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  WRITINGS OF CHARLES L GOODELL
  by Charles L. Goodell
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A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by Charles L. Goodell,
compiled for study and devotional reading.

  Chapters: 24

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS
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    1. 01.00. Heralds of a Passion
    2. 01.01.     CHAPTER I - THE PASSION OF JESUS
    3. 01.02.     CHAPTER II - THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS
    4. 01.03.     CHAPTER III - HERALDS OF A PASSION
    5. 01.04.     CHAPTER IV - HOLY BOLDNESS
    6. 01.05.     CHAPTER V - CULTURE A LOAD OR A LIFT
    7. 01.06.     CHAPTER VI - THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS
    8. 01.07.     CHAPTER VII - THE PASSION OF THE GBEAT EVANGELISTS
    9. 01.08.     CHAPTER VIII - THE TEACHER’S PASSION
   10. 01.09.     CHAPTER IX - THE PASSION OP THE CHURCH
   11. 01.10.     CHAPTER X - THE PASSION FOR SERVICE
   12. 01.11.     CHAPTER XI  - HOW TO NOURISH THE SACRED FIRE
   13. 02.00. How to Build a Church.
   14. 02.000.     Introductiion
   15. 02.01.     The Pastor Saving Souls
   16. 02.02.     The Pastor in the Pulpit
   17. 02.03.     The Pastor in the Parish
   18. 02.04.     The Pastor among the Youth
   19. 02.05.     The Pastor in the Prayer Meeting
   20. 02.06.     The Pastor dealing with Skepticism
   21. 02.07.     The Pastor in Revivals
   22. 02.08.     The Privilege op Teaching God's Word ... by Mrs. C. L. Goodell
   23. 02.09.     Ministers' Wives
   24. 02.10.     Woman's Work in Home Evangelization

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  CHAPTER 1: 01.00. HERALDS OF A PASSION
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Heralds of a Passion Rev. Charles L. Goodell, D.D. by Rev. Charles L. Goodell,
D.D.

Secretary, Commission On Evangelism and Life Service of the Federal Council of
the Churches of Christ in America

New York George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1921 by George H. Doran Company Printed in the United States of
America

731980 to My True Friend Judge Amos L. Beaty

FOREWORD

I think it fair to my reader, my booK and myself to guard at the outset against
any possible misapprehension as to the form and purpose of my message. Lest any
one should be misled by the word “ Passion” in my title and its recurrence
through many chapters, I hasten to say this book is no plea for emotionalism or
sentimentalism of any sort. I am not interested in turning the steam on the
whistle; my concern is that there shall be fire under the boiler. Nothing in
this book can be construed as an appeal to fear, or self-love, or a spineless
mysticism, or against criticism, high or low. If scholars have brought virgin
gold to view, if criticism has cut an old truth into finer facets, no one will
welcome that more than I. Each additional discovery makes the whole Christian
world richer. It is a common treasure in which men of all shades of opinion
should rejoice.

You may be wiser than I, and that is well, not because it is a treasure over
which you may gloat, but because it supplies you with the means to be of
greater. service to your kind. He who knows most must, therefore, do most, “for
to whom much is given of him also will much be required. ’ ’ I am following
after you as fast as I can. “What I know not, teach thou me,” said the good St.
Augustine. Wesley cries, “Do not beat me down in order to quicken my pace for
then I can not follow you at all. There is one thing greater than truth, and
that is love. You may die without the knowledge of many truths, and yet be
carried into Abraham’s bosom, but if you die without love, what will knowledge
avail? Just as much as it avails the devil and his angels.”

I am led to the choice of the stirring theme which I present because it seems to
me after wide travel throughout the country and intimate associations with men
in the churches and out of them, that the great need of the hour is a holy
passion for the souls of men. If the angel of the churches was to bring once
more a greeting and challenge to the Church of the Living God, it would be a
repetition of the message to the Church at Laodicea.

Once it was said that “the coat-of-arms of the twentieth century is an
interrogation point rampant above three bishops dormant, and its motto ’Query’.”
We are not passed far into the twentieth century, but we have passed beyond that
attitude of mind. The church and the country are in the throes of no great
theological question the names of Darwin, of Spencer and of Huxley no longer
marshal the scientists and theologians to battle. The effect of the great war
has discounted the position which was taken by many German critics. Even higher
criticism itself has spent much of its forces; some of its contentions have been
established and others have been proven to be of too little value longer to
disturb and irritate the Church. The great fundamentals of the Christian life
were never more generally accepted inside the Church than they are today, but
the sad thing about it all is that the world does not seem to be enough
interested in Christian things even to discuss them. Not long ago the question
was propounded in literary circles, “Do you find religious unrest among your
friends and what is the cause of -it!” The answer returned was, “We know nothing
about religious unrest; we are not disturbed at all, we sleep. We do not go to
church Sunday morning because we are in bed. We do not take up religious
questions because we are not interested in them.” So it appears that the weapon
which is being used against the Church and religion today is not the sword or
the stiletto, but the sand bag. The neglect of these things which we once held
dear is due not to conviction but to indifference. We do not make this as a
sweeping charge. There are happy exceptions throughout the country. On the
whole, no year has marked as large gains in the Christian Church as the present
year, but it still remains true that compared with what might be accomplished
there is such a dearth of zeal and such benumbing of thought and activity as to
sadden the heart of every lover of righteousness. This attitude of stolidity and
indifference was the one thing which Jesus could not stand. Next to actual
hypocrisy, He fulminated against it with all the power of a flaming soul. He
wanted men to think things through and to do as they ought to do. He could not
brook indifference in anything. The message to the Church at Laodicea was: “Ye
are neither cold nor hot. I would you were either one thing or the other. I
would rather you would stand out openly against me than to be cold and
indifferent. You have plenty of money and think you need nothing. You do not
understand. You are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. “ What
a challenge that was to the first orthodox church in town, with a tall steeple
and a fine choir, a big congregation and a great preacher!

I wish to bring this simple message of my Master. When He ordained Peter, He
asked him no question in creed or church reform. There was only one question, so
often repeated that it burned itself into Peter ’s soul, “Lovest thou me?”

Among the dilettanti, it is supposed to be bad form to be interested in
anything. The spirit of wonder has died out. Nothing any more is grand, dominant
and imperative. The glory of Wordsworth’s early morning has faded into the light
of common day. In some way we must get back our old enthusiasm; in some way we
must find once more that passion which changed the face of the ages and sent the
Church with a pentecostal flame to carry the good tidings everywhere. It is to
that purpose that these pages address themselves. c. L. a.

CONTENTS

Foreword 1. Passion of Jesus 2. Table-Talk of Jesus 3. Heralds of Passion 4.
Holy Boldness 5. Culture a Load or a Lift 6. The Passion of the Prophets 7. The
Passion of the Great Evangelists 8. The Teacher’s Passion 9. The Passion of the
Church 10. The Passion for Service 11. How to Nourish the Sacred Fire


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  CHAPTER 2: 01.01.     CHAPTER I - THE PASSION OF JESUS
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CHAPTER I - THE PASSION OF JESUS That word “ passion” has gotten into bad
company if, as Dr. Crothers says, “a noun is known by the company it keeps.” The
word itself is a pure word. It simply means love on fire. A master of English
literature has said all high poetry has its source in passion. Of course that
passion may take form in love, or jealousy, or hate, or any other strong passion
that transports the mind out of and above itself. It was left for Christianity
to give to that word its highest meaning. The passions of the human heart were
crowded into the yearning of a life and the agony of the cross. The symbol of
our faith is a cross. On that cross our Master died, and our chief business is
to declare a love that even the cross could not halt. Everytthing great in life
is a passion, and religion, if alive, must be impassioned, must be threaded
through and through with a network of exquisite nerves. I am the more anxious to
impress this, because we are living in an age that aims to rob religion of its “
inflammatory touch.” There are those who look upon all signs of emotion and
devotion with distress. They seek to set forth their faith in mental crystals,
they keep a cold bath for every fervor, and when their epitaph is written,
sad-eyed angels will carve in the marble, “They died of too much self-control.”
“ Light enough, but no heat,” was the way someone described ancient philosophy.
That is a good description of much of the theorizing of today. It is heat the
world needs quite as much as light. The path to sound thinking is not always
through a big brain, sometimes it is through a warm heart.

“The heart is wiser than the intellect And works with surer hands and swifter
feet Toward wise conclusions.” A big brain and a big heart ought to go together.
Neither is complete without the other.

It is a life on fire that kindles another. The fiercest enemy to be fought in
our day is sheer apathy. We have been talking about religious unrest. As a
matter of fact, there is too little of it the people are asleep. What breaks the
heart of the enthusiast is to fire red hot shells into a mud bank. Have you ever
meditated on the passion of our Lord? Is there a more pathetic story in
literature than the rejection of Jesus? He caine unto His own and His own
received Him not.

He was poor and lowly. He was cast out as evil.

He died upon the cross died deserted, and men called Him mad. He was born among
the cattle and He died among thieves. We marvel how the Jews could turn away
from Him, but if the Lord of Glory came among us today, would we give Him any
kindlier reception? He was eager; we are cold. He was enthusiastic; we are
indifferent.

He wept over Jerusalem; we seldom weep even for ourselves. The Church’s
-thermometer has dropped; her step in many quarters is leaden and her spirit
dull. “We have lost the fine fervor of our early rapture. There are too few with
blazing eye and burning heart. Some way we must win back that early enthusiasm.
Do we not need the coming of that spirit that shall convict of sin and
righteousness and judgment, so that our hearts shall burn and our tongues
kindle? Time was when sin was an ugly thing; people were positive about moral
things. There were two colors things were very black or very white. There was a
sharp line drawn between him who served God and him who served Him not. In our
disposition to be tolerant, have we not lost the real sense of values? Our black
and white seems to have faded into a general gray. The bad are not so bad as
they might be; the good are not so good as they think they are. As George Eliot
says, “Like an omnibus, we take on board anybody and anything which beckons as
we pass. We entertain God and the Devil on the same floor and on equal terms.”

How often we read in the Scriptures that Jesus was moved with compassion. “When
He saw the multitude, He was moved.” Not simply touched, hut swept as hy a
storm. He wept over Jerusalem, because He saw the people sinning, saw them
missing the mark, saw the harvest of it all. Of course it would be trite and I
shall be enrolled among those who ask silly and impertinent questions, but may I
venture to ask if any of us ever really wept over Boston, or New York, or
Chicago, or St. Louis, or any lesser city, or town where God gave us our place
for service?

It was a beautiful Jerusalem that Jesus looked upon; the temple like a mountain
of snow, forty and six years in building; palaces for Herod and Caiaphas, a
grand theater, and a great hippodrome; three historic towers on the north and
east, and an acropolis, a sight to stir the souls of men, and an unspeakable
anguish to contemplate its catastrophe. Some of you have climbed the Mount of
Olives and marked what yet remains of the walls the Saracen builded and the
ruins of other days. Have you also climbed the hills around Boston or
Pittsburgh? Have you gone to the Metropolitan or Woolworth tower and looked upon
the riches of our great city, the clustered spires of cathedral and university
where millions of people come and go, and have you wept over those who go down
those streets to shame and death the flotsam and jetsam of a great city? Or have
you cried as Bliicher cried from the dome of St. Paul’s, in London, “What a city
for pillage!” And have you gone down to join the crowd in its quest after pelf
to wrest something for yourself out of the general forage and plunder? I hardly
dare venture to ask it, but if you were to open your desk and take out your
diary, would there be in it any record of nights of anguish and of prayer for
lost men such as they put down who wrote in the Gospels, the diary of the Son of
God? “At the foot of the cross,” says Sir Oliver Lodge, “there has been a
perennial experience of relief and renovation. Ours is not a creed, it is a
passion. Men in every age have died for it. In every land where its tale is told
and with every new sun that dawns, drunkards may be found whom it has made
sober, thieves whom it has taught to be honest, harlots whom it has lifted up to
chastity, selfish men who, touched by its preaching, live by a great law of
self-sacrifice. It is the root whence blossom great heroisms and charities. All
human sorrows hide in His wounds. All human self denials lean on His cross.”

Well says Heine, “How great a drama is the passion of Christ. How glorious a
figure is that of the Man-God. His words are a balm for all the wounds this
world can inflict, and the blood that was shed at Golgotha has become a healing
stream for all that suffer. The white marble gods of the Greeks were spattered
with His blood and they sickened with terror and can never more regain their
health.” The simple record of three short years of Christ’s life has done more
to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and
all the exhortations of moralists.

If proof is wanted of the vital forces that dwell in Christ, we find it in the
impression He made upon the men about Him. They were only fishermen, sitters at
the seat of custom bits of common clay, but they caught the spirit and took
their impulse from Christ. His spirit so wrought in them that when He himself
had left the earth, they became heralds not of a creed but of a passion.

Jesus opened the gates into a new universe.

He taught us that the cross on which the sinless one died for the sinful is the
supreme interpretation of God. He turned His face to the world in the midst of
His own suffering and cried, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” In His
own person He brought a spiritual power and dynamic which broke up the old order
of the pagan world and founded a system based upon an uncalculating and
overwhelming love. He mastered men and events and broke into the leaden night
with a blazing passion that was volcanic and irresistible. He broke up the order
of His time to the breaking of His own heart. Well says Forsythe, “He was an
austere man, a severe critic, a born fighter, of choleric wrath and fiery scorn,
so that the people thought he was Elijah or the Baptist. Yet He was gentle to
the last degree, especially to those ignorant and out of the way. Clear, calm,
determined and sure of His mark, He was the next hour roused to such impulsive
passion as if He were beside himself. But if He let himself go, He always knew
where He was going. He poured out His soul unto God and unto death and He was
the friend of publicans and sinners.*’ At the cleansing of the temple, He was so
hot with imperious haste and mighty indignation that from that moment His
enemies said, “You to the death,” and they never let up in their persecution
until they had Him nailed to the Cross. When His disciples saw His fiery
indignation, we can imagine one as saying to the other, “Of what does this
remind you?” and the other answers, “It reminds me of the Psalm in which it is
written, ’The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up/ “The visual image of zeal as
Coleridge calls it, is a boiling pot. The root of the word is in the Greek #60
-to boil. Could there be a more vivid word to describe the boiling over with
heat of the passions and emotions of the Son of God? Is it any wonder that it is
written, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten; be zealous therefore and
repent. ’ ’ The one thing that Jesus could not endure was ease in Zion. The
words to the church at Laodicea fairly blistering us, “I know thy works, that
thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because
thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”

What a phrase that is “to be eaten up with zeal.” All fear of what the people or
the leaders might do unto Him is forgotten. All sense of reserve and lamb-like
meekness devoured. For the first time we appreciate “the wrath of the Lamb” as
we see what He did in His Father’s house that day. With far-reaching emphasis
Alexander White says, “His holy zeal sustained Him and impelled Him all through
His life, and the same ruling passion was His greatest strength in His death,”
His disciples must have recalled it and said to one another even while they
forsook him and fled, “The zeal of His Father’s house hath eaten Him up.” They
must have said it to themselves as they stood afar off and saw His crucifixion
consummated.

Now the Saviour said Himself that it was enough for the disciple to be as his
Lord. We bear His name; we represent His life to the world; we are to personify
His teachings. How can we do that if we ourselves are not ablaze with holy
passion? It was a flame which was the symbol of Pentecost. Those disciples,
discouraged and ashamed, were to have every barrier melted away and to go
forward with a blazing passion that nothing could stop, until, as tradition has
it, Paul’s zeal consumed his body and his head rolled from the block. The rest
of the disciples had cruel mockings and scourgings and imprisonments, their
devotion so consuming them that they had no heart left for anything save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. It was not a new thing for an absorbing passion to
consume the lives of men. Love of power had just eaten up Julius Caesar; love of
praise had eaten up Tullius Cicero; love of liberty had eaten up Marcus Cato;
love of pleasure had consumed Mark Antony. Was it any wonder that Paul, consumed
by a greater passion than any of these, should say, “I live, yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me. For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Put this
over against any purely intellectual conception of Christianity, and how frigid
all that appears. The one thing necessary for every soul is to catch his Master
’s passion. Small wonder that “Whitefield’s cenotaph has carved upon it a
flaming heart, and that the grave of Adam Clark bears similar testimony to a
passion which consumed a life in a blaze of flaming devotion. The proposition
which I wish to lay down as the prerequisite to all evangelistic endeavor is
that no man can be the herald of his Lord’s passion if he does not himself share
it. No man can win for God unless he is willing to pay the price in blood and
tears. I make my plea to the church and the ministry for a consuming zeal. “No
heart will long foe pure that is not passionate, no virtue safe that is not
enthusiastic.” Our splendid cathedrals are built according to the most approved
plans of the architects, and our altars are set up in noble and stately art. I
am ready to grant the virtue of apostolic succession to all who minister there,
but the question which I ask with deep heart yearning is this one, Have the
fires been kindled and are they blazing on the altar, or have they gone out and
are men now shivering in doubt where once God’s prophets led out His hosts in
power! In many places the priests of Jehovah seem to be as impotent as the
priests of Baal to call down the heavenly fires.

They have poured the waters of doubt over the stones and the sacrifice and they
stand forsaken where once there were cleft skies, and falling fires to consume
sacrifice and altar and later lick up the last drop of the waters of doubt and
demonstrate to all Israel that God and Baal do not keep company on the same
Olympus. From crying “Thus saith the Lord,” and saying with holy assurance “I
know whom I have believed,” they are shaking limp hands over a credo of faith
and immortality which has lost its power, and are looking behind them with the
hope that they may be buttressed by scientific investigation rather than the
glad assurance of a triumphant faith.

We preach many sermons about the rejection of Christ, and we blame the men of
His century, but what is the condition with us? We bow before the conventional
and are smug and comfortable.

If we had Jesus with us today, would we not find Him a great inconvenience, and
maybe send Him either to jail or to an asylum as a disturber of the peace! Such
zeal as His was in the highest degree uncomfortable for the dilettanti of His
time.

Even those who represented the Church would not abide it, but the record of
history is that in all its great ages humanity has bridged the gulf which
threatened it by ’’walking over the body of some fanatic who made himself a
highway for his race/’ Jesus was a man of intense feeling and He never held in
His emotions. When He saw men robbing their poor neighbors at the seat of the
money-changers, He overthrew their tables, and lashed with His tongue those who
had prostituted their opportunities and imposed upon their neighbors. When He
saw the city given over to indifference and men walking holy places with stolid
heart, He wept.

We have a great deal to say in our conventions and stately assemblies about
emotionalism. We are greatly fearful lest religion shall seem to be a matter of
life instead of a matter of creed. As a matter of fact, there is no fear
whatever in our time that there will be too much emotion connected with
religion. Even the great evangelistic meetings are not open to that charge. I
have been in closest touch with them for the last generation, and I am bound to
say that I have nowhere seen anything which approached emotionalism. I have seen
tens of thousands of men coming up to shake hands with evangelists, but not one
in a hundred had even a tear in his eye. The impelling motive in most cases was
purely social or ethical, with no sense of such conviction of sin as would
blanch the cheek and make men’s knees knock together. He is a poor student of
psychology who does not know that the emotions must lie at the base of all great
thinking or doing.

Herbert Spencer said, “In the genesis of a system of thought the emotional
nature is a large factor, perhaps as large a factor as the intellectual. ’ ’ It
is a sad tribute which Charles Darwin brings. After an experience which had
dwarfed his emotional life, he says “At the age of thirty poetry of many kinds
gave me great pleasure and music was a great delight. But now for many years I
cannot endure to read a line of poetry and I find Shakespeare so intolerably
dull that it nauseates me. I have lost my taste for pictures and music. The loss
of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
intellect and more probably to the moral character by enfeebling the emotional
part of our nature.” In his essays on “Criticism” Matthew Arnold says, * ’ The
permanent virtue of religion is that it has lighted up morality, that it has
applied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the way
perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.” Dr. Sheridan quotes
John Stuart Blackie: “The early church worked by a fervid moral contagion, not
by the suasion of cool argument. The Christian method of conversion, not by
logical arguments but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost has
with the masses of mankind always proved itself the most effective.”

Dr. John Watson will not be accused of lack of clearness in thought; he says:
“Every great movement which has stirred the depth of life and changed the face
of history has sprung from some profound sentiment and powerful emotion.” Dr.
Alexander Maclaren, one of the clearest thinkers of his time, is moved to say,
“There is a kind of religious teachers who are always preaching down enthusiasm
and preaching up what they call ’sober standards of feeling ’ in matters of
religion. By which, in nine eases out of ten, they mean precisely such a tepid
condition as is described in much less polite language when the Voice from
Heaven says, * Because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my
mouth. ’ I should have thought that the last piece of furniture which any
Christian Church in the nineteenth century needed was a refrigerator. A poker
and a pair of bellows would be much more needful to them. Not to be all aflame
is madness, if we believe our own creed.”

“He shall baptize you with fire,” and if it does anything it will kindle
emotion. The great glory of the Gospel is to cleanse men’s hearts by raising
their temperature, making them pure because they are made warm, and that
separates them from their evils.

William James ought to understand the psychology of religious life, and he says,
in his “Varieties of Beligious Experience”: “I believe that feeling is the
deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are
secondary products like the translations of a text into another tongue. ’ ’ Dr.
Jowett voices a great truth when he says: “ If the church would be pure, the
church must be passionate. Elevation of character depends upon warmth of
affection. A fiery heart by the energy of its own heat creates a self-preserving
atmosphere against the devil.”

Among those liberal denominations which have been quite inclined to accept the
dictum of President Eliot that the religion of the future will be intellectual
and not emotional, that religious emotion is the result of defective culture and
will cease when education and evolution have done their work, there is a mighty
swing of the pendulum. They are holding evangelistic services night after night.
When the present writer was asked to give an address on evangelization before
one of the important gatherings of one of the liberal churches, he asked with a
smile, “Do you think you can stand my message?” The reply was, “We must have
more vital religion.” Of all the addresses which I have given, none were
received with greater apparent fervor than the one delivered under such
circumstances. To feel the thrill of a great love and to be profoundly
interested in men and things is not bad form, it is Christ-like. To warm up to a
publican and to warm over a Pharisee is the kind of business which thrills the
heart of God. He said there was one thing all men needed, and that was
conviction. We have our foibles, our weaknesses, our indifferences, our by-plays
and our avocations. The crying need of the world is a few first-class
convictions. And what is a conviction? Is it not something that makes a convict
of you; that is, something that fastens a man to one thing so that he is not at
liberty to roam everywhere to no purpose? Then he can say, “This one thing I
believe; this one thing I do.” A Christian without conviction is powerless and
is a contradiction of terms. A Christian that prefers plans of salvation to
salvation itself, that raises definitions of the nature of Jesus above surrender
to the joy-giving Saviour is a travesty on the Son of God. The seal on Adam
Clark’s grave, to which I have referred, is a candle burned down to the socket.
Underneath are the words “In living for others, I am burned away.”

Livingstone burned out his life that he might overthrow the slave trade of
Africa. Aristotle said, ’ ’ No great genius was ever without some admixture of
madness.’* It was this joy in service, this uncalculating devotion which has
proven itself mighty to change the hearts of men, and the age in which it has
lived. It was not Erasmus, the polished, the learned, the vacillating, the
mightiest intellect of his time, but it was rough, yearning, burning Martin
Luther who made Germany. In his last sermon Joseph Parker said, “As long as the
church of God is one of many institutions, she will have her little day. She
will die and that will be all. But just as soon as she gets the spirit of Jesus
until the world thinks she has gone stark mad, then we shall be on the high road
to capture this planet for Jesus. “

One fears that in some quarters the pulpit has lost its nerve and forgotten the
evidence of history, that whenever Christianity has been most convincing she has
been most victorious, and whenever she has been most apologetic, she has been
most futile; and also that it is the schools within Christianity which are
constructive and aggressive, and not the schools that are critical and eclectic
which have chiefly affected their generation. If, as some think, our fathers
were too sure about everything, it would be an immense gain if some of their
children were absolutely certain of anything. It would be a great disaster if
the intellect of the Church should be so occupied in recasting the form of the
Scriptures as to have no strength left for declaring the Gospel which they
contain. Is it not time that the strength of the ministry were withdrawn from
purely intellectual exercises, from purely intellectual investigations and
destructive criticism and given to evangelism? Have we not had enough of
recanting? Is it not time for some confessing? We are justified in disbelieving
the things which have not been proven, only if we believe and practice upon the
things which have been proven. There are some who seem to be ready to refuse to
believe anything which our fathers believed, and are quite ready to accept
anything if it is not in the Bible. A book which denies is supposed to be honest
and thoughtful, and a book which affirms, it is taken for granted, must be
narrow and prejudiced.

Those who doubt everything which the Church has held for nineteen centuries give
themselves amusing airs of superiority, and the people who hold the heart of the
Christian creed are likely to be regarded with intellectual pity. There is one
thing worse than the arrogance of wisdom and that is the arrogance of learning,
for the learned man ought to be broad enough to know better. As a matter of
fact, there is no more ability in doubting than in believing. If there is a
bigotry of orthodoxy there is also a bigotry of heterodoxy, and the last appears
to be the more insolent.

Why should so many prefer the evidence of nonreligious persons on faith to those
who are its chief experimental witnesses? It does not follow that because Darwin
knew about earth worms that he was an authority on the soul; or because Mr.
Huxley was a most lucid teacher of natural science that he had any right to say
the last word on miracles. Even in religion one must be scientific and depend
not upon amateurs but upon experts. “In the high affairs of faith, are we not
more likely to arrive at the truth by listening to the saints than by listening
to persons whose admirable studies have been among the lower animals?” John
Watson says there are only two provinces of absolutely sure knowledge one is
pure mathematics and the other is the experience of the soul. “If Paul had a
right to say ’I,’ and we allow him to be a conscious being, then he had a right
to say ’I know.’ And if it be granted that he could know anything, he had
perfect right to finish his sentence, and say, ’I know whom I have believed,’
and we can do no better than to accept the certainty of such experience.”

Faith is the center of the financial world. From the man who sends his goods for
money he has not seen to the man who accepts the last dictum of science, we move
in this world by faith. Unbelief blocks the wheels of all progress. Only faith
can right a ruined world. Only faith can make men lay down their arms and pick
up the ax and the shovel, and faith finds its highest exemplification in the
matters of the soul.


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  CHAPTER 3: 01.02.     CHAPTER II - THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS
========================================================================

CHAPTER II - THE TABLE-TALK OF JESUS The table-talk of great men is always
fascinating. It is supposed to be the measure of a man when he is among his
friends and can speak unhindered by fear of misunderstanding or failure to
appreciate. It is years since I read the table talk of Martin Luther; from it I
gained a new idea of the great throbbing heart and the human interest of that
great leader of the Protestant Reformation. To another generation the table talk
of Hazlitt was full of literary surprises and nuggets of wisdom, the depository
of much that would otherwise have been lost to the world, and the loss of which
would have made the world poorer. The master reporter of table-talk is Boswell.
It is Boswell who gave Samuel Johnson to the world. One hardly knows at times
which to admire the most the stern old philosopher or the loving scribe, who
sets apples of gold in pictures of silver. We like to know what men thought it
worth while to talk about to their friends, what were the values that they held
to be supreme. When there was no reason to trim one’s sails to social, political
or ecclesiastical trade winds, how did they sail their crafts?

Perhaps there is no remark of Daniel Webster’s more frequently quoted than the
one he is said to have made at a table where distinguished friends had gathered.
One asked, “What is the most important question you were ever called upon to
consider?” His questioner may have thought of the great legal and political
questions which had been submitted to the great lawyer.

He may have had in mind some of the grave questions concerning our Republic, but
Mr. Webster, running his eye down the table, asked, “Are there any outsiders
here?” “No, sir, all are your friends.” With deepest solemnity of manner the
great man said, “The most important question that ever engaged my mind is that
of my personal responsibility to Almighty God.”

I am sure the world is agreed that of all the table-talk which has been caught
by devout disciples from the lips of statesmen and philosophers and passed on to
a listening and adoring multitude, none is so full of meaning or read with such
rapt attention as that which fell from His lips who spoke as never man spake. We
have some of His words reported to us by His friends.

How we long for the thousands that must have dropped by the wayside, or at the
morning or evening meal. What a sweet hyperbole is that of John, “And there are
also many other things which Jesus did, which if they should be written every
one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books which
would be written. “ If the world today could find some new word which He thus
spoke to His disciples, its presses would run night and day until every last
citizen could have another message from His lips.

Parables like those which now gladden the world must have fallen without stint
from His blessed lips. A few of them have been preserved for us and make us rich
indeed, Jesus was a famous diner-out. His enemies charged upon him, that while
John came as an ascetic, Jesus was “a glutton and a wine bibber.”

You do not think of it in that fashion, but close examination will impress one
with the humor of Jesus. Who can read His parables, if he reads with
discrimination, without a smile; and then how intense He was. “If your eye
offend you, pluck it out”; “if your hand offend you, cut it off.” Go drown
yourself rather than say a word that shall offend one of these little ones. And
what paradoxes were His! He that would save his life shall lose it. He that
would lose his life shall save it. It was the heart of the man that was
thrilling in all His table-talk. It was the love of His soul, the zeal that was
burning and fairly consuming Him that manifests itself here. His whole life
could be epitomized in the single sentence “He had a passion for saving the
lost.” And at these wonderful dinner parties, this message thrills ont. The
table-talks of Jesus are not an interlude to His passion, they are a part of it.
They are introduced here to show that in the most intimate social relations in
life one thought is ever uppermost. He never temporized; He never kept the
yearning of His heart out of sight. Whether He talked with Pharisee, or
Sadducee, or publican, or sinner, in public or in the privacy of their own home,
before the interview was over He had told them in some form the one glorious
fact that was epitomized in Him “I am come that ye might have life and that ye
might have it more abundantly.” The table-talks of Jesus are such talks as a
father might give with his arm around the neck of a thoughtless or a sinning
child. This was what He meant when He said, “ Whoso hath seen me hath seen the
Father.”

Here are two dinner parties that we may first consider. After Matthew, the
publican, was called from Ms disreputable profession, he did a rather brave
thing. He gave a farewell dinner to his old friends in office to celebrate his
going away, and he invited Jesus. I suppose he wanted the old comrades to see
what sort of a man He was to whom he had given his allegiance, and it may be
that he had hopes the Master’s presence and love would do for them what it had
done for him. One almost wonders at the courage of Matthew to invite the friends
of the old life to meet the One who had led him to the new.

Matthew must have been satisfied that his old friends would feel at home with
Him and he knew that whatever Jesus said would be said with a kindly heart, with
no sense of aloofness, and least of all with any sense of the attitude of the
Pharisee. What do you suppose the scribes and Pharisees, the members of the
church, the high-toned leaders of Capernaum said when they heard of it? Do you
wonder that they attacked His disciples and said, “Why eateth your Master with
publicans and sinners f What does He have in common with them?” You would not
expect in our time a lot of grafters and men of doubtful reputation to be
especially eager to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Greek Primate. In
whatever talks Jesus had with Matthew before and he must have had many of them
we do not know what approaches He made, or what Matthew said, but at last He
came one day to the tax gatherers’ office and said unto him, “Follow me.”
Matthew must have leaped with delight to think that all he had done that was
selfish and evil was so thoroughly forgotten or forgiven that Jesus wanted him
to be with Him, and when he heard that call he left all and followed Him. I
suppose Matthew never forgot his old business and the stigma which went with it.
I confess there is a tug at my heart as I see where this humble disciple, when
he wrote the list of the apostles, put in his own name and did not forget to
round it out by saying “And Matthew, the publican.”

Much that He said there we have no record of, but with such a company and with
such a host, we know almost as well as if it were written down, what He would
have said. We know His stainless purity would humble them, but we know also His
infinite yearning would make itself manifest, so that they would see He loved
them so that He was willing to die for them. That was why publicans and sinners
drew near to hear Him, that was why the common people heard Him gladly. He
opened His heart to them. He told them of His love. You remember how Jesus
answered the Pharisees who murmured because He had gone to Levi’s house, “They
that are whole need not the physician, but they that are sick. I came not to
call the righteous but the sinners to repentance.”

Then there was another dinner. This time He is invited to a Pharisee’s house. It
was after a busy day that Jesus had an evening engagement to dine with Simon,
the Pharisee. That dinner has been heard of throughout the world, not because of
the palace in which it was served and not because of the courses which crowded
the table, but simply because of one broken-hearted woman who was a sinner and
who intruded herself upon the feast.

It looks as if she had met Him before and that she had already some cause for
gratitude. Can you not picture her you who have seen her like in the great city?
Do you not understand why she came there? Can you not see the pictures of the
days of innocence, which floated before her eyes, maybe of a home of prayer; of
an anxious father and mother from whom she had turned; of the promises made to
them which she had broken; of the promises made to her which others had broken?
And so the poor girl with broken heart and broken life steals in to the feast.

Whether she had told Him her story before or not, we do not know. Whether she
had heard that wonderful story of the lost boy, we cannot tell, but at any rate,
in some way, hope stirs in her heart and a changed life stretches before her,
pointed out by the tender love of the Man who sits there at the feast. Her
attitude is not one of importunity, it is rather one of passionate gratitude for
something already granted her.

Maybe she is just leaving Capernaum to go back to her mother and begin a new
life, and this is her last chance of showing her love. You picture the scene the
guests reclining on couches around the board, their feet resting on cushions,
and then this poor woman throwing herself with passionate sobbing at the feet of
the Master. The veil is off her face and the fastenings from her hair.

If anything was necessary, these are the things which tell of her life. An
alabaster box of ointment she pours on His feet and with her glorious hair she
wipes them and presses her lips on them with adoring devotion. Of course
everybody is disturbed. Simon is courteous and condescending to his guest. The
neighbors are saying, “This prophet must have known about the woman. Why does He
let her touch him!” Simon’s thoughts are plainly stamped upon his face. And now
listen, ’ ’ Simon, I have somewhat to say to thee.” With some restraint and
rather sadly, Simon says, “Rabbi, say on.” And then comes the story of the big
debtor and the small one and how the gracious creditor forgave them both, and
the query which of the two loved the giver most. We hear Simon saying, “That
does not interest me, but I presume the one to whom he forgave most.” Now Simon,
it is your turn. It may be the Master’s hand crept down his seamless robe and
rested upon the head of the penitent, “I would not have mentioned it, Simon, but
when I came to your house, you did not even offer me water for my feet; but this
woman has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me
no kiss of greeting, but she, from the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss my
feet. My head with oil you did not anoint, but she hath anointed my feet with
ointment. Wherefore I say unto you, her sins which are many, are forgiven, for
she loved much; but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” Is
there any story that shows more tenderly the yearning of the Master’s heart?

There are many who identify this woman with Mary Magdalen, and that fact is
“imbedded in centuries of Christian art and literature,*’ and the name will
always persist as a synonym for a fallen hut penitent woman. If it is true, is
it not a beautiful and thrilling thing to see how the devotion of that once
abandoned woman never failed by so much as a jot until the end? She was one of
the few who saw Him die on Calvary, and regardless of the contumely and insult
which might be heaped upon her, she followed His body to the grave and was the
first at the sepulchre on the glorious Easter morning. With agonizing heart, she
cries to him whom she took to be the gardener; “Sir, if thou hast borne Him
hence, tell me where and I will take Him away,” and with the same voice that at
first spoke peace to her repentant soul, her Lord spoke the one word 4 * Mary! ’
’ Nobody else ever said it that way; into no other voice could such pure and
tender solicitude be pressed. In an instant she knew the glad truth that her
Lord was risen, and she fell at His feet crying, “My Master, my Master!”

How anybody could think of that dinner in the house of Simon, the Pharisee, and
what the Master said, and all that flowed out of it and still remain indifferent
to those who long for the saving grace which comes from unstinted love must
surely pass human knowledge. It is a heart of stone that can remain stolid, when
he thinks of what happened and how the joy of it never faded away, but was
crowned with glory on the resurrection morning. Small wonder that when Renan was
looking around for someone whom he could make responsible for a resurrection
which he wished to deny, he should have cried, “Divine power of love, sacred
moments in which the passion of an hallucinated woman gives to the world a
resurrected God!” Is it strange that Renan’s book and his theories were buried
with him, while the whole Christian world stands in adoring wonder at Mary’s
side?

It was at another Pharisee’s table that He smote the heart of the cold and proud
by telling of those who give tithes of what amounts to nothing the mint and
anise and cummin and neglect the mightier matters of the law. When His host
complains that he had not performed the usual ablution, He showed the folly of
those who were more anxious to have clean hands than clean hearts, who looked at
the outside of the cup but paid no attention to the filth that was within.

It was at the table of Simon, the leper, that another Mary showed a love without
bound or limit, born in homely fellowship, perfected at her brother ’s grave.
Perhaps the cap of the alabaster box refused to open, and in her haste she broke
the box and poured the ointment, fit for a king 1, upon the head she loved.

It was when the utilitarian spirit flared out, as it has done in all the days
since; it was when those who take no account of love and sacrifice and holy
ideals but who weigh everything on the scales of self-interest and measure
everything by worldly standards it was when such people were taking all merit
out of a noble act and making it only an impetuous movement of an ill-balanced
mind, that Jesus lifted this little woman upon a pedestal so high that all the
world will see her till the crack of doom! Can anybody have any question as to
what Jesus thinks of uncalculating service? Can anybody ever think of offering
Jesus anything but their best after this? There it stands; let it never be
blotted out. Let it be written on the fleshly tablet of every devoted heart that
is willing to pay the price that his Lord demands “Verily I say unto you,
wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, there
shall also this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her. ’ ’
There is at least one pedestal in the temple of fame which God has set up that
will never be vacant. With reverence let us muse upon the reason!

Those who are troubled by many things, who are examples of what Emerson said, *
’ Things are in the saddle and they ride mankind/* let them stand behind the
Master at Martha’s simple feast.

’ ’ Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. ’ ’

Three different types. The anxious housekeeper, with a sense of responsibility,
who brings things to pass, a good manager, a capable woman who has to be
responsible for things. Here is one type of those who hide their own feelings
and never like to see others express theirs. Sentiment does not appeal to her
and she is quite inclined to take to task any whom she calls mystical,
emotional, sentimental. Martha has her good points, may she never disappear from
the family. The wheels of daily life would drive heavily without her. “When her
dear old hands are folded, more tears will be shed for her possibly than she has
shed for others, but if Martha can only understand the gentle reproof of the
Saviour, she will know that the sister whom she calls a dreamer, who indulges in
holy contemplation, and nourishes a devout soul, is one of the pure in heart who
see (rod and are thereby the more lovable. “She hath chosen the good part which
shall not be taken from her.” Let Martha and Mary twine their arms around each
other. They will each be the stronger for the other’s presence. Jesus says,
“Don’t fret, Martha, put the first things first, and all things shall work
together for good.” As for Lazarus, for whom the feast is given, from him we
hear nothing. Paterson Smith recalls the suggestion that he was the young rulei
who once made the great refusal, whom Jesus beholding loved and kissed him on
the brow. Perhaps that is not true, but at any rate, Jesus loved him with the
yearning of a great heart, and Martha and Mary knew that as much as He loved
them, Lazarus was preeminent, for they named him to Jesus, “Him whom thou
lovest.” From that dinner table may the love which gives each heart its place
around the family board be passed to every home! Of all the Master’s words at
table, surely none were so precious as those He spoke at the last supper, when
He was host himself. He and His disciples knew it was the last talk He would
have with them before He faced the tragedy which they could neither appreciate
nor understand. We are minded of a scene three hundred years before when the
sacred ship had come back from Delos and the eleven had stricken off his chains
that Socrates might drink the fatal hemlock, and his jailer was saying, “He was
the gentlest and best that ever came here. ’ ’ But beautiful as was that scene
against the clear blue of the Grecian sky and beautiful as was that cheery
message of him who was going out upon a great adventure, this is an hour before
which all other human farewells shine with a lessening ray.

Since there were no servants to do it, Jesus had washed His disciples 7 feet and
said to them, “He that would be chief among you, let him be the servant of
all.*’ Judas has gone out “and it was night. “What does he say as a pattern for
all those hours when the disciples talk together? The one word which is in the
air when words can be but few, the one word which rolls in infinite reiteration
from His lips is the word which was the center of His life and of His kingdom
“Love.” Here is a new command ’ ’ That ye love one another as I have loved you.”
Here is the measure of your discipleship “Ye are my disciples if ye love one
another. The* measure of your love for me will be the measure of your union with
me. If ye love me, ye will keep my commandments.” And then He falls to talking
about the same thing that Socrates talked about, only with an assurance and
depth of meaning which Socrates never knew, and with good reason.

We are inclined to say with Philip of Spain, who, when asked if he had noticed
the eclipse, said, “No, I am so busy with things down here that I have no time
to look up.” There are many who are restive at any word concerning the future
life. Not so Jesus. He revelled in it. His last table-talk was pitched to the
tune of it “Let not your heart be troubled. I am going away from you. In my
Father’s house are many mansions.

I am going to prepare a home for you and we are all of us going to be there.
Here you will be lonely and you will be troubled, but I shall be thinking of you
and waiting for you.”

If we could live on here without headache or heartache; if we could feel no want
and know no poverty; if no bitter words were spoken, and no unkindly acts done;
if nobody grew old, and love was never disappointed; if no red flag ever waved,
and the sexton never plied his spade, what a world this would be! But Jesus said
over the table at the last supper, “I am going to get a place like that ready
for you.”

Sam Johnson said he didn’t like Wesley, for just as he got his legs under the
table for a long talk, Wesley would run off to see some old woman who was in
want. Here the days and nights of friendship are short. Here we cry, “All hail,”
and in the next instant, “Good-by. It is time to go.” Jesus said that His was a
land of perfect fellowship, and there was never to be any night with its
darkness and separation. We say, “I shall always be thinking of you,” but Jesus
said more; He said, “I shall always be with you.

You will not see me, but I will be there, closer than breathing, nearer than
hands and feet. The Holy Spirit, one with me and the Father, will walk and talk
with you. He will lead you into the paths of truth. He will be your comforter in
trouble, your wisdom in ignorance, and will bring you safely through. Lo, I am
with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

After that they sang a song His song but the message of it all was “ death does
not make any difference with love.” We can say to those to whom our hearts are
bound, “Thee I loved always, I love still but thee, And thee will I love Through
eternity.”

Death is only crossing a seam in the carpet, passing through an open door. Here
and there and always, love never faileth. These are the messages which fell from
His lips when He who spake as never man spake, talked with His friends and with
the world out of His heart. Do you not feel the passion of them and do they not
awake an answering passion in your own soul?


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  CHAPTER 4: 01.03.     CHAPTER III - HERALDS OF A PASSION
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CHAPTER III - HERALDS OF A PASSION

We cannot be heralds of our Lord’s passion unless we enter into the fellowship
of His suffering. He has left behind Him in the path He trod a message written
in His blood and fastened with a nail to His cross “If any man will come after
me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” We long for
His triumph and are fain to have some humble part in it, but the condition on
which we gain it is found in the words, “If so be that we suffer with Him, that
we may be also glorified together.” If we may attain unto that any price will be
cheap. The apostle was so convinced of that that he cries, “I reckon that the
sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory
that shall be revealed to us-ward.” How can any of us dare to represent Christ
to men if we do not know something of the thrill of His passion, if we do not
yearn after the souls of men so that we can cry concerning our own flock, as
John Knox cried for Scotland, “Give me or I die!” This and no other is the
passion which has transformed the world. Paul had caught it from his Master when
lie exclaimed, “I could wish that I myself were anathema from Christ for my
brethren’s sake, my kinsmen according to the flesh. “It is a wonder that we can
go through the sublime task which is laid upon us as heralds of a passion with a
sense that it is an ordinary and common task. “I marvel,” said the old Puritan,
“how I can preach stolidly and coldly, how I can let men alone in their sins,
and that I do not go to them and beseech them for the Lord’s sake however they
take it and whatever pains or trouble it should cause me. When I come out of my
pulpit, I am not accused of want of ornaments or elegance, nor of letting fall
an unhandsome word, but my conscience asketh me ’How could you speak of life and
death with such a heart?

How couldst thou preach of heaven and hell in such a careless and sleepy manner?
Truly this peal of the conscience doth ring in my ears, *0 Lord, do that on our
own souls that thou wouldst use us to do on the souls of others.’ “ Are we not
to get a verdict? Are we not sent out, in modern phrase, to actually sell goods?
What boots it us that when we come down from the pulpit steps gracious ladies
and cultured men thank us for the sermon, but do not surrender their souls to
the will of their Lord? Is preaching a proclamation of a sublime and insistent
truth, or is it only a lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice and can
play well on an instrument?

Morley says of Gladstone, who gained in Ms great Midlothian campaign, when over
seventy, one of the greatest oratorical triumphs of history, that “he bore his
hearers through long changes of strenuous periods as if he were now a hunter and
now an eager bird of prey, now a charioteer of fiery steeds kept well in hand,
and now and again we seemed to hear the pity or dark wrath of a prophet with the
mighty rushing of wind and the fire running along the ground.” Would that apply
to much of our preaching today? As Dr. Jackson asks, “Are we not growing too
quiet, too tame, too subdued? Are we not sacrificing to mere literary primness
and prettiness and to a mistaken self-restraint? Our preaching, ’ ’ he says, “is
too dry-eyed; there is no red blood visible under the skin. The commonplace is
not vitalized; the thin wire of words is charged with no current that quickens
and thrills. ’ ’ Men are often apparently eager for some theoretical truth but
oblivious of the real purpose for which the truth is presented.

Dr. Bonar, after listening to a minister who was preaching with great gusto,
said to him, “You love to preach, don’t you?” “Yes, indeed, I do.”

“But,” said Bonar, “do you love the men to whom you preach?” We do not have to
choose between a fervid ignorance and a passionless culture. Thank God, we may
have both a knowledge and a zeal, a well trained mind and a warm heart. The man
who knows the most ought to feel the most and do the most. The material which he
gets together ought not to be a mass of dead fuel, he ought to touch it with the
prophetic glow that shall set it ablaze. Only the divine fire wrought out in his
own experience and conviction can do that. A recent writer to ministers has
said, “The cold-blooded pedantry which affects to look down on all religious
zeal as religious rant is being suffered to inflict the gravest injury upon the
whole life and work of the church, and not least upon the life and work of the
preacher. “ After all, nothing is so touching as an honest enthusiasm, and other
things being equal, it is the man who is himself greatly moved and is not
ashamed to let it be seen, who will greatly move others. Therefore, if a
preacher has received from God a rich, strong, emotional nature, let him give no
heed to the silly clatter of those who tell him he has no right to work on men’s
feelings as if religion could do anything for a man whose feelings are not
worked on! Let him give his zeal full play and he will find it mighty to the
opening of many doors against which his most profound logic will beat itself in
vain. In all true preaching spiritual passion is an essential element.

After all, it matters little how excellent the fuel if the fire be out. All that
a man has of intellectual strength to the last ounce, he can put into the work
of preaching, but intellect alone can never make a preacher, and the man with no
more heart than can be made out of brains is in the wrong place in the pulpit.
Dr. Chalmers once compared the sermons of the Moderates to a fine winter’s day:
“They were short, clear and cold.

Brevity is good, and clearness is better, but the coldness is fatal. Moonlight
preaching ripens no harvest.”

Dr. Jackson reminds us that whoever will go over the great names in the history
of the Christian pulpit will discover that the passion to win men is the
ultimate fountain of all preaching that is of the prophetic order. Of Rutherford
a contemporary said, “Many a time I thought he would have flown out of the
pulpit when he came to speak of Jesus Christ.” John Knox was supported in his
old age by attendants to his place in the pulpit, but when he arose to speak,
the divine passion blazed in his soul, until, one of his friends said, “So
mighty was he in his yearning that I thought he would break the pulpit into
bits.” Of Joseph Alleine it was said, “Infinite and insatiable greed for the
conversion of souls, he preached with far reaching voice, flashing eye and a
soul on fire with love.” Is not St. Paul the best of all examples for the
preacher? Hear him calling himself a servant of Jesus Christ, “separated unto
the Gospel of God.” He could say, “This one thing I do.” The divine imperative
was upon his soul. ’ * I must see Rome,” he cried, because he was eager there to
preach the gospel; and shouts with holy fervor, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel
of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation.” The record shows that
Paul was constrained by the word. His message burned like a fire in his bones.
His passion to win men was a divine constraint which gave him no rest. By the
space of three years, he told the Ephesian elders, “I ceased not to admonish
every one night and day with tears.” When his friends urged him not to go to
Jerusalem, he cried, “I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at
Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.” Does anyone doubt that a passion like
that had been kindled by the altar fire of Christ’s own life?

What words are these from the hot heart of an English teacher of preachers! ’ *
Shall we repeat an old sermon? Yes, if you can recover the heat in which it was
first made, but if your soul is no longer kindled by it, if the fire is gone out
of it, and it is now but a poor dead cinder, then let it be put straightway in
the place of cinders.

People do not care whether your sermon is old or new; the only question is, ’Is
it alive?’ Alas for the minister who forces the simple folks to say, ’What he
says is faultless enough, but it leaves me strangely cold.’ So will it be if the
truth which once was a glowing conviction at which men wanned their hands
becomes but a heap of ashes from which the last glint of fire has died out. That
is the tragedy of more pulpits than one cares to think of.” The greatest thing
in the world is love. That never faileth. It is the one thing which He asks of
us. “We cannot simulate it, if we wear a mask it will slip sometime. If love for
man thrills our every act the world will take knowledge of us that we have been
with Jesus*


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  CHAPTER 5: 01.04.     CHAPTER IV - HOLY BOLDNESS
========================================================================

CHAPTER IV - HOLY BOLDNESS The trouble with most Christian workers ministers and
laymen is that they are afraid, and now as of old fear bringeth a snare. We are
afraid of what people will say, for the moment a man does anything different
from the ordinary, that moment he is the target for criticism. Some will call
him too zealous, too personal and too insistent. It is only perfect love and
perfect confidence and perfect abandon to the will of God that casteth out fear
and that brings the personal victory. The New Testament has a great deal to say
about boldness. We often quote the passage ’ (They took knowledge of them that
they had been with Jesus.” But why did they? The record says, “When they saw the
boldness of Peter and John.” So it seems that boldness was associated in the
thought of the people with the life of Jesus. Again the apostle says that he
declared the truth “with all boldness,” and the effect of that truth was a
thrilling one on himself as well as on those who heard. Conviction breeds
conviction. Hear the apostle say that “In nothing we shall be ashamed, but that
with all boldness as always so now Christ shall be magnified in my body whether
by life or by death.” You cannot hold a man like that no pent-up Utica contracts
his powers. So everywhere through the teachings of the apostles, we are
challenged to a boldness that is not arrogance, or simply self-assertion, or
dogmatism, but an authority in boldness that has its birth in a sense of the
mighty consequences that are at issue a sense of the importance and imminence of
a decision that outreaches time and thought. No doubt there were friends who
stood by and said to John the Baptist, “Be careful what you say to Herod.” But
John thundered the truth into the very teeth of the royal sinner though it cost
him his own head. “Mind what you say to Felix,” Paul’s anxious companions might
have said, but Paul reasoned of righteousness and of judgment to come until the
knees of the proud ruler knocked together. “We boldly proclaim the word,” says
the apostle again and again. It was the same spirit in which he said concerning
himself and all of us that we were to come boldly to the throne of Christ and
find help in every time of need.

Thousands of ministers are cribbed, cabined and confined because they do not
dare to make the great adventure. Their faith fails them they will not put it to
the test. If they could only remember, “if thou hast faith like a grain of
mustard seed thou shalt say to this mountain, remove hence to yonder place and
it shall remove.” So many men who will not leave the safe harbor and put with
God to sea! They are conventional and smug and comfortable. They do not know the
joy of a great emprize. In this matter I am speaking out of my own experience. I
know the temptations which face every minister through the weakness of the
flesh. Some of us are naturally timid and shrink from the great contests where
there must be a decision a victory or a defeat. We would rather avoid it if we
can, but if we do, we shall only know the shallows of life. For the comfort of
some of my brethren, I do not mind saying that again and again in my early
ministry, I was put to the test which almost overwhelmed me. More than once I
have walked around a city block before I could get up courage to go to the door
and talk to a man about his soul’s interest. I shall never forget the struggle
of my own soul when I was asked to stand on the steps of the City Hall in New
York and to address an audience of many thousands of men in the open. As
chairman of the Committee on Outdoor Service for the Evangelistic Committee of
the city, it was suggested that it would greatly help our cause and secure for
our work helpful publicity if we could arrange for a service on the steps of the
City Hall. When I asked permission, I was passed on by the city officials from
one department to another, but at last permission was granted, and we were told
that we should have all the police protection that was necessary. I was quite
aware that in my audience were many who were more inclined to scoff than to
pray. I knew there were anarchists and socialists by the hundred in front of me,
who cared for none of these things. It was not an easy matter to screw my
courage to the sticking point and to say with shut teeth, as Garrison said long
before, “I will not equivocate and I will be heard,” and say without fear in the
face of all classes and conditions of men “There is none other name given under
heaven among men whereby ye must be saved but the name of Jesus,” or to say with
Peter on the day of Pentecost, “This same Jesus ye have taken and by wicked
hands have crucified. “ It was not an easy thing for me, with a temperament that
shrinks from notoriety, to stand on the seat of an automobile in “Wall Street,
under the windows of J. P. Morgan’s office, and preach the unsearchable riches
of Jesus Christ to a surging crowd; to stand on the steps of the Custom House,
the historic spot where the great political leaders, presidents and senators of
the United States had stood, and to speak to thousands of men, who looked up
into my face, concerning the one thing to which I had been called in the
Christian ministry. But out of every one of these experiences, which were so
trying to me that I could hardly gather courage to speak, there came such grace
into my own heart that in a few minutes I forgot all ahout the crowd and only
remembered my message and my Master. Scores came to me as I spoke at these
places and told me how they had decided to go back to their old manner of life
and to accept Jesus Christ as their Saviour. Some of them were hack-sliders,
some had been superintendents and local preachers and class leaders, but they
had come into the city and had hidden themselves away. They had said, “I have
worked hard for many years, now I will rest.” In resting it soon happened that
they lost their zeal, and soon their love for the Master had become cold and
indifferent. I had the pleasure of knowing that in many cases they came back to
their old love and united themselves for vital service with the Church of the
Living God. And many who heard the Gospel for the first time aliens by wilful
choice and wicked life from the kingdom of God came back to their Father’s house
and to His yearning love.

It was when I stood on the steps of the City Hall, bringing home to the members
of the church, with all the force of which I was capable, the fact that they
were chosen of God for the world’s redemption and that they needed to throw
themselves with uncalculating devotion into the work, that I repeated several
times the two words which stand at the head of this chapter, and urged that
those who were followers of Jesus, who counted not His own life dear unto
Himself, should themselves be able to proclaim with boldness His truths and to
stop short of no sacrifice for Him.

I delivered my soul with great earnestness of the message which it seemed to me
God had laid upon my heart. It was some weeks after that when one of the most
successful preachers in America laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “I owe
you a debt I shall never be able to pay, and all on account of two words which
you used, but which I believe were sent by the Holy Spirit. When I went home
after hearing your message, those two words kept ringing in my ears, ’Holy
boldness, holy boldness,’ and I said to myself, ’You are a coward. You do not
dare to venture. You will not do what you know you ought to do. You are afraid
of that fine congregation that gathers at your morning service. You want to
observe all the proprieties and have the most dignified and proper service. You
would not dare to preach a message straight to their hearts and to urge them to
give themselves to Jesus Christ on the spot.

You would not dare to send your deacons among that congregation and ask them to
urge men and women to be reconciled to God.’ I thought about it and I prayed
about it, and the more I thought and the more I prayed, the more the conviction
laid hold upon me that I must make the great adventure. In order to preserve my
own soul alive, I must cast myself into the breach. I remembered how He said,
’If any man will save his life, he shall lose it, and if he will lose his life
for my sake and the Gospel’s, he shall find it.’ On the next Sabbath morning I
called my officials into the study and told them that I was greatly moved. I
felt that something ought to be done and done at once; I feared that perhaps
they would not like it and that the congregation might feel like resenting it,
but I had in my heart the same feeling which Luther had when he said, ’Here I
stand, God help me, I can do no other.’ I told them all that was on my heart,
and we had a time of great heart searching and agony before God. I asked them to
spend the week in thought and in prayer, and on the next Sabbath morning as we
gathered the atmosphere seemed to be surcharged with spiritual conviction. ’I
want you,’ I said, ’to help me take the message this morning and bring it to the
thought and conscience of the people for immediate action.’ “

So, my friend said, when he had given his message as hot with yearning as he
knew how to give it, he called the officials to the front, and, in the presence
of the congregation, charged them to carry the message of the Master to their
friends among the people. “It was such an hour as we had never witnessed in the
church. Strong men bowed their heads upon the pews before them and many of my
leaders were in tears. When I gave the invitation for men and women to stand for
Christ and proclaim their choice of Him as their life leader, one and another
and another responded until more than forty men and women came to the front, and
clasping my hand, made a solemn promise to be true to God. I count that,” said
the preacher, “the greatest hour in my ministry hitherto, and, if I am ever
tempted to be unfaithful, I hope I shall hear those words ’holy boldness’
ringing in my ears, and that I may never prove recreant to the call of my Lord.”


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  CHAPTER 6: 01.05.     CHAPTER V - CULTURE A LOAD OR A LIFT
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CHAPTER V - CULTURE A LOAD OR A LIFT May my tongue falter and my pen forget its
cunning before I say or write one word that hinders any man in his search for
the deepest and broadest culture of which his nature is capable.

True culture should increase our capacity, enlarge our ability and quicken our
perceptions. When properly applied, it is the handmaid of religion as well as
the husbandman of the mind. But is it possible that such a beneficent thing may
be throttled in its purpose, so that it becomes a source of spiritual death
instead of life 1? Here the appeal must be not to theory but to fact. Does
anyone doubt that German Kultur came to be a blight upon the individual and the
world? Germany was unequaled in her intellectual attainments of a certain kind,
but the effect of it all on her scholars in the atrophy of spiritual vision and
power will ever remain as an indictment of a godless culture that cannot be
overlooked or explained away. Are we not right then in asking ourselves, “Is the
culture which I have and to which I aspire strengthening my devotion to those
things which are pure and lovely and of good report? Are the most cultured men I
know the most devoted to the highest interest of humanity and the most
uncalculating and unselfish in the measure of their service?” Surely there can
be no doubt that the standard of unselfish service is the one by which, in the
last analysis, the greatness of men will be determined. There has been no
dissent to the sublime affirmation of the Galilean Teacher “I am among you as he
that serveth,” and “he that would be chief among you, let him be the servant of
all.” When you apply this standard, the record of culture is not always pleasant
reading. Emerson made his literary bow to the world in his Harvard Phi Beta
Kappa oration on the alienation of men of letters from the affairs of national
life.

Like wealth and power of any sort, culture has its insidious temptations. First
of all, it is compelled to be analytical and critical. It takes things to
pieces. Its flowers lose their perfume in the study of calyx and sepal. There is
no song in the nightingale y’s throat when the scalpel is searching for the
source of its melody. It comes to the city of Man-Soul as most of our railroads
come to town, through the purlieus of poverty and waste. Because it does not
find beauty there, it is tempted to think the city has none. Because the city’s
soul is not in the street, it is quite inclined to believe that it has none. It
loves to say it is a searcher after truth for truth’s sake, and is impatient
with the pragmatic test.

What is truth for truth’s sake? If you mean a truth that is sterile, that does
not eventuate in life, then it is an impertinence in the sight of God and man to
talk of that kind of truth. From the standpoint of a life spent in association
with Greek and Roman philosophers, who freely encouraged suicide and lived lives
whose abominations smelled to heaven, Pilate had good reason when he asked of
the fettered Man before him “What is truth?” He found out, as any man of culture
needs to find out “For this cause was I born, that I might witness to the truth.

“I am the truth.” The only truth that counts in the realm of morals and religion
is felt truth truth that is vital and imperative. A formal creed is only the
skin of truth stuffed. It is as useless as a last year’s bird nest on the boughs
of time. It is only when truth becomes incarnate that the world bows its knee to
it and accepts it. That was what happened when a brown-frocked monk was walking
up the holy staircase at Rome, and when the heart of an Oxford don was strangely
warmed in Aldersgate Street.

Another temptation to which culture is especially susceptible is pride. It is
fair to say that those who most reveal it are those whose culture is really
limited, but, alas, there are so many of that kind! It is always true that
knowledge may be proud that it knows so much, but wisdom will be humble that it
knows so little.

There was a never-to-be-forgotten day when a freshman in another college
strolled into the museum at Harvard. It was the opening of a fairyland to him.
Eager-eyed he was gazing at specimen after specimen and wishing that he knew
more about them, when a sweet-faced man, whose smile would have made summer in
the Arctic, was standing at his side. Captivated by the man, the freshman heard
him say, “ These are my pets. May I tell you about them? ’ ’ He lifted a
trilobite and told the ignorant boy how that fossil was old when Pharaoh builded
the pyramids and Attic poets sang. With infinite patience he answered questions
which must have seemed foolish. When the wonderful man was interrupted and
called away, the freshman asked a guide, “Who is that man?” “ Don’t you know
that is Agassiz!”

It is always true that a little learning is a dangerous thing and most of us
with all our culture have yet but little knowledge compared with what is before
us, and yet we are proud. Edison has said, “No man knows one seven-billionth
part of anything.” There is an arrogance of ignorance which we greatly condemn,
but there is an arrogance of culture which ought with greater justice to be
condemned, because the cultured man ought to know better.

Culture is tempted to interest itself in the form of things. It needs to be
reminded “ ’Tis life whereof our nerves are scant.”

It is more life and fuller which is the need of the hour. John Stuart Mill was
the greatest thinking machine in England in the last century. At twelve years of
age he knew more Greek than most of the professors in Oxford, and at fourteen
the greatest mathematicians took off their hats to him. At the morning walk with
his father, at the mature age of thirteen, they discussed the problem of
Gibbon’s “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.” When I was a boy in college, few
names were more quoted in cultured circles than his, but I have seldom heard his
name mentioned in the last twenty years. His latest historian says of him, * *
There was no fire under his boiler. ’ * His culture was aloof and academic. He
had no thrill of human interest, no glow of conviction. Toward the world’s
needs, he was as heartless as a graven image. When asked how he would feel if
the principles he advocated were universally accepted, he said, “I would not
feel.” He was the consummate flower of the culture of his time, but it was the
culture of the dilettanti.

Perhaps no two men of the same age better illustrate the difference between
culture and service than Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus was the greatest scholar of
his day. There were none to challenge his supremacy. He thoroughly agreed with
the principles of Martin Luther, but when Luther’s friends asked him to come out
in the open and stand with him he said, “Why should I lose my living or my
head?” He realized all the abominations of the Church of Borne. He said that
instead of saying their prayers the monks were eating gingerbread that they
might take more kindly to their beer, but he left Luther to fight alone for God
and men. If he had only stood with the little monk at the Diet of Worms he could
have changed the thought of half the world and projected himself for the help of
men through untold millenniums. Luther sighed over his deflection and might have
chanted with Browning in his Lost Leader, “Just for a handful of silver he left
us, Just for a riband to stick on his coat.”

If you want to see culture as a load, read Froude’s “Times of Erasmus and
Luther. “ If you wish to see culture as a lift, there is Henry Drummond, the
scholar; “Chinese” Gordon, the soldier, “Who always and everywhere Gave his help
to the weak, His sympathy to the suffering, His substance to the poor, And his
heart to God.”

There is Phillips Brooks, the preacher, and Borden P. Bowne, the greatest
philosopher that America has produced and one of the most faithful,
eager-hearted Christians I have ever known. In Conferences and Assemblies and
Synods throughout the country, I have had ministers by the score ask, “Why is it
that with deeper, more scholarly culture and training, I am less effective in
moving men to God?” The answer is not far to seek your culture has become a load
instead of a lift. While you have been busy with the delights of scholarship the
fire has gone out upon the altar. Thus so many of the prophets of God stand
shivering around the altars where the fires have failed and are as impotent as
were the priests of Baal to call down the fires of God from the ascenting
heavens.

Knowledge ought to be power. Culture, if it is to be a lift and not a load, must
be transmuted into service for God and man. When the culture of the mind exceeds
the culture of the soul, a man is educated beyond his capacity. He is doing too
much business for his capital. It is a prostitution of talent when he who knows
the most does the least. It might be well for the best of us with all our
culture to lay our finger on our lips and listen to the greatest Teacher of all
the ages, Son of Mary and Son of God, who says to His friends in words which the
world will never allow to be discounted or to perish, “If any man will do my
will, he shall know of the doctrine.”


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  CHAPTER 7: 01.06.     CHAPTER VI - THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS
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CHAPTER VI - THE PASSION OF THE PROPHETS No one can look at Sargent’s picture of
the Prophets in the Boston Public Library without feeling a tug at his soul.
What glorious men they were laymen all of them gatherers of sycamore fruit, cup
bearers to the king, but whatever else they did, one great absorbing passion for
the Israel of God was on their souls. They were not only forth-tellers of the
truth, but they lived it out. There was Israel turning from God, giving herself
up to idols, and they were sore distressed.

See stern old Elijah, the greatest of them all, for whom to this day every child
of Abraham sets a chair at his solemn feast, the man whom they say locked up by
his prayers the cisterns of the heavens and carried the keys of them for three
long years in his pocket! How shall he let Israel and its king go on to their
destruction? A king is seeking him but he will not temporize his message, “Art
thou he that troubleth Israel?” Elijah answered, “Not I, but you and your
father’s house have wrought the overthrow. of this people. ’ ’ And he told him
that in Naboth ’s vineyard, where of all places on God’s green earth the king
would least desire to meet the prophet of Jehovah.

See him on Carmel calling back Israel to her oldtime faith. He will not
temporize or equivocate, stern old prophet of righteousness. He will not let
things drift. It is a time of decision. “Choose ye this day whom you will serve;
if God be God, serve Him, and if Baal, serve him.” More of the Saviour’s
challenge decide something, don’t drift! And then that a race to Jezreel a king
in a chariot bested by a prophet on foot, and the prophet oversped by the rain
drops of the mercy of God! Small wonder that when John the Baptist came, they
said it was Elijah, and when Jesus came they said it was the spirit of Elijah
and the thunderous voice of John the Baptist rolled into one. And here is
Isaiah, perhaps the most gifted of all the prophets, a man of great natural
endowments, intensified and consecrated to the loftiest ends by his
self-surrender to God. He had the intellectual grasp of a great statesman and
the fervid imagination of a great poet. He was a seer who could see. How his
yearning soul portrayed the love of God and His righteous indignation! What
irony, what ridicule, what challenge to heights of spiritual experience! How
utterly all his gifts were mastered as he sought to win Israel back to God. His
were the words that Jesus loved to quote, and no prophetic words are oftener on
the lips of preachers today than the words of this marvelous prophet. He is the
great evangelist, the proclaimer of the good things. “Ho, everyone that
thirsteth come ye to the waters, buy wine and milk without money and without
price.” And those Messianic prophecies “He was wounded for our transgressions;
the chastisement of our peace was laid upon him, and by his stripes are we
healed. ’ ’ May my soul stand in holy wonder before such a flaming heart and
fiery tongue until I myself have caught the blaze of it! Of Jeremiah it was an
English preacher who said, “However many Isaiahs there may have been, I am glad
there was only one Jeremiah.”

He seems to think that one weeping prophet and one set of jeremiads was enough,
but would it not tend toward the multiplication of good shepherds who would give
their lives for the sheep if there were many who could come to say “0 that my
head were waters and mine eyes a fountain of tears that I might weep day and
night for the slain of the daughter of my people.”

What shall I say more for the time would fail me to tell Daniel and Nahum and
Amos, gatherer of sycamore fruit, and Jonah, and Habakkuk, whose prayer, Webster
said, was the most sublime thing in literature, and all the long list of the
prophets down to Malachi, who with a challenge which burns in our soul, cries,
“Will a man rob God,” and all the yearning of his soul condensed into one
glorious prophecy at wMch the heart of God’s people will bound for joy until
they see the prophet himself in the land of his fruition, “Then they that feared
the Lord spake often one to another and the Lord harkened and heard it, and a
book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and
that thought upon His name, and they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in
that day when I make up my jewels and I will spare them as a man spareth his own
son that serveth him.”


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  CHAPTER 8: 01.07.     CHAPTER VII - THE PASSION OF THE GBEAT EVANGELISTS
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CHAPTER VII - THE PASSION OF THE GBEAT EVANGELISTS Where shall we begin the
story of evangelism? Who were the great evangelists? We can only touch upon one
here and there, for their number is legion. Prophets, apostles, the church
fathers, the reformers themselves were all what they were because of the great
evangel which trembled upon their lips. Perhaps we cannot do better than to
mention first that wonderful evangelist, John Bunyan. How we love him! How we
have marched with him to the city of the great King, the new Jerusalem! He has
led us all the way into the green pastures by the delectable mountains, past the
slough of despond, and all the wonderful path until we come in sight of the City
of the Saved. All this he crowded into a narrow cell in Bedford Jail. It was
there he heard sweet angels singing lauds for him, and because of what happened
there, he would be willing to go back and stay “until the moss grows over my
eyebrows rather than in anywise to deny my Lord. ’ ’ Look at his wonderful
characters and the names they bear Mr. Great Heart, Christian, Faithful, and Mr.
Valiant-f or-Truth. How many souls has John Bunyan led out of the City of
Destruction? He could not have led others if he had not gone that way himself.
It is out of his own great experience that he is speaking, and no man can lead
others unless he himself is led of God. John Bunyan had known the sinful life,
but with what fulness and depth he came to know his Saviour is found in the
sweet story of Grace Abounding. May we all stand at last with Mr.
Valiant-forTruth and see the heavens filled with the chariots of God and hear
the trumpets sound for us on the farther shore.

Next we turn for a moment to the man who traveled more miles to bring the gospel
to the lost, as Birrell says, “than any man who ever bestrode a beast “; a man
whose devotion was marvelous from the days when he was a student in Lincoln
College in Oxford, but who says that all that availed him nothing until that day
which Christendom will never allow to pass out of its sight, when his heart was
“strangely warmed” and he went out to do for England more than was done by the
armies and navies of England in the whole length of his life. What courage and
what toil! Ease and he had parted company, and as for money, he lived upon a
pittance and gave away more than $200,000. Abused and maligned in his time, he
could say, “I leave my reputation where I leave my soul in the hands of God.”

He said to his brother Charles, “When I devoted to God my ease, my time, my
labor, did I exempt my reputation.” So he traveled 225,000 miles and preached
2,400 sermons, and, amid misrepresentation and abuse, never knowing the delights
of love at home, subject to incessant attacks of the mob, the pulpit and the
press, he did not abate a jot of heart or hope until he had reached the age of
eighty-eight and ceased at once to labor and to live. Canon Farrar says,
“Overwhelming evidence exists to show that the church and people of England in
his day were dull, vapid and soulless and the preaching was careless, the land
steeped in immorality. To Wesley was granted the task for which he was set apart
by enviable consecration the task which even an archangel might have envied him,
of awakening a mighty revival of religious life in those dead pulpits in that
slumbering church and moribund society. His was the religious sincerity which
not only formed the Wesley Community but, working through the heart of the very
church which had despised him, he flashed fire into her whitening embers. It was
he who discovered that lost secret of Christianity the compulsion of human
souls.

He was the voice that cried over the valley of dry bones, l Come from the four
winds, oh spirit, and breathe upon the slain that they may live.’ “ In
Westminster Abbey, that great temple of silence and reconciliation, one may read
three of his great sayings: one full of holy knowledge, “I look on all the world
as my parish”; another full of triumphant confidence, ’ * God buries His workmen
but His work goes on”; the third, his cry in age and feebleness extreme, the
best of all is, “God is with us.” In the long list of great evangelists, no name
stands out clearer in the light of an absorbing passion than that of Whitefield.
To him two continents acknowledge their debt and keep green the traditions of
his marvelous power. Most of the leaders and charmers of men have come to their
service from under the low lintels of the poor, and “Whitefield was no
exception. Uniting with Wesley to form the Holy Club at Oxford, he was at first
morbid in his spiritual earnestness.

He wore patched clothing, ate coarse food, prayed under the trees far into the
winter nights in such agony of soul that the sweat ran down his face. At last he
laid hold on God by simple faith. He had traveled his own via dolorosa and
through pain he came to peace; thereby he was enabled to help others who journey
alone in the cypress path.

Ordained at twenty-two, he began to preach immediately with tremendous effect.
Probably no man since the days of Paul excelled him in sacred eloquence. Said
John Newton, “If you ask me who is the second preacher in the world, I do not
know; but if you ask me who is the first, there can be but one answer.”

Franklin went to hear him plead for Ms orphan school in Georgia, but resolved
lie would give nothing. After listening a little, he decided to give his
coppers, then his silver and then his gold, and emptied his pockets into it when
the plate was passed. Hopkinson left his money at home purposely, but was moved
to borrow of his neighbors. Garrick said he could repeat the word “Mesopotamia”
so that it moved him to tears. But after all has been said about his eloquence,
his power with men depended most upon the passion of his soul which absorbed
every lesser ambition and used every God-given power to lead men to the personal
choice of Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord. He was a kindred spirit with
Jonathan Edwards in this regard and together they led the Great Awakening of our
young Republic. No man was more untiring in devotion than he. At one time he
writes, “Lord when thou seest me in danger of nestling down put a thorn in
tender pity into my nest,” and again, “I am determined to go on until I drop, to
die fighting though it be on my stumps.” When nations forget their dependence
upon Him and personal allegiance is lightly held and the individual conscience
is benumbed, when form triumphs over spirit, and worship degenerates into
heartless ceremonials, God sends his messengers of flame. So came the old
prophets to Israel; so came Savonarola to Italy; Luther to Germany; Knox to
Scotland; Wesley to England, Edwards and WMtefield to America, In such manner
God in all ages has called back His people from apostasy. When Whitefield
preached in Boston, the city was at white heat. Twenty thousand heard him in
Philadelphia, and thirty thousand crowded Boston Common to listen to him. Mr.
Cooper, pastor in Boston, said, “Under Whitefield ’s preaching more people came
to me in one week in deep concern about their souls than in the whole
twenty-four years of my ministry.” Mr. Prince, another pastor, said in substance
the same thing.

Mr. “Webb said about 1,000 in deep conviction came to him in three months. The
pastors unite in saying the same spirit prevailed for more than a year and a
half after Whitefield had gone.

Speaking of his passion, Dr. Parsons said of him, in a sermon preached on the
day of his death, “ We were convinced that he believed the message he brought to
be of the last importance.” On the marble cenotaph above his dust at Newburyport
these words are carved: “As a soldier of the Cross, humble, devout, ardent, he
put on the whole armor of God, preferring the honor of Christ to his own
interest, repose, reputation or life.’* In thirty-four years he crossed the
Atlantic thirteen times and preached 18,000 sermons. For his seal he had a
lambent flame and under it the motto, “Let us seek heaven.” In his time,
Whitefield, like Wesley, was accused of almost every crime. As Dr. Squintum, he
was caricatured by Foot, the actor, from one end of Great Britain to the other,
even after he was in his grave. He was called the clerical pickpocket, and
accused of appropriating his great collections to himself, but those accusations
only live in history to fasten obloquy upon those who made them. In Cowper’s
words, “He loved the world that hated him. The tear That dropped upon his Bible
was sincere.

Assailed by scandal and the tongue of strife His only answer was a blameless
life.” The record of his last hours at Newburyport is thrilling beyond words to
tell. He is preaching his last sermon. His subject is “Faith and Works.” With
far carrying tones he cries, “Works, Works, a man get to heaven by Works!

I would as soon think of climbing to the moon on a rope of sand!” But his voice
begins to fail, “I go, ’ ’ he said, 1 1 to my everlasting rest. My sun has
risen, shone, and is setting. Nay, it is about to rise and shine forever. I have
not lived in vain, and though I could live to preach Christ a thousand years, I
die to be with Him, which to me is far better. “ He was to preach that night,
but he felt he could not. He took his candle to go up to bed, but midway on the
outside stairs he paused with his candle in his hand. Answering the importunity
of the people, he spoke with the passion of his blessed Lord until the candle
burned down to its socket and went ont. Would that a picture of that scene at
Newburyport might hang in every preacher’s study in America! He went up to his
room and to an agonizing night, then “Just as the sun in all his state Illumined
the eastern skies He passed through glory’s morning gate And walked in
Paradise.”

Whitefield was no organizer like Wesley. He was the voice of one crying in the
wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord,” and America owes him a debt which
it does not fully appreciate and which it can never repay.

Time would fail me to tell of Fox and Tennant and Brainerd; of Finney, losing
his strength that he might gain his power; of Moody saying, “There shall be one
man completely consecrated to show the world what God can do with a soul
entirely given up to His service; and scores of men, some of whom have finished
their evangel in victory, and others who still move the people up to God, both
in the pulpit and out of it. They are the heralds of a passion which stopped not
at the Cross, and they shall share here and hereafter the glory and benediction
of their Lord.”


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  CHAPTER 9: 01.08.     CHAPTER VIII - THE TEACHER’S PASSION
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CHAPTER VIII - THE TEACHER’S PASSION

There is one miracle of grace by which a wandering soul comes back to God. There
is another by which a soul itself touched with infinite love feels an absorbing
passion to go after another who, like itself, had gone astray. There is no place
where one who has felt this high commission can hope to win greater trophies
than in the Sunday School. Birrell says of John Wesley that “he was out of
breath pursuing souls.” If only the same panting desire might be born in the
heart of every Sunday School teacher!

Thompson pictures, in “The Hound of Heaven,” God out after the soul; pursuing it
up and down the universe. The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee, from
the highest and seeks refuge in every human thing that could be called at all
good, but the point of the poem is that the good must never hide men from the
best. So the soul is never allowed to rest in lower things; just as the soul
would nestle in some new covert, she is turned from it by the imperious best of
all that claims her for its own.

Now in the teacher’s life there are many opportrinities to advance the good, to
develop intellectual taste, to encourage the scholar’s thirst for learning, but
none of these must stand in the way of the one thing for which the teacher is
called to his high eminence. Nor literature, nor ideals of any sort can take the
place of the one ideal the perfect life in Christ Jesus. So the Sunday School of
itself is not an end; teaching of itself is not an end. The result of the Sunday
School is the production of life and character, and the end of teaching is that
Christ may ]be formed in each scholar, the hope of glory. In order to teach such
lessons, it goes without saying that one must have experience in the thing he
teaches, so that no one may turn upon him and say, “Sayest thou this thing of
thyself or did another tell it thee of me!” Has he first hand information? Does
he speak out of a rich and full experience, which has been wrought in him by
holy ventures and has entered through the travail of his soul into the substance
of his life? To a heart which has such an experience, what a challenge presents
itself! Twenty-seven millions of young people in this country who are not in the
Sunday School and almost as many millions more already within its reach! Of old
one crusade followed another. That the sepulchre of Jesus might be won from the
Saracen, Peter the Hermit cried “God wills it,” and hundreds of thousands of men
marched on the first crusade. Fifty years later a million and a quarter set out
for Jerusalem, no one of whom saw the Holy Land. So one crusade followed
another, and little enough resulted from them.

Perhaps the saddest of all crusades was the Children’s Crusade in 1212. An army
of thirty thousand French children, unarmed, led by a boy named Stephen, set out
for the Holy Land by way of Marseilles, and a similar army of German children
marched over the Alps and came to the Mediterranean. They thought the sea would
divide for them and they would pass over to the Holy Land in safety. Most of
them perished on the march, or were lost at sea, or were sold into slavery.

Now the time has come for a crusade for the children. A challenge of unspeakable
importance rests upon the heart of the church. Shall we be able to win these
millions to the service of the Master? You may rear buildings, but the torch of
the incendiary may consume them or the tempest may overthrow them, but when we
put our touch upon the plastic soul of youth, it will remain there when the wax
has changed to adamant. We must not bungle our work. We see men and women who
were the subject of malpractice in their youth by careless or ignorant servant
or physician. They will walk the path of life to the grave and every step they
will go with pain. Life’s functions instead of being a joy have become an agony.
Sad as is that picture, it is not for a moment to be compared with the work of
one who bungles in the forming and transforming of the soul, who brings only
human diagnosis and remedy in the place of the wisdom and power of God.

Every teacher must realize that her students are looking not simply into her
face but into her. soul, that the thing she is is greater than the science she
teaches. Garfield said if he could sit on one end of a log and have Mark
Hopkins, president of “Williams College, on the other, it would be all the
college he required.

Here as nowhere else comes the gospel of the personal touch. I cannot bear to
think that the soul of a child should be either mishandled or neglected. That
thrilling story of human experience, “Twice Born Men,” was called in England
“Broken Earthenware.” I do not want the fair vase of life broken. Thank God it
sometimes happens that a broken vase may be mended by His grace so that it can
hold the water of life, but let me protect and surround the vase so that it may
not be shattered. It is a sad comment on the passion and the efficiency of our
teaching force that one out of every five who come to the Sunday School is won
to Christ in the School, one after they leave the School, and three are not won
at all. It is time we taught our children that they are never too young to
surrender their hearts to Jesus Christ. It is time our teachers felt that their
work has been in the most important part failure, unless by personal experience
their members are coming to know Him whom to know aright is life eternal.


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  CHAPTER 10: 01.09.     CHAPTER IX - THE PASSION OP THE CHURCH
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CHAPTER IX - THE PASSION OP THE CHURCH

If one were asked what should be the passion of the church, there could be but
one answer from progressive or conservative, and that would be “to serve the
world.” The Master’s thrilling challenge would rise to our lips, “Ye are the
light of the world, ye are the salt of the earth. “ The church ought not to be
divided into two camps when it conies to the application of this great
principle. At heart, we believe, the Church is really one, though it has often
happened that, as in the old story, men looking at different sides of the same
shield have called it silver or gold and have fallen to blows over their
differences, when if each had taken the viewpoint of the other, their
differences would have disappeared. May we venture an irenic word with the hope
that it may serve in the end to make matters a little clearer and to unite for a
common purpose forces which have seemed at times to be arrayed against each
other? A little careful thought will show that there is no antagonism between a
personal and a social gospel. It is no doubt true that men have been slow to
realize that in addition to the burden which rests upon them from a sense of
personal wrong-doing, they are also face to face with corporate iniquities and
national selfishness and organized brute force, and that somebody is to blame
for it. “We are all diseased and with our surfeiting and wanton waste have
brought ourselves into a burning fever, and we must bleed for it.’ 7 It is
doubtless true that a conscience awakened to responsibility in social guilt will
soon focus itself upon the more immediate circle of life about its possessor and
bring to sight the hideous consequences of his own self-seeking, unfairness,
indulgence and distrust. But it is also true that in most cases, the conscience
does not become awakened to a sense of social guilt until it has become
sensitive, by a personal touch with Him who is the illumination of the soul. We
do not come to love God through love to men, but we come to love men through
love to God, and then the two are seen to be in essence one. The great task
which the church has is to bring men first to loyalty to Jesus Christ as Saviour
and Lord; from that will flow the second loyalty to God’s world, to do justly,
to love mercy and to walk humbly with Him, and with that will go the passion to
spend and to be spent for those for whom Christ thought it not beneath Him to go
himself to the cross, and who said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny
himself and take up Ms cross daily and follow me.” There is a third loyalty to
which our attention is called, namely, loyalty to the Church, to prayer, the
study of the Bible, the worship of God’s house, the fellowship which comes with
a life of love. No one will accuse Henry Sloane Coffin of Union Theological
Seminary with not having the modern viewpoint. He says: * ’ Religion is not
primarily something useful, but something fruitful. It is not a means of
improving mankind alongside of other means, such as education, art, politics and
morality; it is the parent of them all their fountain of life. It is not one
among several factors cultivating the soil of humanity, it is the source of its
fertility. We are busy today directing the flow of Christian motives into many
trenches to irrigate tracts of life which hitherto have been desert. And the
church must stand then, through its ministry, not simply as a mere instructor
imparting facts; the pulpit stands for the application of truth to create
character. The minister preaches not to make men wise about books, or scientific
discoveries, but to give them the power and grace of an endless life. The final
test in preaching does not then lie in the fact imparted, but in the use of any
fact to create an ennobled life.” Dr. Crooker has well said, “When the teacher
has set a fact in the mind, like a brick in the wall, he has practically
finished his work, but the preacher must plant that fact in the soil of the soul
to grow as the seed of a new life.’ 7 It is true that the great need of the time
is a social conscience, but what is a social conscience? Is it something
concerned only with hours and wages and profits and conveniences’?

We certainly need a corporate conscience, so that we will not permit
corporations to do what individuals have no right to do. But the social
conscience that we need is one that shall concern itself primarily with those
social duties and obligations out of which grow a noble life a conscience about
prayer and worship and Christian nurture, and not a social conscience that only
concerns itself in a fair division of things. The stability of society is not
dependent primarily on industrial conditions but on religious duties and
spiritual ideals.

Dr. Roberts truly says, “There are such things as social or collective sins, but
conscience does not deal with them on that plane Sin is an intensely individual
thing and the man who ha.s had a controversy with his conscience knows that it
is the ambassador within him, not of a certain social order, but of the moral
order of the whole universe. It is not the mere reverberation in a man’s soul of
a social order evolved by way of a natural selection; conscience is native,
elemental, primitive. It is impossible to get behind the beginning of it. The
thing which invests wrong with wrongness, and right with rightness and speaks in
the imperative mood is an indigenous thing, antecedent to the most primitive
society/’

Roger Babson affirms: “ Religion is both the anchor and the rudder of
prosperity. The real security of the nation is not its militia, but its
religion. The real protectors of our homes are not the policemen but rather the
preachers. Only as religion saves the world, can we save ourselves. A religious
spirit makes better employers, better workers, and a better public spirit with
which to deal. Furthermore, without such a religious spirit, all legislative,
cooperative and other plans are of no avail. Religion is to the world what a
spring is to a watch, and the sooner it is generally recognized the more people
will be healthy, happy and prosperous.” This man of business makes bold to say
that the three things which the business world, the world of labor and of
capital need are not the nostrums of socialism but spiritual power, faith and
prayer. We hear, and properly, a very great deal about the material form in
which Christianity should express itself, but are we not in danger of putting so
much emphasis on works that we forget the source of conduct? If we are to have
fruit, must we not realize that fruitage depends upon rootage? What will the
hand do if the heart ceases to beat? If we have no wealth of soul to give, of
what use will mechanics be?

One of the most illuminating of modern writers has said, “The most urgent demand
is not for service, but for spirituality. A soul fed from on high will certainly
how down and lift the lowly, hut a generation that has lost faith in Grod and
ceased to love Jesus will not serve humanity. “ The gospel of Jesus was nothing
more nor less than the gospel of the inner life. His whole inaugural, the
declaration of His purpose in the world could he condensed into a single
sentence, “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more
abundantly.” The beatitudes are not blessings upon belief, they even go deeper
than conduct and service; they go down to the roots of life What are His
parables nothing more nor less than pictures of life; the leaven, the mustard
seed, the wise virgin, the used talents, the good Samaritan. The abundance of
the soul life is the thing which He came to bring, and so far as Jesus Himself
was concerned, it was not His teachings though they were the most sublime ever
uttered but the spirit of His life. When He examined Peter for his ordination,
He did not ask him questions of creed or ethics, or doctrines of any sort; the
only question which He asked, and that He repeated again and again, was “Lovest
thou me?”

It was the things that Jesus stood for that won the disciples at the first, or
in any other age* of the world’s history. It was a life. It was He who said, “I
am the life.” The world has had many great teachers, but who goes to a life of
self-denial along a path so hot as to blister their feet because of these
teachings? What was it that sent Father Damien to the leper, Paton to the South
Sea Islands, Morrison to China, Livingstone to Africa, Grenfell to Labrador?
Nothing but a personal love for a personal Saviour. May we always remember that
we must give ourselves to the needy and to the oppressed. A Unitarian has
written, “ There is more danger that the source of personal piety will dry up
than that children will starve or go naked,”

There is deep wisdom in the words of Paterson Smith in his “People’s Life of
Christ”: “Men are teaching laws of economics and principles of utilitarianism
and ethical persuasions on the duty of doing good, but they are leaving out
Christ; and they are not succeeding and they know it. Our political and
industrial and social leaders feel their impotence, their lack of some great
spiritual impulse to make their projects work. It is religion that is needed. It
is not enough to tell us to do right. “We want a pressing motive and a power.”

There is only one challenge I wish to give ’’Is thy heart as my heart? If it be,
give me thy hand.” There is room for almost infinite differences of opinion but
there can never be any difference in the matter of a whole-hearted devotion to
the Kingdom of God. The dying Scott said to Lockhart, his son-in-law, “Give
yourself royally.”

Paul, speaking of Jesus Christ, says in a verse that is matchless and
stupendous, “ Christ gave himself.” Dying millionaires have given away their
millions only when Death, the grim archer, had sent his arrow to their hearts
and the rigors of death had loosed their grasp upon their treasure. But Jesus
spent His life in giving himself.

If, after having spent a life in ease and selfindulgence, in toying with our
tasks and in shirking all we could, we should come up to the heavenly gate, over
which is written, “These are they who came out of great tribulation,” would we
have the effrontery to pass in? “Would we not ask for some lesser gate where we
might hide our selfish and diminished head? But Heaven has no such gate. Its
twelve gates are all alike, one motto is over them and one word is the password
at each. When a rich man died a neighbor asked, “How much did he leave,” and the
village wag replied, “He left every cent.” All you can hold in your cold dead
hand is what you have given away!

Well says Bishop Quayle, “The angel at the gate of life will make inquiry of
every comer, ’Did you spend all your estate?’ “ When Ian MacLaren’s “Doctor of
the Old School” was dying, he faintly murmured, “I am tired to death!” He had
used up every ounce of his strength and ability to help those to whom he
ministered as a good physician.

There is Whitefield utilizing the last bit of his strength, stopping on the
stairs on the way to his chamber to preach a last message to the crowd at
Newburyport, and then going upstairs to die.

There is Wesley, riding more miles for the Master than any man who ever bestrode
a beast, giving all he had of money and energy and time, and at the last
leaving, as his biographer says, “a good library, a well-worn clergyman’s gown,
a much abused reputation and so the Methodist Church. “ Paul used that gigantic
word of his Lord, “He emptied Himself” to the last drop of His blood, and as for
Paul himself, hear his own modest epitome of his service “In stripes above
measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times
received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I
stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep.
In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by
mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils
in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren, in
weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings
often, in cold and nakedness.”

Let us put that up against the spirit of our own devotion that it may be a
challenge that shall nerve us in times when the fire burns low and the path of
dalliance seems to be strewn with flowers. Which shall we choose to be, an
Ananias or a Paul, au Ananias keeping back part of the price and dying of shame,
or to empty ourselves for a time and be filled of God’s grace for all eternity?
The apostle says, “What things were gain I counted lost for Christ.” He takes no
credit to himself, but he says, “Though I preached the gospel I have nothing to
glory of, for necessity is laid upon me. Yea, woe is unto me if I preach not the
gospel. ’? Having seen the vision, he must be true to it, and the one thing that
glorified his life down to Jhe time when he said, “I have fought a good fight, I
have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” was the blessed fact that he
“was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision,” Do we not need to have something
of his burden?

We are not to misunderstand this. We shall know something of what he said, that
though he was cast down, he was not forsaken; though he was poor, he was making
many rich; though he was in tears, yet was he also in bounding joy. The very
measure of his anxiety and longing became, on the other hand, the measure of his
delight and victory when the desire of his heart was accomplished. So we would
hear him saying, “I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart, for I
could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen
according to the flesh.” It is the same spirit which a father knows when he
would rather have lost his life than that his own son should be killed, the same
spirit which a mother feels when she will gladly wear herself out for the sake
of her child, and will not leave him even at the prison door or the scaffold’s
step. It is for this spirit that we yearn. When the world sees it, it will be no
longer faithless but believing.


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  CHAPTER 11: 01.10.     CHAPTER X - THE PASSION FOR SERVICE
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CHAPTER X - THE PASSION FOR SERVICE

It goes without saying that whosoever will follow his Master must live a life of
service. “I am among you as he that serveth,” said the Master, and washing His
disciples’ feet, He set the pace for helpful, gracious ministries of every sort.

What we need is a vast number of charter members for the Society of the Towel
and the Basin. When an imperious mother asked of Jesus that one of her sons
should be on His right hand and the other on His left in His Kingdom, she was
speaking from the standpoint of the same selfishness and greed which we are
facing today. We find men who want preeminence even in the ministry. There are
plenty of us who would like to be major prophets, but who among us wants to be
classed as a minor prophet? Who envies the man who is known as James, the less?
It was very significant that when some time ago, reporters asked men in the
streets of New York who was the. greatest man in America, different men were
named because a different valuation was placed upon the effect of their lives,
but the basis on which each of them was named was not of position, of office, of
power, or of money, but only on the basis of service. Whatever difference there
might be in the estimate of their achievements, there was no difference as to
the cause of true greatness.

It has always been so the history of the world shows plainly that it has counted
as its greatest men those who have most truly served. Every institution and
every organization is measured by its service to mankind. When a nation proves
itself unfitted for a task, it must pass away, and the same thing is true of the
Church. What a fulfilment of this declaration we have seen in the last few
years!

“Lord, where are kings and empires now Of old that went and came*?”

He hath put down the mighty from their seats and exalted those of low degree. We
have seen many of the thrones of Europe emptied, discarded crowns by the dozen
have fallen into the scrap heap. Why all this? Because they were useless,
because God said, “I am tired of kings I suffer them no more.” There is no more
any divine right of kings. The motto of the Prince of Wales “I serve” is the
only motto fit to be engraved over any throne.

After traveling through the country and being in touch with schools and
colleges, as well as with the men of the street, after reading modern literature
in the magazines and weekly papers, one is impressed with the fact that there is
a sort of materialistic epicureanism which is seeking to make its way in high
places. There is a drying up of the great source of life, of the old sense of
the outreach of humanity, of destiny outlasting the stars, and a high calling
that is not ended with dollars and position. As a recent writer in one of our
leading magazines has said, “Robbed of eternity, we mean to make time pay to the
utmost.

Hence this nervous, feverish activity. Our anxiety is an unconfessed
manifestation of our immense sense of loss. We have but a few minutes in which
to rob the house of life, let us seize all the articles in sight. Death, the
householder, is even now waiting to take us into custody.” As we look back at
our old Puritan ancestors, we pity them for their narrow quarters, and all the
hardships which they must have endured from lack of the conveniences which have
become necessities to us. We live so much more comfortably and easily. In the
dread winters which they passed, they must fell the trees and chop the wood and
throw it into the great fireplace where most of the heat disappeared up the
chimney. To light their homes, they had the tallow dips, which they prepared
with much labor. Now if we want heat or light, we press a button. Conveniences
of every kind await our nod. Handicapped as our fathers were, we often wonder
was their life worth living. But as a matter of fact, they seem to have been
rather happier than we are. The wilful poverty of our spiritual lives must
vastly impress us as we contrast that with the holy joy which is reflected in
the story of their lives, which they have handed down to us. At a recent church
convention, the question arose on what issue to put special emphasis.

Some thought it should be on social regeneration, some that it should be on
legal enactments to outlaw sin, and others that it should be the application of
religion to business, but it was finally decided that the crying need of the
hour was first to get some religion that could be applied, to have some ideals
that were good enough to regenerate the world when they were applied. A recent
article in one of our leading magazines makes bold to say that the destiny of
man was once talked of as a spiritual mystery, connoting endless endeavor and
opportunity. Terror and splendor attended the Word. Now the highest dream of
high destiny is a porcelain bathtub, or some safe shelter behind a wire screen
where we shall be impervious to the attack of germs. We have need of a prof
ounder faith, a more poignant fear than this age knows.

One of our New York papers asked this question, “What is the matter with our
mode of life?” and these were the answers given by the men whom the reporters
stopped on Broadway: “We are drifting away from the faith of our forefathers.
There are 65,000,000 heathen in America. That alone answers the question.”
Another said, “People are fighting for the material things of this world,
instead of the spiritual.” And the next man said, “We are drifting away from the
teachings of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

We need to be transformed instead of reformed.

We are in the grip of a materialistic philosophy.”

I think we are all agreed that the need of the hour is the restatement of the
great verities which always have been and always will be supreme in the lives of
men. We want the same upholding strength which the patriarchs knew and by virtue
of which they went out to a land which they knew not, because they heard the
call of God. We never needed more than we need now the consolations which uplift
the soul in the midst of catastrophe and loss. They tell us that our churches
are empty, but our asylums and our morgues are full.

There is nothing that will so steady men in the midst of strain and calamity to
play the game, to fight the good fight to the end, as to realize the besetting
and f orefending God. If we have lost our faith, our hope in immortality, how
did we lose it? Must we not go back to the place where we had it last and see if
we cannot find it? “If we have been robbed of incalculable hopes and
aspirations, who robbed us? Do we not owe it to ourselves and to our children to
bring the robbers to trial and to take from them that which they have filched
from us, making us and our children bankrupt indeed?”

One of our liberal papers some time ago had two editorials, the heading of which
seemed like an affront to our whole Christian life. The first question asked
was, ’ Can democracy tolerate the Church?” At first one was inclined to be
indignant at the iconoclast who could even frame such a question, but it all
resolves itself into a question of fact. If the church is the friend of the
people, if the church is helpful in those things which are lovely and of good
report, if the principles which it advocates make life safer, property more
secure, and conserve the highest interest of society, there can be no question
but that democracy must be the greatestally which the church has, and the church
the greatest organization to consummate a true democracy. The other question
was, “Can Christianity tolerate the church?” The answer to that must lie in the
question, “What is the church in its essential spirit and what is it seeking to
become! ’ ’ Christianity cannot tolerate the church unless the church is
Christian, that is unless it has the principles of Christ in its life, unless it
puts the first things first and enthrones spiritual values above all others and
gives itself uncalculatingly and unstintingly to those things to which the
Master gave Himself. It must cease to discriminate between the rich and the
poor, or even between the ignorant and the learned, or between those socially at
the top or socially at the bottom. Jesus was no respecter of persons. He has one
gospel for the Pharisee and the Publican one gospel for Dives and for Lazarus.

Customs hoary with age have passed away because they were useless, because they
did not benefit mankind. Once slavery flourished in every land, That was service
under compulsion. It was right dominated by might, and God said, “It must go.”
The same is true of organization and methods of business and everything else
that does not serve humanity. Their doom is written in the nature of things.
Customs which curse and not bless cannot long survive, for they bear their doom
in their own deeds.

We invite to our clubs and to our secret societies men who occupy a similar
social plane, or who are congenial, or men of common tastes. If we want to make
a club of the church, we can do the same thing there, but such a church will go
down to ruin. A church must serve all classes and conditions of men, and he who
has caught the spirit of his Master will go with a bounding love and a heart on
fire to give service to those who need it most. It needs to be everywhere
proclaimed that while the first duty of a man is to get his own soul right with
God, he cannot grow in grace or even preserve his own sense of acceptance with
God unless he throws himself with absolute abandon into the same work for which
his Master lived and died.

“God does with us as we with torches do Not light them for themselves; For if
our virtues go not forth of us ’Twere all the same as if we had them not.” The
church need have no fear of anarchy or socialism or sabotage or skepticism of
any sort, if it will give itself to service. But it is not enough, as we have
said, to care for the lesser needs of our human life. * * A man’s life
consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.” We are to
lead men to a larger life. Here is our greatest service. We must seek for better
conditions for men, but we must realize that first and last and all the time our
object is to make better men.

I know scores of fathers and mothers who are in anguish not because their sons
are not well paid, not because they do not live in good houses and under the
best of sanitary conditions, but their hearts are breaking because their
children are reaping the wages of unrighteousness, because in the midst of all
their plenty they have turned from God to serve the world, the flesh and the
devil. No one can read the daily papers without staggering under the fact that
men of social prominence and many of our leaders, both among workers and
capitalists, are men of ungodly lives who use the advantages of better
conditions of labor and better returns of capital to weigh their sonls down to
hell with the additional temptations which these successes have given them. The
church is to be the regenerator of the world to throw itself into the breach,
and since it stands supremely for spiritual things, it is to put these things at
the very front. How can a pastor sleep nights or enjoy the comforts of life
until he is conscious that he is doing the utmost within his power to put life
under the ribs of this death?

How can any member of the church go to his place of worship, receive the holy
sacrament, which marks afresh the sacrifice of his Lord and recalls his own holy
promise to be true to Him, without realizing that by daylight and by dark he
must sound forth the call of his Master by his lips and by his life? When the
passion of such a service shall possess the heart of the church, the world will
throw off its indifference and the church will come to its own by the
preeminence of its life and the power of its sacrifice.


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  CHAPTER 12: 01.11.     CHAPTER XI  - HOW TO NOURISH THE SACRED FIRE
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CHAPTER XI - HOW TO NOURISH THE SACRED FIRE

“Follow me,” said Jesus, “and I will make you fishers of men.” A man cannot
become such of his own self. He is not equal to a task so supernal. As we have
been saying all along, nothing but the touch of the Master’s passion can create
or conserve the soul’s spiritual life.

Boreham remarks on the transformation which took place in the life of Thomas
Chalmers. He was the brilliant pastor of a little church in Kilmany, a marvelous
preacher when he was onlytwenty-three. He was a good pastor and won their
unstinted admiration and love. But they could not understand why when they came
to the kirk on the Sabbath day he fulminated at that little company against the
heinous wickedness of theft, of murder, and of adultery. After they had spent a
hard week’s work in field and stable, why should they be berated by their
minister as if they had spent the week in open shame! “This,” says Chalmers*
biographer, “continued from 1803 to 1811, but then something happened. Chalmers
ceased to thunder against the grosser crimes and against the iniquities of
Napoleon, but every day he had something fresh to say about the love of God,
about the cross of Christ, and about the way of salvation.” “He would bend over
the pulpit and press us to take the gift,” says one of his hearers, “as if he
had it that moment in his hand and would not be satisfied until every one of us
had got possession of it. And then when the sermon was over and he rose to
pronounce the benediction, he would break out afresh with some new entreaty,
unwilling to let us go until he had made one more effort to persuade us to
accept it.”

He says that in 1811 he was converted. When he was called away to a great city
parish this was what he said to his humble parishioners: “For the first eight
years of my twelve with you, I thundered away against crimes of every sort, but
the interesting fact is that during the whole of that period I never once heard
of any reformation being wrought among you. It was not until the free offer of
forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon you that I ever heard of
those subordinate reformations which I made the ultimate object of my earlier
ministry. You have taught me that to preach Jesus Christ is the only effective
way of preaching morality, and the lesson which I have learned in your humble
cottages, I shall carry into a wider field.”

Bunyan said the same thing long before the days of Chalmers. He says: “I went
for the space of two years crying out against men’s sins and their fearful state
because of them. After which, the Lord came in upon my own soul with peace and
comfort through Christ. He gave me many sweet discoveries of blessed grace
through Him.

Wherefore now I altered in my preaching and did much labor to hold forth Christ
in all His offices, relations and benefits unto the world. After this God led me
into something of the mystery of the union with Christ. Wherefore that I
discovered and showed it to them also.” Ah, if we could only measure to the
heights of that personal experience of which it is written “What we have seen
and felt with confidence we tell.”

Theories may be cold, but reality is full of passion. When one has an experience
of his own, then he hastens to bring others into the same blessed knowledge, and
when once others are brought in his own confidence is thereby multiplied. What a
miracle of grace to be able to win a soul to God and what infinite comfort to
the soul who wins another! Nothing can take the place of it. Mr.
Valiant-for-Truth cries out, when the summons to go hence seized him, “My sword
I give to him who shall succeed me in my pilgrimage; my courage and skill to him
who can get them; my marks and scars I carry with me to be my witness that I
have fought His battles who will now be my rewarder.” When a man has victories
hung up in the high halls of memory, how his faith increases! He won them
himself at the point of a Damascus blade, which is the word of God, and he is
fain to say with David, “There is none like it; give it to me.”

It is a sad thing in the life of the individual when the child spirit dies; when
he ceases to wonder and adore. How supremely true it is in the life of him who
proclaims the message that he will lose its power when the wonder and marvel of
it fades out of his soul! A man need have no troubles over the miracles of the
first century, when he sees them reproduced in his own life at the touch of the
pierced Hand. If one can feel the compelling glow of those adoring words, “When
I survey the wondrous cross On which the Prince of glory died My richest gain I
count but loss And pour contempt on all my pride.” he will be able to say
“Jesus, I love thee, thou art to me Dearer than ever mortal can be.” As well
think of restraining the ardor of the bridegroom as to lay restraining hands
upon his devotion. His love is as fire shut up in his bones. That will transform
the pulpit and kindle a blaze which will draw men from every walk in life to see
it burn.

We must make more personal the message which we bring to men. Dr. Jefferson will
not be accused of failing to emphasize the social note or of being unduly moved
by his emotions, but in his Yale Lectures, he says, “Many a man is preaching to
a dwindling congregation because his sermons have lost the personal note. He
chills by his vague generalities, or enrages by his wholesale denunciation. This
is not the age in which the preacher can afford to lose the personal touch.

Many forces conspire to blur the edges of individuality and melt men into a
common mass.”

Even organized philanthropy has a tendency to lose the individual. It is the
lack of this personal touch which is multiplying our problems and deepening the
blackness of human tragedy. Thousands of men and women all over the world have
lost their grip upon the high things of life because no one but God feels for
them. There is no one on earth who cares for their souls. Men are lost to the
church as soon as they are submerged in the crowd. Dr. Jefferson adds, “In fact,
the preacher is in danger of losing himself. “

It is a matter of history that on one occasion when Julia Ward Howe invited
Charles Sumner to meet a distinguished guest at her house, he replied, “I do not
know that I wish to meet your friend. I have outlived my interest in
individuals. “ Recording in her diary that night the Senator’s surly remark,
Mrs. Howe wrote after it, “God Almighty, by latest accounts, had not got so far
as this.” The great secret of power is the personal touch.

God Himself put on a soul and a body when He came to us. They were arms of flesh
and blood, like ours, which stretched wide upon the cross, and which when taken
down and folded over the lifeless bosom invisibly folded a saved world in their
embrace.

What a beautiful testimonial that was to the matchless personality of Henry
Drummond, that when an artisan was dying, his wife knocked at Drummond ’s door
and said, “My husband is deeing’, sir. He’s no’ able to speak to you, and he’s
no’ able to hear you, and I dinna ken as he can see you; but I would like him to
hae a breath o’ you aboot him afore he dees.” No books can ever nourish a
believing heart as will the goodness and patience and truth which is reflected
in individual lives.

Here then is the conclusion of the whole matter.

Jesus said, “I am come that ye might have life and that ye might have it more
abundantly. ’ ’ By vital contact with Him who is the way, the truth, and the
life, we must keep our souls alive. The inner light must not fail; our passion
for the souls of men must never cease. But if, alas, our passion for the souls
of men has in any sense failed, we must get it back. We must have our trysting
place with God and meeting Him there, He who heareth in secret will reward us
openly, and we shall have power with men. However great our natural abilities,
they are only the channels through which the tides of holy passion and power
must run. Let us not mistake the channel for the power, and let us be careful
that no act of ours shall sever our connection with the source of power. The
secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him. In fellowship with Him we shall
catch His love a love which stopped not at the cross.

We cannot do better than to utter the prayer of the old hymn which for
generations has aroused the church to a waiting pentecost.

“Oh, that it now from heaven might fall, And all our sins consume, Come, Holy
Ghost, for thee I call, Spirit of burning come.

“Refining fire, go through my heart, Illuminate my soul, Scatter thy life
through every part, And sanctify the whole.” The Master’s call is upon us. It is
hot with haste. Rise up; let us go! THE END


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 13: 02.00. HOW TO BUILD A CHURCH.
========================================================================

How to Build a Church.

Rev. C. L. Goodell, D.D.

St. Louis. With an Introduction by Rev. E. B. Webb, D.D. Boston.

Copyright, by Congregational Sunday-School and Publishino Society,

1883.

Boston Stebeotype Foundby, No. 4 Fsasi. Stbnr.

CONTENTS.

Introduction 1. The Pastor Saving Souls 2. The Pastor in the Pulpit 3. The
Pastor in the Parish 4. The Pastor among the Youth 5. The Pastor in the Prayer
Meeting 6. The Pastor dealing with Skepticism 7. The Pastor in Revivals 8. The
Privilege op Teaching God’s Word ... by Mrs. C. L. Goodell 9. Ministers’ Wives
10. Woman’s Work in Home Evangelization

PREFACE, On the twenty-seventh of November, 1882, the people of Pilgrim
Congregational Church, St. Louis, celebrated, by public exercises, the tenth,
anniversary of their pastor’s work among them. Rev. Robert West, editor of the “
Advance “ at Chicago, took part in the services, and said to the pastor, on
leaving: “Write a series of articles for the ’Advance’ on ’ How to Build a
Church.’ It has been given you to see two churches built up widely apart: one in
the conservative and solid East, and the other in the progressive and
swiftly-moving West. I believe it will do good to tell in the ’Advance’ how it
has been done.”

Mr. West had been for five years the successful superintendent of Home Missions
in Missouri and the Southwest. He had often been present and helpful in the
services of Pilgrim Church, and had received sympathy and aid in planting the
waste places on his field. He desired it to appear, as an important principle,
that churches everywhere, which had aided heartily, according to their ability,
in building in the “regions beyond,” had in this way contributed much to their
own temporal and spiritual welfare. The articles were undertaken, and written by
snatches in the busiest of winters, amidst ever-pressing duties and cares within
the church and without. The pages contain only hints and suggestions, and are,
of course, (try limited and incomplete. They were not written for those in the
ministry older and wiser than the writer, but in the hope that something might
be said that would practically help many earnest builders in the Church of God
that are asking, “ Who is sufficient for those things? “ and prayerfully seeking
aid wherever it may be found. This is an age ripe for the builder’s work, that
the Church of Christ may be a temple worthy of her glorious Lord. It is good to
know our tools. It is needful to come back to that place where we can see what
great things God can do with weak and imperfect men, if the}’’ only trust him
and act on his word, as seekers after souls. Their power hides here. It is
important to see that our failure, when we fail, lies in our own want of faith
in God. Moses and Joshua, and Gideon and Paul, and the long line of conquerors
in the divine kingdom, have been faith-men. They have taken God’s word when He
has said: “ I will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle; by horses,
nor by horsemen, but by the Lord their God.” Such confidence in His promises has
made them mighty spiritual warriors, for their hold on the sword of the Lord has
led them to wield with a powerful hand the sword of Gideon also. The spirit
required for the workman of Christ, East and West, is essentially the same. What
will succeed in one place will, as a rule, in another. The failure is not so
often from want of ability or leanimg or right location as it is from the want
of deep, believing piety. Many workers often comfort themselves too easily. They
contend that the age of miracles is past; that apostolic methods are not for us,
and revivals are not wise; so in the morning they sow the seed, and in the
evening they withhold their hand. Little matter, they say, about their success;
that is God’s part, — the great thing is faithfulness. Fidelity is a great
thing; but Noah’s fidelity in the building of the ark would have availed little,
if he had not possessed the skill also to lead in the households under his care.
The faithfulness which God rewards is that which is not content till it brings
results to pass. It is never satisfied to tread the old rut, year after year,
making it deeper, while the churches are gradually decaying and dying under it.
The truth is, faithfulness is success. It never stops with routine. It oarries
power and conveys blessing, and, although it may not always add to the number of
the saved, there is a light and splendor in the fulness of its devotion to
Christ that makes the place of its feet glorious.

It stands knocking until Christ comes in and unveils His beauty, and fills the
parish with a sense of divine power, making all things new. This preaching and
going to sleep on our faithfulness till God gives the increase, is what is
wasting us. The pastor who calls nothing fidelity which does [missing pages]


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  CHAPTER 14: 02.000.     INTRODUCTIION
========================================================================

INTRODUCTION. The voice of experience — this is the one great value of this
book. It is the open avowal of convictions and methods which have been found
successful in practice. Dr. Goodell as a Christian minister has occasion to
thank God profoundly for what he has enabled him to do. I suppose he never
thought of making a book when he wrote these papers, but he certainly has a
purpose and an aim in giving himself to the work of the ministry. How sharply he
brings it out in the very first sentence: “ The supreme object must be the
salvation of men.” And this has ever been, and ever must be, the one, living,
supreme, imperative end of every true minister of Jesus Christ. “ For the Son of
Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost. To convert sinners, to edify
the body of Christ; aside from this he has nothing to do; short of this he
cannot stop. And he will suit his methods to his end; and especially, and above
all, he will keep his own mind and heart in tenderest and quickest sympathy with
Christ and his gospel. One says of Baxter, “ When he spoke of weighty soul
concerns, you might find his very spirit drenched therein.”

“ Much impressed Himself, as conscious of his awful charge, And anxious mainly
that the flock he feeds May feel it, too.” And evidently the heart out of which
these writings came is full; full of the joy of the Lord, and full of watchful,
eager desire to save souls. We see our author about his work every day. He goes
right on. He has no time to dally with the fascinations of aesthetics, or to
pillow his head upon a lap where the strongest is sure to be shorn of his
strength. He has no affection for doubts which obstruct and darken the
Christian’s way, and turn him aside to blaze a path — a dubious and treacherous
path for himself — through swamps and deserts, where no sure ray of heaven’s
light is seen, and no voice from above the tree-tops is heard. From beginning to
end these chapters show a mind clear of that folly which assumes that a man may
entertain one thing and teach another. He preaches what he believes, and
believes what he preaches. ’ For as he thinketh in his heart so is he.” He
neither criticises the church nor complains of her creeds. He neither doubts the
authorship of the Pentateuch, nor denies the logic of Paul. He is not wise above
what is written. He is not more liberal than his Master. He knows nothing of an
unknown God; but he does know the crimson guilt and the fearful sentence of the
sinner. He does know the gift of free grace, and the power of the Holy Spirit.
He knows the time for repentance. “Now is the accepted time.” He also knows the
way of salvation. Christ is the way. “ There is none other name given under
heaven among men whereby we must be saved.” And in such knowledge and
convictions — knowledge gained from the inspired Word and convictions wrought by
experience of the Spirit’s power — is found the secret of ministerial success.

Most grateful also and natural is the earnest spirit of this little book — an
earnestness that throbs in every line, and inspires exertion everywhere, and to
the last. Here is an urgency like that which runs through the teaching of the
Master and his apostles. “Strive to enter in at the strait gate.” “As though God
did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.”

Timely and suggestive also is this book. Statistics show that in some towns,
cities, and even States the church of Christ is not holding her own. With
multitudes the pleasures and pursuits of this world are all-absorbino:. There is
a lowerinor of the law and a cheapening of the gospel. Sinners ignore the claims
of Jesus Christ, and idle away their Sabbaths and their probation in unbelief.
The very atmosphere is charged with the forces of skepticism. And just as a
nation ignorant of the true God sets up wooden gods, so the people, when they
have renounced the Christian religion, embrace superstitions that are hideous
and errors that are deadly. And is the Church free from responsibility in all
this? Are our robes, as Christian ministers, without stain? Whoever reads these
pages attentively will find the impulses of his own heart prompting him to an
earnestness and activity which are altogether the best antidote for the evils
which afflict our day. The gospel is God’s gift to sinners. To understand and
accept it makes a new man. ’’ If any man be in Christ he is a new creature.” And
the new creature must have a new home. How to build this home is briefly and
forcibly told in this little book. Most heartily do I commend it, especially to
young ministers, and pray that it may prove a guide and an inspiration to all
who build “ upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ
himself being the chief corner-stone.”

E. B. WEBB.

Shawmut Church, Boston, July 30, 1883.


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  CHAPTER 15: 02.01.     THE PASTOR SAVING SOULS
========================================================================

HOW TO BUILD A CHURCH.

I. THE PASTOR SAVING SOULS. To build a church, the supreme object must be the
salvation of men. It is the first business for which the church exists. God sent
his son into the world that the world through him might be saved. Our Lord
himself came to seek and to save that which was lost. The Holy Spirit, at
Pentecost, endued the disciples with power to become witnesses for. Christ
everywhere. The first sermon was a bow drawn for sinners, and the prick of the
arrow was felt in three thousand hearts. From that hour there were daily
additions to the church. Here everything points directly to the salvation of
men. While this end was kept in the forefront, the secret of success in building
the church was an open secret. To recover men lost by sin is the deepest motive
which ever stirs the soul. It draws from God the greatest gifts he ever imparts.
This passion for souls is the engine that moves the whole train. Divine power
was not more conspicuous in the disciples than the human energy they put into
their work. “ This one thing I do,” says Paul. They all had an eye single to the
exaltation of the cross. They passed by many good things to do this chief thing.
First, and continually, they won souls. It was their mission from their Master.
This purpose of converting souls and gathering them into the fold, is to be kept
uppermost to the last. This is what the church is here for. There is no true
success if this fails. The church will not fill its other functions fitly, if
this leading one is lost sight of. Culture goes for nothing if there are no
new-born souls to cultivate. There is little building up without living stones
to build with. But if there is success in converting men, there will be life and
movement throughout the church. It is what the church lives on, — the joy of
new-bom souls.

There are four sources from which to draw: the family, the Sunday-school,
church-goers unsaved, and the great outside world. To keep four streams flowing
into the church from these, is back of everything. In order to do this,
ministers must be men of God, masters of gospel methods, filled with its spirit,
and untiring fishers of men. To build a church is to take hold in God’s name and
build it. Every victory for Christ costs prayer and toil and blood. It must be
sweat through. The church will not grow in the chill air of this world, without
somebody to love it, and yearn over it with watchful care, as the mother over
the cradle. The pastor must give days and nights to it, counting all things as
gain which he can possibly do for it, whatever the loss to him.. Men do this in
business and make no moan over their sacrifices. Should Christ’s disciples do
less? The strength put into business in this age, if consecrated to saving men,
would rapidly build powerful churches all over this land. Business men move
mountains to rear their rolling-mills and grain-elevators and railways. The
thunder of their captains fills the land. Ministers, with God overhead, often
fail to move mole-hills. Much of their lack of progress is the sheer want of an
enterprise and endeavor in keeping with the greatness of the object and reward.
It never harms the religion of a church to let a living stream of honest
business energy flow through. The religious life of a community would never lag
behind the business life, if the same eflbrts were put forth in its behalf. We
need work. I speak for St. James, the neglected saint of the New Testament. Men
believe and pray, but fail to do. Though manna lies thick on the ground, God’s
people do not gather it. There is a soul to be saved at every Christian’s elbow,
yet the heart to do it is wanting. Some say the art is lost. Many of the
soldiers of the cross have called a halt in this brightest day of the Lord, and
are taken up in mending the chariot of salvation, re-fashioning it after the
wisdom of this world, putting on new attachments of human device, not satisfied
with the divine model. We get what we strive for. A minister may be a hard
worker, yet his church decline because he does not put his best work into it, or
does not put it in wisely. When the pastor is occupied with less than the
highest, the church feels the loss. The social life, the educational interests,
art circles, literary gatherings, lectures, concerts, public courtesies, and
wide outside demands, all bid for the preacher’s time, and he may give his left
hand to them if he can. But to build the church of God calls for the full powers
of a consecrated life. It may be good to be an accomplished scholar in curious
learning, to be looking up subjects of unique interest, to be an effective
writer, to have the oversight of schools, to lecture, and to lend a hand all
round. Benefit comes of it, after its own kind. But it builds the church only
remotely, and it often weakens it. It is not the prize which comes from drawing
men into the fold; ministers lose unspeakably here. They are engaged in a
thousand profitable things besides this, and neglect this, which is the very
first work they are set to do. The general interests outside flourish, and their
own proper work grows weak. They get what they live for, but the churches
dwindle. The minister is built up, but the church is built down, and the end is
loss to the minister also. Men are built by what they build. Nothing so develops
character as holding with all one’s soul to the one great mission. To live among
the miracles of the new birth, and the growth of the divine life, is to stand by
the open gates of glory, and be filled and transfigured by the outshining of the
mighty One.

Ministers justly seek to be widely useful for Christ, but there is no influence
which one can exert, singlehanded, to be compared with the powder which one can
wield under God through a well-ordered church, instinct, and radiant with the
life of its great Head. The priest’s breath, when the silver trumpet was put to
his lips, became a bugle blast in the ears of all Israel; so the church, built
by the Spirit of God, is the pastor’s trumpet, ringing the invitations and
warnings of the Word in the ears of the world. What higher or holier ambition
can any minister have than 4o compact a community of spiritual lives into one
organic body, and lift it up as a pillar of testimony, bringing its whole weight
to bear in vindication of righteousness and truth, or scathing evil with the
liofhtninof of its rebuke? What minister in the land, sincerely seeking to be
useful, yet making the building of his church a secondary object, gains an
influence equal to what it might have been had he staked his soul in rearing a
true church of the Redeemer?

It is common to say the power of the ministry is decaying. If a minister is
regarded as one ordained to do everything under heaven while his church is
simply an annex, it may be true. But when the minister as a man of God sent to
declare the gospel of the new life sticks to his business, his power was never
greater. On his own ground to-day he is invincible. This keeping the salvation
of souls in the lead, in building the church, is the best way to edify those
that are saved already. The warmth and earnestness of Christian living which
brings in converts preserves them alive when won. The preaching which produces
conversions quickens at the same time all the saints, and holds them in service.
The constant incoming of new members has a healthy and happy effect on the
church. The teachers teach better. The preacher preaches better. The
prayer-meetings have more life. The home altars blaze more brightly. The
brethren are fired with greater ardor and zeal. The benevolence is stimulated.
Not a department of the church but feels the blessedness. The best way to train
a church and keep it in every good work is to so order it that fresh fruit of
evangelism steadily flow into it.

Never was a greater error than to believe that there was a time evangelism for a
certain, and then that the church must stop and train the converts. Both are
done best alongside. The best kind of edification and training the church knows
is that which comes from that style of church living, and praying, and teaching,
and giving, and watching, and soul-seeking, which secures an inflow of souls all
the year round. Every member has a place and a work then, and is built up and
enlarged, and led from strength to strength in the Lord. If ten souls have been
saved, and you wish to train them, set them to saving ten more, and let all the
church lead in the work by spirit and example.


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  CHAPTER 16: 02.02.     THE PASTOR IN THE PULPIT
========================================================================

II. THE PASTOR IN THE PULPIT;

We are living in an age of good preaching. The pulpit is faithful and courageous
in applying the truth to the sins of the day. It has a special care for children
and youth. It urges a large benevolence. The preaching of the times stimulates
lay activity, calling not only men but Christian women and youth into service.
It pleads for the planting and endowing of Christian institutions and has
enlarged conceptions of duty and service to the whole world, seeking to win all
nations to Christ. Thus many preach, and the power of these truths is manifest.
But this preaching of Christ with so much beauty and sweetness, often leaves out
of sight and untouched the awful fact of human sin and guilt, and thus fails of
the full effect that would be secured, if the two great truths of man’s danger
in sin and Christ’s redemption were kept side by side. It makes a onesided
gospel. Love is set forth, but not righteousness; salvation, but not punishment;
heaven, but not hell. It is easy to break over all barriers of God’s Word at
this point, and conclude that Christ, so wondrous in his love, will save all men
sometime somewhere. So preachers often lay more stress on widening the gate and
broadening the way of salvation, than in fitting men to walk in the path which
God has appointed in his word.

Sin is not less in the human heart because less is said in the pulpit. Out in
the great world sin is stem and desperate, and relentless unto death. Make
salvation easier in book and sermon, still the way of the transgressor Is hard.
Till sin lets go its hold on the soul, preaching against sin cannot cease. We
must preach the great salvation “warning every man,” l)ecause sin and punishment
are so great. The sermon must be judged by the Bible fruit it bears in leading
souls out of sin into the new life. It may be good when it ought to be better.
The final test of pulpit discourse is the result that follows after the pattern
of the gospel. One of the dangers of the ministry is that, preaching well, it
shall yet stop short of reaching the most important result. ’They went forth,”
says Mark 16:20, “and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them and
confirming the word with signs following.^^ This is the fruit the pulpit should
bear. We need often to review our preaching, searching out its defects. Paul
calls us to judge ourselves, that we may not be judged by God. “ Not he who
commendeth himself is approved, but he whom the Lord commendeth.” 2 Corinthians
10:18.

Some of the defects in modem preaching, according to Bible tests, are these: —

1. Unbelievers are not converted. There are few adequate “ signs following “ the
Word. The gains in many places are not equal to the losses. The mill runs on,
but little comes of it. Revivals are seldom, and there is much distaste for
them. In those portions of the country where means and opportunities for saving
souls are greatest, conversions are fewest. There is a want of direct,
aggressive, gospel work. Pastors are compelled to lament, “The harvest is
passed, the summer is ended, but the souls under our charge are not saved.” It
is a terrible impeachment of our preaching. The exceptions only make the
failures the more humiliating. We who sit in the seats of Moses, and yet lead so
few people forth, do not feel as we should the great force of this charge
against us. We have stopped in the wilderness, while Providence goes on and
leaves us. Where is the old passion for souls? How little revival power 1 How
few call on the mighty God. We offer excuses, try new schemes of doctrine, and
find fault with the Bible, but God lays the charge at our door. To save lost men
was Christ’s first work, and it is ours, and nothing can blind God’s eyes to our
failure here.

2. Tbe modern pulpit does not reach the masses, the great multitude of the
people. With the whole field given us, we lose ground each year. Churches do not
increase as fast as the population does relatively, nor as fast as they ought
and could. The world waxes powerful and pours past the church doors every
Sabbath a vast, restless throng untouched. Our churches mainly give up, and do
not try to reach them. The ministers are educated often away from the masses,
and keep away. Few could stand up on a street comer and deliver a simple
powerful gospel message. They are not masters of assemblies, having little taste
or inclination to handle the crowd, and fasten the gospel in their hearts as a
nail in a sure place. The disciples “ so spake that a great multitude both of
the Jews and also of the Greeks believed.” Acts 14:1. Many of our clergymen read
a paper to a church circle of cultured people of their own set at the top of
society (what right has any minister to have a set?), and leave the great,
sturdy, powerful, rising multitudes at the bottom, untouched. They preach to
magazines and reviews and controversial books, and only a few even of their
hearers know or care anything about the sermon. The pulpit becomes a literary
bureau, while the people, the vast, untamed, restless throng, infidel toward God
and his Book, trampling on his day and law, impatient of all authority, setting
up a beer saloon and divorce court on every corner, are swelling in numbers and
rising in power, and threaten soon to come to the top of society and rule. With
vigorous body, and all their faculties sharpened by contact with the world,
their dislike to church-people intensified, they will come to leadership, — they
have now in many places, — and the fine people who have taken the cream of the
gospel for themselves, and forgotten the needs of the many, will be crushed and
powerless in these vast upheavals. God brings us the masses. Failing to invite
them in, the bulk of the people go in the great trains thundering on, and the
church rides in a dainty parlor-car behind. Christianity ought to be conductor
of the train. The answer to the blind groping of the people in England for
Christian leadership is the Salvation Army; and the English Church, from the
classic shades of Oxford and Cambridge, is listening to learn what can be done
for the people. The solution of this question from Christ is, “ The poor have
the Gospel preached unto them.” The example from the apostles is, “They went
everywhere preaching the Word.” God’s suggestion for us is Moody. How truly the
preaching of our time on this subject has lost its way. God and his Book point
one way, and we go another. Under our preaching unbelief thrives, and discontent
increases. But God and his Word will both hold us to account in eternity.

3. Our lack of effort for foreigners is another defect. The tide of foreign life
is rising around us every day, higher. We go on, unmindful of the amazing
changes going on in society, and learn next to nothing from their presence among
us — preaching and conducting church affairs as if these people did not exist.
Seven million Germans among us; in several States more children of foreigners
born than of natives, and in many States the ratio of births in a foreign family
far greater than in the native family; immiofration cominor in at the rate of
one million a year, like the invasions of earlier centuries when the character
of whole continents was changed. Yet what minister has converted a German? Who
has really cast his nets in on that side? Our church is great in learning, and
translates tons of German skepticism. Who has preached a sermon to the Germans
in their tongue? We discourse to one small class on one phase of thought and
philosophy, and scarcely make any impression on these raging millions of our
population who imagine a vain thing, and in whose hands are the destinies of the
Republic and the church of God. We are seeking after “ wisdom,” spinning our
theories and speculations, as Nero fiddled when Rome burned. The wisdom of God’s
Book is greater than all human learning, and the power of his Spirit above all
human power. The foolishness of God is wiser than man. God has put the means for
this work in our hands. For this duty God has brought this nation to its present
high standpoint in history. How vast its achievement might be across the whole
continent, if it would address itself in its Christian might to its work as Paul
wrought for the Gentiles! 4. The pulpit of the day does not call young men to
the work of the ministry as it ought. We are losing here each year, and the
decade past makes sad revelations of decline. We call, they do not come. We
preach in their ears, and they go out to business. There is some note wanting in
the voice of the ministry where this is true. There is a judgment seat in every
young man’s soul. Roll the facts of his duty on him, show him man’s sin and need
of the Gospel, and no work will be more attractive to him than work for Christ.
What doctrine does the missionary preach, the evangelist, the pastor in
revivals? This doctrine of deliverance from sin through Christ, pressed on the
conscience. It brings times of refreshing, fills the church with missionary
power, and begets ministers and teachers. These truths have dropped out of much
of our preaching, and hence its want of effectiveness. The people slide down
into all sorts of errors, and young men have no heart for the ministry. Call
them to preach because it is an easy service: they can find easier ones in the
world. Call them to sufierins: and sacrifice, to toil and heroic service for
Christ’s sake, and they will come. Nothing was difficult to Paul when Christ
called him. In these things » and others, our preaching has turned aside
somewhat into the pleasant groves of the academy, and does not lay hold of the
great wicked world, and change its ways as it should. Its movements are often
sidewise and hesitating. We suffer from the delays of unbelief, and the grand
work of the age which God appoints us to waits and wants the power which fails
to come, “the Holy Ghost sent down from Heaven.” These are grievous faults, and
more so as we study them. The remedy is in a firmer adherence to the Word and
Spirit of God, anointing the soul with holy fire. If we make the Bible teach
what we think it ought, instead of what it plainly does, in order that it may
seem consistent always with human thought, and broad and liberal toward sin from
our standpoint, marking out new channels for God’s grace, instead of standing by
his own methods, we shall preach the gospel of the natural heart instead of the
Gospel of the Son of God, and so loss of power is certain. The highest test of
our love to God is our obedience to his Word; and obedience to God’s Word in the
pulpit is mighty power over the souls of men. “ Forever, O Lord, thy Word is
settled in Heaven.”


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  CHAPTER 17: 02.03.     THE PASTOR IN THE PARISH
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III. THE PASTOR IN THE PARISH.

There is a greater difference now between the work of the pulpit and that of the
parish than in the early days of Christianity. We have lost much which needs to
be regained. Jesus Christ went about among the homes of men doing good. Paul
ceased not to declare the gospel of life from house to house, night and day,
with tears. Christianity began in a parish and worked parish-wjse, going from
door to door and heart to heart among the people. Planted in the household, the
household still remains its stronghold. It did not get into a church to preach
formally from a pulpit for more than a century. Its greatest triumphs were won
in this near approach to souls through the personal wrestling of love. Here is
the foundation of the parish idea, and of pastoral work. Let the early example
and practice be restored, and salvation brought down from its cold perches in
the church to the hearts and homes of the people. The family altar, at which
Abraham ministered, and to which for centuries prophet and apostle bent the
knee, will be used by the faithful minister as a great factor of his power. “
Salute the church that is in their house.” The first work, then, in the parish,
as in the pulpit, is the rescuing ^of souls from the power of sin. The pastor
that determines with Paul not to know anything among his people but Jesus Christ
and him crucified, will be swift to see and seize the special opportunities for
reaching and saving men, which pastoral work presents. He will seek to imbue the
life of the parish with the spirit of grace. The one day’s teaching of the
pulpit will be illustrated and enforced by six days’ faithful living among the
people.

“ What! carry the solemn proprieties of the pulpit down into the secularities of
the week, and work there to save men? It would repel them.” No — rather carry
the sweet and blessed spirit of Christ into the joy of Sabbath and sermon, and
also into the hardness and toil of the week, and make them both glad and
helpful. The pastor who goes around the parish in stone like the two tables of
the law, is a pagan, and hardly less so is he who goes around among the tables
of the parish, a mere good fellow, talking horses and stocks, feeling he has
done up his piety for the week on Sunday. A pastor mistakes if he thinks by
being worldly in conversation and bearing he will be more attractive. The ideal
gentleman, according to Sir Philip Sidney, is a Christian gentleman. He wins
because of high thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy.” The pastor that is
filled with the spirit of his Master will be welcome everywhere. He is all the
more loved and sought because he is a living, serving Christian. Instead of
putting aside Christ to make himself more acceptable, it is the Christ-likeness
he bears that makes his coming a joy. There is no place where the minister gains
by leaving Christ behind. What is called “society” kills down personal effort.
The fashions of this world act as an exhausted receiver on the minister; he
loses heart for individual labor, and courage wavers when the rich and
pleasure-loving are to be sought. Much that goes as culture is as mildew, and
even when a pastor has worked his parish up into a fine social state, a society
tempest will upset it all; for such work, however pleasant, has little root. The
same time spent in deepening the spiritual life of the church will secure a
stability that endures when all the waves are up and the winds are contrary, for
it is founded on a rock. For his spiritual.work the pastor has something to
show. All else is hay wood, and stubble,” and the time is short, and multitudes
around him are unsaved. The pastoral work has great possibilities. The minister
goes to the people with blessing, as Christ came to the world. How shall we get
souls? “ Go for them,” says Moody. Give your prayers feet. How do the bees fill
the hive? They go to the fields. Where there is a will there is a way. It was a
good day’s work when Andrew went out and brought in Peter. The sermon will shake
down much fruit, but there is much that must be hand-picked. The pastor is
watching for souls, and selects the occasions that promise most; availing
himself, of every argument of love and reason and individual interest. He can go
where his sermon cannot, and speak when it could not, and say what it would not
say. Providence is always opening fresh opportunities, and the pastor is also
seeking them himself. A sick child, a son or daughter away at school, a wedding,
a personal trial, all such things are open doors. The parish work is the short
way to the heart.

There are six classes of which the pastor will be always mindful: the sick;
those in trouble and affliction; children; the aged and infirm; the strangers in
the gates; and souls seeking salvation. Others are reached as time permits.
Opportunities like these are like angels encamping round about the pastor.
Timely visits make gains for eternity. Once lost, the occasion cannot be
recalled. We can never draw souls to Christ as when trial comes. Then, if ever,
a man wants to see his pastor, and his heart is open to the best he can give. He
can represent his Master to the soul’s needs, and make the Saviour’s love and
aid indispensable. It opens the way for prayer and the taking down of the old
Bible. Such service kindles the soul. It makes work for Christ real, revealing
man’s estate and his needs as they are. It is preparation for other work. There
is no school like a parish. A good book is a boon to a minister if it is wiser
and better than he, but contact with believing souls is more instructive and
power-giving than contact with books. Souls are God’s star-points of light in
the world, — “ living epistles *’ are they, bearing the Lord’s own image and
signature. It is communion with the highest when you come into the inner life of
the sons and daughters of God; you meet God in his dealings with them, and
witness his wonder-working; and nothing more strongly convinces and impresses
the mind with a sense of divine truth. Pope saw God in nature. It is more to see
him in the parish. A pastor will find stronger evidences of Christianity in
God’s dealings with souls around him than in all the books of his library. God
is there in the scenes of joy and sorrow, birth and death. Work for God in the
harvest-fields of life is an educator that no minister can do without. Love for
souls is the spring of all best parish work. The bird must be in your heart
before you can find it in the bush. You can go over seas and mountains for the
soul you love. The pastor who seeks to save souls will find souls to save. There
will always be one more case — a straying sheep to be brought back. And how
shall souls ever be found, except they are soufifht? Pastoral work strikes to
the core. To sit down beside a man and open to him the gates of light, and let
all you know of Christ’s mercy and goodness pass before him, setting forth the
love and grace that wait for his acceptance, as you have tasted them in your own
soul, Christ’s image shining in you, and the accents of his love blending with
yours, is to gain that man for Christ.. He will bow over and accept the Beloved
whose Spirit pleads at the door of his soul. The greatest good the pastor can
bestow on his people is to come to them in their homes and business in the
fulness of the Gospel of Christ, and such service is essential for the good of
both pastor and people.

Ministers often whet their blades all away in literary studies, and never cut
down thorn or briar in any hard path. They keep the mind in the smudge of
book-doubt till the temper of the blade is drawn. Real contact with the people
corrects all this, and keeps the pastor’s heart warm with love, and strong in
faith, and active and wise in service. He gathers up the dewdrops of God’s grace
out of praying hearts as he goes, and his soul grows fuller until the cloud
breaks in revival showers. Being in the work himself, the pastor can set all his
people to work, and the Pastoral Aid Society which he puts in motion carries
blessing to every nook and comer of the community.

It is possible to turn every place into a pulpit or to carry the parish
everywhere. See St. Paul praying with the elders on the sand at Miletus, with
heaven for a canopy, and the voice of the great sea in their ears. What a mighty
reaper was he in the parish, shut up neither to time nor place! The pastor needs
to visit the homes of his people, and talk of the good things of the kingdom.
Where does the heart flow out heavenward more readily than at the board of
hospitality, in the circles of household confidence and affection, under a
friendly roof, sheltered by divine care and surrounded by tokens of God’s
presence? There, with the children present, where the treasures of years of
experience, both happy and bitter, gather, how easy to speak of all God’s
benefits, and to let the happy interview blossom into songs of gratitude and
praise from the quickened hearts of the kneeling group.

Modem refinement is difficult of approach, and the homes of wealth reticent
concerning Christian experiences. But the pastor is privileged. He is expected
to minister to the soul, and bear into the family circle the flowers of
paradise. The occasion of such visits will be fragrant in the home as the coming
of the spring lilacs, and dewy with the breath of the eternal morning.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 18: 02.04.     THE PASTOR AMONG THE YOUTH
========================================================================

IV. THE PASTOR AMONG THE YOUTH.

He who builds the church of Christ must save the children. K we save the
children, we save the world. The world is most easily and effectively saved in
childhood. The best Christian workers are largely taken and consecrated to lives
of benevolence and sacrifice and service from circles of Christian youth. Dr.
Bushnell tells us of the out-populating power of the Christian stock, exceeding
all other in its quality and influence over men and nations. The advanced
cohorts of Christ’s army in every field of work and in all lands were once the
children of the temple. Life and death are in the training of children. The
generation which takes the most children along with it for Christ will do most
to build his kingdom, and to thin the ranks of the opposition. Out of
well-trained children we are to rear the strongest defences of Christianity, — a
soldiery of godly souls, true to the great Captain. The Holy Land is a barren,
shadeless land for the want of fresh young trees. The church without the young
ingathered and trained is a deserted field. Though aged palms are found in the
courts of the Lord’s house, we need, as well, the straight and beautiful rods of
youth there. Wise kings these days plant young forests in all waste places; so
wise pastors will be busy setting plants in the gardens of the Lord. Shepherds
increase their flocks by carefully nursing the lambs; so pastors enlarge their
folds by caring for the young. The question is being earnestly asked, “ How can
we bring the men to Christ?’’ Bring in the boys, then you will have the men. The
boys will come if we seek them on their own ground, meeting thoughts and hearts
with thoughts and hearts that are kindred and congenial. Seek the children
early, seek them faithfully. The pastor’s best work will be in giving direction
to their life at the start. The pointing of the gun determines the entire course
of the ball.

There is no escape from these truths. The charm and beauty of Eden still cling
to the children, yet they possess a sinful nature, and must have a new heart
from above. Selfishness and disobedience and anger stain the sparkling fountain
of youth, except the Spirit of God renew and redeem their lives. No human
training can take the place of this. It is the new life in Christ which makes
the culture availing and successful. Though God has gladdened the earth with
little children, if we would be spared the pain of seeing them drop in the
blossom, their feet must surely be directed to Christ and never misled. The
beginnings of the divine life must be put in their hearts before the world gets
in.

Many are the ways in which the pastor may reach and guide the children. 1. He
will first secure them through the home. His own example and teaching will,
under God, make each household a joyous, living church of Christ. There will be
daily family worship at the altar, bright with psalm and song. Obedience will be
cheerful and prompt; kindness and forbearance the atmosphere. The spirit of
Christ will abide in father and mother, leading all hearts into loving unity.
Good-will and helpfulness one tq another will abound, and every duty will be
taught and remembered in its time. Reverence for God and his Word and day and
house, faith in Christ,- regard for the truth, love of right-doing, sorrow for
sin, true manliness, desire for usefulness, self-sacrifice for others, and every
excellence desirable in the Christian will be planted in the child. The pastor,
thus, by seeking to make a true Christian home, will secure the conditions of a
successful start in the Christian life among the children. They will bear the
marks of the home through life.

2. The pastor will reach the children through the Bible-school; that is not the
children’s church, but it is the church and pastor mingling with the children,
and laying out all their experience and wisdom and spiritual power on them for
their instruction in righteousness. The pastor is always in the Bible school. He
thus brings the adults and youth together, retaining the older scholars in the
school, and all bound together by mutual interest. That great and widening gulf
between adults and children, so harmful to each, is in this way prevented. The
Bible-school places an acting-pastor in the person of the teacher over each
circle of youth. It affords a work to do which blesses both teacher and pupil.
It keeps the heart warm in service, and prepares the whole church for
usefulness. It prevents any gap occurring in the services of the church. The
young worship with the parents, the adults study God’s Word with the young, and
all grow up together, homogeneous. The Sabbath-school becomes a constant feeder
of the church; the church becomes a garden enclosed about the children. Is not
this God’s order?

3. The pastor will save the youth through the pulpit. They must be made to feel
that they have a place in the service, and a part in the worship; that their
presence is desirable, and their absence regretted. An entire sermon to the
young is good now and then. So is a five-minutes’ talk, if it be fit and good
for adults also. A special hymn for the young, a psalm read responsively,
repeated recognition of children in sermons, the chanting of the Apostles’
Creed, children joining, the keeping of texts through the year in a little book
adapted for the purpose, and other methods which the pastor will easily devise —
all this always bearing directly on their conversion and nurture and not on
their diversion, will constantly secure most beneficial results. Given a pulpit
to stand in, and a Bible, and a Saviour, and the Holy Spirit, and a group of
bright immortals fresh from the hand of God, with the sunny gleam of heaven
still on their faces every Lord’s day in the year, and if he does not lead many
of them to Christ as the days go on, God have mercy on his soul! He has not yet
taken his stand on the heights from which he can see eternity. The pastor will
gather the young on certain stated occasions for doctrinal instruction, laying
down the great landmarks of Christian truth, seeing that the youth of his charge
are established firmly and intelligently on the Rock of Ages, and duly warned
against the pitfalls and dangers of this present evil world. And if he have in
his hand a catechism outlining for substance of doctrine the royal path along
which millions of God’s children have walked securely and rejoicingly home to
glory, nobody will be hurt by this. The pastor will wish to have young people’s
meetings and gatherings for Christian endeavor where workers may be trained for
special lines of usefulness, the study of missions, the practice of benevolent
giving, and the art of gathering in the straying. He will give them printed
matter to read. He will guide them to habits of usefuhiess. He will enlist every
young person’s service in some fit way, where a responsibility will develop the
character by sound and healthful growth. His motto will be: “ A work for every
boy, and a boy for every work.”

Among the objects which the pastor will keep uppermost, is the search among the
young for those who shall become missionaries and ministers and teachers and
devoted workers in the Church of God. To this end he will labor and pray
diligently, never content till his church is in that state of spiritual life,
that shall be constantly yielding young men for the college and the ministry,
and daughters for the seminary, and minute-men for all the diversities of
service called for by the church. A church bearing such fruit is happy and
blessed above all the households of faith. Beginning with the young, every
pastor may do this, and end the famine in the ranks of the ministry.

There is great advantage here through personal intercourse with the young as
Providence opens the way. The Timothies who have known the Scriptures from a
child, and been taught the faith at the mother’s knee may, in a sacred hour of
personal communion with the pastor, decide, to preach the glorious gospel at
home, or to bear the cross over strange seas to the dark places of the earth.


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  CHAPTER 19: 02.05.     THE PASTOR IN THE PRAYER MEETING
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V. THE PASTOR IN THE PRAYER-MEETING. The secret power with God is prayer. The
prayer meeting is the most important circle that gathers in the church, both in
its influence on Christians and on the world. The Church of Christ was bom in a
tendays’ prayer-meeting, and it must still be found in the place of prayer. In
building the Church of God, prayer has the first place. Before sermon or parish
work is prayer. Above all other services is the prayer service. God calls his
house a House of Prayer. He rears his church over the wells of salvation, and by
prayer the water of life with joy is drawn. The believer that is always there
receives and gives a blessing which will hardly be exceeded by any other work he
ever does. The prayer-meeting must have the pastor for its guide. There may be
scores of godly and able members, but he stands at the centre, and none can
understand the needs and fitnesses, and bring out the gifts and graces as he
can. An engine on the deck of a steamship moves nothing; but planted at the
heart of the vessel, fired and throbbing, it geai*s on to everything; each part
finds its place and use, and the whole ship is in motion. So the pastor is the
heart of fire at the hour of prayer, setting everything in order, calling each
talent into service, and giving direction and movement. The staple of the
prayer-meeting is its spirituality. It is not a sociable, though it is social.
It is not a talking and singing meeting, though men talk and sing with the
heart. It is not a solemn rehearsal of prayermeeting prayers; nor is it a weekly
lecture by the pastor, made up of what is left over. Such a meeting is the poppy
among the flowers in the garden of plants. Nothing can be substituted for the
pure gold of devotion. Sprightliness and skill in displaying trifles will not
pass. You cannot have a soul-moving prayermeeting without soul-moving piety.
There is auroral light, and there are many stars, small and great, but it is the
sun that creates the day. The one thing that makes the hour of prayer blessed is
the light of the living God in the souls of his communing children. If our
prayer-meetings are poor, it is because our piety is shallow. Nothing will make
them powerful and profitable like more godliness. Deepen the consecration and
you deepen the interest and helpfulness. When the church has had most form, it
has had least prayer; when its power has been greatest, it has been oftenest
bowed at the mercy-seat. The gift of knees is Pentecost. Wealth, worldliness,
and fashion fly to form and say prayers. Living faith lifts the heart and bends
the knee. George Herbert, in his ’ Priest to the Temple,” strange to say, makes
no mention of the prayer-meeting. It was choked by the ritual, as it is now at
times by unbelief, by conclusions of science, speculations of philosophy, and
the higher criticism.

Preparation for the hour of prayer is essential. It will not go itself, however
good the saints that are gathered. It requires as much time and thought to be
charged for it as it does for a sermon; and the conduct of it, as much wisdom
and skill. It deals with the greatest principles of our being, and with the most
vital doctrines of revelation. He who guides it, — his mind must be taught of
God, his heart must be near Christ’s heart, and his ear long at the lips of his
Lord. The leader Avill not go up lightly from the world to this gathering, but
come down as from the high places, his face made like Moses’ face, from secret
communings. The prayer-meeting is a place of power. Miracles are done in it.
When the disciples were praying, the Holy Spirit’descended. When the church was
praying at John Mark’s house, Peter was let out of prison by an angel. When the
church prays now, there is answer in India and China and Africa. While
Christians pray there is fresh anointing from on high; they become strong in the
Lord and the power of his might. The hour we stop doing for God and spend in
communing with him is the most strengthening in the week. More prayers and less
words. Less time with men, and more with God. We get the victory in the
prayer-room where no eye sees but God’s, and all hearts are one before Him. The
prayer circle is a place of instruction. Prayer is a great teacher. The word of
truth is unfolded there; mysteries are explained; promises are fulfilled;
deliverances are wrought; what God teaches in prayer is pure truth; what we
learn on our knees, we never unlearn. The place of prayer is a place of rest
after toil, for comfort in perplexity and trouble. It is good to draw near to
God. “Draw nigh unto me and I will draw nigh unto you.” The gates to the
mercy-seat are many, and, like those to the Golden City, stand open day and
night, that every soul may enter in. It is a place of fellowship. Next to the
joy of heaven is the gladness of hearts gathered together in prayer. It is a
place for conversion of souls. Of how many it shall be written: “They were born
there.” It is a place for replenishing the daily losses of the heart, and
enthroning or God again from the seat of the soul. A Christian is always helped
in his association with other Christians. Single coals do not hold fire, but
gathered together there is glow. Double the number in this fellowship and
commission, and you more than double the interest and power of the meeting. A
definite object is desirable, toward which the current of the meeting presses,
that it may gather force as it goes, and draw into itself the cold and waiting
ones. Variety is important; sameness is tameness. The tree of life bears twelve
manner of fruit, a great diversity; and it sheds its leaves every prayer-meeting
hour for the healing of God’s children. Many a leader runs the wheels of
salvation into the old rut early in the meeting, and there he is stuck, with no
help from saint or sinner.

Make the meeting the centre of Christian work and benevolence. Let the best life
of the church gather there; cause it to be a place of resort and comfort for all
the weary and heavy laden, bringing what they have learned in the daily conflict
of life; what defeats and what progress; see that it is the register of all best
thoughts, feelings, struggles, and triumphs for each week. Make it a
praise-meeting now and then.

Let each one give a reason for thanksgiving; recount hindrances to the better
life; sing sometimes through the entire hour, alternating after each verse with
prayer. Have a conference on ’such subjects as Sabbath keeping, family worship,
training of children, amusements, and so on. Let any ask for prayers. Suggest a
season of silent prayer; join in the Lord’s Prayer.

Write out a covenant each one, and resolutions, and let them be presented. Have
a Scripture reading, all taking part. Privately ask several beforehand to take
part one after another without being called on. For a Bible lesson, at the
opening, let each one repeat a verse, and so read the Scriptures from the tablet
of memory. Print a list of subjects and circulate them. Have a question-box.
Give out the subject from the pulpit Sunday. Be on the watch for fresh
experience of God’s love and goodness, of promises fulfilled, of aid rendered,
and prayers answered, and new conversions, and let the facts be spoken to the
praise of God. At the beginning of a meeting give out. a living topic, and name
six brethren before you to speak on it, three minutes each, and after singing
and prayer call on them. If the meeting refuses to go at any time, turn it into
a conversation, all rising and greeting the next neighbor; they will soon find
their tongues. Appoint several members quietly beforehand to discuss a subject,
and set it going without any public warning. Let a verse of Scripture be handed
to each one on entering, to be read or recited in due time, and given away to
some one before Sunday. There should be a great deal of Bible in the meetings.
Sit in silence a little time now and then with God and your own thoughts. Let
all bow sometimes, and one after another utter a sentence of prayer that most
presses on the heart, without rising. Take much pains with the music. Short
sentiments in prose and verse may be repeated by the young with profit. Talk
about the prayer-meeting through the week. Never scold, or tease, or worry the
members. If you have any criticism or rebuke to give, do it in private. Make it
the happiest hour in the week, and the most helpful place for the soul. Let it
all be mellowed and sanctified by the spirit of prayer. Ask all the church to
come, and make the hour so profitable to the inner life that they cannot afford
to stay away. You cannot drive the bees with a whip, but plant a clover field
and you will get them, and they will fill the hive with honey.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 20: 02.06.     THE PASTOR DEALING WITH SKEPTICISM
========================================================================

VI. THE PASTOR DEALING WITH SKEPTICISM. The pastor, in dealing with skeptics,
will make it his steadfast aim to win them to Christ. The way to melt hardened
steel is to give draught to the furnace fires; the way for the pastor to draw
unbelievers to.the truth is to have his own heart hot with love for souls. When
the great Refiner of silver sits by the pastor’s heart till the Refiner can see
his own face there, the skeptic also will see in the pastor’s heart the divine
face, and be drawn by the power of redeeming love. The pastor then will first
charge himself with fault for his own low tone of faith and life, and reproach
himself that he has so held forth the Word of life, that there are any in the
parish who doubt the truth of the glorious gospel of the blessed God. With God’s
word in his hand, “ the powers of the world to come “ on his side, and the
Almighty God over him, the honest skeptics will be few. Pastors have to blame
themselves for much of the unbelief of the day, since their own doubts keep them
away from the cross, and carry others farther than they themselves drift. When
the life of God fills the souls of his people, doubt and unbelief find little
place, and that will be less and less if the pastor put the power of piety
against infidelity as the best cure.

1. The pastor will be patient with the doubters. Christ was with Thomas, and won
him. Thomas had good stuff in him, such as eminent Christians are made of. When
Christ went up to Jerusalem, knowing that he should meet his death, no words
could be grander than Thomas’s: “ Let us go up too, that we may die with him.”
But when his Lord was really dead, his faith received a great shock. He drew off
by himself for a time, unbelieving. But Jesus was patient with him. He did not
taunt him, nor storm at him. And when Thomas finally came to him at the meeting,
Christ’s goodness won him. By patience, a true soul was rescued from the snare
of doubt. This is our Lord’s own example for our use.

“ There is nothing so kingly as kindness There is nothing so royal as truth.”

2. The pastor will be Christ-like in dealing with unbelievers. That is more than
to be patient. He will meet their darkness with that “true liorht which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world,” and not with his own human weapons. “ In
Christ was life; and the life was the light of men.” The pastor being himself in
the light, will “ bear witness to the light, that all men through him might
believe.’ Unheeding the flings and jeers of skeptics, and blind to their
hostility, the pastor’s fervent longing that they may know Christ and come to
the true light, will melt the ice of their hearts, and the warmth of his love
for them under their criticism will carry conviction to their minds. For the
perversity of men the Lord bore the cross and conquered. The pastor’s own
heart-break for their rescue from sin will prevail. Love is the strongest power
in the world, for God is love. Railing accusations set the teeth of unbelievers
on edge. It is Greek meeting Greek. When the pastor stoops to this, he is a
loser. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. Any purpose to triumph over
unbelievers in contests of argument, to ridicule them, or to humiliate and make
a show of them openly, only provokes opposition. Nothing is gain to the pastor
but the gain of their souls to Qirist; and in this victory of grace both pastor
and unbeliever are alike blessed. When God’s goodness leadeth to repentance, no
one is conquered. Unbelievers can stand anything better than the steady flow of
that love that suffereth long and is kind, that vaunteth not itself, is not
provoked, that beareth all things and never faileth. It is not said that the
time never comes when a mean and dishonest infidelity may not be soundly lashed
by a whip of corda and shown up by a righteous indignation, but never with a
carnal heart gratifying the flesh. It is always the new life of Christ in the
soul, and not the old one of sin, that conquers the opposers. The “ old man’ in
the Christian must keep out of the fight, however much he aches to get in. ’
Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”

3. The pastor, in dealing with skepticism, will be filled with the Holy Spirit.
It is by the Holy Spirit that every soul is renewed. The Bible is a dead book to
a soul dead in sin; and a sermon without the spirit is a dry bough, though
plucked from a cedar of Lebanon, and having in learning and manner all the
excellency of Carmel. It is not social nor mental power that is to transform
this world, but the power of the Spirit of God. God taught the prophets, “ It is
not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit.” Christ taught the disciples, “ It
is not ye that speak, but the spirit of your Father which speaketh in you.” When
Peter stood up to deliver the first discourse under Christianity, he preached
not his own wisdom, nor the wisdom of this world, its learning, philosophy or
science, “lest the cross of Christ should be of none effect.” He preached the
gospel of the cross by the power of the spirit, and God opened the hearts of the
hearers to receive it. ’ Peter did not load himself with human arguments for a
conflict with unbelievers. He was not a ’*disputer of this world.” Ye must be
bom again.” The heart must be renewed, and its disposition changed. God had
taught him that, and promised the power. Peter depended upon the promise, and
looked not in vain. The Spirit, as he spoke, was manifested, and men cried out
for deliverance. This result came through their hearts as he preached, the
Spirit convicting them of sin and moving them to seek immediate salvation. When
Paul came to Corinth, it was “ not in the enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in
demonstration of the Spirit and of power.” “ He had not received the spirit of
the world, but the Spirit which is of God” for his hope of success. He did not
expect their ^ faith to stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”
His words were according to “ the wisdom which the Holy Ghost teacheth,” and
souls were thus born by the Spirit with which he was filled into the light and
joy of the kingdom of God. Very truly may Paul say to those who are set to lead
men out of doubt and unbelief, Be filled with the Spirit! “ The Spirit of
Pentecost still lives. It is when the pastor is filled with the Spirit in
preaching the Word, that blind eyes are opened, deaf ears unstopped, and
unbelieving hearts are made to see and receive the redemption of Christ. The
pastor will learn this secret of power with God, hardest of all truths to learn,
and bring in many unbelievers. The sling of David brought in Goliath against all
human expectjition. To be filled with the Spirit is the pastor’s sling. He can
say, “ 1 have no words of human power and wisdom to go against so great a host,
but I have the Spirit and promise of God, and herein is the biding of power.”

4. The pastor, in dealing with infidelity, will be mighty in the Scriptures. The
Bible belongs to the weak things of this world and the things that are not, in
human esteem, bringing to naught the things that are, the institutions and
powers that so impress and dazzle the world. The Bible is ’’ wheat and not
bread,” and, when cast into the soil of faith, grows, and no power can stop it.
The little kernel gives no promise of the greatness of the harvest. The pastor
will be a sower going forth to sow on the fields of life. The tares will perish,
but the grain is not for death. The Bible is an arsenal for the pastor’s use;
everything he needs is there shaped by divine wisdom.

It is a theological seminary. It is the library for the whole church of God. To
know it in head and heart, by prayer and the teaching of the Spirit, is above
all other knowledge. It is the rod put in the pastor’s hand, by which he is to
lead darkened and doubting men through sea and wilderness to the final home.
“The entrance of thy Word giveth light.” How many times, when dealing with
unbelief, has an arrow from this quiver been effective?

5. The pastor will aim at great results. Pour in the light of the Gospel on the
darkness of doubt. Establish the true in all wisdom as against the false. Cause
men to see the right way over the wrong. Preach the truth as it is in Jesus, not
as it is in sentiment or poetry, or the wisdom of this world. Set a system of
truth before men, and show them what to believe. Every time you strike down an
error, lift up a sound doctrine. Whenever men see the better, it will be easier
to drop the worse. Doubt and unbelief are negative. Infidelity is not a
principle, it is a mood. The other side of unbelief is faith. When doubt is
gone, belief is come. The pulpit is for enlightenment as well as for conversion.
Bring forth your strong arguments. Cause the people to grow in the knowledge of
the Lord Jesus Christ. Let there be instruction in righteousness. Our modern
faith has breadth; give it depth and intensity. The army of Gideon increased in
power when it was reduced in numbers. Fill not men’s hearts with all conceivable
objections which they never thought of before, and then try to answer them. Give
the truth bathed with holy fire. Preach no longer on little themes, but great
ones. Build up Jerusalem with vast blocks of stone hewn out of the mountains of
God. Be no longer babes with milk; produce strong meat. Under such a treatment
there may be waves of skepticism and moods of doubt and unbelief, but they will
be transient, and there will be, as in the flowing of the tides, steady gain
till the saving knowledge of God floods the earth.


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  CHAPTER 21: 02.07.     THE PASTOR IN REVIVALS
========================================================================

VII. THE PASTOR IN REVIVALS.

“ The God that answereth by fire, let him be God.” In setting forth the gifts
that commend the ministers of Christ, Paul mentions, among others, the
possession of “the Holy Ghost, the power of God.” (2 Corinthians 6:6-7) God’s
ambassadors must be Holy Ghost men, power-of-God men. Revival work must be a
leading feature in the work of ministers and churches. To labor among the youth,
bringing them early into the fold, is of the utmost importance. Home piety and
the Christian culture of children is a foundation stone in Zion. But our Saviour
did not stop there, and the church must not. Christ’s mission ended at
Pentecost, where that of his disciples began, — with the descent of the Holy
Spirit, and revival power. The church has therefore two special arms of service
— child nurture and revival work. The one secures the young and tender before
they stray, the other reclaims the hardened and wandering. By the former,
covenant mercies are distilled into the heart of childhood, bringing salvation
quietly as the moring dawns; by the latter, the stout-souled sinner is convineed
of sin, and brought to the feet of Jesus.

God is God both of dew and of fire. The Christian training of children provides
for one whole side of the community, — folding the lambs; but the pastor will
find that he needs revival power from God to reach the unbelieving and godless
ones moving down the broad way to death on the other side of the community. The
experience of ages shows that the pious care of children, aided by baptismal
water, and catechism, and confirmation, without times of refreshing from on high
to give depth and power to their piety, results in a lifeless, formal church. It
needs a spark of the new life from “ the God that answers by fire.” A reviving
from the Holy Spirit gives new life to the church and new power to truth and
doctrine. The pastor, in building the church, will give both these truths a
place in his plans of work. They do not come into conflict. They help each
other. Neither one can be dispensed with without great loss. While we hold fast
to the covenant-keeping God, to the gentle “Shepherd who shall gather the lambs
with his arm and carry them in his bosom,” let us, for the sake of the waste
places and dark comers in every parish, keep near that Mighty One who speaks to
stony hearts in tongues of flame. This is the privilege of every pastor. It is
the highest gift of God to the ministry; the anointing from heaven for the
conversion of souls. The pastor may or may not be aided by evangelists or other
pastors; the spiritual awakening in his church may be more or less extended or
frequent, but it is his own prerogative as a minister of God, endued with the
Holy Ghost and the power of God, to see many souls converted from sin, and the
miracle of the new birth so wrought upon the hearts of worldly and wicked men
that the entire church shall be moved midst tears of penitence and gratitude to
new consecration and better service. Let no pastor say that these gifts of ’God
are for others and not for himself, until he has waited all the night long, many
a night, at the gates of the Temple, praying and longing for the light as one
that watcheth for the morning, and until God finally makes answer that there is
no more mercy in the skies for lost men; that the wells of salvation are dry,
and the promises of redemption recalled.

If all the gods who are asleep or away on a journey when they are worshipped,
and who only supply fancies and vaporings to the pulpit, were cast out for the
one God of Pentecost, what increase of power there would be. To sit down on
these gods as Rachel did would be a step forward in the art of winning souls,
and the preaching that converts nobody would end. The final test of all doctrine
and method is fruit-bearing. Our churches must yield more fruit, and have
greater power with God, revival power. The pastor must speak as one having
authority, and not as the Scribes.” The grace that converts one soul will avail
as well for a hundred. It is as near at hand, and as easily entreated.

K the pastor will carry a soul-saving faith and prayerfulness and courage, he
may secure many conversions as surely as a few. He will constantly watch his
hour when he may move out into deeper waters and cast his net in on the other
side, drawing it in full.

Christ walks all the waves of life with hands outstretched to save. The church
needs nothing so much as to be led out on these wide waters to rescue sinking
souls.. The pastor, then, builds thoroughly and powerfully when he seeks for his
church the converting presence of the Holy Ghost in His promised fulness. Such
periods of divine quickening accomplish great results. They arouse the
indifferent, and reach the careless. A great number of those who have had no
early religious training, or have passed to manhood untouched by it will be
saved in no other way. By revival work I do not mean such spasmodic efforts as
are followed by long periods of repose, or to such as leave the converts uncared
for to return to their old ways. I mean a faithful ingathering after sowing — a
sowing in order to a speedy and full reaping. The indifference to the harvest
sometimes seen — pastors thinking if they only sow and go to sleep sowing, God
will bring in the sheaves — is a fallacy and a sin. While the good man sleeps,
the enemy fills the field with tares. God uses harvesters of living, tireless
men, and He needs many, for the fields that are white. “ In due time we shall
reap.” In many churches the time is overdue because the pastor has not put in
the sickle, but has been waiting for God to do it.

Revivals will always have opposers; nevertheless, revivals are a part of God’s
plan in saving the world. The church was begun in a revival, and in spiritual
outpouring it shall end, nations being born in a day, the glory of God filling
the earth. Earth’s hope is in these visits of God to his people. “The Lord, whom
ye seek, shall suddenly come to His temple.” (Malachi 3:1.)

Revivals awaken respect and awe for Christianity. Skeptics who have ridiculed
the Bible feel the might of God, and the testimony of bad men converted shuts
the mouths of boasters, shaking down the castle of self-righteousness. Revivals
make the Bible a new book. They deepen piety, incite to prayer, lift up the
family altar, and quicken all the drooping graces of the church. Laymen are set
to work, new streams of influence are opened, and men are raised up to special
service. Difficulties are healed, alienations overcome, brotherly love made to
abound, and knowledge and experience of Christian truth extended. In revivals
God and Eternity seem great, Christ’s love near and precious, and Christian duty
pressing.

Revivals bring the church back to the simplicities of doctrine and worship, and
Christian living. They awaken regard for the Sabbath and the house of God the
prayer-meeting, and all the divine ordinances.. They fill up the evening
service, and make that hour the best in the Sabbath for reaching and saving the
masses. By revivals ministers and churches are more united, pastors and people
are drawn into more endearing fellowship and better established, benevolence is
enlarged, lost joy restored, and both home and public standards of piety are
elevated. Revivals make preaching more Scriptural and pointed. The Word of God,
pure and simple, comes to the front. A personal Christ is set forth, and the
evil of sin and the eternal loss of the soul without salvation. The doctrines of
regeneration by the Holy Spirit, forgiveness of sin through the sacrifice of
Christ, and the rewards and retributions at the judgment day; are made vivid and
weighty, half-truths and heresies starve, and sectarianism gives place to
brotherly love- Revivals take churches out of the rounds of formal ism and the
fashions and pomps of this world, putting new life into everything. They lighten
the burdens of the ministry. It is never so easy to preach and pray as in the
Spirit’s presence. They pay church debts, lift up the fallen, and give the
church a wider field and a fresh lease of life and usefulness. Many ’* almost
persuaded,’ will never start till this time comes. Missionaries and ministers
and teachers are born in revivals, and great Christian societies which bless the
world follow them. The church is always becoming cold and entangled with the
world without this freshening power of the Spirit. A revival is another chapter
added to the Book of Acts. Ministers and churches must have such seasons of
divine renewal, consecrating hearts more fully, multiplying offerings,
increasing service, moving thought and feeling profoundly toward God and the new
life. The breath of the Highest is on the community, and the hearts of believers
yield a sweet odor like the fragrance of spices outpoured.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 22: 02.08.     THE PRIVILEGE OP TEACHING GOD'S WORD ... BY MRS. C. L. GOODELL
========================================================================

VIII. THE PRIVILEGE OF TEACHING GOD’S WORD.

It is a joy to teach God’s Word, to prepare for it, to anticipate it, carrying
it in one’s heart. Many are the teachers all over our land who know this
blessedness. Our Bible-schools are full of them.

There is a blessing in the preparation. Among the happiest hours are those with
the open Bible at the feet of the great Teacher. A Sunday-school class is a good
spur to Bible study. In this busy age many a Christian is at a loss for time to
read, much less to search the Scriptures. This duty is crowded out by the
pressing cares and toils of active life. While the body receives its nourishment
the soul goes starving. But when you pledge yourself to a Bible-class, other
things must give way; the lesson must be prepared, and this calls for faithful
study of the Bible. It leads to real searching of the Scriptures. The teacher
seeks diligently for the meaning and mastery of the passage. It is thus fixed
permanently in his mind, and he makes solid progress through the demands of the
class on him. He endeavors to have his heart in accord with the truth he
studies, and with the object of the work before him. It takes him out of a
dreamy sentimental Christianity, and settles him into the heart of divine truth.
It compels him to dig out the meat of the Word and to be on his knees before God
in earnest prayer, and to exert all his powers in behalf of his pupils. It keeps
him on the watch for profitable thoughts and illustrations. He becomes a daily
learner, searching for good things to bring to his class. Nothing could possibly
occur better than this for the spiritual growth and enlargement of the teacher.
It compels him to be in the spirit on the Lord’s day. It restrains from
wandering thoughts, dispels indifference, and leads him to abide by the cross.
He cannot squander time and opportunity. He cannot let down in his faith, nor
allow his life to drift, being set to a lower grade of Christian living. A few
years of such teaching, bringing all the better powers into play, establishes
one’s character on a higher grade. The good obtained by such service grows wider
in its influence than the class taught, and fits one for better work and a wider
sphere through life. We get more than we give, and that which we undertake as a
sacrifice comes to be a special source of blessing. While pupils are under
obligations to the teacher, the teacher is under still higher obligations to the
pupils.

There is blessing also in the teaching. When thus brought into living contact
with the Word, and your ear is opened to hear the divine voice, you are filled
with a longing to tell others of these things, and teaching is but giving
utterance to the revelation of God’s Word to your own soul; it is only drawing
aside the veil that his riches may be seen. Teaching is not simply asking
questions. The substance of the lesson must be opened up and brought into sight.
There must be something imparted to interest and awaken the mind. Acquaintance
with the lesson gives confidence and courage. The tejicher cannot give what he
has not got. But the soul, glowing under the power of the truth, is able to send
it forth and awaken the same interest. Teacher and class discoursing together as
they turn their Bibles, comparing one passage with another, one reading a verse
aloud, another asking a question, another still suggesting a practical thought,
the teacher meanwhile gathering up the main points of the lesson, and guiding
the thoughts of the class into spiritual channels; the moments are precious, and
the hour is gone too quickly. Few joys are greater than that of the teacher
who,. first taught of God, gives to others what he has received. Then again the
teacher is brought into close personal sympathy with the class; he feels a
responsibility for their individual welfare. He sits down by them. He learns
their needs and difficulties, and enters into their yearnings for the better
life, and by loving counsel leads them on higher. The teacher is thus a
spiritual leader and guide. Pleasant are the friendships formed between teacher
and pupils, — friendships that will continue through eternity. A blessing comes
too, in results. The truth searches the conscience and makes it tender and
receptive; Christ comes near with his comforts and helps; light breaks in and
cheer to troubled souls; burdens fall; heavenly things seem real, and the dew of
Christ’s love is distilled, and the ice melts from cold hearts. Many testify of
the good they find in Bible study. This is one of the most restful hours I have
in the week.’’ The Bible comes to be a new book.” There is nothing that pays
back such rich rewards as the study of the Word.” ’What a wonderful Book this
is!” “I never regret the time I spend in Bible study; it helps me all the week.”
A special joy comes to the teacher who is permitted to see the members of his
class coming to Christ. What an incentive this is to faithful teaching! We may
not forget that we are dealing with immortal souls, susceptible to the power of
the Holy Spirit. The truth we teach is God’s truth, not ours. What faith we may
have in it Weakness ourselves, the Word is power.

There is a blessing in the memories. Who does not recall his first Sunday-school
class? Vividly those bii^t faces come up before you now, though years have
passed since they gathered round you. After months of patient toil you saw in
one and another the seed taking root, and you had the joy of gathering the fruit
into the fold. You recall hours when a thoughtful silence rested upon the class.
A gentleness in manner, a subdued expression on their faces, and here and there
a moistened eye told you the Holy Spirit was near sealing the truth. Your soul
yearned for them. You trembled as you realized the issues of that hour. You
breathed a silent prayer for wisdom and help to lead them to Christ. The joyous
privilege was yours, and the memory of it will abide forever. Here is treasure
laid up.


========================================================================
  CHAPTER 23: 02.09.     MINISTERS' WIVES
========================================================================

IX. THE INFLUENCE OP MINISTERS’ WIVES.

There is an unfortunate and mistaken notion somewhat prevalent respecting the
duties of a pastor’s wife. It has sometimes been remarked by ministers, and even
from the pulpit: “ When I was called, my wife was not called “; or, “ My wife
has no salary,” implying that no work in the parish must be required of her.
Again, words like these: “ The parish ought not to demand so much of the
minister’s wife,” said in a half-pitiful tone, as if she had a hard time, and
the parish were to blame for it; as if she were a kind of martyr to the cause.

Now, looking at this matter simply from a secular standpoint, does not the true
wife take to heart and share the burdens and fortunes of her husband, whatever
his calling is, whether mechanic or farmer, or one of the learned professions?
And is she not ready at all times to cheer and aid him, and show herself a
worthy helpmeet? And if, through her love for him, she often denies herself and
makes great sacrfices in order that his interests may be advanced, are others to
be blamed for it? But there is a higher view to take of the position of any
Christian wife, whether her husband is a minister or merchant or day-laborer.
She has obligations higher than those she owes to her husband. “One is your
Master, even Christ.” So it is to Him that she owes her best service, and this,
happily, never conflicts with her duties to her husband. The limit of our
obligations to Christ is our opportunity. So if the minister’s wife has a wider
sphere than some other Christian women, it is simply an enlargement of her
opportunity, and the duties that grow from it are not laid on her by the church
of which her husband is the pastor, but a bestowment of great and blessed
privilege from God, which ought to be a joy to her, and for which she must give
account to Him. So it appears that the duties of a pastor’s wife are no more,
after all, than those of any Christian woman blessed with similar opportunities.
But a minister’s wife is a Christian; she has her own soul to save, and has her
own work to do. According to her ability she is bound to God’s service;
according to her greater opportunity she will be glad to do what is in her
power; and instead of being burdened thereby, all:she thus does in His name and
by His grace will add SO much to the depth of her joy and to the blessedness of
her life in Christ. The more we dwell in sympathy and grateful love on the
humiliation and sacrifice of our blessed Lord for sinners, the greater joy we
shall count it to be allowed to do something in return for him. Duty becomes a
pleasure then, and we hail with delight the opportunities that are open to us.
We cease talking about ’’how much we have to do,” or “the great demands on our
time and strength.” When we rise to consider, in any adequate sense, what our
Saviour has done for us, we are ashamed that our service to Him has been so poor
and meagre; and with quickened heart we cry out: “ Lord, what wilt Thou have me
to do? “ Let not any of us, then, who are ministers wives, plan how little we
can do to help on the cause of Christ in our church, and in our husband’s
parish; how small we can narrow down our influence; how much time and strength
we can spare from our Christian duties to devote to “ society,” to amusement, to
recreation, to personal ease. With such a spirit we shall dishonor our Saviour,
and we shall.be sure to have a hard, uncomfortable time of it ourselves, and the
stars in our crown will be few. There are souls all about us hungry for the
Christian aid and comfort we can bring them from the precious Word of God. There
are those we can bless and cheer on every hand. Let us not say as Jeremiah did:
“ I cannot — I am but a child.” If God gives the opportunity, He surely gives
the ability.

There are, it may be, younger ministers’ wives who are looking to us for a
worthj*^ example. I shall never cease to be grateful for the bright, beautiful
life of my pastor’s wife in the East — a lady who early ripened for Heaven, and
was called from great and marked usefulness. I thought if I could only be like
her in devotion to Christ, — if I could be a blessing to others, as she had been
to me, in leading them nearer to the feet of Jesus, — how happy I should be. And
for years after she had gone up higher, her noble, sweet example was before me,
a great inspiration in my own daily life.

“Let your light so shine...” This light must be Christ in us^ if others are led
to glorify our Father in Heaven. If we are God’s children we shall have the
light of Christ in our hearts; and if we drink deep at the fountains of His love
every day, and feed on the riches of His Word, we shall have wherewith to enrich
and benefit others. “As we have therefore opportunity let us do good unto all
men.” Instead of murmuring and being sour because sacrifices and burdens come
upon us, — and much is to be done, — let us thank God he has counted us worthy
to be sharers in the toils of the kingdom He is building, leading back wandering
feet to Him, and esteem the privilege of working with Him who has suffered for
us a great gain.

It is enough that the servant should be as his Lord. Who is the minister’s wife
above other wives, that she cannot spend and be spent in the great company of
those who are freely yielding up themselves for Him who kept not back his own
life for us?


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  CHAPTER 24: 02.10.     WOMAN'S WORK IN HOME EVANGELIZATION
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X. WOMAN’S WORK IN HOME EVANGELIZATION.

I LIVE close beside the great gates of the West through which multitudes of the
children of the East pass in long procession to the ripe fields beyond. Every
day trains laden with immigrant families from European countries roll over the
great bridge of the Mississippi, and emigrant wagons with their white canvas
covering the home treasures, from the Eastern States, journey leisurely past my
windows: both tides alike, home and foreign, with their faces set towards new
homes far out on the great plains.

These things constantly keep the thought and necessity of home missionary work m
mind and heart, and it comes by force into my daily prayer. I little thought in
early years to have spent so much of my life amidst such scenes; but it may have
been so in God’s Providence that I might appeal, with more directness and
effectiveness, to my sisters that remain in the East in behalf of this great
work. Seeing is believing. If you could look through my eyes I am sure your
heart would be stirred with an impulse that would not let you slumber in the
face of these demands upon us.

These emigrants come in families. Each family is a hive of bright-faced,
interesting children. Our American families, as well as foreign families that
move West, abound in vigorous, healthy children — boys and girls to be guided
and instructed in good ways. It is a sight to awaken the deep heart-yearnings of
any Christian mother. For these children are on their way to homes as yet
unmade, and to communities unfurnished with Christian institutions and
influences, and which often abound with snares and pitfalls for tender feet.
Hence the pressing need of ministers and churches in these places of spiritual
destitution, that the family altars may be set up in the homes, the children
gathered into Sunday-schools, and taught the way of life. Here is a strong
appeal to mothers to work for home missions. Other countries, except the
Catholic, are not sending missionaries to us. If we neglect our own country,
there are none to care for it. You look at your own children in their
comfortable homes with every advantage of Christian culture, and the contrast is
appalling; and you say, “Important as my sphere of usefulness is at home, I
cannot stop with my own children; my duty is as wide as the opening fields” —
for the mother’s power must reach wherever the children go. The work is not now
so much to strengthen the weak churches as to provide shepherds for these
incoming flocks.

Multitudes of children in the older States are destined to make their homes and
spend their lives on these new fields. From every neighborhood in the East some
young men have gone out of your homes to the frontiers; great numbers of your
sons and daughters are sure to follow. What better work can possibly be done
than to seek to evangelize these fields, and to brighten the atmosphere with
Christian light and love for the future welfare of these children? Their own
children will be born there; their lives will be passed there. There they will
be buried. We need to lay the foundation of many generations now, to begin to
build such institutions as we are willing to have our children spend their lives
in. If we commence they will complete the work, and carry it still farther on
after we are gone.

How much depends on right beginnings! Much has been said, and truly so,
concerning the rapid and luxuriant growths of these Western prairies. It is no
less true that the seed of divine truth has been equally rapid in its growth,
and the yield abundant in places where it has been sown. It is especially within
the power of the Christian women to aid in this work of sending the gospel
missionary to these fields. They may appeal to every element in the community
around them. Other forms of missionary work may reach separate classes only.
This affects all classes. Each person in the church and out of it may be asked
for aid, according to their means, to build up Christian institutions in the new
West. It is in the interest of business, of capital, of good order, of labor, of
education, of the family, and home and country. It is in the interest of the
life eternal.

There is some diversity of opinion as to methods of organization among Christian
women. Whoever is a member of the church of Christ belongs to the best
organization in the world for Christian work. The family is the divine unit, and
in God’s order we are households for the Lord, and ordained to work church-wise
together — men, women, and children, and the stranger within our gates. This,
certainly, can be done. Christian ladies in every church can make, in behalf of
home missions, an annual canvass of the entire parish, visiting every person,
subscription paper in hand, in place of the meagre basket collections, and
thereby double and triple the amount now raised. This is a very simple way; but
when fifteen or twenty ladies systematize the work in a parish, and go for the
last dollar for the great home missionary cause, they will return laden with
bountiful offerings.

We must read God’s purpose and our duty in this swelling tide of foreign
population to this great West land. From my childhood I have been taught to
reverence and love the work of foreign missions; and all the ardor I have felt
for the multitudes abroad lost in sin, now kindles in my soul for these whom God
is sending to my own land, past my own door. I see in it God’s plan to warm
these cold hearts at our firesides, and to feed these hungry souls from our own
loaf of life. As we draw the living water for ourselves, we must draw it also
for these parents and their children.


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Source: https://sermonindex.net/books/writings-of-charles-l-goodell/
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