01 The Servant of the Spirit

LECTURE I THE SERVANT OF THE SPIRIT

I MUST begin the honorable task your kind confidence has assigned to me by a simple and heartfelt acknowledgment of this high privilege. You have asked me to attempt an undertaking which can never have been an easy one, and which becomes measurably more difficult as the long sequence of volumes occupies shelf after shelf of our libraries. There were as you know humane laws under the old Hebrew dispensation in favor of those who had to toil for small reward as gleaners of the meager residuum of the harvest-field after the more favored harvesters had filled their barns to overflowing with grain of the earlier reaping. So far as I can see my predecessors have had little compassion on posterity. They never beheld my pathetic figure laboriously garnering the slender ears they had overlooked, and submitting them for acceptance to a highly critical market.

Nevertheless, if I cherish for my distinguished predecessors just a faint sentiment of envy, I trust I am able at the same time to perceive that they did not have all the good fortune. We are gleaning on a field where history is being made every year. The passage of the generations enhances the splendor of the retrospect, and, in proportion, the magnificence of the prospect. You have not invited me here to lecture on an obsolete art. This is not a funeral oration. The prophet is not on the point of being bowed out of the modern world. The progress of civilization may make some professions unnecessary. With the world wide triumph of the Prince of Peace I take it the soldier will make his final salute to the nations; and I suppose even the lawyer may find existence somewhat precarious. Some of us look to see the enterprise at present associated with the manufacture and sale of injurious liquors and implements of war diverted to more wholesome channels.

Some trades and professions, it is clear, will die out as the kingdom of God comes to its own. But for every voice that carries inspiration to its fellows; for every soul that has some authentic word from the Eternal wherewith to guide and bless mankind, there will always be a welcome. No changes of the future can cancel the commission of the preacher. He does not hold that commission from any human society. He is the servant of the Spirit. He is not the creation of a state, or a municipality. Societies may organize and reorganize themselves as they will. They may make and unmake their officials. Some commonwealths have chosen to break with the tradition of kingship. Some have tried every form of military dictatorship and civil despotism; they have experimented with oligarchies, autocracies, and aristocracies. At times they have tried every form of government in swift succession. Possibly it is a wise thing that we should not cast our forms of national life in so rigid a mould. But in any case nobody would be bold enough to predict that this or that office in the commonwealth is final and permanent; and may not be modified if society so decides. You remember Mr. William Watson’s fine lines: The seasons change, the winds they shift and veer; The grass of yesteryear Is dead; the birds depart, the groves decay;

Empires dissolve, and peoples disappear:

Song passes not away.

Captains and conquerors leave a little dust And Kings a dubious legend of their reign; The swords of Cesar they are less than rust; The Poet doth remain."

Suppose Watson had said, the prophet rather than the poet? For the prophet is of older and nobler lineage, and his order includes all the children of inspiration whether they have kindled the soul of the world by speech or song. And I repeat, as society cannot commission a man to be a poet, even so it is beyond the authority of any state however powerful to create the prophet; aye, or to make his message false or barren, no matter how governors may growl, and throned iniquities fulminate. No human authority can credit or discredit his words. His credentials are of superior authenticity. Let me state the position I propose to occupy in these lectures once for all, and at its highest. The preacher, who is the messenger of God, is the real master of society; not elected by society to be its ruler, but elect of God to form its ideals and through them to guide and rule its life. Show me the man who, in the midst of a community however secularized in manners, can compel it to think with him, can kindle its enthusiasm, revive its faith, cleanse its passions, purify its ambitions, and give steadfastness to its will, and I will show you the real master of society, no matter what party may nominally hold the reins of government, no matter what figurehead may occupy the ostensible place of authority. Nor is the office of the preacher in the smallest danger of lapsing for lack of candidates. Our embarrassment arises from riches not from poverty. Today everybody will preach to us and at us, whatever qualifications for the function they may have or lack. Never was this old world sown so thick with pulpits. Never was heard in it such superabundance of gospels. Who that has ever read a modem newspaper will affirm again that the dogmatist is dead! Creeds jostle one another in the market-place and in the drawing-room; and their often harsh and hoarse prophets and prophetesses announce salvation and denounce judgment quite in the orthodox style. Hot-gospellers today are a prolific race; and some of the beliefs for which they woo and win converts speak volumes for the credulity of mankind.

It is astonishing what eagerness there is in our time to enter into competition with the conventional and orthodox pulpit, and to usurp its functions in dealing with the big human problems. Now it is the dramatist who is not content until he has converted the stage into a pulpit; now it is the journalist seeking to charm the public ear with some message that he believes to be vital to the common well-being; now it is the Socialist agitator, on his soap-box rostrum at the street-comer, making capital out of the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of society, quite in the old prophet strain; now it is the novelist marshalling the forces of experience and imagination, and training all his guns on some citadel of real or fancied wrong; now it is the statesman converting the platform of political expediency into the pulpit of eternal principle; now it is the poet, or the prose essayist, setting our highest and wisest dreams of good to music and lifting up the eyes of fallible human nature to the hills whence cometh its strength. It must sometimes appear to us that humanity is a long-suffering, much-lectured creature, and that not we of the churches only but journalists, artists, politicians, novelists, playwrights conceive their fellow-men and women as sitting in pews, patient and defenseless, at the mercy of every would-be exhorter who has discovered that they are not so good as they should be.

Thomas Carlyle in his day expressed pity for humanity whose ears were thus besieged by armies of strident voices, in consequence of which he, Thomas, lifted up his voice and shouted louder than all the rest. I confess to you I enjoy a quiet smile whenever the pessimists suggest that the vocation of the preacher is in danger of becoming obsolete. But I agree that God’s order of preaching friars is a far wealthier society than some of us have recognized. America today will not forget to blazon upon the roll of her great nineteenth century preachers of righteousness the name of Abraham Lincoln as well as of Henry Ward Beecher; and Englishmen who are justly proud of Robert Hall and Thomas Binney, Dale and Spurgeon, cannot forget to number also among her national prophets Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and John Bright. And why not? It is no business of ours to belittle our calling. We hold no brief for any narrow and exclusive theory of preaching. Inspiration is not conditioned by a white tie or a Geneva gown. I am glad to have listened to truths as noble and as Christian on the floor of parliament as have ever been uttered under the dome of St. Paul’s. The Gettysburg speech was the message of a prophet of God, even if it was not divided into three heads and an application. No, we who call ourselves preachers enjoy no monopoly of the greatest of all arts, nor are we interested in establishing one. The spirit breatheth where it listeth. Nobody doubts that Amos was of us, though so far as I know he did not, as we say, preach regularly twice a Sunday. Ploughmen and herdsmen, carpenters, fishermen, tax-collectors and tent-makers, sons of German miners, Huntingdonshire farmers, and Kentucky backwoodsmen, each in his time and order, have received the divine afflatus, and therewith, the spiritual and moral leadership of mankind.

History it is true gives little space to this aspect of the progress of the race. Its canvas is crowded with uniforms, of kings and warriors and courtiers. The romance which the historian sees and describes to us is the romance symbolized by the banners, the martial music, and all the seductive pageantry of war. But the real romance of history is this romance of the preacher; the sublime miracle of the God-intoxicated soul with vision of an eternal Will, and sense of an empire to which all continents, tongues, races belong. This man stands serene amid the clash of arms, and the foolish braggadocio of Force, asking only for the sword named Truth, for the harness of righteousness, and the spirit of peace. This is the world’s unconquerable and irresistible Hero. All its most enduring victories are his. It is he who year after year, and generation after generation, in spite of rebuffs, defeats and disappointments, has planted the banner of the kingdom of justice, freedom and humanity on the conquered and dismantled fortresses of oppression, selfishness and wrong. Do not think I am in danger of departing from the special object of these lectures if I strike this note at the outset. It will do us all good to realize the catholicity and magnificence of our order. It is well to realize that for justification of our existence we can make appeal to an universal instinct. We may well cherish our affinities. Our kith and kin is the mightiest family under God’s heavens.

"Shakespeare was of us; Milton was for us;

Burns, Shelley were with us; they watch from their graves."

Certainly, no man was ever elect of God’s spirit to be the mouthpiece of Christian righteousness who did not thereby confess himself one of us. The word "Sermon" has sometimes had an uninviting sound. It has not always been associated with the melting of the mists, and the vision of the infinite blue. Sometimes it is to be feared that it has made the mists more dense, impenetrable and chill. We are not so prejudiced as to deny the fact. But rightly understood mankind lives and grows on great sermons; and in no other way. Sublime thoughts, high and holy conceptions of life and death and duty, lofty interpretations of nature and experience, the light that reveals God upon the scene, and that dignifies and glorifies human nature –here is the substance of those great sermons that enter into men’s souls and make them sons of God, and brothers of humanity. Have any of us fathomed the depth of that supreme saying of our Lord’s that the real life of man is by "every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"? Every word! The science of biogenesis is as comprehensive as that. The vital ingredients in our spiritual nurture are as manifold as that. Every word of God, in whatever language or dialect of the mother tongue of Deity, is endowed with this creative power. No single syllable of the Divine speech but has in it life-bearing, life-bestowing qualities. Even the inorganic creation is a mute evangelist. The God who uttered Himself in nature has decreed that its dumb lips should have their own peculiar eloquence. There are sermons in stones. In the rocks beneath our feet lie the hoarded histories of past millenniums. They are like ancient cinematography films by means of which the marvelous procession of extinct existences passes before our wondering eyes, and stirs our sluggish imagination. Of course it is possible to watch the drama but to miss the meaning. But even Charles Darwin tracing the amazing progress of the universe, and linking up as he believed all sentient existences to their flower and consummation in the life of man, confessed that "at times there came over him with irresistible force the conviction that he had seen the Father." Then again, as he sadly confessed, he lost the vision. But alas! there is nothing extraordinary in that experience. Because we make every use of Nature except to hearken to her sublimest message, it does not follow that she has lost her soul, and discarded her prophet’s mantle. Only we are, as our fathers used to say, gospel-hardened to her words of truth and grace, and especially to their more secret and subtle meanings. Some day she will surprise us in a more sensitive and responsive mood, and show us in her mirror the very countenance of Deity, and we shall know that the place we stand on is holy ground. After all, Wordsworth’s Peter Bell, sordid and vulgar, is not altogether false to the possibilities of life when he is represented as overwhelmed by a sudden revelation of Nature’s inner glory; and the man to whom before "A primrose by the rivers brim A yellow primrose was to him And it was nothing more," looks into the heart of Nature’s handiwork, hears a Voice commanding him to worship and believe, and becomes from that hour a changed man, awakened from moral and spiritual torpor. A primrose in God’s hands is text enough to shatter all our shallow agnosticism’s, and reward our honest quest for the Eternal. "Whither can I go from Thy presence?" cries the psalmist with his poignant sense of the inescapable Preacher, who has freighted every atom of an infinite universe with Divine lessons, warnings, appeals and inspirations. "If I ascend into the heavens Thou art there; if I descend into hell behold Thou art there." Above the earth, the glittering heavens declare the glory of God; and beneath it the dark secrets of the underworld cannot be explored without Him. Somehow, you and I have been staged in an infinite theatre, every fragment of which represents some letter in the Divine calligraphy, some note or tone in the ineffable oratorio music, in which the spheres sing the arias; and yet not an electron, infinitely minute, but has its part in the chorus. That is how we conceive it. The Universe is itself a great Bible, with the sublimest of all intelligible themes to set forth and illustrate, and with its myriads of worlds so many chapters expanding the one central and vital revelation, until by endless iteration, recapitulation and accumulation of evidence, the argument is established on which immortal souls can build an unconquerable faith.

I do not forget that there are many to whom the whole creation is inarticulate, and the universe eloquent of Nothing. To them the final achievement of our humanity is unconsciousness of God. The progress of the race is marked by the gradual unlearning of · the spiritual lore of its childhood. Slowly but surely, one by one, every prophet voice is to be silenced, without and within. The solemn call to the human soul to recognize its origin and its destiny in God is to be heard no more. The worlds resolve themselves into masses of matter, many of them mere useless dereliction the ocean of space. They cease to be the flaming manuscripts of the Eternal Wisdom, with their address to the conscience and reason of mankind. From this green earth the dews of inspiration are withered; the bloom of its higher mystic beauty is fled. It becomes merely a ball of ponder-able matter revolving aimlessly in unfathomable space; the chance grave of innumerable generations of existence that once cherished the pathetic illusion that underneath them were Everlasting Arms. The evolutionist, tracing the history of man, finds this astonishing phenomenon, that once there dawned on man the consciousness of God, that the dawn ripened into the perfect day, and then that the light faded from the sky, and the human soul passed through the twilight of dubiety into the night of dark and sterile negation. The Universe will then become like some ruined and dismantled abbey or cathedral, once aglow with light and beauty, and, as it were, quivering with music, attesting its high heroic human faith in God and man; but now with altar desolate and prostrate pulpit, and mouldering fabric, no longer a witness to the world of spirit, no longer a trysting-place between the human and the divine, no longer the sanctuary where the oracles of heaven are heard and tested and believed. That is what we are sometimes threatened with. Men may conceive the universe as a vast warehouse; but it will cease to be a church.

Over against such a possibility there is the undeniable fact that every fragment of creation is endowed with the preaching office, and man with a soul that cannot be insensitive to the universal appeal. Nor has he proved himself to be so. From a thousand immortal canvases he has uttered and still utters the truths with which Nature has indoctrinated him. He has made himself her expositor, her interpreter. Through him she has expressed her inner meaning. And not only by the artist’s canvas but by the language of the poet we are admitted to the shrine where the arcaria of Nature are communicated to us. The materialists who flatter themselves that they are about to impoverish the universe of its idealism forget that they have not only to fight down the instinct of worship in every human breast, but to make war against all the supreme interpreters of Nature,--musicians, artists, poets and the rest--who saw into the heart of things with illuminated Vision, and dedicated their genius to proclaim what they saw. The significant fact is that every man is surrounded by the Voices that call to life; and that no one can ever be quite sure that he has closed every avenue through which divine appeals may reach his highest nature and start new processes of faith which may wholly change his character and his destiny.

"Just when we’re safest, there’s a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death, A chorus-ending from Euripides, And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears." At any moment, in any place, we may find ourselves in church, at worship. The heart, so securely garrisoned, may be suddenly stormed. Before we know it we have made the fateful concession, and thereby signed our capitulation. God has taken a text, and preached. We can say with the young prophet of long ago, "The angel came and waked me, as a man is waked out of sleep." In all of this there is no suggestion that the office and function of the preacher can ever be superseded. Rather he has his roots in the nature of things, and can never cease to fulfill his mission until all the works of God cease to be eloquent of the love and wisdom of their Creator. It may be true that of late years mankind generally has been tempted to lay the accent on other instrumentalities. The State bulks more largely in the thought of the average man today than the Church does. The statesman and politician are, in the thought of our democracies, clothed with almost limitless powers for the betterment of human conditions. They have a very attractive and absorbing gospel to preach. Their sermons are of higher wages, better houses, the fairer distribution of wealth, and the shortening of the hours of labor. Their sphere of action is this present life, with its urgent immediate needs; and just because their aim is avowedly to make this present world a better place to live in, they will never fail to find an audience.

You remember the sort of popular appeal that George Eliot put into the mouth of "Felix Holt, the Radical," when he took up his parable at the street corner against the churches and the parsons: "The aristocrats supply us with our religion like anything else and get a profit on it. They’ll give us plenty of heaven. We may have land there. But we’ll offer to change with them. We’ll give them back some of their heaven, and take it out in something for us and for our children in this world." When things have gone wrong with us socially and industrially, preaching such as that makes many strings to vibrate in the average human breast. It is natural that the multitude should begin to fix their hopes on what governments can do for them, and should have but little patience with the evangelist who would hand to Lazarus, greedy for crumbs, a tract on the bliss he will enjoy when he gets to Abraham’s bosom. God forbid that I should deny that there is a suggestion of irony in talking of the bread of life to the physically starving, the raiment of righteousness to those in threadbare rags, and the mansions of the blessed to those living in garrets or cellars. Most of us do not believe, any more than Felix Holt did , that the purpose of religion is to reconcile us to the postponement of all comfort and all luxury until we pass into another world. No sane critic will ever accuse the Lord Christ of being indifferent to the physical well being of the people. But readers of George Eliot’s famous story will remember that Felix Holt’s social ministry was the result of a moral and spiritual crisis to which he confessed; and it had not occurred to him to enquire whence the impulse came prompting him to social service and political propagandism on behalf of the disinherited. "The angel came and waked me," said the young prophet Zechariah, and could give no clearer account. All he knew was that for years he had been in a state of somnambulism--as one walking in his sleep. He had lived for the superficial, for the things of sense. The things of the spirit had been outside his consciousness. Then came the visitation--the influence of the higher ministry--and his soul awoke. You are familiar with Sant’s popular picture of "The Soul’s Awakening." The young girl has been reading in some book of vision; and now she is looking up with the aspect of one to whom Revelation has come, and who has found God and Life and Duty. When Zechariah was awaked, shaken out of sleep, and forced to open his eyes upon reality, we are told what it was that he saw. A new civilization! A city with streets in which the children played, and where the inhabitants grew old; where there was work for all and leisure for all. A city, too, built without walls, unarmed, unfortified, with open gates hospitable to all mankind, the symbol of peace and brotherhood. This is the vision of an awakened youth. It is not unreal though it is as yet unrealized. On the contrary, it is the kind of vision ought to be a permanent endowment of every preacher’s imagination. The one thing needful to make us prophets is an experience akin to that of Zechariah --the soul’s awakening. Some angel of the Lord, some messenger from His Presence, some ministry of His Hands must wake us out of our sleep. Of this I am very sure--no preacher will thrill and move his generation who has not himself known this kindling of the soul. For it is "soul" the world needs. Everywhere today I hear the same complaint--that we are suffering from lack of soul. Art, they tell us, shows no falling off in skill of technique, but there is so little soul in modern pictures. Music is the same; the great composers have left no successors. Poetry died out in the nineteenth century. It is the same in other spheres. The employer complains that his workmen put no soul into their work. The workman retorts that industries today are managed for the most part by companies; and companies are well enough called "bodies" of men, but they are bodies without souls. Even the pulpits of the world, I hear it said, are occupied by those who unite to a chaste style a well-furnished mind, and a genius for criticism and analysis; but somehow there is little soul, and the winds of heaven do not sweep over the spirits of their audience as in days gone by.

All this may be exaggerated. I suspect it is. But nobody can question that there is a measure of truth in it. And here, remember, is something that no parliaments or congresses can do. Here governments are impotent. If they could put money in every one’s pocket, a good roof over every one’s head, and the best clothes on every one’s back; still they could not put a soul of faith and love in every one’s breast. Here the preacher has really no competitor. There is something in the living voice of the true prophet that thrills us as nothing else can. We may be rich and increased with goods and yet have need of everything. Poverty is not the most fatal enemy of empires. The great empires of yesterday did not go to their ruin because of any lack of wealth. They were on the contrary enervated by luxury. They perished, like Hamlet’s father, "full of bread." They declined and fell for lack of "soul." Where there is no "vision" the people perish. The appearance of a true preacher is the greatest gift that any nation can have. By his presence, and his spirit, he multiplies the fighting forces for righteousness indefinitely. John Knox’s voice was as the sound of a trumpet. When Luther rode to Worms, every timid believer in the Reformation plucked up heart to speak and act more boldly. When Cromwell arrived on Marston Moor, the historian tells us that a great shout went up in the Puritan camp was the presage of victory. It was more. It was victory. What Washington and Lincoln were to your own heroic fathers in their day of trial, men of faith, men of soul, men of God, are to all hard-pressed Christian causes and all humane enterprises. It is this force that we call "soul" that is the motive-power of all progress; that turns all the wheels that ever do turn to any noble purpose. "The words that I speak unto you," said Jesus, "they are soul." As a mere matter of fact He has kept the soul of the world alive. As John Morley wrote many years ago, "The spiritual life of the West has burned during all these centuries with the pure flame first kindled by the sublime Mystic of the Galilaean Hills." This is our business--the business which all the parliaments of the world are powerless to transact. I might have called the subject of these lectures, in which I hope to review some of the more notable preaching exploits of history, "Keeping the soul of the world alive." I have preferred to call it "The Romance of Preaching." Frankly, I fear that in these modern days we have been losing our sense of the splendid possibilities of our vocation. The thought of it does not thrill us. We do not go down to our work as we should, with our hearts beating high for the wonder and the hope of the adventures. We tend to become slaves to the routine of it. Once we were alive in the age of miracles. By "the vision splendid" we were "on our way attended." But the beauty is off the morning sky, the glow of the dawn is past. We have "Seen it die away And fade into the light of common day."

There is no tragedy in the world like the disillusioned minister. He has to keep on preaching. His congregation is often weary; but no one is so heavy of heart as he is. "What a genius I was," cried Swift, "when I wrote that book!" referring to a work of his early prime. Millais, in the presence of a collection of the pictures representative of the splendid idealism of his youth, burst into tears and rushed out of the building. Somehow, so many of us are strangers to the truth of Paul’s affirmation that "experience worketh Hope." So many have gathered doubt and even despondency as the fruit of that tree. So we begin to envy other men their tasks. The physician who with reverent hands and spirit repairs the temple of the body; the lawyer who serves the ideals of justice; the statesman who helps to rear the fabric of a nation’s prosperity or a world’s peace; the explorer and the engineer who between them prospect and build the roads for a higher civilization --all these we begin to believe are following the gleam with nobler ambitions and to a more glorious goal.

That, in part, is why youth does not rally to the call of the ministry today, and why the preacher’s face is all too often in the shadow. The time has surely come to sound another note. Who should be proud of their calling if not we? What other history has ever equaled ours? Think of the procession of the preachers! No range of mountains has been high enough to stay their progress; no rivers deep and broad enough to daunt them; no forests dark and dense enough to withstand their advance. No poet has ever sung the epic of their sacrifices. Was ever such a romance? Was ever love exalted to so pure a passion? Was ever in the human soul so unquenchable a fire? Silver and gold they had none. They did not seek to win mankind by materialistic gifts. Such as they had they gave. The alms they distributed were faith, hope, love. Wherever they went they trod a pilgrim road, and flung forth their faith, often to a skeptical and scornful generation. But what heeded they? They passed onward from frontier to frontier, "the legion that never was counted," and, let us add, that never knew defeat.

Gradually before their message, ancient pagan empires tottered, heathen despots bowed the head, in the lands of Goth and Vandal stately cathedrals reared their splendid towers and spires, and the battle music of the Christian crusade rang triumphantly in chiming bells and pealing organs over conquered races. In the recesses of Indian forests, up the dark rivers of Africa and South America that often flowed red, along the frozen coast of Greenland and Labrador, the pioneer preachers made their pilgrimage. Let every village preacher who climbs into a rude rostrum, to give out a text and preach a sermon to a meager handful of somewhat stolid hearers, remember to what majestic Fraternity he belongs, and what romantic traditions he inherits. He, too, is the servant of the spirit. He, too, does his work in the land of Romance. Many modern influences have tried to kill the consciousness of this truth. Even the churches do not always allow us to realize it. Materialism and rationalism would fain lay sacrilegious hands upon our task, and secularize it. But the true Prophet has that within his soul which no external adversaries can destroy.

“I see my call! It gleams ahead Like sunshine through a loophole shed!

I know my Task; these demons slain The sick earth shall grow sound again ;

Once let them to the grave be given, The fever-fumes of Earth shall fly!

Up, Soul, array thee! Sword from thigh! To battle for the heirs of Heaven!"