The Preacher in His Pulpit
Nd now, gentlemen,” said the first
President of the Royal Academy, as
he closed his lectures on Art, “I
have but one name to present to you: it is
the name of the incomparable MICHAEL
AngelO.”
The central vital secret of all successful preaching, in its last analysis, is the constant presentation of the One and only Name under heaven given among men, vrhereby we must be saved.” All power must primarily and ultimately depend upon the faithful preaching of Christ crucified; and to this all means and methods must be tributary and subsidiary. But terms are not always used intelligibly, and, as possibly we have drifted more or less from our original moorings, it may be well to ask what is meant by “preaching the gospel “? For some rea-
“Acts iv. 12.
lOI
102 THE DiriXE ART OF PREACHIA’G.
son the pulpit often fails to reach, touch, move, and mold men for a better life, and carries no converting power. Paul has left us his model for effective preaching, and hinted somewhat as to its matter, manner, and mission.’
Its subject-matter is “Christ crucified.” The medicine of God for all the wants and woes of man is the cross; to preach the gospel is to lift up the Lamb of God so that all may look and live. Even John the Baptist was content to be only a voice crying, a finger pointing: “Behold the Lamb of God.”
The very heart of the gospel is a fact. “He bare our sins.“* That fact is closely linked with all other effects, such as our death unto life, our bringing unto God, our redemption from sin, our deliverance from the world.” This grand fact is therefore the central theme of all true preaching, the stem around which crystallizes the science of salvation. To lift up Christ as an example, the model for a “reconstructed manhood,” is not enough. The rallying-point and the radiating-point of both doctrine and
‘I Cor. i. 17-31.
‘I Pet. ii. 24. iii. t8; Titus ii. 14; Gal. i. 4.
life is the CROSS, that golden milestone in the Forum of the Ages, where all roads meet. From all quarters sinners, seeking to be saved, must come to it; to all quarters, saints seeking to save, must move from it; and on our way to the cross as penitent sinners, or on our way from the cross as witnessing saints, we find every need of man met and every vital question answered.
“Christ crucified” is, however, no narrow theme. As the God-man, all that is in God is in Him; and all that is in man is in Him, save sin; and, combining both, He adjusts all the mutual relations of God and man. From His cradle to His cross, and from His cross to His crown, all our experience is represented and illustrated. He is the power and wisdom of God, for He offsets our impotence and ignorance. Man’s sin springs partly from the incapacity of the natural man, and partly from the hostility of the carnal mind.’ Its cure cannot be found, therefore, either in the power or wisdom of man, and all attempts at self-help and selfrescue have been, and ever must be, dismal and disastrous failures. The providential mission of the two great nations of antiquity
‘Cf. I Cor. ii. 14, and Rom. viii. 7. was to show man’s weakness and folly. Roman civilization stood for law and arms; its watchword was Poivcr. Greek civilization stood for letters and art; its watchword, Wisdom. Both those nations rotted in their own vices, and drew the vultures to the prey by the scent of their decay. Well might Paul not be ashamed to present to the Roman, Christ the power of God, and, to the Greek, Christ the wisdom of God.
He who would preach must be true to his own convictions; the pulpit is holy ground, and He who dwelt in the Bush demands truth in the inward parts. Candor and a good conscience demand that we in the pulpit utter our deep experiences and deliberate convictions. And no marked advance hi pulpit-poivcr will be attained without more emphatic and exchisive preaching of Christ crucified, enforced by experience..
The themes treated in the modern pulpit, as well as the sensational announcements by which they are heralded, often make us blush with shame.’ Thej’ are travesties up-
‘Take the pulpit notices for one week: “Confuience,” “Dynamite under the Throne,” “Bible Laws .it Business,” “Ideals of Manhood,” “Why She came to the Kingdom,” “Scientific Skepticism,” “Taking Account of Character,” “Would the Virgin Mary, St. retcr, or St. Patrick attend on preaching. The connection of many a so-called “sermon” with the Word is fictitious or factitious; the robe of a tawdry rhetoric is substituted for a divine simplicity of speech; for laclc of specific gravity, specific levity abounds, and the pulpit becomes a place for secular entertainment, if not for clownish buffoonery.
A lecture may be popular and even profitable and yet unfit for the pulpit. Preaching is the unfolding of a “Thus saith the Lord.” The true preacher thinks God’s thoughts after God, searches the Word, compares spiritual things with spiritual, and so gets at the mind of God. This germ, buried in his heart, is by holy, prayerful meditation made to grow and germinate. The Word, first born of God, is born again of man; it becomes incarnate in his conviction and affection, and so in his speech.
a Catholic Church?” “Forcibleness of Right Words,” “Sins Covered at Pompeii,” “Ethics of Marriage,” ‘’ Conditions of Power,” “Success in Life,” “Up a Tree,” “Short Beds and Narrow Coverings,” “How to Choose a Wife,” “A Youthful Heroine,” “Whittier, the Quaker Poet,” “Errors of Police Courts,” “A War with Chili,” “A Rain of Righteousness,” “That Night Interview,” “A Delightful Journey,” “The Function of Particularism,” “A Scarlet Thread,” “Pretty Women,” “Character of Hamlet,” “Boomerangs and Monkeys,” etc.
io6 THE DIVINE ART OF PRE.ICIIIXG.
The true sermon has therefore a divine genesis; it begins in God. The Spirit broods over the mind, till the chaos of dim perceptions and confused conceptions is resolved into order. God says, “Let light be,” and light is.’ Then comes separation between heavenly and earthly things, and, like stars in a cloudless sky, celestial glories appear, and there is revealed a firmament of radiant splendor.
It is not strange if the preaching that has such a Genesis ends in an Apocalypse of Jesus Christ, a revelation of the crucified and glorified One, which fits a man to speak with strange authority and power. The Word of God, alive with the thought of God, has taken root downward and bears fruit upward. It is no mere intellectual growth, branching into analytic argument and blooming into flowers of rhetoric. The hearer instinctively feels that such preaching is a more than human product — a burning bush, aglow with the mystic flame before which reverence removes the sandals of criticism.
So it haseverbeen. The preaching which God uses to convert men lifts Christ cruci- ‘Gen. i. 3, Hebrew.
fied, and finds the secret of its power in turning the eyes of men to Him alone. The Master Himself has left us our first and last lesson in homiletics: “And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me.” ‘The preacher is a mediator between God and man, His mouthpiece. His ambassador. He must hear the Word at His mouth, and then speak that Word as nearly as possible just as he hears it from God.
This is the first and last law of the sermon. Preparation must, above all, be scriptural and spiritual. To learn to do such work easily is the peril of the preacher. Facility and felicity in the merely literary processes, and fluency and beauty in utterance, are often mistaken for pulpit power. The homiletical faculty is substituted for a mind, heart, tongue, infused, suffused, transfused with that Spirit who is the breath, the light, the life of the Word. The intellectual and human crowds out the spiritual and divine.
Such preaching will, of course, be powerless to save and sanctify, for a stream rises to no higher level than its source. Preaching, when it is instinct with God’s power, is ‘John xii. 32. the spreading of God’s truth over the whole man, till it touches intellect, sensibilities, affections, conscience, will; but we can apply truth to others only so far as it has first been applied to ourselves. God’s word, in order to be effective, must have the man behind it as well as before it, and come forth backed by a rich personal experience, a co-ordinate testimony from the inward life of the preacher.
How obvious it is, therefore, that the preacher must be a genuine man, and his whole life be a doing of the truth. Nowhere do subtlety and fraud appear to more disadvantage than in the pulpit.
On the Duke of Richmond’s report about fortifications, Sheridan said he complimented “the noble president on his talents as an engineer, which were strongly evinced in the planning and constructing of that very paper... He has made it a contest of posts, and conducted his reasoning not less on principles of trigonometry than of logic. There are certain assumptions thrown up like advanced works to keep the enemy at a distance from the principal object of debate; strong provisos protect and cover the flanks of his assertions; his very queries are his casemates.” I remember to have heard in a great ecclesiastical gathering, from a conspicuous ecclesiastic, the most disingenuous and thoroughly dishonest speech I ever heard. How can such a man help struggling souls? Oh for the sermon behind which is the whole, honest minded, honest hearted man, who speaks what he knows and has been taught of God.
It has “pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.” The pulpit is the main agent in evangelization, and to raise or lower its standard is to help or to hinder every other form of active effort to save souls. When the “preachers of the gospel” are content to preach the gospel;’ when Christ crucified is their theme, and it is treated “in a crucified style;” when thegerm of every sermon is some seed-thought of God that has found root in the heart and borne fruit in the speech; when the aim of every sermon is to glorify Christ in saving and sanctifying souls, and toward that end every thought and word and gesture converge — we shall see results of which even Pentecost was but a prophecy and foretaste.
In the assault on Fort Pulaski, every ball in the first volley of seventy guns struck no THE DIVINE ART OF PREACHING.
within a circle twelve feet in diameter. Down came the flag I Of what use to resist such a fire! Many a flag of Satan would be hauled down if our guns were pointed in one direction, and shot upon shot were hurled, heavy and hot, against the walls of his citadel. The gospel is still the power and the wisdom of God unto salvation. There is no promise that man’s word shall not fail; but “My word, “says God, “shall not return unto me void.” ’
Again we affirm it — would that it were with a clarion peal as loud as the trump of Gabriel! — we must have a thoroughly evangelical, if we are to Kave a thoroughl)- evangelisticy pulpit. Men must be drawn not to us, but to the cross, and to us only that they may through us be drawn to Christ. Those attractions only are legitimate in the preacher that make the cross effective. Let us have the gospel unmixed with human philosophy, poetry, rhetoric, and apologetics. It is the mixture of incongruous material that makes brittleness. That preaching that corrupts and adulterates God’s gospel with man’s wisdom lacks consistency and coherence, and is doomed to practical failure. ‘Is. Iv. II.
I preached philosophy and men applauded: I preached Christ and men repented.
The facts, rather than the philosophy, of redemption, we are to preach. We are to speak the truth on the authority of a “Thus saith the Lord.” Lowering God’s Word into a comparison and competition with systems of human teaching sacrifices this unique authority. The primary test of human systems is found in their appeal to one’s reason and conscience; the primary appeal of the gospel is found in the fact that God speaks. The philosophy of His scheme of salvation is too deep for me; even the angels desire to look into the deep things of God. I may, like Nicodemus, ask Jioivonwhy these things are so, but to my question God answers only by solemn and emphatic repetition, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee.” So must we dare to preach with authority, as ambassadors of God. There has never been an era of pulpit power except with such conditions, and there never will be.