Professor W. G. Elmslie, D.D.: Memoir and Sermons

by William Gray Elmslie

In his old students who had become ministers he took an earnest interest, and their letters show sufficiently how they prized him. "I feel," says one, "that you have inspired me with a something quite apart from the detailed work of the class—with spirit and enthusiasm for preaching."

He himself was soon drawn back to the pulpit, and as he preached in the various Nonconformist churches of the Metropolis it was almost immediately felt that a new force of the first rank had appeared. He preached frequently in Brixton Independent Church, then under the brilliant and devout ministry of James Baldwin Brown. Mr. Brown's health was very infirm when Dr. Elmslie began to preach there, and on his death the congregation looked to the Professor as his natural successor. Ultimately a cordial invitation was given. The inducements offered were great, and the position was among the most influential London Nonconformity can bestow. That a change of ecclesiastical relations would have been necessitated by his acceptance would have been no difficulty to Dr. Elmslie. But he feared to face the physical strain involved, and preferred to continue his work as Professor.

The disappointment felt at his declinature of the invitation to Brixton Independent Church was very deep, although the members construed his refusal in the right way, and understood that no difference of opinion on ecclesiastical polity and no doubt of their fidelity had anything to do with it. Some of the letters written to him were very touching. Among these I may quote the following:—

"Dear Sir,—We are, with the exception of my husband (who is somewhat of an invalid), closely occupied all the week, sometimes even the strain becoming excessive. On Sundays, when you come, your teaching and influence lift us above all our difficulties, and we start for the next week full of hope, and feeling nothing too hard to be accomplished. With regard to my sons, it is an especial boon, because, though they are thoughtful and good, it has been almost impossible to get them to attend church during the last two or three years. They did not meet, perhaps, with a single service for many weeks into which they could enter with the slightest interest, so they stayed away. We have all found our Sundays very wearisome, but on those you have visited us all is changed. All are deeply interested, one competing with the other in bringing forward the ideas that have interested them." The writer goes on reluctantly to acquiesce in a declinature which had evidently gone to the heart of the whole household.

His sphere as a preacher steadily widened, and he became, in addition, a most popular platform speaker at the May meetings in Exeter Hall and elsewhere. There is no room to recount his triumphs, and no need to do so. All who heard him bore the same testimony. If he was preaching in one of the suburbs the trains towards the time of service brought a company of admirers from all parts of London. The chapel would be crowded to the doors. When he stood up in the pulpit strangers felt surprise. Youthful in appearance, unpretending in manner to the last degree, and in the early part of the service generally nervous and restrained, it was not till the sermon began that he showed his full powers. He usually read the first prayer, and was always glad if he could get some one to help him with the lessons and the giving out of hymns. But in preaching all his powers were displayed at their highest. He did not read his sermons, but his language was as abundant and felicitous as his thought, and his audience was always riveted. Alike in manner and matter he was quite original. He imitated no preacher; he did not care to listen to sermons, and was rarely much impressed by them when he did. I doubt if he ever read a volume of sermons unless it was to review them. His knowledge of the Bible and his knowledge of life gave him inexhaustible stores; he had always matter in advance, and never felt that sterility of mind which so often afflicts the preacher. He would retell the stories of the Old Testament, and make them live in the light of to-day. The reality and firmness with which he grasped life—the life of toiling, struggling, suffering men and women—was his chief power. His sympathetic imagination helped him to divine the feelings of various classes of the young men in business, for example, with a small salary, and little prospect of rising, forbidden the hope of honourable love, and tempted to baseness from without and within. He had an intense concern for the happiness of home life, and much of his preaching was an amplification of the words—

"To mak' a happy fireside clime

To weans and wife;

That's the true pathos and sublime

Of human life."

Mothers' hearts he would win by praying for the "dear little children asleep in their beds at home." Young couples he would warn to keep fresh the tenderness and self-sacrifice of first love. But the sermons which follow speak for themselves, though nothing can transfer to the printed page the light and fire of which they were full as the preacher spoke them.