The Power of the Pulpit

It may not be deemed the most modest service in one who ministers at the altar, to select as the topic of somewhat discursive remark, The Power of the Christian Pidjnt. “Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips.” The light of the pulpit ought so to shine before men, as to need no other commendation, save its strong and steady radiance.

Yet it was not egotism in Paul, to “magnify his office.” The work of the Christian Ministry is one which possesses strong pecviliarities, and one which has strong claims. There is nothing that resembles it in the ordinary employments of men. While it has its full share of toil, it has solicitudes and discouragements, dependencies and disabilities, that are peculiarly its own. It has too its successes, its expectations, its honors and its rewards. It knows its own bitterness, and ‘’ a stranger does not intermeddle with its joy.”

For the purpose of presenting our subject in as practical a light as I am able, I propose to advert to the fact itself that the pulpit has power; to show what are the constituent elements which invest it with this moral influence; to point out the duties of ministers themselves in order to malxc full ‘proof of the power with which it is invested; and to specify the ohligations which rest on the church of God to give it its due place and importance. It is to the first of these thoughts that we shall devote the first three chapters, — the fact itself that the pulpit has power.

Our first remark, on this branch of the subject, is, that the institution of such an order as religious teachers is deeply imbedded in the common principles, and common wants of man, as fallen by his iniquity. Such is his intellectual and moral nature, that he imperatively demands religious teaching. The necessity is perfectly absolute. Teachers of religion are indispensahle to the existence of religion in the world. No matter what the religion is; so long as natural conscience has a dwelling in the human bosom, there must be a class of men devoted to its services. So far as my information extends, there is no nation, nor tribe, nor any age of the world, that ever has been utterly destitute of an order of men separated to sacred purposes. Paganism, in its more degraded, as well as its more enlightened and polished forms, down to the “Medicine man” of our own wilderness, has its shrines, its oficrings, its sacrifices, and its priests. If man is not a religious, he is a superstitious heing. In the most degenerate tribes, the priests have been found even divided into different and distinct orders, and distinguished by their costume, as they have been simple soothsayers, or astrologers, or familiar with the arts of magic.

The Sacred Order constitutes one of the essential elements of the social state. Society can no more exist without it, than without some form of civil government. Men must have some religious ritual; the form must exist, where the reality is dead; and even where the reality itself is death, there must be a ritual to preserve the death-like reality. All religion is, to a certain extent, the religion of form; even that revealed from Heaven is so far a religion of form, that its spirit is expressed in outward and instituted observances. Men will not consent to occupy a place in associated communities without the recognized dispensers of these religious rites. Conscience demands them for the living and the dead. Be it but necromancy, or some strange form of “black art” conjuration; the mother demands them for her new-born child, and the child demands them at the obsequies of its parent. There is no stoicism, no sullen apathy, so strongly intrenched within its philosophic indifference, but that it is sometimes bathed in tears. Human wisdom never erects her temple so high as to be above the tempest. A voice that is oracular must speak to men in the day of their calamity, even though the oracle be unheeded in the elevation of their pride. A hand that is allied to what is unseen and unearthly is looked for to wipe away the tears from the face of sorroAV, even though it be unsought amid the sunshine of joy.

This voice of nature is strong — in this respect is stronger than the “strong man armed.” The infidel Hume was no friend to the pulpit, yet has he left the lesson to the world, “Look out for a people entirely void of religion; and if you find them at all, be assured they are but few degrees removed from thjB brutes.” Infidelity itself could not live without religion. Were every class and order of religious teachers now abolished, and every man of them exiled from the earth, not only, in some form or other, would the office be resuscitated and restored, but their most violent opposers would be clamorous for their restoration.

And what are these but indications that the institution of such a class of men as religious teachers has its foundations too deeply laid in the nature of man ever to he powerless? If it has power where its only aliment is the grossest darkness, and the most degrading superstition, it is no arrogance to say, that power belongs to it where it is nurtured by God’s truth. If it has power because man wills it, it is not too much to affirm, that it has power because God wills it, and it rests upon his authority. If conscience demands it, and it is created by the wants of man, then in its best and truest form, is it no institution of mere arbitrary appointment, but one which abundantly indicates the wisdom and bene violence of its Divine Author.

But we pass from these regions of mere Theism and pagan darkness, instructive as they are. There is a negative influence which the pulpit exerts, which is not always appreciated. The importance of suppresnng the vicious habits of men can be estimated only by the intrinsic turpitude of their vices, and the devastation and ruin which they spread over the world. It were no easy matter to calculate the vast sum of wretchedness suppressed, and misery prevented, by the influence of the Gospel. It is a thought of some interest, that the well springs of overt and public iniquity are broken up just in the measure in which the pulpit has power over the minds of men. So absolutely is it at war with immorality and vice, that the vicious and immoral almost uniformly shun its instruction. Such persons are rarely found in the house of God, The atmosphere is one they cannot live in; and the honest, faithful preacher of the Gospel, to his honor be it spoken, one whose presence and influence they cannot abide. Plant a pulpit in the hot-bed of crime, and the atmosphere becomes gradually more pure; the fearful activity of wickedness is restrained, and low vices and black crime skulk away, and seek a shadow under some deadly Upas, rather than regale themselves beneath the Tree of Life. Men are not found worshipping a golden image, or a block of marble, or a crawling reptile, in lands where the Christian pulpit has a place. Those depraved passions and stupid and degraded vices, everywhere the attendants on the debasing sytems of idolatry, prevail only in lands where this divine institution is not kno n, or where it just begins to be recognized. If the land in which we dwell is not as debased as ancient Egypt, or Phenicia, or Babylon, or modern India, and if our sacred rites are not such as to shock every mind that is touched with the least sense of decency and virtue; it is because the pulpit guards it by purer influences. Go to lands where there are no pulpits, or to those portions of the world where they are “few and far between,” and what do you hear, if not the most awful profanation of the name of the great God, even from the lips of lisping childhood and hoary age? and what do you see, if not the most mournful desecration of that Day of rest which the King of the universe claims for his own; which the God of life has given for the physical, intellectual, and moral benefit of man; and without which no hounds can he found that set a limit to the grossest ignorance and the grossest crimes? Who can tell the amount of wickedness which would be found in the various relations of human life, if the strong bonds of social organization were not inwoven with the uttered truths of God, and watched over and fortified by his ministers? Where would be the subordination of subjects to rulers, of children to their parents? and what would become of those ties of affection and delicacy which now bind so many thousand hearts, and which keep Christian lands from presenting the most dreadful scenes of anarchy and confusion, of contention and hatred? How many terrible convulsions has the warning voice of the pulpit suppressed or restrained? Men would be well nigh fiends without it; spectacles of horror would be spread around them; “their hand would be against every man, and every man’s hand against them;” the sword would be bathed in blood, and their history would be written in “mourning, lamentation, and woe.” And has the pulpit checked no licentiousness, imposed no restriction upon dissoluteness and profliaacy of manners, prevented no libertinism, and kept no unhappy female, and no reckless man, from going down to the chambers of death? Has it set no bounds to idleness and prodigality, to iniquity, dishonesty, and fraud, to plunder and pillage?

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