THE PREACHER'S THEME
man"—David Dickson: "and that man showed me all my heart. " These, surely, are the supreme functions of preaching in every age. And if these things are happening, if in a congregation one soul here and another there may be receiving, as the sermon proceeds, some vision of the majesty of God, some glimpse of the loveliness of Christ, some revelation of personal need beneath the searchlight of the Spirit, is the ministry of the Word to be minimized, or regarded as less divine, more doubtfully devotional, than other parts of the service? Is not such preaching worship?
The late Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, once propounded a thesis which, he admitted, many people would feel to be outrageous and fantastic. "This world, " he said, "can be saved from political chaos and collapse by one thing only, and that is worship." Certainly, as it stands, that dictum may look eccentric and absurd. But Dr. Temple proceeded to define what worship is, (Notice how significantly the three elements enshrined in Wodrow's story make here their reappearance.) "To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God." But are not these precisely the aims and ends of all genuine preaching? And that being so, is not the supposed antithesis between the sermon and the devotions of the sanctuary again discovered to be thoroughly misleading and untenable? Is not true preaching worship?
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