1.C 06. Self-Training an Education

Self-Training an Education. This whole necessity of self-use is provided as a school of education for every man, and especially may it be made efficient in the dissemination of the gospel. He who gives his whole life-force to the work of converting men unto Christ, will find, I think, that for a long time he scarcely will need anybody to tell him what to do and what to be.

You must go into a parish and say to yourself, “There is not a man, woman, or child within the bounds of this parish to whom I am not beholden.

I am to bring the force of my whole soul to bear upon these persons. I am to get thoroughly acquainted with them. I am to make them feel my personality. I am to prepare them to hear me preach by gaining their confidence outside of the church and pulpit.” You must meet them in their every-day life, in their ruggedness and selfishness.

You will find one man spoken of as a laughing stock in one neighbourhood, and another as an odious man in another. Nobody can be a laughing-stock or odious to you. You arc like physicians who attend the inmates of an hospital; it matters not to them from what cause the patients are lying hurt and wounded there. Sick men belong to the physician’s care, and he must take care of them. Do not pick out the “beautiful and good, or those who suit you.

Select from your parish the men who need you most, and if you cannot be patient with them, if you can not bring your soul to be a sacrifice for others and bear with them, how can you make them understand what Jesus Christ did for the world? You have got to do that same thing right over again at home, with the members of your church, with the outcast and with the wanderer. You must be, if I may say so, little Christs. You must make a living sacrifice of yourself again and again, against your instincts humbling your pride, holding in desires, submitting to things you do not like, and doing things which are repugnant to your taste, for Christ’s sake and for man’s sake; learning to love to do it; and so interpreting, by your personality, what it means for Jesus Christ to have made a sacrifice of himself for the salvation of the world. What else did the apostle mean by saying, “Christ in you “? And if he promises to abide in you, how can he abide in you in any other sense than that?

PREACHING THE PREACHER’S WHOLE BUSINESS. The next point I wish to make with you is, that if you are to be preachers in any such sense as this which I have explained to you, preaching will have to be your whole business. Now, in a small way, everybody preaches; but if you are going to professional preachers, if you will make that your life calling, it is not probable that there is one of you who was built large enough to do anything more than that. It will take all that you have in you, and all your time. I do not think a man could run a locomotive-engine, paint pictures, keep school, and preach on Sundays to any very great edification. A man who is going to be a successful preacher should make his whole life run toward the pulpit.

Perhaps you will say, “Arc you not, yourself, doing just the other thing? Don’t you edit a paper, and lecture, and make political speeches, and write this, that, and the other thing? Are you not studying science, and are you not an fait in the natural enjoyments of rural life? “Well, where a man stands in the pulpit, and all the streams run away from the pulpit down to those things, the pulpit will be very shallow and very dry; but when a man opens these streams in the neighbouring hills as so many springs, and all the streams run down into the pulpit, he will have abundant supplies. There is a great deal of difference, whether you are working in the collaterals toward the pulpit, or away from the pulpit.

You can tell very quickly. If, when a man comes back from his garden, his lectures, his journeys, and his aesthetic studies, or from his scientific coteries and stances, he finds himself less interested in his proper work, if the Sabbath is getting to be rather a burdensome day to him, and it is irksome to be preaching, he must quit one or other of those things. The streams run from the pulpit instead of into it. But if, when a man feels lie is called to be an architect of men, an artist among men, in moulding them; when one feels that his life-power is consecrated to transforming the human soul toward the higher ideal of character for time and eternity, he looks around upon the great forces of the world and says to them, “ You are my servants; “ to the clouds, “Give me what you have of power;” to the lulls, “ Briii”“ me of your treasures; “ to all that is beautiful, “ Come and put your garment upon me;” and to all that is enjoyable, “Fill me with force and give abundance to the fulness of my feeling”- if a man makes himself master of the secrets of nature that he may have power and strength to do his W0 rk then he is not carrying on three or four kinds of business at the same time, He is carrying 011 one business, and he collects from a hundred the materials and forces by which he does it. That is right. It will do you no hurt, but will benefit you, if you will make yourself familiar with public affairs. But you must not let public affairs settle down on you and smother you. You must keep yourself abreast of science; but you must be surer of your faith than science is of its details.

You must see to it that you are the master of every thing, and not it the master of you. If music is more to you than your duties, it is dangerous; but it ought to be a shame to you that it is dangerous.

If genial society and the flow of social merriment is sweet to you, and it seduces you from your work, it is perilous; but it is a shame that these things should so easily overcome you. You ought to build yourselves on a pattern so broad that you can take all these things along with you. They are the King’s; and you have a right to them. You have a right to be a child with children; the best fellow among young men. You have a right to all manly recreations, but you must see to it that you are stronger than the whole of them. You have a right to feel like other men, and to take part in all their interests, but you must be larger than them all.

You must feel that you are charged with the realities of the great world that is hanging over our heads and, my God, such a world! that never says any thing; that keeps silence above us, while the destinies of the ages have been rolling onward; and where there are such things going on, that I marvel no sound ever drops down to us. But if a man lives and has seen Him that is invisible, and It that is invisible, all these lower things are open books unto him; and, instead of weakening, they become elements of strength and power.