HERALDS OF GOD
florid writing and preciosity without seeming to deny their reality. "We talk now," exclaimed Joseph Parker, "about sermons being polished, and finished, and exquisite, with many a delicate little touch artistic. The Lord send fire upon all such abortions and burn them up, till their white ashes cannot any more be found!"
This is not to ban emotion from preaching. Any such advice would be supremely foolish. No man who realizes what is at stake the depth of the human plight and the wonder of the divine remedy will lack the authentic touch of passion. The preacher, said Lacordaire, is like Mount Horeb: "before God strikes him he is but a barren rock, but as soon as the divine hand has touched him, as it were with a finger, there burst forth streams that water the desert." What I would warn you against is not the genuine note of feeling that will carry your words like winged things into many a heart: it is that self-conscious straining after effect which may be legitimate in the schools of the sophists but is totally out of place at the mercy-seat of God. "Great sermons," declared Henry Ward Beecher, "are nuisances. Show-sermons are the temptation of the devil." Life and death issues are in your mouth when you preach the Gospel of Christ; and it is simply tragic trifling to make the sermon a declamatory firework show, or a garish display of the flowers of rhetoric. Have you ever marvelled at the Bible's sublime economy of words? Take a story like the coming of Ruth and Naomi. There is no striving
40
