"And there"s a nice youngster of excellent pith-- Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith; But he shouted a song for the brave and the free-- Just read on his medal--"My Country--of Thee""
The song he thus shouted was written for the Fourth of July celebration, in Park Street Church, Boston, in 1832, and has become our national hymn. When I met the genial old man in Sweden, and travelled with him for several days, he was on his way home from a missionary tour in India and Burmah. He told me that he had heard the Burmese and Telugus sing in their native tongue his grand missionary hymn, "The Morning Light is Breaking." He was a native Bostonian, and was born a few days before Ray Palmer. He was a Baptist pastor, editor, college professor, and spent the tranquil summer evening of his life at Newton, Ma.s.s.; and at a railway station in Boston, by sudden heart failure, he was translated to his heavenly home. He ill.u.s.trated his own sweet evening hymn, "Softly Fades the Twilight Ray."
Among the elect-ladies who have produced great uplifting hymns that "were not born to die" was Mrs. Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, the daughter of the saintly Dr. Edward Payson, of Portland, Maine. Her prose works were very popular, and "Stepping Heavenward" had found its way into thousands of hearts. But one day she--in a few hours--won her immortality by writing a hymn, beginning with the lines,
"More love to Thee, O Christ, More love to Thee"
It was printed on a fly-sheet, for a few friends, then found its way into a hymn-book, edited by my well-beloved friend, Dr. Edwin F.
Hatfield, and then it took wing and flew over the world into many foreign languages. I often met Mrs. Prentiss at the home of her husband, Dr. George L. Prentiss, an eminent professor in the Union Theological Seminary. She was a very bright-eyed little woman, with a keen sense of humor, who cared more to shine in her own happy household than in a wide circle of society. Her absolutely perfect hymn--for such it truly is--was born of her own deep longings for a fuller inflow of that love that casteth out all fear. This has been the genesis of all the soul-songs that devout disciples of our Lord chant into the ears of their Master in their hours of sweetest and closest fellowship. Mrs.
Prentiss has put a new song into the mouths of a mult.i.tude of those who are "stepping heavenward."
CHAPTER V
THE TEMPERANCE REFORM AND MY CO-WORKERS
As stated in the first chapter of this book, I became a teetotaler when I was a child, and I also stated that the first public address I ever delivered was in behalf of temperance. When I made my first visit to Edinburgh in 1842 I learned that a temperance society of that city was about to go over to Glasgow to greet the celebrated Father Theobald Mathew, who was making his first visit to Scotland. I joined my Edinburgh friends, and on arriving in Glasgow we found a mult.i.tude of over fifty thousand people a.s.sembled on the green. In an open barouche, drawn by four horses, stood a short, stout Irishman, with a handsome, benevolent countenance, and attired in a long black coat with a silver medal hanging upon his breast. After the procession, headed by his carriage, had forced its way through the densely thronged street, it halted in a small open square. Father Mathew dismounted, and began to administer the pledge of abstinence to those who were willing to receive it. They kneeled on the ground in platoons; the pledge was read aloud to them; Father Mathew laid his hands upon them and p.r.o.nounced a benediction. From the necks of many a small medal attached to a cord was suspended. In this rapid manner the pledge was administered to many hundreds of persons within an hour, and fresh crowds continually came forward.
When I was introduced to the good man as an American, he spoke a few kind words and gave me an "apostolic kiss" upon my cheek. As I was about to make the first public speech of my life, I suppose that I may regard that act of the great Irish apostle as a sort of ordination to the ministry of preaching the Gospel of total abstinence. The administration of the pledge was followed by a grand meeting of welcome in the city hall. Father Mathew spoke with modest simplicity and deep emotion, attributing all his wonderful success to the direct blessings of G.o.d upon his efforts to persuade his fellow-men to throw off the despotism of the bottle. After delivering my maiden speech I hastened back to Edinburgh with the deputation from "Auld Reekie," and I never saw Father Mathew again. He was, unquestionably, the most remarkable temperance reformer who has yet appeared. While a Catholic priest in Cork, a Quaker friend, Mr. Martin, who met him in an almshouse, said to him, "Father Theobald, why not give thyself to the work of saving men from the drink?" Father Mathew immediately commenced his enterprise. It spread over Ireland like wildfire. It is computed that no less than five millions of people took the pledge of total abstinence from intoxicating poisons by his influence. The revolution wrought in his day, in his own time and country, was marvellous, and, to this day, his influence is perpetuated in the vast number of Father Mathew Benevolent Temperance Societies.
[Ill.u.s.tration: DR CUYLER AT 32 (When Pastor of the Market St Church, New York)]
Second only to Father Mathew in the number of converts which he has made to total abstinence was that brilliant and dramatic platform orator, John B. Gough. When he was a reckless young sot in Worcester, Ma.s.sachusetts, he had owed his conversion to a touch on his shoulder by a shoemaker, named Joel Stratton, who had invited him to a Washingtonian temperance meeting. Soon after that time he owed his conversion, under G.o.d, to the influence of Miss Mary Whitcomb, the daughter of a Boylston farmer in the neighborhood. He formed her acquaintance very soon after he signed the temperance pledge in Worcester, and she consented to a.s.sume the risk of becoming his wife. In the summer of 1856 I visited my beloved friend Gough at his beautiful Boylston home to aid him in revival services, which he was conducting in his own church, then without a pastor. He was Sunday-school superintendent, pastor and leader of inquiry meetings--all in himself. One evening he took me to the house of his neighbor, Captain Flagg, and said to me: "Here, in this house, Mary and I did our brief two or three weeks of courting. We didn"t talk of love, but only religion and about the welfare of my soul.
We prayed together every time we met; and it was such serious business that I do not think I even kissed her until we were married. She took me on trust, with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to me the best wife G.o.d ever made." When they went to Boston, Dr. Edward N. Kirk received Mr. Gough into the Mt. Vernon Street Church, just as many years afterwards he received Mr. Moody to the same communion table.
Of Mr. Gough"s extraordinary platform powers I need not speak while there are so many now living that sat under the enchantment of his eloquence. A man who could crowd an opera house in London to listen to so unpopular a theme as temperance while a score or more of coroneted carriages were waiting about the door must have been no ordinary master of oratory. As an actor he might have been a second Garrick; as a preacher of the Gospel he would have been a second Whitefield. My house was his home when visiting our city for many years, and he used to tell me that my letters to him were carried in his breast pocket until they were worn to fragments. His last speech, delivered in Philadelphia, displayed much of his early power, and the last sentence, "Young man, keep a clean record," rung out as he fell stricken with apoplexy, and the eloquent voice was silent forever. G.o.d"s messenger met him where every true warrior may well desire to be met--in the heat of the battle, and with the harness on.
My acquaintance with Neal Dow began in the early winter of 1852. He had been chosen Mayor of Portland in the spring of the year, and then he struck the bold stroke which was "heard round the world" and made him famous as the father of Prohibition. He had drafted a bill for the suppression of tippling houses and placed in it a claim of the right of the civil authorities to search all premises where it was suspected that intoxicating liquors were kept for sale, and to seize and confiscate them on the spot. It was this sharp scimitar of search and seizure which gave the original Maine law its deadly power. He took his bill to the seat of government and it was promptly pa.s.sed by the legislature. He brought it home in triumph, and in less than three months there was not an open dram shop or distillery in Portland! He invited me to visit him, and drove me over the city, whose pure air was not polluted with the faintest smell of alcohol. It seemed like the first whiff of a temperance millennium. An invitation was extended to him to a magnificent public meeting in Tripler Hall, New York. At that meeting a large array of distinguished speakers, including General Houston, of Texas; the Hon. Horace Mann, of Ma.s.sachusetts; Henry Ward Beecher, Dr.
Chapin and several other celebrities, appeared. On that evening I delivered my first public address in New York, and have been told that it was the occasion of my call to be a pastor in that city two years afterwards. A gold medal was presented to Neal Dow that evening. He went home with me to Trenton, and from that time our intimacy was so great and our correspondence so constant that if I had preserved all his letters they would make a history of the prohibition movement from 1851 to 1857, the years of its widest successes. With him I addressed the legislature of New York, who pa.s.sed a law of prohibition very soon afterwards. A forceful, magnetic man was General Dow, thoroughly honest and courageous, with a womanly tenderness in his sympathies. I have been permitted to know intimately many of the leaders in great moral reforms on both sides of the ocean; but a braver, sounder heart was not to be found than that which throbbed in the breast of Neal Dow.
On his ninetieth birthday the hale veteran sent my wife his photograph.
She placed his white locks alongside of the photograph which Gladstone gave her, and she calls them her duet of grand old men. The closing years of General Dow"s life, like the closing years of Martin Luther, were clouded with anxiety. He saw the great movement which he had championed checked by many difficulties and suffering some disastrous reverses. Some States which had enacted total prohibition forty years before had repealed the law. In the five States which retained it on their statute books its salutary enforcement was dependent on the moral sentiments in the various localities. In his own, beloved Maine, his own beloved law had been trampled down in some places; in others made the football of designing politicians. These reverses saddened the old hero"s heart, and he sent to the public meeting in Portland which celebrated his ninety-third birthday this message: "That the purpose of my life work will be fully accomplished at some time I do not doubt, and my hope and expectation is that the obstacles which now obstruct us will not long block the way." The name of Neal Dow will be always memorable as one of the truest, bravest and purest philanthropists of the nineteenth century.
The most important organization for the promotion of temperance in our country is the National Temperance Society and Publication House, which was founded in 1865. I prepared its const.i.tution, and the committee which organized it met in the counting room of that eminent Christian merchant, the late Hon. William E. Dodge. I once introduced him to the Earl of Shaftesbury at a Lord Mayor"s reception in London in these words: "My lord, let me introduce you to William E. Dodge, the Shaftesbury of America." To this day he is remembered as an ideal Christian merchant and philanthropist. With him conscience ruled everything, and G.o.d ruled conscience. He was one of the founders of a great railway and cut the first sod for its construction. Long afterwards the Board of Directors of the road proposed to drive their trains and traffic through the Lord"s day. Mr. Dodge said to his fellow directors: "Then, gentlemen, put a flag on every locomotive with these words inscribed on it, "We break G.o.d"s law for a dividend." As for me, I go out." He did go out, and disposed of his stock. Within a few years the road went into the hands of a receiver, and the stock sank to thirty cents on the dollar.
During the Civil War, General Dix and his military staff gave Mr. Dodge a complimentary dinner at Fortress Monroe. General Dix rapped on the table and said to his brother officers: "Gentlemen, you are aware that our honored guest is a water-drinker. I propose that to-day we join him in his favorite beverage." Forthwith every wine-gla.s.s was turned upside down as a silent tribute to the Christian conscience of their guest.
When the whole Christian community of America shall imitate the wise example of that great philanthropist it will exert a tremendous influence for the banishment of all intoxicants from the public and private hospitalities of society. Mr. Dodge was elected the first president of the National Temperance Society, and served it for eighteen years and bestowed upon it his liberal donations. He closed his useful and beneficent life in February, 1883, and he was succeeded in the presidency of the Society by Dr. Mark Hopkins of Williams College, by the writer of this book, by General O.O. Howard and by Joshua L. Bailey, who is at present the head of the organization. The society has done a vast and benevolent work, receiving and expending a million and a half dollars, publishing many hundreds of valuable volumes, and widely circulated tracts.
The limits of this chapter will not allow me to pay my tribute to the venerable Dr. Charles Jewett, Dr. Cheever, Albert Barnes, Dr. Tyng and the great Christian statesman, Theodore Frelinghuysen, Miss Frances Willard, Lady Henry Somerset, Joseph Cook and many others who have been prominent in the promotion of this great Christian reform. It has been my privilege to labor for it through my whole public life. I have prepared thirty or forty tracts, written a great number of articles and delivered hundreds of addresses in behalf of it, and preached many a discourse from my own pulpit. I have always held that every church is as much bound to have a temperance wheel in its machinery as to have a Sabbath school or a missionary organization. It is of vital importance that the young should be saved, and therefore I have urged temperance lessons in the Sunday school and the early adoption of a total abstinence pledge. The temperance reform movement made its greatest progress when churches and Sunday schools laid hold of it and when the total abstinence pledge was widely and wisely used. The social drink customs are coming back again and a fresh education of the American people as to the deadly drink evil is the necessity of the hour, and that must be given in the home, in the schools and from the pulpit and from the public press. I have become convinced from long labor in this reform that the ordinary license system is only a poultice to the dram seller"s conscience, and for restraining intemperance it is a ghastly failure. Inst.i.tutions and patent medicines to cure drinkers have only had a partial success. The only sure cure for drunkenness is to stop before you begin. Entire legal suppression of the dram shop is successful where a stiff, righteous, public sentiment thoroughly enforces it. Otherwise it may become a delusion and a farce.
The best method of prohibition is what is known as "local option,"
where the question is submitted to each community, whether the liquor traffic shall be legalized or suppressed by public authority. Of late years friends of our cause have fallen into the sad mistake of directing their main a.s.saults upon liquor selling instead of keeping up also their fire upon the _use_ of intoxicants. Legal enactments are right; but to attempt to dam up a torrent and neglect the fountain-head is surely insanity. The fountain-head of drunkenness is the _drinking usages_ which create and sustain the saloons, which are often the doorways to h.e.l.l. In theory I always have been, and am to-day, a legal suppressionist; but the most vital remedy of all is to break up the demand for intoxicants, and to persuade people from wishing to buy and drink them. That goes to the root of the evil. In endeavoring to remove the saloon, it is the duty of all philanthropists to do their utmost to provide safe places of resort--as the Holly-Tree Inns and other temperance coffee houses--for the working people. And another beneficent plan is for corporations and employers to make abstinence from drink an essential to employment. My generous friend, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, when he recently gave a liberal donation to our National Temperance Society, said to me: "The best temperance lecture I have delivered was when I agreed to pay ten per cent premium to all the employees on my Scottish estates who would practice entire abstinence from intoxicants." The experience of three-score years has taught me the inestimable value of total abstinence; the benefit of the righteous law when it is well enforced, and also that the church of Christ has no more right to ignore the drink evil than it has to ignore theft, or Sabbath desecration, or murder. Let me add also my grateful acknowledgment of the very effective and Heaven-blessed work wrought by that n.o.ble organization, the Woman"s Christian Temperance Union. As woman has been the sorest sufferer from the drink-curse, it is her province and her duty to do her utmost for its removal.
CHAPTER VI
MY WORK IN THE PULPIT
During the first eighteen months after I graduated from Princeton College I was balancing between the law and the ministry. Many of my relatives urged me to become a lawyer, as my father and grandfather had been, but my G.o.dly mother had dedicated me to the ministry from infancy, and her influence all went in the same line with her prayers. With the exception of my venerated and beloved kinsman, Dr. Cornelius C. Cuyler, Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, who died in 1850, no other man of my name has stood in an American pulpit. During the winter of my return from Europe to my home on the Cayuga Lake, one of my uncles invited me to go down and attend an afternoon prayer service in the neighboring village of Ludlowville. There was a spiritual awakening in the church, and the meeting was held in the parlor of a private house. I arose and spoke for ten minutes. When the meeting was over, more than one came to me and said: "Your talk did me good." On my way home, as I drove along in my sleigh, the thought flashed into my mind, "If ten minutes" talk to-day helped a few souls, why not preach all the time?" That one thought decided the vexed question on the spot.
Our lives turn on small pivots, and if we let G.o.d lead us, the path will open before our footsteps. I reached home that day, and informed my good mother of my decision. She had always expected it and quietly remarked, "Then, I have already spoken to Mr. Ford for his room for you in the Princeton Seminary." My three years in the Seminary were full of joy and profit. I made it a rule to go out as often as possible and address little meetings in the neighboring school-houses, and found this a very beneficial method of gaining practice. A young preacher must get accustomed to the sound of his own voice; if naturally timid, he must learn to face an audience and must first learn to speak; afterwards he may learn to speak well. It is a wise thing for a young man to begin his labors in a small congregation; he has more time for study, a better chance to become intimately acquainted with individual characters, and also a smaller audience to face. The first congregation that I was called to take charge of, in Burlington, N.J. contained about forty families. Three or four of these were wealthy and cultivated, the rest were plain mechanics, with a few gardeners and coachmen. I made my sermons to suit the comprehension of the gardeners and coachmen at the end of the house, leaving the cultivated portion to gain what they could from the sermon on its way. One of the wealthy attendants was Mr.
Charles Chauncey, a distinguished Philadelphia lawyer, who spent the summer months in Burlington. Once after I had delivered a very simple and earnest sermon on the "Worth of the Soul," I went home and said to myself, "Lawyer Chauncey must have thought that was only a camp-meeting exhortation." He met me during the week and to my astonishment he said to me: "My young friend, I thank you for that sermon last Sunday; it had the two best qualities of preaching--simplicity and down-right earnestness. If I had a student in my law-office who was not more in earnest to win his first ten dollar suit before a Justice of the Peace than some men seem to be in trying to save souls I would kick such a student out of my office." That eminent lawyer"s remark did me more service than any month"s study in the Seminary. It taught me that cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides a mult.i.tude of sins in raw young preachers.
Another instance that occurred in my early ministry did me a world of good. I was invited to preach in the Presbyterian Church at Saratoga Springs about two years after I was licensed. My topics were "Trusting Jesus Christ" in the morning and "The Day of Judgment" at the evening service. The next day, when I was buying my ticket at the railway station to leave the town, a plain man (who was a baker in the village) said to me: "Are you not the young man who spoke yesterday in our meeting-house?" I told him that I was. "Well," said he, "I never felt more sorry for any one in my life." "Why so?" I asked. His answer was: "I said to myself, there is a youth just out of the Seminary, and he does not know that a Saratoga audience is made up of highly educated people from all parts of the land; but I have noticed that if a minister, during his first ten minutes, can convince the people that he is only trying to save their souls he _kills all the critics in the house_." I have never ceased to thank G.o.d for the remark of that shrewd Saratoga baker, who, I was told, had come there from New Haven, Connecticut, and was a man of remarkable sagacity. That was one of the profoundest bits of sound philosophy on the art of preaching that I have ever encountered, and I have quoted it in every Theological Seminary that I have ever addressed. If we ministers pour the living truths of the Gospel red-hot into the ears and consciences of our audiences, they will have enough to do to look out for themselves and will have no time to level criticisms at us or our mode of preaching. Cowards, also, are never more pitiable than when in the pulpit.
I will not enter here into the endless controversy about the comparative merits of written or extemporized sermons. My own observation and experience has been that no rule is the best rule. Every man must find out by practice which method he can use to the best advantage and then pursue it. No man ever fails who understands his forte, and no man succeeds who does not. Some men cannot extemporize effectively if they try ever so hard; there are others who, like Gladstone, can think best when they are on their legs and are inspired by an audience. During the first few years of my ministry I wrote out nearly all of my sermons. The advantage of doing that is that it enables a young beginner to form his own style at the outset by careful and systematic writing. Spurgeon, often when a youth, read some of his sermons, although afterwards he never premeditated a single sentence for the pulpit. Dr. Richard S.
Storrs was a most fluent extemporaneous speaker, but for twenty years he carefully wrote all his discourses. My own habit, after a time, was to write a portion of the sermon and turn away from my notes to interject thoughts that came in the heat of the moment and then turn to my ma.n.u.script. This was generally the habit of Henry Ward Beecher. After thirty years in the ministry I discarded writing sermons entirely and adopted the plan of preparing a few "heads" on a bit of note-paper, and tacking it into a Bagster"s Bible. Dr. John Hall wrote carefully, leaving his ma.n.u.script at home; and so does Dr. Alexander McLaren, of Manchester, who is to-day by far the most superb sermonizer in Great Britain. The eloquent Guthrie, of Scotland, committed his discourses to memory, and delivered them in a torrent of G.o.dly emotion.
In preparing my sermons my custom was, after taking some rest on Monday, to get into my study early on Tuesday morning. To every student the best hours of the day are those before the sun has reached the meridian. Then the mind is the most clear and vigorous. I have never in my life prepared sermons a dozen times after my supper. Severe mental work in the evening is apt to destroy sound sleep; thousands of brain workers are wrecked by insomnia. To secure freedom from needless interruption I pinned on my study door "_Very Busy_." This had the wholesome effect of shutting out all time-killers, and of shortening necessary calls of those who had some important errand. Instead of leaving the selection of my topic to the risk of any contingency, I usually chose my text on Tuesday morning, and laid the keel of the sermon. I kept a large note-book in which I could enter any pa.s.sage of Scripture that would furnish a good theme for pulpit consumption. I also found it a good practice to jot down thoughts that occurred to me on any important topic that I could use when I came to prepare my sermons. By this method I had a treasury of texts from which I could draw every week. Let my readers be careful to notice that word "Text." I have known men to prepare an elaborate essay, theological, ethical or sociological, and then to perch a text from the Bible on top of it.
"Preach my word" does not signify the clapping of a few syllables as a figure-head on a long treatise spun out of a preacher"s brain. The best discourses are not manufactured, they are a _growth_. G.o.d"s inspired and infallible Book must furnish the text. The connection between every good sermon and its text is just as vital as the connection between a peach-tree and its root. Sometimes an indolent minister tries to palm off an old sermon for a pretended new one by changing the text, but this shallow device ought to expose itself as if he should decapitate a dog and undertake to clap on the head of some other animal. Intelligent audiences see through such tricks and despise them. "Be sure your sin will find you out." When a pa.s.sage from the Holy Scripture has been planted as a root and well watered with prayer, the sermon should spring naturally from it. The central thought of the text being the central thought of the sermon and all argument, all instruction and exhortation are only the boughs branching off from the central trunk, giving unity, vigor and spiritual beauty to the whole organic production. The unity and spiritual power of a discourse usually depend upon the adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired Book. The Bible text is G.o.d"s part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers. To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary"s redeeming love. I laid hold of the great themes, and I found a half hour of earnest prayer was more helpful than two or three hours of study. It sometimes let a flash from the Throne flame over the page I was writing.
To me, when preparing my Sabbath messages, G.o.d"s Holy Word was the sum of all knowledge, and a "Thus saith the Lord" was my invariable guide. I found that in theology the true things were not new, and most of the new things were not true. I remember how a visitor in New Haven was looking for a certain house, and found himself in front of the residence of Professor Olmstead, the eminent astronomer, whose stoves were then very popular. The visitor inquired of an Irishman, who was working in front of the house, "Who lives here?" The very Hibernian answer was, "Shure, sur, "tis Profissor Olmstead, a very great man; he _invents_ comets, and has _discovered_ a new stove." In searching the Scriptures I used the very best spiritual telescopes in my possession, and gladly availed myself of all discoveries of divine truths made by profounder intellects and keener visions than my own; but I leave this self-styled "advanced age" to invent its own comets, and follow its own meteors.
In one respect I have not followed the practice of many of my brethren, for I never have wasted a single moment in defending G.o.d"s Word in my pulpit. I have always held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; G.o.d will take care of His Word if we ministers only take care to preach it.
We are no more called upon to defend the Bible than we are to defend the law of gravitation. My beloved friend, Dr. McLaren, of Manchester, has well said that if ministers, "instead of trying to _prop_ the Cross of Christ, would simply _point_ men to that Cross, more souls would be saved." The vast proportion of volumes of "Apologetics" are a waste of ink and paper. If they could all be kindled into a huge bonfire, they would shed more light than they ever did before. It is not our business to answer every sceptic who shies a stone at the solid fortress of truth in which G.o.d places His amba.s.sadors. If Tobiah and Sanballat are challenging us to come down into the plain, and meet them on their level, our answer must ever be: "I am G.o.d"s messenger, preaching G.o.d"s word and doing G.o.d"s work. I cannot stop to go down and prove that your swords are made of lath."
To my younger brethren I would say: "Preach the Word, preach it with all your soul, preach it in the strength of Jehovah"s Spirit, and He will give it the victory."
I found the effectiveness of my sermons increased by the use of every good ill.u.s.tration I could get hold of, but I tried to be careful that they ill.u.s.trated something. Where such are lugged into the sermon merely for the sake of ornament, they are as much out of place as a bouquet would be tied fast to a plough-handle. The Divine Teacher set us the example of making vital truths intelligible by ill.u.s.trations, when he spoke so often in parables, and sometimes recalled historical incidents.
All congregations relish incidents and stories, when they are "pat" to the purpose, and serious enough for G.o.d"s house, and help to drive the truth into the hearts of the audience During my early ministry I delivered a discourse to young men at Saratoga Springs, and closed it with a solemn story of a man who died of remorse at the exposure of his crime. The Hon. John McLean, a judge of the United States Supreme Court and a prominent man in the Methodist Church, was in the congregation, and the next day I called at the United States Hotel to pay my respects to him. He said to me, "My young friend I was very much interested in that story last evening; it clinched the sermon. Our ministers in Cincinnati used to introduce ill.u.s.trative anecdotes, but it seems to have gone out of fashion and I am sorry for it." I replied to him, "Well Judge, I am glad to have the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in favor of telling a story or a personal incident in the pulpit." There is one principle that covers all cases. It is this: Whatever makes the Gospel or Jesus Christ more clear to the understanding, more effective in arousing sinners, in converting souls, in edifying believers and in promoting pure honest living is never out of place in the pulpit. When we are preaching for souls we may use any and every weapon of truth within our reach.
Those who have sat before my pulpit will testify that I never spared my lungs or their ears in the delivery of my discourses. The preaching of the Gospel is spiritual gunnery, and many a well-loaded cartridge has failed to reach its mark from lack of powder to propel it. The prime duty of G.o.d"s amba.s.sador is to arouse the attention of souls before his pulpit; to stir those who are indifferent; to awaken those who are impenitent; to cheer the sorrow-stricken; to strengthen the weak, and edify believers An advocate in a criminal trial puts his grip on every juryman"s ear So must every herald of Gospel-truth demand and command a hearing, cost what it may: but that hearing he never will secure while he addresses an audience in a cold, formal, perfunctory manner.
Certainly the great apostle at Ephesus aimed at the emotions and the conscience as well as the reason of his hearers when he "ceased not to warn them night and day with tears." I cannot impress it too strongly on every young minister that the delivery of his sermon is half the battle.
Why load your gun at all if you cannot send your charge to the mark?
Many a discourse containing much valuable thought has fallen dead on drowsy ears when it might have produced great effect if the preacher had only had _inspiration_ and _perspiration_. A sermon that is but ordinary as a production may have an extraordinary effect by direct and fervid delivery. The minister who never warms himself will never warm up his congregation. I once asked Albert Barnes, of Philadelphia, "Who is the greatest preacher you have ever heard?" Mr. Barnes, who was a very clear-headed thinker, replied: "I cannot answer your question exactly, but the greatest specimen of preaching I ever heard was by the Rev.
Edward N. Kirk before my congregation during a revival; it produced a tremendous effect." Those of us that knew Kirk knew that he was not a man of genius or profound scholarship; but he was a true orator with a superb voice and a sweet persuasiveness, and his whole soul was on fire with the love of Jesus and the love of souls.
It is not easy to define what that subtle something is which we call pulpit magnetism. As near as I can come to a definition I would say it is the quality or faculty in the speaker that arouses the attention and strengthens the interest of his auditors and which, when aided by the Holy Spirit, produces conviction in their minds by the truth that is in Jesus. The heart in the speaker"s voice sends that voice into the hearts of his hearers. It is an undoubted fact that pulpit fervor has been a characteristic of almost all the preachers of a soul-winning Gospel. The fire was kindled in the pulpit that kindled the pews. The discourses of Frederick W. Robertson, of Brighton, were masterpieces of fresh thought, but the crowds were drawn to his church because they were delivered with a fiery glow. The king of living sermon-makers is Dr. McLaren, of Manchester. His vigorous thought is put into vigorous language and then vigorously spoken. He commits his grand sermons to memory, and then looks his audience in the eyes, and sends his strong voice to the furthest gallery. Last year after I had thanked him for his powerful "Address on Preaching" to a thousand ministers in London, he wrote to me: "It was an effort; for I could not trust myself to do without a ma.n.u.script, and I am so unaccustomed to reading what I have to say that it was like dancing a hornpipe in fetters," Yet ma.n.u.scripts are not always fetters; for Dr. Chalmers read every line of his sermons with thrilling and tremendous effect. So did Dr. Charles Wadsworth in Philadelphia, and so did Phillips Brooks in Boston. In my own experience I have as often found spiritual results from the discourses partly or mainly written out as from those spoken extemporaneously. While much may depend upon the conditions in the congregation and much aid may be drawn from the intercessory prayers of our people, the main thing is to have a baptism of fire in our own hearts. Sometimes a sermon may produce but little impression, yet the same sermon at another time and place may deeply move an audience, and yield rich spiritual results. Physical condition may have some influence on a minister"s delivery; but the chief element in the eloquence that awakens and converts sinners and strengthens Christians is the unction of the Holy Spirit. Our best power is the _power from on high_.
I would say to young ministers--look at your auditors as bound to the judgment seat and see the light of eternity flash into their faces. Then the more fervor of soul you put into your preaching the more souls you will win to your Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
As I look back over the last sixty years I think I discover some very marked changes in the methods of the American pulpit since the days of my youth. In the first place the average preacher in those days was more doctrinal than at the present time. The masters in Israel evidently held with Phillips Brooks that "no exhortation to a good life that does not put behind it some great truth, as deep as eternity, can seize and hold the conscience," Therefore they pushed to the front such deep and mighty themes as the Attributes of G.o.d, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Nature and Desert of Sin, the Atonement, Regeneration, Faith, Resurrection, and Judgment to come, with Heaven and h.e.l.l as tremendous realities. They emphasized the heinousness and the desert of sin as a great argument for repentance and acceptance of Jesus Christ. A lapse from that style of preaching is to be deplored; for as Gladstone truly remarked, the decline or decay of a sense of sin against G.o.d is one of the most serious symptoms of these times.
Charles G. Finney, who was at the zenith of his power sixty years ago, bombarded the consciences of sinners with a prodigious broadside of pulpit doctrine; and many acute lawyers and eminent merchants were converted under his discourses. No two finer examples of doctrinal preaching--once so prevalent--could be cited than Dr. Lyman Beecher and Dr. Horace Bushnell. The celebrated sermon by the former of these two giants on the "Moral Government of G.o.d" was characterized by Thomas H.
Skinner as the mightiest discourse he had ever heard. Henry Ward Beecher hardly exaggerated when he once said to me, "Put all of his children together and we do not equal my father at his best." Dr. Bushnell"s masterly discourses with all their exquisite poetry and insight into human hearts were largely bottomed and built on a theological basis. To those two great doctrinal preachers I might add the names of my beloved instructors, Dr. Archibald Alexander and Dr. Charles Hodge, of Princeton, Albert Barnes and Professor Park, Dr. Thornwell, Dr. Bethune, Dr. John Todd, Dr. G.T. Bedell, Bishop Simpson and President Stephen Olin.
Has the American pulpit grown in spiritual power since those days? Have the churches thriven whose pastors have become more invertebrate in their theology?
Another characteristic of the average preacher sixty years ago was that sermons were generally aimed at awakening the impenitent, and bringing them to Jesus Christ. The evil of sin was emphasized; the way of salvation explained; the claims of Christianity were presented; and people were urged to immediate decision. Nowadays a large portion of sermons are addressed to professing Christians; many others are addressed to n.o.body in particular, but there is less of faithful, fervid, loving and persuasive discourses to the unconverted. This is one of the reasons for the lamentable decrease in the number of conversions.
If ministers are set to be watchmen of souls, how shall they escape if they neglect the salvation of souls?
I think, too, that we cannot be mistaken in saying that there has been a decline in impa.s.sioned pulpit eloquence. There is a change in the fashions of preaching. Students are now taught to be calm and colloquial; to aim at producing epigrammatical essays; to discuss sociological problems and address the intellects of their auditors rather in the style of the lecture platform or college cla.s.s room. The great Dr. Chalmers "making the rafters roar" is as much a bygone tradition in many quarters as faith in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. I have often wished that the young Edward N. Kirk, who melted to tears the professors and students of Yale during the revival there, could come back to us and teach candidates for the ministry how to preach. There was no stentorian shouting or rhetorical exhortation; but there was an intense, solemn, white-heat earnestness that made his auditors feel not only that life was worth living, but that the soul was worth saving and Jesus Christ was worth serving, and Heaven was worth securing, and that for all these things "G.o.d will bring us into judgment." If Lyman Beecher and Dr. Edward Dorr Griffin and Finney did not possess all of Kirk"s grace of delivery, they possessed his fire, and they made the Gospel doctrines glow with a living heat that burned into the hearts and consciences of their auditors.