HERALDS OF GOD
I grant you that such a conception of the preacher's task may well overwhelm us with a sense of personal inadequacy and unworthiness. But no lower conception can do justice to the stupendous theme of which we are the heralds. Moreover, the very recognition of preaching as an integral part of worship will save us from many errors. It will restrain us from using the pulpit for the expression of views, preferences and prejudices which are purely personal and subjective. "The pulpit" wrote Bernard Manning, "is no more the minister's than the communion table is his." It will make us resolute to eliminate from our preaching everything that is cheap and showy and meretricious. It will give us a salutary horror of flashy rhetoric, slovenly informality and elegant frippery. It will arm us against the vulgarity of a self-conscious exhibitionism. "No man," declared James Denney, "can give at once the impressions that he himself is clever and that Jesus Christ is mighty to save." Above all, it will inspire us to make our preaching "a living sacrifice, which is our reasonable service." It will drive us to our knees. It will baptize every sermon in the spirit of importunate prayer. Then preaching will be worship indeed.
III
We have seen that the apostolic kerygma which at the first carried the Gospel like fire across the world centred in two historic events. To the supreme facts of the Cross and the Resurrection, which are really not
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