1.B 04. Fertility in Subjects
Fertility in Subjects.
Sympathy with your people, insight of their condition, a study of the moral remedies, this will give endless diversity and fertility to your subjects for sermons. He that preaches out of a system of theology soon runs his round and returns on his track.
He that preaches out of a sympathy with living men will sooner exhaust the ocean or the clouds of water, than his pulpit of material. It is true that subjects must be studied; that principles must be traced, that facts must be collected and arranged, that books must be studied, that systems must be understood. But all this is far back of preaching. It is general preparation. Out of the stores thus accumulated one must select for sermons, on the principle that a physician selects for remedies for the sick, or stewards provide food for the household, with an eye on the persons to be treated. The wants of your people must set back into the sermon, and give to it depth, direction, and current. Preaching is sometimes word brooding; sometimes it is a flash of light to those in darkness; sometimes a basket of golden fruit to the hungry, a cordial to the comfortless, all to all, just as Christ is All in All! You will very soon come, in your parish life, to the habit of thinking more about your people and what you shall do for them than about your sermons and what you shall talk about. That is a good sign. Just as soon as you find yourself thinking, on Monday or Tuesday, Now, here are these persons, or this class,” you run over your list and study your people, “ what shall I do for them (“ you will get some idea what you need to do. Sometimes it is to call men from their sins; sometimes to repress the malign; sometimes to encourage hope in the faint-hearted; sometimes to instruct the understanding; sometimes to broaden men’s knowledge, and move them off of their prejudices. There are a thousand things to do. A preacher is a carpenter, building a house. You ought to know, as the house goes up, what you shall do next. Or, if it be built, and you are to furnish the house, you are to determine what is to be its furniture, and how distributed. You will know that this room is not lighted, or that room is not warmed.
Wherever you go among your people, you will, to use the mercantile figure, “ be taking account of stock.” That will suggest an endless number of subjects, and these subjects will turn you back to the New Testament to see what you can find there; and that will send you back to Nature, where you will see what is in God’s other great revelation. In this way you will grow fertile. You will not be troubled in looking for subjects on which to write sermons; your only trouble will be to find opportu nities for delivering sermons. I know that some men are more fertile than others; but a sympathetic study of human life is a remedy for uniform theology.