1.B 05. Style

Style. The effect of this notion of preaching from sympathy with living men rather than from sympathy with any particular system of thought upon the preacher’s style will be very great. I have often heard ministers in private conversation, and said to myself, “ Would to God you would do so in the pulpit! “ But the moment they are in the pulpit they fall into their scholastic, artificial style, which runs through the whole ministerial life. A man will talk to you naturally, and say, “ I do wish you would come down to-night; the young people had the promise of your coming, and why won’t you come? “sweet, natural, pleading, persuasive. Yet he will go into the desk, where prayer is to be made in a persuasive tone, and he will begin addressing the Lord with a drawling, whining falsetto in voice, and a worse falsetto in morals. He has thrown him self out of his proper self into a ministerial self a very different thing! A man will stop you in the street and discourse with you there, and be just as limber and affable in his sentences, just as curt and direct and crisp and simple in conversational vernacular as any one; and yet in the pulpit, two-thirds of what he has to say will be Latin periphrases woven together; three members on one side the sentence-pivot, balanced by three members on the other, and that recurring all the time. This style is false to everything but books. It may be all in sympathy with them; but no man in earnest, talking to his fellow-men with a purpose, falls into that artificial style. The man who preaches from the heart to the heart can hardly help preaching so that there shall be a naturalness in his style, and that will be the best style for him. I have known men who would be excellent ministers, if it were not, first, for their lives; secondly, for their theology; and thirdly, for their style.

One other point. I was asked yesterday if I would say a few words as to “the call.” I have already indicated a word as to the call for the min istry. Practically, it acts in this way. Young men are sometimes brought up to it, as I was. I never had any choice about it. My father had eight sons.

Only two of them ever tried to get away from preaching; and they did not succeed. The other six went right into the ministry just as naturally as they went into manhood. Therefore, as far aspersonal experience is concerned, I have nothing to say.

I have observed, however, in classes in college, and elsewhere, that where young men have not been brought up to believe all through their childhood that they were to be ministers, they generally have the question brought to their minds in some serious mood, whether they ought to go into the law, or into medicine, or to be civil engineers, or whether they ought to go into the ministry. They think about it a good while, and at last it is borne in upon them, without any special reason, that they had better preach; and they resolve to do it. These are young men who ordinarily cannot form judgments; they drift. When you look beyond this number, what are some of the elements that fit a man for the life of a true Christian minister?

I say, first, the preacher ought to be a man who is fruitful in moral ideas, has a genius for them, as distinguished from every other kind of ideas. We know what it is to have a genius for arithmetical or mathematical ideas, for musical ideas, or for aesthetic or art ideas. A tendency in the direction of moral ideas, whether developed or susceptible of being developed, is a prime quality. A second quality fitting a man for the Christian ministry, is the power of moving men. If a man is cold and unsympathetic, perhaps he may be able to make himself over; but if he cannot, he had better not go into the ministry. It will be a hard task for such a one. But a man that has quick sympathy, apprehensiveness of men, intuition of human nature, has eminent qualifications for a minister. Every merchant, who is a true merchant, has to know how to deal with his customers. The moment they come into the store he reads them. A good jury lawyer must have the same aptitude. We are all the time obliged to use these qualities the knowledge of men, the power of managing men. A real master of men, when one draws near to him, forms a judgment of the new-comer just as instinctively and as quickly as of a locomotive or a horse. (Do you ever see a fine horse go by and not take his points? Then your education has been neglected.) A minister who I walks down a whole street and sees nobody, who? only looks inside of himself, is but half a minister.