Preaching
It is not my purpose to describe in this chapter the brilliant discourses by which, forty years ago, Mr James became famous among English Congregational ists, nor do I intend to review those sermons of his later years which were delivered away from home, or on special occasions; the most remarkable of these may be read and studied in the first three volumes of his Collected Works. This chapter is intended to answer the question. How did Mr James preach every Sunday in his own pulpit?
He had a profound sense of the greatness of the preacher’s vocation. Though he sometimes echoed the fashionable creed that the press has usurped or inherited the ancient supremacy of the pulpit, he never heartily accepted it. He believed in preaching as a Divine institution, for which the true ministers of Christ receive sjDccial endowments from the Holy Ghost. He thought of it, too, as the highest employment of man’s natural powers, demanding from all who are called to its responsibilities and glories, the consecration of every faculty and every noble passion. He permitted no side pursuits to divert his strength or abate his enthusiasm. Theological reading, literary work, ecclesiastical business, social pleasures, were forbidden to encroach on the time claimed by his sermons. With some preachers, preachmg seems a mere parenthesis in their life, interrupting the piu-suits to which they give most of their energy and nearly all their heart; Mr
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James expended his utmost resources in making his sermons attractive and powerful
For very many years his preparation for Sunday seldom commenced later than Wednesday morning * and he liked to be able to lay down his pen between one and two o’clock on Saturday, that he might have the afternoon for the students, and the evening for quiet thought and prayer. But he did not suppose that when the sermon was written all preparation for the pulpit was over. He always read on Saturday evenings books which powerfully move the religious affections, or which assert the awful dignity of the ministerial office — books like Baxter’s “Keformed Pastor,” Payson’s “Life,” Brainerd’s “Life,” Howe’s “Blessedness of the Paghteous,” Owen’s “SX-)iritual Mindedness,” Archbishop Leighton’s “Commentary on Peter.”
To the last he wi’ote his sermons very fully, though, except on occasions of unusual importance, he never used his manuscript in the pulpit. When his popularity as a preacher was at its height he preached memoriter, and, I think, that even in his later years he generally delivered many passages nearly as he had written them. Few could speak better when altogether unprepared, but he escaped the ruin into which a fatal fluency has betrayed many a clever but indolent man, by conscientious and painstaking preparation for ordinary as well as extraordinary services. He was not satisfied when he had mastered the meaning of his text, and thought out the didactic matter of the sermon. He conceived that a preacher was not a mere quarryman, but a sculptor; and that the arrangement, language, and illustrations required as much labour as the solid thought. In this process he was guided partly, no doubt, by the oratorical instinct which was born with him, but partly, too, by the spirit he had caught from the great preachers whose works he had studied, and by the observations he had made on the style, topics, arguments, and appeals by which men are most deeply interested, and most powerfully moved. He could have written a very useful book, and I once begged him to do it, on the influence of particular
He often began on Tuesday.
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asjjects of religious truth on the affections and the heart, a homiletical treatise, discussing the substance of sermons, instead of the form.
He was so much in the habit of insisting on the imiortance of the preacher’s manner, that some people suppose that his own power lay principally, not in what he said, but in how he said it, and that his sermons owed all their charm to his voice, tones, and gestures. This is a great mistake. He knew precisely what facts, what truths, what arguments have the mightiest control over the common heart, and these he reiterated with unwearying perseverance. It was the substance of his preaching that produced impression as well as the manner, and the impression was produced by thoroughly legitimate means. Vivid descriptions of natural scenery, exciting stories, frequently recurring appeals to the natural affections of the human heart, may hold a congregation breathless, brighten a thousand eyes with delight, or make them dim with tears, while the truth around which all these telling passages are grouped is neither illustrated nor enforced. The sermon seems powerful, for the hearts of the people were filled with agitation and emotion; but examined more closely it will be pronounced powerless, for it was not the glory of the Divine character which hushed and awed the listening crowd, but the preacher’s representation of an appalling thunderstorm; it was not an apostolic appeal to their Christian zeal that flushed their cheeks with enthusiasm, but a splendid panegyric on the patriotism and daring of some popular hero; it was not the compassions of the Lord Jesus Christ which “fail not,” His mercy which “endureth for ever,” that brought tears, but the story of some fair giii with bleeding lungs and hacking cough, wasting away through the dreary winter, and longing for the tardy summer. It was not by such means as these that Mr James sought to produce effect.
And yet his preaching was addressed to the imagination and the passions, as well as the judgment. He knew that there are obstructions to the reception of truth which reasoning cannot remove, but which arc often consvmied in a blaze of feeling. Blasting is often more speedy and effectual than the pick and the spade.
Even when he had obtained the assent of the understanding, he was unwilling to leave the truth to produce its own effect. He did not think of truth so much as a living seed, which by its own vital force will germinate if once lodged in a kindly soil, but as a weapon which must be wielded by a vigorous hand and directed by a keen eye, if any results are hoped for. He asked himself what particular impression he wished to secure by the facts or doctrines which formed the staple of his sermon, and selected and arranged all his materials with an eye to this. He always meant to prevent his hearers committing some sin, or to persuade them to discharge some duty; to awaken gratitude, reverence, faith, fear, hope, or joy. He never forgot that to demonstrate is not always to convince, nor to convince always to persuade. A gulf, broad and deep, often lies between the judgment and the will, and he endeavoured to bridge it over. Hence his sermons would never by any accident be called intellectual. That term has been applied of late years as an epithet of honour, to describe a style of preaching which is deficient in all that distinguishes eloquence from instruction. The orator does not exert his intellect less strenuously than the philosophical lecturer, but in a different way; he appeals to the emotions of his audience, and not merely to their logical facidties. He does not analyse the process of persuasion, but persuades. He does not shew how strikingly adapted certain truths are to ennoble all that believe them, but so states and enforces these truths as to produce belief.
“Intellectual “sermons are not distinguished from good sermons of another kind by the presence of greater logical power, but by the absence of what is even better than that. Neither Shakspeare nor Sir Walter Scott were” intellectual; “neither Charles James Fox nor Lord Erskine; neither Jeremy Taylor nor Dr Chalmers; neither Robert Hall nor Edward Irving.” Intellectual preaching” is preaching in which nine-tenths of human nature are clean forgotten. “We have to do,” exclaims Mr James in his “Earnest Ministry,”” not only with a dark intellect that needs to be instructed, but with a hard heart that needs to be impressed, and a torpid conscience that needs to be awakened; 2q
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and have to make our hearers feel, that, in the great business of religion, there is much to be done as well as much to be known. We must give knowledge, for light is as essential to the growth of piety in the spiritual world, as it is to the growth of vegetation in the natural one; and the analogy holds good in another point, for we must not only let in light, but add great and vigorous labour to carry on the culture. We must, therefore, rise from exegesis into exhortation, warning, and expostulation. The apostle’s manner is the right one, — ‘Whom we preach warning every man, and teaching every man, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.’ There must not only be the directive bu.t the impulsive manner. All our hearers know far more of the Bible than they practise. The head is far in advance of the heart; and our great business is to persuade, to entreat, to beseech. We have to deal with a dead, heavy vis inertice of mind; yea, more, we have to overcome a stout resistance, and to move a reluctant heart. If all that was necessary to secure the ends of our ministry were to lay the truth open to the mind; if the heart were already predisposed to the subject of our preaching, then, like the lecturer on science, we might dispense with the hortatory manner, and confine ourselves exclusively to explanation. Logic, unaccompanied by rhetoric, would sufBce; but when we find in every sinner we address, an individual acting in opposition to the dictates of his judgment, and the warnings of his conscience, as well as to the testimony of Scripture, an individual who is sacrificing the interests of his immortal soul to the vanities of the world and the corruptions of his heart; an individual who is madly bent upon his ruin, and rushing to the precipice from which he will take his fatal leap into perdition, can we, in that case, be satisfied with merely explaining, however clearly, and demonstrating, however conclusively, the truth of revelation? Should we think it enough coldly to unfold the sin of suicide, and logically to arrange the proofs of its criminality, before the man who had in his hand the pistol or the poison with which he was just about to destroy himself? Would exegesLs, however clear and accurate, be enough in this case? Should wej not entreat, expostulate, beseech? Should we not lay hold of
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arm uplifted for dostruction, and snatch the poison cup from the hand that was about to apply it to the lips? What is the case with the impenitent sinners to whom we preach, but that of individuals bent upon self-destruction, not, indeed, the present destruction of their bodies, but of their souls? There they are before our eyes, rushing in their sins and their impenitence to the precipice that overhangs the pit of destruction; and shall we content om’- selves with sermons, however excellent for elegance, for logic, for perspicuity, and even for evangelism, but which have no hortatory power, no restraining tendency, none of the apostle’s beseeching entreaty? Shall we merely lecture on theology, and deal out religious science to men, who, amidst a flood of light already pouring over them, care for none of these things?”
The resources of Mr James’s eloquence were very varied. As some painters are only successful with a gloomy sky and a restless sea, others with quiet corn-fields and running brooks, so some orators can only produce terror, and others only tears. Sublimity and tenderness are not often found in the same preacher, but Mr James had both. He could fire enthusiasm, or awaken pity; he could terrify, or soothe at will.
There was one characteristic of his preaching by which he often made a very deep impression, at which, perhaps, strangers have sometimes been surprised. I mean the freedom with which, especially in his own pulpit, he employed arguments and appeals derived from his physical infirmities, his domestic sorrows, his affection for his people, and their affection for him. It appears to some that the attempt to stimulafte a church to greater generosity, to more regular attendance on public worship, to the maintenance of peace and brotherly love, by motives of this order, is to lower the digTiity of Christian duty. Most persons would admit that Mr James availed himself of these elements of power to an extent which few other men could have imitated with safety or propriety, and that sometimes a severe taste might have complained that he himself transgressed the limits it would have been well for him to observe; but that these personal allusions should be excluded from the pulpit altogether, must not be too hastily conceded.
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It would be easy to shew from the Eiistles of Paul that his strong hold of the affection of his converts, his love for them, his solicitude for their welfare, the impressions produced by his manifest sincerity and goodness, were among his most valued instruments of persuasion. He had learning and genius, he could argue with irresistible cogency, he had the authority of high office, and of inspiration; and yet his eloquence, his logic, and his apostolic commission itself, appeared to him to need the corroborating power of his personal character, and of the mutual sympathies between his converts and himself. In writing to the Ephesians, for instance, he closes a magnificent train of inspired eloquence, in which he has wielded all the grandest and loftiest motives which the Divine love supplies, with an appeal to the sympathy of the Ephesian Church with his personal sufi’erings. He has spoken of the grace which, before all ages, chose iis in Christ, and predestinated us to the honours and joys of Divine Sonship; he has identified believers with Christ in a sublime and mystical unity, declaring that the same power which wrought in Him is working in us, that we sit with Him in heavenly places, that the Church is the fulness of Him that filleth all in all; he has declared, that, in our salvation and in the glory and bliss to which God intends to raise us, He will reveal to the ages to come, and to heavenly principalities and powers. His manifold wisdom and the exceeding riches of His grace; and had exclaimed that God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all we ask or think, — though he had just prayed that the Ephesians might be “filled with all the fulness of God;” — and then he appeals at once to thfeir love for himself, “/ therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you.” All his calamities and persecutions, and especially his present imprisonment, had come upon him through his zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles to Christ; and so, after pointing them to the throne of heaven, he points them to the chain which for their sakes he bore on his arm, and besought them to walk worthy of the vocation wheremth they were called.
And this was Paul’s manner. He entreated the Philippian Christians to fulfil his joy by being “like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind.” He gave pathos and power to his solemn charge to the Ei3he.sian elders, when he met them at ]Iiletus, by reminding them, that during the three years he had lived in their city, he had not ceased “to warn every one night and day with tears,” and that he knew they should see his face no more.
It is surely a mistake to regard with suspicion the alliance between the social and the religious affections, and the stimulus and support which the spiritual life derives from admiration and love for those who are eminently good. Our complex nature is perfected by a complex system of spiritual forces. Not only the heat and light of the sun in the heavens, but the kindly dews of the earth, and the gentle breeze.s, feed and ripen the fruits of the Spirit. A saintly man is a means of grace to all who know him. The love and the respect he inspires, the pleasure of possessing his approbation, and the fear of incurring his rebuke, are aids to holy living. The social affections have been effective instruments of moral debasement and ruin, and they are used by God to purify and ennoble us. Mr James could not be ignorant of the strength of his personal influence over the hearts of his people, and he used it to enlarge their liberality, to rouse their activity, and to maintain brotherly confidence and love.
To return from this digression, I repeat that Mr James’s preaching was addressed to the emotions, as well as the understanding and that he was able to awaken emotions of the most varied character.
Sermons of the terrific order are now seldom heard, I suppose, from English pulpits; Mr James thought it a grievous mistake and a cruel neglect of the duty which the preacher owes to the impenitent for him to ignore the severer aspects of the invisible world. There is a savage, fiendish mode of denouncing God’s vengeance, which can only provoke disgust and indignation in cultivated persons, and which must produce frightfully distorted conceptions of God’s character in the minds of the untaught; but those who are entrusted with the “ministry of reconciliation” shrink from half their duty, if they do not warn men of the moral
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ruin and everlasting despair, which are the just and inevitable penalty of refusing Christ’s mercy and resisting the Holy Ghost. The mighty spell by vphich Mr Finney compels the reluctant conscience to condemn sin is a power of a different order. Mr James could startle and terrify by vivid representations of the Divine indignation and wrath, but his appeals were directed to the passion of fear rather than to the moral sense. It was by pointing to the vengeance which is gathering like a thunderstorm over the future of the unsaved, rather than by assorting the righteous claims and awful majesty of the Divine Law, that he was able to awaken alarm.
But he was very far from supposing that the Christian minister should devote all his strength to sermons intended to alarm the impenitent and to persuade the unpardoned to receive God’s mercy. The instruction of Christian people in the duties they owe to God and to man, had a very conspicuous place in his preaching. He thought it necessary to shew the application of spiritual principles and moral laws to the minutest circumstances of human life. He was incessantly preaching to particular classes on their peculiar duties and dangers. He did not think it a violation of the dignity of the pulpit to preach to mistresses and servants, masters and workmen, husbands and wives, on their mutual obligations. His ethical sermons were among the ablest and most powerful that he ever delivered. Whatever truth there may be in the reproach often thrown on the evangelical pulpit of neglecting the inculcation of ordinary moral duties, no one who heard Mr James frequently would bring the charge against him. Some men imagine that wherever the divine life has been implanted it will transform by its own intrinsic energy the whole character, and that to instruct those who have been renewed by the Holy Ghost in the details of moral duty is unnecessaiy. Would to God that this were so! But there is no pastor who is not from time to time grieved and amazed by the obliquity, or dulness, or very partial development of the moral sense, even in good people. Wherever true love to God has power in the heart, there will be an earnest and habitual endeavour to do whatever is
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’ thought to be right; but within certain limits, the opinions of men as to what this is, will vary with their education and circumstances. Llany a man who would die rather than lie like Abraham and Jacob, must be conscious that, on the whole, Abraham and Jacob were much better men than himself; but the structure of our modern social life has given us a conviction which it was impossible they should have of the inviolable obligation of truth. There are commercial transactions in which a professional man, unaccustomed to business, has at first some diflBculty in discovering any wrong, which are justly felt by a merchant to involve serious gmlt. On the other hand, a scholar is often indignant at the dishonesty of which business men of the highest integ-rity are guUty in the discussion and investigation of matters of opinion.
The contents of the New Testament afibrd, however, the best answer to those who deny the necessity of minute ethical teaching. Exclude the practical precepts from the Gospels and Epistles, and you diminish the New Testament to half its present bulk. The apostles are unanimous in affirming that men whose hearts have been renewed still need to be warned against particular sins, and to be exhorted to particular duties. St Paul, in the First Epistle to the Thessaloniaus, supplies a startling illustration of this statement; though he felt it necessary to threaten with the Divine vengeance certain gross sensual offences, he adds, “But as touching brotherly love, ye need not that I write unto you; for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another.”
Very few of ‘Mr James’s ethical sermons were preached on isolated texts chosen for the purpose. He expounded in course many of the books both of the Old Testament and the New, and he often said that in addition to the many other advantages of this practice, it enabled a minister to preach on particular moral virtues, and on particidar moral offences, without giving the congregation reason to suppose that the infirmities or sins of any individual had suggested the discourse. His expository sermons were very uupretentious, but were marked by sound judgment, and were very instructive. He availed himself freely of the most recent, as well as the older exegetical authorities. John Owen, for whose general theolo-LIFE OF JOHN ANGELL JAMES.
gical works Le felt too little admiration, he esteemed veiy highly as a commentator, and greatly prized his wonderful Exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews. For Archbishop Leigliton on St Peter, even Coleridge could not have had a profouuder reverence. He also greatly liked the good sense of Dr George Campbell’s Notes on the Gospels. For Macknight, I think he cared but little; Matthew Henry’s praises he was always reiterating; he was less enthusiastic about Scott; Dr Adam Clarke he consulted constantly, though he had but little respect for the doctor’s judgment. Dr John Browni’s Expository Discourses, especially those on Peter, Dr Eadie’s Commentaries on several of St Paul’s Epistles, Alexander on Isaiah, Moses Stuart on the Komans and the Hebrews, and several of Albert Barnes’s commentaries, were among his favourite books. He greatly admired Tholuck, and occasionally used Hengstenberg and Olsliausen.*
In historical sermons, Mr James was also very successful. He was equally happy in illustrating the lessons suggested by the domestic life of the patriarchs, and in painting the splendour of Belshazzar’s feast, or the terrors of the plagues of Egypt, the “darkness that might be felt,” “the thunder, the hail, and the fire” that “ran along the ground.” Unlike many preachers who tell the story in their introduction, and fill the rest of the discourse with mere didactic matter, he interwove the narrative with the instruction, and the climax of the story was often wrought into the peroration of the sermon. Indeed, he could tell the facts in such a way that made it almost uimecessary formally to state the “moral.”
The same observations apply to the sermons he preached on public events. He was not continually looking through the columns of the newspaper for tales of blood and horror to drag into the pulpit; but, now and then, when the public mind was greatly excited — whether by a continental revolution, or a financial
* I leave this passage as it stands, although it has been partly anticipated in the preceding chapter. It may be interesting to some readers to notice the coincidence between the testimony of Mr James’s son and that of Mr James’s colleague.
rKKACHING.
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crisis — by the apprehension of war, or the hope of peace — by a royal marriage, or the death of a great statesman — or by the execution of some notorious criminal, whose dark career suggested salutary warnings — he availed himself of these circumstances with consummate tact, and as in his historical sermons, the lessons he wished to inculcate were so interlaced with the facts, and the facts themselves were so skilfully arranged, that the congregation listened with an interest that became more and more intense as the discourse proceeded. These sermons were not only popular, but calculated to do great good.
It is hardly necessary to say that, in his regular ministry, very many sermons were devoted to the encouragement of devoutness and spirituality of life. Perhaps, in his eager anxiety that his church should live under the constant control of the invisible world, he reiterated entreaties and exhortations, when his object would have been more certainly secured by less direct methods, — especially by preaching more frequently on those iarts of God’s revelation which fire and exalt the religious affections. He often spoke with rapture to the unbeliever of God’s mercy; but it was not often that he expatiated in his sermons, with any excitement of joy, on the blessedness of Divine sonship, “the exceeding greatness of the power that worketh in them that believe,” and the consciousness possible to the devout and faithful Christian that he dwells in God, and God in him. He was a Calvinist, but there was very little Calvinism in his preaching; there was neither the severity of the darker parts of the system, nor the mighty and victorious confidence of its brighter aspects. He worked out his salvation “with fear and trembling.” He thought it safer to utter constant warnings against sin to preserve men from falling, than to proclaim, too often, how certain it is that those who are in Christ’s hands will never perish.
At a time when there was a gTeat deal of talk about the supposed decHne of orthodoxy among the yoimger ministers, Mr James, in conversation with a young minister, was expressing the apprehensions which he often uttered in public; his companion, who thought his apprehensions groundless, and saw that he was
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in a desponding mood, looked up and said, rather mischievously, “Well, Mr James, you know that I am more orthodox than you are.”
“What! what!” was his reply, with a puzzled and amused look; “how do you make that out?”
“At least I am more Calvinistic than you.”
“No, sir,” said Mr James, raising his closed hand to give emphasis to his words; “I hold the doctrines of Calvinism with a firm grasp.”
“But, sir, you never preach about them, and I do.”
“Well,” he replied, rather slowly, “there ’s not so much about them in the Bible.”
“That proves what I say, sir,” answered the younger minister; “you don’t half believe them.”
This conversation, though only half in earnest on one side, indicates Mr James’s real position. In creed he was a moderate Calvinist, belonging to the school of his predecessor, Dr Williams, but his temperament led him to dwell much more on Christian duty than on Christian privilege.
But the sermon was far from being the only remarkable part of the Carr’s Lane service. As Mr James slowly ascended the pulpit, the stranger would see in his calm and solemn countenance that his spirit was awed by a sense of God’s presence; and, after the opening psalm was read,* and a hymn sung, he offered a prayer which was generally characterised by the profoundest awe and reverence for the Divine Majesty, and by earnest, sometimes impassioned supphcation for spiritual blessings. The Scriptures were then read a second time, and a second prayer was offered, in which intercession was made for “all sorts and conditions of men,” for the Queen on the throne, for the ministers of the crovm, for
* Some changes were made in the order of service a year or two before Mr James’s death. Formerly the order was, 1. The reading of a psalm; 2. Singing; 3. Prayer; 4. Reading the Scriptures; 5. Prayer; 6. Singing; 7. Sermon; 8. Singing; 9. Prayer and benediction. The present order, which is nearly the same as when Mr James died, is, 1. Prayer; 2. Singing; 3. Reading the Scriptures; 4. Prayer; 5. Singing; C. Prayer; 7. Reading the Scriptures; 8. Singing; 9. Sermon; 10. Prayer; 11. Singing; 12. Benediction.
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judges and magistrates, for merchants and tradesmen, for masters and servants, for the rich, the poor, and the troubled, for all Christian churches and ministers, and very often for some special department of Christian labour; missions in China and the East being often remembered. And again, at the close of the prayer, there were solemn ascriptions of praise, sometimes swelling into lofty eloquence, to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The tones of his voice, rich and deep, his manner — never hurried and generally very deliberate — added solemnity to the devotional part of the service; and many, I should suppose, are ready to acknowledge with myself that his prayers were often characterised by even brighter excellencies than his sermons.