HERALDS OF GOD
without which all altars are cold and all worship dead.
Need I add that the first essential is that your own life should be possessed utterly by the truth and the glory of the Resurrection Gospel? Perhaps the vitalizing of many a ministry waits upon some such experience as that which came to R. W. Dale. The story is familiar how one day when he was engaged upon writing an Easter sermon for his people the reality of the all-but-incredible fact broke in upon him as it had never done before. "Christ is alive" he found himself crying, "alive! Living as really as I myself am! It came upon me as a burst .of sudden glory. Christ is living! My people shall know it." It may not come to us—the great heart-piercing conviction—in any such dramatic way: but if not, then come in some more secret way it must, or we have no awakening Gospel to preach. Pray God that the truth of the Resurrection may smite you with its glory, and go through your mind and spirit with its consuming flame! Only so will you be able to lead others out of the torpor of vague half-belief to the vitality of passionate conviction. John Keats said of his poem Lamia that it had "that sort of fire in it that must take hold of people some way"; and of Christian preaching the same claim should be true. Too often in our churches we are still on the wrong side of Easter. We are like the groping, fumbling disciples between Good Friday and the Resurrection, How our congregations would worship, with what joy and eagerness and abandon the
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