THE PREACHER'S STUDY
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.
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