Heralds of God/Chapter 3
Chapter III
THE PREACHER'S STUDY
"This excuses no man's ignorance, that is not able to preach seasonably, and to break, and distribute the bread of life according to the emergent necessities of that Congregation, at that time; Nor it excuses no man's lazinesse, that will not employ his whole time upon his calling; Nor any man's vain-glory, and ostentation, who having made a Pye of Plums, without meat, offers it to sale in every Market, and having made an Oration of Flowres, and Figures, and Phrases without strength, sings it over in every Pulpit."—John Donne.
ERNEST RAYMOND, novelist and essayist, has described the most impressive sermon he ever heard. In itself, he relates, the sermon was ordinary enough: intellectually negligible, aesthetically ragged. Its construction was faulty, its delivery abominable. Yet its effect was overwhelming. It was during the war of 1914-18. A group of men had gathered in a cellar to hear an Anglo-Catholic father. They went expecting some dry-as-dust theology or perfervid moral exhortation. But what actually happened was quite different. The preacher, sitting down, and staring at the floor or ceiling in search of words—so halting was his speech—spoke of the text, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." "I think," wrote Raymond, "he spoke for an hour, and not a man of us moved, and most of us were very quiet all that night."
There you have a striking testimony to the power of preaching to mediate the Real Presence of Christ. What matter though all the rules be broken, as long as men are made piercingly aware of Jesus in the midst? It is one thing to learn the technique and mechanics of preaching: it is quite another to preach a sermon which will draw back the veil and make the barriers fall that hide the face of God. If that is not achieved the most careful craftsmanship is worthless; while on the other hand, all mannerisms can be forgiven, all violent infringing of the rules condoned, if there comes—as through the sermon which so moved Raymond and the others that night—some authentic touch of the unseen, some deep subduing sense of the eternal.
"Can I ever forget," wrote Joseph Parker, "the sermon Gilfillan delivered in my pulpit in Manchester? Nothing like it was ever seen under the sun. He took the sermon out of his trouser pocket and laid it in little heaps on the pulpit Bible, and took it up scrap by scrap, and read each at the pulpit lamp as if he were announcing a bazaar or a tea-meeting." You would scarce credit it that any message could survive the handicap of a delivery so execrable. But listen to the words in which Parker goes on to describe the effect produced. "First the shock, then the almost-laugh, then the wonder, then the prayer, then the heart-felt thanks. It was very wonderful, and often beautiful exceedingly." When preaching impels the hearers to prayer, you may be sure that, whatever its defiance of the accepted canons of the art, it is preaching indeed. The great Thomas Chalmers, as Professor Hugh Watt in a recent study has reminded us, preached with a disconcertingly provincial accent ("the bruising barbarism of his pronunciation," to use Professor Masson's phrase), with an almost total lack of dramatic gesture, tied rigidly to his manuscript, with his finger following the written lines as he read. Yet vast congregations hung breathlessly upon that preaching, and those sermons went like fire through the land. In that very striking account of a spiritual pilgrimage, A Wanderer's Way, Dr. Charles Raven has described an incident which occurred during his student days at Cambridge. It was the visit of a well-known preacher at whose methods and message some were inclined to scoff. "The sermon was as an argument puerile," writes Raven, "but the man was aflame, radiating a power of loving that filled his simple words with meaning and with an atmosphere of worship. Here was a man not only passionately convinced of his gospel, but, for whatever the words mean. God-possessed. … Here surely was the real Christianity, that had changed the course of human history: if this man were deluded, I should almost be content to share this delusion. The scoffer stayed to pray," Is it not manifest that the ultimate secret of true preaching—the preaching which begets worship and mediates a Presence and wields converting power—is something quite apart from any rules of logical structure or artistic form? "The wind bloweth where it listeth: and thou canst not tell whence and whither."
This is not to say, however, that the craftsmanship of preaching is to be belittled or despised. That would be quite a false deduction from our premises. To argue that, because the message in itself is so all-important, we can afford to ignore the mere form of its presentation, would be arbitrary and wrong-headed. On the contrary, it is precisely because the message entrusted to us is of such paramount importance that we should labour at it night and day, sparing no pains to become skilled in our craft and to make the earthen vessel as worthy as we can of the treasure it contains. St. Paul thanked God for the Corinthians, that they were " enriched in all utterance, 'and in all knowledge," for it is essential that those who know the truth of Christ should also learn how to set it forth convincingly for others. In this regard, congregations to-day are much more exacting than they were a generation ago. Probably in no small measure this is due—as a recent writer in the Spectator suggested—to the influence of Broadcasting House, "If people listen to competent speaking on all kinds of subjects during the week, they will ask for equal competence from the pulpit on Sunday." Slovenly work, careless technique, faulty construction and inarticulate delivery have had their day: they will pass muster no longer. And surely the preacher's task, undertaken at God's command for Christ's dear sake, demands the very best that unremitting toil and care and disciplined technical training can bring to it. "Neither will I offer burnt offerings unto the Lord my God of that which doth cost me nothing."
Beware, however, of any lecturer who—on the Warrack foundation or any other—should announce a course on "How to Preach: By One who Knows." The creature is an impostor! No man knows how to preach. You will have to reckon with this significant, disconcerting fact, that the greatest preachers who have ever lived have confessed themselves poor bunglers to the end, groping after an ideal which has eluded them for ever. When you have been preaching for twenty years, you will be beginning to realize how incalculably much there is to learn. There will be days when the Socratic knowledge of your ignorance will desolate and overwhelm you. Even if Providence should spare you to this work for fifty years, your thought will be, as the gloaming closes in around you, "If only I could start all over again now!" There is no vocation in all the world which has such rewards to offer of deep and satisfying joy. But it is also true that there is no vocation so perpetually humbling to a good man, no task in which failure is so inescapably the fate appointed. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?
Rejoice Thy word is unexpressed;
And inexpressible must be
On this side of Eternity;
And I with all my travail vast
Am glad that I must fail at last.
If I had found the Word complete,
No glory could I march to meet:
A pilgrim home from pilgrimage!
A soldier with no fight to wage!
But now my powers I still must spend,
And go on failing to the end,
But failing I shall leave behind
Some hints of the Eternal Mind,
And hungry pilgrims, where I went,
May find a broken Sacrament.
I
In any case, take courage! It is right that the vast difficulty of the task should humble you. It is wrong that it should paralyse you. When you sit down in your study to write a sermon, you are not without vital resources behind you. All your experience of God, all your acquaintance with life, all your knowledge of men, all your fellowship with the great minds of the centuries, will come in then to your aid.
I do not dwell here on the fundamental resource—your personal, first-hand communion with God. Of that I hope to speak in a subsequent lecture. But what of your acquaintance with the world, your knowledge of your fellows, your understanding of the problems and vexations that besiege the souls of men? To be merely bookish and academic is quite fatal. It is a damaging criticism of any preacher, that he is out of touch with the actualities of other men's lives, ignorant of the conditions with which they have to grapple, and therefore incompetent to speak to their needs or to give them counsel and guidance for their struggle. There is no reason why any man's ministry should be crippled by such aloofness and inhumanity. There is every reason why the ambassador of Christ, more than anyone else, should be alert and sensitive to men's difficulties, aspirations, conflicts, bafflements, to their social and economic strains and stresses and insecurities, to their dreams and defeats, heroisms and tragic blunders. Everything that can help you there—all first-hand acquaintance with contemporary conditions, all working knowledge of psychology, all practical experience of living in community—will bring an indispensable contribution to the resources of insight, understanding and sympathy out of which you are to preach. In this connection, let me urge upon you the immense importance of the preacher's work as pastor. Have nothing to do with the foolish suggestion that the two offices might advantageously be severed. Let no specious arguments about the necessity of conserving your energies, or of concentrating on other tasks, organization, committees, and the like, deflect you from your primary duty of knowing the people whom you are sent to serve for Jesus' sake. Above all, I would ask you to consider this paradox. Would you know men better? Then get closer to God! For indeed the only way to understand your brother truly is to see him as God sees him, to look out upon him through the eyes of the great Father of us all.
There is another resource which will come in powerfully to your aid in the preparation of your messages week by week: your fellowship with the great minds of the centuries. No minister of the Gospel has any right to cease to be a student when his College days are done. However burdened he may be in after years with the crowding cares of a large city congregation, however wearing to body, brain and spirit the toils of his twelve hours' day, he must and he can—by resolution, self-discipline, and the grace of God—remain a student to the end. The preacher who closed down his mind ten, twenty, thirty years ago is a tragic figure. Keep alert to what theology is saying. Refresh your soul with the living waters of the spiritual classics. Augustine's Confessions, Baxter's Reformed Pastor, Pascal's Thoughts, William Law's Serious Call, Wesley's Journal, von Hügel's Letters—all these and many more are your rightful heritage: and who could dwell with these and not be "strengthened with might by God's Spirit in the inner man"? Enlarge your range sometimes to include the great enemies of the faith. Be debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians. Know what men have said against our holy religion. See how even there God turns the wrath of man to His praise, and the damaging arguments of the sceptics to the greater glory of Christ. Nor will you, if you are wise, neglect literature of a more general kind. You will find that history and biography, science and literary criticism, drama, fiction, poetry—all have some gift to bring for the preparation of your message. Not that you are to direct your reading with a deliberate eye to the garnering of sermon material! That makes for homiletical professionalism. But to have companied with Shakespeare and Plutarch, Tolstoy and Dickens, Robert Bridges, Chesterton, Eddington, T. S. Eliot, is to find all your horizons stretched and widened. Such intercourse will impart new qualities of breadth, insight, dignity and precision to all your work. Therefore, in the words of the apostolic injunction, "give attendance to reading."
Need I remind you that when Paul laid that charge upon Timothy he was thinking supremely of Scripture reading? "I do not know," exclaimed Spurgeon, "how my soul would have been kept alive if it had not been for the searching of Scripture which preaching has involved." It is your immense privilege that the very nature of your calling compels you to live daily in the pages of the Bible. But do not, I beg you, debase the Word of God by regarding it as a mere hunting-ground for texts and subjects. Let there be a deeper constraint behind your Bible study than the feverish question, "Now what am I going to preach about next Sunday?" If all our people need the devotional use of the Bible for their spiritual nourishment and growth in grace, how much more do we, who have to speak to them in the Name which is above every name! Nothing can atone for slackness and indiscipline at this point. Let us give ourselves day by day to prayerful and meditative study of the Word, listening to hear what God the Lord will speak: lest, when we seek to interpret the Scriptures to others, it should have to be said of us, in the words of the Samaritan which were once applied to Robert Southey's attempt to interpret the life and character of Wesley, "Thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep!"
II
Now before proceeding to discuss the practical
questions of sermon construction, there are three pleas
I wish to make.
The first is a plea for expository preaching. This is one of the greatest needs of the hour. There are rich rewards of human gratitude waiting for the man who can make the Bible come alive. Congregations are sick of dissertations on problems, and essays on aspects of the religious situation: such sermons are indeed no true preaching at all. Men are not wanting to be told our poor views and arguments and ideals. They are emphatically wanting to be told what God has said, and is saying, in His Word. There is no durable satisfaction in anything less than that. Therefore we do wrong when we take a text and read our message into it. Let the Bible speak its own message. Incidentally, this will deliver us from the peril of monotony. The preacher who expounds his own limited stock of ideas becomes deadly wearisome at last. The preacher who expounds the Bible has endless variety at his disposal. For no two texts say exactly the same thing. Every passage has a quite distinctive meaning. It is not the Holy Spirit's way to repeat Himself. If you can write a sermon, and then attach it to any one of half a dozen texts indiscriminately, you would do well
to be suspicious of that sermon! Do not be like the preachers Spurgeon describes, who, having announced their text, "touch their hats, as it were, to that part of Scripture, and pass on to fresh woods and pastures new." Open up the riches that the particular text contains. Remember there is something there which occurs nowhere else. Bring to light its buried treasure. Why should we so often find ourselves racking our brains and cudgelling our souls, and producing in the end only some poor disquisition lamentably devoid of any qualities of vivid interest or grip or appeal? It is because we will persist in driving along the path of our own thoughts and preconceptions instead of following where the Bible leads. Give the strength of your ministry to expository preaching, and not only will you always have a hearing, not only will you keep your message fresh and varied, but, in the truest sense, you will be doing the work of an evangelist; and from many of those quiet words of grateful acknowledgment which are amongst the most precious and sacred rewards of any man's ministry, you will know that through the Scriptures God has spoken again, as He spoke to the fathers by the prophets.
The second plea is for a due observance of the Christian Year. Your own personal devotional life stands to gain much, in discipline, vividness and vitality, by active celebration of the great Christian festivals. Moreover, such observance has no small ecumenical value: it is one way of asserting, through all differences and divisions, our essential unity in
Christ. But what mainly concerns us here is its place in preaching. The great landmarks of the Christian Year—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Whitsunday, Trinity set us our course, and suggest our basic themes. They compel us to keep close to the fundamental doctrines of the faith. They summon us back from the bypaths where we might be prone to linger, to the great highway of redemption. They ensure that in our preaching we shall constantly be returning to those mighty acts of God which the Church exists to declare. In passing, I would remind you that the true meaning of Christmas can unfold itself only to those who have climbed the slopes of Advent, that the joy of Easter in all its splendour of victory can lay hold only upon those who have watched through Lent and have been with Christ in His passion, and that the power of Pentecost can be fully revealed only to those who, "with one accord in one place," have waited expectantly for the gift from heaven. Throughout these periods of the year, therefore, our preaching ought to be specifically directed, Sunday by Sunday, towards preparing our people in mind and heart for the fresh disclosure of Himself which it is God's will to send. Then indeed the great triumphant festivals of universal Christendom will become high places of the spirit: a mighty means of grace to a people prepared for the Lord.
My third plea is this. Put into your sermon-making the very best you have in you. Stint no toil to achieve clear thought, fit language, true construction, decisive in
appeal. The late Viscount Grey once confessed to Lord Bryce the difficulty he experienced in composing speeches. "You need not be disturbed," was the answer, "as long as you feel like that. The time to become alarmed is when you find that you can speak quite easily without having anything to say." If you are gifted with facility of utterance, what Coleridge once shrewdly described as "a premature and unnatural dexterity in the combination of words," beware! If it is your lot to stand on "the slippery floor of a popular pulpit"—to use a phrase of Alexander Whyte's—be doubly on your guard. There will be subtle temptations to scamp the work of preparation. You will be tempted to rationalize your other crowding duties into a justification for relaxing the inexorable discipline of your study-desk. If you are not resolute, the very constitution of the Church itself—its intricate machinery of meetings, committees, conferences, organizations—will seem to aid and abet that weaker, slacker self within which is only too glad to escape the travail of lonely wrestling with the Word of God. If the Church cannot, or will not, break through that vicious circle, you must do it for yourself. You are called to speak to men in the name of God. Dare you think lightly of such an undertaking, or of the stern discipline of heart and mind which it involves? "I earnestly beseech you all," wrote Richard Baxter well-nigh three hundred years ago to his brethren in the ministry, "in the name of God, and for the sake of your peoples' souls, that you will not slightly slubber over this work,
but do it vigorously and with all your might and make it your great and serious business."
The preparation of two sermons a week, to say nothing of other talks and addresses, is indeed a tremendous task. I would urge you, for your own peace of mind, to systematize your days. Aim at having one sermon finished by Wednesday night, the other by Friday. As far as lies in your power, guard your mornings from interruption. God, says Jeremiah, "rises up early," to send His prophets: on which John Oman comments pithily, "Naturally His prophets should follow His example." "A man in his study in his bedroom slippers, unshaved and in his dressing-gown, is in about as perilous a state for his soul as a man who takes to secret drinking." "These," says Phillips Brooks, "are the race of clerical visionaries who think vast, dim, vague thoughts, and do no work." A lifelike picture! It would probably be agreed that a sermon which cannot be prayed over before it is preached is hardly likely to set the heather on fire, or to bring to any seeking soul "the fulness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ." And can we honestly pray over a bit of scamped work, or any sermon into which we have not cared to put our best? Dr. Sloane Coffin once declared that "the recipe for compounding many a current sermon might be written: 'Take a teaspoonful of weak thought, add water, and serve.' The fact that it is frequently served hot, may enable the concoction to warm the hearers; but it cannot be called nourishing." You will remember how mercilessly William Cowper pilloried certain preachers of his day whose shoddy sermons belied the dignity of the prophetic vocation and brought it into contempt:
The things that mount the rostrum with a skip,
And then skip down again; pronounce a text;
Cry—hem! and reading what they never wrote,
Just fifteen minutes, huddle up their work,
And with a well-bred whisper close the scene!
Overdrawn? No doubt. Yet the race of "clerical visionaries" is not extinct.
Yours is a task, I repeat, which demands and deserves sheer hard work, sweat of brain and discipline of soul. You must not, for example, allow your week's sermon preparation to be at the mercy of moods. You must not wait for the inspired hour before getting under way. Spurgeon indeed urged his students, when deliberating on the right text to choose, to "wait for that elect word, even if you wait till within an hour of the service." It may have been the wise policy for a Spurgeon; but then Spurgeons are few and far between. Ordinary creatures like ourselves will be well advised to follow the less spectacular and dramatic path of plodding diligence and patience. In any case, you will often find it is as you pursue that hard and apparently thankless way that quite suddenly the fire from heaven begins to fall. Speaking of the art of writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch roundly declared that "solid daily practice is the prescription and 'waiting upon inspiration' a lure. These crests only rise on the back of constant labour." If that is true of writing in general, it is certainly true of sermon preparation in particular. "Only out of long preparation can come the truly triumphant flash." If you persist in waiting for the divine afflatus, you will waste valuable hours which might have been more profitably spent in making dogged progress with the work, "line upon line, here a little, and there a little." Anthony Trollope, in the Autobiography, described his own methods of work. "It had at this time become my custom to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that my 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went." We may feel disposed to deride such a practice as hopelessly mechanical. What we regard as our artistic temperament cries out against it. But let us not be blind to the wisdom it contains. Certainly we have little right to preach to others about conquering the power of moods if our own sermon preparation is swayed by that tyranny!
Nor must we presume upon the text which runs, "Take no thought how or what ye shall speak; for it shall be given you in that same hour." Only textual vivisection of the worst kind could twist that passage into meaning that it is a meritorious action to enter the pulpit unprepared. It is quite a false antithesis which would set the toil and premeditation of the study over against guidance by the Holy Spirit. Jesus was referring to the special grace which would be ministered to His followers when the hour of emergency leapt upon them, and they were dragged before rulers and governors. The sudden crisis. He assured them, would bring with it a sudden reinforcement." As thy days, so shall thy strength be." That is manifestly true, in the twentieth century no less than in the first. But when we as preachers count upon the aid of the Holy Spirit to give us utterance, we would do well to reflect that the promise is conditional upon the loyalty of common days. The Spirit of the Lord will be upon us in proportion as our work has been earnest and faithful and ungrudging.
There are, of course, those who would argue that the place of preaching has long been grossly exaggerated. They minimize its value. Long hours of preparation they regard as waste of energy and effort. They are particularly scornful of anything which may be called "popular preaching." This they would exclude as incompatible with the worship of God. Moreover, they say, its very popularity proves that it is riddled with insincerity. Preaching—"mere" preaching, as the derogatory phrase expresses it—has had its day: let us be finished with the cult of preaching, or at least reduce it to a quite subsidiary place. Let those hours in the study be devoted to more profitable and practical ends! But the pulpit need not fear the battery of such superior critics. It is likely to outlive them all. William Cowper, speaking of the pulpit in that same poem, The Task, from which I have already quoted, confesses:
I name it filled
With solemn awe, that bids me well beware
With what intent I touch that holy thing;
and he prophesies that it
Must stand acknowledged, while the world shall stand.
Indeed, as I pointed out in an earlier lecture, the fashion of disparaging preaching is simply due to muddled thinking. It represents a failure to understand what preaching essentially is—the heralding of the eternal Word of God—and a consequent inability to grasp its integral place in all true worship. Nor should we be misled by any strictures on "popular" preaching. To aim at a cheap popularity would indeed be a despicable disloyalty. But does it not stand written of our Lord that "the common people heard Him gladly"? John Kelman was a popular preacher: and there are scores of men to-day who would confess that it was to Kelman, under God, that they owe their souls, Studdert-Kennedy was a popular preacher: and Studdert-Kennedy did far more to stir the social conscience of the country than any of the critics who label popular preaching as dope. This disparaging of preaching is a passing phase. Do not be misled by it. Resist the suggestion that to sweat blood over your sermon preparation is a subtle form of pride and selfishness, or at the least a reprehensible misdirection of time and energy. Long after all such pontifical utterances of a one-eyed dogmatism have passed away, it will still be pleasing God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
There is no short-cut to escape the burden and the toil. Any evasion of the cost will inevitably rob a man's ministry of power. Any refusal to accept the relentless, implacable discipline will result in diminished spiritual influence. Put into your sermons your unstinting best. When Carlyle was toiling at his French Revolution, he wrote to Emerson: "That beggardly Book hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought. That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually. For the present, really, it is like a Nessus' shirt, burning you into madness; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all other mischiefs." Surely we, who have to wrestle with the Word of truth for the immortal souls of men, must ask no easier way. "What," cries Richard Baxter, "have we our time and strength for, but to lay both out for God? What is a candle made for, but to be burnt?"
iii
It may be well at this point to underline two guiding principles which the preacher must constantly keep in sight.
Remember, first, that what you are hoping to produce is a sermon—not an essay, not a lecture, not a College exegesis, but a sermon. That is to say, when you sit down to write in your study, you must visualize a gathered congregation. This will give your work those qualities of directness, liveliness, verve and immediacy which are so essential. It will prune drastically your involved, elaborate periods, and sternly repress any addiction to purple passages. It will eliminate irrelevances. It will constrain you to clarify your own ideas. It will urge you to translate abstractions into concrete terms. It will embolden you to use personal forms of address. It will banish the dull stilted tediousness of the sermon-essay. It will keep the dominant notes of urgency and reality, of appeal for a verdict, sounding unmistakably. Roman oratory of the classical age had three rules: placere, docere, movere. To please, in the sense of gripping the hearers' minds and keeping interest alert; to teach and instruct, as distinct from the purveying merely of exhortation and uplift, and the recital of pious platitudes; to move the heart, and sting the will into action is not this the Christian preacher's task? And where is the possibility of its accomplishment unless there stands vividly before his consciousness, as he prepares his sermon in his study, the vision of his waiting congregation, the thought of the men and women, with all their crowding, clamorous needs, to whom as Christ's ambassador he is to speak?
In this connection, let me draw your attention to a striking passage in Jebb's Lectures on The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry, in which the Greek poet and the Christian preacher are compared. The paragraph is well worth pondering. "In every province of intellectual activity, and in that of poetry among the rest, the Greeks of the classical age demanded a living sympathy of mind with mind. What they felt in regard to the poet can be best understood by comparing it with the feeling which not they alone, but all people, have in regard to the orator and the preacher. The true orator, the great preacher, speaks out of the fulness of genuine conviction and emotion to the minds and hearts of those who hear him; through all variations of mood and tone, he keeps in mental touch with them. The excellence of the classical Greek poet was tried by the same test. No elaboration of art could sustain the poet through his ordeal, if he failed in truth to nature. False sentiment may pass muster in the study, but it is inevitably betrayed by its own unveracity when it is spoken aloud before listeners whose minds are sane, as those of the Greeks pre-eminently were; the hollow ring is detected; it offends; and the exemption of the best Greek poetry from false sentiment is a merit secured by the very conditions under which that poetry was produced." Remember, therefore, to keep your congregation before you as you write. For no array of literary merits can possibly redeem a discourse which lacks the living sympathy of mind with mind.
The other basic principle is this. Make sure that every sermon you preach has a definite aim. To say this is indeed simply to apply in one particular and very important direction a truth which ought to govern a man's whole ministry. Why are we in this work at all? To bring men to God through Jesus Christ. That is the ultimate goal of all our striving, the purpose of our commission. It ought to be our one consuming ambition to help men and women, through the services of the sanctuary, to meet the living God. And if ever we lose sight of that commanding goal, if we grow hazy and uncertain about our aim, if we eventually reach a point where we have ceased expecting the Holy Spirit to act mightily amongst our people with convincing and converting power, the Lord have mercy on our souls! "Why should it be thought a thing incredible that God should raise the dead"—yes, even through our poor preaching? Therefore, as our whole ministry must press toward that mark, as it can have meaning and value and momentum only by keeping that goal in sight, so every sermon must have its own quite definite aim. "A sermon," said Beecher, "is not like a Chinese fire-cracker to be fired off for the noise which it makes. It is the hunter's gun, and at every discharge he should look to see his game fall." There is something wrong with a preacher who sends people away with the bemused and puzzled feeling, "Now what was all that about? What was the fellow driving at to-day?" The artist in Don Quixote, on being interrogated what precisely he was painting, replied, "That is as it may turn out." Who has not suffered under sermons evolved in the same deplorably haphazard way? The acid test is to confront yourself, before ever you put pen to paper, with the question: "What is the aim and intention of this sermon? What is the central truth it is to convey? Can I concentrate that into a single sentence?" It is true, no doubt, that when Dickens first invented Pickwick there were only the haziest outlines of an idea in the author's mind what to do with the character he had created, true that the early instalments of the story were launched upon the world in serial numbers before any course had been charted or any plot conceived. But for the preacher it is imperative to see the end from the beginning. In every sermon, he must know exactly what truth it is that he is proposing to drive home to the hearer's minds. He must see clearly the objective to which he hopes to lead them. He ought to be able to define it to himself in a dozen words. Without such definiteness of aim, preaching remains self-stultified and ineffectual, and may never touch a single life. With it, the simplest words, taking wings from the Spirit of God, may reach the hidden depths of many hearts.
IV
I am reserving to a later point in our discussion the crucial matter of the choice of texts and subjects. In the meantime let us come to grips with the more technical questions of construction. Let us assume that a particular theme has laid hold upon your mind, so that you feel constrained to preach on it. You have prayed about it, and your main objective is clear. What next? The immediate step is to set down on paper—without any regard at this stage for logical sequence—all the thoughts, suggestions, illustrations which your chosen theme brings clustering into your mind. Do not let the resultant disarray and confusion unduly daunt you! However chaotic that page, go ahead: get everything down. That done, your next undertaking is to reduce the chaos to order. Out of that jumbled mass of material you are to hammer a coherent shape. Now here I would urge you to spare no pains. Clarity, logical progression, natural transitions, closely riveted connections—these are duties you owe to your hearers. The preacher who stints toil at this point, being disinclined for the strenuous mental discipline involved, is laying upon his congregation the onus of a task which is really his, not theirs. He is transferring to them a burden he ought to have taken on himself. Is it surprising that their acceptance of it should, to put it mildly, lack enthusiasm? Never grudge the labour which clear thinking and methodical construction demand. A sermon which has some symmetry about it, built to an orderly plan and showing evidence of carefully chiselled thought, is likely to have far more thrust and grip and attack upon the hearers' minds than any amorphous collection of fine ideas. There is a story of a young minister who, concerned about the apparent failure of his preaching, consulted Dr. Joseph Parker in the vestry of the City Temple. His sermons, he complained, were encountering only apathy. Could Dr. Parker frankly tell him what was lacking? "Suppose you preach me one of your sermons here and now," said Parker; and his visitor, not without some trepidation, complied. When it was over, the Doctor told him to sit down. "Young man," he said, "you asked me to be frank, I think I can tell you what is the matter. For the last half-hour you have been trying to get something out of your head instead of something into mine!" That distinction is crucial. Wrestle with your subject in the study, that there may be clarity in the pulpit. "For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?"
Now comes the actual writing of the sermon. Immediately the question confronts you, How to begin? It was the almost invariable habit of the preachers of a bygone generation, having announced a text, to start off by expounding its Scripture setting and historical background. Nor is this method by any means to be despised to-day. For one thing, it provides a corrective of that arbitrary treatment of Scripture which, breaking all the canons of exegesis, imports meanings into texts in complete disregard of what the original writer meant to say. For another thing, the historical setting, if briefly and vividly sketched, will illuminate and make doubly relevant the message of the text itself. Thus, for example, a sermon on Zechariah's young man with the measuring-line might well begin with some account of the danger which the prophet sensed in the rebuilding of Jerusalem—the danger, namely, that the new community might be constructed precisely upon the lines of the old, a facsimile of the city that had stood there before the divine judgments in history had swept it away. Is that not a real peril still, that men should have their faces to the past rather than to the future, hankering after the social structure or the economic security or the ecclesiastical divisions which their fathers knew? Or again, if you have decided to preach on Isaiah's "Watchman, what of the night?" you might not unfittingly introduce your subject by showing that the watchman is one of the great figures of Scripture, to be descried on page after page, standing on the walls of beleaguered cities, peering through the darkness infested by foes, scanning the horizons for the coming of a deliverer, keeping vigil (as the apostle saw him) over troubled hearts like the sentinel peace of God. Given the saving grace of brevity, and some faculty of historical imagination, much is to be said for the recognized tradition of starting from the Scripture context, and working on from that to the message for to-day.
There is, however, another method which is better adapted to grip your hearers' attention and secure their interest at the very outset, especially in these days when so many of them have the notion—the quite erroneous but stubbornly prevalent notion—that the world of the Bible is remote and alien from their own. This is to start from present-day experience. Begin where your hearers are. Meet them on their own ground. Let us assume, for example, that you are going to preach a sermon on the conquest of depression, taking for your text the words in i Samuel, "David encouraged himself in the Lord his God." Instead of starting with a historical introduction based on the Biblical incident, go straight to the experience of your hearers themselves. Your first sentences will arrest their attention, if you speak of the disheartened moods which no one quite escapes, and of those difficult days when work is a weariness and resilience is low, or when life has defeated some cherished hope and dreams have died. Then ask them to observe how one brave spirit faced this very test and emerged victorious. Show them David, as that most moving page of Old Testament biography depicts him, girding himself to meet a succession of adversities that might well have made any man a nervous wreck. Not by the method of the Stoic, who lectures his own soul on the matter of morale; not by the way of the wishful thinker, who practises a comfortable self-deception; not by these did this man triumph, but by letting God in upon the situation, by an act of religious realism that smote the low mood and brought dawn breaking through the midnight of the soul Or again, suppose your subject is Handicapped Lives, and your text Paul's thorn in the flesh. If you begin with a disquisition on the apostle's disability, your hearers may accord you only that tepid interest which a doubtfully relevant theme elicits. But start off from the fact that almost every life is conscious of a handicap of some kind—whether of health, or talent, or opportunity, or personality, or social gift—and immediately their attention is engaged: For you will be touching the very nerve of their own experience. Then you will go on to show how Paul, by the grace of Christ, turned his limitations to glorious gain, and how any man or woman to-day may do the same.
A useful variant of this method of approach is to begin with some arresting incident or picture from life or literature. Take, for instance, a subject on which you are bound to speak to your people not once but many times, the immemorial question “Does God care?” You might prelude your sermon on this theme with that extraordinarily vivid picture Carlyle gives near the beginning of Sartor—the philosopher gazing out across the city at midnight from his lofty attic, musing on the mingled joys and sorrows, hopes and miseries of the half-a-million human beings huddled round him there: “But I,” he exclaims at last, “I sit above it all; I am alone with the Stars.” Is God like that—an aloof, spectator God? Or you might begin with that youthful outburst in one of Hugh Walpole’s stories. "You know that there can't be a God, Vanessa. In your heart you must know it. You are a wise woman. You read and think. Well, then, ask yourself: How can there be a God and life be as it is?" The great initial advantage of this method is that it vivifies the crucial issue with which you are proposing to deal. Right at the outset in a couple of sentences or little more—as in the vivid strokes of a lightning artist—it focuses the dramatic relevance of the theme, and thrusts it compellingly upon mind and heart.
It will not have escaped your notice, in this connection, how often our Lord Himself in His teaching found His point of departure in some incident, scene or inquiry uppermost in His hearers' minds at the moment. Instead of beginning with an exposition of the fundamental verities of religious faith. He would begin with the concrete stuff of life, the raw material of familiar experience; and thence would lead on and up to the eternal truth it was His mission to declare. Jesus got His texts, time and again, from the congregations gathered around Him. So, too, with St. Paul at Athens. "As I passed by, I found an altar 'To the Unknown God.'" That arrested attention immediately. That nailed down the issue, fastening it firmly to contemporary fact. Rightly and wisely, the apostle began just where his hearers were, hoping that as his argument marched to its climax he would be able to lead them through to an acceptance of the ultimate revelation in Christ. Let me add that the trouble about that Athenian sermon was, not that he began there, but that he stayed there too long. The blunder was and mark this well, for it is a common fault with preachers still that half his discourse that day was introduction. Indeed, it was only at the end that the trumpet-note of God's mighty act in Christ was heard. Perhaps Paul on Mars' Hill was conscious of a latent antagonism in his congregation. Perhaps his surprising adoption of alien methods rhetoric and philosophy, classical allusions and bits of poetry was a deliberate peace-offering intended to neutralize the unspoken criticisms with which the atmosphere seemed sultry. At all events, reflecting subsequently on the comparative failure of that sermon, he resolved that never again would he lengthen out his prologue so discursively, nor travel to his goal by so roundabout a road. Between Athens and Corinth, the decision was reached. He would indeed meet his hearers on their own ground, but he would take them straight from there to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Well for us if we have learnt the same lesson, and made the same vow in our own souls! If you have a propensity towards long and involved introductions, check it ruthlessly. A few vivid sentences can be so much stronger and more telling than the most elaborate historical or theological approach. "Gentlemen," said Spurgeon to his students, "don't go creeping into your subject, as some swimmers go into the water, first to the ankles, and then to the knees, and then to the waist and shoulders: plunge into it at once over head and ears!"
Before passing from this matter, let me add that perhaps the ideal sermon introduction is that which consists in a judicious combination of the two main methods outlined above. One example must suffice. Take the striking incident of Paul's encounter at Ephesus with the group of disciples who had never "so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." A sermon on this text might begin from the Biblical passage itself. You might portray Paul puzzling over the lack of vitality and the sense of strain in the religious life of those Ephesian converts, until the root of the trouble was disclosed; and then you would draw the parallel with that desupernaturalized Christianity so familar to-day, which awaits a fresh baptism of power. Or alternatively, your sermon might set out from the contemporary situation, from the manifest failure of the Christian forces to make their God-intended impact upon this generation, and from the disturbing question haunting so many hearts, "Why has my religion not made a more vital difference to me?" Then you would ask your hearers to observe the Word of God confronting this precise perplexity, diagnosing the trouble with sure insight, and dealing with it decisively. But better than either of these lines of approach to the cardinal truth of the narrative in question would be an introduction which combined them both. Here is how John Hutton does it—note how in three arresting sentences we are taken, not only to the crux of the problem at Ephesus, but to the heart of our own predicament to-day: "Wasn't it too bad of those who taught them the rudiments of the Christian faith—to leave those poor innocents in their little boat with nothing but oars! Not telling them that they might step a mast and let loose a sail, for there was always a favouring breath on the face of those waters! What a fool indeed a man would be who should decide to-day to cross the Atlantic, rowing!"
V
If I have dwelt at some length upon this question of how to begin, it is because it is so essential to gain your hearers' interest at the outset. Those first two or three minutes are vitally important. But now we pass to the main body of the sermon. Is the time-honoured usage of divisions—"heads," as they are called—to be recommended? My advice would be to avoid any slavish bondage to tradition at this point. It is certainly not necessary that all sermons, like Gaul, should be divided into three parts. There is no intrinsic sanctity in the tripartite sermon division, nor is it (as some appear to hold) a prerequisite of sound doctrine and essential to salvation. Sometimes your discourse may have six heads, sometimes none. Vary your methods deliberately. Cultivate flexibility. It is bad to cast all your sermons in one mould, so that people know infallibly in advance what shape they will be. Principal Rainy once spoke of sermons to which congregations listened "with respectful resignation, foreseeing clearly how it was all to be, and conscious that mental consuetude had superseded mental life." Refuse to allow any one form of sermon structure to dominate your preaching. In any case, a sermon ought to be a living thing of flesh and blood: do not, therefore, let the bones of the skeleton obtrude themselves unduly. It is the finished building men want to see, not the builder's scaffolding. "The well is deep and you must have something to draw with. But there is no need," says Dr. W. R. Maltby, "to make people drink out of the bucket, still less to chew the rope."
The value of heads is, of course, that they drive home to your hearers' minds the truth for whose acceptance you are pleading. They focus the issue, and so help towards obtaining a verdict. They may stick in the memory when all the rest has been forgotten. Some texts indeed supply their own divisions. Thus, if you are to preach on "The Church at Worship," from the words "They continued stedfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers"; or on "The Fight of Faith," from the apostolic injunction "Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong"; or on "The Four Dimensions of Redeeming Love," from the prayer of intercession "That ye may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height"—it will hardly be necessary to search far for your divisions, for in each case they are shouting at you from the text itself. With other texts, again, appropriate heads reveal themselves on due consideration and reflection. You are going to preach, let us say, on the words "Looking unto Jesus." What does a steady Christward look involve? It means looking outward, and not inward; upward, and not downward; forward, and not backward. There, then, are your divisions: and you proceed to show that the characteristic trend and direction of our life as Christians must be outward to the objective facts of revealed religion (though of course you will express this differently), not inward to our subjective moods and processes; upward to our divine destiny, "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ," not downward to any earthy origins; forward to the greater disclosures Christ has yet to make to us, not backward to the record of past attainment. Or suppose that one day, feeling constrained—as you often—will to lead your people to the very crux of God's dealings with them, you take the texts from Hebrews: "It was not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins"; "He hath appeared, to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself." Your theme is man's desperate dilemma and God's decisive answer. You begin by remarking that the whole history of humanity has been the record of the age-long endeavour to answer the stubborn question. How to make peace with life. How to be right with God. You proceed to point to three classic answers to the problem, three historic expedients which have been tried: the answer of the Jew, the answer of the Greek, the answer of the Roman. You show that each of us has in his constitution something of all three: something of the Jew, who hoped to deal with sin by the intricacies of a religious cult; something of the Greek, who thought to deliver his soul aesthetically and intellectually; something of the Roman, who trusted to moralism and disciplined conduct. Finally, where all three answers break down, through the night of man's despair comes God's answer, smiting the darkness like a sudden dawn. Every other experiment fails: only Christ's —the experiment of the Cross—triumphantly succeeds.
All for sin could not atone:
Thou must save, and Thou alone.
It was quite a common practice with preachers of a former generation to announce the main divisions of their subject at the very outset of a sermon. Now this is bad psychology. It gives everything away. It holds no surprises in reserve. It may, indeed, if used on rare occasions prove effective enough. But, on the whole, it is apt to be destructive of interest if people know in advance exactly where you intend to lead them. You handicap yourself if you divulge incontinently the heads you are proposing to use. But let me repeat, whether you formally announce any divisions or not, you must have them clear in your own mind. It is quite fatal to embark on a sermon without having a plainly charted course to follow. How can you hope to have any freedom or conviction in delivery if there is no connecting-thread running through from start to finish, no measured march and progression of thought? Far too many sermons wander erratically from one thing to another, going off at sudden tangents, perpetrating aimless involutions, anon returning upon their own tracks, moving in circles, with divisions overlapping, heads leading to anticlimax, transitions muddy and blurred. The manuscript of Carlyle's essay on Robert Burns went for revision before publication to Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review. When the proof sheets came, the author found—he complained—"the first part cut all into shreds—the body of a quadruped with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting out his thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the hips"; and Carlyle refused to let his work appear "in such a horrid shape." His words might stand as a description of a certain class of sermon—misshapen, disjointed, lopsided and ill-proportioned. Make sure that each point you are going to include receives due weight. Avoid giving so much space to the earlier and perhaps subordinate stages of your argument that you have to foreshorten and telescope the matters of main importance. Aim at a cumulative effect. Keep your most telling points to the last. Lord Palmerston, whose style was apt sometimes to be slipshod and untidy, was speaking one day in Parliament. "I think," he declared, "the honourable member's proposals an outrageous violation of constitutional propriety, a daring departure from traditional policy, and, in short, a great mistake." Bathos, which can play havoc with a sentence, can also damage seriously the total structure of a sermon. Never forget you are working for a verdict. You are hoping and praying to leave your people face to face with God in Christ. That goal must never fade from sight. Make the whole sermon an ascent thither. Construct it with that end in view. Fashion it with that deliberate design; and please God, it will lead men through the outer and the inner courts to the altar of incense, and the Holy Place, and the very presence of the Lord.
VI
This brings us to the crucial matter of sermon-endings. There are preachers who experience the greatest difficulty in drawing to a conclusion. "I must desist," exclaims Beecher, taking a sudden grip of himself at the close of his great discourse on "Hindrances to Religious Life," and openly and undisguisedly ramming on the brakes, "I must desist! The clock gets through before I do, every Sunday. I would that it were slower; for, though I often begin sorrowfully and heavily, the time for me to stop never arrives that I do not feel that I would fain continue till the going down of the sun." No doubt, with a Beecher in the pulpit, men may listen gladly for hours on end. But if you are wise, you will cultivate conciseness. And it is no easy art. Someone once asked Woodrow Wilson how long he took to prepare a ten-minute speech. "Two weeks," was the answer. "How long for a speech lasting an hour?" continued the questioner. "One week," declared the President. "How long for a two-hour speech?" "I am ready now!" Prolixity needs no midnight oil ; but to be concise, to achieve compression, to nail down the issue and bring the whole matter to a terse and trenchant close—hoc opus, hic labor est. But such toil and care are never wasted. You desire your sermon, under God, to make a difference to human lives. You hope that the result may be some vow secretly ratified, some bondage broken, some cross more resolutely shouldered, some song in the night more bravely sung, some area of life more thoroughly surrendered to the sovereignty of Christ. The weakness of too many sermons is that they meander along and beat about the bush; never bringing the hearer to the point of saying, "This means me"; never leaving him facing Christ and asking, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" They are like the Abana river, making a brave show for part of its course, but losing itself eventually and dying out and vanishing in the waste. See to it that your sermon shall not hirple vaguely to a lame, ineffectual close. Why should the Word of the Lord peter out in the desert sands? Clinch your message as decisively as you can, and do not hesitate to use the note of direct personal appeal.
In thus urging upon you the crucial importance of your final paragraphs and sentences, I am not suggesting the use of elaborate perorations. Far from it. The day of the florid, self-conscious climax is past. People are rightly suspicious of, and tend to grow restive under, a sermon culminating in a blaze of literary fireworks, like a sonata with a noisy coda. Diminuendo, not crescendo, ought to be the rule as you draw near the end. Much better conclude quietly and even abruptly than indulge in any declamatory pyrotechnics. If you wish to see how powerful and effective the abrupt close can be, read some of Reinhold Niebuhr's sermons. You will never weaken the force of your final appeal by keeping it restrained. In nine cases out of ten, quiet notes are better there than crashing chords. No doubt there are exceptions. One occasion in St. George's, Edinburgh, was long spoken of with bated breath by those who were present. It was a Communion Sunday, and Dr. Alexander Whyte had chosen his text from the story of Gethsemane. He took his hearers into the darkness of the Garden, and spoke of our Lord's prayers, of the anguish of the conflict and the sweat of blood; he spoke of the seamless robe with the red marks of that agony upon it; then suddenly he broke off into Mark Antony's appeal to the citizens of Rome:
If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time ever Caesar put it on;
'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent—
and the preacher, having quoted the almost unbearably moving passage, added the cry that broke from the Roman's lips when the crowd at last caught fire "Now let it work." Then back to the Garden, and the place of prayer, and the dark betrayal night, and the eternal love that agonized for sin; and it is said that when the sermon closed that day with a great shout "Now let it work!" the spiritual effect was well-nigh overwhelming.
Such occasions, however, are the exceptions which prove the rule. Have you noticed how often there comes in the greatest literature, after the surge and passion of a mighty theme, the contrasted beauty of a quiet and measured close? You have it in the Greek tragedians: if Aeschylus and Sophocles sometimes bring the dramatic tension near to breaking-point, they invariably relax it in the final scene. You have it in the closing lines of Paradise Lost, of the Idylls of the King, of the Tale of Two Cities, of Sohrab and Rustum, of The Everlasting Mercy. Inexpressibly moving is the long falling close of Matthew Arnold’s poem, in which—after the noise and dust of conflict, and the desolating grief of the father who unwittingly has slain his son—we are made to see the majestic river Oxus flowing on
Out of the mist and hum of that low land,
Into the frosty starlight. …
A foil’d circuitous wanderer:—till at last
The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide
His luminous home of waters opens, bright
And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath’d stars
Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea.
You have it superbly in the twenty-ninth Psalm, where whirlwind and tempest and thunder give way in the last verse to a still small voice: “The Lord will give strength unto His people; the Lord will bless His people with peace.” You have it at the end of St. Paul’s magnificent description to the Corinthians of death and the hereafter, of crashing worlds and tempest blasts, of judgment and the resurrection: suddenly comes the subduing hush—“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the Work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
Let these things be your pattern. Men are not saved by declamation, nor are souls carried on the wings of peroration into the Kingdom of Heaven. Cultivate the quiet close. Let your last words of appeal have in them something of the hush that falls when Christ Himself draws near. Remember that, even at the best, "we prophesy in part," and that "whether there be tongues, they shall cease." But if, when our poor stammering words have fallen silent, there comes forth then out of the silence the one eternal Word; if men are able in that silence to hear even though only dimly and far away the challenging and healing cadences of the voice of God, the work will have been done, and we shall not have preached in vain.
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