Preparation for the Pulpit, Ethical and

Spiritual.

A Lecture delivered in the Trophy-Room in St. Paul's Cathedral, on the afternoon of February 13th, 1877, to the Members of the Church Homiletical Society.*

A

VARIETY of considerations, in my judgment, serves

to invest the subject before you to-day with an importance and an interest of no ordinary kind. With troublous times close at hand, as many of us think,—with a struggle impending, which may be precipitated sooner than we, any of us, suppose,-it behoves us to be able to know, and to take, each of us, his own proper place in the great spiritual battle-field; to suffer no portion of our harness to rust in desuetude and neglect,-no part of our heavenly panoply to lie by uncared for or disused; but, mindful of that wherein our true strength lieth, to take unto us the whole armour of God, and to seek to wield, wisely and well, those "weapons of our warfare,"

* This lecture originally appeared in the Clergyman's Magazine, and is now republished by the kind permission of the Editor.

which are "not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds." Prominent in that divinely appointed armoury-excellent among those spiritual weapons-is the preached Word, the sword of the Spirit, the ministry of the pulpit, the "Gospel preached with the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven," that Gospel of Christ which is still (as it was of old) "the power of God unto salvation" in the hearts and lives of men. And therefore it is that preparation for the pulpit has always held, and must ever hold, in the judgment of every "faithful and wise steward" of his Lord, a place of supreme moment, of foremost magnitude. It will claim, and claim justly, the right to such a man's best thoughts, his ripest and richest studies, his constant and laborious industry; and he will set about it with the conviction that to venture on it lightly, with slender and imperfect furniture, bespeaks at best but a sorry sense of the preacher's responsibility, and can only consist with lamentably defective views of the real gravity of the trust which he has so solemnly undertaken. Nor will this estimate of the subject appear to be excessive or exaggerated, when we consider duly the divine order of the pulpit, the divinely prescribed place and power assigned to public preaching, the beautiful and essential fitness of this ordinance in the economy of grace, to accomplish that which God pleases, and to prosper in that whereto He has sent it, even to "turn the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just," to "make ready a people prepared for the Lord," "for the perfecting of

the saints, for the work of the ministry, and for the edifying of the body of Christ." Nor may we forget that the progress of corruption and apostasy in the Christian Church, history tells us (and history is prone to repeat itself from age to age), has always gone pari passu with the neglect or abuse of the proper functions of the pulpit. Witness the decadence and disasters of those middle ages, when the appeal to the heart through the Word, was superseded by the appeal to the senses by means of ecclesiastical pageantry; and when the clergy were content, for the most part, to be showmen, not teachers— performers in some great Passion Play, rather than persuaders of men, and preachers of the Gospel. Now if we are minded to make due and careful preparation for the discharge of our trust, if we desire to wield effectually this great spiritual weapon, it is essential for us to understand rightly, in the first place, the material we have to work on; and, in the next, the material we have to work with.

The material we have to work on is man-man, with that complex nature of his, so wonderfully made; the mind, with its noble faculties; the heart, with its deep. inner yearnings; the imagination, the conscience, the memory, the will, the whole moral being, wrecked and ruined, yet noble even in its ruins, and capable of great things when touched, and quickened into life and power, by the Spirit of God. The material we have to work with is simply God's revealed truth, ministered chiefly by the preaching of His Holy Word, and made operative in

the hearts and lives of men by the power of the Holy Ghost. And thus we have, in some sort, sketched in outline, in these two leading lines of thought, the necessary relation and mutual inter-dependence, in our pulpit preparation, of these its two principal factors-the Ethical and the Spiritual. Let us dwell briefly on each of these in the order proposed.

I. "The great business of the pulpit is to take man as it finds him, but not to leave him as he is." It is to take man with his passions and prejudices, his pride and his selfishness, his blind unreasoning devotion to this world, and his feeble aspirations, in the unrest of his soul after a better, and seek to accomplish by the grace of God, by the power of His truth and of His good Spirit, that the chaotic mass may be moulded into harmony, and that out of these marred and ruined materials of mind and heart, of intellect and affection, of soul and body, may be fashioned and edified a beautiful and glorious temple of the Holy Ghost, for this world and for the next. And with this exalted end in view, assuming this to be the great business of the pulpit, the purpose and aim of the preacher, to take this noble fortress (for conversion, let us remember, is heart-work), and having taken it, to garrison and hold it for the rightful King, he will wisely weigh and discreetly provide for that preparation which is needful to make his approaches successful and his victory sure. And it is precisely from this point of view that the importance of giving the Ethical element its rightful place in our pulpit preparation appears in its

true light, and calls for our prudent and prayerful sedulity. Whether you view it objectively or subjectively, -as something habitual, so to speak, become in a measure a very habit of one's daily life- or something occasional and special, cultured and exercised as occasion may require, to meet some particular need, to grapple with some special emergency; from whatever standpoint contemplated, the subject presents features of peculiar interest and significance. Suggestive and to the point, as bearing upon this portion of our subject, are the words of Lord Bacon: "If you would work any man, you must either know his nature and fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him; or his weakness and disadvantage, and so awe him; or those that have interest in him, and so govern him." And accordingly, if we would persuade men, we must study and comprehend man; if we would recover him and win him for God, we must find the key to his heart, assured that we shall find it there, where another has found the key to our own-convinced of this, that in proportion as our own hearts are possessed by the doctrines which we teach,-in proportion, that is, to the extent to which, in the history of my own inner life, those truths have passed out of the region of speculation into that of experience, have become to me things and not thoughts, realities not theories,—in the same degree shall I succeed in leading troubled hearts into rest (the rest of God)—in guiding men's feet into the way of peace, and in making clear and authentic the voice which speaks from Revela