Part 7
the market as the best books of Experimental Divinity. No wonder,
then, that we make such slow and short way in the skilfulness,
success, and acceptance of our preaching and our pastorate.
But, at the same time, my brethren, all your ministers' experience
of personal religion will be lost upon you unless you are yourselves
attending the same school. The salvation of the soul, you must
understand, is not offered to ministers only. Ministers are not the only
men who are, to begin with, dead in trespasses and sins. The Son of
God did not die for ministers only. The Holy Ghost is not offered to
ministers only. A clean, humble, holy heart is not to be the pursuit of
ministers only. It is not to His ministers only that our Lord says, Take
up My yoke and learn of Me. The daily cross is not the opportunity of
ministers only. It is not to ministers only that tribulation worketh
patience, and patience experience, and experience hope. It was to all
who had obtained like precious faith with their ministers that Peter
issued this exhortation that they were to give all diligence to add to
their faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge
temperance, and to temperance patience, - and so on. Now, my
brethren, unless all that is on foot in yourselves, as well as in your
ministers, then their progress in Christian experience will only every
new Sabbath-day separate you and your ministers further and further
away from one another. When a minister is really making progress
himself in the life of religion that progress must come out, and ought
to come out, both in his preaching and in his prayers. And, then, two
results of all that will immediately begin to manifest themselves
among his people. Some of his people will visibly, and still more will
invisibly, make corresponding progress with their minister; while
some others, alas! will fall off in interest, in understanding, and in
sympathy till at last they drop off from his ministry altogether. That is
an old law in the Church of God: 'like people like priest,' and 'like
priest like people.' And while there are various influences at work
retarding and perplexing the immediate operation of that law, at the
same time, he who has eyes to see such things in a congregation and in
a community will easily see Hosea's great law of congregational
selection in operation every day. Like people gradually gravitate to like
preachers. You will see, if you have the eyes, congregations gradually
dissolving and gradually being consolidated again under that great
law. You will see friendships and families even breaking up and flying
into pieces; and, again, new families and new friendships being built
up on that very same law. If you were to study the session books of
our city congregations in the light of that law, you would get
instruction. If you just studied who lifted their lines, and why; and,
again, what other people came and left their lines, and why, you would
get instruction. The shepherds in Israel did not need to hunt up and
herd their flocks like the shepherds in Scotland. A shepherd on the
mountains of Israel had nothing more to do than himself pass up into
the pasture lands and then begin to sing a psalm or offer a prayer,
when, in an instant, his proper sheep were all round about him. The
sheep knew their own shepherd's voice, and they fled from the voice
of a stranger. And so it is with a true preacher, - a preacher of
experience, that is. His own people know no voice like his voice. He
does not need to bribe and flatter and run after his people. He may
have, he usually has, but few people as people go in our day, and the
better the preacher sometimes the smaller the flock. It was so in our
Master's case. The multitude followed after the loaves but they fled
from the feeding doctrines, till He first tasted that dejection and that
sense of defeat which so many of His best servants are fed on in this
world. Still, as our Lord did not tune His pulpit to the taste of the
loungers of Galilee, no more will a minister worth the name do
anything else but press deeper and deeper into the depths of truth
and life, till, as was the case with his Master, his followers, though few,
will be all the more worth having. The Delectable Mountains are wide
and roomy. They roll far away both before and behind. Immanuel's
Land is a large place, and there are many other shepherds among
those hills and valleys besides Knowledge and Experience and
Watchful and Sincere. And each several shepherd has, on the whole,
his own sheep. Knowledge has his; Experience has his; Watchful has
his; and Sincere has his; and all the other here unnamed shepherds
have all theirs also. For, always, like shepherd like sheep. Yes. Hosea
must have been something in Israel somewhat analogous to a session-
clerk among ourselves. 'Like priest like people' is certainly a digest of
some such experience. Let some inquisitive beginner in Hebrew this
winter search out the prophet upon that matter, consulting Mr.
Hutcheson and Dr. Pusey, and he will let me hear the result.
Now, my brethren, in closing, we must all keep it clearly before
our minds, and that too every day we live, that God orders and
overrules this whole world, and, indeed, keeps it going very much just
that He may by means of it make unceasing experiment upon His
people. Experiment, you know, results in experience. There is no other
way by which any man can attain to a religious experience but by
undergoing temptation, trial, tribulation: - experiment. And it gives a
divine dignity to all things, great and small, good and bad, when we
see them all taken up into God's hand, in order that by means of them
He may make for Himself an experienced people. Human life on this
earth, when viewed under this aspect, is one vast workshop. And all
the shafts and wheels and pulleys; all the crushing hammers, and all
the whirling knives; all the furnaces and smelting-pots; all the graving
tools and smoothing irons, are all so many divinely-designed and
divinely-worked instruments all directed in upon this one result, - our
being deeply experienced in the ways of God till we are for ever
fashioned into His nature and likeness. Our faith in the unseen world
and in our unseen God and Saviour is at one time put to the
experiment. At another time it is our love to Him; the reality of it, and
the strength of it. At another time it is our submission and our
resignation to His will. At another time it is our humility, or our
meekness, or our capacity for self-denial, or our will and ability to
forgive an injury, or our perseverance in still unanswered prayer; and
so on the ever-shifting but never-ceasing experiment goes. I do
beseech you, my brethren, take that true view of life home with you
again this night. This true view of life, namely, that experience in the
divine life can only come to you through your being much
experimented upon. Meet all your trials and tribulations and
temptations, then, under this assurance, that all things will work
together for good to you also if you are only rightly exercised by
means of them. Nothing else but this growing experience and this
settling assurance will be able to support you under the sudden ills of
life; but this will do it. This, when you begin by experience to see that
all this life, and all the good and all the ill of this life, are all under this splendid divine law, - that your tribulations also are indeed working
within you a patience, and your patience an experience, and your
experience a hope that maketh not ashamed.
WATCHFUL
'Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel.' -
The word of the Lord to Ezekiel.
'They watch for your souls.' - The Apostle to the Hebrews.
There were four shepherds who had the care of Immanuel's
sheep on the Delectable Mountains, and their names were Knowledge,
Experience, Watchful, and Sincere. Now, in that very beautiful episode
of his great allegory, John Bunyan is doing his very utmost to impress
upon all his ministerial readers how much there is that goes to the
making of a good minister, and how much every good minister has to
do. Each several minister must do all that in him lies, from the day of
his ordination to the day of his death, to be all to his people that those
four shepherds were to Immanuel's sheep. He is to labour, in season
and out of season, to be a minister of the ripest possible knowledge,
the deepest and widest possible experience, the most sleepless
watchfulness, and the most absolute and scrupulous sincerity. Now,
enough has perhaps been said already about a minister's knowledge
and his experience; enough, certainly, and more than enough for some
of us to hope half to carry out; and, therefore, I shall at once go on to
take up Watchful, and to supply, so far as I am able, the plainest
possible interpretation of this part of Bunyan's parable.
Every true minister, then, watches, in the words of the apostle, for
the souls of his people. An ordinary minister's everyday work
embraces many duties and offers many opportunities, but through all
his duties and through all his opportunities there runs this high and
distinctive duty of watching for the souls of his people. A minister may
be a great scholar, he may have taken all sacred learning for his
province, he may be a profound and a scientific theologian, he may be
an able church leader, he may be a universally consulted authority on
ecclesiastical law, he may be a skilful and successful debater in church
courts, he may even be a great pulpit orator, holding thousands
entranced by his impassioned eloquence; but a true successor of the
prophets of the Old Testament and of the apostles of the New
Testament he is not, unless he watches for the souls of men. All these
endowments, and all these occupations, right and necessary as, in
their own places, they all are, - great talents, great learning, great
publicity, great popularity, - all tend, unless they are taken great care
of, to lead their possessors away from all time for, and from all sympathy with, the watchfulness of the New Testament minister.
Watching over a flock brings to you none of the exhilaration of
authority and influence, none of the intoxication of publicity and
applause. Your experiences are the quite opposite of all these things
when you are watching over your flock. Your work among your flock is
all done in distant and lonely places, on hillsides, among woods and
thickets, and in cloudy and dark days. You spend your strength among
sick and dying and wandering sheep, among wolves and weasels, and
what not, of that verminous kind. At the same time, all good pastors
are not so obscure and forgotten as all that. Some exceptionally able
and exceptionally devoted and self-forgetful men manage to combine
both extremes of a minister's duties and opportunities in themselves.
Our own Sir Henry Moncreiff was a pattern pastor. There was no
better pastor in Edinburgh in his day than dear Sir Henry was; and
yet, at the same time, everybody knows what an incomparable
ecclesiastical casuist Sir Henry was. Mr. Moody, again, is a great
preacher, preaching to tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but, at
the same time, Mr. Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive
pastors that ever took individual souls in hand and kept them over
many years in mind. But these are completely exceptional men, and
what I want to say to commonplace and limited and everyday men like
myself is this, that watching for the souls of our people, one by one,
day in and day out, - that, above everything else, that, and nothing
else, - makes any man a pastor of the apostolic type. An able man may
know all about the history, the habitat, the various species, the breeds,
the diseases, and the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing at all of a true
shepherd. And so may a minister.
Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far the
best way of watching for souls. I well remember when I first began my
ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed with what
one of the ablest and best of our then ministers was reported to have
testified on his deathbed. Calling back to his bedside a young minister
who had come to see him, the dying man said: 'Prepare for the pulpit;
above everything else you do, prepare for the pulpit. Let me again
repeat it, should it at any time stand with you between visiting a
deathbed and preparing for the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.' I was
immensely impressed with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me, but I have lived, - I do not say to put my preparation for the
pulpit, such as it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week's
thoughts, but - to put my visiting in the very front rank and beside my
pulpit. 'We never were accustomed to much visiting,' said my elders to
me in their solicitude for their young minister when he was first left
alone with this whole charge; 'only appear in your own pulpit twice
on Sabbath: keep as much at home as possible: we were never used to
much visiting, and we do not look for it.' Well, that was most kindly
intended; but it was much more kind than wise. For I have lived to
learn that no congregation will continue to prosper, or, if other more
consolidated and less exacting congregations, at any rate not this
congregation, without constant pastoral attention. And remember, I
do not complain of that. Far, far from that. For I am as sure as I am of
anything connected with a minister's life, that a minister's own soul
will prosper largely in the measure that the souls of his people
prosper through his pastoral work.
No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle's
itself, can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation and
personal intercourse. 'I taught you from house to house,' says Paul
himself, when he was resigning the charge of the church of Ephesus
into the hands of the elders of Ephesus. What would we ministers not
give for a descriptive report of an afternoon's house-to-house
visitation by the Apostle Paul! Now in a workshop, now at a sickbed,
now with a Greek, now with a Jew, and, in every case, not discussing
politics and cursing the weather, not living his holidays over again and
hearing of all the approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in
his own incomparably winning and commanding way repentance
toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ. We city ministers
call out and complain that we have no time to visit our people in their
own houses; but that is all subterfuge. If the whole truth were told
about the busiest of us, it is not so much want of time as want of
intention; it is want of set and indomitable purpose to do it; it is want
of method and of regularity such as all business men must have; and it
is want, above all, of laying out every hour of every day under the
Great Taskmaster's eye. Many country ministers again, - we, miserable
men that we are, are never happy or well placed, - complain
continually that their people are so few, and so scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive, that it is not
worth their toil to go up and down in remote places seeking after
them. It takes a whole day among bad roads and wet bogs to visit a
shepherd's wife and children, and two or three bothies and pauper's
hovels on the way home. 'On the morrow,' so runs many an entry in
Thomas Boston's Memoirs, 'I visited the sick, and spent the afternoon
in visiting others, and found gross ignorance prevailing.
Nothing but stupidity prevailed; till I saw that I had enough to do
among my handful. I had another diet of catechising on Wednesday
afternoon, and the discovery I made of the ignorance of God and of
themselves made me the more satisfied with the smallness of my
charge . . . Twice a year I catechised the parish, and once a year I
visited their families. My method of visitation was this. I made a
particular application of my doctrine in the pulpit to the family,
exhorted them all to lay all these things to heart, exhorted them also
to secret prayer, supposing they kept family worship, urged their
relative duties upon them,' etc. etc. And then at his leaving Ettrick, he
writes: 'Thus I parted with a people whose hearts were knit to me and
mine to them. The last three or four years had been much blessed, and
had been made very comfortable to me, not in respect of my own
handful only, but others of the countryside also.' Jonathan Edwards
called Thomas Boston 'that truly great divine.'
I am not such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I
always call Boston to myself that truly great pastor. But my lazy and
deceitful heart says to me: No praise to Boston, for he lived and did his
work in the quiet Forest of Ettrick. True, so he did. Well, then, look at
the populous and busy town of Kidderminster. And let me keep
continually before my abashed conscience that hard-working corpse
Richard Baxter. Absolutely on the same page on which that dying man
enters diseases and medicines enough to fill a doctor's diary after a
whole day in an incurable hospital, that noble soul goes on to say: 'I
preached before the wars twice each Lord's Day, but after the wars but
once, and once every Thursday, besides occasional sermons. Every
Thursday evening my neighbours that were most desirous, and had
opportunity, met at my house. Two days every week my assistant and I
myself took fourteen families between us for private catechising and
conference; he going through the parish, and the town coming to me. I first heard them recite the words of the Catechism, and then examined
them about the sense, and lastly urged them, with all possible
engaging reason and vehemency, to answerable affection and practice.
If any of them were stalled through ignorance or bashfulness, I
forbore to press them, but made them hearers, and turned all into
instruction and exhortation. I spent about an hour with a family, and
admitted no others to be present, lest bashfulness should make it
burdensome, or any should talk of the weakness of others.' And then
he tells how his people's necessity made him practise physic among
them, till he would have twenty at his door at once. 'All these my
employments were but my recreations, and, as it were, the work of my
spare hours. For my writings were my chiefest daily labour. And
blessed be the God of mercies that brought me from the grave and
gave me, after wars and sickness, fourteen years' liberty in such sweet
employment!' Let all ministers who would sit at home over a pipe and
a newspaper with a quiet conscience keep Boston's Memoirs and
Baxter's Reliquiae at arm's-length.
Our young communicants' classes, and still more, those private
interviews that precede and finish up our young communicants'
classes, are by far our best opportunities as pastors. I remember Dr.
Moody Stuart telling me long ago that he had found his young
communicants' classes to be the most fruitful opportunities of all his
ministry; as, also, next to them, times of baptism in families. And every
minister who tries to be a minister at all after Dr. Moody Stuart's
pattern, will tell you something of the same thing. They get at the
opening history of their young people's hearts before their first
communion. They make shorthand entries and secret memoranda at
such a season like this: 'A. a rebuke to me. He had for long been
astonished at me that I did not speak to him about his soul. B. traced
his conversion to the singing of 'The sands of time are sinking' in this
church last summer. C. was spoken to by a room-mate. D. was to be
married, and she died. Of E. I have great hope. F., were she anywhere
but at home, I would have great hopes of her,' - and so on. But, then,
when a minister takes boldness to turn over the pages of his young
communicants' roll for half a lifetime - ah me, ah me! What was I doing
to let that so promising communicant go so far astray, and I never to
go after him? And that other. And that other. And that other. Till we can read no more. O God of mercy, when Thou inquirest after blood,
let me be hidden in the cleft of that Rock so deeply cleft for unwatchful
ministers!
And then, as Dr. Joseph Parker says, who says everything so
plainly and so powerfully: 'There is pastoral preaching as well as
pastoral visitation. There is pastoral preaching; rich revelation of
divine truth; high, elevating treatment of the Christian mysteries; and
he is the pastor to me who does not come to my house to drink and
smoke and gossip and show his littleness, but who, out of a rich
experience, meets me with God's word at every turn of my life, and
speaks the something to me that I just at that moment want.' Let us
not have less pastoral visitation in the time to come, but let us have
more and more of such pastoral preaching.
But, my brethren, it is time for you, as John said to the elect lady
and her children, to look to yourselves. The salvation of your soul is
precious, and its salvation is such a task, such a battle, such a danger,
and such a risk, that it will take all that your most watchful minister
can do, and all that you can do yourself, and all that God can do for
you, and yet your soul will scarcely be saved after all. You do not know
what salvation is nor what it costs. You will not be saved in your sleep.
You will not waken up at the last day and find yourself saved by the
grace of God and you not know it. You will know it to your bitter cost
before your soul is saved from sin and death. You and your minister
too. And therefore it is that He Who is to judge your soul at last says to
you, as much as He says it to any of His ministers, Watch! What I say
unto one I say unto all, Watch. Watch and pray, lest you enter into
temptation. Look to yourself, then, sinner. In Christ's name, look to
yourself and watch yourself. You have no enemy to fear but yourself.
No one can hurt a hair of your head but yourself. Have you found that
out? Have you found yourself out? Do you ever look in the direction of
your own heart? Have you begun to watch what goes on in your own
heart? What is it to you what goes on in the world around you
compared with what goes on in the world within you? Look, then, to
yourself. Watch, above all watching, yourself. Watch what it is that
moves you to do this or that.
Stop sometimes and ask yourself why you do such and such a
thing. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a motive in a human heart?
And did your minister, watching for your soul, ever tell you that your
soul will be lost or saved, condemned or justified at the last day
according to your motives? You never knew that! You were never told
that by your minister! Miserable pair! What does he take up his
Sabbaths with? And what leads you to waste your Sabbaths and your
soul on such a stupid minister? But, shepherd or no shepherd,
minister or no minister, look to yourself. Look to yourself when you lie
down and when you rise up; when you go out and when you come in;
when you are in the society of men and when you are alone with your
own heart. Look to yourself when men praise you, and look to yourself
when men blame you. Look to yourself when you sit down to eat and
drink, and still more when you sit and speak about your absent
brother. Look to yourself when you meet your enemy or your rival in
the street, when you pass his house, or hear or read his name.
Yes, you may well say so. At that rate a man's life would be all
watching. So it would. And so it must. And more than that, so it is with
some men not far from you who never told you how much you have
made them watch. Did you never know all that till now? Were you
never told that every Christian man, I do not mean every
communicant, but every truly and sincerely and genuinely Christian
man watches himself in that way? For as the one essential and
distinguishing mark of a New Testament minister is not that he is an
able man, or a studious man, or an eloquent man, but that he is a
pastor and watches for souls, so it is the chiefest and the best mark,
and to himself the only safe and infallible mark, that any man is a
sincere and true Christian man, that he watches himself always and in
all things looks first and last to himself.
SINCERE
'In all things showing sincerity.' - Paul to Titus.
Charles Bennett has a delightful drawing of Sincere in Charles
Kingsley's beautiful edition of The Pilgrim's Progress. You feel that you
could look all day into those clear eyes. Your eyes would begin to quail
before you had looked long into the fourth shepherd's deep eyes; but
those eyes of his have no cause to quail under yours. This man has
nothing to hide from you. He never had. He loves you, and his love to
you is wholly without dissimulation. He absolutely and unreservedly
means and intends by you and yours all that he has ever said to you
and yours, and much more than he has ever been able to say. The
owner of those deep blue eyes is as true to you when he is among your
enemies as he is true to the truth itself when he is among your friends.
Mark also the unobtrusive strength of his mouth, all suffused over as it
is with a most winning and reassuring sweetness. The fourth
shepherd of the Delectable Mountains is one of the very best of
Bennett's excellent portraits. But Mr. Kerr Bain's pen-and-ink portrait
of Sincere in his People of the Pilgrimage is even better than Bennett's
excellent drawing. 'Sincere is softer in outline and feature than
Watchful. His eye is full-open and lucid, with a face of mingled
expressiveness and strength - a lovable, lowly, pure-spirited man -
candid, considerate, willing, cheerful - not speaking many words, and
never any but true words.' Happy sheep that have such a shepherd!
Happy people! if only any people in the Church of Christ could have
such a pastor.
It is surely too late, too late or too early, to begin to put tests to a
minister's sincerity after he has been licensed and called and is now
standing in the presence of his presbytery and surrounded with his
congregation. It is a tremendous enough question to put to any man at
any time: 'Are not zeal for the honour of God, love to Jesus Christ, and
desire of saving souls your great motives and chief inducement to
enter into the function of the holy ministry?' A man who does not
understand what it is you are saying to him will just make the same
bow to these awful words that he makes to all your other conventional
questions. But the older he grows in his ministry, and the more he
comes to discover the incurable plague of his own heart, and with that
the whole meaning and full weight of your overwhelming words, the
more will he shrink back from having such questions addressed to him. Fools will rush in where Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and
Peter and Paul feared to set their foot. Paul was to be satisfied if only
he was let do the work of a minister all his days and then was not at
the end made a castaway. And yet, writing to the same church, Paul
says that his sincerity among them had been such that he could hold
up his ministerial life like spotless linen between the eye of his
conscience and the sun. But all that was written and is to be read and
understood as Paul's ideal that he had honestly laboured after, rather
than as an actual attainment he had arrived at. Great as Paul's
attainments were in humility, in purity of intention, and in simplicity
and sincerity of heart, yet the mind of Christ was not so given even to
His most gifted apostle, that he could seriously say that he had
attained to such utter ingenuity, simplicity, disengagement from
himself, and surrender to Christ, as to be able to face the sun with a
spotless ministry. All he ever says at his boldest and best on that great
matter is to be read in the light of his universal law of personal and
apostolic imperfection - Not that I have attained, either am already
perfect; but I follow after. And blessed be God that this is all that He
looks for in any of His ministers, that they follow all their days after a
more and more godly sincerity. It was the apostle's love of absolute
sincerity, - and, especially, it was his bitter hatred of all the remaining
dregs of insincerity that he from time to time detected in his own
heart, - it was this that gave him his good conscience before a God of
pity and compassion, truth and grace. And with something of the same
love of perfect sincerity, accompanied with something of the same
hatred of insincerity and of ourselves on account of it, we, too, toward
this same God of pity and compassion, will hold up a conscience that
would fain be a good conscience. And till it is a good conscience we
shall hold up with it a broken heart. And that genuine love of all
sincerity, and that equally genuine hatred of all remaining insincerity,
will make all our ministerial work, as it made all Paul's apostolic work,
not only acceptable, but will also make its very defects and defeats
both acceptable and fruitful in the estimation and result of God. It so
happens that I am reading for my own private purposes at this
moment an old book of 1641, Drexilius On a Right Intention, and I
cannot do better at this point than share with you the page I am just
reading. 'Not to be too much troubled or daunted at any cross event,'
he says, 'is the happy state of his mind who has entered on any
enterprise with a pure and pious intention. That great apostle James
gained no more than eight persons in all Spain when he was called to
lay down his head under Herod's sword. And was not God ready to
give the same reward to James as to those who converted kings and
whole kingdoms? Surely He was. For God does not give His ministers a
charge as to what they shall effect, but only as to what they shall
intend to effect. Wherefore, when his art faileth a servant of God,
when nothing goes forward, when everything turneth to his ruin, even
when his hope is utterly void, he is scarce one whit troubled; for this,
saith he to himself, is not in my power, but in God's power alone. I
have done what I could. I have done what was fit for me to do. Fair and
foul is all of God's disposing.'
And, then, this simplicity and purity of intention gives a minister
that fine combination of candour and considerateness which we saw
to exist together so harmoniously in the character of Sincere. Such a
minister is not tongue-tied with sinister and selfish intentions. His
sincerity toward God gives him a masterful position among his people.
His words of rebuke and warning go straight to his people's
consciences because they come straight out of his own conscience. His
words are their own witness that he is neither fearing his people nor
fawning upon his people in speaking to them. And, then, such candour
prepares the way for the utmost considerateness when the proper
time comes for considerateness. Such a minister is patient with the
stupid, and even with the wicked and the injurious, because in all
their stupidity and wickedness and injuriousness they have only
injured and impoverished themselves. And if God is full of patience
and pity for the ignorant and the evil and the out of the way, then His
sincere-hearted minister is of all men the very man to carry the divine
message of forgiveness and instruction to such sinners. Yes, Mr. Bain
must have seen Sincere closely and in a clear light when he took down
this fine feature of his character, that he is at once candid and
considerate - with a whole face of mingled expressiveness and
strength.
Writing about sincerity and a right intention in young ministers,
old Drexilius says: 'When I turn to clergymen, I would have sighs and
groans to speak for me. For, alas! I am afraid that there be found some which come into the ministry, not that they may obtain a holy office in
which to spend their life, but for worse ends. To enter the ministry
with a naughty intention is to come straight to destruction. Let no
minister think at any time of a better living, but only at all times of a
holier life. Wherefore, O ministers and spiritual men, consider and
take heed.
There can be no safe guide to your office but a right, sincere, pure
intention. Whosoever cometh to it with any other conduct or
companion must either return to his former state of life, or here he
shall certainly perish . . . What is more commendable in a religious
man than to be always in action and to be exercised one while in
teaching the ignorant, another while in comforting such as are
troubled in mind, sometimes in making sermons, and sometimes in
admonishing the sick? But with what secret malignity doth a wrong
intention insinuate itself into these very actions that are the most
religious! For ofttimes we desire nothing else but to be doing. We
desire to become public, not that we may profit many, but because we
have not learned how to be private. We seek for divers employments,
not that we may avoid idleness, but that we may come into people's
knowledge. We despise a small number of hearers, and such as are
poor, simple, and rustical, and let fly our endeavours at more eminent
chairs, though not in apparent pursuit; all which is the plain argument
of a corrupt intention. O ye that wait upon religion, O ministers of God,
this is to sell most transcendent wares at a very low rate - nay, this is
to cast them, and yourselves too, into the fire.'
There are some outstanding temptations to insincerity in some
ministers that must be pointed out here.
Ministers with a warm rhetorical temperament are beset
continually with the temptation to pile up false fire on the altar; to
dilate, that is, both in their prayers and in their sermons, upon certain
topics in a style that is full of insincerity. Ministers who have no real
hold of divine things in themselves will yet fill their pulpit hour with
the most florid and affecting pictures of sacred and even of evangelical
things. This is what our shrewd and satirical people mean when they
say of us that So-and-so has a great sough of the gospel in his
preaching, but the sough only.
Another kindred temptation to even the best and truest of
ministers is to make pulpit appeals about the evil of sin and the
necessity of a holy life that they themselves do not feel and do not
attempt to live up to.
Butler has a terrible passage on the heart-hardening effects of
making pictures of virtue and never trying to put those pictures into
practice. And readers of Newman will remember his powerful
application of this same temptation to literary men in his fine sermon
on Unreal Words.
Another temptation is to affect an interest in our people and a
sympathy with them that we do not in reality feel. All human life is full
of this temptation to double-dealing and hypocrisy; but, then, it is
large part of a minister's office to feel with and for his people, and to
give the tenderest and the most sacred expression to that feeling. And,
unless he is a man of a scrupulously sincere, true, and tender heart,
his daily duties will soon develop him into a solemn hypocrite. And if
he feels only for his own people, and for them only when they become
and as long as they remain his own people, then his insincerity and
imposture is only the more abominable in the sight of God.
Archbishop Whately, with that strong English common sense and that
cultivated clear-headedness that almost make him a writer of genius,
points out a view of sincerity that it behoves ministers especially to
cultivate in themselves. He tells us not only to act always according to
our convictions, but also to see that our convictions are true and
unbiassed convictions. It is a very superficial sincerity even when we
actually believe what we profess to believe. But that is a far deeper
and a far nobler sincerity which watches with a strict and severe
jealousy over the formation of our beliefs and convictions. Ministers
must, first for themselves and then for their people, live far deeper
down than other men. They must be at home among the roots, not of
actions only, but much more of convictions.
We may act honestly enough out of our present convictions and
principles, while, all the time, our convictions and our principles are
vitiated at bottom by the selfish ground they ultimately stand in. Let
ministers, then, to begin with, live deep down among the roots of their
opinions and their beliefs. Let them not only flee from being
consciously insincere and hypocritical men; let them keep their eye
like the eye of God continually on that deep ground of the soul where so many men unknown to themselves deceive themselves. And, thus
exercised, they shall be able out of a deep and clean heart to rise far
above that trimming and hedging and self-seeking and self-sheltering
in disputed and unpopular questions which is such a temptation to all
men, and is such a shame and scandal in a minister.
Now, my good friends, we have kept all this time to the fourth
shepherd and to his noble name, but let us look in closing at some of
his sheep, - that is to say, at ourselves. For is it not said in the prophet:
Ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God, saith
the Lord God. All, therefore, that has been said about the sincerity and
insincerity of ministers is to be said equally of their people also in all
their special and peculiar walks of life. Sincerity is as noble a virtue,
and insincerity is as detestable a vice, in a doctor, or a lawyer, or a
schoolmaster, or a merchant, - almost, if not altogether, as much so as
in a minister. Your insincerity and hypocrisy in your daily intercourse
with your friends and neighbours is a miserable enough state of mind,
but at the root of all that there lies your radical insincerity toward God
and your own soul. In his Christian Perfection William Law introduces
his readers to a character called Julius, who goes regularly to prayers,
and there confesses himself to be a miserable sinner who has no
health in him; and yet that same Julius cannot bear to be informed of
any imperfection or suspected to be wanting in any kind or degree of
virtue. Now, Law asks, can there be a stronger proof that Julius is
wanting in the sincerity of his devotions? Is it not as plain as anything
can be that that man's confessions of sin are only words of course, a
certain civility of sacred speech in which his heart has not a single
atom of share? Julius confesses himself to be in great weakness,
corruption, disorder, and infirmity, and yet he is mortally angry with
you if at any time you remotely and tenderly hint that he may be just a
shade wrong in his opinions, or one hair's-breadth off what is square
and correct in his actions. Look to yourself, Julius, and to your
insincere heart. Look to yourself at all times, but above all other times
at the times and in the places of your devotions. Ten to one, my hearer
of tonight, you may never have thought of that before. And what
would you think if you were told that this Sincere shepherd was
appointed us for this evening's discourse, and that you were led up to
this house, just that you might have your attention turned to your many miserable insincerities of all kinds, but especially to your so
Julius-like devotions? 'And Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man.
And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.'
What, then, my truly miserable fellow-sinner and fellow-
worshipper, what are we to do? Am I to give up preaching altogether
because I am continually carried on under the impulse of the pulpit
far beyond both my attainments and my intentions? Am I to cease
from public prayer altogether because when engaged in it I am
compelled to utter words of contrition and confession and
supplication that little agree with the everyday temper and sensibility
of my soul? And am I wholly to eschew pastoral work because my
heart is not so absolutely clean and simple and sincere toward all my
own people and toward other ministers' people as it ought to be? No!
Never! Never! Let me rather keep my heart of such earth and slag in
the hottest place of temptation, and then, such humiliating discoveries
as are there continually being made to me of myself will surely at last
empty me of all self-righteousness and self-sufficiency, and make me
at the end of my ministry, if not till then, the penitent pastor of a
penitent people. And when thus penitent, then surely, also somewhat
more sincere in my designs and intentions, if not even then in my
attainments and performances.
'O Eternal God, Who hast made all things for man, and man for
Thy glory, sanctify my body and my soul, my thoughts and my
intentions, my words and my actions, that whatsoever I shall think or
speak or do may be by me designed to the glory of Thy name. O God,
turn my necessities into virtue, and the works of nature into the
works of grace, by making them orderly, regular, temperate,
subordinate, and profitable to ends beyond their own proper efficacy.
And let no pride or self-seeking, no covetousness or revenge, no
impure mixtures or unhandsome purposes, no little ends and low
imaginations, pollute my spirit or unhallow any of my words or
actions. But let my body be the servant of my spirit, and both soul and
body servants of my Lord, that, doing all things for Thy glory here, I
may be made a partaker of Thy glory hereafter; through Jesus Christ,
my Lord. Amen.'