"Some Remorses of an Old Minister"

=< UR old ministers have all the re-: SWE morses of other men, but in addi-Ae, tion to that they have many remorses of their own that other men know nothing about. No man lives to old age who has not a multitude of things in his past life that cause him keen remorse unless his conscience is seared with a hot iron. But our old ministers have a whole world of remorses that no other men, and happy for them, know anything about, and will not easily understand even when they are told them. At the same time I do not think it will be an ill-spent half-hour to-night if I tell you some of the remorseful experiences of one of the most faithful and most successful ministers that ever lived. The narrative may serve to open your eyes to some of the remorses and repentances and reformations that are going on in your own ministers, young and old, every day they live. ‘Now, I beseech you,’ said the Apostle, ‘for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me, in your prayers to God for me, lest that by any means when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway.”

It was ‘Thomas Shepard’s oldest remorse in life that he had been so long in making up his mind to be a minister; to be one of the ministers of Jesus Christ and a preacher of the everlasting Gospel to the men of his own generation in England. Shepard was born, so he tells us, in an English town that was a perfect Sodom and Gomorrah; a perfect sink of all sensuality and profanity; and it was his lifelong wonder and praise that he was dug out of such a ditch and was sent to Cambridge to study for the Christian ministry. Dr. Thomas Goodwin the famous Puritan was preaching in Cambridge in Shepard’s undergraduate days and I can well believe all that Shepard says of the unparalleled power of Goodwin’s pulpit work. At the same time such was the hold that original sin had in the young student’s heart that he sums up his first two years in Cambridge in these remorseful words: an ‘utter neglect of God, and an unconquerable aversion to secret prayer.’ But Goodwin’s preaching gradually got such a hold of young Shepard’s conscience that it ultimately ended in his complete conversion. Still, such was the remaining worldliness and disloyalty of his heart that he hesitated for a long time before he finally gave himself up to the labours

P and the dangers of the evangelical pulpit in that day of such atrocious oppression and persecution. The utter ungodliness of his student days and then his shameful slackness in surrendering himself to the service of his Saviour, these two memories of his youth caused Shepard deep shame and keen remorse all his after days. ‘Despise not the ministry,’ said Goodwin one Sabbath day in a sermon to students. ‘The wares that the ministry deals in are immortal souls. No; despise not the ministry. God Himself had only one Son and He made Him a minister.. And that sermon both awakened a lifelong remorse in one hearer’s heart, and at the same time sealed him to a lifelong service of the Son of God. Not only had Shepard a lifelong remorse for his early unwillingness to enter the holy ministry, but added to that he had a lifelong remorse also on account of his great ‘ raw-headedness’ after he was well on in his ministry. His early preaching when he looked back upon it was no preaching at all. It was everything but true preaching. And he himself was so far from being what a true preacher of the Gospel ought to be. And then the topics he preached on, and the way he preached on them, were neither the topics nor the treatment for which Jesus Christ had appointed the Christian pulpit. All that, when he looked back at it, made him see that he was an exact specimen of what John Bunyan in his own plain-spoken way calls ‘a blundering and a raw-headed preacher. ‘When I began,’ says Shepard, ‘I neglected the great things of the Gospel; and I dwelt far too much on matters of but little moment. And I did not labour, as I ought to have laboured, to have the Holy Ghost seated in my heart when I was supposed to be delivering His message.” But the day came when all that so bitter remorse made Shepard a better and better preacher to the end of his life. Till this was the way he was spoken of in his funeral sermon and in the hearing of his broken-hearted people. ‘He spent,’ said the preacher, ‘his whole week on his sermons. He finished his preparation for the Sabbath on Saturday afternoon; and then he gave up the whole evening to meditation and prayer. When he was dying he told the students assembled around his bed that every sermon he preached cost him both sweat and tears. He wrote his sermons out of his own heart, and thus it is that they still so reach the heart. They discover the sins, they satisfy the needs and they comfort the souls of all who hear and read them.’ ‘Who was wrought upon to-day?” was the usual question after a sermon of Shepard’s; so did he preach, expecting an immediate result, and he got it. The exceeding sinfulness of sin, the exceeding greatness of salvation, and the exceeding glory of Christ were now his constant themes, as if to make up for the ‘ raw-headedness’ of his early preaching. We have a thousand such testimonies to the reformation that Shepard’s lifelong remorse produced upon his old age preaching upon his pastorate and upon his personal and family religion.

Like all praying men Shepard’s heart held a deep remorse for his restraint of prayer. It was not that he restrained preaching about prayer. He preached plenty about prayer. For some years of his ministry he preached about little else. Indeed he so scolded his people about prayer that some of his most prayerful people left his intemperate and unbalanced ministry. The friend at midnight, the importunate widow, the Pharisee and the publican, Matt. vi. 6, Matt. vii. 7, John xvi. 24, Rom. xii. 12, Eph. vi. 18, Col. iv. 2, 1 Thess. v. 17, 1 Pet. iyegs and so on; there were weeks and months — and years when you could not have sat a single Sabbath under Shepard’s pulpit that you — would not have heard a most heart-moving and a most conscience-searching sermon on some such texts as these. But all the time — he does not indeed say that he wholly neglected — private prayer himself — but he will tell you that — all that time he never prayed as he preached; he never all that time prayed either for himself or for others as he ought to have done. Even when he was most importunate in his own behalf he was basely forgetful of his family of his people — and of his best friends. So much so that when it came to bidding his congregation and his family and his other friends farewell how his heart failed — him for his neglect of prayer in their behalf. —

Every one of his great texts came back to his heart on his deathbed with a deadly stab. Oh! he cried, had I my ministry to begin again I would say far less about prayer in the pulpit but I would perform it far more in the closet. And as he opened the apostle’s wonderful prayers for his people, Shepard would fall on his knees and would exclaim: ‘Oh, my own people! Oh, my own mishandled people! Oh, my own soul-murdered people!’ And then he would rise from his knees saying: ‘Would God I could put my old head on the young shoulders of my son! But no; that cannot be. Like his father he must learn wisdom out of his own bitter experiences. Only, I will bequeath my little book to him in the hope that it may help him to a better old age than his father’s has been.’

As the years went on Shepard’s pastoral work left many a sharp sting in his pastoral conscience. I suppose there was not a harder working man or minister than Thomas Shepard in the whole of New England. Day and night, Sabbath and Saturday, he was incessantly at his work. But he was not always at his right work. He did not distribute his time and his strength always wisely. His biographers tell us that ‘his repute was greatest among the best of his people.’ And if truth be told the good man was tempted to pay most pastoral visits to the houses where his appreciation and his repute were the greatest. Still, repute or no, civility or no, his people were his people; so much so that he seldom heard of the death of one of his people that he had not remorseful stings of conscience because of his neglect of them both in their life and in their death.

You will have difficulty in believing such a humbling thing as this about such a man. But have we not heard it sung that ‘ the saints are lowered that the world may rise’? And no man in all that old world was more lowered, in his own eyes at any rate, than was Thomas Shepard, because of Mr. T. H., and his great name among the New England people; his great name and the way his well-written books sold so far beyond Shepard’s atrociously badlywritten books. Some of you will remember that black Sabbath day when Shepard was lying ill at home and when his wife came back from church and talked all day like a fool about Mr. ‘T. H., his sermon. Talked and talked like a born fool till she made her husband’s bed in hell that Sabbath night. Shepard spent that whole night in the same bed with Heman the saddest the gloomiest and the most sinful of ail the psalmists. Till he was convinced before morning that Heman must have had almost as bad a heart at David as he had at Mr. T. H., his too talented neighbour. Shepard had not as yet found out the true cure for the disease of such a heart as his, the cure that William Law found out and published a hundred years after but not in time for Shepard’s sanctification. ‘If you would enjoy the prosperity and the success of any rival of yours,’ says the great author of the Serious Call, ‘ pray that his prosperity may be made a real blessing to him and his. And if you would joyfully endure beside you the man who at present is such a snare and such a cross to you pray continually for his well-being in every way. And surrounded as you are with such men, pray for them all and actually without ceasing.’ So far as I see, Thomas Shepard, with all his spiritual genius, had not made that epoch-making discovery for his own sanctification. At any rate he seems never to have got entirely over Mr. T. H., his famous sermons and his successful books.

But at this point Shepard takes us back again to his people. His remorses are never long away or far away from his people. And this time his keen remorse is for the way he could never keep himself from talking to his people about one another. If any of his people happened to offend him or to vex him or to disappoint him in any way, do what he could, bridle in his tongue all he tried, his hot heart would break out in most unwise and most unguarded speeches concerning the offenders. And then the offenders were always told what the minister had said till there was no end of bad blood and a bad conscience between him and them. And till we meet with this remorseful entry again and again in his humiliated diary, this: ‘I see that I should never speak about any of my people to their neighbours. If my heart is often hurt with some of them, and is often sore against some of them, I see now that I should all the more set a watch on the door of my lips. I should not carry my hurt to any of their neighbours but to Him only whom they have hurt far more than they can ever hurt me.” But as we read on we have reason to believe that Shepard quite got over this bad habit of his some time before he died.

I feel sure that long ere now you must be dead tired of Shepard and his endless remorses. You will say that you could not have believed that a minister with such a great name as Shepard could have been so near being a castaway. And, therefore, I will not burden you with any more of his remorses to-night, not that I have exhausted them but I have far exhausted your patience with him and with them and with me. Now just one word in closing this discourse. I wonder would all that remorse in that most remorseful manse in New England be all on one side? What think you? Would there be entire peace of conscience and complete self-approval among all Shepard’s people all this time? I do not read. I do not know. I cannot say. You will know better than Ido. And what do you say? For instance, what do you say about his ‘ raw-headed’ preaching? Would they all know that his preaching was raw-headed? Some of them would but would they all? Perhaps some of Shepard’s hearers preferred that kind of preaching. I have seen as much even in our own advanced and enlightened day. Only, that raw-headed and rawhearted preacher came to repent and to reform and to turn from all his rawness to be the ripest and the richest and the most spiritual preacher in all New England. I wonder if his people all turned with him? What do you think?

Then about prayer? The first houses that were built in New England by the pilgrim fathers all had a secret place for prayer. Does that architectural and domestic arrangement still continue in America? I have not been there and I do not remember that any of our visitors to the States have reported to us upon that. But how about yourselves? Have you any place in your house to which you can retire on occasion to pray? And do you keep any record of the people who ask you to pray for them and who live on believing that you do? And what method do you employ in order to find time and retirement for this great responsibility? Poor Shepard had terrible remorses on his deathbed about God’s neglected mercy-seat and about his own neglected family and friends. Will you have entire peace of mind toward God in that respect when you are on your deathbed? What do you think?

And then how about your fault-finding and censorious talking about one another and especially about your ministers? I was not fishing for it but an old elder was led on to tell me only last night that when his children began to grow up their mother and he came to a distinct understanding with one another that they were never to say one single word to the detriment of either

234 THOMAS SHEPARD Bias

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