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

by William Gray Elmslie

At Regent Square he flung himself into the work of the congregation with eager sympathy. He rapidly became popular and was made welcome in every home. In Dr. Dykes he found a wise and kind helper, to whom he became warmly attached. He appreciated his methods of working and his power as a preacher; but most of all he was struck by that grace of devotional fervour which gave Dr. Dykes' prayers so constraining a power to draw the souls of his people into communion with God. Nothing could have been brighter and happier than the life of the young preacher in his new surroundings, and his contagious enthusiasm and energy reacted on all who knew him. Here in London, at the busy centre of so much of the world's activity, his eager, questioning spirit found material for its restless enquiries; whilst that knowledge of human nature and its needs, which lay at the back of his most powerful spiritual work in later years, was slowly moulded by the opportunities of this time.

He describes in a letter to his mother the opening of his pulpit work at Regent Square. His chief fear was for his voice: "It looked such a distance," he writes, "to the faces in the end gallery." He got a friend to sit at the far end of the church, just over the clock, with a handkerchief which he was to wave if the speaker were inaudible. The subject of his sermon was, "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin."

It is curious that the only despondent note that sounds through his correspondence at this time is the lamentation that he is unfitted for the pulpit. Repeatedly he expresses the fear that he will never make a preacher. He feels stiff and ill at ease. Official trappings of any kind he always disliked; and the pulpit robes, which he afterwards, as far as possible, discarded, he even then, as he told Dr. Dykes, detested. "I find it," he writes, "most hopeless to get anything I much care to say, and even then it is a perplexity generally to see what really is the reason. I am at the very point of giving over preaching altogether." Again, "I am more sure than ever that I am not a preacher," "Romps with Mr. Turnbull's children's singing-class are, on the whole, the most satisfactory occupation I know of."

These doubts and discouragements are not surprising. From the very first Dr. Elmslie conceived of the Christian Faith in a deep, comprehensive way, and its ideals of purity and holiness touched and warmed his nature at many points. Just because the outline was so large the filling-in took years to accomplish. It was only by continuous and patient self-analysis, by long observation and study of his fellow-men, that he was able to meet the needs of humanity, at all points, with a message which no one interpreted more largely. His sermons at Regent Square are sketches and outlines which experience alone could embody and complete. I have been much struck, in preparing a selection of his sermons for the press, with the growth of their composition. The sermon, for example, which stands first in this volume is, I think, the earliest he ever wrote. But the sermon, as it was last preached and is now printed, is not the sermon as he wrote it. The latter, though in outline identical, has been emptied of its original contents and re-filled out of the abundance of a heart which had grown in deeper knowledge of human needs and the approaches of Divine compassion.

His greatest satisfaction he found in his intercourse with the young men in the congregation.

"At the Young Men's Society," he writes, "I have been chairman for some time, and have to sum up: it costs me no preparation, and yet how they listen, and how I feel I can sway them as I please! I enjoy that kind of speaking."

It was at the close of these weekly discussions that Mr. Elmslie and I used often to meet. Our homeward paths were not identical, but we used to imagine that we were alternately escorting one another home as we spent a measurable portion of many a night upon the pavement, heedless of the thinning traffic, in keen debate over some of those deep insoluble problems which, I am glad to think, trouble his eager heart no longer. "I have long believed," he writes, "thinking to be more unhealthy than fever, cholera, bad drains, etc. I would give a good deal to be only an animal now and then."

Almost the first hopeful word about his preaching in Regent Square occurs in the following passage; it is interesting otherwise:—

"On Monday evening I was at Mr. Bell's. He pressed me to stay; thought I should not be a Professor; meant for a preacher; would have great power; something quite peculiar about my sermons; made Christ and everything so real, and near, and helpful; and my prayers always did him good, etc., etc.

"Curious, that in my sermons tells with everybody, for it comes from my line of reading and thinking at college, especially from the German books on Christ, such as Strauss; they made me trust Him as a Person rather than a doctrine; besides, I know I have come to regard Him all round differently in consequence. I have had to pay dearly for the reading, and have often wished I had not, so it is a little comfort to find that my coming through it makes me more helpful now."