04 The Royalty of the Pulpit: Athanasius and Chrysostom

LECTURE IV THE ROYALTY OF THE PULPIT: ATHANASIUS AND CHRYSOSTOM THE Christian Church has been the nursing home of great orators. This is not wonderful. For oratory to become great, it needs the inspiration of a great cause, of great ideals. This the Christian Church supplied, with its doctrines of the All-Father, of man triumphant by faith over sin and death, and of humanity destined to become one universal family in Christ. It made an overpowering appeal to the imagination in the mystery of the Word made flesh, in Paul’s doctrine of solidarity, and in the revelation of eternal life. We know that as a matter of fact, so mighty was the new inspiration beneath which the souls of men were revived, that Art, Literature, Architecture, Music were born again. When we speak of Christian Art or Christian Literature we do so because we are sensible of a new quality in them distinguishing them from art or literature under pagan forms. The same is true of architecture and music. The Christian cathedral is different in kind from the noblest form of classical temple. We are conscious that the soul of the architect is seeking to express higher ideals of reverence and mystical experience. The student of poetry proposes to himself as a problem what it is in Dante that touches us so much more nearly and powerfully than Vergil, why all the poetry of the ancients is pale before the disciplined emotion and passion of Milton. Music can hardly be said to have found itself, and given permanent expression to human aspiration until it became the handmaid of Christianity, and gave utterance to the depths of human grief and heights of human rapture in the Oratorio and the Mass. Today I ask you to believe, that this new inspiration of which Christ Jesus was the author, created also a new order of speakers, a new type of oratory. If I speak of Christian eloquence, it is because I believe that the highest type of eloquence the world has ever known is inseparable from the most exalted inspiration and can only flow from that source. This is not said to depreciate the glorious philippics of Demosthenes, or the orations of Cicero, the two outstanding orators of the classic ages. But splendid as Cicero’s speeches are, and worthy of your study as masterpieces of forensic eloquence with their invective, their argument, their satire, their wit, their occasional high ethical appeal, they do not stir the deepest emotions of our souls, or inspire in us the loftiest vision. The orations of Demosthenes are the utterances not only of a supreme rhetorician, but of a true prophet and a great patriot. In his passionate devotion to the liberties of his people he is one of the immortals. The glow of his heroic spirit is in his words still, and will keep them alive forever. But all local patriotism however deep and fervent must be inferior in real greatness to that patriotism to the kingdom of God which is the creation, I say it reverently, of the genius of our Lord, and possessed by which men transcend their local racial distinctions, and realize their brotherhood with all humanity. When a soul speaks to us great enough to be illuminated by that ideal, and noble enough to be fired by that enthusiasm, he becomes the standing demonstration of the superiority of the power of Christianity, the universal religion, over every localized or nationalized form of religion whatsoever.

I ask your attention at this lecture to two great masters of rhetoric, admirable illustrations of the romance of preaching, whose astonishing careers provide innumerable lessons for the modern preacher. The two I refer to are Athanasius and Chrysostom. I associate them not so much because they were almost contemporaries in that critical fourth century, but because they were so dissimilar in the externals of their ministry while exemplifying so vividly the same supreme power of inspired personality. We shall see that so far as outward advantages are concerned, Chrysostom had everything that Athanasius lacked. Nature had fashioned him to be an orator. He was tall and commanding in figure, handsome in features, with a magnificent organ-voice, and a flow of words which no other orator could rival. So far as education was concerned he had passed through the discipline of a legal training, and had won distinction at the bar before he was carried by irresistible sympathies into the service of the Church. We see the result of his legal practice in that lucid and cogent forensic style which made his expositions of Scripture so fascinating, and left the hearers without an answer. But there is a vast difference between Chrysostom the legal pleader and Chrysostom the Christian pleader. Chrysostom’s homilies are an exalted form of argumentative discourse; and it is the sacred passion that throbs through his periods that, even more than his rhetorical felicities, captures our interest still. Over against the royal figure of the golden-mouthed prince of preachers stands the one whose name and fame overtopped that of emperors and military conquerors, but whose unparalleled ascendancy over his fellows was due wholly to spiritual, and in no degree to physical, properties. Ernest Renan described St. Paul, in one of those fierce phrases that live, as an "ugly little Jew." Athanasius was apparently a dwarf, shortening by a stoop even the squat figure. His nose was hooked, and he wore a stubby, bristling beard. His hair was apparently straw-colored. It is surely not in such a guise that Mr. Bernard Shaw would have us recognize the super-man; and I suspect that many college committees might have hesitated long before accepting for the ministry one who would have required some mechanical means to add a cubit to his stature, before he could even have been seen over the side of any ordinary pulpit.

Yet super-man he was. I like to read how that strange countenance was illuminated to seraphic beauty by light of inward holiness and zeal for truth. Such was the mighty soul in the attenuated body of him who dared emperors and defied ecclesiastics, who was exiled again and again and again and yet again, who was as much at home in the caves of the Egyptian deserts as in the council-chamber of Nicaea or the palace of Alexandria. No man was less depressed by defeat, or exalted by success. Yet the gorgeous annals of Constantine afford no parallel to the splendor of popular triumph, when Alexandria swept out beyond its walls to welcome back its banished preacher and bishop, the multitude of its people suggesting to an eye witness the Nile overflowing its banks. Then came stepping along the sandy road out of the wilderness of his exile, the strange dwarf figure, with the beard whitened with toil and care, but the face still radiant, and the light in the eyes that told of the unconquerable soul. No modem preacher, with any pride in his sublime calling, can ever omit to do reverence at that niche in the great temple of prophets where the statue stands of Royal-hearted Athanase By Paul’s own mantle blest."

If only we could extract from the pages of history or extort by some scientific process the secret of that magical fact we call personality! But in default of that, we may surely be pardoned for doubting whether any man is going to make more of the ministry than a very commonplace and even humdrum affair who has never been set on fire. It may be doubted whether all the modern athletic experts can add a cubit to our stature, and in any case, the conquest of the world does not depend upon it. Less and less will mere physical qualities, or mere brute force, stand for empire in the affairs of men; and this I venture to say who am nevertheless keenly alive to all the joys of bodily existence, and advantages of a trained physique. But the one supreme qualification for the ministry is a soul of flame. Helen Keller may be blind and deaf and dumb, but she has preached faith and courage and love all round the world; while millions of men and women of no physical defect whatsoever have never had any message to which it was worth while for any one to listen. The power to kindle the spirits of our fellows is the endowment for which we pray and plead. I am well aware that no class room can give it. Even amid the intellectual interests of university life, and the vivid enthusiasms of youth, it may be lost and not found. The Minister who has it, carries with him everywhere the argument from which there is no appeal. The minister who has it not may labor pathetically with the tools of logic and rhetoric but at the end he will be desolate of spirit because of the little that his hands have built.

It is an old story this, yet we cannot get away from it, that the world bows before soul. What it wants to know about our religion is not so much that it is reasonable as that it is real. One of Athanasius’ enemies wrote about him that he was "a dwarf and no man"; but once Athanasius rose to defend the faith that was dearer than his life and he was a man of giant stature and no dwarf. Vast audiences that were tempted to laugh at his puny figure and mean appearance, drew faith and hope and love and zeal from the Christ-illuminated soul of this apostolic preacher.

I would commend the study of Athanasius to any one who has not formed the true idea in his mind of the royalty of the pulpit, and that it is to be maintained in this world as the one place where the truth of God is to be proclaimed without fear or favor. Woe to that preacher who does not keep within his breast an incorruptible conscience, whose vision of God is clouded by unworthy fear of his audience, and whose self-respect is undermined by unmanly compromises and surrenders to placate wealthy or influential patrons! Everybody knows the temptation to substitute for the high and difficult vocation of a prophet of Truth, the amiable ambition to please a congregation. Many well-meaning ministers have spent weary years cajoling and flattering their people, softening down the rebukes of the Gospel, and lining Christ’s hard sayings with velvet till the most touchy consciences in the pews of Christendom can come in contact with them without a shock. It might seem as if some preachers had laid down as a law for themselves to make nobody uncomfortable whose income was more than L200 ($1OOO) a year. Quite recently I heard a sermon on luxury in a fashionable West-End church in London; and as the preacher took pains to explain that Christ’s life was so different from ours that we could not imitate its externals, I was conscious of that pleasant rustle of silk and satin which gently indicated the relief of the hearers. I doubt whether anything has done so much harm to the pulpit as the impression which has gone abroad, that we preachers do not face the tremendous sayings of Christ with real faith and courage, but rather that we fall back on critical theories, and explain to our amenable congregations that the more difficult commands of Christ are probably textual corruptions due to a later and ascetic age, and in any case need not vex the peace or alter the conduct of the twentieth century. Yet these sayings of Jesus blaze and burn. What use is our New Testament if it is not a very furnace of Truth into which men’s souls are plunged and purified, and saved so as by fire?

I have no belief whatever in ascetic monastic systems, which seem to me to require an unchristian, and even anti-Christian theory of life. But I confess to you I am impressed by the fact that both Athanasius and Chrysostom had a monastic preparation for their public ministry. Youth needs to be austere with itself. Self-discipline can be learned in better places than the cell of the anchorite, but it must be learned if the ministry is not to make shipwreck. These men learned how to do without things; they learned to be content with simplicity; they learned that life "consisteth not in the abundance of the things a man possesseth." They definitely crucified some of the subordinate ambitions. They got fairly through the crust of civilization and made contact with the realities that lie at its heart. Such men when they come to deal with shams and illusions are apt to be severe iconoclasts, like Elijah and John the Baptist, but they know how to sear men’s souls and shake their consciences.

Sometimes I am tempted to think that the defect of our modern ministerial preparation for the ministry is that we have too much to enjoy and too little to endure. When we go out into the arena our thews and sinews are too soft; and in the first shock we go down in the dust, and sometimes it takes bitter years to find our feet. When we are dependent on the superfluities of life we are not so likely to be able to speak out our truth, if by so doing we may be in danger of losing them. Do not let me be misunderstood. I am the last man to underrate to you the virtues of tact and discretion. It was Athanasius’ distinction that his own people loved him and trusted him without reserve. He had the two endowments with which any minister can go far--common sense and the gift of humor. Besides, I think too highly of mankind to believe that as a rule they resent the ministry that deals faithfully and affectionately with them. Dr. Dale used to say that people talked of saying faithful things when they meant saying disagreeable things; and the communicated love of Christ to our hearts ought ever to forbid us to be censorious, offensive and truculent where our duty is to speak the truth with love. I have not intended to leave that side of things out of sight. But if Athanasius and his heroic ministry has one message more than another for us, it is as to the sovereignty of the Truth we hold over all human souls, and the royalty of the preacher’s office when he knows that God has given to him a message which all without distinction must hear and heed. The second aspect of Athanasius’ ministry which I would ask you to consider is the preacher as controversialist. When we take down our histories and read the extraordinary story of how an abstract theological proposition, framed in the curiously flabby mind of Arius, set the world on fire, we are oppressed by a sense of despair of ever being able to understand an age in which such things could be. Neither do the facts become more intelligible as we see how secular policies were affected by it, and the fortunes of an empire fluctuated as the Arian tide flowed or ebbed. But after all, human destinies are settled in the world of thought and ideas. The doctrine of Homoousianism in the mouth of Athanasius meant the unity of empire even as the word Justification on the lips of Luther meant the Reformation of Europe and a free Western civilization. Faber threw into the verse of a hymn a great truth when he wrote:

Workman of God! oh lose not heart, But learn what Gad is like; And in the darkest battlefield Thou shalt know where to strike." That is why I take it the first content of the Church’s consciousness must be to know "what God is like"; otherwise its very fighting power is paralyzed, and its blows are aimed uncertainly. It does not surprise me, therefore, that the first great controversy in the Christian Church should be in regard to the nature of God; and we shall generally be agreed that as against the crude and fatuous theory of Arius, Athanasius’ protest for the unity of the Godhead was infinitely more noble and dignified; even as the orations of Athanasius are a monument of massive thought and argument in comparison with the dervish-like jingles in which Arius endeavored to popularize his pet heresy. But it is quite true that from the far shore on which we stand we look across "the dark backward and abysm of time," and see those ages of theological cyclone and volcanic action with wondering gaze. That is very largely because we have ourselves fallen upon the inglorious days of Quietism. It is a strange irony if you come to think of it that sluggishness and apathy mark our religious life today in what we speak of as the strenuous West, and that this great Arian controversy was fought out with frenzied fervor in what we speak of as the still and tranquil Orient. Certainly the Orient was not sluggish and stagnant when Athanasius was fighting the world for his faith.

You remember the cynic historian’s description of how the great problems laid their grip of every huckster in the marketplace, who, before he served you with merchandise, or counted out your small change, would demand your opinion as to the relations of the Persons of the Godhead. Very likely, I grant, to produce a plague of theological prigs! But would it do us any harm to day, in your land or in mine, if some great question of eternal things were once again to be supreme, and to awaken in the chattering chaffering crowds of the market-places a higher curiosity? Is it after all so noble and superior an attitude of mind, this modern one of ours, that nothing matters; that high thoughts about Deity are wasted time; that sublime speculations and doctrinal controversies are the signs of an inferior and degenerate age? I am not here to apologize for the controversial language of Athanasius. Dean Stanley made a careful but not exhaustive collection of his favorite epithets for his theological opponents--" devils, antichrists, maniacs, Jews, polytheists, atheists, dogs, wolves, lions, hares, chameleons, hydras, eels, cuttlefish, gnats, beetles, leeches." His vocabulary, it is plain, might have won for him distinction in a political career. But in theology to day we have reached serene heights of unruffled calm. The chaste soul of the most definite of our modern dogmatists would never be conscious of sufficient provocation to depart from the language of self-possession and politeness even if he indubitably believed that the errors of some other teacher were poisoning men’s souls. But do we not suggest a contrast Theology today is for the most part a product of the academic life. In the days of Athanasius it was hammered out in the wilderness and the cell. Men forged their beliefs, like thunderbolts, at the center of the storm. The faiths that clothed their souls were tested in the furnace heated sevenfold. You can still tell the difference between the article of a creed cunningly worded to evade a difficulty, conciliate a doubter or confound an enemy, and an affirmation which is the cry of a great soul for some truth which is a fixed star in its firmament and without which it will blunder along its way. It is this passionate sincerity that lends dignity to controversy. As we read the story, all Athanasius’ extravagances and personalities drop away from him, and we only see the prophet who cared so supremely for the glory of his God and the honor of his Savior, that he was prepared to stand alone against the world, until the truth he saw was recognized and acknowledged by all. My brethren, it is an open question with me whether either the evils of controversy or the gains of compromise are as great as we often think them. Controversy is noble or ignoble according to the spirit in which it is conducted. What is referred to, ad nauseam, as the virtue of compromise and accommodation usually means the painful discovery of some colorless and almost meaningless formula in which two antagonistic ideas, whittled down to their minimum, are supposed to be peaceably interred. I am always comforted to know that you cannot really bury any belief alive. You cannot bury it until you can truly say, "peace to its ashes." It belongs to the glory of Athanasius that, even living when he did, he had no belief in the coercion of conscience by force. He was, rather, like the dear old priest in Praed’s poem, who "Held, in spite of all his learning, That if a man’s belief is bad It will not be improved by burning." This zealot for truth, and even for dogma, believed in fighting his battle out with the weapon of argument, reason and persuasion, and winning the only victory that is honor-able to a Christian combatant. Nobody expects that our battles of today or to-morrow will prove a reproduction of the old Arian strife; though there are more unlikely things than a keen revival one of these days of a controversy as to the being of God and the nature of the relations between the Father and the Son. But if it should not be your lot to live through an age of theological dispute, there are other controversies upon us in which the knights of the Church of Jesus may not refuse to quit them like men. There has never been a generation yet in which the Lord has not had a controversy with His people; and it is a test of our right to be where we are, whether we hear the Lord’s controversy or not. We cannot rank ourselves under the Christian flag without conceding certain human rights, which no existing social system that I know of, adequately and practically interprets. The contrast between the Sermon on the Mount and a civilization like that of Europe, based on force and fear, does not grow less violent as our people become more intelligent. Nor can a civilization that includes the extremes of pampered luxury and grinding poverty live in the light of a renascent Christian ethics. Controversy there must be on behalf of the unity of humanity as strong and uncompromising as Athanasius ever waged for the unity of Deity. When many of you go forth to the field where in Milton’s words "immortal garlands are to be won not without dust and heat"; when in the war for Christian Righteousness as well as for the Christian Faith you flash your maiden swords, I can only beseech you that the spirit of your warfare may be the spirit which our Captain made unique--a love that no bitterness can alienate, a peace that no strife can disturb, and a gaiety of soul which can take the rubs and knocks without melancholy, acrimony, or self-pity.

I turn now to a brief consideration of the life and work of Chrysostom, who has always enjoyed a place of preeminence among Christian preachers and the world’s famous orators, and who may suggest many lessons to the more ambitious among us who are resolved to achieve and to practice the craft of a master of assemblies. So far as I know, Chrysostom was the first preacher to bring to the service of the Gospel all the arts of oratory which are relied upon in the law-courts and the forum. Nobody knew better than he how to take captive the intellects of his hearers in the toils of a closely-knit argument; and, indeed, it would be true to say that he observed the golden rule that rhetoric should always be the servant of logic, even as in a great picture the absence of accuracy of drawing and perspective can never be wholly atoned for by the most resplendent coloring. First of all, he knew clearly where he was going, and saw to it that his hearers could not fail to know. Afterwards he devoted all the resources of his knowledge and imagination to add to the interest and profit of the journey. He must indeed have been a formidable critic and antagonist, for his powers of irony and satire were unrivaled, and no person in high place who came under his scathing censures was ever likely to forget it. Satire is a dangerous weapon to handle; and only a kindly and genial form of it is ever likely to produce a Christian end in repentance or conversion; and perhaps in his last years of exile and persecution, Chrysostom himself may have wondered whether other weapons than the lash of fiery and sarcastic speech might not have profited the kingdom of God more. Moreover, if satire is always a questionable instrument for achieving the real ends of preaching, rhetoric is equally an indulgence that needs to be carefully guarded. Chrysostom’s courage in rebuking the Empress Eudocia was admirable, but his task would have been many times easier if he had not allowed himself to be carried away at first on the tide of rhetoric, to inflated and fulsome panegyric and adulation.

Having uttered those two warnings, I go on to say that Chrysostom’s style is a model of what Christian eloquence at its highest can be. You and I live in a time when, as I shall often have occasion to insist, the preacher has lost the sense of the splendor and romance of his calling. This loss has affected us in many ways. The colors have faded out of our sky. The universe has turned gray around us. The glory and radiance of the dawn have suffered some eclipse. Our range of vision, and our confidence of victory are alike attenuated. In consequence, that highest form of rhetoric which is the glow and poetry of faith and enthusiasm becomes almost impossible to us. For rhetoric is the natural language of emotion and imagination. Where there is no real depth of feeling it is artificial and stilted and tiresome. But when the passion of the heart is strong and deep it will express itself with some splendor of Pre-Raphaelite coloring. The preacher has never really been thrilled by the ideal of his vocation who has not wanted to set it to music, as Robert Burns set Nature to song, or as Turner transferred her glories to canvas.

It is hardly necessary to say that the rhetoric of Chrysostom has little or nothing in common with that disease of the pulpit egoist which manifests itself in pretentiousness and polysyllables. If you want the model of peerless eloquence it is to be found in the most familiar passage of the New Testament, and it may interest you to count the words which are of more than one syllable, "Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." There are great passages in Lincoln and in Bright--our two supreme modern masters of Saxon speech--which are as simple as this, and yet similarly charged with emotion that leaves none of us unaffected. No, rhetoric is a nobler thing than the turgid recital of redundant epithets and high-sounding substantives. To how small a modicum of thought can some rhetorical efforts be reduced when you have shaken the sawdust out I But as against the modern taste for Christianity in capsules, and for the tersest, most prosaic and least emotional statement of fact and argument, I do venture to break a lance for Chrysostom. The supreme merit of Chrysostom is that he never for one moment forgets that he is dealing with human beings and human life. He is not solely concerned with making good certain logical or theological propositions. While his legal training is invaluable to him, his is no narrow canonistical intellect, nor is his outlook upon mankind less human because of the careful development of his reasoning powers. Before his eyes the great pageantry of the people’s life always moves; and in his sermons you will find a vivid picture of his times. On his canvas are brilliant splashes of color; for it was his object to hold up the mirror to the multitude and compel them to see what their existence was like. It has been truly said that the pages of Chrysostom present us with a "cosmical panorama." The pomp and pride of the Imperial court, and the luxurious mode of life of an Oriental aristocracy are so powerfully portrayed, that after fifteen hundred years you can almost hear the strains of music at some princely banquet or be conscious of the perfumes that scented the raiment of the feasters. Equally lifelike are his descriptions of the hippodrome, with its wild scenes of racing and gaming; while, if I may quote again, "Even the rope-dancers, jugglers, conjurers, fortune-tellers, buffoons, mountebanks mingled with grave philosophers with long beards, staff and cloak, were grouped together in his homiletical sketches."

Here lies his charm and his power. This man of giant brain, and legal and monastic training, is nevertheless himself a human being, with a warm heart and wide knowledge of his brothers and sisters in the life of his city. He has mingled with them in their pleasures, has pitied their follies, sympathized with their temptations, trembled for their sins, wept with them for their griefs, and laughed with them in their frolics and diversions. The people flocked to him and hung upon his lips, not only because of his oratory, but because he knew them so well, loved them so much, and talked to them about those actual homely facts of daily life which make up the greater part of every one’s existence.

Here then we have two qualities in Chrysostom which in their combination make him unique--he is a Man of the Word and a Man of the World. The Homilies of Chrysostom are to me a phenomenal production. In their close and minute analysis of Scripture, and courage of exposition they are an anticipation of the best modern criticism. Chrysostom himself is saturated with the Scripture, and is determined that his audiences shall be taught to base their lives upon the principle of Holy Writ. In those days when the writings of the New Testament were comparatively so recent, and were so little known to the masses, this great preacher felt that their best hope of progress lay in their systematic education in the letter and spirit of the Scriptures of our faith. He thus made himself the popular interpreter of the Christian documents, always endeavouring to get at the exact sense, and to preach the truth honestly and fearlessly. At the same time by virtue of his catholic experience he is, in the best sense of a much-abused term, a man of the world; and he is resolute to apply the Gospel ethics over the whole wide area of human life and affairs. That is why he must know at first hand, life at the court, life in the bazaars, life at the games, and life in the streets, the school, the homes of the people. Again and again we find him, with all his admiration for the devout monk, protesting that Christ’s laws and privileges are for all men and women without exception and "not for solitaries only." If it be not possible, he argues, in the secular life, and in wedded life, to attain the Beatitudes, then Christ has destroyed, and not saved, all men. No preacher in all the Christian ages had a clearer conception of the great truth that the Evangel of Life in Christ is for all people, at all times and in all places, and that no exigencies of business, politics or pleasure can relieve any of us of the duty of obedience to the laws of the kingdom of God.

I notice further for our own instruction that the Homilies of Chrysostom are not the expositions of a lecturer, but, what is very different, the expositions of a preacher. There is a very wide contrast between one who is only a teacher, an expositor, a lecturer, an essayist, and one who is a preacher and a prophet. It has always seemed to me that there is much force in the modern appeal for more expository preaching. I only submit that it must be preaching. The class-room is one place, the pulpit is another. The closest possible application is needful in the study if we are to be sound interpreters of the Gospel; and the new Renaissance which some of us will live to see, when the interest of the people will be rekindled in the best and greatest of all books, may very likely come along the line of systematic and scientific exposition. But we have got to preach our exposition. I mean, that the same passion for souls, the same constraining love of humanity, must burn and glow in our expository discourses that make it possible to warm our hearts at Chrysostom’s Homilies to the present day. Men must be brought to see that in the Bible one end is sought by divers means and in divers portions, and that end is the salvation and happiness of all mankind. In other words if the world is to be interested in the Bible, it must be convinced that the Bible is interested in the world; and that the modern world is made up of just the same great root problems of life and death, joy and sorrow, vice and virtue that Isaiah wrestled with, and on which the Lord Christ shed His ineffable and unfading light. The advent of Chrysostom is, I think, the dawn of a new epoch in preaching. True, there is nothing new in the authority which he asserted for his message. In his courage and freedom in dealing with the wealthy and highly-placed he was the worthy contemporary of Athanasius. There was nothing new in the risks he ran, or the afflictions he suffered. He was one of those who well knew that the preacher’s lot is a desperate war with organized evil and throned iniquity. The length of his public ministry is a tribute to his moral ascendancy. But we are not astonished, though we may stand aghast, when at last the forces of hell are let loose upon him, and once more in history Jezebel drives Elijah to exile and the desert, though in this case the prophet was to return no more. The long-drawn-out agony of his last exile it is not for me to describe. He died in that same far lone spot among the mountains of Asia Minor, where many centuries afterwards another martyr-evangelist, Henry Martyn, burned out for God. His dust rested there until the day when with pontifical splendor amid the tears and reverence of a subsequent generation and solemn prayers and penances of princes and people, it was translated to the City of Constantine where the better part of his life work had been done.

It has been my aim that the significant facts about these two great pulpit orators should emphasize themselves for us without my italicizing them. But perhaps by way of summary I may gather together two or three suggestions that are well worth your consideration. I think we want a new pulpit oratory that will be free from the vice of turgid rhetoric, but that will be the rich fruit of a new vision of our world-conquering Faith. Something has got to happen to us; some magic change must pass over our spirits; and beneath the inspiration of the new revelation of Deity and Humanity our speech will clothe itself with color and beauty as naturally and inevitably as the spring adorns and decorates the earth. I am one of those who believe that the churches have never been so rich in scholarship, and so competent in criticism. But I am not sure that any human being has been inspired to attempt the heights of love and life because he has been thrilled with the realization of the composite character of the Book of Genesis. Science is the one authority left, I know, to which we all do obeisance, and in the presence of which we take off our shoes from our feet. But I sometimes imagine the mere scientist standing in the presence of the wonder and glory of Niagara, with its flashing, flying waters, and iridescent waves, and summing it all up in the terse and eloquent formula H20. I am all for scientific accuracy and precision; but I confess that the Bible is more to me than is summed up in the formulas of critical analysis, Its magic, its mystery, its poetry, its glory escape the skill of those patient investigators who track its secret in the dissecting room. Athanasius’ theology may have been wrong; but nothing can destroy the fact that he trod the desert as he trod the marble halls of princes bathed in the light that never was on sea or land. Let us be quite certain that in our honest ambition to understand all mysteries and all knowledge we are not strangers to that experience of the Love Divine of which there is no scientific explanation possible except that it is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit that is given unto us.

Once more, let us think of these two great apostles together. If I may make the rough distinction, Athanasius preached more about Deity and Chrysostom more about humanity. Chrysostom I think knew men better, and Athanasius I think knew God better. I have spoken to little purpose if I have failed to bring home to my hearers, that I believe we need men in the ministry who know and sympathize with human life in all its phases. But today I close upon the other note. It is much easier to talk about men than to talk about God. It is a rarer thing to find in the pulpit a man whose mind moves naturally and easily in the sublimest of all themes and experiences, than to find a man in the pulpit who can talk wisely and helpfully about human life. But it is the condemnation of the Christian preacher when his audience comes to feel that though he knows them very well, he cannot teach them to know God, whom to know is life eternal. Wordsworth’s lark, as you remember, with nest upon the earth, was nevertheless born to the freedom of the upper air, and knew the secret of the infinite blue, and the Christian prophet and orator of to-morrow, I doubt not, must equally be master of the two worlds "True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home."