How a Popular Preacher’s Mind Worked.
How does a great preacher’s mind work? Insight into this mystery is gained from the letters of the Reverend Frederick Robertson, a popular preacher at Brighton, England.
He died before he was forty, of brain disease brought on by overwork, broken down by the nervous strain of preaching.
Robertson wasted his strength very often in small controversies, such as Sunday observance, and the unfortunate fact that he had no sense of humor often led him to take seriously and regret childishly, and answer bitterly, criticisms which were not worth thinking about and critics wholly unworthy of his steel.
Robertson himself knew that certain serious defects of character are almost inseparable from the preacher’s office.
“I wish I did not hate preaching so much,” he wrote one day; “the degradation of being a Brighton preacher is at times almost intolerable,” and, again he regrets that he has weakened his nervous system by “stump oratory.”
Preaching always excited him, and a sermon would leave him for days too much agitated to work. He doubted often if he ought not to give it up—for the sake of his spirit—though he would not attend to his doctor’s advice and give it up for the sake of his body.
Blameless as was his life, and fruitful as were his exhortations, he could not escape the minor dangers which the pulpit shares with the stage. He grew sensitive and self-centered, he came to need the stimulus of a crowd moved to emotion.
Close as were his intimacies and wide as were his benevolences, the circle of his affections was latterly narrow, indeed. Yet he hated excitement as much as he craved it. He wrote:
“I am persuaded there are few things morally so bad as excitement of the nerves in any way; nothing—to borrow a military word and use it in a military sense—nothing demoralizes so much as excitement. It destroys the tone of the heart; leaves an exhaustion which craves stimulus, and utterly unfits for duty. High-wrought feeling must end in wickedness; a life of excitement is inseparable from a life of vice. The opera, the stage, the ballroom, French literature, and irregular life—what must they terminate in?”