The Preacher and the Pulpit

Dr. Gordon as a preacher— His view of what the pulpit should be— Power

in illustration— Examples

'"T^HE mutes," said a recent French critic of the pulpit,

A. "are on all the violins of God." Preaching has become too often in our city churches an art where it should be an enthusiasm. It ripples from a type-written manuscript; It ought to pour from a bursting heart. It suggests not the mountain cataracts, but the linden-lined canals of Holland. It is of Bossuet, not of Savonarola. Faultily faultless in finish and style, it recalls the sophist lecturing on ethics to the Roman ladies of the Antonines in some private amphitheater of marble; it should rather bring up a prophet in leopard-skin to whom a message from God is intrusted. Ah, yes, the mutes are indeed on the violins. The old word " repent " is heard rarely save in undertone. The horror of sin has not taken hold as it must and will. The mighty rushing wind sweeps not yet over these fine-twisted, taut strings of silver.

Whatever the character of Dr. Gordon's preaching in the earlier days, there was in him in the years of maturity little of the court preacher. He proclaimed without flinching the helplessness of man, the impotence of the unrenewed will, the destiny of sorrow and punishment to which the unconverted are drifting. And where the knife probed the ointment followed. For, while there was no abatement of stem truths, there was in his preaching, as in the gospels, no want of tenderness. As the Etruscans were wont to whip their slaves to the note of flutes, so did the preacher lay bare sin, yet with much gracious invitation and pointing away to the Lamb of God. Controversy he shunned as a canker. " Prophesying against the prophets of Israel that prophesy " would have been arduous work indeed to one so absorbed in holding up the perfect Christ before men. Self-advertisement never suggested itself to him; he was but a wire to transmit currents.

The best estimate of any preacher is apt to be his own estimate of what the pulpit should be. In the present case we have much information. The advice to ministers, the criticisms, favorable and unfavorable, on the development of the contemporary pulpit, and the suggestions and remarks and observations on the whole subject of the ministry of the Word which Dr. Gordon left behind, would, if collected, constitute almost material enough for a text-book on homiletics— a textbook which, from the point of view of apostolic preaching, would be fairly classical. In reading these over we see, as it were, the fresh types from which the message has been struck. The man himself rises before us, massive in delivery, earnest in appeal, from whose lips rivers of living water flow continually. Here is unconscious self-portraiture.

Let us look, then, at the ideal which this preacher of God's truth set before him. The notes which we quote first, on " The Homiletic Habit," are indeed suggestive to those familiar with the absorbed look, the abstracted, meditative face of his week-days. Tauler was wont to draw his cap over his eyes that the violets might not disturb his introspections; Gordon likewise lived much within the veil.

" In one of Professor Shedd's admirable chapters on ' Homiletics ' we find the phrase, ' homiletic habit,' as descriptive of that mental mood which in ministers is most conducive to easy and successful preparation for the pulpit. We like the term and commend it to our brethren as exceedingly suggestive. The method by v^^hich the vast majority of sermons are produced is anything but easy and natural. Many are the result of the most painful retchings and strainings of the brain. Many are the issue of mere spasmodic throes of the intellect. Many have only a galvanic life, the heart having really given nothing of its own emotions for their inspiration. How few are part and parcel of the preacher's daily life— a piece cut from the texture of his habitual experience!

" Now it would be a grand thing if preachers could only

live in their sermons. Milton declares that to be a poet one must make his whole life an heroic poem, and it is equally clear that to be a true preacher one must make his whole life a gospel sermon. It is a good thing to be able to find sermons in stones, but better to be able to find them in one's own heart. And he is a wise preacher who keeps his mind so filled with the seeds of Scripture, with the fruitful and springing germs of pious studies and meditations and experiences, that it readily yields the weekly harvest, and does not compel him to spend his time in gathering exotics from a foreign soil. The thoughts of other men can never be truly appropriated except they have been first planted and reproduced in our own experiences. Fervor a century old is poor leaven for a sermon of to-day. Unction fried out of the lore of some old divine is thin anointing for the discourse of the living preacher. These things must be peculiarly one's own in order to possess any real value. They must be the outcome of a genuine experience— the product and commodity of an habitual mental and spiritual discipline.

" Hence the importance of keeping the mind and heart toned up with respect both to fervor and activity in order that the preacher may be able to bring forth freshly and readily the living message.

" There is an almost universal habit among ministers of letting down and unbending after the fatigues and pressure of the Lord's day. This is well, provided it does not result in disorganization and demoralization. But if the preacher in attempting to rest disbands his Sabbath thoughts and gives furlough to his holier frames and feelings so that several days are requisite to get them back into rank and file again for producing a sermon, his rest has been really a serious loss. Let a minister be Mondayish on Monday provided he does not thereby incapacitate himself for being Sundayish on the other days of the week— those days over which the work and worship of the approaching Sunday must always project themselves, and for the labors of which the strength and tone acquired upon the preceding Sunday should be always prudently economized. The minister can ill afford to let his fires go out and his mental machinery come to a dead standstill for a day. If he does, when he returns to work he will find much of the time which ought to be wholly used in producing demanded for the mere work of starting up again. Having lost his preaching mood, he finds it exceedingly difficult to get it back again; for a mood is not like a colt turned out to pasture that can be caught and bridled at will, but a very illusory and often refractory thing. And so, having to preach of necessity, he finds himself forced up to an unwelcome and ungenial task in the preparation of his discourses, instead of finding in this process of composition a grateful vent for the outflow and overflow of his resources and a joyful exercise of ready and spontaneously acting powers.

" Preaching ought to be ' a mode of self,' to use Dr. Alexander's striking phrase— the exhibition of one's own religious life and experience. ... To be obliged to borrow a character to preach in is worse than being obliged to borrow a sermon to preach. The latter is literary plagiarism, and the former moral plagiarism, which is worse. Yet who that preaches has not been at times painfully conscious of his two personalities? Who does not feel that the perfect harmonizing of the two, the complete blending of the two into a consistent and inseparable unity, is the greatest attainment for the work of the ministry? Nothing is stronger or more inexorable than habit. Blessed is the man to whom the duties, the spirit, the aim, and the example of the ministry have become a habit and no longer a painfully acquired exception. The best commentary on the whole subject may be found in the recent saying of Canon Wilberforce concerning his father— that 'in his later years he gave up preparing sermons, and simply prepared himself.'

II

In the next few extracts polemical and sensational preaching is deprecated

" A Christian is the most powerful evidence of Christianity, and an infidel is the most potent factor of infidelity. Let the man of God do his utmost to conquer the man of no God, and skepticism will go inevitably. We have not the impertinence to call a halt in the war upon abstraction— so many hundred embattled theologians discharging their logic guns at agnosticism, positivism, atheism, and what not— but we may be pardoned for inviting a fresh assault upon agnostics and atheists, not in any martial attitude, but on our knees. If the thousand pulpits and churches in our land would concentrate their prayers, their faith, and their tender persuasions upon such skeptics as come within their range, what inroads would be made upon unbelief within a few years!

" ' Brethren,' writes James, ' if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him; let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a mtiltitude of sins.' And shall we

28o ADONIRAM JUDSON GORDON

reverse the method, and first aim at the multitude of sins, battUng with the whole brood of doubts and denials and hberalities and speculations in hope that, having slain these, we may arrive at last at the sinner who harbors them, to turn him from the error of his way and save his soul from death? No; the sinner converted, the multitude of sins will be swept away the doubter won, his doubts will vanish into air. God's warfare does not set us first to reduce the circumvallation of doubt and unbelief, but to capture at once and completely the citadel of the heart. Is it not true that most-pf the attacks on skepticism are made from a fondness for intellectual tournaments, or at least for the gatidium spolii, t^e joy of victory, which the contests may afford? Were the real purpose to win over the unbeliever, there would be often more self-denial than self-gratification in the undertaking. Let us lay doivn the cudgel and take tip the cross. The beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water; therefore leave off contention and take up prayer and pleading, that it may be as when one letteth out tears."

Ill '. ^ '

" One of the most fatal errors of the time is that ministers undertake to be feeders of men instead of fishers of men. One cannot be fed upon the gospel until he has been renewed. But what if a preacher with a crowd of unconverted hearers before him makes it his chief aim to feed them, instead of dropping the gospel hook among them, and holding it there until upon its barbed point somebody is pricked in the heart and led to cry out, ' What must I do to be saved? ' and so be caught for Christ? Feeding the fish may be very exciting business, but it is very profitless. Bait with no hook on it, bait consisting of popular hits at the faults and inconsistencies of the church, keen thrusts at the stupid bigotry of the old musty creeds, sharp innuendoes about sanctimonious deacons and hypocritical professors— what a stir and excitement and flash of exhilaration will follow when a handful is thrown out! By it how many fish will be caught? Nay; ' I will make you fishers,' not feeders, ' of men.' Catch the fish first and bring them into a regenerated life; then they will have a relish for the solid and substantial food of Scripture truth, and we shall not have to feed them on the bait of popular novelty and bits of sensationalism....

" But let us not forget that we are sent to save men, not to destroy them; to win them, not to wound them. And, therefore, what glory is it that we have won a reputation for keenness in rebuke, for brilliancy in pulpit repartee, for pungency in hitting off the faults and foibles of our brethren? It is a short road to popularity, indeed. Let it be known that a minister on next Sunday is going to give a hot, spicy discourse on the crookedness of deacons and the shallowness of Christians in general, and it will be sure to call out a large attendance. The popularity of some of our most noted preachers has been largely due to their ingenuity in this direction. But this is not our calling as Christians. 4 It is for us to set forth the beauty and excellency of Jesus Christ, and not to exhibit the follies and blemishes of human nature. '7ln either case we shall be unconsciously assimilated to the image of that on which we dwell. ' I do not allow myself to look at a bad picture,' said Sir Peter Lely, the artist, ' for if I do my brush is certain to take a hint from it.' Caricaturists of human nature likewise come at last to present very bad specimens of human nature in their own character. They learn unconsciously to personate their own pictures and to exemplify their own exaggerations. Take now and then a sorrowful look at human nature, but for one look in this direction take ten toward the perfect Christ and hold^m up steadily and faithfully, and all the while you will be growing into the same iraaee from glory to glory."

IV

Compactness, humility, unwearied reiteration of the truth, unction, the preeminent use of the Word, the avoidance of speculative preaching, the commingling of the sterner truths of the gospel with the more pleasing in due proportion, are inculcated in the extracts which follow

" That is an admirable and witty homiletic maxim, ' Do not make too many heads to your sermon, lest you may not be able to find ears for them all! ' Indeed, having the ears already at hand, how many a minister by his long sword of intolerable prolixity wantonly repeats the offense of Peter upon the servant of the high priest! Brevity is not only the soul of wit, but the soul of wisdom for the preacher....

" Self-seeking corrupts everything and turns even the Lord's work into a means of self-promotion. How often the minister quenches the Spirit by trying to shine! How often the soul-winner goes out of the pulpit because the great preacher has come in!. ,1.

"What is considered a fault in rhetoric is a virtue in testimony, viz., repetition, saying the same thing again and again till it has fairly worn a hole in men's indifference and let the light in.

" The Lord would not have told Simon to put up his sword if it had been the sword of the Spirit that he was wielding. The sword of the Spirit lays open the heart, while the sword of the flesh only cuts off the ears. Now there has been a long succession of Petrine apostles, valiant swordsmen of the faith, whose principal ministerial trophies are severed ears, and not converted hearts; who have preached with such two-edged severity as to alienate their hearers when they should have won them. The Lord has not called us to be theological gladiators, to win applause from the crowd by our skill in cutting and slashing. ...

" We are God's witnesses, not his logicians sent to argue men into the kingdom of heaven. We are not God's debaters, sent to discuss theology with men, and to convince them of the truth of Christianity. If this were so, we might well be afraid of getting worsted; for the world is full of good logicians and skilled debaters—men that are more than a match for us on that ground. We, on the contrary, as Christ's servants, are simply to bear witness year in and year out, using the Word of God, and not our own. Our success will not depend upon our acuteness or our eloquence or our skill, but upon God's Spirit, that accompanies and energizes that Word. It takes a strong muscle to throw a hand-ball so that it shall strike a hard blow; but a child can fire a rifle-ball effectively, since the propelling power is in the powder and not in the muscle. So it takes a strong man to use an argument effectively; but a babe in Christ can use a text of Scripture with prevailing force, since it is not by might nor by power, but by God's Spirit, that the text is impelled. ' The power of a word,' says Emerson, 'depends upon the power of the man that stands behind it.' But the power of God's Word depends upon the power of the Spirit that stands behind it, its inspirer and its abiding energizer....

" The sincere milk of the Word may be dispensed from the pulpit, yet given out so frigidly and unfeelingly as to make it very hard to receive. In Siberia the milkmen sometimes deliver their milk in chunks, not in quarts, it being frozen solid and thus carried about to the customers. Alas! is not this the way many pulpits deliver the milk of the Word? It is the pure article, sound, orthodox, and unadulterated, but it is frozen into logical formularies and hardened and chilled by excessive reasonings. Let us so preach, O men of God, that our sermons shall not have to be thawed before they can be digested....

\ " Use nourishments instead of stimulants in your efforts to bring up the spiritual tone of the church. By stimulants we mean frantic appeals, severe denunciations, stinging rebuke. These rouse for the single day on which they are employed, but their effect is exhausted before the week is over, and the application must be repeated the next Sunday, and so on week after week. By nourishment we mean the Scriptures unfolded, expounded, and steadily applied. ' The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.'...

" Feet shod, not with the preparation of the gospel of peace, but with conjecture, tracking an experiment, running in the way of some unexplored 'perhaps'— these can leave no path for sin-blinded and truant souls to walk in....

" Two chemical elements which are very mild and innocuous in themselves often have prodigious energy when combined. So it is with love and truth. Those who preach love alone are often the weakest and most ineffective witnesses for Christ those who preach the truth alone not infrequently demonstrate the impotence of a soulless orthodoxy. But the truth in love is vital,penetrating, and has the dynamic force which we seek....

" The highest reach of genius comes far short of the lowest degree of inspiration. To electrify a hearer is one thing; to bring a hearer prostrate at the feet of Jesus, quite another... ."

In power of illustration Dr. Gordon had few equals in the contemporary pulpit. His comparisons were always vivid, always, to use a fine French phrase, "palpitating with actuality." They had a power of instantaneous illumination, making clear at once any abstruseness in thought which it might be necessary to light up. Never were they haled in for their own sake. " Distinguished guests," he was wont to say, " we may introduce with as extended formality as we choose, but we do not introduce our servants. They fulfil their office best by coming in quietly and unheralded, performing their proper duty, and then retiring. Illustrations are the preacher's

THE PREACHER AND THE PULPIT 2S5

servants. Their elaborate presentation to the audience tends to Hft them out of their proper subordination, as though they came to be ministered unto instead of to minister."

These illustrations were not raised, as turnips or roses, by careful cultivation. They were plucked by the wayside, and had all the freshness and artlessness of wild flowers. Returning one day from a fishing excursion— the only one, we believe, since boyhood in which he ever took part, and which was, naturally enough, ill fated in its results—he ran across a lad with a long string of black bass. He announced his own poor luck and asked the reason therefor. " I guess yer didn't keep out of sight," was the appropriate answer, which was used to explain in the next Sunday's sermon why some ministers made so few converts. At another time, in passing through the woods, he noticed two trees which had rubbed the one against the other and had then grown together. Shortly afterward he was called upon to speak at the Mildmay Conference in London. At the end of his address he recalled the fact of the crossed trees and used it in the following exquisite and perfect illustration:

"And now I must close. In the part of New England where I spend my summer holidays I have seen a parable of nature which sets forth what I have said. It is an example of natural grafting. Two little saplings grew up side by side. Through the action of the wind they crossed each other. By and by the bark of each became wounded and the sap began to mingle until, in some still day, they became united together. This process went on more and more, and by and by they were firmly compacted. Then the stronger began to absorb the life of the weaker. It grew larger and larger, while the other grew smaller and smaller, withering and declining till it finally dropped away and disappeared. And now there are two trunks at the bottom and only one at the top. Death has taken away the one; life has triumphed in the other.

" There was a time when you and Jesus Christ met. The wounds of your penitent heart began to knit up with the wounds of his broken heart, and you were united to Christ. Where are you now? Are the two Uves running parallel, or has the word been accomplished in you, ' He must increase, but I must decrease'? Has that old life been growing less and less and less? More and more have you been mortifying it until at last it seems almost to have disappeared? Blessed are you if such is the case. Then can you say, ' I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now hve in the flesh I live, not of myself, but by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. Henceforth for me to live is Christ.' "

Biography furnished constant illustrations. Now it would

be the story of Ziska's skin stretched over a drumhead, leading the Utraquists to victory; now the heroic tale of some

early saint or of some Reformation martyr. We recall the

thrilling power with which the story of John Coleridge Patteson's death was used in a missionary meeting in Philadelphia. The isle on the distant horizon, unvisited and unexplored, was first described. Then came the story of the departure, the voyage over the still water, the landing, the attack upon Patteson, the flight back to the canoe, and the return with the dead missionary's body pierced with five wounds and covered with palm-leaves. The application of the incident followed. This earth, a little isle in the infinite, was pictured, and the yearning of the Lord Jesus for its blessing. He too put out through the seas of space; he too landed on an errand of grace; he too was rejected and slain; he too was laid away in grave-clothes with five bleeding wounds. The stillness was intense as the preacher passed from point to point through the whole series of touching correspondences, and as he urged the duty of Christians in the task of completing the missionary work of the Lord Jesus on earth, as the sue-

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cessors of Patteson on the lonely Melanesian isle had finished

his.

With this power of illustration went along an extraordinary scripturalness. His mind had become saturated with biblical phraseology by the long years of patient meditation on the Word. He held the Bible, so to speak, in solution; he was completely assimilated to it in word and in thought. His illustrative gifts were to him as a second language by which he could interpret his meaning at will. His skill at translation back and forth from the vernacular to the Scripture equivalent gave him the power of a third tongue. Thus he was trilingual in his exposition, using, as it might happen, his own vigorous Saxon dialect, the mellow diction of the Bible saturated with tender associations, or the picturesque idiom of illustrative anecdote.

In the pages which follow there are collected a few fine and pregnant characterizations and some quaintly apposite illustrations, together with a number of examples of beautifully discriminating exposition. Perhaps in years to come these and many which have appeared elsewhere will be referred to and quoted as the Puritan divines of former days were quoted by him.

" ' Ye became followers of us and of the Lord.' Not of us

alone, but of us and of the Lord. We are to imitate good

men, but all the time we must look beyond them to the Lord himself. If you examine a school-boy's copy-book you will find that the writing grows worse and worse as you go down the page. Why? Because in the first line he looked only at the master's copy. Ever after that he looked more or less at his own reproduction of it. Look at human models, but follow them ever back to the divine original. Christ's example stands at the head of the page; all that comes after is more or less imperfect. Let us look to it, therefore, diligently, lest, by our faulty example, we become dissenters from our own creed."

" In the order of divine providence, the Lord needs the action of our will just as much as we need the action of his will. In the old-fashioned watch there are the mainspring and the hair-spring. The hair-spring does not move the mainspring, but is moved by it; and yet the mainspring depends on the hair-spring to take off the power that was stored up in it. By tick after tick of this little spring the motion that was coiled up in the great central spring is released and communicated to the machinery. So we say our will does not move God's will; it is moved by it. At the same time God's will is dependent on the submission and choice of our will in order that he may bless us and give us the things that we need."

" It costs our government just as much to uniform a welldressed recruit as it does a ragged one. In either case the recruit must put off his citizen's dress and put on the army blue; and so it is not worth while for a volunteer to spend his labor and pains to get a new suit to enlist in. There is likewise no necessity for a sinner's waiting to get a better moral garb, a more respectable wardrobe of frames and feelings, before he may come to Christ."

" I saw a sign-painter take a dish of gold-dust and pour it over the board upon which he was working; but when he turned the board over all of it seemed to slide off. But no, not all; the lines where his brush had been drawn a few moments before with the adhesive preparation, these caught the glittering particles and held them firm. So, thought I, must the teachers of God now do. They must pour the golden sand of the gospel over the whole congregation; and if it seems to slide off and get no hold upon their hearts, they must know that many a one who has been touched with the preparing grace of the Holy Spirit will catch and hold fast the Word of life, and so the Word shall not return to God void."

" The audacity of unbelief is the secret of its attractiveness to many minds. The act of walking on a rope stretched over Niagara does not differ materially, as a physical performance, from that of walking on a brick pavement; yet the latter is so sober and common an act that it attracts no attention, while the former from its very peril and hardihood will draw hundreds to witness it. And so the feats of those who walk on the perilous edge of truth, the ventures of those who play with falsehood and hang suspended over the vortex of unbelief> with just sufficient hold on faith to keep them from falling in, are always vastly more diverting than the proceedings of those who pursue an orderly and even way of truth and orthodoxy."

" Some people seem to think that if they can pack the gospel away into a sound and orthodox creed it is perfectly safe. It is a sort of canned fruit of Christianity, hermetically sealed and correctly labeled, which will keep for years without decay. An extravagant reliance has been placed, therefore, on confessions of faith as the preservatives of a pure gospel. But the heart is greater than the creed; and if the heart is wrong it will very soon corrupt the creed and interline it with its own heresies. Hence the wise injunction of the apostle, ' Holding the mystery of the faith /;/ a pure conscience.^ ^^

" It is a sad fact that evil is far more infectious than good. Disease is contagious; health is not. If an invalid could only catch the robust healthfulness of the one who sits next him in the street-car as readily as a well man catches the cholera or the smallpox from his traveling companion, what a happy circumstance it would be! Instead of quarantines for isolating

disease we should have hospitals for propagating health. We

should vaccinate men with the contagion of sound lungs and pure blood. But alas! while it is very easy for evil communications to corrupt good manners, it is very difficult for good communications to correct bad manners. Puritan Manton says, ' Ears of corn do not catch our clothes and hang about them, but thorns and burs do.' Very true. And how the burs of avarice and the thorns of worldliness catch upon the garments of the church as she passes along Therefore it is necessary that we should pick off these burs every night when we come home from walking through this present evil world. Be sure it is not the function of the pulpit to paint these burs so that they shall look like roses, to blunt these thorns so that they shall cease to wound the conscience,"

" When you carry a manuscript to the printer for him to put into type, he says to you, ' In a few days I will send you a proof.' He makes the proof by laying a sheet of paper on his types and taking an impression of them. Now the ordinances are proofs of Christ, the facsimile of the death and resurrection; and creeds are proofs of Christ, the duplicate copy, if they are correct, of his Word and doctrine."

" Experimental religion, as it used to be called, has an immense advantage over philosophical and sacramental religion at this point. One can go into court on an experience, but who cares to hear one swear on a syllogism or a tradition? To have come into direct personal contact with Christ in regeneration enables believers to say, with John, ' that which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the Word of life.' Unanswerable confession. That which we have handled with our hands is very warm and vital; that which has been handed to us by priestly hands gets strangely cooled and devitalized in coming through the long reaches of tactual succession. We have a living Christ made ever present to us through the Holy Spirit; and we cannot afford to receive our grace through lessened and circuitous channels when such provision has been made for obtaining it immediately by the touch of a personal and appropriating faith. The Chinese worshiper, in praying to his ancestors, believes that if he makes known his petition to his dead father, and he in turn to his father till the remotest ancestor is reached, the latter will hand it over to God. This, it will be perceived, is sacerdotalism with the current reversed. Poor Chinaman! Poor sacramentarian

How faint the echo of those intercessions, how feeble the

impact of that grace, which has come through such interminable routes!

" Pascal says very beautifully, ' Jesus let only his wounds be touched after his resurrection. Hereby I perceive that we can now be united to Christ only through his sufferings.' Yes; now only through his atonement which those sufferings have purchased. It is not the life of Christ lived before the crucifixion by which we are to be saved, but the life of the risen and glorified Christ. ' Henceforth I know no man after the flesh,' says Paul: ' yea, though I have known Christ after the flesh, yet now I know him no more.' Many to-day are trying to imitate the earthly life of Christ; many others are trying to be saved by imitating the death of Christ. The world is pretty nearly divided between these two classes, those who are seeking salvation by copying Christ's life, and those who are seeking salvation by copying his death, the one looking for peace by self-morality and the other by self-mortification. One of our missionaries relates the terrible suffering of a heathen whom he found. So many years he had lived with his body immersed in water; so many years he had swung on hooks piercing through his flesh— a horrible record of studied barbarities inflicted on the body. He was simply trying to make peace with God through his wounds. Here, in this little meeting of the disciples, is the most significant answer to such blind yearnings of our poor humanity— the risen Lord standing before the world and saying, ' Peace be unto you,' and then showing the wounds in his body by which he has purchased that peace. No longer are we called to make peace with God, since the Scriptures declare that Christ has made peace by his cross. The gospel which we preach now to the world is not Make peace^ but 'Take peace.'... Choirs of angels— all the orchestra of heaven— singing, ^* Peace on earth, good will to men,' are nothing compared with this little sermon within the closed doors. 'Peace be unto you'; 'and when he had so said he showed them his hands and his side.' Here was the handwriting of redemption deeply engraved in his flesh; here was the title-deed of pardon written in his risen body. The wounds of Christ are an eternal and unanswerable reply to all accusations of conscience.

" We are aware, however, that men will not look to Christ's wounds for healing until their hearts have been wounded for sin. This, then, is the first requisite— that our hearts be melted for our sins. We say melted. David said, ' A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.' The law of God by the hammer of affliction or by the smitings of judgment may break the heart. But broken ice is just as cold as solid ice. And we have seen worldly hearts all shattered and bruised to pieces by calamity, yet remaining as frigid as an iceberg. We do not undervalue law work in preaching, but oh! it is grace work that melts. And the wounds of Christ are just as powerful to melt the heart as to heal it."

" What a solemn expression is this, ' Making the cross of Christ of none effect '! No power or might of man can sweep the stars from the sky or blot the sun from the heavens or efface the splendid landscape; but one wound in the eye can destroy the sight and make all those things as though they were not. So the atonement of Christ can never pass into eclipse or cease to be a fact; but there is such a thing as the

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eclipse of faith— unbelief filming the soul so that the cross and atonement of Christ shall become a great blank— vacant, Ufe-

less, meaningless. O eyes that are becoming dim, but not

with age; blinded, but not with tears; hard of seeing, but not with use— hear the Lord speaking from heaven, ' Anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.' It is not that God has need to do greater things for us, but that we should open our eyes and see what he has done."

" I have been struck in observing the various attempts to explain a certain phrase that Paul uses— 'In all these things we are more than conquerors.' Yet how simple it is when taken in its connection. He sums up all the things he is enduring— the sword, peril, nakedness, dying all the day long for Christ, led daily like a sheep to the slaughter; and then he saj's, 'In all these things we are more than conquerors.'

How? Plainly thus. The man who is victorious through

victory is a conqueror; but he who is victorious through defeat is more than conqueror."

" Many persons prefer not to know their whole duty lest they should be obliged to do it. We read the other day of a rich miser who was afflicted with cataracts on both his eyes. He applied to an eminent surgeon to remove them, and after examination was told that it could be done. ^* But what will it cost? ' was his anxious question. ' One hundred dollars for each eye,' was the answer. The miser thought of his money and then thought of his blindness, and said, ' I will have one eye restored; that will be enough to enable me to see to count my money, and I can save the expense of having the other operated on.' ' O Lord, open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law,' cries the true Christian. But the half-and-half Christian wants only one eye opened. He likes to have the minister preach conversion strongly, because he has been converted himself and beUeves in it; but he does not like to have him preach consecration, for that implies laying himself and all his wealth on God's altar, and he is not ready for that. In other words, he deUberately chooses a oneeyed religion— that which sees Christ as Saviour but ignores him as sanctifier. But is Christ divided? Can we halve him by om- partial faith, so that he can be our Saviour who delivers us from the penalty of otu" sins, and not be our Master who

commands our obedience? We do not think so. We can-

not be saved without Christ's cross, and we cannot be sanctified and made meet for the kingdom of heaven without our own cross. ' Except a man take up his cross daily, and follow after me, he cannot be my disciple.' To begin to be a Christian is an easy thing, but to be a Christian, in all the length and breadth of meaning involved in that word, this costs a battle— a battle with self, a battle with sin, a battle with the world, a battle with the evil one."

In a gracious article on " The Names of Scripture " he says " None will have their names stricken off because of their waywardness and wanderings. On the contrary, these will be the oftener mentioned, as the straying sheep hears its name called more frequently than the one which keeps close to the flock. Did you ever think to listen and hear Jesus, the Good Shepherd, call his sheep by their names? 'Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: but I have prayed for thee.' ' Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful' ' Saul, Saul, why persecutes! thou me?'"

" Speech is that which especially reveals the flavor or quality of the man. It may sometimes feign sanctity, to be sure, when it is wanting in the life; and it may seek to make itself

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redolent with a borrowed grace, as the tippler disguises his breath with spices and perfumes; but the illusion cannot be long maintained. 'Thy speech bewrayeth thee,' is a saying of universal application. One cannot live sinfully and talk holily, live impurely and talk cleanly, live selfishly and talk generously. ' Show me your tongue,' says the doctor, as the first demand of the patient. Here is the most favorable point for a diagnosis. And the truest diagnosis of the soul can be made in the same way by examining the tongue to see what kind of a deposit and coloring the thoughts and desires have left there. Therefore, of those who are constituted the salt of the earth we are not surprised to find the requirements made, ' Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt.'

Well shall we mark the words. We are not told to let our

speech be salt entirely, totally. To take a whole mouthful of salt will choke one and turn his stomach. We may in spiritual things disgust and repel men by a too raw and excessive and unmixed use of religious conversation. A pious but very refined and sensitive minister recently declared that the greatest provocation to anger and intemperate speech that he had ever encountered was in the conduct of a rough and boisterous Christian, who used to shout at him across the street or in the cars or wherever he chanced to meet him, ' Well, brother, how's your soul? ' It was difficult, no doubt, for him always to answer the salutation with grace; and the reason is obvious. This man's speech was not delicately seasoned with salt, and so was nauseous and intolerable when it might, if fitly seasoned, have proved refreshing. It is a great art to temper one's Christian conversation exactly to the occasion."

" The hfe of Jesus gave us the inspiration of example; the cross of Jesus kindled the inspiration of love; the resurrection of Jesus begot the inspiration of hope; but the ascension of Jesus gave the inspiration of direct power."

" ' Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,' is a significant note in the prophecy of his birth. Four times in the gospels is our Lord's advent to earth spoken of as a visit. But it was a visit which never for a moment looked toward a permanent abiding. At his birth he was laid in a borrowed manger; at his burial he was laid in a borrowed tomb because he owned no foot of earth and between the cradle and the grave was a sojourn in which the Son of man had not where to lay his head. The mountaintop whither he constantly withdrew to commune with his Father was the nearest to his home. And hence there is a strange, pathetic meaning in that saying, 'And every one went to his own house. Jesus went into the Mount of Ohves.' "

" Covering sin is allowable if only the sin is another's, not

ours. ' He that covereth his sins shall not prosper,' but

' Charity covereth a multitude of sins,' the faults and flaws and imperfections of others."

" Many have been the kinds of bread that have been devised to meet the cravings of the perverted appetites which everywhere prevail. Bread of intellect and bread of imagination; bread of art and culture, and bread of doubt and denial bread half baked in which gospel and science, faith and philosophy, have been kneaded together in an impossible mixture and poisoned bread, which is the sheerest infidelity, sent forth with the stamp of some pulpit on it. Of the two things which are distressing to look upon to-day, one knows not which is the more distressing, the great multitude which cares nothing for the bread of life, or the other multitude which feeds on the bread of death and is satisfied with it."

"The uplifted gaze without the outstretched hands tends to make one visionary; the outstretched hands without the upward look tend to make one weary."

" It is not the fleshly heart alone that has a right ventricle and a left ventricle. The spiritual heart is divided in the same way, and the great majority of Christians assign one compartment of the heart to self, and leave the other side to Christ. That is half-heartedness in service."

" Persecution, indeed, like everything else which the Lord has blessed and sanctified, has been counterfeited by his great enemy. Many a man who glories in tribulation is really glorying in his own shame, his fancied crown of martyrdom being only a fool's cap which signalizes his preeminent self-deception. The ritualist setting up in the church his half-heathen ceremonials, and complaining of the discipline that sets him aside from the ministry; the rationalist crucifying the faith of Christ with the nails of his unsanctified logic, and then, because God's true servants hold off from him, counting it persecution — what have these to do with wearing the crown of Christ's rejection? "

" Never shall I forget a scene which I witnessed in yonder cemetery. There was one solitary mourner bearing an only child to burial. I stood by his side and offered the last prayer, and then he shut the lid of the casket and locked it, and, putting the key into his pocket, turned away. Instantly I seemed to hear from the garden of God, where Jesus is, the words, 'Why weepest thou? Fear not; for I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive foreverm ore, and have the keys of death and of the grave.' That father could turn the key that shut in his child, but not the key that opened the door back to hfe; but Jesus has the key that openeth."