THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE
accents and styles, and his own experiences, all of which came home to our hearts, but it was the Spirit of the Lord which we felt pouring through him." That penetrating analysis goes right to the roots of the secret of true preaching. "I—yet not I, but Christ!" Not mine the witness, not mine the cry and beseeching, not over my poor lips but out from the depths of the eternal breaks the word that is to convict and save. I plead with men, yet not I: Christ pleadeth in me. In Christ, God goes forth in action through the Spirit. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear "
There is a second, subsidiary source of the preacher's authority. This is the testimony of the Christian centuries behind him and of the universal Church around him. Not as an isolated, lonely figure, intruding oddly upon the contemporary scene, does he stand in his pulpit to-day. What matter though his sphere of labour be thankless and obscure, and his own gifts and talents meagre and unimpressive? Behind him stand Spurgeon and Liddon and Newman and Chalmers and Baxter and Jeremy Taylor and Latimer and Luther and Francis and Augustine and Chrysostom and Paul. Those who belittle the vocation of the preacher prove the poverty of their own historic imagination: for behind every pulpit from which the Word is faithfully proclaimed to-day there stretches the august pageant of the gathering ages. It is an immensely thrilling experience to know, when you tell men of Christ the Lord, that your poor words are backed and reinforced by the witness of two thousand years. Indeed, the very
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