The Ministry for Our Age

I am to speak to you to-day upon the preacher in his special relation to our own time. There is a strange sound, perhaps, when we think about it, in the very suggestion that the preacher of the Gospel is to be something special with reference to the special time in which he lives. For we have dwelt upon the one universal and eternal message which the preacher is sent to carry to the world. That message never changes. The identity of Christianity lies in its identity. Nay, the identity of man is bound up with it; and so long as man is what he is, what God has to say to him by His servants will certainly always be the same. And so the preacher, as the bearer of that message, must have his true identity, must stand before men in essentially the same figure and speak with essentially the same voice in all the ages. Where, then, does the adaptation of a preacher to his own age come in? The best answer, perhaps, would be, by way of illustration, in the position which every live and cultivated man holds with reference to the time he lives in. He is, in the first place, a man in universal human history. His are the rights, the duties, and the standards which belong to all men simply as men. In proportion as he is a strong, wise man, this larger life is real to him. He knows that he will live his special life more healthily for himself and more helpfully to his brethren, not by forgetting, but by remembering his place in the general and continuous humanity. It will keep his sight truer. Many times it will preserve his independence when it is in danger from the fleeting passions of the hour. But yet he lives the special life. He is a man of his own day, thoroughly interested in the questions that are exciting men around him, pained by the troubles, delighted by the joys, and busy in the tasks of his own time. His broad humanity and broad culture makes him a man of all days; his keen life and quick sympathies and healthy instincts and real desire for work, make him a man of his own day. We can all see the ideal completeness of such a life. Whenever we have seen a man at all attaining it, we have felt how complete he was. The incompleteness of men comes as they fall short of this on one side or the other. The man who belongs to the world but not to his time, grows abstract and vague, and lays no strong grasp upon men’s lives and the present causes of their actions. The man who belongs to his time but not to the world grows thin and superficial.

And just exactly this is true about the preacher. J There are the constant and unchanging needs of men, and the message which is addressed to those needs and shares their unchangeableness; and then there are the ever-varying aspects of those needs to which the tone of the message, if it would really reach the needy ^>ul, must intelligently and sympathetically correspcjad. The first of these comes of the preacher’s larger life, his study of the timeless Word of God, his intercourse with God in history, his personal communion with his Master, and the knowledge of those depths of human nature which never change whatever waves of alteration may disturb the surface. The second comes from a constantly alert j watch of the events and symptoms of the current times, begotten of a deep desire that the salvation of the world, which is always going on, may show itself here and now in the salvation of these particular men to whom the preacher speaks. If we leave out the difference of natural endowments and of personal devotedness, there is nothing which so decides the different kinds as well as the different degrees of ministers’ successes as the presence or absence of this balance and proportion of the general and special, the world-consciousness and the time-consciousness. The abstract reasoner, laying his deep trains of thought which run far wide of the citadels where sin is now entrenched, and never shatter a stone of present wickedness with their ponderous explosions, whatever other good things he may do, fails as a preacher to men. The mere critic of the time who, with no deep principles and no long hopes, goes on his way merrily or fiercely lopping off the ugly heads of the vices of the time with his light switch or valiant sword, he, too, fails in his work, and by and by is wearied and distressed as he finds the surface character of all the reformation to which he brings his converts. It is the first sort of preaching that wearies men when they complain of what they call a very profound but a very dull sermon. The second is what makes people dissatisfied with a sense of unthoroughness as they come home still mildly tingling from what they call a sensational sermon. The first man has aimed at truth without caring for timeliness. The second man has been so anxious to be timely that he has perhaps distorted truth, and certainly robbed her of her completeness. Truth and timeliness together make the full preacher. How shall you win such fulness? Let me say one or two general words, and leave particulars of the method to come out, if they may, all through the lecture. First, seek always truth first and timeliness second, — never timeliness first and truth second. Then, let your search for truth be deliberate, systematic, conscientious. Let your search for timeliness consist rather in seeking for strong sympathy with your kind, a real share in their occupations, and a hearty interest in what is going on. And yet again; let the subjects of your sermons bejnostly eternal truths, and let the timeliness come in the illustration of those truths by, and their application to, the events of current life. So you will make the thinking of your hearers larger, and not smaller, as you preach to them.

So much in general. But now let us come to this most interesting age in which we live and in which we are set to preach. I want to point out two or three of its broadest characteristics and see how they affect the preacher’s work. I do not undertake any such task as a general estimate of the character of our strange century and country. I only want to indicate some points in it which come directly home to you and me, and to see, if we can, how we shall treat them. Let me speak of the feeling of our time about Truth and Life in general, about the Ministry and about the Bible.

In the first place, then, there are certain vaguely conceived but real difficulties lying in people’s minds to-day against which the Gospel that we preach strikes. We meet them in a great variety of forms. We find their spirit appearing in regions of intelligence where there cannot be any understanding of their intellectual statements. The most common, the most wonderfully subtle and pervasive of all these is the notion of Fate, with all the consequences which it brings with it to the ideas of responsibility and even to the fundamental conception of personal Life. We are so occupied with watching the developments of fatalistic philosophy in its higher and more scientific phases that I think we often fail to see to what an extent and in what unexpected forms it has found its way into the common life of men and is governing their thoughts about ordinary things. The notion of fixed helplessness, of the impossibility of any strong power of a man over his own life, and, along with this, the mitigation of the thought of responsibility which, beginning with the sublime notion of a man’s being answerable to God, comes down to think of him only as bound to do his duty to society, then descends to consider him as only liable for the harm which he does to himself, and so finally reaches the absolute abandonment of any idea of judgment or accountability whatever, — all this is very much more common than we dream. It runs down through all the degrees of lessening consciousness. There is nothing stranger than to watch how the intelligent speculations of the learned become the vague prejudices of the vulgar. You can shut up nothing within the scholar’s study-door. For good or for mischief all that the wisest are thinking becomes in some form or other the basis upon which the ignorant live. Partly this, and partly a power which works just the other way. Partly that the learned are led on by their oneness with all their brethren to take for the subjects of their study those things to which the interest of the unlearned has been turned and to reduce to philosophical expression those ideas by which the rudest are shaping their lives. Whatever the interaction of the two causes may have been, the result is here a certain suspicion of fatalism all around us. With it come the inevitable consequences of hopelessness and restraint pervading all society and influencing all action, different in different natures, hard and defiant in some, soft and luxurious in others, but in all their various forms unfitting men for the best happiness, or the best growth, or the best usefulness to fellow-men. This is what we find scattered through the society in which we live. This is what you have got to preach to, my young friends. You will not escape it by ministering to one class of people rather than to another, for it runs everywhere. You will leave it in the study only to find it in some new form in the workshop. You will silence it in the dull querulous discontent of the boor only to hear it in the calm and resigned and lofty philosophy of the sage. What preaching can you meet it with? Certainly one may point out the broadest features of the preaching which alone can meet it. It must be positive preaching. There never was an age when negative preaching, the mere assertion of what is not true, showed its uselessness as it does to-day. It does no good to show the fatalist that fatalism is untenable. He does not really believe it; it is only that he seems to be unable to believe anything else. You disprove it, and that only adds another to the heap of things that are incredible. You must preach positively, telling him what is true, setting God before his heart and bidding it know its Lord. And it must be preaching to the conscience. The conscience is the last part of

our personality that dies into the death of fatalism. It must be the first part of us that wakens to the privileges and obligations of personal life. Make a J man know that he is wicked and that he may be good, j and his self and God’s self will be realities to him j which no juggle of words can make him believe do j not exist. And, thirdly, there never was an age that so needed to have Christ preached to it, the personal Christ. In his personality the bewildered soul must re-find its own personal life. In the service of Him it must re-discover the possibility and the privilege of duty. The haunting scepticism must be invaded by preaching such as this. The doubt which has grown up so vaguely and will give no account of itself, must be overshadowed and undermined, overshadowed by the vivid majesty of God in Christ, undermined by the sense of sin and the necessity of righteousness. The only hope of its complete dispersion is to produce the Christian life which is its own assurance, declares its own freedom and prophesies its own possibilities.

I speak of this tendency to doubt concerning spiritual and personal forces principally as it appears all through the movements of society and the lives of common men. I have not much to say here about the way in which the preacher meets it in the theories of science, the guesses at the philosophy of the universe which the philosophers of our time have made so plentifully. But nobody can listen to sermons nowadays and not be struck by seeing how confusedly the purpose of preaching and the function of the preacher seems to be apprehended by those who preach. Among the preachers who busy themselves with what modern science is doing and saying, we can easily discern several classes. One class claims competently to criticise the work of specialists and to revise their judgments, even about those subjects on which they ought to be authorities. It attempts to pronounce with competence upon the results of scientific inquiry in a summary way which it would never tolerate with reference to its own peculiar subjects of study. It is needless to say how this class puts itself into the power of those whom it criticises. It can get the material for its criticism only from them. So soon as it leaves the field of general reasoning and attempts to touch the question of scientific fact, it must look for its facts to those who, for the time, it is treating as its adversaries. It is reduced to something of the helplessness to which the Israelites were brought when the Philistines who had conquered them compelled them to come to their smiths to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock. Another class seems to stand ready, not merely to disown the power of competent criticism, but to accept with headlong zeal every momentary conclusion of modern science, even before the scientific world itself has learned to treat it as more than a probable hypothesis; and seems to be all the more eager to accept it the more entirely it seems to be in conflict with the faith of Christianity. No one will deny, I think, that there are among the disciples of natural science to-day some men who curiously repeat on their own ground every offensive and arrogant peculiarity of the priestcraft whose historical enormities they so fondly and truly upbraid. It is an interesting illustration of how human nature is the same at heart, and, if it be bad, will show the same kind of badness whether it wear the priest’s surplice or the professor’s gown. To this overbearing assumption this second class is always in great haste to prostrate itself. Surely the spirit of both of these classes is not good. Either is bad; either the competence with which some clergymen attempt to pronounce upon the value of scientific theories, or the panic in which other clergymen seem to be waiting only to surrender to the first man with a hammer or a microscope who challenges them. There is another class still which seems to be merely frightened. A sense of vague inevitable danger is continually haunting those who feel how wholly incompetent they are to master or even to comprehend the thing they fear. They hate and dread the very name of Science. They would really, literally, silence its investigations if they could. As the best thing which they can do, they are very apt to devise or to adopt some exceedingly fantastic and exaggerated form either of church government or of ritual, or of doctrine, which they clothe with artificial sacredness, and then set it up to keep the advancing monster back, as they said that the Chinese piled their most sacred crockery upon the track to stop the progress of the first locomotive that came thundering through their land. All fanaticism is closely bound to fear. These are the dispositions with which some ministers meet the spirit of the

day. These are the various classes. Among these classes comes some new minister, and stands and says, To which shall I belong? Is there not something better than either? Indeed there is. It is possible for you and me, taking the facts of the spiritual life, to declare them with as true a certainty as any preacher ever did, in what men call the “ages of faith.” They are as true to-day as they ever were. Men are as ready to feel their truth. The spiritual nature of man, with all its needs, is just as real a thing, and Christ is just as truly and richly its satisfaction. To speak to it and offer Him is your privilege and mine. And yet not to be unregardful of what men are thinking by our side, to watch it, so far as we may to understand it all, but always to watch it with a desire to see, not what it will say to overthrow, but what it will say to strengthen and enlarge the truth we preach; to watch it with a feeling that it may modify our conception and statement of the truth, but with no fear at all that it ever can destroy the truth itself; this does seem to me to be the temper for the preacher of to-day. Our truth stands on its own evidence, but it has its connections with all the truth that men are learning so wonderfully on every side. To listen to what they learn, not that we may see whether our truth of the soul and of God is true, but that we may come to truer and larger ways of apprehending it, this is our place. If we can take this place, it will give us both firmness and freedom; it will free us alike from the uselessness of doubt and the uselessness of bigotry.

I seem to see strange panic in the faces of the ministers of to-day. I have seen a multitude of preachers gathered together to listen to one who expounded scientific theories upon the religious side, and making the hall ring with vociferous applause of statements which might be true or not, but certainly whose truth they had not examined, and in which it certainly was not the truth but the tendency to help their side of the argument that they applauded. I think that that is not a pleasant sight for any one to see who really cares for the dignity and purity of his profession.

The preacher must mainly rely upon the strength of what he does believe, and not upon the weakness of what he does not believe. It must be the power of spirituality, and not the feebleness of materialism that makes him strong. No man conquers, no true man tries to conquer merely by the powerlessness of his adversary. I think the scene which I just described was principally melancholy, because it suggested a lack of faith among the ministers themselves. And one feared that that was connected with the obstinate hold upon some untenable excrescences upon their faith which they chose to consider part of the substance of their faith itself. So bigotry and cowardice go together always.

But after all, in days like these, one often finds himself falling back upon the simplest truths concerning the whole matter of belief. If there be disproof or modification of what we Christians hold, the sooner it can be made known to us the better. We are Christians at all, if we are Christians worthily, because we are first lovers of the truth. And if our truth is wholly true, it is God’s before it is ours, and we may at least trust Him with some part of its care. We are so apt to leave Him out.

And there is one strong feeling that comes out of the extravagant unbelief of our time, which has in it an element of reassurance. The preacher and pastor sees that in human nature which assures him of the essential religiousness of man. He comes to a complete conviction that only a religion can overthrow and supplant a religion. Man, wholly unreligious, is not even conceivable to him. And so, however he may fear for single souls, the very absoluteness of much of the denial of the time seems to offer security for the permanence of faith.

But the main thing is to know our own ground as spiritual men, and stand on its assured and tested strength. And that strength can be tested only by our own experience; and so once more we come round to our old first truth, that the man is behind the ministry, that what is in the sermon must be in the preacher first.

Here must come what useful work we can do for those who are bewildered and faithless in these trying times. If you are going to help men who are materialists, it will not probably be by a scientific disproof of materialism. It will be by a strong live offer of spiritual realities. It is not what the minister knows of science, but how he grasps and presents his spiritual verities, that makes him strong. Many ignorant ministers meet the difficulties of men far wiser than themselves. I may know nothing of speculative atheism. It is how I know God that tells.

I do not disparage controversy. Theology must be prepared to maintain her ground against all comers. If she loses her power of attack and defense, she will lose her life, as they used to say that when the bee parted with his sting he parted with his industry and spirit. Only not every minister is made for a controversialist, and the pulpit is not made for controversy.. The pulpit must be positive, telling its message, trusting to the power of that message, expecting to see it blend into harmony with all the other truth that fills the world; and the preacher, whatever else he may be elsewhere, in the pulpit must be positive too, uttering truth far more than denying error. There is nothing that could do more harm to Christianity to-day than for the multitude of preachers to turn from preaching Christ whom they do understand, to the discussion of scientific questions which they do not understand. Hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Preach positively what you believe. Never preach what you do not believe, or deny what you do believe. Rejoice in the privilege of declaring God. Let your people frankly understand, while you preach, that there is much you do not know, and that Joth you and they are waiting for completer light.

I must not linger longer on this topic. May God help you, as you meet it constantly, to be wise and true.

Another of the questions which belong to this time of ours in some peculiar ways is the question of toleration, — the relation of truth to partial truth and error. This again, like every deep pervading question, has its form for the learned and for the unlearned. To the scholar it comes with the speculations, for which the enlarged acquaintance with other lands and times have furnished such abundant food, about comparative religions. To the unscholarly it offers itself in the prevailing disposition to exalt conduct above belief, and ask not what views a man holds, but what sort of life he lives. In both these cases the tendency of our time is no doubt toward tolerance. The scholar and the ignorant man alike are both content that their neighbors should think differently from them about religion. The very desire for the stake has died away. We look back to the sixteenth and seventeenth century and wonder at the enormities of bigotry. We are all thankful for the progress; but often as we read the books of the time, often as we talk with our friends, there is a misgiving which intrudes. How much of this toleration is indifference? How many of these people that are kindly to their neighbors’ faiths are careless about their own? How much of the difference between us and the zealots of the seventeenth century has come from our weakened hold on truth-? They believed with all their hearts, and were intolerant; we have grown tolerant, but then we do not believe as they believed. We must realize their intensity before we presume to sit in judgment on their intolerance. So often we are only trying to be mutually harmless. We are like steamers lying in the fog and whistling, that we may not run into others nor they into us. It is safe, but commerce makes no great progress thereby, and it shows no great skill in navigation. And then there comes the picture of a higher state than either the seventeenth or nineteenth century has reached. We see that here, as everywhere, mankind has been advancing in a halting and awkward way, first dragging one side forward, and only gradually dragging the other side along to meet it. There was a time when men were standing with their love of truth in advance of their love of personal liberty. We see that we are standing now with our love of personal liberty in advance of our love for truth. We anticipate a time when the love of truth shall have come up to our love of liberty, and men shall be cordially tolerant and earnest believers both at once. When that comes it will be a new thing in the world. It has been seen in beautiful or splendid individuals scattered all through the ages, but there has been 10 age in which the mass of thinkers were at once strong in positive belief, and tolerant of difference of opinion.

Now it is certainly the minister’s duty to inculcate positive belief. We rejoice that it has also been recognized as the minister’s duty to foster charity and tolerance. In the minister, then, would seem to rest the hope of that better time to come when both of these together are to bless the world. As he goes about among his people he is perpetually saddened by their unnatural divorce. He hears some member of his church talk about truth. He listens to clear statements of the Gospel; wise, sound discriminations; true scriptural explanations of the mysteries of God and man and grace. And all uttered with a deep fervor, which shows how the man loves the truth he knows. The preacher says, “What clearness!” “What faith!” and rejoices over his disciple. And just then some stray word drops from the glowing lips which shows with what a strangeness, amounting almost to antipathy, this believer looks upon other people who hold truth differently from himself; with what a sense of narrow and exclusive privilege he treasures his orthodox belief. Or, just the opposite. Some hearer of your preaching delights you with his ardent charity for all religions, until you find that he has no real religion of his own. He upbraids the bigot without ever having dreamed of the intense belief which has made the bigot what he is. In either case there is a disappointment in the result of your work as it appears in these two men. Belief and charity are not yet in their true association. Mercy and truth have not yet met together. And you set yourself, as you walk home from your two parish calls, to think what you can do to bring about their union. What the minister can really do is this. I give it in no special rules. I know none. If I did, I should not think it worth my while or yours to come here and repeat the little methods of my working which would not help you. I only give here, as I have tried to all along, the principles for which the grace of God and your good sense, if you have both, will find for you the applications. The preacher can, first always insist on looking and on making his people look on doctrines not as ends but means; and so, if other men less perfectly reach the same ends by means of other doctrines, he will be able to rejoice in their attainment of the end without doing dishonor to or valuing one whit the less the truth which as it seems to him leads much more directly and fully to the great attainment. “Master,” said John, “we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and we forbade him because he folio we th not with us.” And Jesus said, “Forbid him not, for there is no man which shall do a miracle in my name that can lightly speak evil of me. For he that is not against us is on our part.” I suppose the day is past

H36 LECTURES ON PREACHING.

when people strengthened their sense of the importance of the Gospel and of their privilege in hearing it, and of their duty to carry it to the heathen, by asserting that no heathen could be saved who had not heard it. But something of the same spirit lingers still at home. The grosser forms of an error will often disappear before its milder ones. And many men, many ministers, are apt to emphasize the value of the truth to themselves by asserting or at least implying consequences which they do not really think would follow on its rejection by their neighbors. The abandonment of such a way of thinking and talking would be a great step forward toward the desired union of belief and charity.

And again the preacher may industriously and discriminatingly set himself to discern what there is good in the heart of the system that he tolerates, and, tolerating it for that good, may so keep his absolute standards and his love for his own truth unimpaired. The weakness of a large part of our tolerance for other systems than our own is that it is not discriminating. It is a mere sentiment. It thinks that it is narrow not to tolerate, and so it says, “Come now and let us tolerate;” but it never dissects out that soul of goodness in things evil or only half good which should make it possible to tolerate them cordially and be glad of their existence; and so while it wastes its cheap and unmeaning compliments upon them, it often has no real sympathy with them, and either despises or hates them underneath its compliments. This is the kind of tolerance that haunts the anniversary platforms where sects are met together, where men seem to have forgotten that there are any differences between them, and from which they go back to their pulpits without a perceptible mitigation in the blindness with which they misapprehend the whole position of their neighbor who is preaching in the next street to them. Toleration as a mere fashion and sentiment is very feeble. It must study and appreciate that which is good in what it appreciates. To see the positive truths that underlie the Roman Catholic errors, that is the only way to be cordially tolerant of Romanism, and yet keep clearly and strongly one’s own Protestant belief.

It is possible for earnest belief to be united with ardent charity, and it is for us who preach the Gospel of Christ to show the possibility in all our life and preaching. Value the ends of life more than its means, watch ever for the soul of good in things evil, lnd the soul of truth in things false, and beside the richer influence that will flow out from your life on all to whom you minister, you will do something to help the solution of that unsolved problem of the human mind and heart, the reconciliation of hearty tolerance with strong positive belief.

I have been speaking of some of the intellectual characteristics of our time which the preacher must encounter. They are very prominent. But there are other characteristics of a different sort that force themselves upon us almost as much. We talk about the scientific character of our age. We think of it as wholly given up to the search after knowledge. But after all there is a vast preponderance of the activity of our time which is in no sense scientific. The commercial and social and political movements which go on about us cannot be said, I think, to have any more of the scientific spirit, to show any more tendency to revert to facts and trust to established principles, than those same movements have always manifested. The trouble with these great continuous and universal interests of life no doubt has its connections with the danger which besets the study of science. What we have to fear is the magnifying of second causes to the forgetfulness of the first cause and the final cause of things. We need to remember as we preach with what enormous urgency this danger is pressing upon the lives of the men and women to whom our preaching is addressed. The men and women are living in the midst of the intense but superficial excitement which comes of the unnatural and exclusive vividness of second causes. It seems to the business man as if Wealth were the king of everything; as if it made reputation, made happiness, almost made character. It seems to the man or woman oi society as if Fashion, in some supreme reserve of queenship where she sits and whence her undisputed mandates come, were the supreme arbiter of destiny. It is the frankness with which men own that their views of the forces which govern things stops with these immediate causes, wealth and fashion and the pleasure of the senses, that appals us now. They do not even go through the form of recognizing some spiritual force farther back. “Alas, there are no more hypocrites now,” cried the Abbe Poulle in France in the last century. And it was indeed a symptom. As humanity is constituted, when men no longer give themselves the trouble to make an imitation, it proves how little the reality is honored; and the very carelessness of men about affecting any thought of higher causes is an indication of how the lower causes have absorbed the attention and are trying to satisfy the needs of men.

This is the world to which we have to bring the Gospel, the story that begins with “God created the heaven and the earth,” and goes on with the record of God’s power and love until it comes to the prophecy of the spiritual Judgment Day. What can we do to get that story of the one first cause home to the leart of this eager, feverish age worshipping in its Pantheon of second causes? JFirst, O my brothers who are to be pastors of the Church, we can take watchful care that the Church herself is true to her belief in God as the source of all power. One of the most terrible signs of how the spirit of sordidness has filled the world is the lamentable extent to which it has pervaded the Church. The Church is constantly found trusting in second causes as if she knew of no first cause. She elaborates her machineries as if the power lay in them. She goes, cap in hand, to rich men’s doors, and flatters them and dares not tell them of their sins because she wants their money. She lets her officers conduct her affairs with all the arts of a transaction on the street or an intrigue in politics, or only shows her difference of standards and freedom from responsibility by some advantage taken which not even the conscience of the exchange or of the caucus would allow. She degrades the dignity of her grand commission by puerile devices for raising money and frantic efforts to keep herself before the public which would be fit only for the sordid ambitions of a circus troupe. You must cast all that out of the church with which you have to do, or you will make its pulpit perfectly powerless to speak of God to our wealth-ridden and pleasure-loving time. You must show first that His Church believes in Him and trusts Him and is satisfied in Him, or you will cry in vain to men to come to Him. To do this, you must not only cast out at your doors the disreputable tinsel of church life of which I have been speaking. You must believe in man as the child of God enough to preach to him at once the highest spiritual truth about his Father. Many a well-meaning preacher is all wrong here, I think. He says, “You must take men as you find them. You must speak to such faculties and perceptions as are awake in them.” And so because he sees the economical perceptions very acute in our commercial time, he preaches the economy of goodness. He shows men how holiness will pay. He knows there is a higher truth, but he cannot trust men to hear it. He hopes to lead them on to it by and by. Ah, that is all wrong. There is in every man’s heart, if you could only trust it, a power of appreciating genuine spiritual truth; of being moved into unselfish gratitude by the love of God. Continually he who trusts it finds it there. A hundred men stand like the Spanish magnates on the shore and say, “You must not venture far away. There is no land beyond. Stay here and develop what we have.” One brave and trustful man like Columbus believes that the complete world is complete, and sails for a fair land beyond the sea and finds it. The minister who succeeds is the minister who in the midst of a sordid age trusts the heart of man who is the child of God, and knows that it is not all sordid, and boldly speaks to it of God his Father as if he expected it to answer. And it does answer; and other preachers who have not believed in man, and have talked to him in low planes and preached to him half gospels which they thought were all that he could stand, look on and wonder at their brother-preacher’s unaccountable success. There have always been illustrations of this. There never were more striking ones than in our time. With all the sordidness of our time, the preachers that nave been the most powerful have been the most spiritual. His theology has something of the taint of mercenariness

about it, but of all the great revivalists I do not know where we shall find any one who has preached more constantly to the good that there is in man and assumed in all men a power of spiritual action than Mr. Moody. There is nothing finer than to see a soul, which amazes the men in whom it rises, rise up in men, when he who trusts it to answer to the highest call speaks to it of the love of God. In all your preaching echo the ministry of Jesus, who spoke to the lowest and most sensual people directly of the everlasting love, and by the trust He had in them brought them to His Father.

I do not think that one could rightly suggest the characteristics of our time which a minister encounters without naming a tendency to sentimentalness which shows itself in a great deal of our religion, and which, both directly and indirectly, does our work great harm. It is connected with the other features of the time, with the prevalence of doubt and unbelief. It is most natural that when a multitude of men have more or less deliberately taken up the idea that the foundations of faith are shaken, when they are afraid to say that they hold the truths of religion to be literally and absolutely true, when even the authority of religion as the lord of morality is disturbed, and men are looking somewhere else than to God for a constant reason why they should do right, and when yet, with all this, the impulses of reverence and worship remain strong, it is inevitable then that a certain religion of sentiment should grow up, of which it is impossible to say how much it believes, but which delights in glowing and vague utterances of feeling. No one can read our hymns, whether they be of the rudest revival sort or the translated mediaevalisms of ritualism, without feeling what I mean. They are very beautiful often, but, compared with the hymns that our fathers sang, they are weak. They lack thought, and no religion that does not think is strong. It may be in reaction from the way in which many of the old hymns were made to labor with a process of reasoning that struggled on most unlyrically from verse to verse, that the favorite hymn of to-day discards connected thought and seems to try only to utter moods of mystic feeling, or to depict some scene in which the spiritual parable is apt to be lost in the brightness of the sensuous imagery. I think that the same thing is true of prayers. A prayer must have thought in it. The thought may overburden it so that its wings of devotion are fastened down to its sides and it cannot ascend. Then it is no prayer, only a meditation or a contemplation. But to take the thought out of a prayer does not insure its going up to God. It may be too light as well as too heavy to ascend. I saw once in a shop-window in London a placard which simply announced “Limp Prayers.” It described, I believe, a kind of Prayer Book in a certain sort of binding which was for sale within; but it brought to mind many a prayer to which one had listened, in which he could not join, out of which had been left the whole backbone of thought, and to which he could attach none of his own heart’s desires.

I know that there have always been sentimentalists in religion. Mysticism, which at its best is a very high and thorough action of the whole nature in apprehending spiritual truth, is always degenerating into sentimentalism. But it is dangerous to-day because it so frankly claims for itself that it is religion. Disowning doctrine and depreciating law, it asserts that religion belongs to feeling, and that there is no truth but love. You will meet it surely in your first parish at the very door. Some of the sweetest and noblest natures there are sure to be full of it, and show it to you very winningly. Others will set it before you as mere weak self-indulgence. You will find many of the strongest brains and consciences in town separated entirely from the church, because they consider it, as they would say if they spoke their whole minds out to you, to be the very shop and banquet room of sentimentalism. You cannot ignore this as you preach. You cannot help struggling against its influence upon yourself. The hard theology is bad. The soft theology is worse. You must count your work unsatisfactory unless you waken men’s brains and stir their consciences. Let them see clearly that you value no feeling which is not the child of truth and the father of duty. And to let them see that you value no other feeling you must value no other feeling either in yourself or them.

It is natural for sentimentalism and scepticism to go together, like the fever and the chill, and the same mixture of deeper faith and more conscientious duty must be medicine for both.

We ministers cannot help noting with interest among the symptoms of our time the way in which the preacher himself is regarded. To remark the changed attitude which the people generally hold towards ministers is the most familiar commonplace; to mourn over it as a sign of decadence in the religious spirit is the habit of some people. But the reasons of it are plain enough and have been often pointed out. The preacher is no longer the manifest superior of other men in wit and wisdom. That deference which was once paid to the minister’s office, upon the reasonable presumption that the man who occupied it was better educated, more large in his ideas, a better reasoner, a more trustworthy guide in all the various affairs of life than other men, if it were paid still would either be the perpetuation of an old habit, or would be paid to the office purely for itself without any presumption at all about the man. This latter could not be long possible; no dignity of office can secure men’s respect for itself continuously unless it can show a worthy character in those who hold it. I am glad that the mere forms of reverence for the preacher’s office have so far passed away. I am not making a virtue of necessity. I rejoice at it. Nothing could be worse for us than for men to keep telling us by deferential forms that we are the wisest of men when their shelves are full of books with far wiser words in them than the best that we can preach; or that we are the most eloquent of men when there are better orators by the score on every side; or that we are the best of men when we know of sainthoods among the most obscure souls before which we stand ashamed. No manly man is satisfied with any ex-officio estimate of his character. Whether it makes him better or worse than he is, he cares nothing for it. And so the nearer that ministers come to being judged like other men just for what they are, the more they ought to rejoice, the more I think they do rejoice. But what then? Is the minister’s sacred office nothing? Does not his truth gain authority and his example urgency from the position where he stands? Indeed they do. It seems to me that the best privilege which can be given to any man is a position which shall stimulate him to his best and which shall make his best most effective. And that is just what is given to the minister. An official position which should substitute some other power for the best powers of the man himself, and should make him seem effective beyond his real force, would be an injury to him and ultimately would be recognized as an empty sham itself, I quarrel with no man for his conscientious belief about the high and separate commission of the Christian ministry. I only quarrel with the man who, resting satisfied with what he holds to be his high commission, is not eager to match it with a high character. The more you think yourself different from other men because you are a minister, the more try to be different from other men by being more fully what all men ought to be. That is a High Churchmanship of which we cannot have too much.

I hold then that the Christian ministry has still in men’s esteem all that is essentially valuable, and all fchat it is really good for it to have. It has a place of utterance more powerful and sacred than any other in the world. Then comes the question, What

‘TJjriVIRSITY! has it to utter? The pedestal is still there. Men will not gather about it as they once did perhaps, without regard to the statue that stands upon it. But if a truly good statue stands there the world can see it as it could if it stood nowhere else.

There are two great faults of the ministry which come, one of them from ignoring, the other from rebelling against, this change in the attitude of the minister and the people towards each other. The first is the perpetual assertion of the minister’s authority for the truth which he teaches. To claim that men should believe what we teach them because we teach it to them and not because they see it to be true is to assume a place which God does not give us and men will not acknowledge for us. Many a Christian minister needs to be sent back to him whom we call the heathen Socrates, to read these noble words in the Phaedo — which whole dialogue, by the way, is itself no unworthy pattern of the best qualities of preaching. “You, if you take my advice, will think little about Socrates, but a great deal about Truth.”

And the other fault is the constant desire to make people hear us who seem determined to forget us. This is the fault of the sensational preaching. A large part of what is called sensational preaching is simply the effort of a man who has no faith in his office or in the essential power of truth to keep himself before people’s eyes by some kind of intellectual fantasticalness. It is a pursuit of brightness and vivacity of thought for its own sake, which seems to come from a certain almost desperate determination of the sensational minister that he will not be forgotten. I think there is a great deal of nervous uneasiness of mind which shows a shaken confidence in one’s position. It struggles for cleverness. It lives by making points. It is fatal to that justice of thought which alone in the long run commands confidence and carries weight. The man who is always trying to attract attention and be brilliant counts the mere sober effort after absolute truth and justice dull. It is more tempting to be clever and unjust than to be serious and just. Every preacher has constantly to make his choice which he will be. It does not belong to men, like angels, to be u ever bright and fair” together. And the anxious desire for glitter is one of the signs of the dislodgment of the clerical position in our time.

There is a possible life of great nobleness and usefulness for the preacher who, frankly recognizing and cordially accepting the attitude towards his office which he finds on the world’s part, preaches truth and duty on their own intrinsic authority, and wins personal power and influence because he does not seek them, but seeks the prevalence of righteousness and the salvation of men’s souls.

The relation of our time to the Bible is another subject which must interest a preacher very deeply. The Bible is the authority by which we preach; and to find the people whom our preaching interests so largely uninterested in and ignorant of the source from which our truth is drawn, must awaken some questions as to whether our preaching is wholly right. I do not speak now of the prevalent doubts about the Bible, though they are of course connected very closely, both as cause and effect, with men’s ignorance about it. I speak merely of the fact of that undoubted ignorance. Who is there among our people that knows the Old Testament? Where are the people that in any real sense know the New?

If we look for the reasons of such ignorance about a book which lies on everybody’s table, and whose name is on everybody’s lips, they are not hard to find. First there is in our time a great reaction from the belief that men once had in the saving power of the Bible. Men who have read a book not because it was true or because they wanted to get at its lessons, but because they thought it was safe to read it and unsafe not to read it, just as soon as the notion of safety is loosened from it, will be less ready to care for its truth and to feel its power than that of other books. This is human nature. The stronger feeling about the Bible has kept down the more familiar feeling which attaches us to other books. Another reason is, of course, the crowd of other books, their cheapness and their apparent pressingness. Even the man who knows that the Bible is the best of books, will read the last new treatise on religion instead of the Bible, because he knows the Bible belongs to all ages, and can never pass out of date, while with this “latest publication” it is to-day or never. And yet another reason is the prevalent disposition to consider the Bible the clergy’s book. We wonder at the pusillanimity with which the people of the Middle Ages and the Romanists of to-day have submitted to restrictions on the reading of the Bible, and to the acceptance of whatever account of it their preachers chose to give. The real truth is that they like this state of things; and many of our Protestants like it too, and of their own free will treat the Bible so exactly as the Mediaeval Christian was compelled to treat it that it ought not to seem strange. And another reason is, that the clergy by their unreal fantastic treatment of the Bible often do what they can to make the people think that it is indeed unintelligible except to one who holds a very complicated key, and so that it is not for the like of them to touch it. This is the evil of all unreal exegesis. It throws an unreal air about the book of God. I heard of a sermon on the first verse of the forty-first psalm which declared it to be a statement of the mission of Christ and the scheme of the Atonement. Imagine a believing disciple going home after that sermon and reading his Bible with the slightest hope of knowing what it meant! And another reason still is our unbiblical preaching. I mean our preaching about all topics with various degrees of wisdom but with nothing which would suggest that what we give men is only a few drops out of a spring of truth and life, and so would send them eagerly to the fountain to drink their fill.

Against these tendencies to make the Bible unreal and uninteresting there has come the protest of the new way of treating it and the new books about it, I know the danger of superficialness which attends the realistic treatment of the Bible. I know how apt it is to carry the mind up to a certain point of amateur interest and leave it there. Certainly no one can praise it except as an introduction to a spiritual richness which is far deeper than itself, but in our day it is something to be very glad of that Milman and Stanley, and Farrar and the author of “Ecce Homo,” in literature, and Holman Hunt and Bida, in the region of art, have made the outer life of the Bible live anew, and by sweeping aside the mist of unreality that hung about its door have opened the way for a deeper entrance into its spirit than man has yet attained.

There is need of every special effort to make men know the Bible. The Bible class, the expository lecture, the illustrative picture, none of them can do too much. But there is yet greater need that you and I who preach should let the people see that we are men of the Bible, that we know its letter and are possessed by its spirit, that out of it directly comes the support of our own religious life and the food which we offer in our preaching.

I must not let my lecture grow any longer. I have tried to point out to you some of the peculiarities of our time which we as preachers must encounter. I must not close without begging you not to be ashamed or afraid of the age you live in, and least of all to talk of it in a tone of weak despair. In the beginning of the last century many men talked of Christianity as if it were an effete superstition. And yet behold the new life which has come forth since from that which men then called dead. The state of things which then existed may seem to be renewed, though it is not possible for men to be as wholly unbelieving in the nineteenth century as they were in the eighteenth. But out of what men now call a slow death new life will come. In many ways we can see clearly that it is not death, but some strange change and progress of the methods of life by which we are surrounded. To be thoroughly in sympathy with the Ige, to admire everything in it that is admirable, to rejoice in its great achievements, to see the beauty of the superb material structure which it is building for the better spirituality which is to come to dwell in it, to love to trace the strange nomadic currents of spiritual desire which run, often grotesquely or frantically, through its tumultuous life, to see with joy how its new needs bring out new sides of helpfulness in the ever helpful Gospel of Christ, this is the true culture of a preacher for our time. He believes in it and loves it, and sees its great strong faults against the background of its noble qualities. He thanks God, who sent him here to work; for he is sure that while there have been many centuries in which it was easier, there has been none in which it was more interesting or inspiring for a man to preach.