The Congregation

[” HAVE said what I had to say about the preacher and about the sermon. To-day I want to speak to you about the congregation. There is something remarkable in the way in which a minister talks about “my congregation.” They evidently come to seem to him different from the rest of humankind. There is the rest of our race, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and the Islands of the Sea, and then there is “my congregation.” A man begins the habit the moment he is settled in a parish. However young, however inexperienced he may be, he at once takes possession of that fraction of the human family and holds it with a sense of ownership. He immediately assumes certain fictions concerning them. He takes it for granted that they listen to his words with a deference quite irrespective of the value of the words themselves. He talks majestically about “what I tell my congregation “as if there were some basis upon which they received his teachings quite different fronrthat upon which other intelligent men listen to one who takes his place before them as their teacher.

He supposes them to be subject to emotions which he expects of no one else. He thinks that, in some mysterious way, their property as well as their intelligence is subject to his demand, to be handed over to him when he shall tell them that he has found a good use to which to put it. He imagines that, though they are as clear-sighted as other people, little devices of his which are perfectly plain to everybody else impose upon them perfectly. He talks about them so unnaturally that we are almost surprised when we ask their names and find that they are men and women whom we know, men and women who are living ordinary lives and judging people and things by ordinary standards, with all the varieties of character and ways which any such group must have, whom he has separated from the rest of humanity and distinguished by their relation to himself and calls “my congregation.”

I think that a good deal of the unreality of clerical life comes from this feeling of ministers about their congregations. I have known many ministers who were frank and simple and unreserved with other people for whom they did not feel a responsibility, but who threw around themselves a cloak of fictions and reserves the moment that they met a parishioner. They were willing to let the stranger clearly see that there were many things in religion and theology %vhich they did not know at all, many other questions on which they were in doubt, points of their church’s faith which they thought unimportant to salvation, methods of their church’s policy which they thought injudicious. All this they would say freely as they talked with the wolf over the sheepfold wall, or with some sheep in the next flock; but in their own flock they held their peace, or said that everything was right, and never dreamed that their flock saw through their feeble cautiousness. The result of all this has sometimes been that parishioners have trusted other men more than their minister just because he was their minister, and have gone with their troublesome questions and dark experiences to some one who should speak of them freely because he should not feel that he was speaking to a member of his congregation.

It is easy to point out what are the causes of this feeling which we thus see has its dangers. The bad part in it is a love of power. The better part is an anxious sense of responsibility, made more anxious by the true affection which grows up in the preacher’s heart. It is almost a parental feeling in its worse as in its better features, in its partialness and jealousy as well as in its devotion and love. But besides these there is another element in the view which the preacher takes of his congregation which I beg you to observe and think about. It is the way in which he assumes a difference in the character of people when they are massed together from any which they had when they~were looked at separately. This is the real meaning of the tone which is in that phrase “my congregation.” It is to the minister a unit of a wholly novel sort. There is something in the congregation which is not in the men and women as he knows them in their separate humanities, something in the aggregate which was not in the individuals, a character in the whole which was not in the parts. This is the reason why he can group them in his thought as a peculiar people, hold them in his hand as a new human unity, his congregation.

And no doubt he is partly right. There is a principle underneath the feeling by which he vaguely works. A multitude of people gathered for a special purpose and absorbed for the time into a common interest has a new character which is not in any of the individuals which compose it. If you are a speaker addressing a crowd you feel that. You say things to them without hesitation that would seem either too bold or too simple to say to any man among them if you talked with him face to face. If you are a spectator and watch a crowd while some one else is speaking to it, you can feel the same thing. You can see emotions run through the mass that no one man there would have deigned to show or submitted to feel if he could have helped it. The crowd will laugh at jokes which every man in the crowd would have despised, and be melted by mawkish pathos that would not have extorted a tear from the weakest of them by himself. Imagine Peter the Hermit sitting down alone with a man to fire him up for a crusade. Probably all this is less true of one of our New England audiences than of any other that is ever collected in our land. In it every man keeps guard over his individuality and does not easily let it sink in the character of the multitude. And yet we are men and women even here, and the universal laws of human nature do work even among us. And this is a law of nature which all men have observed. “It is a strange thing to say,” says Arthur Helps in “Realmah,” “but when the number of any public body exceeds that of forty or fifty, the whole assembly has an element of joyous childhood in it, and each member revives at times the glad, mischievous nature of his school-boy days.” Canning used to say that the House of Commons as a body had better taste than the man of the best taste in it, and Macaulay was much inclined to think that Canning was right.

What are the elements of this new character which belongs to a congregation, a company of men? Two of them have been suggested in the two instances which I have just quoted, — the spontaneousness and liberty, and the higher standard of thought and taste. It is not hard to see what some of the other elements ire. There is no doubt greater receptivity than there is in thejfldividual. Many of the sources of antagonism are removed. The tendency to irritation is put to rest. The pride of argument is not there; or is modified by the fact that no other man can hear the argument, because it cannot speak a word, but must go on in a man’s own silent soul. It is easier to give way when you sit undistinguished in an audience, and your next neighbor cannot see the moment when you yield. The surrender loses half its hardness when you have no sword to surrender and no flag to run down. And, besides this, we have all felt how the silent multitude, in the midst of which we sit or stand, becomes ideal and heroic to us. We feel as if it were listening without prejudice, and respondingunselfishly and nobly. So we are lifted up to our best by the buoyancy of the mass in which we have been merged. It may be a delusion. Each of these silent men may be thinking and feeling meanly, but probably each of them has felt the elevation of the mass about him of which we are one particle, and so is lifting and lifted just as we are. Who can say which drops in the great sweep of the tide are borne, and which bear others toward the shore, on which they all rise together?

This, then, is the good quality in the character of the congregation. It produces what in general we <jall responsiveness. The compensating quality which takes away part of the value of this one is its irresponsibility. The audience is quick to feel, but slow to decide. The men who make up the audience, taken one by one, are slower to feel an argument or an appeal to their higher nature, but when they are convinced or touched, it ’ is comparatively easy to waken the conscience, and make them see the necessity of action. I have often heard the minister’s appeals compared to the lawyer’s addresses to the jury. “Look,” men say, “the lawyer pleads, and gets his verdict.” “You plead a hundred times. You argue week after week, and men will not decide that Christianity is true, nor steadfastly resolve to lead a new life.” The fallacy is obvious. We are like lawyers pleading before a jury, which in the first place feels itself under no compulsion to decide at all; and in the second place, if it decides as we are urging it, must change its life, break off its habits, and make new ones, which it does not like to contemplate. There is no likeness between it and that body of twelve men, who cannot go home till they decide one way or the other, and who have no selfish interest to bias their decision. No wonder that our jury listens to us as long as it pleases, perhaps trembles a little when we are most true and powerful, and then, like Felix, who was both judge and jury to St. Paul, shuts up the court, and departs with only the dimmest feeling of responsibility, saying, “Go thy way for this time. I will hear thee again of this matter.”

The result of all this is that in the congregation you have something very near the general humanity. You have human nature as it appears in its largest contemplation. Personal peculiarities have disappeared and man simply as man is before you. This is a great advantage to the preacher. “It is more easy to know man in general than to know a man in particular,” said La Rochefoucauld. If in the crowd to whom you preach you saw every man not merely in general but in particular, if each sat there with his idiosyncrasies bristling all over him, how could you preach? There are some preachers, I think, who are ineffective from a certain incapacity of this larger general sight of humanity which a congregation ought to inspire. It has been said of the French preachers that Bossuet knew man better than men, but Fe*nelon knew both man and men. There are some preachers who seem to know men but hardly to know or to be touched by man at all. They are ready with special sympathies and with minute advice in the dilemmas of detail which men encounter; but the sight of their race does not rouse them, and they are not able to bring to bear upon a people those universal and eternal motives of the highest human action, which, however they may distribute themselves into special motives for special acts, still have a real unity and are the springs of many goodnesses of many kinds. Such men may have a certain fitness to be the spiritual advisers of individuals, but it is not easy to see how they can be powerful preachers to mankind.

I think that it is almost necessary for a man to preach sometimes to congregations which he does not know, in order to keep this impression of preaching to humanity, and so to keep the truth which he preaches as large as it ought to be. He who ministers to the same people always, knowing them minutely, is apt to let his preaching grow minute, to forget the world, and to make the same mistakes about the Gospel that one would make about the force of gravitation if he came to consider it a special arrangement made for these few operations which it accomplishes within his own house. I think there are few inspirations, few tonics for a minister’s life better than, when he is fretted and disheartened with a hundred little worries, to go and preach to a congregation in which he does not know a face. As he stands up and looks across them before he begins his sermon, it is like looking the race in the face. All the nobleness and responsibility of his vocation comes to him. It is the feeling which one has had sometimes in travelling when he has passed through a great town whose name he did not even learn. There were men, but not one man he knew; houses, shops, churches, bank, post-office, business and pleasure, but none of them individualized to him by any personal interest.

It is human life in general, and often has a solemnity for him which the human lives which he knows in particular have lost. And this is what we often find in some strange pulpit facing some congregation wholly made up of strangers.

But this should be occasional. A constant travelling among unknown towns would no doubt weaken and perhaps destroy our sense of humanity altogether. There can be no doubt that it is good for a man that his knowledge of a congregation should be primarily and principally the knowledge of his own congregation, certain dangers of a too exclusive relationship being obviated by preaching sometimes where the people are all strange. It is remarkable how many of the great preachers of the world are inseparably associated with the places where their work was done, where perhaps all their life was lived. In many cases their place has passed into their name as if it were a true part of themselves. Chrysostom of Constantinople, Augustine of Hippo, Savonarola of Florence, Baxter of Kidderminster, Arnold of Rugby, Robertson of Brighton, Chalmers of Glasgow, and in our New England a multitude of Buch associations which have become historic and compel us always to think of the man with the place and of the place with the man. Everywhere a man must have his place. The disciples are sometimes set before us as if our pastoral life of modern times

were an entire departure from their methods; and yet they had their pastorates. Think of St. Paul at Ephesus. Think of St. John in the same city. Think of St. James at Jerusalem. The same necessity, may we not say, which required that the Incarnation should bring divinity, not into humanity in general, but into some special human circle, into a nation, a tribe, a family, requires that he who would bear fruit everywhere for humanity should root himself into some special plot of human life and draw out the richness of the earth by which he is to live at some one special point. There is nothing better in a clergyman’s life than to feel constantly that through his congregation he is getting at his race. Certainly the long pastorates of other days were rich in the knowledge of human nature, in a very intimate relation with humanity. These three rules seem to have in them the practical sum of the whole matter. I beg you to remember them and apply them with all the wisdom that God gives you. Eirst. Have as few congregations as you can. Second. Know your congregation as thoroughly as you can. Third. Know your congregation so largely and deeply that in knowing it you shall know humanity.

I have lingered too long upon the congregation as a whole. Let me go on to speak of that which appears to every minister as he takes a certain congregation to be his congregation and comes to know them very well. Then the unity in which he saw them the first time he stood before them breaks up, and they are divided into various classes. Between that one great gathering which fills the house and the individuals of whom it is composed, there are divisions into various groups, which with certain modifications here and there, appear in every congregation in the land. Let us see what they are.

First and most prominent in every congregation there are some persons who peculiarly represent it to the world. They live in the Church, as it were. Their whole life is bound up in its interests. They may be church officers or not. They are part of its history and of its present life. The congregation goes by their name almost as readily as, in your Congregational fashion, by the minister’s. They are the persons to whom every new enterprise in church life looks first for approval and then for the means of its execution. They are what are sometimes called the “pillars of the Church.” And such people are very valuable. Often their lives are very noble and devoted. There are people so prominently representative of churches, whose life is as truly a consecrated life, with an ordination of its own, as any minister’s. They give a solidity and permanence to the congregation, preserve its continuity and identity in the midst of the continual changes of these parts of 4) which are less firmly fixed. They gather their strength about the minister. They save him from falling into that heresy which has beset all Christian history and been the fruitful source of many kinds of woes, the heresy that the clergyman is the Church. They constantly remind him that the people are the Church, and that he is the Church’s servant. I recognize the value of this element in the congregation very heartily. I think that every parish needs such laymen. It would be a very loose and incoherent thing without them. But still I want you to notice the dangers that may come in connection with the special prominence and special usefulness of a few members of the Church. There is chance always of the Church becoming a sort of club, providing for the wants, perhaps indeed the highest spiritual wants, of a few, but forgetting that it has the world about it and was meant for all men. This is a danger which belongs to the very fact of a recognized body called the congregation. It is a danger which is intensified when in the centre of that body there is a core which emphasizes all its qualities and spirit, the congregation of the congregation. The congregation ought to be exclusive only, as our old professor of theology used to say of the Gospel, as the light in the Pharos was covered with glass merely that it might burn the more brightly and shed the more light abroad. Remember this danger. Give much time and thought and care to the outskirts of your

;fU parish, to its loose and ragged fringes ;, seek the people who just drift within your influence, and who will drift away again, if your kind strong hand is not upon them. Do not spend too much time in the safe sheepfold where the ninety-nine are secure, while there are sheep upon the mountains. Be sure that nothing will make the core and heart of your congregation so solid as a strong drawing inward of its loose circumference. The strong and settled men of your church will value you and your usefulness to them more highly if they see you busy among the wretched, the careless, and what men dare to call the worthless souls. And there is another danger, I think, which the congregation in the congregation brings with it. The laymen who are most active and interested in church life are very often not the most - receptive hearers. They are apt to take a few truths for settled, and, realizing them very fully, using them in their church work constantly, to ask no more, indeed to be hardly open to any more. They are half clergyman, half layman, without the full receptivity and mental enterprise which belongs to either. This is the reason why they sometimes become dogmatic, and not merely do not care themselves to speculate or learn, but, with an honest and narrow fear, begrudge the clergy and their fellow laymen an eagerness for truth which overruns their own settled lines. The strongest bigotry is often found among theological laymen rather than among clergymen. The pillars of the Church are apt to be like the Pillars. of Hercules, beyond which no man might sail. Dean Stanley, in an essay upon the connection of Church and State, says of the lay element in Church Synods: “The laymen who as a general rule figure in such assemblies do not represent the true lay mind of the Church, still less the lay intelligence of the whole country. They are often excellent men, given to good works, but they are also usually the partisans of some special clerical school; they are in short clergymen under another form rather than the real laity themselves.” He is writing on an English subject, but his words describe a danger which we in America can recognize, and which makes us glad to go on and find in the congregation other elements besides this most valuable, this indispensable one of which I have been speaking.

To pass at once, then, to the other extreme, there is in very many, if not in all, congregations in these days what we may call the supercilious hearer. He is a man who for some reason comes to church, but is out of sympathy what goes on there. He is sceptical about the truth of what we believe and preach. You come to know that hearer. You are sure that he is critical. You are aware that some safe, sonorous, and unmeaning statements, which some of your people will take because they have the right words in them, and the true ring about them, he seizes on the moment that they fall from your lips and tears their flimsiness to pieces in his merciless mind. Sometimes your heart has sunk as you have said some foolish thing and not dared to look him in the face, but felt sure that it has not escaped him. In one of his Lent discourses Massillon upbraids such hearers. “It is not to seek corn,” he says, “that you come into Egypt. It is to seek out the nakedness of the land. Exploratores Estis, ut videatis infirmiora terrse hujusvenistis.” Now, such an element in a congregation, though it may be very small, cannot but influence the preacher. What shall he think about it? He ought to start, it seems to me, by feeling that the very presence of such men in church means something. They have not come wholly, certainly they will not come continually, for the malicious reason which Massillon ascribes. There is some better and deeper cause, even though the man is not conscious of it himself. The preacher has a right to believe this, and so the man’s presence may become not an embarrassment but an inspiration. And then, when this is gained, he may become a help in other ways. He keeps the atmosphere of the church fresh. He makes you aware as you preach of the unbelief which you have no right to forget. He incites you with the sense of difficulty and the consciousness of criticism. A parish of critics. would be killing, but a critic here and there is tonic He keeps the walls of your church from growing so solid that as you preach, you cannot, as you ought, look through them as if they were glass, and preach in the present remembrance of the multitudes who never come to church, and do not know your truth, and yet for whom your truth is just as true and might be just as helpful as it is to you. This man makes all this real to you. He compels you to remember it. It is strange how the general scepticism about us may not put us out, or disturb us at all, while a special case close by us will excite us and waken all our powers. It is like the way in which you can go on with your private work or thought, perfectly well, perhaps all the better, for the general roar of the city, while a single hammer clanging under your window distracts you and compels you to hear it. How shall such a critic enter into your preaching? What influence shall it have upon your sermon to know that he is there? The influence, I should say, of making the whole sermon more true and conscientious, more complete in the best qualities that belong to all good sermons. But not the influence of changing the sermon’s essential character. Preach the Gospel all the more seriously, simply, mightily if you can, because of the unsympathetic criticism that it has to meet, but let it be the same Gospel which you would pour into ears hungry to receive it. The two faults that you have to avoid in preaching to unbelief are, Defiance and Obsequience. One makes the unbeliever hate your truth, and the other makes him despise it. Be frank, brave, simple. There is nothing the unbeliever honors like belief. Let the influence of your supercilious and sceptical audience be primarily upon yourself, making you more serious and eager; then let it come indirectly into your sermon, not changing its topic

but filling it with a stronger power of conviction and of love. Of course I am speaking now, not of the sermons in which one specially deals with some special phase of scepticism, but only of the general tenor of a man’s preaching in view of this part of his congregation.

The next element in the congregation of which I wish to speak is less interesting than these two; perhaps, also, more puzzling. In every congregation there are many people who come to church, as it seems, purely from habit. As with the supercilious hearers, it is hard to tell why they come, but not now because of any positive reasons why they should not, but merely from the absence of any reasons why they should. Such a hearer seems to be docile, but his docility consists in never doubting or denying what you say. He has probably grown up in the Church. There is more or less of the notion of respectability attaching to that mysterious impulse which every Sunday turns his steps toward the sanctuary. Probably if you could get deep enough, deeper than his own consciousness of its causes, you would find that some vague fear had something to do at least with the origin, perhaps with the continuance of this strange habit. He is no unusual sight. He comes and goes in all our churches. In many churches it seems as if such as he made up a large part of the congregation. Now what shall we say of him? First of all, certainly, as we said of the critic, that we have a right to believe that we have not wholly fathomed the secret of his presence. At least we may hope that, however unconsciously and vaguely, the spirit of the place has reached him. Hoping this, you may expect to see the unconscious impulse develop into a conscious seeking, if you can intensify the spirit of the place, and make it more positive about him. The form in which the change takes place will vary according to his character. It may be sudden and vehement; a conversion as true and picturesque as any that comes to one who, after years of brutal ignorance, hears for the first time the story of the Saviour. Or it may be very gradual, the slow, still drawing to a focus, and quickening into fire of that heat which he has been absorbing, without knowing it, so long. There are two effects of every sermon, one special, in the enforcement of a single thought, or the inculcation of a single duty; the other general, in the diffusion of a sense of the beauty of holiness and the value of truth. To the second of these effects, this routine listener has been susceptible during many a service and sermon that seemed to pass across him like the wind. However the awakening comes, there is no happier sight for any minister to see. It puts new vigor into him, makes him believe his truth by one more evidence, and teaches him that lesson which the preacher must know, but which he can only learn thoroughly out of experiences such as this, that it is not his business to despair of anybody. Perhaps, so far as the minister is concerned, this is the final cause of this most discouraging being’s presence in the congregation. He furnishes the minister now and then with an encouragement such as nobody but himself could furnish. And, in the mean time, sitting there with the calm countenance which has faced so many sermons, if anything could sting the jaded and commonplace minister into freshness and pointedness, it would seem as if it must be this man’s presence. He shames you and inspires you. He makes you feel your responsibility, and makes you eager not to boast of it. He reminds you of your duty and your feebleness. He rebukes anything fantastic or unreal in your preaching. He tempts your plainest, and directest, and tersest truth. There is a prayer in an old Russian Liturgy which always seemed to me the very model of a minister’s prayer, which I wish that all of us ministers could learn to pray continually, and which this man in your congregation makes you pray with double earnestness, — “O Lord and Sovereign of my Life, take from me the Spirit of idleness, despair, love of power, and unprofitable speaking.”

But from these classes let us turn to that part of a congregation which constitutes its chief and most inspiring interest. I mean those who in any way are to be characterized as earnest seekers after truth,. It V

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is the element that calls out all that is best in a preacher. Very often as we read Christ’s teachings, we can almost feel His eye wandering here and there across the motley crowd around Him, till He finds some one man evidently in earnest, and then the v discourse sets towards him, and we almost feel the Saviour’s heart beat with anxiety to help some poor forgotten creature, who has long since past out of the memory of man, but in whom on that day so long ago He saw a seeker. And we may say with certainty that any man who has not in him the power of quick response to the appeal of spiritual hunger, lacks a fundamental quality of the true preacher. There are some men who cannot see bodily pain without a longing to relieve it, which begets an ingenuity in relieving it, out of which spring all the best refinements of the doctor’s art. There are other men who, just in the same way, perceive the wants and longings of men’s souls, and in them is begotten the holy ingenuity which the true preacher uses. The soul quickens the mind to its most complete fertility.

I do not subdivide this class. It includes the whole range of personal earnestness. The heart just conscious of some need, all ignorant of what it is, dissatisfied and restless, not alone from the unsatisfactoriness of earthly things, but likewise from a true attraction which comes to it from a higher life, this heart is close beside another which has long known the truth and long rested on the love of Christ but yet is always craving a deeper truth and a more unhindered love. The two hearts belong together. They help to throw the same kind of spirit into the congregation. They send up the same kind of inspiration to the preacher. It is good always to think of these two hearts together, to count your congregation, not by the point in Christian attainment which you conceive them to have reached, but by the spiritual desire and eagerness which you can perceive in them. We may mistake the first. We can hardly be mistaken about the second. Here must be the preacher’s real encouragement. Behind all tests which the church-membership lists and the contribution boxes can furnish, there lies the knowledge, which comes out of all his anxious intercourse with them, whether these men and women to whom he preaches are seeking for more truth and higher life. It seems is if one of the ways in which the Lord’s beatitude about the hungerers and thirsters after righteousness came true was by the power to help them which the very sight of their thirst and hunger gave to those whom God had sent to be their feeders.

And I believe that the proportion of this class in the general congregation is much greater than we are apt to imagine. In all life, and nowhere more than in what we say about the Church and its work, cynical and disparaging ideas are capable of much more clever, epigrammatic statement than hopeful ideas. So they have easy currency and impose on people. It is easy to draw the picture of the faithless or frivolous elements in a congregation till it appears as if the whole company which meets every Sunday were in an elaborate conspiracy to make sport of itself, as if a crowd of people came together to criticise what none of them believed, and to endure with half-concealed impatience what none of them cared anything about. But such a picture, the more cleverly and sweepingly it is drawn, evidently disproves itself. If that were the congregation, evidently there would not long be any congregation. If that were what their meeting meant, evidently they would not meet again and again year after year. No mere momentum of a past impulse could carry along so dead a weight. No, there is in the congregation as its heart and soul a craving after truth. Believe in that. Let it give an expectant look to the whole congregation in your eyes. Let it fill your study as you write at home. And if among the elements which make up your great congregation you grow bewildered and cannot tell to which one you ought to write or speak, I do not hesitate at all to say let it be this one. This is the spirit to which if you speak you will be sure to speak most universally. One sermon here and there to those who are entirely indifferent, beating their sleepy carelessness awake; one sermon here and there to those who are scornfully sceptical, showing them if you can how weak their superciliousness is, a sermon fired if need be with something of “the scorn of scorn;” one sermon here and there perhaps for those rare few whose life seems to have mastered truth and bathed itself in love, a sermon of congratulation and of peace; but almost all your sermons with the seekers in your eye. Preaching to them you shall preach to all. The indifferent shall be awakened into hope; the scornful shall feel some sting of shame; and before those who are most conscious of what God has done for them shall open visions of what greater things he yet may do, and like St. Paul they may forget the things behind and press forward with a new desire.

It is from the recognition of this element in the congregation that the minister’s perception of the necessary variety of Christian life proceeds. All earnestness emphasizes individuality. So long as you see no personal anxiety in your people’s eyes, you may calmly form your own plans about them, make

(TTiriTBRSITTlfr oar w. II up your mind what they are to be made, and go to work to make them that with certain expectation that they will take your truth in just your way, and shape their lives into the mould which you lay before them as if it showed the only shape of Christian character. But when you feel the anxious wish of men and women really seeking after truth, when the cry “What must I do to be saved?” sounds in your quickened ears from all the intent and silent pews, then is the time when you really learn how wide and various salvation is. The revival and the inquiry room must always widen a man’s conception of Christianity, and they are only the emphatic expressions of what is always present and may always be felt in every congregation. A minister once said to me how strange it seemed to him that he had been preaching one truth in one language for years and yet the people who came to him moved by the truth he taught never conceived it in his form, nor used, as they told him their experience, the language in which he had set the truth before them. It troubled him. It made him wonder whether the language he had used was wrong and false; perhaps also whether the truth which they stated so differently really was the same truth which he had tried to teach them. To me it rather showed that there must have been truth and noble reality about his words, a genuinely feeding power, that men should have taken them as they take the healthy corn out of the fields and turn it into all kinds of strength and work. However that may have been, the more truly you think of your congregation as seekers after salvation, to whom you are to open the sacred doors, the more ready you will be to see each entering in to a salvation peculiarly his own. You will be glad and not sorry when a man tells you what God has done for him, and only gradually you find that it is the truth which you told him, transformed into some new shape of which you never dreamed, that is the new treasure of his life.

These, then, are the elements which make up the congregation. They are the constant factors. In order to realize the congregation entirely, we must think of it as not closed, but open, and always including some people who as mere strangers have wandered in and taken their seats among the people who are always there. They suggest the outside world. Their unfamiliar faces remind the preacher of the general humanity. They are not classified at all. They are simply men and women. I think it is a great advantage to a congregation that it should have such an element. They are to a congregation what the few people who came into contact with Jesus who were not Jews — such as the Syrophenician woman, and the Centurion, and the Greeks, who asked to see him — were to Christ’s disciples. They kept men’s conception of His ministry from closing in tightly to the Jewish people. This is the danger of the country parish, where you know everybody who comes into the church. You forget the mission to the world. I know no safeguard against such forgetfulness but a deep sense of the general humanity of the people underneath their special characters, which shall make them true specimens of the race, as well as the distinct individuals, whose faces, names, and ways you know.

These are the elements, then. Now mingle these elements in your mind, and ask what sort of body they make. What will be the general characteristics of this assemblage, so heterogeneous and yet with such a true unity in it, which we call The Congregation? It has the genuine solidity which comes from certain fundamental assumptions. It is gathered as a Christian gathering. It is not loose and incoherent, like the multitude who stood about Paul on the Hill of Mars, merely asking in general for what is new, or, more earnestly, for what is true. It has a positive character. It accepts a positive authority. And yet it is alert and questioning. The truth which it desires is open to abundant varieties of conception and application. It is this combination of solidity with vitality, this harmonizing of settled conditions with constant activity and growth, which makes, I think, the most marked character of the Christian congregation. It is an institution pervaded with individual life; it is an assembly of individuals to which has been given something of the coherence of an institution. It is the home at once of Faith and Thought. Try to keep all of this character in your congregation. Remember both its institutional character and its individual character. Do not try to make it a highly organized machine, nor to let it merely dissipate into an audience. Make it one, without losing its multitude; treat it as many, without forgetting its oneness. Let it be full of the spirit of] authoritative truth, and at the same time of personal responsibility for thought and action.

If we look at the Christian congregation in another and perhaps a simpler way, it stands as perhaps the best representative assembly of humanity that you can find in the world. Men, women, and children are all there together. No age, no sex must monopolize its privileges. All ministrations to it must be full at once of vigor and of tenderness, the father’s and the mother’s touch at once. Riches and poverty meet indifferently in fk i’^^ Vmwavm- if. iny frfl fa the reality, of the congregation. Even learning and ignorance are recognized as properly meeting there. However difficult it may be to do it, it is clearly recognized that men ought to preach so that the wisest and the simplest alike can understand and get the blessing. Here, then, is pure humanity. What other assembly so brings us together on the simple warrant of our race. This is what I always think is meant by that record of the ministry of Jesus, “The common people heard Him gladly.” It was not the poor because of some privilege that belonged to their poverty. It was those, rich or poor, wise or rude, in whom the fundamental elements of human life were unclouded by artificial culture. Pharisee or publican, fisherman or philosopher, if they had not forgotten to be men, they were still “common people,” and heard the human Saviour gladly. It was to their humanity He preached, and nothing that He knew of God was too precious to be brought, if He could bring it, to their understanding. Preach to this same humanity, and you too will give it your best. Trust the people to whom you preach more than most ministers do. Begin your ministry by being sure that if you give your people your best thought, it will be none too good for them. They will take it all. Only be sure that it is real, and that you are giving it to them for their best good, and that it is what, if they did receive it, would do them good, and then give them the very best and truest that you know. For one minister who preaches “over people’s heads “there are twenty whose preaching goes wandering about under men’s feet, or is flung off into the air, in Jie right intellectual plane perhaps, but in a wholly wrong direction. Not that there must not be discrimination; only it must not be in the quality of your thought. Never your best thought for the old, your cheap thought for the children; never your best thought for the rich, and poor thought for the poor. The best that you can give is not too good for any one; but in that giving of the best, there is need for the most true and delicate discrimination as to how it shall be given, and which part of it shall be given to this congregation and which to that. It is not a matter of rule. It belongs to wise and sympathetic instinct. To cultivate that instinct, to learn to feel a congregation, to let it claim its own from him, is one of the first duties of a minister. Until you do that you may be a great expounder, a brilliant” sermonizer,” but you cannot be a preacher. Never to be tempted to profoundness where it would be thrown away; never to be childlike when it is manly vigor that you need; never to be dull when you mean to be solemn, nor frivolous when you mean only to be bright; this comes from a very quick power of perception and adaptation. Our work has always had some curious connections with the art of fishing. Let me quote you from Isaak Walton what Piscator says to Venator while they sit by the stream-side at breakfast, on the morning of the first lesson in trout-fishing. I was struck by its appropriateness to the subject of discrimination in preaching. It may help you, if you remember it, when you come to “fish for trout with 14 a worm “yourself, and may make no unfit rule for real timeliness in the pulpit.” Take this for a rule,” he says,” when

you fish for trout with a worm, let your line have so much and not more lead than will fit the stream in which you fish; that is to say, more in a great troublesome stream than in a smaller that is quieter, as near as may be so much as will sink the bait to the bottom and keep it still in motion and not more.” Weight and movement, — these are what we need in fishing and in preaching.

The congregation being what it is, let me ask, in the few moments that remain to-day, what it can do for the preacher, both in the way of help and in the way of danger.

In the way of help, it brings him the inspiration of its numbers, the boldness and freedom of its mitigated personality, and the larger test of his work. It is not safe to judge of the effect of your work by any one individual; but when a congregation pronounces on it, not by the unreliable witness of praise, but by the testimony of its evidently changed condition, its higher life, its more complete devotion, it is never wrong. Do not despise the witness that even the meanest of your people bear to your faithfulness or unfaithfulness. When it really rains, the puddles as well as the oceans bear witness to the shower. Trust jrour people’s judgment on your work: what they say about it, a good deal; but what it does upon them, much more.

And I cannot help bearing witness to the fairness and considerateness which belongs to this strange composite being, the congregation. His insight is very true, and his conscience on the whole is very right. If he sees that his minister is totally devoted to him, and giving his life up to his work, he stands by that minister of his and provides for him abundantly. If he sees that his minister is taking good care of his own interests, he lets him do it, as he would let any other man, and does not trouble himself about it, as there is no reason that he should. Whether the minister feels the congregation or not, the congregation feels the minister. Often the horse knows the rider better than the rider knows the horse. There may be exceptions which would not justify my confidence. In all these lectures I am only giving you the impressions which have come out of my own experience. I am sure it will be well if you can never allow yourself to complain that your congregation neglect you without first asking yourself whether you have given them any reason why they should attend to you.

Indeed, the danger of the congregation to the minister comes more from their indulgence than from their opposition. The feeling of the strongest ministers about the superficialness of clerical popularity is very striking. Nothing seemed to vex Robertson bo much as to be talked of as the idol of the crowd. Indeed, he is absolutely morbid about it, and hates that to which he need only have been indifferent. It would seem as if mere popularity, to a man of any independence, was the driest of all Dead Sea fruits. And there is reason why it should be so. It is the worst and feeblest part of your congregation that makes itself heard in vociferous applause, and it applauds that in you which pleases it. Robertson, in one of his letters, says of a friend: “He has lost his power, which was once the greatest that I ever knew. The sentimental people of his congregation attribute it to an increase of spirituality, but it is, in truth, a falling-off of energy of grasp.” Those words suggest the cause of many a minister’s decay, the Capua where many a preaching Hannibal has been ruined. “Turba est argumentum pessimi,” says Seneca. There are certain other causes which help to produce the impression, but still there is truth in the belief that much of the best thinking and preaching of the land is done in obscure parishes and by unfamous preachers. The true balance, if we could only reach and keep it, evidently is in neither courting nor despising the popular applause, to feel it as every healthy man feels the approval of his fellow-men, and yet never to be beguiled by it from that which is the only true object of our work, God’s truth and men’s salvation.

And remember this, that the only way to be saved from the poison of men’s flattery is to be genuinely devoted to those same men’s good. If you really want to drag a man out of the fire, you will not be distracted into self-conceit by his praises of the grace and softness of the hand that you reach out to him. You will say, “Stop your compliments and take hold.”

The subject of the popularity of ministers is indeed a curious one, and may well merit a few moment’s study. We hardly realize, I believe, how far the desire for popularity in this time and land has taken the place of the ambition for preferment which we read of in English clerical history, and which has so strongly and so justly excited our dislike. He who used there to seek the favor of a bishop, or some other patron, bids here for the liking of the multitude. It is a question hardly worth the asking, which ambition calls out the lower arts, or does the greater mischief. Both are very bad. To set one’s heart on being popular is fatal to the preacher’s best growth. To escape from that desire, one needs to know that the men who are in no sense popular favorites do much of the very best work of the ministry. In all work there seems to be generally two classes of workers, one whose processes of working are apparent, the other whose results only appear. Now most popular preachers seem to me to belong to the first class, and to owe their popularity to that characteristic. Not only what they do, but the way in which they do it interests people. It is not only the power of the truth which they declare: it is the eloquence of the sermons in which they declare it. It is not only the gracious influence they exercise: it is their gracious way of exercising it, the smile, the tone, the transparent vision of the kindly heart. Let a man understand this, and it will certainly require no very profound philosophy or devotion for him to let the popularity go if he can do the work. The popularity is an accident: the power is essential.

And, no doubt, the absence of lively popular favor has an influence in enabling a minister to apprehend the larger indications of the successful working of his truth. The people’s applause emphasizes the small success, and tempts a man to be content with that. He who works in silence becomes aware of the larger movements of the truth and the surer conquests of the power of God. The small signs fail; there is no glitter in the arms, no shout of triumph anywhere, but often the very silence lets one hear more clearly the great progress that is going on all over the field.

Again, there is great difference in men according as they seem to possess or to lack themselves the qualities and conditions which they try to create in other people. Some men are all afire themselves, and seem to fire others by contagion; other men appear cold, but send forth fire from their very coldness. Some men are full of movement and so make others move; other men seem sluggish and yet awaken others to a vitality which they do not seem to possess themselves.

“The enormous axle-tree That whirls (how slow itself! ) ten thousand spindles.”

In general, the popularity, the quick general sympathy and admiration, will go with the first class of men. The others will do their work in quietness, with much power but not much observation.

To be your own best self for your people’s sake. That is the true law of the minister’s devotion. “Loquendum ut multi, sapiendum ut pauci” — the thought of the few in the speech of the many — that describes a popular power which any preacher has not only the right but the duty to covet.

The whole of the relation, then, between the preacher and the congregation is plain. They belong together. But neither can absorb or override the other. They must be filled with mutual respect. He is their leader, but his leadership is not one constant strain, and never is forgetful of the higher guidance upon which they both rely. It is like the rope by which one ship draws another out into the sea. The rope is not always tight between them, and all the while the tide on which they float is carrying them both. So it is not mere leading and following.

It is one of the very highest pictures of human companionship that can be seen on earth. Its constant presence has given Christianity much of its noblest and sweetest color in all ages. It has much of the intimacy of the family with something of the breadth and dignity that belongs to the state. It is too sacred to be thought of as a contract. It is a union which God joins together for purposes worthy of His care. When it is worthily realized, who can say that it may not stretch beyond the line of death, and they who have been minister and people to each other here, be something holy and peculiar to each other in the City of God forever?