HERALDS OF GOD
Another of those secret allies on which you can count in your ministry is the human heart's need of comfort. Was it not Ian Maclaren who, near the end, declared that if he could begin his life-work over again he would strike the note of comfort far oftener than he had done? The amount of trouble in the average congregation is far greater than any unimaginative onlooker would ever guess. So many who face the world gallantly and uncomplainingly are wearing hidden sackcloth next their hearts: "men of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." "Who but my selfe," cried John Donne in a sermon in London in 1626, "can conceive the sweetnesse of that salutation when the Spirit of God sayes to me in a morning, Go forth to-day and preach, and preach consolation, preach peace, preach mercy?" And when the Spirit of God thrusts you forth on that same compassionate errand, your words—if you are careful to avoid all sentimentality, and to offer only the strong, bracing comfort of the New Testament, the authentic paraklesis—will make a highroad to many hearts.
But best of all God's secret allies in the souls to whom you preach is the eternity God Himself has planted there, the hunger for the bread of heaven. Often only an inarticulate craving, concealed deliberately sometimes behind a mask of apathy and irreligion, it is nevertheless the decisive element in the situation and the supremely hopeful factor of your ministry. No man's soul can be satisfied indefinitely with the wretched husks of a materialist philosophy. It begins
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