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 godly 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 God 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 multitude 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 God 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 manuscript. 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 manuscript 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 Godly 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 passage 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. God'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 passage 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 God'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, God'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 God's Word in my pulpit. I have always held that the Bible is a self-evidencing book; God 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 God places His ambassadors. 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 God's messenger, preaching God's word and doing God'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 illustration I could get hold of, but I tried to be careful that they illustrated 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 illustrations, 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 God'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 illustrative 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 God's ambassador 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 manuscript, and I am so unaccustomed to reading what I have to say that it was like dancing a hornpipe in fetters," Yet manuscripts 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 God, the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Nature and Desert of Sin, the Atonement, Regeneration, Faith, Resurrection, and Judgment to come, with Heaven and Hell 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 God 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 God" 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 nobody 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 impassioned 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 class 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 "God 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.
May God send into our churches not only a revival of pure and undefiled religion, but also a revival of old-fashioned soul-inspiring pulpit eloquence!
It is rather a delicate subject to touch upon, but I am happy to say that in my early ministry the preachers of God's Word were not hamstrung by any doubt of the divine inspiration or infallibility of the Book that lay before them on their pulpits. The questions, "Have we got any Bible?" and "If any Bible, how much?" had not been hatched. When I was in Princeton Seminary, our profoundly learned Hebrew Professor, Dr. J. Addison Alexander no more disturbed us with the much-vaunted conjectural Biblical criticisms than he disturbed us with Joe Smith's "golden plates" at Nauvoo. For this fact I feel deeply thankful; and I comfort myself with the reflection that the great British preachers of the last dozen years--Dr. McLaren, Charles H. Spurgeon, Newman Hall, Canon Liddon, Dr. Dale and Dr. Joseph Parker--have suffered no more from the virulent attacks of the radical and revolutionary higher criticism than I have, during my long and happy ministry.
Ministers had some advantages sixty or seventy years ago over their successors of our day. They had a more uninterrupted opportunity for the preparation of their sermons and for thorough personal visitation of their flocks. They were not importuned so often to serve on committees and to be participants in all sorts of social schemes of charity. Every pastor ought to keep abreast of reformatory movements as long as they do not trench upon the vital and imperative duties of his high calling. "This one thing I do," said single-hearted Paul; and if Paul were a pastor now in New York or Boston or Chicago, he would make short work of many an intrusive rap of a time-killer at his study door.
I have noted frankly a few of the changes that I have observed in the methods of our American pulpit during my long life, but not, I trust, in a pessimistic or censorious spirit God forbid that I should disparage the noble, conscientious, self-denying and Heaven-blessed labors of thousands of Christ's ministers in our broad land! They have greater difficulties to encounter than I had when I began my work. They are surrounded with an atmosphere of intense materialism. The ambition for the "seen things" increasingly blinds men to the "things that are unseen and eternal." Wealth and worldliness unspiritualize thousands of professed Christians. The present artificial arrangements of society antagonize devotional meetings and special efforts to promote revivals. On Sabbath mornings many a minister has to shovel out scores of his congregation from under the drifts (not very clean snow either) of the mammoth Sunday newspapers.
The zealous pastor of to-day has to contend with the lowered popular faith in the authority of God's Word; with the lowered reverence for God's day and a diminished habit of attending upon God's worship. Do these increased difficulties demand a new Gospel? No; but rather a mightier faith in the one we have. Do they demand new doctrines? No; but more power in preaching the truths that have outlived nineteen centuries. Do we need a new revelation of Jesus Christ? Yes, yes, in the fuller manifestation of Him; in the more loving, courageous and consecrated lives of His followers. Do we need a new Baptism of the Holy Spirit? Verily we do need it; and then our pulpits will be clothed with power, and our preachers will have tongues of fire, and every change will be a change for the better advancement and enlargement of the Kingdom of our adorable Lord.