07 The Passion of Evangelism: Wesley and Whitefield

LECTURE VII THE PASSION OF EVANGELISM: WESLEY AND WHITEFIELD THE problem of the Preacher as evangelist is one of which we are all bound to think, and on which history has much to teach. I shall begin by agreeing that we make far too sharp a division between a ministry that is educational, and a ministry that is evangelistic; and too marked a distinction between a morning service for edifying the saints, and an evening service for evangelizing the sinners. There seems to be no adequate reason why people should take their minds to church in the forenoon, and their souls in the evening. If occasionally more soul were put into the morning sermon, and more mind into the evening sermon, we might improve the quality of the saints and make the conversion of the sinners more permanent. But when that is said, I shall proceed to state my main proposition with all the force I can command—that it is time all Christian preachers equipped themselves more definitely for evangelistic work, and refused to allow the most vital part of their aggressive policy to be undertaken for them by an order of preachers however able and devoted who have to be called in for the purpose like consulting physicians at a crisis. The ministry that is not an evangelistic ministry is not in the full sense a Christian ministry, for we cannot obey our Lord’s command and leave His Divine appeal unuttered to those who are heedless and unresponsive. But it is equally certain that evangelism, rightly understood, is not as simple a matter as it seems. It is the greatest mistake in the world to imagine that defects in education are a qualification for evangelism; or that, to put it in another way, such an absence of real culture as would disqualify a man for the full work of the ministry might rank as an endowment for his work as an evangelist. I rate the work of evangelism far higher than that. It is work that demands the best brains we possess; and no training can be too thorough, and no reading too wide for the minister whose aim it is to be to bring the irreligious and the indifferent on to the side of Christ and the Kingdom. We can never forget that it was Paul, the most accomplished and erudite of the apostles, whose soul was fired most with a passion for evangelism before which all the old racial barriers went down like a bowing wall and a tottering fence. Does anybody suppose that he would have been better fitted for his apostolic work if he had never sat at the feet of Gamaliel? So far from lamenting the catholicity of his culture, we know how much depended upon his ability to become as a Greek to win the Greeks, and as a Roman to win the Romans. I am not prepared to argue that the result of learning is always to widen the sympathies; and that learned men are invariably the most human and versatile of beings. Experience hardly warrants so satisfactory a generalization, and Carlyle’s old friend "Dry-as-dust," "with loads of learned lumber in his head," does exist even outside novels like "Middle march." Indeed, the notorious fact that many profound scholars have been men of narrow sympathies and pedantic opinions, has been responsible for the fear, that one may still hear expressed, lest promising young preachers should be ruined at college by being made too bookish and scholastic. But Paul’s example is decisive as to the value, for the work of evangelism, of that generous culture which frankly confesses the debt it owes to Jew and Roman, Greek and Barbarian,--a confession which, in itself, is more than half the victory over those disabling prejudices which prevent a missionary from getting on terms with his audience. It is surely not too much to say that, humanly speaking, no untrained and uncultured man could have done Paul’s work among conditions so diverse. The Church of today needs to ponder deeply on this fact, that it was the man of most massive intellect and most varied scholarship, who was the first great Christian evangelist. No one will claim for St. Francis of Assisi the rank of a scholar; but his education was good as the standard of the time was, and there are no evidences of weakness in that charming intellect which he carried with him through his spiritual pilgrimage to the Italian peasantry. But as to his namesake, Francis de Xavier, there are no deductions to be made. He who was to wear his life out in romantic evangelistic journeying through lands that were at that time the Ultima Thule of travel, was educated in the University of Paris, became a lecturer in the Aristotelian philosophy, and might have successfully aspired to almost any position in that academic world, so brilliant were his intellectual talents. One cannot have all the gifts; and even Xavier confesses in his letters that he had no skill in languages, which was the reason why his work had to be done through the difficult medium of an interpreter, and why the legend arose that his deficiencies in this respect were conveniently made good by the gift of tongues. No grammars and dictionaries were available in the strange lands of his voluntary exile; and, had they been, he had no time for their study. But to a hero of his spirit there was less embarrassment in this deficiency than most men would have suffered. For he had within him the universal language of sympathy and faith, which was the secret of his amazing conquests.

Even in these modern days there is something staggering in the bare record of his phenomenal travels. Fever and peril, by land and sea, had no terrors for him. From Portugal to Mozambique and on to Goa; from Goa to Travancore; from Travancore to Ceylon; from Ceylon to Malacca; from Malacca to Japan; from Japan back again to India, and through that last desperate fight for a foothold in China; we watch this fiery and intrepid evangelist, whose powerful mind was undaunted by the social, moral and religious difficulties which the life of the Orient presented. There are always some people who argue that men of the first rank in intellectual power are thrown away on evangelistic missions, either to the depraved of their own land, or to the habitations of heathenism. As they watch the academic career of a Henry Martyn till he fulfills the highest ambition of a mathematical scholar at Cambridge University, wins the University prize for Latin composition, is appointed a fellow of his college, and then dedicates his talents to the mission field, they cry in protest, "To what purpose is this waste?" But they do not tell us by what means, or in what career, those brilliant parts of Henry Martyn might better have been unified and concentrated and employed, for the welfare of humanity.

Think of him as Sir James Stephen describes him in his Cambridge days, and before his life decision had been taken. The passage is a famous one: "a man born to love with ardor and to hate with vehemence; amorous, irascible, ambitious and vain; without one torpid nerve about him; aiming at universal excellence in science, in literature, in conversation, in horsemanship and even in dress; not without some gay fancies, but more prone to austere and melancholy thoughts; patient of the most toilsome inquiries, though not wooing philosophy for her own sake; animated by the poetical temperament, though unvisited by any poetical inspiration; eager for enterprise, though thinking meanly of the reward to which the adventurous aspire; uniting in himself, though as yet unable to concentrate and to harmonize them, many keen desires, many high powers, and much constitutional dejection--the chaotic materials of a great character." Chaotic materials indeed! How the vision came to Henry Martyn, in the light of which this chaos was resolved into order and harmony, and how henceforth he saw his way, and could say with the apostle, "This one thing I do," is the story of his conversion, and his self dedication to the work of an evangelist. To those whose thoughts are engrossed with secular ambitions, his was a lost life, and he himself the mere victim of a fanaticism that laid waste his powers. But to all who understand what are the real honors to be won on this earth, and the permanent foundations of fame, Henry Martyn’s disinterested devotion, and sacrificial labors, belong to those records which make us proud of our humanity. The beautiful tribute might be paid to him which is engraved on the cenotaph of John Howard the prison reformer, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, that "he followed an open but unfrequented pathway to immortality." There were, doubtless, many easier and pleasanter pathways open to him; but his feet followed where his heart and his reason led the way. He had reached what, I often think, is the most profound conviction possible to us, and one which can only be entertained by an intellect that is powerful enough to penetrate to that reality which lies beneath the outward shows of things--the conviction expressed in a passage in his journal written about the natives on his first landing in India, "I feel that they are my brethren in the flesh, precisely on a level with myself." You may put that saying of his side by side with David Livingstone’s confession that, after living among and for the native Africans, he forgot that they were black and remembered only that they were fellow-mortals. I repeat, that it does not require a powerful mind to perceive the external differences between one race and another, but it does require an absolutely just and strong reason to discern the fundamental unity of humanity, and to live in the consciousness of that, rather than of any outward distinctions, whether of color, class or creed. This, indeed, I should be disposed to regard as the most indispensable endowment of the evangelist. The converted prize-fighter, in John Masefield’s vivid poem, cries out:

"I thought that Christ had given me birth To brother all the sons of earth." And surely we may with confidence contend, that this is the purpose and effect of the new birth. The new spirit that is created thereby is one of brotherhood to all the sons of earth without distinction. This is not the language of sentimentalism. It is, once again, a "glory of the lighted mind." It is the fruit of the spirit of justice and equity new-born within the God-surrendered soul. If I were alone in the opinion I should still maintain that the supreme proof of Henry Martyn’s intellectual greatness is not to be found in his New Testament translated into Hindustani, or the Book of Psalms translated into Persian, but rather in the absolute fraternity of spirit which inspired his labors among the beggars of Cawnpore, and the unshaken constancy of purpose which held him faithful through his final painful wanderings, until fever-wasted and shattered by disease, he sank, at the age of thirty-two, into his lonely grave at Tokat. Such was the passion of evangelism which exalted and mastered Henry Martyn, so that the young brow of a famous Cambridge scholar wears, today, the aureole of a modern saint; and so that Lord Macaulay was moved to write the well known lines of him:

"In manhood’s early bloom The Christian hero found a pagan tomb; Religion, sorrowing o’er her favorite son, Points to the glorious trophies which he won. Eternal trophies, not with slaughter red, Not stained with tears by hopeless captives shed; But trophies of the Cross." But surely we may say that outside the apostolic era, the greatest evangelistic movement was the one that changed the face of England, and gave birth to the new era of missionary expansion and adventure. The breath that filled the sails of the good ship Duff—the first distinctively missionary ship that ever sailed the ocean—was in reality that mystic rushing mighty wind which swept over the lifeless soul of England at the great Pentecostal season of the evangelical Revival. The new missionary enterprise was the witness to the reality of this rebirth of the Church. The satisfying proof that the Lord was visiting His people was, that the unknown heathen of Tahiti were seen to be not only as needy, but as worthy of sacrificial service, as their brethren in the neglected villages and city-slums of England. The regenerate churches of Christ, in my own country, could not close their eyes to the vision of a perishing humanity, but fervently believed that Christ had, indeed, given them birth "To brother all the sons of earth."

Yet if ever evangelism had plausible excuse to offer for concentration, and a narrowing of the area of service, it was at that memorable time. Something that sounded perilously like common-sense took up its parable, and pleaded that, until the work of Christianization was complete at home, it was mere waste of good money and valuable lives to evangelize the far islands of the Pacific. Could Henry Nott find no sphere of work as a city missionary in the East end of London, that he must hazard everything for the Tahitian cannibals? It was, at bottom, the old heresy that would have chained Paul to Jerusalem, and imprisoned Christianity within the narrow limits of Palestine. The old patriotism of the Jewish prophet might have persisted, but the new patriotism of the Christian prophet must assuredly have perished. What I have called the epic of world-conquest, would have been no more than a poor attenuated apology or a great poem. The plain fact is, that Christianity cannot fly either a national or a racial flag. It is world-empire or nothing. This is its Romance. The Cross must claim its sway over all continents, islands and oceans, or its glory is departed. That is why evangelism is so essential in any true interpretation of our religion. It sounds the universal note. It levels, in faith, all barriers. It has a regenerate imagination. It is fired by the patriotism of Humanity. The passion for souls is its mainspring. Material space is as nothing. The soil of England or America is of no more consequence in the sight of the Son of Man than the soil of Tahiti, Central Africa or Labrador. Evangelism means the love of man as man. That is why its results are so mighty. That is why the most obstinate prejudices melt away before it. That is why, when churches grow cold and self-centered, and lose the evangelistic spirit, straightway those bigotry’s reappear, and the cruel divisive walls that sever man from his fellow-man are rebuilt. Evangelism, and the spirit it represents, is the secret of the unity of humanity. Within its breast lie the spiritual forces that are to conquer the proud and bitter antagonisms of great empires and nations, safeguard the rights and liberties of the weak, and create the just and spirit which is the best guarantee of world-peace and world-progress.

I am still insistent that, for the noblest form of evangelism, God wills the dedication of the finest intellectual powers, because I am arguing that the policy of evangelism is demanded and justified by the highest reason. We all remember that the evangelical Revival which saved England morally, spiritually and politically was born at Oxford, which has not only been as Matthew Arnold said, "The home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs," but the birthplace of many a reformation to which mankind owes much. Wise men are always watchful of those centers of thought where the representatives of the coming generation are facing the issues of life. But I do not know that the wisest observers of that day indulged in any radiant prophecies as to the future influence of the much-ridiculed members of the Holy Club, or spared more than a passing thought for two ardent young men, John Wesley and George Whitefield, who were associates in the society stigmatized by that name. To be quite frank, John Wesley, as a youth, was not a very lovable person; and Whitefield’s perfervid and dramatic nature had vent in extravagances calculated, rather to alienate than to attract, the average University undergraduate. But all the same, through the petty persecutions and even violent controversies in which they were involved, the honors of war were all with those who could not be satisfied by the arid and ambitionless faith, which did duty for Christianity over well-nigh the whole area of so-called Christian England. They knew that if God was a fact, and Christ’s Gospel a reality, then the existing church in England was a caricature and a farce. They felt, moreover, that to be the ministers of Christianity meant to be in the grip of a resistless Power, servants of an inerrant Will, whose Sovereignty could not be satisfied with anything less than the surrender of the whole being. They faced the claims of Christ, even as they appropriated His promises, with unshrinking trust; and the result was, that when the time came, they were found to be endowed with a vision of the Kingdom such as had not been conferred by apostolic hands on any of their clerical contemporaries. The name and tradition of George Whitefield are perhaps especially dear to me; but I should not be true to my own convictions if I did not confess that John Wesley, as his was the finer intellect, was the more powerful evangelist so far as permanent results were concerned. There are tests by which this may be judged, apart altogether from the obvious statistical ones. George Whitefield, to the end of his life, never realized what human slavery meant, nor saw any inconsistency in offering spiritual redemption to those whose physical servitude he was unwilling to end. Wesley’s keener and stronger mind searched the slave system to its foundations, and unhesitatingly and passionately condemned it. Yet Whitefield’s temperament was far more naturally sympathetic and tender than Wesley’s. Where he fell short was in intellectual power; and that shortcoming was responsible for the lack of real human statesmanship, which spelled failure to secure the full results of his unparalleled labors.

I know all that can fairly be alleged against John Wesley’s strength on the intellectual side, by reason of the vein of superstition from which he was by no means free, and his lamentable misjudgment of the American case, at the time of the War of Independence. It is well to know that our heroes are so vulnerable, as there is the less temptation to dehumanize them by a doctrine of infallibility. But one thing there is about John Wesley which every careful student of his career, and especially of his preaching career, must observe—that he was never satisfied to persevere in any course which he could not justify to his own reason; and that again and again he changed his views against all his traditions and prejudices because he could not defend an attitude of obscurantism or conservatism. It is characteristic of him that when he first meditated taking orders in the Church of England, he was involved in serious difficulties because of the Calvinism of the articles, and the "excluding clauses" of the Athanasian Creed. As everybody knows, his objection to Whitefield’s program of field preaching sprang out of his intimated stiff prejudice in favor of the existing conventions that governed public worship and the preaching of the Gospel. But he could not resist the argument of the Sermon on the Mount; and he saw that apostolic practice was of far more importance and authority than ecclesiastical conventions, which could neither be defended by Scripture nor by common-sense. Let us remember not only his limitations, but all from which he emancipated himself. Let us remember that by temperament he was an aristocrat; and that his affinities were rather academic than democratic. Remember his scholarly endowments; that he and his brother Charles were accustomed to converse in Latin to the end of their lifetime. Remember his passionate and pathetic devotion to the church in which he was ordained, and his concern to be her faithful son, subject to all reasonable authority. Then recall how, in spite of the past, and in spite of himself, he was taught by slow experience that for the work of Evangelism he must sound the universal note. "I am a priest of the Church Universal," he claims; and again utters the memorable words, "The world is my parish." The fascination of John Wesley’s life is in the gradual achievement of full spiritual liberty, and emancipation from the trammels of ecclesiastical convention, as his spirit is by degrees illuminated in actual contact with his fellows, and through a deep experience of the laws and methods of salvation.

If that argument is not conceded, I should have to make appeal to his sermons; and I should do it with all confidence. As evangelistic discourses they are most significant and most surprising. The evidences of a mind steeped in classical culture and keenly alive to the thought of his time, abound on almost every page. Every perusal of them leaves me wondering, what it was in them, that pierced the consciences of the most hardened sinners to the quick. There is nothing sensational in this evangelism. There is plain dealing. There is much practical, sensible and serious exhortation as to the sins that corrupt men’s lives and harden their hearts. Of rhetorical fireworks there is not a trace. We are less impressed by the vehemence than by the calm strength of them.

Yet certain it is, that when this man preached, the world knew that the hour of battle had sounded. Those scenes of fury, which belong now to English history, and in which Wesley’s life was again and again in peril, are the tribute to the power of his message. If he had been arguing for a verdict before a society of learned men, he could hardly have reasoned more closely, or employed more classical illustrations. From which fact surely one lesson of supreme value may be drawn. The evangelist, on whom all Hell is let loose, has yet no need to let his mission down, or condescend to base and unworthy methods of attack or of appeal. Such means do not really and permanently tell. Even as Wesley was singularly fine and pure in controversy when he was being assailed by a multitude of scurrilous pens, and pelted with gutter epithets, so, also, in the warfare which he waged with error and evil in almost every market-place in the land, he was content to use the Gospel weapons of Truth and Love, and as the smoke cleared from the battle-field it was seen that he and his forces were in possession of the best strategical positions.

I grant you that, often enough, in the face of the granite indifference and apathy with which the preacher is confronted, the temptation to try the earthquake, the hurricane and the explosion, and to mistrust the still small voice, is very natural and very great. But sensationalism does not win Wesley’s victories, nor ever can. At the long last, the conquests of the Cross are seen to have been won by the old-fashioned weapons of persuasion, patience, sacrifice, courage and overwhelming sympathy, joined to that sagacity or common-sense which in Wesley amounted to genius, and that was the secret of the extraordinary organization which, more than a century after his death, holds together for worship and service millions upon millions of Christian people.

If I do not attempt any description of the complementary but contrasted work of George Whitefield, it is because the characteristics of his famous oratory have been described by so many writers. We may accept the almost universal verdict that for dramatic and declamatory power he had no rival in his own age, and no superior in any age. Doubtless it was true, as Mr. Lecky observes, that he had a narrow range of ideas; but it is also true, as the same historian reminds us, that his genius and disposition suited him to "the position of a roving evangelist," that he was "adapted for the boisterous vicissitudes of the itinerant life," that he excelled in impassioned religious appeals--which seem never to have lost their force or their freshness though repeated hundreds of times --that his preaching "combined almost the highest perfection of acting with the most burning fervor of conviction," that "his gestures were faultless in their beauty and propriety," that he had "a large command of vivid, homely and picturesque English, and an extraordinary measure of the tact which enables a practiced orator to adapt himself to the character and disposition of his audience," and finally that he possessed "a contagious fervor of enthusiasm which like a resistless torrent bore down every obstacle." All this is very true, if very trite. His art was so perfect that he could invest "tawdry and even ludicrous strokes" of rhetoric with extraordinary power; and it should be remembered that he set it before him, on his own admission, to rouse the passions to the highest point, especially the passions of love, hope and fear.

All these characteristics belong to the externals of his ministry, and it may well be urged that without them his open-air campaign must have failed in its effect. Let us remember how Whitefield viewed the opportunity. To him, England was the theatre of a great struggle, a fierce and terrible war, which must be fought out with every perfection of armament by the Christian host if the day was not to be lost, and the soul of a people destroyed forever. He did not fit himself out with rhetoric and dramatic skill merely to entertain the populace. "By all means he must save men." If the arts of oratory were necessary that he might storm the consciences of the democracy, then in what better cause could he practice them? We may choose to recall that men and women of the finest taste and highest consequence were avowedly his admirers; that Garrick, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Lord Chesterfield and the Countess of Huntingdon came under the spell of his marvelous eloquence; but it is no more than justice to remember, at the same time, that it was not for these that he equipped himself with so much labor, and pursued his methods with so much courage. It was for the miners and the peddlers and the weavers; the masses of neglected and ignorant artisans and field laborers, to whom clergymen and ministers had ceased to appeal, and for whom in all the land there existed no passionate sympathy until George Whitefield arose, and spoke to them in a voice often choked with tears of death in sin, and life in Christ.

It is Whitefield who so pointedly raises, for the student of oratory and its permanent effects, the problem of emotional preaching. Mr. Lecky tells us that "no talent is naturally more ephemeral than popular oratory." He does not go on to tell us that no talent has produced such mighty results. The man who can kindle the multitude, recreate faith in a worldly age, and inspire the ideals of a whole people does more than all the authors, artists and statesmen put together. We, in England, know perfectly well how the moral power was generated which in the early years of the nineteenth century swept the slave-trade from the Empire, cleansed the prisons, multiplied the schools, revolutionized the constitution, and established a large measure of religious equality. All these reforms, and many others, were the’ product of the new religious life of the common people. Whitefield may have believed, or thought that he believed, that Christianity aims at gathering out of a lost world an elect, fit but few; but it was his practice and example rather than his dogma that prevailed, and his practice was to make appeal not to the few but to the masses, believing that the power of Christ over them is beyond all calculation; and the results, if they discredited his Calvinism, abundantly justified his evangelism.

There are three points of great practical value which I ought to press home upon you before I close. The first concerns the art of popular preaching; the second concerns the place in evangelism of theological formulas; and the third concerns the "call" of the masses. On each of these I should like to say a very few words.

(1) Popular preaching has come to have a bad name among us. We are tempted to pride ourselves on preaching that is unpopular, and to assume that the best test of good preaching is that it should empty churches rather than fill them. The man who draws and holds the crowd must, we presume, be a superficial preacher, while the man who reduces his audience, like Gideon’s army, to a small and high souled elect, is like a farmer who has successfully operated a milk separator, and has retained only the pure and rich cream. This operation on the part of a minister is by no means uncommon, and is usually assumed to be due to profound thinking. I suggest that we have come to the time when we may wisely reconsider this problem. The common people heard our Lord gladly, and it is difficult to pay compliments to ourselves, if they do not care to hear us at all. I submit to you that in our reaction against a frothy emotionalism, we have gone to the extreme of impoverishing our preaching of the human touch, and by so doing we have lost our power over the human heart. When I read our Lord’s infinitely moving lament over Jerusalem, or His impassioned indignation against religious hypocrisy, I marvel that we can ever imagine Christian preaching to be admirable that is not deeply penetrated with emotion. I am told that this sort of advice does violence to our modern temperament and attitude of mind. Today we are all for self-control. We think a man is a fool to "let himself go." Enthusiasm is at a discount; skepticism is in the ascendant. I am told that love has given place to the science of eugenics; and that in the well-regulated modern world, when the Romanticist and the Poet have been suppressed in the interest of pure science, emotion and imagination will have no place. If this be so, our Revelation is still to the wise, foolishness; but it does not follow we are to surrender to any so-called scientific school. At any rate, if my protest were the last word ever to be said in a Lyman Beecher lecture in favor of "human preaching" and the cultivation of the art of popular oratory, I would venture to say it. You have every chord of the human heart to play on. Surely the art of eliciting their music is worthy of your study and cultivation. Men and women, after all their history and education, are still human beings, compounded of laughter and tears, sunshine and shadow. Humanity is still, as it has always been, capable of the heights of heroism, and the depths of shame. Not one of the elemental human passions has been eradicated by all our philosophies. No process of evolution has carried us, or ever will, beyond their grip. Life and death are just as poignant experiences as in the early days of our race; and if our refinements have done anything for us, they have made us more sensitive and not more stoical. We may, of course, ignore these facts, and assume that those to whom we preach are above all things engrossed with metaphysics, and have an inward craving for the critical probability that there were two Isaiah’s. But if that is our attitude we have much to learn. Nobody ought ever to go into a pulpit who can think and talk about sin and salvation, and the Cross of Christ, which is for all true men the symbol of hope and service, without profound emotion and passion.

I recognize that for the business of reading moral essays, disquisition’s on ethics, or treatises on movements in theology, but little equipment in oratory is needed. Oratory indeed is unthinkable apart from the inspiration of some great human theme. When the preacher’s soul is blessed with real vision, and the hand of the Lord his God is upon him, he will be conscious of profound unrest until he can deliver his soul to those multitudes in the valley of decision, to whom his message represents the way of life and liberty. Do not misunderstand me. The order of preaching friars must always be a catholic one; and there is room in it for the man of quiet, thoughtful spirit who delivers to a devoted flock his meditations on the Gospel. But I like that phrase of the apostle of Patmos, descriptive of his own experience-"He carried me away in the spirit." We cannot always be in the same mood, nor if it were possible would it be well. But surely this is one of our noblest capacities--this of being transported out of ourselves by the vision of God, and of His will, "carried away" by the rush of emotion, enthusiasm and imagination to that lofty standpoint where we greet the dawn of the Day of Christ’s Kingdom on earth; and watch the Holy City, New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. That is why I lay stress today upon the highest possibilities of preaching. We are always being told that this is a materialistic age; that modern industrialism has no soul; that as our machines grow more human, the men who make them grow more mechanical. It is true. And for that very reason we want Poetry back again, and Art, and Music, and, above all, the Prophet who is the supreme interpreter of the spiritual. When I look at the famous portraits of Whitefield, and conceive him as he faces the multitude under God’s sky, with the heavens for sounding-board, the hillsides for meeting-house, and some rude boulder for pulpit; as his splendid energy expresses itself in the fold and sweep of his robes, and his passion for souls in his kindled countenance, his flashing eye, and the tender solemn tones of his voice, I feel as if this is the one thing to pray for--that God will raise up a new race of genuine orators of the evangel, who without any unworthy artifices will shake men’s souls and thrill their hearts.

(2) In the second place I am bound very briefly to express my belief that theological formulas will matter comparatively little in the new evangelism. My reason for saying this is an historical one. The two men who together were responsible for the Evangelical Revival were representatives of two contrasted schools of theology, which all the praiseworthy efforts of their successors have not been able wholly to reconcile. Whitefield affirmed with immense conviction what Wesley decried with equal strenuousness. There never has been in the history of theological controversy, a deluge of pamphlets so virulent, and so scurrilous as those with which their partisans assailed one another. You might easily have supposed that these antagonistic schools of theologians would have neutralized one another, or, at least, minimized the general effect of their mutual labors. But it was not so. And the reason is, of course, that in the mercy of God the blunders of our finite minds are not permitted to prevent His Word from having free course and being glorified. It is not creeds that bring the breath of life back to exhausted souls, but faith. That is not to say of course that crude and unworthy teaching about God or man may not produce painful reaction of an intellectual sort. This that I am saying is no plea for slipshod and shallow thinking. But just as the most profound and wise theology may utterly fail to inspire the hearer to virtue and to faith, apart from men of soul and fire to believe it and to preach it; so a theology that is greatly inferior in intellectual strength may nevertheless be more than compensated for by a preacher whose heart God hath touched. It is faith, faith, faith, that conquers the world. The life of God is the strength of the saints; and it is the same divine life in Calvin and in Wesley, in St. Francis of Assisi and John Knox, in Jonathan Edwards and Henry Ward Beecher. In man’s fight for life as a spiritual being the mystic breath of the Divine Spirit is more than all our formulas.

(3) Lastly, evangelism recognizes the call of the masses. Explorers tell us that there is a resistless power in "the lure of the wild." They tell us that after a taste of it they soon weary of our tame conventional civilization; and prefer all the risks and hardships and perils of the wild to the monotony of our unambitious and routine existence. There is a very true parallel between the life of the explorer and the life of the evangelist. The true evangelist listens to the call of the wild --that raw, untamed, passionate human nature that is a yet unknown and uncultivated soil but that has all the virgin possibilities of limitless fertility. I do not think our Lord had no feeling of reverence for the Temple and the synagogue, and those who were in sincere association with these, but I do think His soul responded to the call of the wild, the Churchless multitude, neglected, outcast, uncultured, waiting only for the ploughshare and the seed to become glorious with the harvests of God. Today we may well thank God, as I most humbly do, for our churches. They form the base of operations for every good and great campaign. But the campaign must not be restricted to their boundaries. The campaign is for the lands beyond the frontiers. The Church is still the homeland to all the soldiers. Its patriotism fires us. The warmth and joy of its hearth glow in our hearts when we are out on the great adventure. Perhaps we never learn to love it until we come to know at first hand the meaning of that unhallowed secularity where its atmosphere does not extend. Let every preacher resolve he will be churchman and evangelist in one. The call of the Church, and the call of the wild are both to be heard, I think, in the soul of every true ambassador of Christ. We may not love Jerusalem less; but the song of the pioneer must be ever in our hearts and on our lips, "They shall build the old wastes--the ancient wilds, --they shall raise up the former desolation’s, they shall repair the waste cities,--the civilizations run to waste,--the desolation’s of many generations."