18. Divinity students
18
Divinity students
If the divinity students here present will listen to me let them do this. Let them borrow from their library the index volume of Dr. Thomas Goodwin’s immortal works. And next Sabbath morning and evening let them open that splendid index under “Christ.” Let them ponder those five glorious pages slowly and thoughtfully and believingly and appropriatingly; and, if they do not leap in their rooms at the glorious prospect of their soon being preachers of Christ there must be something far wrong with them. They are surely too far off their right road in life already. Let them forthwith choose some other calling. Let them go to the bar, or to medicine, or to the army, or to the civil service; but it is only common sense that they should not go to the Church of Christ. They may make passable advocates, or doctors, or soldiers, but not preachers of Christ to please him and to edify his people and to earn his reward.
And yet, no! That is not good advice, and I will take it all back. Rather than that, let them look well down into their own sinful hearts; and back, and forward, into their own sinful lives; and all around at the world of sinful men round about them. And then let them read with all their scholarship and with all their philosophy and with all their personal experience say, the prologue to John’s Gospel and his seventeenth chapter, and then the Epistle to the Colossians, and then Goodwin’s index again under “Christ.” And I am sure as I am standing in this pulpit that neither the army, nor the bar, nor anything else in this world will ever get those men. It is because so few of our able young men ever think about Christ that there is everywhere such a dearth of first-class divinity students. It is not the falling Sustentation Fund,1 nor is it the Higher Criticism, nor is it the many openings into wealth and honour at home and abroad that steals from the Church her choicest sons. No, no. It is simply this: It is simply because, like John Bunyan in his blinded youth, they are not yet sensible of the danger and the disaster of all sin and of their own sin. And then, as the result of that, it is because they never think of the Divine Redeemer from sin, or whether there is one, or no. O come, all you youths of genius and of learning and of the beginnings of grace! For here is the proper scope for you! Your proper field in all this world is the Evangelical pulpit and pastorate. Here is the one sphere in this whole world in which to lay out and to multiply your talents so that both you and they may be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ. “God,” says Goodwin, “had only one Son, and he made him a minister.”
*From Bunyan Characters, Fourth Series (Edinburgh/London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, [1908]), 34-35.
1. The Sustentation Fund provided for the financial support of the Church’s ministers.