1.B 00. QUALIFICATIONS OF THE PREACHER
Chapter 2: QUALIFICATIONS OF THE PREACHER February 1, 1872.
ELOQUENCE has been defined, sometimes, as the art of moving men by speech.
Preaching has this additional quality, that it is the art of moving men from a lower to a higher life. It is the art of inspiring them to ward a nobler manhood. In thinking about the preparation for the Christian ministry, we are apt to regard the sermon as the chief thing; and certainly, in the whole series of instruments, it does rank highest, for the power of the man, all that he has been doing collaterally, culminates in that. After all, there is a world of encouragement for men that cannot preach. If a preacher is a true man (and a true man spreads out and covers with himself all times and all places), he preaches not only while he is in the pulpit; but just as much when he is conversing with a little child upon the side-walk, when he is in a social company, or when he is out on a sportive or picnic occasion with his people. A true minister is a man whose manhood itself is a strong and influential argument with his people. He lives in such relations with God, and in such genuine sympathy with man, that it is a pleasure to be under the unconscious influence of such a mind. Just as, lying on a couch in a summer’s evening, you hear from a neighbouring house the low breathing of an instrument of music, so far away that you can only hear its palpitation, but cannot discern the exact tune that is played, and are soothed by it and drawn nearer to hear more; thus the true Christian minister is himself so inspiring, so musical, there is so much of the divine element in him, rendered home like by incarnation with his disposition, brought down to the level of man’s understanding, that wherever he goes little children want to see him, plain, people want to be with him; everybody says when he comes, “Good! “ and everybody says when he goes away, “ I wish he had stayed longer; “ all who come in contact with him are inclined to live a better life. Manhood is the best sermon. It is good to fill the minds of people with the nobleness and sweetness of the thing itself to which you would fain draw them. “ Go preach “ was no more authoritative than “ Let your light so shine that men, seeing your good works, shall glorify your Father.”
There is no form of preaching that can afford to dispense with the preacher’s moral beauty. He may be as homely as you please, physically as awkward as you please but you will find in the true preacher somewhere an element of beauty; for God works always toward beauty, which is one sign of perfection, so that, though riot an essential element, beauty is still a sign and token of the higher forms of creation.
I endeavoured to impress you yesterday with the idea that preaching is the exertion of the living force of men upon living men for the sake of developing in them a higher manhood. I say a higher man hood rather than a higher life, because I do not wish to separate a Christian life as something distinct from the movement of the whole being. Men are not like musical organs of many stops, one of which is Religion, as something separable and distinct from the rest of their nature. Religion is harmonized human nature. It includes every element which manhood includes. It is wholesomeness of soul. It is man hood, on a higher plane. It includes the physical, the social, the intellectual, the aesthetic, the moral, the spiritual. The whole man working in harmony with the laws of his condition, that is the New Testament idea of a Christian man. And that which we undertake to do by preaching, whether in its technical or special form, by the delivery of a sermon or in its collateral and more diffusible forms by social intercourse, is to mould and shape men into a nobler manhood, Jesus Christ being the highest ideal and exemplar. Our ministry is effectual in proportion as we do that, and deficient in the proportion in which we fail to do it.