Speaking to the Heart

TIRE low — the order which generals have often given to their men before fighting began — suits the pulpit not less than the battle-field. The mistake common both to soldiers and speakers is to shoot too high, over people’s heads; missing, by a want of directness and plainness, both the persons they preach to and the purpose they preach for. So did not the prophet Nathan, when, having told his story of the little ewe lamb, and kindled David’s indignation, he fixed his eyes on the king to say, Thou art the man. So did not the Baptist, when, recognising in the crowd Pharisees swollen with pride and rich with the spoil of orphans, he cried, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to cornel And, though with speech less blunt and rude and unpolite withal, as some might say, so did not the great apostle of the Gentiles, but directed his addresses, like arrows, to the hearts and habits, the bosoms and business of his audience. In Athens, full of false gods, he proclaimed the true one; in Corinth he denounced the vices which made her name so infamous. Before the Hebrews, who clung so tenaciously to the sacrifices of lambs, bulls, and goats, he set forth the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world — like an expert physician applying to each disease its own direct and appropriate remedy.

Arraigned at a judgment bar, it furnished him with a topic of discourse. He proclaimed the judgment to come, and, with the skill of an orator and the courage of a martyr, preached to an intemperate and unrighteous judge of temperance and righteousness, till, as the captive flashed and thundered from the bar, the judge on the bench grew pale and trembled. In this he followed the example of Him, the Prince of Preachers, whom the common people, enchanted and enchained with his speech, heard gladly — speaking, in the judgment even of his enemies, as never man spake.

With matter divine and manner human, our Lord descended to the level of the humblest of the crowd, lowering himself to their understandings, and winning his way into their hearts by borrowing his topics from familiar circumstances and the scenes around him. Be it a boat, a plank, a rope, a beggar’s rags, an imperial robe, we would seize on anything to save a ’ drowning man; and in his anxiety to save, poor sinners, to rouse their fears, their love, their interest, to make them understand and feel the truth, our Lord pressed everything — art and nature, earth and heaven — into his service. Creatures of habit, the servants if not the slaves of form, we invariably select our text from some book of the Sacred Scriptures. He took a wider, freer range; and, instead of keeping to the unvarying routine of text and sermon with formal divisions, it were well, perhaps, that we sometimes ventured to follow his example; for may it not be to the naturalness of their addresses and their striking out from the beaten path of texts and sermons, to their plain speaking and home-thin sts, to their direct appeals and homespun arguments, that our street and lay preachers owe perhaps not a little of their power?

Illustrating the words of the great English dramatist —

“Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything,”

our Lord found many a topic of discourse in the scenes around him; even the humblest objects shone in his hands as I have seen a fragment of broken glass or earthenware, as it caught the sunbeam, light up, flashing like a diamond. With the stone of Jacob’s well for a pulpit, and its water for a text, he preached salvation to the Samaritan woman. A little child, which he takes from its mother’s side, and holds up blushing in his arms before the astonished audience, is his text for a sermon on humility. A husbandman on a neighbouring height between him and the sky, who strides with long and measured steps over the field he sows, supplies a text from which he discourses on the Gospel and its effects on different classes of hearers. In a woman baking; in two women who sit by some cottage door grinding at the mill; in an old, strong fortalice perched on a rock, whence it looks across the brawling torrent to the ruined and roofless gable of a house swept away by mountain floods — Jesus found texts. From the birds that sung above his head, and the lilies that blossomed at his feet, he discoursed on the care of God — these his text, and Providence his theme j and with gray hairs on our own head and hoary heads around, we feel that his practice justifies us in making these our text; and addressing you, as I proceed to do, from these words — “Gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not.”

I. Gray hairs are a sign of decay.

Giving a mane to the lion, antlers to the hart, to the males among birds a brighter plumage, and among four-footed beasts a bolder carriage and a bigger form, God, the maker of all, has distinguished the sexes, not only among mankind, but among the higher orders of the lower animals. He had a wise purpose in this. A God of order and not of confusion, he has for wise purposes also given distinctive features to the different periods of human life, from the cradle onwards to the grave. In roaming over the mountains, we often find on the tops of all but peaked and picturesque ranges, a level space — a table-land, as it is called, between the ascent from one valley and the descent into another, where the water, having no run, gathers into lonely tarns, or stagnates in a black morass. Human life between the ages of forty and fifty presents such a level. Travelling onward with little change in our appearance, in our powers of body or of mind; after growth has ceased and before decay has begun; ere the signs of youth have entirely left us or those of age have come; arrived at full maturity, with waste and supply in perfect balance, it were hard to say whether we are yet ascending from the cradle, or, having turned the hill-top, are on our way down to the grave. It is a solemn position that culminating point, where we see the cradle we have left on this side, and the grave where we shall lie on that! Yet it is not of much practical consequence to know whether we are going up or down hill, since there are in disease and the chapter of accidents many causes which make it the lot of few to number the appointed threescore years and ten. Death strikes down his victims at all ages; and of the crowd that started together, but two or three stragglers reach the natural term of life. Many more die young than old: and death so extends his ravages over the whole period of life, that, whether with buoyant steps we are pressing up or are tottering down hill beneath a load of years, we tread on graves the road, if I may say so, is paved with burial stones; and on every side the tombs of all ages, each with its memento mori, tell the young not less than the old to prepare to die.

Keep reading