THE PREACHER AS A THINKER.
Gentlemen, in the foregoing lectures I have adverted very little to the studies, in preparation for the work of the ministry, with which you are at present occupied. Indeed, I have rather ostentatiously kept to a standpoint at some distance from the academic one, for reasons which I explained in the opening lecture. But the clue which I have endeavoured faithfully to follow has brought us at last to this point also; and I welcome the opportunity of saying something about the more intellectual aspects of our work. The subject to-day is the Preacher as a Thinker.
In my last lecture I spoke of the vast sphere of operations assigned to St. Paul and of the almost superhuman exertions which he made to fill it. But what did he exert himself to fill it with? It was not merely to overtake the ground and be himself present in so many countries and cities that he was so zealous. That which drove him on was the glorious message of which he was the bearer, with the sound of which he desired to fill the world. He often combines these two ideas in his writings—that the Gentile world had been committed to him as a trust, to care for the souls which it contained, and that the Gospel had been committed to him as a trust, to be communicated to the Gentiles. These two things were included in his apostolate—on the one hand, the care of the heathen world, and, on the other, the publication of the Gospel.
Of course he had not, like the original apostles, heard the Gospel from the lips of Christ; but he had received it directly from Christ in some other way; and you know how vigorously he claimed that he had not received it from man and was not indebted to the other apostles for it. He frequently calls it his own gospel, and he maintains it to be as authentic and authoritative as that preached by any of the other apostles. How it was revealed to him we cannot tell. This is the same mystery as we encountered in studying the prophets of the Old Testament. Both prophets and apostles speak with a knowledge of the mind and will of God which has a certainty and authority peculiar to their writings. We ought to speak, if we speak at all, with certainty and authority too; but there is a difference between ours and theirs. I know how difficult it is to define the difference; we cover it up with the vague word Inspiration; but I do not see any use in hiding from ourselves that it exists.
Admitting, however, that there is this mystery, yet we can see, in some respects, how the truth, when it came, dealt with St. Paul, and how his mind was exercised about it; and in these respects he is not beyond our imitation.
What I wish to emphasize in this lecture is, that Christianity did specially lay hold of him in the region of the intellect. It is meant to lay hold of all parts of the inner man—the feelings, the conscience, the will, the intellect; and it may lay hold of certain people more fully in one part of their being and of others in another according to their constitutional peculiarities. Some suppose—and perhaps they are not far wrong—that the first preaching of the Gospel consisted of little more than the simple story of the life and death of Jesus; that those who heard it sympathetically began forthwith to live new lives in imitation of Christ; and that this was the most of their Christianity. In a fine and peculiar nature like that of St. John, again, the Gospel caught hold chiefly in the region of the emotions; and his Christianity was a mystical union and fellowship between the Saviour and the soul. St. Paul was not by any means deficient in the other elements of humanity; but he was conspicuously strong in intellect. That is to say, he was one of those natures to which it is a necessity to know the why and the wherefore of everything—of the universe in which they live, of the experiences through which they pass, of the ends which they are called upon to pursue. This natural tendency was strengthened by the training of an educated man. And therefore the Gospel came to him as a message of truth, which cleared up the mysteries of existence and presented the universe to the mind as a realm of order.
St. Paul often expresses the intense intellectual satisfaction which Christianity brought him, and the joy he experienced in applying it to the solution of the problems of life. The light which Christianity cast on the universe was to him, he says, like the morning of creation, when God said, Let there be light, and there was light. Before, all was darkness and chaos, but then all became sunshine and order. He often speaks with wondering gratitude of the fact that the mystery which had been hidden from ages and from generations had been revealed to him: Eye had not seen, nor ear heard, neither had entered into the heart of man, the things which God had prepared for them that love Him, but God had revealed them unto him by His Spirit. And by this mystery he meant the tangle of God's providence in history, which the coming of Christ disentangled and smoothed out into a web whose pattern the mind could discern.
Having himself received Christianity as an intellectual system, he very specially addressed himself to the intellect of others. The door of the kingdom of heaven, it has been beautifully said, can only be opened from the inside; but to that observation this other may be added, that in a sense there are many doors, but each man can only open to others the one by which he has entered himself. Christianity had come to St. Paul as the truth about God and the world and himself. There was plenty of emotion besides; but the emotion for him came after the clear intellectual conviction and sprang out of it. And he expected that others would receive Christianity in the same way. Therefore he never spared the minds of those he addressed; he expected them to think; and he would have said that, if they would not open and exert their minds, they could not receive Christianity.
I hardly know anything more puzzling than the audacity with which he cast himself on the minds of his hearers and trusted them to understand him, when he was thinking his strongest and his deepest. Imagine an epistle of his arriving in Rome or Ephesus, and read out in the audience of the church for the first time. Who were the hearers? The majority of them were slaves; many had till a short time before been unconcerned about religion; in all probability not a tithe of them could read or write. Yet what did Paul give them? Not milk for babes; not a compost of stories and practical remarks; but the Epistle to the Romans, with its strict logic and grand ideas, or the Epistle to the Ephesians, with its involved sentences and profound mysticism. He must have believed that they would understand what he wrote, though scholarship has considered it necessary to pile up a mountain of commentaries on these epistles. Christianity, as it went through the cities of the world in St. Paul's person, must have gone as a great intellectual awakening, which taught men to use their minds in investigating the profoundest problems of life.