1.C 03. An Easy Danger
An Easy Danger
Too often men find a certain facility in themselves in single directions, and they confine their preaching to that particular line. The consequence is, their congregations are very soon classified. One sort of a preacher gets one sort of people, and another sort gets another sort of people, instead of all churches having some of every kind of mind in them. They become segregated and arranged according to ministers. That is very bad for the churches.
It is a good thing for a village that it has but one church for all the people; where the rich and poor, the cultured and the unlettered, have to come together and learn to bear with each other. This is a part of that discipline and attrition which smooths and polishes men, and makes them better, if there is grace to do it. But in the cities you will find that churches are classified; and in the city of New York I can point out to you many a church in which there are almost no poor, plain people, but the great body are people of wealth, culture, and refinement, and the pulpit is invariably high-toned, perfectly pure in language, clear and methodical in discourse, always proper so proper, in fact, that it is almost dead for want of life, for want of side branches, for want of adaptation and conformity to human nature as it is.
It is under such circumstances, where a man follows a single groove in himself or in his congregation, and does it because he learns to work easier so, year by year, and it is really on that account, that preaching becomes narrowed down, and very soon wears out.
It has been asked here why pastors change so often. Preachers are too apt to set the truth before their congregations in one way only whichever one they find they have the greatest facility for; and that is like playing on one chord men get tired of the monotony. Whereas, preaching should be directed to every element of human nature that God has implanted in us to the imaginative, to the highly spiritual, to the moral, to that phase of the intellectual that works up and toward the invisible, and to the intellectual that works down to the material and tangible.
He is a great man who can play upon the human soul! We think him a great artist who can play on an organ with sixty stops, combining them infinitely, and drawing out harmony and melody, marching them through with grand thought to the end of the symphony; that indicates a master, we think. It does; but what organ that man ever built does not shrink in comparison with the one that God built, and called man? Where you have before you a whole congregation or a whole community, and all their wants and needs are known, and you are trying to draw out of them a higher and nobler life, what an instrument you have to play upon, and what a power it is when you have learned it, and have the touch by which you can play so as to control its entire range and compass! There is nothing more sublime in this world than a man set upon lifting his fellow-men up toward heaven, and able to do it.
There arc no sensations in this world comparable with those which one has whose whole soul is aglow, waking into the consciousness of this power. It is the divine power, and it is all working up toward the in visible and the spiritual. There is no ecstasy like it.