To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work

by H. C. G. Moule

But if all this is true of the desk and of the blessed Table, it is true also, and in a high degree, of the pulpit. Singularly independent, up to a certain point, is the position of the preacher. He chooses his own text; he assigns himself (at least in theory) his own length of discourse; he is entitled, under the ægis of the law of the land, to speak on to the end without interruption; he is bound, within the limits of a sanctified common-sense, to speak with the authority of his commission. Here are powerful temptations to an inconsiderate man, perhaps especially to an inconsiderate young man, to show much inconsideration. And therefore, here is a pre-eminent occasion for the true Pastor, who thinks, prays, loves, and is humble, to practise the beautiful opposite. Shall you and I seek grace to do so?

RESPECT ELDER HEARERS.

Put yourself often, my dear Brother, while I do the same, into the position—which we once occupied always, and often do still—of the hearer. You, the Curate, or the young Incumbent, have recently come into the parish, and you are full of a young man's energy and enterprize, and a little infected perhaps with a common and natural belief of your time of life, but a belief not quite true to facts, that the world is made for young men. And among your hearers, week by week, as you preach from that pulpit, sit men and women who were working, and thinking, and perhaps believing, literally long before you were born. Put yourself in their place. Into many of their experiences, and their sympathies born of experience, you cannot possibly enter personally. You cannot feel personally how this or that innovation of language or manner, this or that too crude statement of your message, this or that baldly new and perhaps by no means true theory, aired as if it were all obvious and of course, must look and sound to them. You cannot feel it all; but you can think about it. Perhaps these are educated and refined people, and accustomed all their lives to value clear thought and pure diction, in any case accustomed to carefulness in the matter and manner of the sermon. You cannot enter into all their mental habits in your own mental workings; but you can take account of them, and in a loyal and thoughtful considerateness you can remember them in practice, and honestly aim so to prepare and to preach as to conciliate the thoughtful and the elders.

Such considerateness will not mean the stifling of prayerful conviction, or the failure to be faithful as the messenger of the Lord. But it will mean a severity upon yourself as regards the tone and spirit of your thoughts, and also as the manner of your utterance. You will take pains, even at a heavy cost to self (and such costs are always gains in the end), so to minister as to attract the attention of the flock, not to yourself, but to your blessed Master and His Word; preaching "not yourself, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and yourself their servant for Jesus' sake." [2 Cor. iv. 5.]

With this aim of Attractiveness, then, in our minds, and with this motive of Considerateness beside it, let us come to some thoughts in detail about the matter of preaching.

And here first I must bring in another word to meet the word "attractive." That word is "faithful."

WRONG KINDS OF ATTRACTIVENESS.

As a matter of most obvious fact (we noticed it in the previous chapter), there is a false and useless attractiveness, as well as a true. There is the poor and miserable attractiveness—it draws a certain class of modern hearers—of mere brevity; the "ten-minute sermon." There are no doubt exceptional occasions when ten minutes, or even five, may be the right limit to our utterance; but there is something wrong with both sermon and audience if in the regular ministration of God's holy Word the preacher must at once begin to stop. There is again the specious and spurious attractiveness of excitement and froth of manner, or of a merely emotional appeal to perhaps not the deepest emotions, an attraction which has little in it of that divine magnet which draws the will and lifts the soul in regenerate faith and surrender. There is the attraction, tempting, but futile for the true purposes of the pulpit, of the sermon which is after all only a lecture, or a leading article; full of the topics of the day, of the hour; full perhaps of some celebrated name just immortalized by death[32]; but not full of the eternal message for which the pulpit exists. Most certainly there is no divine rule which excludes from the sermon all allusions to politics, to society, to science, to great men; but there is a divine rule, running through the whole precept and example of the New Testament, which keeps such things always subordinate to the supreme work of preaching Jesus Christ.

[32] "I went longing to hear about Christ, and it was only Newman from beginning to end." This was the actual lament of an anxious soul, one Sunday in 1890.

FAITHFULNESS.