1.E 04. The Power of Imagination

The Power of Imagination.

Yet, despite all these necessary differences, there are certain important elements that enter into all ministries. And the first element on which your preaching will largely depend for power and success, you will perhaps be surprised to learn, is Imagination, which I regard as the most important of all the elements that go to make the preacher. But you must not understand me to mean the imagination as the creator of fiction, and still less as the factor of embellishment. The imagination in its relations to art and beauty is one thing; and in its relations to moral truth it is another thing, of the most substantial character. Imagination of this kind is the true germ of faith; it is the power of conceiving as definite the things which are invisible to the senses of giving them distinct shape. And this, not merely in your own thoughts, but with the power of presenting the things which experience cannot primarily teach to other people’s minds, so that they shall be just as obvious as though seen with the bodily eye.

Imagination of this kind is a most vital element in preaching. If we presented to people things we had seen, we should have all their bodily organism in our favour. My impression is, that the fountain of strength in every Christian ministry is the power of the minister himself to realize God present, and to present him to the people, No ministry can be long, various, rich, and fruitful, I think, except from that root. We hear a great deal about the breadth of the pulpit, and about the variety of the pulpit, and about carrying the truth home to men’s hearts. I have said a great deal to you about it, and shall say more. I claim that the pulpit has a right and a duty to discuss social questions, moral questions in politics, slavery, War, peace, and the intercourse of nations. It has a right to discuss commerce, industry, political economy; everything from the rooftree to the foundation-stone of the household, and everything that is of interest in the State. You have a duty to speak of all these things. There is not so broad a platform in the world as the Christian pulpit, nor an air so free as the heavenly air that overhangs it. You have a right and a duty to preach on all these things; but if you make your ministry to stand on them, it will be barren. It will be rather a lectureship than a Christian ministry.

It will be secular, and will become secularized. The real root and secret of power, after all, in the pulpit, is the preaching of the invisible God to the people as an ever-present God. The preacher, then, must have the greatness of the God-power in his soul; and when he is himself inspired with it and filled with it so familiarly that always and everywhere it is the influence under which he looks out at man, at pleasure, at honour, and at all the vicissitudes of human life still standing under the shadow of God’s presence, he has the power of God with man when he conies to speak of the truths of the gospel as affecting human procedure. This power of conceiving of invisible things does not only precede in point of time, but it underlies, and is dynamically superior to, anything else.

Now, imagination is indispensable to the formation of any clear and distinct ideas of God the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost. For myself, I am compelled to say that I must form an ideal of God through his Son, Jesus Christ. Christ is in dispensable to me. My nature needs to fashion the thought of God, though I know him to be a Spirit, into something that shall nearly or remotely represent that which I know. I hold before my mind a glorified form, therefore; but, after all the glory, whatever may be the nimbus and the effluence around about it, it is to me the form of a glorified man. And I therefore fashion to myself, out of the spirit, that which has to me, as it were, a divine presence and a divine being namely, a divine man. But now come the attributal elements, the fashioning of the disposition; and not only that, but a fashioning of the whole interior. I bring to you some day the face, in miniature, of one very beautiful. You look upon it, and say, “ Who is that? “ I describe the person and give you the name. You say, “ It is a beautiful face.” But you do not, after looking at it, feel that you are acquainted with the person.

Now I will take you home with me and introduce you to the friend whose name belongs to this picture; but still you would not feel that you knew her.

You salute her morning and evening, converse with her, and take part in the social festivities. You admire her tact, her delicacy, and her beauty. You say the acquaintance opens well. She seems to you very lady -like and attractive. On the Sabbath-day the Bible-class assembles, and you go there with your friend. In the recitations and the low-toned conversations she shows great knowledge and moral feeling, a bright intellect, and marvellous discrimination. But, still, you do not feel that you know her. Then you fall sick, and experience that delicious interval just after a severe illness, which one sometimes has, the coming dawn after a long night, heralding the morning of returning health. In that time the hours are to be filled up, and she becomes a ministering angel unto you. She is full of resources for your comfort. You notice the wisdom of her management, the power she has to stimulate thought, to play with the imagination, and to cheer the heart. I am not now speaking of one to whom you are to be affianced. It is not for you; only you are making the acquaintance of one whose portrait you had seen, but nothing more. And by thus living in communion with you, she has affected you, little by little, in such a manner that it has been brought home to you; and you say, “ I have found a friend! “ Well, who was she? Did you know her when you first saw her portrait? Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ when you merely see his portrait, as it were, in the Evangelists? Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ when you simply range through his words of wisdom, and take them, germ-words as they are, with all the fulness that you can? No, not until you have been intimate with him, and have had your hearts lifted up in their noblest elements into that serener air through which God only communicates. It is not until you have been in this atmosphere, not only on the Lord’s day, but on the intervening days. It is not until, by the Holy Spirit, you have been made sensitive in every part, and the Lord Jesus Christ becomes chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely. It is not until you have the power to transfuse Jesus Christ into your whole life that you know him, until there is something in the morning dawn that brings you the thought of him, in the hush of the evening, at noon time, in the budding and springing of the trees, in the singing of the birds, when you sit listless on the grass in the summer, in the retreats of man, in the cities and towns, with the fertile power of suggestion and association by which you feel that the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof. When you know him in all the boundless domain of nature, every thing speaks to you of your Lord Jesus Christ. Just so, in your father’s house, every room speaks to you of your mother who is gone, every stair in the staircase, every sound of the bell, every tick of the clock, and everything under the roof, bring back to you her memory. It is not until Jesus Christ fills the soul full, and he is yours, born into you, made familiar, rich, and various, touching something in every part of your nature, and spreading out over all the things around about you, that you have the imagination to conceive of the Lord Jesus Christ, and you have a living conception of him, which you can teach and present to others. But this imagination is required still more vividly in the second step, namely, the power to throw out your conceptions before others, and such a preaching of the Lord Jesus Christ as shall bring him home to your hearers. How will you undertake to do this?

You will have little children to deal with. You will have persons of great practical sense, but of very little imagination, if any. You will have persons of a wayward, coarse temperament, and again others of a fine, sensitive nature. You will have those who take moral impressions with extreme facility, and who understand analogies and illustra tions; and you will have others who understand nothing of this kind. These persons you must imbue with a sense of Christ’s presence with them. This is the prime question in your ministerial life, how to bring Jesus Christ home to men, so that he shall be to them what he is to you. You may present Christ to them historically and far be it from me to say that you must not put great emphasis upon the historical study of Christ but you must remember that Christ, as he was eighteen hundred years ago, interpreted by the letter, is not a living Christ.

It is an historical picture, but it is not a live Christ.

Thence must you get your materials, out of which to make the living faith. Many a minister believes that after he has been delivering a series of sermons on the life and times of Christ, he has been preaching Christ. He has been merely preaching about him, not preaching him. There is many a minister who has been preaching the philosophy of Christ, that is, a view of Christ in which, with infinite refinements and cultured arguments, he makes him one of the persons in the Trinity, who is jealous for his service, jealous for his honour, exactly discriminating where the line of infinity comes down and touches the line of finity, and pugnacious all along that line, and then thinks that he has been preaching Christ. Some ministers think that they have been preaching Christ when they have been discoursing about the relations of Christ to the law, the nature of his sufferings, how it was necessary that he should suffer, what the effect of his suffering was upon the universe, and what was the nature of the effect of his suffering upon divine law, and on the divine sense of justice. They work out of the life and times of Christ, and out of his sufferings and death, a theory of Atonement, or, as it is called, a “ Plan of Salvation,” and present that to men, and then they think they have presented Christ.

Now, I am not saying that you should not discuss such themes, but only that you should not suppose in so doing you have been preaching Christ. You cannot do it in that way. To preach Christ is to make such a presentation of him as shall fill those who hear you. They must be made to conceive it in them selves, and he must be to them a live Saviour, as he is to you. One of the noblest expressions of Paul is where he exclaims, “Christ who died, yea, rather, who liveth,” as if he bounded back from the thought of speaking about Christ as dead. He is one who liveth again and reigneth in the heavens over all the earth.

There is danger of a mistake being made here.

You might ask me if you ought not to preach atonement. Yes. Ought you not, also, to preach the nature, sufferings, and death of Christ? Yes, provided you will not suppose you understand more than you really do on these subjects. There is much in that direction that may contribute to instruction; but it seems to me that what you need, what I need, and what the community needs, is that, in a world full of penalty, where aches, pains, tears, sighs, and groans bear witness to divine justice where, from the beginning, groanings and travailings have testified that God is an avenger there shall be brought out from this discouraging background the truth of the gospel, that God loves mankind, and would not that they die. He is the God that shall wipe away the tears from every eye. He is the God that shall put out with the brightness of his face the light of the sun and of the moon. He shall put his arm around about men, and comfort them as a mother her child. That is the love of God in Christ Jesus. With this we would stimulate men when they are sluggish, would develop their better natures, give them hope in a future life, cheer them onward in the path of duty, and give them confidence in immortality and eternity; for in God we live and move, and have our being. The imagination, then, is that power of the mind by which it conceives of invisible things, and is able to present them as though they were visible to others. That is one of its most transcendent offices.

It is the quality which of necessity must belong to the ministry. The functions of the preacher require it. In godly families it was, formerly, the habit to discourage the imagination, or to use it only occasionally. They misconceived its glorious functions.

It is, I repeat, the very marrow of faith, or that power by which we see the invisible and make others see it. It is the power to bring from the depths the things that are hidden from the bodily eye. A ministry enriched by this noble faculty will not and cannot wear out, and the preacher’s people will never be tired of listening to him. Did you ever hear anybody say that spring has been worn out? It has been coming for thousands of years, and it is just as sweet, just as welcome, and just as new, as if the birds sang for the first time; and so it will be for a thousand years to come. These great processes of nature that are continually recurring can not weary us. But discussions of the systems of theology will. Men get accustomed to repetitions of the same thoughts; but there is something in the love of God and Jesus Christ, and in the application of these things to the human soul, that will give an ever-varying freshness to a ministry which occupies itself with the contemplation and teaching of this law of love, and applying the knowledge to all the varying wants and shifting phases of the congregation. Even though you are forty years in one parish, you will never have finished your preaching, and you will not tire your people.