"My Mind Is a Bucket Without a Bottom"

2? Y mind is a bucket without a bottom,’ said the self-examining and plain-spoken and homely-spoken founder of Harvard. Now SirJames Murray tells us that after all his researches the true etymology of the name is wholly uncertain to him. But the meaning of the name is quite clear. A bucket is a wooden vessel in which water is drawn up out of a well. It is a round wooden pail with an arched handle and with waterproof sides and a waterproof bottom. We do not need to go to the great Oxford Dictionary to tell us what a bucket is. Every child knows quite well what its mother’s bucket is. But we do need a rare man; we need a selfobserving and an original and a bold and a plain-spoken and an idiomatic man to tell us that all our minds, of which we are all so proud, are like so many wooden buckets and all without bottoms. And then we all need to humble ourselves to admit the truth of that and straightway to set ourselves to reform our ways of going to church and of hearing and remembering and putting to practice the things that we hear in church.

Now when we look well at the text and when we take the text and in the light of it look well at ourselves we are all compelled to confess that our minds also are like Thomas Shepard’s mind. For a mind without spiritual understanding, what is it but a bucket without a bottom? If you were to go to the well at your door with a bucket without a bottom in your hand, you might go on letting that bucket down and down and down into that well for a lifetime, but you would take no water home with you all your days from that well. Now that is the exact case of multitudes of people who come to church twice every Lord’s Day. They have plenty of mind and plenty of understanding in their minds for other days, but not for the Lord’s Day. Their buckets have no bottom on the Lord’s Day for the water of life. It was the very same sad case with multitudes of our Lord’s own hearers. They came and they sat till He was done with His sermon and they came back again next Sabbath and sat till He was done when they rose up and went away as they came. ‘Till at last, absolutely wearied and worn out with such hearers, He put them into those terrible parables that are preserved to us in the thirteenth of Matthew. In which parables He told them that all the time He was preaching He saw the wicked one stealing up to the seat where they were sitting and catching away the good seed as fast as He could sow it. As Thomas Shepard has it, the devil himself came and knocked the bottom out of those hearers’ minds. And still Sabbath after Sabbath they brought their bottomless buckets to our Lord’s well till the good angels wept over them and till the angels of the wicked one laughed at them and the whole of the bottomless pit resounded with their laughter every Sabbath day just as it resounds still. Paul had the same experience with his hearers also; especially with some women among them. Till he turned on them one day and told them that they were ‘ ever learning, but were never coming an inch nearer the kaos! ledge of the truth.’ nee till in an Epistle full of his defeated experiences as a preacher he warns all young preachers not to be deceived by the mere attendance at church of such unfruitful hearers. Shall I say it? Yes! I will take boldness to say it! In my own small and obscure way I have had my own experiences as a preacher. There are men and women in this house to whom I have done my best to preach both faith and duty for thirty years and they are not one whit better than when I began. There are people here, and not wholly ungodly people either, who, Sabbath after Sabbath, and year after year, resist all the appeals that are made to them to mend their ways. I have laid out every art of instruction and persuasion and appeal upon them that I could command. I have pointed out their besetting sin to them as plain as words could speak it.

In my defeat and in my despair I have almost called out their very names from the pulpit if so be I might save them from the sins and the faults that everybody sees and laments in them; everybody but themselves. But to no effect. For there they are back at the well again to-night and with their old buckets without a bottom with them. Yes! certainly! I am speaking to you and not to your neighbour!

So much for a mind without true understanding. We come next to a conscience without conviction or contrition. Now, if you hear God’s holy law preached every returning Lord’s Day, if you hear evangelical obedience preached every returning Lord’s Day, and if you go home wiping your mouth and saying that you have done no evil that you need to repent of, what is that but to take your bucket to the well and to go home Sabbath after Sabbath without taking home a single drop of the water of life? To keep his conscience in a state of constant conviction and contrition, the greatest of the Puritan preachers of the seventeenth century was wont every Sabbath morning ‘to take a turn up and down in his past life.’ And with that to take a plunge down into his heart and into his life for the past week. And that spiritual and evangelical practice of his resulted in making him the most commanding of preachers in the most commanding school of preachers the Church of Christ has ever seen. Now be you like that commanding preacher. Never you come up to church, neither morning nor evening, without a renewed contrition of heart. And you will never return home without having your contrition of heart intensified and spiritualised and evangelised. And then this house of God will be to you a weekly well of God’s best salvation. And every Sabbath night after you go home God’s elect angels will camp around your house and they will accompany you and will protect you amid all the trials and temptations of the intervening week. Such rewards does God bestow on every man who has a conscience full of conviction and contrition, a conscience full of inward and spiritual tears for all past sin and for all present sinfulness.

Then again what is it to bring up a will with the power of decision in it to God’s house and to go home again without a single decision or holy resolution taken in it; what is that but to come up and go home carrying another bucket without a bottom? Now to be plain with you and to go no further back than last Sabbath morning. Did you form a good decision and a good resolution here last Sabbath morning? and have you carried out that good resolution this morning and this evening? I do not know, I have no idea, But there is One who knows and you will have to render an account to Him of what you have heard last Sabbath and then of what you have done this Sabbath. I have not time to tell you the pertinent story of Penitens that busy notable tradesman and very prosperous in his dealings but who died in the thirty-fifth year of his age. If you have the conscience-searching book at home read his eloquent history to yourself to-night. And you will come on this at the end of it: ‘ Penitens was here, going on both about his making and his spending of money in the past, but had his mouth stopped bya convulsion, which never suffered him to speak any more. He lay convulsed about twelve hours, and then gave up the ghost.’

Then again, what is a heart without holy affection but a bucket made of the finest wood but all the time without a bottom? The best of hearts are full of cracks and leaks through which the water of life continually runs out and is lost. A hopelessly broken bucket lets all the water run out. But strange to say a hopelessly broken heart is the very opposite of that. A hopelessly broken and a never-to-be-healed heart that is the one heart that carries home the richest supplies of the water of life where an unbroken heart lets all that water run out. And then there are all stages and all degrees of broken hearts. There are hearts so broken that they feel themselves to be without one drop of holy love to God, or to the Son of God, or to the Spirit of God. And there are other broken hearts that begin to feel as if they were at last beginning to love and to obey their Heavenly Father somewhat, and His Heavenly Son, and His Heavenly Spirit. And everything they hear in God’s house turns to an increase of holy affections in their good and honest hearts. O, sirs! it is a fine thing, I assure you, for a preacher to have such hearers! To

‘ have hearers with such minds and such understandings and such consciences and such resolutions and such hearts! Something comes to such a preacher’s knowledge during the week that makes his heart to swell with the assurance that God is beginning at last to own his preaching. He hears, all unknown to the doer of it, of some secret act of a most noble generosity. Or he meets one of his people in the street whose face is still shining with the grace and the truth of last Sabbath. It was such hearers as that who supplied our Lord with His happy parable of the good and honest ground. And it was such hearers and such readers as that who gave the Apostle the call and the opportunity for those noble benedictions and doxologies with which he begins and ends his great Epistles. Such as this to the thoughtful and liberal and magnanimous Philippians, this: ‘ Not that I desire a gift from you; but I do desire fruit that may abound to your account.’ It was because the elders and the deacons and the people of Philippi had a generous heart above all the other Churches of that day; it was because of that that the whole Church of Christ, down to our own day, has in her New Testament the exquisite and priceless Epistle to the Philippians.

And then what is a memory carried to church every Sabbath day without a word remembered on the Monday; what is that empty memory but another bucket without a bottom? I will wager there are a thousand of such persons in this house this evening. I will wager that there are not ten persons present who will of their own accord remember to-morrow morning or once all the coming week either the text or any lesson of this morning or of this evening. At the same time I do believe, for I have the evidence and the proof of it, that a spiritual mind and a spiritual memory for spiritual things is on the increase among us. And now, in connection with our memories for good things, take this ‘ use,’ as our old preacher calls it, out of this head. ‘There is many a child in New England, he says, ‘who immediately forgets all his father’s exhortations and all his family prayers. But wait till many years after when his father shall be no more; and when some sore trial comes to that son, perhaps some similar family trial; and then both memory and conscience will awaken after many years and his father will have joy in heaven for all his sorrow on earth. One word spoken at family worship will sometimes awaken twenty years after when God’s time comes to break that man’s heart and to make him remember the great sorrow he must have been to his father and his mother.’ Such is one of the ‘uses’ that this great preacher takes out of his own awakened memory as often as he goes back to his father’s house and to his father’s godly walk and conversation away back in old England.

And now to sum up all that in two lessons. And the first and the most urgent lesson out of all that is not so much for you as for those who preach to you. And that lesson for them is this. Let all preachers who stand in a New Testament pulpit take good care to dig their pulpit wells deep down where the living water runs not on the surface. And let them keep the people’s ways to those deep wells both open and inviting. Let it never be said of any of your preachers that the wells, which their fathers digged so deep, their sons, like the Philistines of old, stopped them running and filled them with earth. And, especially, let it never be said in divine condemnation of this pulpit that it is a well without water and a cloud without rain.

And now all you who are truly convinced that up till to-night not your mind only but your whole soul has been nothing better than a bucket without a bottom, so far as your salvation is concerned, what are you to do with the state of things? What but go to the Heavenly Cooper, so to call Him, who has shown you to-night your fatal need of His divine help? And He who made your mind and your conscience and your will and your heart and your memory at first, and made them all in His own image, He not only makes it at first, but He repairs and restores and enlarges and enriches His own workmanship. Take then ‘all that is within you’ back to Him and He will repair it all and will restore it all and will perfect it all. Go and tell Him that you have destroyed yourself, body and soul, and He will both redeem and restore you. Be you sure

He will. Resolve where you sit that you will go to Him for His help. Resolve to do it to-night against your proud heart, and against your stubborn will. Waken up your mind and consider well your absolutely hopeless case without His help. Let Him never be able to say any more against you that though He gave you a mind to consider your ways you never did it. And so doing, so considering your ways this will be this night’s song over you in heaven: in that heaven where there is no night; ‘ consideration,’ it will be sung there concerning you:

Consideration like an angel came And whipped the offending Adam out of him.