“[The truth is, you like applause: you care more for that than for doing good, and so you invite people to come and hear you.]
“But does a philosopher invite people to come and hear him? Is it not that as the sun, or as food, is its own sufficient attraction, so the philosopher also is his own sufficient attraction to those who are to be benefited by him? Does a physician invite people to come and let him heal them?... (Imagine what a genuine philosopher’s invitation would be)—‘I invite you to come and be told that you are in a bad way—that you care for everything except what you should care for—that you do not know what things are good and what evil—and that you are unhappy and unfortunate.’ A nice invitation! and yet if that is not the result of what a philosopher says, he and his words alike are dead. (Musonius) Rufus used to say, ‘If you have leisure to praise me, my teaching has been in vain.’ Accordingly he used to talk in such a way that each individual one of us who sat there thought that some one had been telling Rufus about him: he so put his finger upon what we had done, he so set the individual faults of each one of us clearly before our eyes.
“The philosopher’s lecture-room, gentlemen, is a surgery: when you go away you ought to have felt not pleasure but pain. For when you come in, something is wrong with you: one man has put his shoulder out, another has an abscess, another a headache. Am I—the surgeon—then, to sit down and give you a string of fine sentences, that you may praise me—and then go away—the man with the dislocated arm, the man with the abscess, the man with the headache—just as you came? Is it for this that young men come away from home, and leave their parents and their kinsmen and their property, to say ‘Bravo!’ to you for your fine moral conclusions? Is this what Socrates did—or Zeno—or Cleanthes?
“Well, but is there no such class of speeches as exhortations?
“Who denies it? But in what do exhortations consist? In being able to show, whether to one man or to many men, the contradiction in which they are involved, and that their thoughts are given to anything but what they really mean. For they mean to give them to the things that really tend to happiness, but they look for those things elsewhere than where they really are. (That is the true aim of exhortation): but to show this, is it necessary to place a thousand chairs, and invite people to come and listen, and dress yourself up in a fine gown, and ascend the pulpit—and describe the death of Achilles? Cease, I implore you, from bringing dishonour, as far as you can, upon noble words and deeds. There can be no stronger exhortation to duty, I suppose, than for a speaker to make it clear to his audience that he wants to get something out of them! Tell me who, after hearing you lecture or discourse, became anxious about or reflected upon himself? or who, as he went out of the room, said, ‘The philosopher put his finger upon my faults: I must not behave in that way again’?
“You cannot: the utmost praise you get is when a man says to another, ‘That was a beautiful passage about Xerxes,’ and the other says, ‘No, I liked best that about the battle of Thermopylæ.’
“This is a philosopher’s sermon!”[193]
I have dwelt on this feature of the Greek life of the early Christian centuries, not with the view of giving a complete picture of it, which would be impossible within the compass of a lecture, but rather with the view of establishing a presumption, which you will find amply justified by further researches, that it was sufficient, not only in its quality and complexity, but also in its mass, to account for certain features of early Christianity.
In passing from Greek life to Christianity, I will ask you, in the first instance, to note the broad distinction which exists between what in the primitive churches was known as “prophesying,” and that which in subsequent times came to be known as “preaching.” I lay the more stress upon the distinction for the accidental reason that, in the first reaction against the idea that “prophecy” necessarily meant “prediction,” it was maintained—and with a certain reservation the contention was true—that a “prophet” meant a “preacher.” The reservation is, that the prophet was not merely a preacher but a spontaneous preacher. He preached because he could not help it, because there was a divine breath breathing within him which must needs find an utterance. It is in this sense that the prophets of the early churches were preachers. They were not church officers appointed to discharge certain functions. They were the possessors of a charisma, a divine gift which was not official but personal. “No prophecy ever came by the will of man; but men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Ghost.” They did not practise beforehand how or what they should say; for “the Holy Ghost taught them in that very hour what they should say.” Their language was often, from the point of view of the rhetorical schools, a barbarous patois. They were ignorant of the rules both of style and of dialectic. They paid no heed to refinements of expression. The greatest preacher of them all claimed to have come among his converts, in a city in which Rhetoric flourished, not with the persuasiveness of human logic, but with the demonstration which was afforded by spiritual power.
Of that “prophesying” of the primitive churches it is not certain that we possess any monument. The Second Epistle of Peter and the Epistle of Jude are perhaps representatives of it among the canonical books of the New Testament. The work known as the Second Epistle of Clement is perhaps a representative of the form which it took in the middle of the second century; but though it is inspired by a genuine enthusiasm, it is rather more artistic in its form than a purely prophetic utterance is likely to have been.