# Heralds of God/Chapter 4

Chapter IV
THE PREACHER'S TECHNIQUE
   "What skill doth every part of our work require, and of how much moment is every part! To preach a sermon, I think, is not the hardest part; and yet what skill is necessary to make plain the truth, to convince the hearers; to let in the irresistible light into their consciences, and to keep it there, and drive all home; to screw the truth into their minds, and work Christ into their affections; to meet every objection that gainsays, and clearly to resolve it; to drive sinners to a stand, and make them see there is no hope, but they must unavoidably be converted or condemned: and to do all this so for language and manner as beseems our work, and yet as is most suitable to the capacities of our hearers. This, and a great deal more that should be done in every sermon, should surely be done with a great deal of holy skill. So great a God, whose message we deliver, should be honoured by our delivery of it."—Richard Baxter.
I
THERE was a day when that flaming prophet of the eighteenth century, George Whitefield, was preaching to a vast throng on the power of saving faith. The pride of reason and worldly wisdom, he declared, would lead the soul downward to inevitable destruction: only faith in Christ led heavenward. To drive the point home to his hearers' minds, he used an illustration. He begged them to imagine a blind man, with a dog, walking on the brink of a precipice. So vividly did the preacher describe the scene, so acute became the tension as he brought the blind man nearer and nearer to the fatal edge, that suddenly Lord ​Chesterfield, who was sitting in the congregation, sprang up exclaiming, "Good God! The man's gone!" "No, my lord" answered Whitefield, "he is not quite gone; let us hope that he may yet be saved." Then he went on to preach deliverance from the delusions of blind self-trust through faith in Jesus Christ.
Now, we may not possess one-tenth of George Whitefield's dramatic imagination. Nevertheless, the art of illustration is a thing no preacher can afford to neglect. Abstract truth has to be translated into concrete terms, if it is to impinge upon the average mind. The preacher who will not condescend thus to translate his meaning, who disdains the use of illustration, considering it undignified and puerile, is being very foolish. Surely our Lord's example is decisive here. Jesus did not speak of the efficacy of importunate prayer: He showed us a man shamelessly hammering at his neighbour's door at midnight. He did not say that wrong personal relationships were inimical to religious reality: He said it would be wise to leave our gift before the altar, and go and make peace with our brother, and then come back and offer the gift. When a certain jurist, an expert in definitions, demanded "Who is my neighbour?" the answer was "A certain man went down to Jericho," and the story of the Good Samaritan. Truth made concrete will find a way past many a door where abstractions knock in vain.
This is an art, of course, which calls for careful handling. Illustrations dragged in at random and needlessly multiplied betoken a slovenly mind. Any ​Illustration which is only doubtfully relevant to the main theme ought to be rigorously banned. No matter how vivid it may be in itself, if it does not immediately light up the particular truth under discussion, exclude it ruthlessly. Otherwise it will simply distract attention and defeat your purpose. On the other hand, illustrations sparingly and appropriately used can be a vital source of power and illumination. You are describing, let us say, man's search for God, the soul's age-long quest for spiritual reality, and the thrilling moment of supreme discovery. Have you read Madame Curie's Life? Do you remember the moving account of the night of magic when, after years of experimenting, she saw across the darkness of the unlit laboratory the first faint streak of phosphorescent blue, and knew that it was radium? Or suppose you are speaking of the remorse which lashes the guilty soul in the hour of its awakening. There is an unforgettable instance you might adduce the dramatic moment in Saint Joan where the Chaplain, who has stood and watched the end, consenting to the death of the saint, bursts in suddenly upon the Earl of Warwick with the lamentable cry, "I let them do it. If I had known I would have torn her from their hands. O God, take away this sight from me! O Christ, deliver me from this fire that is consuming me! She cried to Thee in the midst of it: Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! She is in Thy bosom; and I am in hell for evermore." Or, once again, your theme may be the companionship of Jesus: you are trying to show the power of that ​companionship to keep life calm and strong and undefeated through days of stress and storm. You recall how Joseph Conrad, in The Mirror of the Sea, quotes from a letter of Sir Robert Stopford, who commanded one of the ships with which Nelson chased to the West Indies an enemy fleet nearly double in number. Describing the desperate hardships of that daring adventure, Stopford wrote: "We are half-starved, and otherwise inconvenienced by being so long out of port. But our reward is—we are with Nelson!" How much deeper and more ineffable the serenity of those who through all the hazards and uncertainties of life can say, "We are with Christ!"
The question may well be raised. How is the preacher to obtain an adequate store of illustrative material? I would warn you against being content to allow others to do this garnering for you. Ready-made collections of illustrations are a snare. Omnibus volumes of sermon anecdotes are the last refuge of a bankrupt intelligence. The best illustrations are those which come to you as the harvest of your own reading and observation. In this realm as in others, there is far more zest and thrill in personal discovery than in second-hand borrowing. Be your own anthologist. Little incidents of daily life, significant happenings in the world around you, moving pages in the books you read—all can serve to illuminate the truth committed to your charge. These things are apt to be fugitive and memory precarious: therefore note them down. Elaborate card-indexing of illustrations is a work of ​supererogation. If a passion for mental tidiness leads you to adopt it, well and good: only beware lest the mechanism of cross-references and the like becomes despotic! For those of us to whom such intricate and even formidable methods must remain counsels of perfection, quite beyond the compass of our less disciplined ways, something much simpler—a loose-leaf commonplace book, with headings—will prove adequate. It scarcely matters how rough-and-ready such a compendium may be, as long as it is veritably your own, sheaves of your own harvesting from the fields of literature and of life. In any case, avoid over-loading. Do not scorn the aid of illustration, but use it sparingly in your sermons, and with discretion. And remember the maxim: Better one illustration that is strong and apt and gripping than ten that are shoddy and irrelevant and sentimental.
II
Passing on to the place of quotations in preaching, we should do well to reaffirm the same rule: be sparing. "Let your moderation be known unto all men." People are not really so avid as some preachers suppose to learn what Confucius said in 500 B.C., or Emerson in A.D. 1850, or the Brains Trust in 1945. Beyond a certain point, the formula "As So-and-so has said" tends to become for some hearers merely irritating, for others positively soporific. Reference was made in an earlier lecture to St. Paul's sermon at Athens, its points ​of strength and of weakness. It is not without significance that the occasion when the apostle, oppressed perhaps by the shadow of Demosthenes, appears to have argued with himself, "If they want literary allusion—poetry, philosophy, comparative religion—let them have it," was one of the conspicuously less successful days of his ministry: so that going on from there to Corinth, and meditating as he journeyed on the recent disappointment, he "determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified."
There is one class of quotations which might well be dispensed with altogether—those which have grown hackneyed and threadbare through over-use. It would be much kinder to W. E. Henley and A. H. Clough if all preachers everywhere would agree to give "Invictus" and "Say not, the struggle nought availeth" a complete rest for the next ten years. It is a different matter, of course, when some commonplace allusion can be set in a suddenly new light or viewed from an unfamiliar angle. Take, for example, Sir Oliver Lodge's dictum, "The modern man is not worrying about his sins." I wonder in how many thousand sermons that remark has made a punctual reappearance? Ought it not now to be disqualified, and to have its sermon-licence suspended sine die? Certainly, if only the obvious sense of the words is intended. But suppose that one day in a sermon you are concerned to emphasize the crucial paradox, so imperfectly understood by many, that the more a man sins the less he is able to realize that he is a sinner (the ​damaging thing about sin being what the Bible calls its unconscious "hardening," its ominous way of blinding a man to its own nature and doping his spiritual perceptions without his knowing that anything of the kind is happening): then indeed you may use the familiar quotation with fresh point and force. For now you are setting it in a new light, "Not worrying about his sins"? No, precisely; for sin's characteristic action is to insensitize the soul, to incapacitate it progressively from seeing that there is anything to worry about. Or take, for another example, the stanza from Omar Khayyam:
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire. Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Banal enough in all conscience, if you are using it merely to illustrate the intractability of life or the disillusionment of a pagan ethic. But there is an inspired flash in Professor A. E. Taylor's comment on the lines when he bids us "put the heart itself at the very head of the list of things to be shattered and remade." There the hackneyed stanza of the Eastern rhymester is suddenly redeemed from its banality, and thrust dramatically into the service of the truth.
Profuse and indiscriminate quotation, then, is a mark of bad preaching. On the other hand, to be able to focus the message at the right moment by quoting some memorable and gripping phrase is a real source of strength. You are preaching, let us say, on the ​words of the twenty-third Psalm, "He restoreth my soul": God's secret ministry in days of spiritual reaction and fatigue. There comes to your mind a sentence from one of Baron von Hugel's letters: "Am doing what I can for her: pray for her. Have explained how she requires a second conversion—this time against the dust and drear when the physical enthusiasm dwindles." Does that not nail down the issue? Or you are speaking of our Lord's vivid use of the "how much more" argument: "If ye know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more your Father in heaven!" If parents will sacrifice themselves for their little ones, how much more God! If a man will lay down his life for his friends, how much more God! If you will suffer for one whom you love, how much more God! Do you remember how Lacordaire once dramatized this very truth? "If you would wish to know how the Almighty feels towards us, listen to the beating of your own heart and add to it infinity" (Incidentally, there you have the whole book of the prophet Hosea—the man's personal history and his religious message to the world—in one golden sentence.) Or, again, you are dealing with what theologians barbarously describe as "the Kenotic Theory of the Incarnation"—what you will prefer, in your sermon title, to call more simply "The Humility of the Divine": "He divested Himself of the glories of heaven," wrote Paul to the Philippians, "and became a servant and stooped to die upon the Cross." In one of her stories, Sheila Kaye-Smith depicts a character ​upon whom, as he knelt one day within a church, this great, subduing truth broke with all the force of a personal revelation. "There was not one pang of his lonely, wandering life, no throb or ache or groan of his up to that moment when the light of his eyes and the desire of his heart were taken from him at a stroke, that had not been shared by God. For if man has known the stars, so God has known the dust." There is a sentence which positively demands quotation. And is it not possible that, long after everything else in your sermon has been forgotten, such a shining word as that—"If man has known the stars, so God has known the dust"—may grip the memory of some who heard it, and go to work in secret ways within their hearts?
III
It may be well at this point to say something on the question of language. Two pitfalls against which I have already warned you are professionalism of vocabulary or pulpit jargon, and the temptations of the purple passage: on these nothing further need be said. Let me rather go on to stress one great positive rule which ought to determine your choice of language throughout: Be simple and direct. "People think," exclaimed Matthew Arnold, "that I can teach them style. What stuff it all is! Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style. "Surely Arnold was right. Every man at Pentecost heard the Gospel, we are told, in his own ​tongue; and that is the basic condition of effective preaching still. Have something to say, and when you are saying it avoid periphrasis and over-elaboration: say it as clearly as you can. Dr. L. P. Jacks maintains that "two lines of Wordsworth—
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
 The difference to me!
are a more adequate expression of human grief than all the funeral sermons ever preached." It is simple directness, not literary embellishment, that moves the hearts of men.
Let us hark back, by way of contrast, to St. Paul's Cathedral at Christmastide 1624, and listen to this trumpet-toned, tremendous utterance of John Donne. He is speaking of the Psalmist's word, "I will sing of mercy and judgment." "If some King of the earth," cries Donne, "have so large an extent of Dominion, in North, and South, as that he hath Winter and Summer together in his Dominions, so large an extent East and West, as that he hath day and night together in his Dominions, much more hath God mercy and judgment together; He brought light out of darknesse, not out of a lesser light; He can bring thy Summer out of Winter, though thou have no Spring; though in the wayes of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintred and frosen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupified till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the Sun at noon to illustrate ​all shadowes, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons." That is magnificent—but try modelling your sermon language upon it, and the result is likely to be disastrous. Or take this, from a preacher of a very different kind, Talmage of Brooklyn. He has just quoted the railing cry of the impenitent malefactor at Calvary, "If Thou be the Son of God"—and he goes on, "If? Was there any if about it? Tell me, thou star, that in robe of life didst run to point out His birthplace. Tell me, thou sea, that didst put thy hand over thy lip when He bid thee be still. Tell me, ye dead, who got up to see Him die. Tell me, thou sun in mid-heaven, who for Him didst pull down over thy face the veil of darkness. Tell me, ye lepers, who were cleansed, ye dead, who were raised. Is He the Son of God? Aye, aye! responds the universe. The flowers breathe it—the stars chime it—the redeemed celebrate it—the angels rise up on their thrones to announce it. And yet on that miserable malefactor's 'if' millions shall be wrecked for all eternity." That, again, is great preaching: and you, too, may have—please God, will often have—those moments when language, winged with the emotion of a mighty theme, soars aloft in genuine eloquence. But artificial eloquence, like sham emotion, is a dreadful thing. Learn to prune your language. Reject every expression that is merely florid and ostentatious. Prefer simple and even homely words to those that are abstract and difficult, direct and pointed speech to involved circuitous ​sentences. Not that you need be arid and prosaic: but you must be lucid. Do not be like the writers Quiller-Couch describes, "perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms." Canon Liddon was writing a letter to a friend one dark Christmas from Amen Court. "London is just now," he wrote, "buried under a dense fog. This is commonly attributed to Dr. Westcott having opened his study-window at Westminster." That, of course, was quite unfair. But clarity is a consummation so devoutly to be wished that you must be ready to sacrifice almost anything to achieve it.
In thus urging upon you the necessity of lucid and simple language, I am certainly not suggesting that the best preaching is that which makes a minimum demand upon the hearers for mental exertion and hard thinking. Simplicity is a very different thing from shallowness; and if it is bad to preach over people's heads, not to preach to their heads at all is worse. I trust that to your dying day you will "preach the simple Gospel," but it is well to remember that there is nothing which so stretches men's mental horizons as God's revelation in Christ, It was a true insight that led the apostle to declare, "The world by wisdom knew not God": but it is a deplorable attitude which would divorce evangelism from the duty of disciplined thought. There is a type of preaching which apparently regards it as more important to generate heat than to supply light: sermons devoid of any element of positive teaching, compounded of anecdotes, appeals and homiletical ​"gush" an affront to any decent man's Intelligence, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Some preachers have the fixed idea that the way to reach the human heart is to by-pass the human understanding. It is emphatically mistaken strategy. Das Denken ist auch Gottesdienst; and nothing could be more tedious than the preaching which is all uplift and exhortation with no food to feed the mind. Resolve, then, that your pulpit work shall represent not only your truest fervour but also your best thought. Your congregation deserves it, and will welcome it. But even with the deep and difficult themes that tax the mind—with these, indeed, most of all—the rule applies: Be clear, be direct. Rabbi Duncan was discussing with a friend one day the merits and demerits of a certain essay. "Is it not deep?" his friend inquired admiringly. "No," came the blunt expressive answer, "not deep, but drumlie!"
IV
We proceed now to consider the fundamental question of the choice of texts and subjects. To every preacher this is a matter of constant and absorbing concern. Indeed, at the outset of a man's ministry, the prospect of having to find two fresh themes each week may well daunt the imagination and weigh upon the mind. Let me bring to you at this point a word of reassurance based on personal experience. You will discover with relief and delight, as the weeks and years go on, how punctually and unfailingly the promise is ​ratiﬁed, "The Lord will provide." But there is one condition: unremitting Bible study. I have already urged upon you the vital importance of expository preaching. Here let me add that it is only as we live in the Bible—devotionally, and as students of the sacred Word—that we can hope to ﬁnd the manna falling regularly for our people's need.
Again and again in your reading of the Bible, phrases, sentences, whole passages will leap out from the page, each of them positively thrusting itself upon you, and clamouring "One day you must preach on me!" This is where your private notebooks come into action. When a text has once gripped you, do not let it escape. Jot it down at the head of a page, and underneath it any thoughts, illustrations, potential sermon divisions it may have brought with it. There is a tragic page in the biography of Hector Berlioz the composer, which tells how one night there came to him quite suddenly an inspiration for a new symphony. The theme of the first movement, an Allegro, was ringing in his head: he knew he ought to capture it there and then, and set the music down in manuscript, but he refrained. The following night it returned, and again he heard the Allegro clearly, and sang it to himself, and even seemed to see it written down: but again he failed to take his pen. The next day, when he awoke, all remembrance of it was gone: the lovely melody refused to be recaptured, and the symphony which might have thrilled the world was never written. Let that sad episode be a warning. No elaborate ​system of tabulation is necessary. All you require is a single reference at the top of a page, and a couple of lines of comment. Very often as you turn the pages of such a reference-book you will find that your theme has been given you; and in a dry season you will thank God you have a reservoir!
It is hardly necessary perhaps to point out that there is one obligation which the very act of preaching from the Word of God binds upon us. I mean the duty of exegetical honesty. There are some sermons which, starting out from a word of Scripture, proceed quite flagrantly to violate the intention of the original writer. This practice of importing alien meanings into texts is strenuously to be discountenanced. To say this is not, of course, to suggest that allegorizing is necessarily bad; nor does it imply a rigid and excessive literalism distrustful of all spiritual lines of interpretation. There is no reason why you should not, occasionally at least, extend the reference of a text beyond its immediate setting. For example, when Jesus declared "What God hath joined together let not man put asunder," He was speaking specifically of marriage and divorce. But the principle there proclaimed runs through the whole of life; and therefore you might well preach from that text on some of those other God-intended alliances which we break at our peril—Faith and Reason (so tragically divorced in the long conflict between the Church and Science), Evangelism and Ethics, Justice and Mercy, Freedom and Discipline, Man the Sinner and Christ the Saviour. Or again, ​take the closing words of Psalm cx: "He shall drink of the brook in the way, and go on with lifted head." It would be pedantic to deny your right to use such words for a sermon on some of the soul-refreshing streams—Nature, Art, Friendship, the Lord's Day, the Bible, Prayer—which God has provided along our pilgrim road. But the strongest and most helpful preaching is that which expounds a text or passage in dynamic relationship to its actual setting in Scripture. Loyalty to the Word of God demands scrupulous care in exegesis. Doubtless it would be possible, on the basis of the text "The simplicity that is in Christ," to paint a vivid picture of the homeliness of the Galilean ministry simple in its lowly origins, simple in speech, in companionship, in teaching, in faith. But we are using Scripture quite illegitimately if we fail to show that what the apostle had in mind was not primarily the simplicity of Jesus at all, but the necessity of simple and single-hearted devotion towards Jesus on the part of Christian converts. Or again, it is more than questionable to use King Agrippa's famous dictum, "Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian," in the sense that here was a soul openly acknowledging the ultimate dilemma, avowedly trembling on the verge of spiritual decision. In point of fact, it seems to have been stinging disdain that inspired the words (though, of course, the bravado may have been self-defence, a smart retort disguising an uneasy conscience): "At this rate, Paul, you will be thinking you have made a Christian of me!" The point is that it is imperative to allow the Scripture ​to speak its own message. Build your sermons on a solid foundation of accurate exegesis. Be honest with the Word of God!
Such strict attention to basic meanings carries with it rich rewards. In the very process of tracking down the original sense of a text or passage, you will find new suggestions leaping out upon you. To take just one case in point, there is that lovely affirmation of St. Paul to the Philippians: "The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus." Even as it stands in the Authorised Version, it is moving and expressive. But notice how much more vivid it becomes when the verb is given its full meaning. "The peace of God shall keep guard over, shall stand as sentry to, your hearts and minds." It will hold the fort in the day of siege, and keep the central citadel inviolate. There, surely, is a conception of inner peace far removed from the sentimentalisms which have all too often blemished this noble theme. Christian serenity, as the apostle envisages it, is no passive exemption or easy immunity from the assaults of life: it is the active strength of a God-garrisoned heart.
In your choice of subjects it is wise, as a general rule, to avoid the bizarre and the sensational. It is easy enough to hit upon quaint, outlandish texts; easy enough, by announcing such a text, to intrigue your congregation with the thought—"Now what in all the world will he be able to make of that?" But there is really very little merit in such performances. The ​chances are that they will leave an impression of the preacher's ingenuity rather than of the majesty of God: and that is failure devastating and complete. Far better gird yourself to grapple with John iii. 16 or Matthew xi. 28 than spend your time pursuing eccentric texts or fashioning odd and startling sermon-titles. "Remember Peniel," says Dr. W. R. Maltby, "and wrestle with the great themes, even if they throw you."
At the same time, it is worth recognizing the fact that on page after page of the Bible there are texts possessing a quite peculiar quality of grip, a dramatic power of arresting attention from the very moment they are announced. To preach from such a text is to implant in your hearers' minds a seed which may go on germinating long after the sermon itself has been forgotten. What converted Spurgeon was not the Methodist lay preacher's sermon in the chapel at Colchester: it was his text—"Look unto Me and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth." "He had not much to say, thank God," declared Spurgeon afterwards, "for that compelled him to keep on repeating his text, and there was nothing needed—by me, at any rate—except his text." When you preach on such a word of Scripture, you start with an enormous initial gain. For from the very outset the text itself goes actively to work, awakening and challenging, smiting and binding up.
For example, you may be anxious to make vivid to your people's minds the wonderful way in which God ​comes to us through the fact of friendship, using the human relationship with its experiences of trust, forgiveness and loyalty to interpret and make luminous for us the very heart and nature of the eternal. Do you remember Jacob's grateful cry to his brother whom he had wronged, when Esau welcomed him back magnanimously after the long estrangement? "I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God." How memorably these moving words express the experience of encountering the divine in the human! Such a text, by its own force of impact and momentum, will break through many barriers and thrust deep into heart and conscience.
Or again, you may wish to stress the fact that the most important thing about any man is his final interpretation of life. What does life mean to him, on a total view of it? What is his ultimate verdict on its significance? Is it a fortuitous succession of events, without rhyme or reason, a sorry tale of injustice and frustration? Or is it a plan of God? You might well invite your congregation to approach this question by way of one of the greatest stories in the world. You might take for your text that simple-looking but immensely deep saying of Joseph in Egypt to the men who had enslaved him: "So now it was not you that sent me hither, but God." Set out from that, and your message will have a double reinforcement. For not only is there the dramatic power of the words themselves: there is also the fact that the whole setting of the text in Genesis sheds light upon your theme. ​You will be able to show that God does not will the baffling evils of the world to-day, any more than He willed the treacherous conduct of Joseph's brethren; that, nevertheless, when sin has taken the game into its unclean hands, God is still master of the situation, using tragedy creatively and making the wrath of man to praise Him; and that the divine alchemy which thus brings good out of evil depends on our willing cooperation, just as it was by refusing the way of bitterness and recrimination, and by keeping his spirit even at the darkest hour alert and sensitive to God, that Joseph was able to turn his necessity to glorious gain and to lead captivity captive.
Or it may be your purpose on another occasion to expose the inadequacy of a merely derivative and borrowed religion in this day of crisis. There is that swift retort of Jesus to Pontius Pilate, who had been vaguely sounding our Lord about His claims to sovereignty: "Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of Me?" How that rapier-like challenge pierces the pretensions of a second-hand religion! Or you are eager to impress upon your people the Christian's paramount obligation to be an active witness among men to the truth and the power of the Gospel. Do you remember the four lepers at the gate of Samaria who were the first to discover that the besieging Syrians had fled? "We do not well," they cried, "this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace." Or you are concerned to stress the dangers of a half-hearted, sentimental religion, the need for a ​dogged, stubborn devotion which will be ready to face the austerity of the divine demand and to pay down the price of discipleship. Jeremiah, writing of the return of the exiles, has a magnificent word about that: "They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward." Or you may be wanting to strengthen and encourage those who may be passing through the difficult and testing times when faith burns low, and the note of rapture dies out of the Christian song, and dulness and dryness possess the soul. There is a gloriously reassuring word for such a mood in Paul's letter to the Romans—Dr. Moffatt has translated it: "God never goes back upon His call." Or you are impressed with the necessity of setting clear before your people's eyes the twofold character of the Christian life, the indissoluble connection between personal religion and social passion, between dwelling in the secret place of the Most High and going forth on crusade against in- justice and oppression and all manner of evils everywhere. You will find it all summed up in the noble words of the prayer of Asa, king of Judah, on the eve of a great battle long ago: "O Lord our God, we rest on Thee, and in Thy name we go against this multitude."
Such words of Scripture, used as texts, are weapons of immense penetrating power. Even if the sermon should be utterly incommensurate with its theme, the Word of the Lord on which it is based will not return unto Him void. There are texts which in themselves are like a sudden rending of the veil. One of my own ​earliest recollections is of a day when Dr. Alexander Whyte of St. George's, Edinburgh, visiting the church in which my parents were members, preached his famous sermon on Micah vii. 18. Everything in the discourse that day has long since faded from memory, but still across the years there come the tones in which the preacher repeated over and again his mighty text: "Who is a God like unto Thee?" Whatever you do, never forsake the custom of preaching week by week from the very words of Scripture. Surely the faithful preacher, with such soul-piercing weapons in his armoury, can never ultimately fail!
There are times when two weapons are better than one; and you may occasionally vary the traditional method by taking two or more texts together. This—if used sparingly—can be very effective. Thus, for a sermon on the spiritual pilgrimage of the human soul in its apprehension of the fact of Christ, you might bring together the four brief, dramatic utterances: "Behold the Man," "Behold the Lamb," "Behold your King," "Behold your God." For has not that precisely been the pilgrim's progress of many a soul in relationship to Jesus Christ—fascinated by His manliness, moved to the depths by His sacrifice, surrendering to His sovereignty, confessing His divinity? Or you may sometimes set two texts side by side by way of contrast. The wonder of the divine welcome to sinners will stand out arrestingly if you link Jephthah's curt demand to the elders of Israel, "Why are ye come unto me now when ye are in ​distress?" with the gracious invitation of our Lord, "Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out"; or the churlishness of Bethlehem, "There was no room," with the hospitality of the king's feast, "Yet there is room!" Or take the Psalmist's cry, "Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then would I fly away and be at rest," in juxtaposition with the apostolic injunction, "Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier"; and immediately you touch the very nerve of one of the most radical tensions in human experience. Sometimes, too, a single word, occurring suggestively in different contexts, will go to work within your mind, and give you the nucleus of a strong and well-knit sermon. You have been impressed, let us say, by the prevalence of two diametrically opposite attitudes in religion: on the one hand, the attitude of some professing Christians who confidently assume that Christ is of their company, whereas in point of fact they have lost Him utterly; and on the other, the attitude of those seeking souls who feel desolately that He is far beyond their reach, whereas in truth He is standing by their side. Do you remember Joseph and Mary who lost Jesus on the Jerusalem road, "supposing Him to have been in the company," and Mary Magdalene who met Him in the garden and knew Him not, "supposing Him to be the gardener"? There the word common to the two passages gives you your theme, and from it you develop your sermon on "Mistaken Suppositions"—the contrasted errors of those who think Christ present when He is absent, and of those who think ​Him absent when He is present. Or again, you may have been struck, in reading the Epistles, by the dramatic use Paul makes of two short, simple words—"But now." Again and again they break out of his argument like the sudden note of a trumpet or the beat of a drum. "By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified. But now the righteousness of God without the law is revealed." "The end of those things is death. But now being made free from sin." "Ye were without God in the world: but now ye are made nigh." "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. But now is Christ risen from the dead." By the coming of Christ, Paul is saying in these four passages, something has got a foothold in history which turns man's struggle into victory, his sin into redemption, his solitude into divine communion, his setting sun into the daybreak of an eternal morning. And all the way through, that trumpet-toned text will keep sounding forth the truth that God's new era for the sons of men is not mere vision and prophecy, for in Christ it has already appeared. It is not a pious dream, it is historic fact. It is not to-morrow, it is to-day. It is not yonder, it is here. But now!
Here let me add that your very calling as expositors of God's Word implies that often you will preach, not from isolated texts or groups of texts, but from whole passages and narratives and incidents. No sermons are more likely to meet with a response of genuine interest and gratitude than those in which the spiritual ​message of a dozen or a score of verses is faithfully and concisely set forth. A single phrase from Psalm cxxxix or Ephesians i might well provide material for a sermon: but why should you not also make the experiment of taking such a psalm or chapter entire, and grappling with it until you can discern, running right through it from start to finish, one clear line along which to lead your people's thoughts? You will find it a fascinating and rewarding study. Read Isaiah vi analytically, and you may feel an urge to preach on the wings of the seraphim, or the smoke that filled the house: nor is there any reason why you should not obey that urge. Read it as a unity, and there will emerge, clear-cut and decisive, the outlines of a totally different kind of sermon: now, with the whole chapter as your text, you will preach on the three visions which came in rapid succession to the prophet and enter still into the experience of every true servant of the Lord–the vision of God, the vision of himself, and the vision of a waiting world. The point is: do not be in bondage to the tradition of the single text and the isolated phrase. Use the microscope by all means; but do not neglect the wider view and the far horizon, I would even, greatly daring, suggest that you should try occasionally, as a useful discipline of your own mental processes and spiritual perception, to concentrate into one sermon the basic message of a whole book, such as Amos, Hosea, or Revelation. There are tens of thousands of people to-day who are quite unable, where the Bible is concerned, to see the wood for the trees. ​You will be doing no small service if, leading them to vantage-points above the lower levels, you show them the country spread out before them like a map, and the glory of the land of far-stretching distances.
Further, I would advise you in the choice of texts and subjects to aim at comprehensiveness. Your task is to surprise your hearers with "the many-coloured wisdom of God," not to bore them with the restricted aspect of the truth which happens to appeal most to yourself. It is a wearisome business for a congregation when the man in the pulpit incessantly thrusts his own preferences, insights and viewpoints upon them, as though these were the sum total of the evangel. Of course, the personal equation is bound to influence your work: and that message alone will ring true which a man can call "my Gospel." But that is no reason why you should jog monotonously down the well-beaten tracks, or drag your people week by week along the grooves of your own favourite ideas. Take stock of your pulpit work from time to time. Ask yourself: "Is there some aspect of the faith which I have been neglecting? Some doctrine which has been missing from my teaching? Have I been doing justice to the many-sided message of the Scriptures?" Use the diversity of the Word of God to widen your own spiritual range. Reject resolutely the tempting tyranny of the obvious and the congenial. And remember Paul's parting words to the elders of Ephesus: "I have not shunned to declare unto you the whole counsel of God."
V
This brings another important matter into view–the value of "courses" of sermons. Much is to be said for the tradition of intimating from time to time a connected sequence of studies on one particular theme or section of Scripture. For one thing, this method gives scope for that systematic instruction in Christian truth which forms so essential a part of any vital ministry. Moreover, it is an immense gain to the preacher himself to have his path for the next six or seven Sundays clearly mapped out in advance. Not only does it mean a saving of valuable hours which he might otherwise waste in a haphazard and fruitless search for texts; there is also the fact that, once the subject is fixed, his mind keeps working at it subconsciously, gathering materials and hammering them into shape. Spurgeon argued against courses of sermons on the ground that the Holy Spirit does not work that way: to prescribe a route in advance by announcing a list of projected themes is to lay a fetter upon one's own soul, and to limit the possibilities of divine inspiration. That is, to say the least of it, debatable–did not an apostle once describe the Holy Spirit as the "Spirit of saving discipline" (sophronismos)?—but perhaps there is enough truth in it to serve as a warning. Just as it is unwise, as a general rule, to give away your proposed divisions or heads at the outset of a sermon, so the announcement of a consecutive series may seem to involve surrendering that invaluable ​weapon of the preacher–the element of surprise. On the other hand, it will be found that most congregations will welcome an occasional course of reasonable length: they will feel with relief that there is a satisfactory definiteness in it, as contrasted with the preaching which bandies them about in a desultory fashion from Genesis to Revelation, without plan or system.
"An occasional course"–I emphasize that: for it is inexpedient to stereotype your methods, running one series of sermons after another all the year round without a break. And "of reasonable length"—that is vitally important. You may have only three or four sermons in a course. As a maximum I would suggest eight or nine. Six would be an ample number. Dr. Alexander Whyte once preached for a whole winter in St. George's, Edinburgh, on one text, Luke xi. I, "Lord, teach us to pray": but then he was a giant of the pulpit, and could dare things not permitted to lesser men. It is told of one of the early eighteenth-century ministers of the City Temple, Robert Bragge, that he announced a course of sermons on the mystical meaning of Joseph's coat of many colours, and continued it Sunday by Sunday for four months. As a contemporary described it:
Eternal Bragge, in never-ending strains,
Unfolds the wonders Joseph's coat contains;
Of every hue describes a different cause,
And from each patch a solemn mystery draws.
The extraordinary thing is that Bragge's popularity with his congregation appears to have survived even ​that severe and searching test. But that was two centuries ago, and is not for emulation to-day. Spurgeon confessed that the epistle to the Hebrews came near being ruined for him in his youth by a seemingly interminable series of discourses to which it was his fate to listen. "I wished frequently that the Hebrews had kept the epistle to themselves, for it sadly bored one poor Gentile lad. That epistle exhorts us to suffer the word of exhortation, and"—he added grimly—"we did so." The passion for comprehensiveness is doubtless a laudable virtue; but it can ruin a man's preaching unless it is held in check by common sense and by a judicious application of the art of omission.
Take, for example, the book of Jeremiah. Might it not be possible, by careful planning and wise selection, to concentrate the main message of Jeremiah into a course of six or eight addresses? The experiment is at least worth trying. It will certainly involve an immense amount of preliminary study, mental spade-work and spiritual discipline. But granted fidelity of preparation, such a course of sermons is likely to meet with an eager and deeply encouraging response. Let me—taking Jeremiah still as illustration—reinforce my plea for this kind of preaching by urging upon you three considerations. For one thing, the message of the book is so decisively significant for the present hour. Do you wish a vivid interpretation of God's will for a time of national crisis? You will find that here. Are you concerned about the part that organized religion ought to play in face of the challenge of the social and ​economic conditions which mould the lives of men? You will find that here. Are you anxious to show what faith can say about the mysteries of Providence, and what God means by allowing life sometimes to be so terribly difficult for those who take His way? You will find that here. Moreover, the man himself is such a fascinating study. Jeremiah has laid bare to us, not only the outward events of his life, but also the inner struggles of his spirit. And finally, here is a book which inevitably leads the preacher straight to the burning heart of personal religion. Thus the strength of such a course of sermons is that history and biography become alive, contemporary, challenging; and exposition merges in evangelism.
By way of variety, a series on the message of a book of Scripture might well be followed by a set of character studies. Some preachers are inclined to disdain this type of sermon and to minimize its usefulness. They regard it as merely an easy and not particularly commendable expedient involving a minimum of thought and positive teaching. This is really very foolish and unimaginative. In point of fact, few sermons can be so spiritually searching and incisive as those in which the preacher, singling out some character from the vast portrait-gallery of Scripture, shows us the actual man, striving, struggling, sinning, repenting, with the living God intersecting his experience and invading his soul. John Galsworthy, in Flowering Wilderness, makes one of his characters, Adrian Cherwell, exclaim: "It's the sudden personal emergency ​coming out of the blue, with no eyes on you, that's the acid test. Who among us knows how he'll come through it?" What wealth of material lies to your hand in the pages of the Bible, to show how different men react to the sudden personal emergency, leaping on them out of the blue, in the unguarded hour! "Souls at the Crossroads," you might call your sermon sequence: and you speak in turn of Esau, of Balaam, of Samson, of David, of Gehazi, of Daniel—of each man in that crucial hour when, as Browning puts it,
God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up beneath his feet—both tug.
It will be strange indeed if, through such a course, many in your congregation do not become aware of God dealing with their own souls in judgment and mercy. Or at another time you may plan a series with the title "Encountering Jesus." From the crowded record of the Gospels you choose out six or seven men and women in the moving and dramatic moment when their several paths crossed the path of Jesus—Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, Zacchaeus, the centurion of Capernaum, the man born blind, the Syrophoenician mother, the dying thief—and it may be that as you endeavour with the aid of imagination (which is just another name for the insight of faith) to reconstruct these scenes, the Gospel story will begin to repeat itself in your congregation; and one here and another there, forgetting all about the preacher and "seeing no man save Jesus only," will register secret ​decisions and ratify new vows, knowing that to them also it has been given—as veritably and as vividly as to those men and women long ago—to encounter the Saviour of the world.
VI
Let me add, in passing from this question of the choice of texts and subjects, two final remarks. It is possible that, in spite of vigilance and fidelity, bad weeks will occur when inspiration seems to have deserted you: no theme lays a coercive grip upon you, no text cries peremptorily "Preach on me." What are you to do then?
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!–
But waiting for that kindling moment is a risky business, with Sunday rushing on inexorably. Nor is it advisable in days when the going is difficult and the fire burns low to take the easy way out and preach an old sermon over again. Certainly there is no reason, if you have once toiled over a sermon and put your best into it, why you should not use it a second time; and the advice sometimes given, "burn the lot," is surely more reckless than heroic. Thomas Chalmers once had an unusual experience. He was growing weary of the gaping crowds that thronged his ministry; and one Sunday morning, being determined to end this displeasing vogue and to prevent the annoyance of overcrowding, he intimated that in the evening he proposed to preach, not a different sermon, but the ​same one which he had just delivered. That night the church doors were rushed! But have a care what moral you deduce from that story. You will be wise not to discard your old sermons. But you will be doubly wise never to have recourse to any of them as a means of escape from the heavy self-discipline, mental and spiritual, of unlit days and difficult weeks. "Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ."
But is there any positive and practical counsel one can give against such hours of emergency, when the mind seems barren, the supply exhausted, and the harp hangs silent on the willows?
Biting my truant pen,
Beating myself for spite,
Fool, said my muse to me,
Look in thy heart, and write.
That is the first essential. Get closer to God. Ponder anew your own immeasurable debt to Him. Has He not delivered, time and again, your eyes from tears, your feet from falling, your soul from death? That recollection will loosen the grip of the low mood from your spirit, as spring breaks up the grip of winter. Then open your Bible. Do not pursue elusive texts. Stop racking your brain for a subject. Take a whole psalm, a complete Gospel incident, or a solid section from an epistle of St. Paul. Set yourself to interpret it faithfully. I am almost inclined to believe that the Holy Spirit deliberately sends such bad weeks occasionally, in order to force the preacher to rediscover the ​virtue of plain, downright exposition. Your wisdom at such a time is to desist from weaving fancies around isolated phrases of Scripture: it is to take an entire passage, and let the Word of God speak for itself. It may be you will find that it is precisely the sermon wrought out in these difficult, ebb-tide hours for which God reserves His richest blessing.
The other remark to be added here is this. Resolve that every sermon you preach shall be in the truest sense your own. This indeed is involved in the very nature of the Gospel itself.
What we have felt and seen
With confidence we tell.
"This," wrote Elgar at the end of the original score of his great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, "this I saw and knew"; and there is little hope of preaching being effectual unless the preacher can implicitly say the same. Every sermon must have something of your own life-blood in it. It is your personal act of witness. "That which we have seen with our eyes, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life, declare we unto you." Not that you are to bestrew your discourse with fragments of autobiography! Keep the first personal pronoun severely in the background. The pulpit is no place for indulging a propensity to egotistical reminiscence. To say that the preacher's sermon should be his own does not at all mean the obtruding of self into the picture. It does emphatically mean that God has a higher ideal in view for His commissioned ​servants than that they should be mere borrowers and copyists.
It is hardly necessary to labour the point that to borrow another man's thoughts, ideas and expressions, and to present them as one's own, may be one way of reducing labour and maintaining the supply, but in God's eyes it is to be a castaway. Here is someone, let us say, who is so preoccupied throughout the week with a medley of good works, all of them doubtless legitimate and worthy in their own way, that at the week-end, finding himself sermonless and in desperate straits, he is driven to use another man's material, "reaping where he has not sown, and gathering where he has not strawed." Is it likely that such preaching should ring true? May not such a habit, if persisted in, neutralize and negative the grace of the preacher's ordination? Must it not imperil his spiritual vitality, and ultimately jeopardize his soul? The five wise virgins who refused to share their surplus oil with their five foolish sisters were not being stingy and cantankerous: they were simply giving realistic expression to the undoubted truth that in this world there can be no shining with a borrowed light. Far better the poorest and most halting discourse that is veritably a man's own than the most elaborate work of art tainted with the breath of plagiarism. But indeed it were superfluous to emphasize this further. The basic note of preaching must ever be reality. And where is honour towards God to be looked for if not in the work of those who are His heralds?
VII
We pass now from the making of the sermon to its delivery. You have found your message. In the quietness of your study you have pondered it and wrestled with it. You have fashioned it to the best of your ability. But that is not the end. There still remains the all-important final stage of the process. You have now to send that message to work as a living thing in other minds. You have to endeavour, face to face with a company of your fellow men and women, to get the Word of the Lord out of your heart into theirs.
No wise man will underrate this ultimate task. Far too many a competent and carefully constructed sermon has been nullified and ruined by a careless or incompetent delivery. To-day, more than ever before in the history of preaching, this matter is vital. Broadcasting has brought right into the homes of the nation distinguished voices speaking on all manner of subjects—literature, politics, science, religion: and people who have thus grown accustomed to well-articulated and effective speech are less likely to be indulgent to a preaching manner that is ponderous or mumbling or uncouth, or to the dull tedium of that hateful thing, the "pulpit voice." The message entrusted to the preacher is not less but far more important than any wireless talk however fascinating on a literary, scientific or sociological theme. That a message of such vast consequence should be delivered in a manner which virtually denies its urgency is witless and inexcusable.
​Now here there inevitably arises the question of the relative merits of read and spoken sermons. This is an old debate and it is not necessary to rehearse all the "pros" and "cons." Let me rather make one or two general suggestions on the main issue, and then draw attention to three specific points which have been singularly overlooked.
You will be well advised, whichever method of delivery you are proposing to adopt, to begin by writing out your sermons fully. During the first ten years of your ministry—and perhaps over a much longer period than that—there is no substitute for this essential discipline. It will safeguard your work against diffuseness, ambiguity and redundance. It will make for clarity of thought and perspicuity of style. Therefore establish it as a rule that one of your two sermons each week—some would go further and say both—shall be, not merely drafted, but wrought out in full from beginning to end.
But having your sermon thus completely written, what are you to do with it? Are you to take the manuscript into the pulpit and read it word for word? That this method has manifest advantages is not to be denied. Thus, for example, it ensures that the balanced presentation of a subject, for which the preacher has laboured in his study, shall not be lost. Moreover, it defends a helpless congregation from the worst evils of extemporaneous padding and prolixity! It defends the preacher from the nightmare experience of floundering in the morass, and fumbling in vain for the ​right word and the telling phrase. Joseph Parker once asked R. W. Dale of Birmingham why he read his sermons; to which Dale frankly replied, "If I spoke extemporaneously I should never sit down." "My command of words," he confessed, "is such that as a young man I could preach standing on my head. To be condensed is my object in writing my sermons." It is eminently desirable that a sermon should be compact, clean-cut and as far as possible free from literary aberrations and logical anacoloutha: herein lies the virtue of the read sermon. Nor ought we to be influenced by what Phillips Brooks once called "the general impression of the piety of extemporaneousness": a crude, erroneous notion, based on a naive doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Have we not all heard sermons delivered without a scrap of paper which moved us not a whit, and merely left us feeling "The Lord was not in the wind"? And have we not listened to read discourses which were memorable in the deepest sense and charged with spiritual power?
There is, however, another side to this matter. The preacher who suffers himself to be tied slavishly to his manuscript is surrendering something—a quality of directness and pointedness, of versatility and verve and liveliness—which he can ill afford to lose. There is the ever-present danger that the typed or written sermon on the pulpit-desk in front of him may act as a barrier between himself and those to whom he speaks. Christian preaching strikes notes of challenge and appeal ​which are almost bound to sound muffled and unnatural where bondage to the written word holds sway. The minister of the Gospel is essentially a herald of the most magnificent and moving tidings that ever broke upon the world; but how shall he make the world feel the living urgency of the message if he is perpetually fettered and shackled by the tradition of the read discourse? If you dispense with your manuscript, and preach freely from a single page of notes, your sermon may indeed lose something of artistry and literary expression; there may be gaps and broken sentences–occasionally even murdered grammar. "Brethren," cried Father Taylor, the sailor-preacher, finding himself entangled in a sentence from whose labyrinthine subordinate clauses there seemed to be no exit, "I have lost the nominative of this sentence, and things are generally mixed up, but I am bound for the Kingdom anyhow!" You may lose some polished idiom or nicely rounded phrase; you may perpetrate many an abrupt and violent anacolouthon. What matter if you do? Take courage: you are in good company. Are there no anacolouthistic sentences in the New Testament, beginning one way, ending another? In any case, what you stand to lose is more than compensated by the gain in personal grip, in directness and urgency and reality, in the immediate impact of mind upon mind and the living encounter of heart with heart. Do you remember Jeanie Deans, in The Heart of Midlothian, telling Reuben Butler of her decision to make the long journey to London and plead in person for ​Effie's life before the king and queen? "Writing winna do it—a letter canna look, and pray, and beg, and beseech, as the human voice can do to the human heart. A letter's like the music that the ladies have for their spinets—naething but black scores, compared to the same tune played or sung. It's word of mouth maun do it, or naething, Reuben." There is something there worth pondering by those whose task it is to plead with men, beseeching them in Christ's stead to be reconciled to God.
It would be very unwise, of course, to prescribe any general rule on this matter. Each man must find his own method for himself. You might decide, for instance, as many preachers have done, to use alternately both methods described, reading one sermon each Sunday and speaking the other. But let me pass on to three facts bearing on this whole debate, which are apt to be strangely overlooked.
First, the preacher's method must be adapted to the needs of the present age. It is no good saying, for example, that because the tradition of read sermons satisfied a former generation it is necessarily valid to-day. It is our lot to have been called to the ministry at a time when the Church is being challenged to get out into the open. All the evidences indicate that this demand will grow even more insistent in the coming years. Can you imagine a preacher facing a crowd in the open-air, the factory, the camp, and reading his address off a manuscript? The thing is absurd. And if your open-air preaching thus delivers you from ​bondage to the letter, why not carry that immense gain across into your pulpit work in church? Let no man, in this hour when the Church is being challenged to come out from behind its own walls and barriers, reject that opportunity with the disclaimer "It is not in my line." Christ has issued His marching-orders: what else matters? Make up your mind to take a full share of this vital work in the wider field and to meet men on their own ground. Not the least of the results will be a new sense of freedom in your ministry. Having once cast off subservience to your own written words, you will not readily submit to a reimposition of the yoke. Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made you free!
Second, it is worth emphasizing that freedom of delivery in the pulpit depends upon carefulness of construction in the study. It is surprising how often this point has been missed in the debate between read and spoken sermons. To the question "Ought I to risk oral delivery of my sermon?" the right answer surely is that it all depends on the sermon. Some sermons it would be almost impossible, even for the man who wrote them, to carry in the mind at all. They meander with mazy motion; they return upon their tracks; ideas overlap; single paragraphs trail on and on for pages; there is not one illustration like a beacon to light the way. For such sermons, oral delivery would involve prodigious feats of memory—and that is no true preaching. On the other hand, it should be quite possible for the preacher, without the stiltedness of ​mechanized memorizing, to get a sure grip and clear conspectus of his own sermon, provided that certain conditions have been observed in the writing of it. These conditions are clarity of logical structure; well-defined divisions and subdivisions; exclusion of irrelevances; short paragraphs, with a single clear-cut thought in each, not long unbroken stretches, where a dozen ideas jostle; balance and progress and development; with one or two strong and vivid illustrations marking out the track. The point is that freedom of delivery will tend to vary in direct proportion to accuracy of construction. If you can fashion a sermon which stands out clearly in all its parts before your own mind, the tyranny of the manuscript is broken.
Third, remember that the opening years invariably tend to fix the methods of a man's whole ministry. Any preacher, even the most tongue-tied and diffident, can achieve freedom of utterance—on two conditions: he must be willing to face the necessary self-discipline, and he must begin early enough. Those first years are big with enviable opportunity and critical decision: for it is then that ways and habits are developing which, once formed, are apt to bind irrevocably. In this matter of delivery, every preacher is at the beginning master of his fate. You may be led to adjudge that you can serve God best in your pulpit by reading your sermons. But if you feel another method beckoning you, have no misgivings. Do not precipitately decide against it. If you want to be free, you can.
VIII
As regards pace, I am disposed to propound a mild form of heresy. The orthodox attitude would be to warn you against the errors of a too rapid delivery, and to beg and beseech you to go slow: put on the brake, and keep it on! I suggest that too much Andante with never a touch of Allegro or even Presto can be quite as fatal. You will not, of course, emulate the preacher whom Spurgeon described, "tearing along like a wild horse with a hornet in its ear." Common sense will teach you to regulate speed in accordance with the acoustics of the building in which you are speaking. But just as a dragging organ accompaniment can ruin congregational praise, so a too deliberate pulpit delivery can gravely decelerate interest in the message. Preaching ought to resemble a purposeful, rhythmic march rather than a slow-paced saunter: it is degraded when it becomes a slouch or a shuffle. There are speakers who proceed with such irritating leisureliness that those listening to them can forecast, before each sentence is half-finished, exactly how it is going to end. No congregation ought to be subjected to such a horrid ordeal. If you are temperamentally inclined to dash ahead like an express train, let reasonableness moderate your impetuosity. But if the voice of orthodoxy in these matters has almost persuaded you that Largo di molto must be the invariable rule of the pulpit, you would do well to consider whether this tempo—deliberate and stately and dignified, verging sometimes ​on the ponderous—is really the best adapted for conveying to your hearers' minds a Gospel urgent and glorious and amazing beyond all other tidings in the world.
In tone, no less than in speed, variety is essential. It is strange that so often the effect of standing in a pulpit should be that a man's natural speaking voice is immediately transformed into something forced and artificial and monotonous. Savonarola declared that many a Gospel hearer had "become like unto a rook on a steeple, that, at the first stroke of the church bell, takes the alarm and hath fear, but then, when accustomed to the sound, percheth quietly on the bell, however loudly it be rung." Learn to modulate the voice, and avoid like the plague the conventional pulpit monotone; lest your people, "accustomed to the sound," cease to heed the message. Always begin quietly. Even when your theme, as it develops, takes hold of you irresistibly (as it ought to do if you are truly preaching), bring yourself back again and again deliberately to the conversational level. As Hamlet put it to the players, "In the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." Never bellow! Remember Savonarola's rook perching disdainfully on the bell, "however loudly it be rung." Let yourself go occasionally if the Spirit moves you; but clamour is not necessarily inspiration, and shouting saves no souls. A good sermon can have its total effect reduced fifty per cent ​by an over-emphatic and hectic delivery; and platitudes which might disclose new meanings if treated quietly become merely tiresome or absurd when shouted and declaimed.
This insistence on being natural applies also to gesture. There is no necessity that the preacher should aim at reproducing the immobility of a graven image; but neither is there any necessity that he should saw the air like a windmill, or behave like a schoolboy with the fidgets. You will be wise, at almost any cost of strenuous self-discipline, to eradicate and eschew all meaningless mannerisms which, so far from adding emphasis to what is being said, serve only to distract. Temperament and individuality play here so large a part that imitation of any kind is bound to be disastrous: the gesture which in one man is right and unexceptionable might be ludicrous in another. Dr. Carnegie Simpson, in his Recollections, has described how once as a youth he heard Spurgeon preaching in the old Metropolitan Tabernacle, on the subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture. At one point the preacher took up some book into his hands, and crying dramatically, "Here is a work of current science—its day will pass," let the volume drop. "Here," he went on, taking up another book, "is a fashionable novel—it soon will be dead," and it also he let fall. Then, taking the big pulpit Bible bodily off its desk, clutching it in his arms and holding it aloft, he cried, "Here is the Word of God which endureth for ever." Spurgeon could dare the startling gesture, and it would be ​magnificently impressive: but with ninety-nine men out of a hundred the risk of an abrupt descent from the sublime to the ridiculous would be prohibitive. It is a wise rule to be sparing of gesture, and to suffer no movement which is not the natural and instinctive expression of a deeply felt mood.
The fact is that this whole matter of delivery can be resolved into two precepts which are not so paradoxical as they appear: Be yourself—Forget yourself. God has given to each man his own individuality, and standardization is emphatically no part of the divine intention for your ministry. How intolerably dull it would be if every preacher had to be cut to the same pattern! You are to give free rein to your personality. "We are too formal," cried Dr. Alexander Whyte. "We have too much starch in our souls." And he went on, in his downright way: "Starch is more deadly than sin. Your soul may be saved from sin, but scarcely from starch." Henry Ward Beecher was no less outspoken: "There may be a propriety in a man's preaching that will damn half his congregation, or there may occasionally be almost an impropriety that will hurt nobody, and accompanied with the right manner will save multitudes." Do not think that personal idiosyncrasies are merely to be suppressed and levelled out. Be yourself. And do not complain if you cannot be someone else. Nothing is more preposterous or pathetic than the sedulous attempts which are sometimes made to imitate external mannerisms or ways of speech. "David played before the ​Lord," says the sacred writer, "on all manner of instruments." If God has made you a clarinet or a flute, do not complain that you are not a violin or a harp. Shall the trumpet say to the oboe, "I have no need of thee"? Or the drum to the ’cello, "I have no need of thee"? Shall the great Master Musician, who controls them all, say to the humblest of His instruments, "I have no need of thee"?
Be yourself, then; but also, forget yourself. You are to use for the delivery of the Word every faculty God has given you; and simultaneously you are to renounce yourself utterly, so that in the end the messenger shall be nothing, the message everything. You are not to cramp or stifle your individuality; but you are to offer it so completely to God upon the altar that, when the service closes, the dominating thought in the worshippers' minds will be, not of any obtrusive human proficiency or cleverness, but only this—"The Lord was in His holy temple to-day!"
We are desperately self-conscious creatures, and that miserable fact of self-love tends to thrust its way into the picture, even in our work for Christ. To achieve release and self-obliteration, one thing is essential for the preacher; as he leads the worship of his congregation, let him see to it that he is worshipping along with them. As he uplifts the supplications of his people to the throne, let him be bowing there himself in heart and mind. Then, when he stands up to preach, he will have found deliverance through worship from the tyranny of self. Not only so, but his words will now ​come forth throbbing with a fervour and reality totally unlike the pseudo-animation of a pretentious and self-conscious delivery. "When the work of the composer," wrote Jebb of the Greek poets, "failed to be vital and sincere, this, the unpardonable fault, was described by the expressive word psychros, frigid. The composition was then no longer a living thing, which spoke to the hearers and elicited a response. It was stricken with the chill of death." Jebb might have been writing there of the Christian preacher. In the moment when sincerity goes, the whole business of preaching is stricken with the chill of death; and the obtrusion of self is always destructive of sincerity. In the last resort, everything depends on the degree in which awareness of self is swallowed up in the vision of God. As he delivers his sermon, the man who has himself entered through worship into the holy place will preach with something of the glow and freedom which mark true inspiration. Among those listening to him there will be some who, as the sermon proceeds, are conscious less of the actual speaker than of a ringing and authentic "Thus saith the Lord!"—some who beyond the human tones will hear, pleading and commanding, the very voice of Jesus. And long after the sermon is finished, that voice will keep sounding on. Paul plants, Apollos waters; but the real issues are wrought out at levels where Paul, Apollos and every other human factor have vanished out of sight. It is not your personality that has to be impressed redeemingly upon other souls—thank heaven for that; it is ​not you who are to dazzle men with your grasp of the truth, or your powers as a defender of the faith; it is not you who are going to convert souls and unlock the shining gates to which only Jesus has the key. Bring everything you have and are to your ministry–your best craftsmanship, your most concentrated study, your truest technique, your uttermost of self-consecration, your toil and sweat of brain and heart–bring it all without reserve. But when you have brought it, something else remains: Stand back, and see the salvation of God.