083. Before I Had Dined I Shook the Sermon Out of my Mind.

LXXXIII ’BEFORE I HAD WELL DINED, I SHOOK THE SERMON OUT OF MY MIND.’

‘ONE day, among all the sermons our parson made, his subject was to treat of the Sabbath day, and of the evil of breaking that, either with labour or with sports, or otherwise. Wherefore, I fell in my conscience under his sermon, thinking and believing that he made that sermon on purpose to show me my evil-doings; and so I went home, when the sermon was ended, with a great burden upon my spirit. But, behold, it lasted not. For before I had well dined, the trouble began to go off my mind. Wherefore, when I had satisfied nature with my food, I shook the sermon out of my mind; and to my old custom of sports and gaming I returned with great delight. But all that day I felt what guilt was, though never before, that I can remember.’ The Apostle Paul, next to Jesus Christ, is our greatest possession, and we owe the Apostle to a sermon on the tenth commandment. And we owe St. Augustine, our next possession after St. Paul, to a sermon on the seventh commandment. And we owe John Bunyan — and you all know what a possession he is — to a sermon on the fourth commandment. And Samuel Johnson to a sermon on that same commandment and to another sermon on the fifth commandment. Humanly speaking, we would never have heard the name of John Bunyan but for that sermon on the sanctification of the Lord’s Day. It is to that sermon that we owe Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Holy War. After he had well dined on beef and greens that afternoon, and after he had revived his spirits with a large tankard of stout English ale, the young tinker set off to the village green in most willing obedience to the Sabbath day commandment of Archbishop Laud. But all the time Moses had been beforehand with Laud. And Moses’ Sabbath sting was in Bunyan’s conscience all that afternoon in spite of his good dinner and his game of cat. Dr. Newman in too many things is a disciple of Laud, but he cannot stomach the Archbishop’s Book of Sports. ‘Satan’s first attempt when he would ruin a man’s soul,’ says Newman, ‘is to prevail on him to desecrate the Lord’s Day.’ And let all men listen to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s sermon on this same subject:

‘Having lived to my forty-sixth year, not without an habitual reverence for the Sabbath, yet I resolve henceforth to attend to it as Christianity requires; I resolve henceforth —

    (1) To rise early, and, in order to that, to go to sleep early on Saturday.

    (2) To use some extraordinary devotion in the morning.

(3) To examine the tenor of my life and particularly the last week, and to mark my advances in religion or recessions from it.

(4) To read the scriptures methodically, with such helps as are at hand.

(5) To go to church twice.

(6) To read books of divinity, either speculative or practical.

(7) To instruct my family.

(8) To wear off by meditation any worldly soil contracted in the week.’

Bunyan had heard many sermons from parish ministers and from army chaplains, but the preacher’s sermon entered the tinker’s conscience that day as no sermon had ever done before. ‘All that day I felt what guilt was, though never before, that I can remember.’ There should be far more preaching to the conscience than there is in our mealy-mouthed and toothless day. Sometimes the sermon should be on one commandment and sometimes on another. But there should be no sermon, whatever the text, that does not leave some sting driven deep down into somebody’s conscience. There should be much more preaching than there is on the first table of the law, and still more frequent preaching on the second table. For as Calvin says, ‘The second table is better fitted for making a scrutiny into such as we are.’ A bee dies, so I am told, when it leaves its sting behind it, but not so a sermon. A sermon only begins to live when its hearer goes home ‘sermon-sick,’ as Bunyan went home that Sabbath forenoon; only, it is by far the most difficult of duties to preach a sermon right home into the conscience of the hearer. To make guilty men feel that the sermon was made on purpose to show them their sin and to say to them, Thou art the man, is no easy task. At the same time, ‘a sufficiently close word,’ says Halyburton, ‘will bring even a Judas to ask, Master, is it I?’ Now, a sermon like that is nothing less than the very sword of the Spirit; only it is not every hand that can send home that sword so as to discern the thoughts and the intents of the heart. As a contemporary of Bunyan has it,

‘Here it may truly be said that of all sermons they are by far the most difficult that are made concerning the hearts and the consciences of men. For as no study is more hard on the student than anatomy, unless the student has first seen some corpse cut up; so also is it in an anatomy lecture on the heart and the conscience. To do this,’ he continues, ‘will be a work impossible to those who have never made acquaintance with themselves: who have never had their eyes turned inwards upon themselves, and who, consequently, do not know the first elements of their own hearts.’ At the same time our preachers must not despair of the success of their sermons, even though they see them having the same fate that the preacher’s forenoon sermon seemed to have that Sabbath in Bedford. Even our Lord Himself had to humble Himself to see His divine sermons shaken out of His hearer’s minds and hearts Sabbath after Sabbath. Till He determined to put His experience and His observation and His indignation into His bitter parable of the sower and his seed, with the wicked one continually catching away that which was sown in the hearer’s heart.

‘But, behold, it lasted not, for when I had satisfied nature with my food, I shook the sermon out of my mind.’ That was wellnigh a fatal dinner to John Bunyan; for, by the meat he ate, and by the ale he drank, and by the talk he poured out, as far as in him lay he quenched the awakening work of God’s Holy Spirit that had been begun in his heart that forenoon. And the last Day alone will declare how many soul-saving sermons have been shaken out of men’s minds, and how many men have sold their souls for a good dinner and for a good supper on the Sabbath day. Though dead, John Bunyan yet speaks to us in hisGrace Abounding, and asks this question at us all:

‘Does your minister’s very best sermon long survive your Sabbath day dinner and Sabbath night supper?’

I have told you an anecdote before now that I think is never absent from my conscience a single Sabbath night after sermon and supper. I was once spending a Sabbath long ago with dear old John Mackenzie of Glenisla. The old saint’s memory still sanctifies the glen and draws visitors of a kindred spirit up to the glen every summer. Well, that Sabbath night after supper I asked my friend to read to me out of the manuscript volume of notes he had taken of John Duncan’s sermons long ago when the future professor was still a probationer in the neighbourhood, and he was still reading in his rich manuscript when the bell rang for family worship. After the worship was offered I turned to my friend and said to him, ‘Let us have some more of the Rabbi’s remarkable sermons.’ ‘Pardon me,’ said the wise old priest, ‘but we always take our candles after family prayers.’ He did not intend that to be a sting in my conscience I feel sure, all the same it was a real sting all that night, and after thirty years it still rankles in my heart and conscience many a Sabbath night and many a week night after supper and worship. If we all took our candles immediately after family worship every week night, and if we could carry to our own room the full impression of the public worship every Sabbath night, it would be the salvation of countless souls, who as it is simply squander the whole grace and truth of the public and private ordinances of God’s grace by the frivolous and dissipating talk even of a godly household. I am not to be taken as preaching salvation by asceticism. I am not to be understood to be denouncing Sabbath dinners and Sabbath suppers and the reading of sermon notes of genius after family worship. Not at all; I am simply stating facts. I am simply remarking on what I have seen and felt for a long lifetime. I am simply mourning over what my Master mourned over as He made, for the instruction of all His ministers, His most painful parable of the thirteenth of Matthew.

There are many other things besides dinners and suppers and readings of sermons of genius that catch away that which has been sown in our hearts in the house of God on the Sabbath day. God has appointed the preaching of the gospel of His Son to be the one and the only complete cure for all the ills of the human heart, and for all the ills of the family, and of the city. But there are mountebanks abroad in our day who thrust upon us their patent pills for the earthquake. Are we full of the pains of a bad conscience like Bunyan? Are we like Bunyan sick to death every day we live with an evil heart? Then are there not botanic gardens in which to walk off our sickness? and picture galleries to amuse us and make us forget our sickness? and bands on the green, and tipcat, and Sunday clubs, and Sunday newspapers? Ah, no! Ah, no! Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou put a hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens? Shall the companions make a banquet of him? Shall they part him among the merchants? Ah, no! Ah, no! But we preach Christ crucified. As my method has been from the beginning of these Bunyan discourses, and as my method will be to their end, I come back to the divinity students before I close. For even one divinity student impressed and directed is worth a thousand of our ordinary hearers. Well then, gentlemen, you have your compensations meantime; you have your compensations for the want of a manse and for the want of family worship. For you have your own rooms standing open and waiting your return to-night, with their tables all covered with the best books in the world, and with your whole time and thought to give to them to-night, and to your own soul, and to your forthcoming work. I often go back to the Sabbath mornings and the Sabbath nights when I was at your present stage. You have no Sabbaths and no sermons such as I had; but such as you have may be used by you and owned by God for your personal salvation and for your pulpit and pastoral equipment. I had the scholarly and saintly Dr. Moody Stuart on the one diet of public worship, and I had the incomparable Dr. Candlish on the other diet, and his sermons still sound in my heart over half a century. But better than that I had such books on my table that I still go back to the same books to draw out of them for my own salvation and yours. I have no books to this day better than those books of my student Sabbath mornings and Sabbath nights. And I will plead with you to let no visitor, the best, and no call of duty even, short of the very best, steal from you your solitary Sabbath nights with the sermons of the day still holding your heart, and with the great books of your calling supporting and sealing the sermons of the day. And your present Sabbath morning and Sabbath night habits, both intellectual and devotional, will abide with you all your after days and will help to protect you among the countless interruptions and distractions and temptations of your ministerial life. And while you study to be a pattern of all civility and affability and hospitality to your people on the Sabbath day, you will all the time have a holy fear lest you and they both fall into Bunyan’s temptation to shake the sermon out of your mind. He was a shrewd king, and he knew the hearts of ministers, who invited the angry prophet home to dine with him at his royal table after sermon, for many an otherwise angry prophet has been turned into a dumb dog by being made trencher-chaplain to a king. And many an angry conscience has been soothed to sleep, as the preacher who awakened it has eaten and drunken and talked and laughed till a late hour on a Sabbath night.

Among the many conflicts of duties and of dangers that you will meet with when you are ministers, this will be one of the most difficult to deal with aright. You will have to take home students, and clerks, and tradesmen, and ploughmen, and apprentices with you on Sabbath nights, if only to make their acquaintance aright, and to make them to feel at home with you and with the manse. But with all your wisdom and with all your tact the impression of the day will wholly pass off from both your mind and theirs as you sit and eat and drink and talk late into the night. You will see the impression gradually passing off under your very eyes, till you will be at your wits’ end between your clear duty, and the as clear danger that always accompanies that duty. The thing I now speak of will be one of the clearest of your pastoral duties and opportunities; and, in some cases, it will be one of the most fruitful. At the same time, in some other cases, you will have to confess that it has been the death of the Lord’s Day, and the burial of all its divine instructions and divine impressions. But all the same do not doubt but that wisdom, and tact, and direction, and discretion, and a rich blessing, will be given you from above as you work your way, Sabbath day and week day, through the manifold duties and the manifold dangers of your ministerial life. God bless you, gentlemen, with His richest and His most effectual blessing! For when you are so blessed multitudes of other men will be blessed in you and with you. Amen.