"Pectus Facit Theologum"

we etes facit theologum — that is to say it is the heart that makes the theologian. Not the head. Not ace Not learning. Not power of speaking. Not power of writing. Other men may be made without much heart. Men of scholarship may be made without much heart. Men of science may be made without much heart but not men of religion. Not men of science even, according to Dr. Newman’s eloquent argument entitled ‘The Philosophical Temper first enjoined in the Gospel.’ But, be that as it may, it is indisputable that it is the heart that makes the true theologian. Take Paul, the first and the best of theologians, take Athanasius, the father of Christology, take Augustine, take Luther, take Hooker, take Chalmers, and it was their heart above all things else that made them all what they were. In elucidation then, and in illustration of this subject, let us take the text and run it through some of the various departments of true theology and of true religion and we shall soon see how

es
SS {ZS fy
true the text holds everywhere that it is the
heart that makes the true theologian.

But to begin with, what is a true theologian? and how does his heart come to make him what he is? Well, a theologian, a true theologian, is just that man whose whole discourse is of God. God is the greatest and the best of subjects on which the mind and the heart of any man can discourse. For God is love. And the seat and the throne of love in God and in man is the divine and the human heart. And consequently the more love any man has in his heart the better able he will be to know God and to discourse concerning God. A blind man will far sooner discourse aright concerning colour, and a deaf man concerning sound, and a dead man concerning life, than any man who is not a partaker of the Divine Nature will discourse aright concerning God and concerning the love of God. I need not labour that matter a moment more. For it is as clear as day that love to God and man will alone make any man a true theologian. As our proverb has it — Pectus facit theologum.

In the second place, it is the heart that makes the true exegete; that is to say the true expositor, the true annotator, and the true commentator on the word of God. A Hebrew scholar can read the Hebrew Old Testament, and a Greek scholar can read the Greek New Testament, and an English scholar can read the whole English Bible. But the best reader of both the Old and the New Testament is the man who brings his whole heart to bear upon the book of God. The eye sees that only which it brings the power to see. And the mind reads only what it brings the power to read. And then the heart both sees and reads and feels what it alone has the power to see and to read and feel. And that is the love of God as that love is written, as with a sunbeam, on every page of the Divine Book. God had His own Book written for us out of his own heart, and the more of God’s heart any man has in himself, the better able will that man be to read for himself, and to draw out for other men, the whole mind and the whole heart of God from the Book of God. As face answers to face in water, so does the heart of God answer to the heart of man; and, again, so does the heart of man answer to the heart of God in the sacred writings. In other words, it is the heart that makes the truest and everyway the best expositor of the word of God and the best annotator thereupon.

And not the true theologian and the true exegete only, but it is the heart that makes the true apologist also. Under this head I shall stand aside and I shall let the prince of apologists speak to you. And I shall let him speak first to you on the true proof of the fall upon which everything afterwards turns. ‘The undeniable proof of the fall,’ he argues, ‘is that man is a poor, miserable, weak, vain, distressed, corrupt, depraved, selfish, self-tormenting, perishing creature. And, in addition, that this present world is a sad mixture of false goods and real evils. A scene of all sorts of trials, vexations, and miseries; and all arising from the frame and the nature and the conditions both of man and the world. This is the full and infallible proof of that awful fall of man which is not to be learned from any history however ancient and however sacred, but which shows itself everywhere, and every day, with such clearness as we ’ see the sun. My first attempt, therefore, upon any man, to convince him of the fall, as the background of the redemption, should be an attempt to do that for him which affliction, and disappointment, and sickness, and pain, and the approach of death, have a natural power to do; that is to convince him of the vanity, and the poverty, and the misery of his condition and his life in this world. For, as this is the true proof of the fallen state of man, so man can only be convinced of it by having all this proof of it brought home to himself.” So much for the fall. As to its worst consequence — indwelling sin — listen to the same master in Israel. ‘Who has not, at one time or other, felt a sourness, and a wrath, and a selfishness, and an envy, and a pride rising up within him wholly without his consent, and casting a blackness over all his thoughts? Sufficient indications, surely, to every man that there is a dark guest within him, which will, on occasion, show itself, and which may be his torment to all eternity. And it was with His eye on this hidden hell within us, that our blessed Lord said when on earth, and says now to every M one of us: ‘Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”” And again, and from the same powerful pen: ‘ All outward fires, chains, torments, slaveries, poverties, are but so many passing shadows of the tormenting slavery of a sinful soul, left and given up to its own selfishness and envy and pride and anger. And in spite of all denials, and all alleviations of these things, one or other of these elements of hell will sometimes awaken so violently as to become absolutely intolerable, and to give a man a true and sure foretaste of the nature of hell in the soul of a lost sinner.’ And that same so powerful pen goes on with its apology in this evangelical way: ‘ All the mercy of God, to such as we are, is to be found in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ alone can save us from our sins. He alone has power to heal all our diseases, and to restore us to our original righteousness. And with Him to help us it matters not what our diseases are: deadness of heart, blindness of mind, covetousness, wrath, pride, ambition, lust, and such like; our remedy is always one and the same; and it is always at hand, and it is always sure and certain and infallible. Seven devils are as easily cast out by Jesus Christ as one. And if you ask where Christ is to be found, I will in apology answer, in your own heart and nowhere else. But you will say to me that it is just your own heart that keeps you such a stranger to Christ, and keeps Him such a stranger to you, because your heart is a very den of devils. Now to that-I answer that your finding this to be the real state of your heart is already the finding or Christ in your heart. For nothing else, and no one else but Christ, can

make manifest to you the sin and misery that is in you. And the Christ who discovers sin is the very same Christ who takes all sin away. Be you sure, that as soon as your sin and your misery make your heart absolutely unbearable to yourself, that is Christ already in you of a truth. For Christ first comes to your heart as the Discoverer and Reprover of your sin. Acknowledge then His presence, and His power, and His grace, in making you to know the plague of your own heart; and then He that wounded you will heal you; and He who showed you the den of devils that is within you, He will not leave you till He has made your heart into a holy temple, for the indwelling of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ And in another place the same unanswerable reasoner proceeds: ‘The whole of the Christian religion stands upon these two pillars, namely, the greatness of our fall and the greatness of our redemption. In the full and true knowledge of these foundation truths lie all the reasons of a deep humility, a deep penitence, and a daily self-denial. As also all the motives and incitements to an immediate and a total conversion from sin to God. Nothing can truly awaken a sinner but a true experience of the depth and the power of his indwelling sin. When he sees and feels that he lies chained deep into the very jaws of death and hell; and when, along with that, he is assured that the free grace of God has provided a Remedy equal to his disease: when a lost man once truly feels and knows these two foundation truths — then no other proofs of the fall and the restoration are needed by that man. Now we believe, said the men of Samaria to the woman at the well, not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.’

And before I close the prince of apologists, I cannot withhold from you this apology of his for prayer. ‘ He who has learned to pray has learned the greatest secret of a holy and happy life. Which way soever else we let loose our hearts, they will return to us empty and weary. Time, and the experience of life, will convince the blindest of us that happiness is no more to be found in the things of this world than it is to be dug out of the bowels of the earth. But when the motions of our hearts are motions of piety, tending to God, in constant acts of devotion and love and desire, then we have found rest for our

souls, Then it is that we have conquered the ’ misery of our nature. Then it is that we have found a good suited to, and equal to, all our wants: a constant source of comfort and refreshment, that will fill us with true peace here and eternal happiness hereafter. For he that lives in a devotional spirit, he whose heart is always full of God, he lives at the very top of human happiness.’ Paley is very instructive and very interesting and he is all that in classical English. And Butler is always very profound and very solemnising. But the apology, of which these passages are specimens, is conclusive, and silencing, and unanswerable, and satisfying to every capable mind and honest heart.

Now, to tell you the truth, I am afraid to take speech in hand again myself after such a defender of the truth as that. But I have one or two things in my mind that I would like to say to you and to myself before I close. And one of them is this — that it is the heart that makes the true preacher as well as the true apologist. For one thing his heart supplies the true preacher with fresh and powerful and home-coming texts continually. A class-fellow of mine complained to me after he was a year settled that he had totally run out of texts for his sermons. I remember how I told him that if he had a heart like mine that would never happen to him. No. No preacher, old nor young, will ever run out of great texts who takes his sinful heart with him to his family worship and to his pastoral work and to all his more retired reading of his Bible. The sinful-hearted preacher who does that will not get peace to die, so many great texts will throng around his deathbed, demanding that he shall arise and shake himself and come back to his pulpit to handle them before his people as he only can. ‘I commend you to your own sanctification, said Samuel Rutherford to a dried-up young preacher. And the same advice followed out every day and every week will continually discover texts that neither the preacher nor his hearers ever heard of before. His daily crosses, his daily heart-breaks, his daily humiliations, his daily wounds, and bruises, and putrefying sores, are all guaranteed to supply him with fresh and sufficient texts if he lived to the age of Methuselah. He will soon exhaust ‘ Euroclydon’ and ‘ the times when the Gospels were writ.’ But he will never exhaust the Psalms, and the Gospels, and the Epistles, and his own heart. No, never! And then when his heart is in his texts and in his sermons :- —

Lo! this man’s brow, like to a title-leaf,

Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.

He trembles, and the whiteness in his cheek,

Is apter than his tongue to tell his errand. Tragic or triumphant, no hearer will fall asleep under such a preacher as that. The preacher, that is, with the sinfullest of hearts himself.

I have not time to tell you how the heart makes the pastor as well as the preacher. Nor have I time to treat of the Church leader and the Church historian. But I cannot let you go till I have tried to show you how the heart makes the hearer as well as the preacher. It was his heart that made one man a stony-ground hearer when our Lord was preaching. And it was his heart that made another man a thorny-ground hearer. And it was his heart that made another man a good-ground hearer. And it was their hearts that made His hearers say what they said after another sermon of His. ‘I have bought a piece of ground,’ said one, ‘and my whole heart is in my new farm.’ And another, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I must away at once to see how they plough.” And another, and with a shining face, ‘I have married a wife, and I do not need to come.’ Unblest oxen! And ill-matched and unhappy wife! Only, from all that, we who are preachers need not be too much cast down. For even when the Son of God Himself was the preacher, it was His hearers’ hearts that decided their destiny. You who are hearers might do this, on occasion. You might try the device that helped to make Thomas Goodwin such a good preacher. It is told of the Atlas of Independency that he always took a turn up and down in his past life before he ventured again into the pulpit. And I am convinced that the thing that so helped to make him a good preacher would help to make you a good hearer. A turn up and down in your past life on your way to church would be a good preparation for sitting down in your pew. And then such a heart in the preacher met halfway with such a heart in the hearer, all that could not fail to end in the best results for us both. Now in one word if it is the heart that makes the hearer as well as the preacher, I do not need to detain you to tell you how and when and from Whom you can at any time you like get a true hearer’s heart:

A heart in every thought renewed,
And full of love divine,

Perfect, and right, and true, and good,
A copy, Lord, of Thine!