THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE
third factor is needful to vest him in the authority of a true ambassador. He must possess the word—or rather, he must be possessed by it—as a living, personal experience. Why is it that two men, enunciating the very same truths, may differ utterly in results achieved? The one declares the salvation of Christ, and little or nothing happens. The other, using almost the identical words, declares the same salvation, and chords are set vibrating in a hundred hearts. It is in the realm of personal experience that the difference lies. There were certain Jewish exorcists, the writer of the Book of Acts narrates, who tried to do the works of God and cast out evil spirits by using the formula, "I adjure you by Jesus whom Paul preacheth." As if miracles could be wrought in the name of someone else's Christ! Are we to tell men to-day of a Christ whom the apostles preached, or Luther, or the Wesleys, or our own immediate fathers in the faith? It is not surprising that the sons of Sceva in the Book of Acts, adjuring their congregation by Jesus whom Paul preached, met the blunt retort—"Jesus we know, and Paul we know, but who are ye?" You may preach Paul's Christ or Calvin's Christ, and not break a single shackle of sin or bind up one broken heart. There is not authority enough in second-hand religion to rouse the listless and set the captives free. But how different it is when, like the apostle, the twentieth-century preacher can declare "my Gospel," when he is manifestly building not on rumour and hearsay but on the proved facts of his own experience, and when those hearkening to his word are
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