# Heralds of God/Chapter 1

Chapter I
THE PREACHER'S WORLD
There shall always be the Church and the World And the Heart of Man Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen, Valiant, ignoble, dark, and full of light Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate. And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail. Darkness now, then Light.T. S. Eliot, The Rock.
AMONG the tributes paid to the memory of Sir Walford Davies, one of the noblest was that of a brother musician, Dr. Vaughan Williams. He dwelt on the sacrifice which Walford Davies had chosen to make quite deliberately—the sacrifice of the more aloof, self-centred life of the composer, for that of the organizer, the advocate, the musical propagandist, the educator of popular taste and opinion; and then he added: "It is an eternal problem that confronts all those who feel they have the creative impulse—'shall I shut myself up from the world and follow the dictates of my artistic conscience, or shall I go down to the world of men and show them what I have learnt about eternity and beauty?' Walford Davies had no doubts—he was a born preacher and he determined to go and preach to the Gentiles. This decision," declared Vaughan Williams, "was probably right." I ​fancy that no one who knows what Walford Davies did for music in this generation will dispute that verdict.
Now the same problem, the same critical decision to which Vaughan Williams called attention in the realm of creative art, reappears even more forcibly in religion; and here it is a problem, not for the few who possess the elusive quality of genius, but for the whole company of believers. "Shall I, as a Christian, be content to pursue the religious quest as a private hobby, and to develop my own spiritual life; or shall I concern myself personally for those outside, and take upon my heart deliberately the whole world's need for Christ?" No man, with the New Testament in his hand, can have a moment's hesitation about the answer. "What I live by," declared St. Augustine, "I impart."
You have decided this matter in the most emphatic way of all, putting your life itself into the decision. Or rather, it has been decided for you, by the constraint of a higher will. For you the issue has been settled. To bring men face to face with Christ has seemed to you a matter of such immense and overruling urgency that you propose to devote your whole life to doing nothing else. You are determined, God helping you, to go down to the world of men, and show them what you have learnt—what indeed you shall go on learning more clearly every day you live—about the eternity of redeeming love and the beauty of the Lord.
​It is a thrilling, noble enterprise. It demands and deserves every atom of a man's being in uttermost self-commitment.
"To go down to the world of men." That thrusts upon us this crucial fact—that our work as preachers has to be done in the actual setting of a contemporary situation.
The Gospel, it is true, stands unchanged from age to age. It remains yesterday, to-day, and for ever the same. In the twentieth century, it is the identical message which was sent by the Lord to former generations through the mouths of His servants Spurgeon and Wesley and Latimer and Xavier and Chrysostom and the apostles. No protean fashions of thought can alter it. No ebb and flow of the tides of history can prevail to modify it. It is as immutable as God Himself.
But while the basic message thus remains constant and invariable, our presentation of it must take account of, and be largely conditioned by, the actual world on which our eyes look out to-day. The Gospel is not for an age, but for all time: yet it is precisely the particular age—this historic hour and none other—to which we are commissioned by God to speak. It is against the background of the contemporary situation that we have to reinterpret the Gospel once for all delivered to the saints; and it is within the framework of current hopes and fears that we have to show the commanding relevance of Jesus.
​This is not a plea for so-called "topical" sermons. It is deplorable that God's hungry sheep, hoping for the pasture of the living Word, should be fed on disquisitions on the themes of the latest headlines. It is calamitous that men and women, coming up to the church on a Sunday—with God only knows what cares and sorrows, what hopes and shadowed memories, what heroic aspirations and moods of shame burdening their hearts—should be offered nothing better for their sustenance than one more dreary diagnosis of the crisis of the hour.
But this is not to say that the preacher must stand aloof, cultivating a spirit of detachment from the march of events. "What is history," cried Cromwell, "but God's unfolding of Himself?"—and the real work of the ministry in this generation will not be done by any man who shuts himself in with his academic interests and doctrinal theorizings, as though there were no surge and thunder of world-shattering events beating at his door. Surely in this immensely critical hour, when millions of human hearts are besieged by fierce perplexities; when so many established landmarks of the spirit are gone, old securities wrecked, familiar ways and habits, plans and preconceptions, banished never to return; when the soul is destined to meet, amid the crash of old beliefs, the ruthless challenge and assault of doubt and disillusionment; when history itself is being cleft in twain, and no man can forecast the shape of things to come—the Church needs men who, knowing the world around them, and ​knowing the Christ above them and within, will set the trumpet of the Gospel to their lips, and proclaim His sovereignty and all-sufficiency.
The question, therefore, is this: If the Gospel, in itself unchanging, must always be set forth in the nexus of a particular historical situation, what are the characteristic moods and tendencies which must influence the presentation of the message to-day?
Attempts are sometimes made to define the spirit of the age in a single phrase—to call it, for example, "an age of doubt," "an age of rationalism," "an age of revolt," and so on. But all such generalizations are misleading. The reality cannot be thus simplified. We have to reckon with a mental and spiritual climate full of the most baffling contradictions. It would indeed be true to say that the most characteristic feature of the modern mood is precisely the unresolved tension between opposing forces. Here we touch the very nerve of the preacher's problem. There are three directions in which this element of tension, of radical paradox and spiritual conflict, of thrust and counter-thrust, is manifesting itself dramatically in the world we face to-day.
I
First, there is the tension between Disillusionment and Hope.
You are going out with the evangel into a world which has reacted strongly and even violently against the bland humanistic optimism which dominated the ​opening decade of the century. Then the great watchwords were the adequacy of materialism, the inevitability of progress, and the sufficiency of man. Science, having finally broken through the bondage of ignorance, and having shattered the tyranny of superstition, was hailed as the New Messiah, the supreme disposer of human destiny. Indeed, so startling and spectacular were the boons and bestowals of this new Messianic age, so strange and exciting the faculties put at man's disposal, that one sinister fact went almost unobserved: all its gifts were double-edged. The dazzling splendours of its achievements masked only too effectively the grim truth—later to be learnt at an immeasurable cost of blood and tears—that science (to quote the words of Reinhold Niebuhr) "can sharpen the fangs of ferocity as much as it can alleviate human pain." That aspect was conveniently ignored. With this new Messiah leading the way, it was argued, was there any limit to what humanity might accomplish? It was an intoxicating prospect. Would not social effort, reinforced by all the resources of technology, speedily bring the New Jerusalem down to earth from heaven? Surely the wilderness wanderings of the children of men were over, and the path of progress must now lead straight and unbroken to the shining Utopia of their dreams. The Renaissance humanists and the ancient sophists had been perfectly right: man was indeed the measure of all things. His will was the architect of destiny. His intelligence, storming the secrets of the universe, had occupied the throne of God. ​"Thou art smitten, thou God," shouted Swinburne vociferously,
thou art smitten; thy death is upon thee, O Lord. And the love-song of earth as thou diest resounds through the wind of her wings— Glory to Man in the highest! for Man is the master of things.
Now it was hardly to be expected that in the heyday of this confident utopianism religion could remain uninfluenced and immune. The Bible might insist that "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour," but theological liberalism smiled to itself in a superior and even contemptuous way: it was not going to take such rhetoric too seriously. The conceptions of the world as fallen, of human nature as infected with a radical taint, of sin as a vicious circle which could be broken through only by supernatural action from outside—these were classed as outmoded fictions, and relegated to the scrap-heap of an antiquated theology. The evolutionary hypothesis, so fruitful in other fields, began to invade the deepest sanctities of the soul: it now appeared that all man had to do for his redemption was to
Move upward, working out the beast. And let the ape and tiger die.
The Kingdom of Heaven was not, as Jesus and the apostles had proclaimed it, a gift of God breaking into history from the beyond: it was a human achievement, ​the product of social amelioration, culture and scientific planning. Jesus Himself according to this view, was the Pioneer of progress, the supreme Leader, the apex of the vanguard of the pilgrim host of humanity—not a terrific Being shattering history with the explosive word, "Before Abraham was, I am." Christianity sounded in men's ears as good advice, rather than good news: an exhortation to be up and doing, to fight the good fight and follow the gleam, not the announcement of something which God had already done, decisively and for ever. There was accordingly an inclination to regard the preacher as the purveyor of religious homilies and ethical uplift, not the herald of the mighty acts of God. So far did the prevailing mood push the tendency to "change the glory of the uncorruptible God into the image of corruptible man" that there actually appeared a plagiarizing hymn, "Nearer, Mankind, to thee, Nearer to thee": a sentiment, said G. K. Chesterton tersely if somewhat scurrilously, which "always suggested to me the sensations of a strap-hanger during a crush on the Tube." Characteristic of this whole attitude was the reduced emphasis upon a theology of atonement and redemption. Why should man, conscious as never before in history of his own vast potential resources, grovel as a miserable sinner, or confess himself immeasurably indebted to sheer unmerited grace?
Every virtue we possess, And every victory won, And every thought of holiness
​were not "His alone,"—emphatically not that—our personal meritorious achievement, the praiseworthy product of our innate spirituality. It was a mood which came dangerously near to making religion itself the handmaid and confederate of that pride which is the final blasphemy and the basic sin of man.
To-day the scene is changed. When you go forth as preachers bearing Christ's commission, it is to a generation which has very largely repudiated the confident optimism of its predecessors. The great tower of Babel—collective man's monumentum aere perennius—has crashed, and the world is littered with the wreckage of disillusionment.
Back in 1918, a few days after the signing of the Armistice, Lord Curzon, moving the Address in the House of Lords, quoted the chorus from Shelley's Hellas:
The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return.
Such sanguine words sound almost sardonic now. "We are living," confessed Aldous Huxley, "in a rather grisly morning-after." The shining dream has proved to be a mirage. Of what profit is man's creative power, theme of his proudest boasts, if it is to become by a strange irony of fate the very instrument of his self-destruction? The old, ruthless dilemma, to which St. Paul gave classic expression in the seventh of Romans, has man in its torturing grip. And across the human scene to-day there echoes the haunting, unbearably poignant cry of Jeremiah long ago: "The ​harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved."
Along with this, there has crept a deeper note into theology. We are no longer inclined to underestimate the radical stubbornness of sin. It has been borne in upon us that human wisdom cannot solve the dark enigma, nor can human action break the fast-bound fetters of the world. If there is any healing for humanity's hurt, it must come, not from man's side, but from God's.
There is, however, a danger here. It is possible for the reaction from the creed of human self-reliance to be so violent that the disillusioned spirit is carried by it right across into pessimism and despair. Dark suspicions rear their heads. Has faith been a ghastly mistake? Is there perhaps no rationality anywhere? What if the spiritual interpretation of life is nothing more than the creation of pious sentiment, muddled thinking and credulity? How can the Christian evangel be relevant in a blatantly non-Christian world? Do not its basic axioms look frightfully incongruous and inapposite? Never forget as preachers that all around you to-day are men baffled and tormented by the assault of that fierce ultimate doubt.
I would have you notice, moreover, that theology itself, in certain of its aspects, has shared in the pessimistic reaction. There are those, for example, whose reflections on the contemporary scene have landed them in hopeless dualism. The world, as they see it, is the battleground where dark demonic forces wage war ​unceasingly with the hosts of heaven. By this conflict God Himself is limited, thwarted in His purposes, constrained to strive and struggle indecisively for the realization of His holy will. It is a recrudescence of the Manichaean heresy. It is quite oblivious of the repeated trumpet-note of the New Testament—that at the Cross once for all Christ raided the dark empire of evil, and vanquished the demons, and led captivity captive.
With others, again, the pessimistic mood expresses itself in religious quietism. They have carried their distrust of human nature to the point of denying the worth of any social action. Confronted with the collapse of the humanist gospel of man's self-redeemability, they seek refuge in the unethical mysticism of a thoroughgoing otherworldliness: "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away, and be at rest."
Once again, there are those for whom the pressure of disillusionment has resulted in theological irrationalism. Man, according to this view, is so radically corrupt that there is no point of his nature left at which the living God can take hold. If ever he was made in the divine image, so completely has that image been obliterated that to talk of fellowship between man and his Creator is downright sophistry and self-deception. The light of reason itself is treacherous and perfidious. He that would frame dogmas, let him abjure the aid of logic. He that glorieth, let him glory in his irrationalism! It is hard to believe that this position, supported though it is by great and honoured names, ​can maintain itself indefinitely. God intends His pilgrims to struggle through the Slough of Despond, not to make it their theological home.
Here let me interpolate a quite personal remark. If you as preachers would speak a bracing, reinforcing word to the need of the age, there must be no place for the disillusioned mood in your own life. Like your Master, you will have meat to eat that the world knows not of; and that spiritual sustenance, in so far as you partake of it daily, will strengthen your powers of resistance to the dangerous infection. Surely there are few figures so pitiable as the disillusioned minister of the Gospel. High hopes once cheered him on his way: but now the indifference and the recalcitrance of the world, the lack of striking visible results, the discovery of the appalling pettiness and spite and touchiness and complacency which can lodge in narrow hearts, the feeling of personal futility—all these have seared his soul. No longer does the zeal of God's House devour him. No longer does he mount the pulpit steps in thrilled expectancy that Jesus Christ will come amongst His folk that day, travelling in the greatness of His strength, mighty to save. Dully and drearily he speaks now about what once seemed to him the most dramatic tidings in the world. The edge and verve and passion of the message of divine forgiveness, the exultant, lyrical assurance of the presence of the risen Lord, the amazement of supernatural grace, the urge to cry "Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel"—all have gone. The man has lost heart. He is ​disillusioned. And that, for an ambassador of Christ, is tragedy.
How to maintain yourselves against the menace of this mood—that I shall speak of more specifically when we come to consider the preacher's inner life. But maintain yourselves you must: or else—don't try to speak to men in the name of God! For your task is to confront the rampant disillusionment of the day, and smash it with the Cross of Christ and shame it with the splendour of the Resurrection. What makes your calling in the Church so urgent and so critical is the fact that human hearts, bombarded with grim perplexities and damaging shadows of despair, are crying as never before, "Is there any word from the Lord?" Men who have seen war's scourge let loose twice in a generation are not going to be put off with polite trivialities and polished essays and pulpit dialectic. They don't want our views, opinions, advice or arguments. Is there any word from the Lord? Tell us that, they demand. Has Christianity failed? Must God's hopes be wrecked for ever on the rock of man's anarchic nature? Are we mad to pray "Thy kingdom come"? These demonic forces of evil in the universe, mocking all our dreams and best endeavours—are they fated to have the last word? It is all very well to stand up in church and sing:
So be it. Lord! Thy throne shall never, Like earth's proud empires, pass away; Thy Kingdom stands and grows for ever, Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.
​But is that true? What if it is only a pose, the silly pretence of the self-deceiving? Was Thomas Hardy perhaps right when he recommended Christianity to "throw up the sponge and say 'I am beaten,' and let another religion take its place"? There is the vast, intolerable mystery of suffering. Is there any word from the Lord about that? There is the more intimate and personal disillusionment, the monotonous misery of defeat in a man's own soul: "the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. O wretched man that I am!" Is there any word from the Lord about that? Such is the demand which thrusts itself clamorously and uncompromisingly upon the Church to-day. And to that demand, you—please God—shall have a right to speak.
Let me at this point remind you, for your encouragement, that if there is a vast amount of disillusionment going about in the world to-day, there is also an immense stirring of eager and passionate hope. The tension between these two attitudes is indeed one of the cardinal factors in the situation. Nor is this strange blending of disillusionment and hope in the minds of men so paradoxical as at first sight it may appear. For a complete breakdown of humanist self-confidence is a true praeparatio evangelica: it makes straight through the desert a highway for our God. Preach to a soul strong in untroubled egotism, mens sibi conscia recti—and it will be like hammering at granite. But bring the Gospel to bear upon a soul ​whose self-trust has been broken, and there before your very eyes the ancient miracle may be renewed, and the glory of the Lord be revealed. Complacence of any kind—whether it be national or social, intellectual or moral, humanitarian or religious—is God's greatest enemy. But when the foundations are undermined, and the edifice of man's vaunted achievements comes down with a crash, then is the time, declared Jesus, to "look up, and lift up your heads; for redemption draweth nigh."
Thus the very disillusionment of to-day is the raw material of the Christian hope. Men are beginning to suspect that no new order which seeks to erect itself on the ruins of the old can have one atom of survival-value, or be other than a patchwork and a sham, unless it has direct and deliberate reference to the mind and programme of God for humanity. Consider in this connection the following verdict, which comes significantly from Dr. C. E. M. Joad: "There is in many Englishmen to-day, and especially in young people newly come to maturity, a renewed interest in the religious view of the world, and a disposition to examine afresh, in the light of it, the traditional answers to fundamental questions which Christianity has provided. … That the seeds of a spiritual revival are germinating in the minds of the people of this country, I, for one, do not doubt." The fact is that to-day, as so often in past history, the very complexity of the human predicament becomes in Christ's hands a weapon for the further advance of His Kingdom. And ​if your calling as preachers in this generation is one of immense difficulty, you will be strong in hope, giving glory to God, not in spite of the difficulties, but precisely because of them. For still to-day, as at the first, it is when the doors are shut, in the bitter hour of disillusionment, that Christ is apt to break in, and stand in the midst, and say "Peace be unto you." And then, out of the dark misery of self-despair, men begin to arise and shine, knowing that their light is come!
Don't listen to the lugubrious voices that incessantly deplore the deadness of the age, and groan about the thankless uphill task of the Christian ministry and the desolating lack of response. It is a thrilling hour in which to bear the commission of your Lord.
I find certain words of St. Paul to the Romans dramatically relevant here. The eighth chapter is one of the most lyrical and triumphant things that ever came from the heart of man: but the note of disillusionment is there. "To this day," wrote the apostle, "the entire creation sighs and throbs with pain." For none knew better than he that the shining civilization was demon-ridden, and that ruthless forces held the souls of men in bitter thraldom. But what his piercing insight saw was this, that the mood of tragic desperation was itself the harbinger of hope. Just because this sighing, groaning creation was racked with pain, it was also tense with a breathless expectancy:
Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade.
​"The whole creation," wrote Paul, "waits with eager longing for the sons of God to be revealed." It is listening for the sound of a distant pilgrim chorus, the march of a great consecrated brotherhood in Christ, the decisive emergence of a new race, the true sons of God, sealed with the Cross. It is scanning the roads down which that ransomed host, that nobler breed of saints, shall come at destiny's hour to bring history to its fulfilment.
It is a daring, magnificent conception. Are we wrong to see in it a parable of that thrust and counter-thrust of disillusionment and hope upon which we look out to-day, and with which as preachers we have to reckon? When a generation has been robbed of its familiar gods of material security, progress, human self-sufficiency, or when the individual soul has found its conventional religion stolen away by the marauding forces of agnosticism, trouble and despair, then strikes God's hour to break in with His salvation. Must we not say that any weariness, unsettlement or consternation is in the last resort a blessed thing if it makes a man or an age in the mood to welcome God? It is a great thing to be brought right down to the depths, if so be that there at last we strike that bedrock which is the Rock of ages; a great thing that life itself should break up even violently the hard core of our proud self-reliance, if so be that the human spirit may be ready then to cast itself upon its ultimate resource in Jesus Christ.
Therefore I counsel you—let no fog of spiritual ​defeatism chill your ministry. Refuse to listen to the lying voices which insinuate that this is an unpropitious hour for the proclamation of the faith. You are to be the heralds of a religion which once saw the blackest, most desperately unpropitious hour in history—the hour of the crucifying of Jesus—turned into history's crowning glory and mankind's brightest hope. Go forth, then, in the heartening assurance that this present cataclysmic hour is alive with spiritual potentialities.
To take but one striking line of evidence, there is the new demand, particularly amongst youth, for a cause worthy of sacrifice or devotion, the new urge towards complete self-commitment. It will be tragic if the Church cannot take that generous impulse and baptize it into Christ. If you are wise, you will not in your preaching mask or minimize the overwhelming, absolute nature of Christ's demand. Men are ready for a Leader who will unhesitatingly claim the last ounce of His followers' courage and fidelity. Field-Marshal Wavell has told, in his notable lectures entitled Generals and Generalship, the story of how Napoleon, when an artillery officer at the siege of Toulon, built a battery in such an exposed position that he was told he would never find men to man it. But Napoleon had a sure instinct for what was required. He put up a placard—"The battery of men without fear": and it was always manned. This is no time to be offering a reduced, milk-and-water religion. Far too often the world has been presented with a mild ​and undemanding half-Christianity. The Gospel has been emasculated long enough. Preach Christ to-day in the total challenge of His high, imperious claim. Some will be scared, and some offended: but some, and they the most worth winning, will kneel in homage at His feet.
II
I pass on now to a second form in which the fact of tension, of paradox and conflict—so characteristic, as we have remarked, of the mental and spiritual climate of to-day—thrusts itself upon the preacher of the Word. This is the radical tension between Escapism and Realism. You will encounter nothing more baffling than the way in which an urgent quest for reality and an intense desire to avoid reality at all costs can apparently consort together.
Consider the latter tendency first. Some of you will know St. John Adcock's striking poem The Divine Tragedy. It is an imaginative attempt to conceive what would happen if Jesus of Nazareth were to come back to the modern world; if some of those who profess our holy religion, and remain safe and snug behind a façade of second-hand dogma and devotion, were suddenly confronted with the blazing reality of Christ Himself. Hear the poet's conclusion:
When a blithe infant, lapt in careless joy, Sports with a woollen lion—if the toy Should come to life, the child, so direly crost,
Leave us our toys; then happier we shall stay While they remain but toys, and we can play With them and do with them as suits us best; Reality would add to our unrest. … We want no living Christ, whose truth intense Pretends to no belief in our pretence And, flashing on all folly and deceit, Would blast our world to ashes at our feet, … We do but ask to see No more of Him below than is displayed In the dead plaything our own hands have made To lull our fears and comfort us in loss—
Who will dare to say that the poet's imagination has misled him? Men have always been ready, in sheer self-defence, to erect some vague idealistic image of Jesus in the temple of their spirits. But that is the image which we have to break, that the living Christ may reign.
"Reality would add to our unrest." Indeed it would. Hence the familiar hiatus between piety and practice, the scandal of the divorce between sacred and secular, between religion and the common life. Hence the intent debating of theological controversies totally irrelevant to human need. Hence the cult of a religion that is garrulous about minutiae of form and procedure, and dumb about social injustice: "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel." Of all such obfuscations of the flaming challenge of Christ, John Oman once pungently declared: "A minister who can do it will ​go far; but the Church that does it is in its grave-clothes. People want to have everything in them spoken to except their consciences." Or in the blunt words of the late Bishop Gore, "We do like to lie to ourselves about ourselves!"
In every age the preaching of the Word has had to reckon with this perverse, tenacious mood. From the days of Amos and Isaiah to the present, "Prophesy unto us smooth things" has been an ever-recurring demand; and Gore, to quote him again, once averred that "the disease of modern preaching is its search after popularity." But it is the false prophet who plays down to men's craving for security when he ought to be showing them the lightnings of God flashing about their sins. "When God commands to take the trumpet," wrote John Milton in a famous passage, "and blow a dolorous or jarring blast, it lies not in man's will what he shall say, or what he shall conceal." The true prophets have never been pious dreamers and idealists, with their heads in the clouds. They have dealt with concrete situations and urgent realities: in the name of their God they have set up their banners against every wrecking force in the life of the world around them, and "Thus saith the Lord" has been their clarion cry.
The trouble is that there is something deep in human nature which objects to God, and will use even religion as a defence-mechanism against the thrust of reality. "The way to be successful," wrote Dr. W. R. Inge with a characteristically caustic touch, "is to give the ​public exactly what it wants, and about ten per cent. more of it than it expects." "Don't go out for popularity," Spurgeon used to implore his students, "preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Christ!"
It is quite impossible to preach Christ faithfully without saying many things which will sting the natural heart of man into opposition and rebellion. You will have to declare, for example, that to imagine one can receive God's forgiveness while refusing oneself to be forgiving to others is sophistry and deceit: a hard saying that for many. Or take the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood. There are still those who accept that doctrine and sun themselves in its warm and comforting glow, but resent being confronted with its disconcerting and inexorable implications in the realm of practical brotherhood and social ethics. "Give us the simple Gospel," they cry: escapism rationalizing itself again. Take even the missionary challenge and the conception of a universal Church. We believe that, just as no man is truly awake to-day who has not developed a supra-national horizon to his thinking, so no Church is anything more than a pathetic pietistic backwater unless it is first and fundamentally and all the time a world missionary Church. But there are stubborn strongholds into which that truth has yet to penetrate—minds which, for one reason or another, persistently regard the missionary enterprise as the province of a few enthusiasts, a side-show, an extra: not realizing that here is something which every ​professing Christian must espouse with all his heart and soul, or else surrender his right to march beneath the banners of Christ. It is your task as preachers to summon men to share with Jesus in the great crusade which began at Calvary and Pentecost, and shall never cease until the whole earth is filled with the glory of the Lord; and where the narrower view prevails, you must at all costs disturb its contentment and bid it reflect what it will feel like for any disciple to stand before Christ at last and say, "The world mission of Your religion had no help from me!"
Therefore resist all temptations to dilute your Gospel. Your task is not to send people away from church saying, "That was a lovely sermon" or "What an eloquent appeal!" The one question is: Did they, or did they not, meet God to-day? There will always be some who have no desire for that, some who rather than be confronted with the living Christ would actually prefer what G. K. Chesterton described as "one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing for ever and ever." But when St. Peter finished his first great sermon in Jerusalem, reported in the Book of Acts, I do not read that "when they heard this, they were intrigued by his eloquence," or "politely interested in his literary allusions," or "critical of his logic and his accent," or "bored and impassive and contemptuous"; what I do read is: "When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart." The heart of man has a whole armour of escapist devices to hold off the danger when reality comes too near. But I would ​remind you that Peter's theme that day—Jesus crucified and risen—is your basic message still: still as dynamic, as "mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds," as moving and heart-piercing, as when men heard it preached in Jerusalem long ago.
There is, however, another side to the matter. Just as we noted how profoundly the modern mind is dominated by the tension between disillusionment and hope, so now we have to observe that over against the escapist attitude, countering it and setting up a further tension, there exists a strange passion for reality. Illogical? Undoubtedly. But there is the fact governing the relationship of multitudes at this moment to the religion of Christ—what repels, attracts; what disturbs and disconcerts, haunts and convinces. In the very moment of the headlong flight from reality, the drive towards reality makes itself felt; and "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man" becomes "Nearer, my God, to Thee!"
It is one of the mightiest safeguards of a man's ministry—to be aware of that hungry demand for reality breaking inarticulately from the hearts of those to whom he ministers. For that cry puts everything shoddy, second-hand or artificial utterly to shame.
You do not need to be eloquent, or clever, or sensational, or skilled in dialectic: you must be real. To fail there is to fail abysmally and tragically. It is to damage incalculably the cause you represent.
Anything savouring of unreality in the pulpit is a ​double offence. Let me urge upon you two considerations.
On the one hand, you will be preaching to people who have been grappling all the week with stern realities. Behind a congregation assembling for worship there are stories of heavy anxiety and fierce temptation, of loneliness and heroism, of overwork and lack of work, of physical strain and mental wear and tear. We wrong them and we mock their struggles if we preach our Gospel in abstraction from the hard facts of their experience. It is not only that they can detect at once the hollowness of such a performance, though that is true: there is also this—that to offer pedantic theorizings and academic irrelevances to souls wrestling in the dark is to sin against the Lord who died for them and yearns for their redeeming.
But there is a further indictment of unreality in preaching. This is rooted not so much in the hard problems men and women are facing—what Whittier called this "maddening maze of things"—as in the very nature of the Christian faith itself. The Gospel is quite shattering in its realism. It shirks nothing. It never seeks to gloss over the dark perplexities of fate, frustration, sin and death, or to gild unpalatable facts with a coating of pious verbiage or facile consolation. It never side-tracks uncomfortable questions with some naïve and cheerful cliché about providence or progress. It gazes open-eyed at the most menacing and savage circumstance that life can show. It is utterly courageous. Its strength is the complete ​absence of Utopian illusions. It thrusts Golgotha upon men's vision and bids them look at that. The very last charge which can be brought against the Gospel is that of sentimentality, of blinking the facts. It is devastating in its veracity, and its realism is a consuming fire.
This is the message with which we are charged. How grievous the fault if in our hands it becomes tainted with unreality!
Of course, this is an issue which concerns the whole Church, and not only the individual minister. Nothing so gravely compromises the Christian witness as the suspicion that organized religion is failing to practise what it preaches. There are at least three directions in which the Church to-day is having to meet and to answer the challenge of the craving for reality. The first relates to worship. Do our forms of worship convey at every point the ringing note of entire sincerity and truth? The second has to do with the social implications of the Gospel. Has it not happened all too frequently that men of generous and noble nature, tormented by the spectacle of the wrongs of society and the sufferings of humanity, and on fire to help their brethren "bound in affliction and iron," have cried out against what seemed to them the appalling torpor and inaction of the Church, dragging its slow ponderous length along, with leisurely, lumbering organization, and have flung away from it in impatience and despair? The third challenge concerns Christian unity. Is it legitimate, is it convincing, for a Church ​to summon men to brotherhood and solidarity, while its own ruinous divisions are manifest to all? Is it real in a day when the thrust and pressure of anti-Christian forces ought to be driving all believers to close their ranks and march together, in a day moreover when the reaction from the hyper-individualism of a bygone age is leading the younger generation to new experiments in the realm of community—is it real to maintain and perpetuate the partisan loyalties which disrupt true fellowship and drive Christians asunder? "Physician, heal thyself!"
In these ways, then, the demand for reality impinges upon the witness of the Church at large. But what mainly concerns us here is the more personal issue. If you are wise you will register a vow, at the very outset of your ministry, to make reality your constant quest. In the fine language of Scripture, "Her merchandise is better than silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies: and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her." Richard Baxter, who after three hundred years is still so sure a guide, has some plain-spoken words on this matter. "It is a lamentable case, that in a message from the God of heaven, of everlasting consequences to the souls of men, we should behave ourselves so weakly, so unhandsomely, so imprudently, or so slightly, that the whole business should miscarry in our hands, and God be dishonoured, and His work disgraced, and sinners rather hardened than converted." By way of contrast, take this ​significant account of the effect produced by a great nineteenth-century preacher on two of the most acute and discriminating minds of his day. "We have just been to hear Spurgeon," wrote Principal Tulloch, describing a visit paid by Professor Ferrier the metaphysician and himself to the Surrey Gardens Music Hall one Sunday morning in 1858, "and have been both so much impressed that I wish to give you my impressions while they are fresh. As we came out we both confessed, 'There is no doubt about that,' and I was struck with Perrier's remarkable expression, 'I feel it would do me good to hear the like of that; it sat so close to reality.' The sermon is about the most real thing I have come in contact with for a long time." That focuses the basic element of the true preacher's power. "It sat so close to reality." O si sic omnes!
To make this quite concrete, let me urge upon you the following maxims.
Be real in worship. If you are to lead others in worship, you must be truly sharing in the act of worship yourself. No doubt this sounds self-evident: yet it does need to be emphasized. It means, for instance, that you are not to occupy the time of hymn-singing conning the Scripture lessons or fidgeting with a sheaf of intimations or moving restlessly about the pulpit or scanning the congregation for absentees. It is unnatural to bid your people lift up their hearts to the Lord and then fail to join your voice with theirs in the common act of praise. Moreover, it is by realizing the attitude of worship in your own spirit that you will ​best find deliverance from awkward mannerisms, from the blight of self-consciousness, and even from that deadly menace, the "pulpit voice," than which nothing is more infallibly destructive of the atmosphere of reality. And if you will remember that the sermon itself should be an act of worship, a sacramental showing forth of Christ, will not that save you from a multitude of pitfalls? You are not likely to become pompous or pretentious or pontifical if you are truly seeing Jesus and helping others to see Him. You will not scold or rate or lecture when God's Word is on your mouth. "Have you ever heard me preach?" Coleridge asked Charles Lamb one day; to which Lamb replied, "I never heard you do anything else." But it is a different preaching which creates the hush that tells when Christ is in the midst. There is nothing like worship, when it is real, for destroying every shred and atom of a man's self-importance. A minister of God who carries a sense of his importance about with him, even into the pulpit, is a dreadful and pathetic sight: but who will say it is unknown?
There are a sort of men whose visages Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, And do a wilful stillness entertain, With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit; As who should say, "I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!"
Not that the corrective of a stiff and ostentatious ​formality is to be a slovenly and casual informality! "Some people imagine," declared the late Bernard Manning of Cambridge, "that informality in the pulpit in itself induces a belief in their sincerity or genius. It induces only a belief in their bad taste, and makes us want to get under the seats. Do not behave with a triviality, a casualness, a haphazardness, as if not merely God were absent, but as if all decent people were absent too." There is one thing, and one thing only, which can rescue the preacher from the immense besetting dangers of his position, and that is to have his own spirit bathed in the atmosphere of worship, awed and subdued and thrilled that Christ should come so near. In the words of a great tribute once paid to John Brown of Haddington by no less a critic than David Hume, "That's the man for me, he means what he says: he speaks as if Jesus was at his elbow."
Be real in language. Shun everything stilted, grandiose, insipid or pedantic. Do not be like the learned preacher who in the course of a sermon in a village church remarked, "Perhaps some of you at this point are suspecting me of Eutychianism." In your business of bringing the Christian religion decisively to bear upon the needs and problems of a twentieth-century congregation, the language of Nicaea, or even of the Westminster Divines, may be a hindrance rather than a help. It is sheer slackness to fling at your people great slabs of religious phraseology derived from a bygone age, and leave them the task of ​re-translation into terms of their own experience: that is your task, not theirs. Beware lest with facile platitudes and prosy commonplaces you cheapen the glorious Gospel of the blessed God. Eliminate everything which does not ring true. Be chary of indulging in oratory. "If a learned brother," said Spurgeon, "fires over the heads of his congregation with a grand oration, he may trace his elocution, if he likes, to Cicero and Demosthenes, but do not let him ascribe it to the Holy Spirit." If you have a tendency towards purple passages, suppress it sternly. A generation which is suspicious and impatient of high-sounding declamatory language in Parliament and press and on the public platform is not likely to be impressed by it in the pulpit; and if you once give men the idea that you are indulging in self-conscious artistry, they will hardly believe that the things of which you speak are overmastering realities. John Bunyan declares, in the Preface to Grace Abounding, "I could have stepped into a style much higher than this, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do." But he is quite candid about his reason for refusing such tricks of elegance and ornament: "I dare not. God did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me; wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was." You are to be dealing in your preaching with real things: temptation, crushing grief, the fear of death, the grace of Christ. On such themes, you cannot indulge in ​florid writing and preciosity without seeming to deny their reality. "We talk now," exclaimed Joseph Parker, "about sermons being polished, and finished, and exquisite, with many a delicate little touch artistic. The Lord send fire upon all such abortions and burn them up, till their white ashes cannot any more be found!"
This is not to ban emotion from preaching. Any such advice would be supremely foolish. No man who realizes what is at stake the depth of the human plight and the wonder of the divine remedy will lack the authentic touch of passion. The preacher, said Lacordaire, is like Mount Horeb: "before God strikes him he is but a barren rock, but as soon as the divine hand has touched him, as it were with a finger, there burst forth streams that water the desert." What I would warn you against is not the genuine note of feeling that will carry your words like winged things into many a heart: it is that self-conscious straining after effect which may be legitimate in the schools of the sophists but is totally out of place at the mercy-seat of God. "Great sermons," declared Henry Ward Beecher, "are nuisances. Show-sermons are the temptation of the devil." Life and death issues are in your mouth when you preach the Gospel of Christ; and it is simply tragic trifling to make the sermon a declamatory firework show, or a garish display of the flowers of rhetoric. Have you ever marvelled at the Bible's sublime economy of words? Take a story like the coming of Ruth and Naomi. There is no striving ​after literary effect; the whole thing is told in short, quiet, almost staccato sentences; not a word is wasted. Yet how packed with emotion it is, how truly and profoundly moving! Or take the chapter which describes how David in the unguarded hour broke faith with his own soul and with God. Could any flamboyant eloquence of denunciation have equalled the overwhelming effect of those quiet words at the close: "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord"? Above all, take the Passion narratives in the Gospels. How their restraint rebukes our vain embellishments! How crude and turgid those cherished purple passages begin to look in the light of the Word of God! Christ's messengers are sent forth armed with a Word able to break men's hearts and heal them. But remember—as Richard Baxter told the preachers of his day—"you cannot break men's hearts by patching up a gaudy oration." Be real in language!
Finally, I would say this: Be real in your total attitude to the message. There is something wrong if a man, charged with the greatest news in the world, can be listless and frigid and feckless and dull Who is going to believe that the tidings brought by the preacher matter literally more than anything else on earth if they are presented with no sort of verve or fire or attack, and if the man himself is apathetic and uninspired, afflicted with spiritual coma, and unsaying by his attitude what he says in words? There is no prayer that ought to be more constantly on your lips ​than those lines of Charles Wesley, surely the most characteristic he ever wrote:
O Thou who earnest from above, The pure celestial fire to impart, Kindle a flame of sacred love On the mean altar of my heart. There let it for Thy glory burn.
Think of the news you are ordained to declare. That God has invaded history with power and great glory; that in the day of man's terrible need a second Adam has come forth to the fight and to the rescue; that in the Cross the supreme triumph of naked evil has been turned once for all to irrevocable defeat; that Christ is alive now and present through His Spirit; that through the risen Christ there has been let loose into the world a force which can transform life beyond recognition this is the most momentous message human lips were ever charged to speak. It dwarfs all other truths into insignificance. It is electrifying in its power, shattering in its wonder. Surely it is desperately unreal to talk of themes like these in a voice deadened by routine, or in the maddeningly offhand and impassive manner which is all too familiar. It ought not to be possible to conduct a Church service in a way which leaves a stranger with the impression that nothing particular is happening and that no important business is on hand, "Went to Church to-day," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in his journal, "and was not greatly depressed." If that is the best ​we can do for people, is it worth doing? "Certainly I must confess," cried Sir Philip Sidney, "I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas, that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet." And to you has been committed the infinitely more heartmoving story of the Word made flesh: "that incredible interruption," wrote G. K. Chesterton, "as a blow that broke the very backbone of history." "It were better," he declared, "to rend our robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgment, rather than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism, in the presence of so catastrophic a claim."
What strikes you about the preachers of the New Testament is that they had been swept off their feet and carried away by the glory of the great revelation. They went to men who had sinned disastrously, and they cried, "Listen! We can tell you of reconciliation and a new beginning." They went to others who had nothing but the vaguest fatalism for a religion, and they proclaimed exultingly the love of the eternal Father. They went to desolate and weak and lonely souls, and with shouts of confidence exclaimed, "Lift up your heads! You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you." They went to others shivering in cold terror at the thought of death's onward inexorable march, and they bade them "Rejoice! Christ has conquered. Death lies dead!" It is the same tremendous tidings for which the world is hungry yet. To discover, after a hundred defeats, that it is still possible in Christ to make a fresh beginning; to have ​distrusted God for half a lifetime of prayerless years, and then to be told that He cares intensely, and that the way to His heart lies open now; to have felt utterly inadequate for life's demands and for the wear and tear of worrying days, and then to learn of vast incalculable reserves of power just waiting to be used; to have had nothing to look forward to but the snapping of the ties that matter most, and then to find that death has ceased to count, because victory and immortality belong to love—this is the glorious news, too often, alas, made dull and commonplace by our poor bungling, and desupernaturalised by our stolidity and ineptitude.
Suppose the apostles were to come back to earth to-day, and watch us at our weekly worship. Would they recognize the religion in whose dawn they had found it such bliss to be alive? Might they not have to say, "What has happened? Is this the faith that once stirred the world like a thousand trumpets? Is this the miraculous religion that burnt us with its flame? How can these our descendants repeat with the chill of lackadaisical boredom words that once awakened the dead? 'God was incarnate': can they say that, and not be thrilled and dazzled by the amazement of it? 'The Son of God was crucified, dead, and buried': can they think of that and not be overwhelmed by its awful meaning? 'Christ is risen': can they tell that, and not want to shout for the glory of it? Why have they allowed these breathlessly exciting facts to be written in the dull catalogue of common things and ​suffocated by the formalities of a routine religion? Why seek ye the living among the dead?"
"Were there but such clear and deep impressions upon our souls," wrote Richard Baxter, "of the glorious things that we daily preach, O what a change it would make in our sermons and in our private course. I marvel how I can preach of them slightly and coldly. I seldom come out of the pulpit but my conscience smiteth me that I have been no more serious and fervent. 'How could'st thou speak of life and death with such a heart?'" The fact is that all our assiduous planning for increased efficiency in organized religion will lead to nothing unless we have a Church which is tingling and vibrating with the wonder of its own evangel. Then, only then, will the Christian forces make their God-intended impact on the world; and then we shall begin to understand the saying that is written: "The zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up."
I am not suggesting that you should simulate a warmth and passion which you do not feel. Such "synthetic unction," as Dr. W. R. Maltby has called it, "may impress simple souls, but it corrupts the preacher. Emotion arises out of the truth: emotionalism is poured on to it." That is the great difference. But you will need no cheap substitute for the real thing if you are living close to Christ. Your heart will burn within you as He talks with you by the way; and something of that inner glow will communicate itself to your preaching, and kindle a flame in other lives.
​This will be true, not only of sermons belonging to what is sometimes called the prophetic function of the ministry, but also of those in which the teaching note predominates, A ministry extending over many years in one place can be effective and fruitful only if much of its strength is given to systematic exposition of the Bible and regularly planned instruction on the great doctrines of the Christian faith. But what I am concerned to insist on at the moment is that even your teaching sermons ought to have in them, and can have, something of the authentic thrill of the evangel. Do not believe the defeatist moan that the production of two vital sermons each week is neither mentally nor spiritually possible. For if there are indeed "unsearchable riches" in Christ, you will always be pioneering and exploring, always discovering new depths in the Gospel, and the streams of the river of life will never for you run dry. The longest ministry is too short by far to exhaust the treasures of the Word of God. Certainly if you preach your own theories and ideas, using Scripture texts merely as pegs to hang them on, you will soon be at the end of your resources and the sooner the better. But if you will let the Scriptures speak their own message, if you will realize that every passage or text has its own quite distinctive meaning, you will begin to feel that the problem is not lack of fresh material, but the very embarrassment of riches; and with the Psalmist you will cry, "I rejoice at Thy Word, as one that findeth great spoil." Thus in teaching and exposition no less than in direct ​evangelism, in your continual task of instructing your people in the whole counsel of God no less than in the act of appealing for decision, the message will be alive, throbbing with vital force, imbued with the redeeming energy of the Holy Spirit: "quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword." No one will doubt or question its reality.
It was this characteristic which R. W. Dale of Birmingham noted in the work of D. L. Moody. "He preached in a manner which produced the sort of effect produced by Luther. He exulted in the free grace of God. His joy was contagious. Men leaped out of darkness into light, and lived a Christian life afterwards." There is no reason why your ministry, in its own degree, should not achieve visible results, provided you keep alive within you a sense of the wonder of the facts you preach and of the urgency of the issues with which you deal. Every Sunday morning when it comes ought to find you awed and thrilled by the reflection—"God is to be in action to-day, through me, for these people: this day may be crucial, this service decisive, for someone now ripe for the vision of Jesus." Remember that every soul before you has its own story of need, and that if the Gospel of Christ does not meet such need nothing on earth can. Aim at results. Expect mighty works to happen. Realize that, although your congregation may be small, every soul is infinitely precious. Never forget that Christ Himself, according to His promise, is in the midst, making the plainest and most ordinary church building into the ​house of God and the gate of heaven. Hear His voice saying, "This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears. This day is salvation come to this house." Then preaching, which might otherwise be a dead formality and a barren routine, an implicit denial of its own high claim, will become a power and a passion; and the note of strong, decisive reality, like a trumpet, will awaken the souls of men.
III
Up to this point, we have been considering the preacher's task as influenced by two crucial factors in the contemporary scene: the tension between disillusionment and hope, and the tension between escapism and realism. We turn now finally to a third characteristic mood with which we have to reckon in our presentation of the Gospel to this age. This is the critical tension between Scepticism and Faith. You are going out to a world which is literally "in a strait betwixt two," torn by an inner conflict between the spirit of denial and the spirit of affirmation, between the loud self-confident dogmatism of the thoroughgoing sceptic and the deep wistfulness of the seeker after God. "Poore intricated soule!" cried John Donne long ago, contemplating the unresolved tensions of man's nature, "Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthicall soule!"
That there has been, on the one hand, a widespread failure of belief is all too apparent. Evidences of it ​can be found in the neglect of public worship; in the indifference to the Bible; in the astounding ignorance even amongst well-educated people as to what Christianity really is; and in the prevalence of the type of humanism we have already referred to, which dethrones God and sets man in the centre of the picture. The causes of the sceptical mood are various. Some have been driven from the citadel of faith by the formidable assaults of science. Others have found their religious beliefs crumbling away before the ruthless, terrifying aspect of a world at war. Others have felt the desolating stab of doubt and misgiving as they grappled with the mystery of suffering. Many have lost the vision through failure to maintain a disciplined devotional life. Many have lacked the necessary powers of resistance to ward off the infection of a predominantly secularist society.
There, then, is the challenge you are called upon to meet. I am not thinking now of that flippant, superficial type of scepticism which will stand in the presence of the profoundest mysteries without a trace of awe or wonder, which will talk jauntily of its emancipation from the ethics of Christ, and smile patronizingly at the prayers of the saints, and look with pity upon those who still frequent the worship and ordinances of the Church. Nor am I thinking of the intellectually half-baked scepticism which has a naturalistic explanation for every phenomenon of the religious life, which calls prayer auto-suggestion, and conscience a utilitarian social contract, and immortality flagrant ​wishful-thinking, and God a projection of the human mind: as if such a travesty of the facts, such a "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable" jargon, compounded of bad psychology and unintelligent rationalism, could cancel out the witness of the Christian centuries, or be the dynamite to blast and to destroy the Rock of ages! I am thinking rather of the deeper and more serious challenge which accosts our ministry in this age when beliefs which once seemed inviolable are fighting for their very life, and when the faith of multitudes of our fellow-men has gone down defeated before the wild surge and onset of militant doubt. Have you, as Christ's ambassadors, the word of the Lord for such a situation? Can you confront it with the decisive testimony of an irrefragable first-hand experience? "I believe," cried the psalmist, "therefore have I spoken." It is a great thing to be able, like the apostle, to add: "We also believe, and therefore speak."
To be aware, however, of the prevalent mood of scepticism and of the widespread failure of belief is not enough. For beneath the surface there is an acute tension: the thesis and antithesis of doubt and faith, the drive of the spirit of denial, and the urge of the quest for God. Do not allow the drift away from the Church, and the apparent indifference and even hostility to organized religion, to deceive you. Everywhere to-day, even in the least likely places, there are men dimly seeking the Lord, "if haply they might feel after ​Him, and find Him." You will remember how the invincible wistfulness of faith kept glimmering even through the scepticism of Thomas Hardy:
That with this bright believing band I have no claim to be, That faiths by which my comrades stand Seem fantasies to me, And mirage-mist their Shining Land, Is a strange destiny.
Surely if we had ears to hear and eyes to see, we should recognize the same deep ache and yearning to-day even in lives apparently devoid of Christian convictions, lacking any conscious background of God for their thinking and activity, with no flame of prayer on the altar of their spirits, and no conception of a risen, regnant Christ who has overcome the sharpness of death and opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers. To all intents and purposes, the sceptical mood and the assault of doubt and denial have choked their spiritual life, as the Philistines choked the wells of Abraham in the valley of Gerar long ago; but you will find, as Isaac did, that the underground wells are still there, buried but undestroyed, and needing only the touch of faith and love to set them flowing free again. That is the measure of your opportunity.
Signs are indeed not wanting that the sceptical mood is less sure of itself to-day than a generation ago. Its armour has been pierced. Its self-confidence has been badly shaken. You will not be handicapped, as were ​some of your predecessors, by having to preach a spiritual view of the world to an age drugged with the narcotic of a thoroughgoing materialism. "We are no longer tempted," wrote Eddington in Science and the Unseen World, "to condemn the spiritual aspects of our nature as illusory because of their lack of concreteness. We have travelled far from the standpoint which identifies the real with the concrete." Many who in the heyday of revolt and emancipation threw over the trammels of orthodoxy are beginning to suspect that the Christian interpretation of life may after all be more credible, more intellectually respectable, than any of the alternatives. Robert Browning's dramatic defence of the faith in Bishop Blougram is doubly cogent now. What the poet saw with piercing clearness was that, if the difficulties facing belief are bad enough, those confronting unbelief are much worse; and that all that scepticism does is to land the mind in problems far more intractable and embarrassing than those it is seeking to escape. This is the fact which is forcing itself into recognition again at the present hour. Hence you start your ministry with an immense advantage. Multitudes of people to-day are haunted by the suspicion that the world is perfectly meaningless apart from God. That is a good atmosphere in which to have to preach the Gospel. If you can bring to troubled hearts the assurance that the Christian faith does make sense of the universe and give a credible interpretation of life, if you can show them God at the heart of their experience, you need never fear that your ​word will return unto you void, nor that your ministry will be suggestive of the sounding brass and the tinkling cymbal. The sceptical mood has had its innings, and has failed to satisfy. Therefore "lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!"
You will do well to remember that, whenever you speak to men in the name of Jesus Christ, unseen instincts deep within them are reinforcing your words.
Thou hast great allies; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind.
"The belief in God," said Rabbi Duncan, "presses multifariously upon man." Let that be your confidence!
You do not preach in a vacuum. Those secret allies of God are always there, working in the hearts of those to whom you are sent. One of the greatest is the sense of sin. However much men may romanticize the guilty conscience, or rationalize with clever casuistry the restless misery of the disintegrated and dishevelled soul, there are stubborn questions which refuse to be silenced: How shall I make my peace with God? Can the damage be atoned for? Can the frightful dilemma be resolved?
O how shall I, whose native sphere  Is dark, whose mind is dim, Before the Ineffable appear, And on my naked spirit bear  The uncreated beam?
​Another of those secret allies on which you can count in your ministry is the human heart's need of comfort. Was it not Ian Maclaren who, near the end, declared that if he could begin his life-work over again he would strike the note of comfort far oftener than he had done? The amount of trouble in the average congregation is far greater than any unimaginative onlooker would ever guess. So many who face the world gallantly and uncomplainingly are wearing hidden sackcloth next their hearts: "men of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." "Who but my selfe," cried John Donne in a sermon in London in 1626, "can conceive the sweetnesse of that salutation when the Spirit of God sayes to me in a morning, Go forth to-day and preach, and preach consolation, preach peace, preach mercy?" And when the Spirit of God thrusts you forth on that same compassionate errand, your words—if you are careful to avoid all sentimentality, and to offer only the strong, bracing comfort of the New Testament, the authentic paraklesis—will make a highroad to many hearts.
But best of all God's secret allies in the souls to whom you preach is the eternity God Himself has planted there, the hunger for the bread of heaven. Often only an inarticulate craving, concealed deliberately sometimes behind a mask of apathy and irreligion, it is nevertheless the decisive element in the situation and the supremely hopeful factor of your ministry. No man's soul can be satisfied indefinitely with the wretched husks of a materialist philosophy. It begins ​to starve for something better than such poor earthly stuff. Sooner or later, the famine grips it. It grows homesick. Try as it may, it can never quite delude itself into believing that the atmosphere of a secular society is its native air. It wants to fling its windows open towards Jerusalem. It cries aloud for the God who is its home. The blank space in the modern heart, said Julian Huxley, is a "God-shaped blank." How can preaching ever die out while these things are so? Do not listen to the foolish talk which suggests that, for this twentieth century, the preaching of the Word is an anachronism, and that the pulpit, having served its purpose, must now be displaced by press or radio, discussion group or Brains Trust, and finally vanish from the scene. As long as God sets His image on the soul, and men are restless till they rest in Him, so long will the preacher's task persist, and his voice be heard through all the clamour of the world.
It ought to fill you with something of the glad fearlessness of the apostolic preachers, the parresia of the New Testament, to know that, even before you open your mouth to speak, God's secret allies have been at work in the hearts of those now waiting for the Word. It will save you from the false diffidence of misplaced apologetic. Shame on our apologizing for the truth of Christ! Shame on our timid offering of some pithless Gospel denuded of the supernatural, dull unkindled ethics with a Christian tinge, views and impressions of current events with a smattering of the Sermon on the Mount, tame humanistic exhortations ​to brotherhood and neighbourliness and the observance of the Golden Rule! Cannot we hear the hearts of men crying for the living God? Do we think Christ purchased the Church with His blood that it should be only a depository of doctrine, only a social conscience, only a glorified discussion group? Nothing about a Church—no culture or enlightenment, no assiduous attention to the details of organization, no elaborate machinery of good works—can avail anything or compensate one atom for the radical defect, if it is not a place where men and women can come quite sure that their hungry hearts will find the living bread.
Have you that gift to offer? In the last resort, everything depends on the inner certainty of your own soul. Two hundred years ago, George Whitefield preached a sermon in Glasgow on The Duty of a Gospel Minister. "You will never preach," he said, "with power feelingly, while you deal in a false commerce with truths unfelt. It will be but poor, dry, sapless stuff—your people will go away out of the church as cold as they came in. For my own part," he cried, "I would not preach an unknown Christ for ten thousand worlds. Such offer God strange fire, and their sermons will but increase their own damnation." Izaak Walton has described John Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's, "preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joyes that he labored to distill into others." Does not that lay bare our deepest need? We want something ​better than second-hand religion and borrowed theology, and stolid unkindled Churches which are merely efficient and competent machines, dealing with reality at a distance and sending earnest seekers away with an aching, disappointed sense that something vital is lacking. We want that thrilling sense of immediacy, that directness of touch, that spiritual drive and momentum, which only a personal encounter with God can ever impart. "It is good," declared Phillips Brooks, "to be a Herschel who describes the sun; but it is better to be a Prometheus who brings the sun's fire to the earth." "I came into the town," wrote John Wesley in his Journal, "and offered them Christ." To spend your days doing that—not just describing Christianity or arguing for a creed, not apologizing for the faith or debating fine shades of religious meaning, but actually offering and giving men Christ—could any life-work be more thrilling or momentous?