H. Harvey

“ The inner life of a preacher always stands revealed in the pulpit; it transfuses itself through his preaching. No mere declamation, no arts of rhetoric, no dramatic simulation of emotion, can conceal the absence of spiritual life. Moral earnestness can never be assumed; it is the attribute [p. 169] only of a soul profoundly feeling the power and reality of Divine truth. The man, therefore, who would speak God’s Word with the pungency and fervor of a Bunyan, a Baxter, a Flavel, or a Payson must, like them, be constant and fervent in prayer. ”

“ The rewards come, in part, in the present life. A faithful minister finds them alike in a clear conscience and a sense of the approval of God, and in his work itself and the blessed results following it. With all its care and toil, the ministry, to the man who knows his call of God to the work and devotes himself to it without reserve, is the happiest work on earth. “Sorrowful” he is, “yet always rejoicing.” Henry Martyn said: “I do not wish for any heaven on earth besides that of preaching the precious Gospel of Jesus Christ to immortal souls. ”

“ All true preaching, therefore, however wide the range of its topics, has a real relation to Christ; and no topic is fit for the pulpit which does not lead to Him. The themes of the preacher are essentially the same in all ages, for the human heart, in its depravity and needs, does not change with changing years; and God’s remedy, the simple, primitive Gospel, remains ever the same. The facts, the doctrines, the duties, the promises, the threatenings, of the Bible are the subjects for the pulpit; none are needed beyond those supplied in God’s Word. ”

“ Besides, a minister’s power is not measured by the immediate, outward result. The powerful revival in which hundreds are gathered into the church finds its occasion, indeed, in the peculiar gifts of some popular preacher, but its real causes often lie hid in the quiet, patient toil of other men differently gifted. Every man has his special adaptation and work—one sows and another reaps—and only in the great harvest at the end of the world will the actual results of each man’s work appear. ”

“ The reading of the Bible should form a part of public worship, both because it is the fitting recognition of Scripture as the Word of God and the church thus presents itself as reverently seeking instruction from Him, and because the omission of this would imply that the words of man are of higher moment than the words of God. The Scriptures should have a large and reverent use in the pulpit, as the fountain of all instruction and the sole standard of faith and practice. ”

“ Instability in the pastoral office is often a result of this. Freshness, originality in thought and expression, is lost, and the people, weary of repetitions and empty platitudes, cease to respect and love the pulpit. The grand object to be sought, then, is to combine the student and the pastor—a mind growing in knowledge and power by habitual work in the study and growing in executive ability and social force by constant activity in the church and contact with the people. ”

“ Avoiding these extremes, a pastor should never allow himself to be a cipher in social life but should make himself a vital force controlling and elevating it. The gravity of his character and work, however, requires him to use special care in regard to deportment and associations. He is, indeed, to be and to act out himself, but, while true to his own nature as a man, he is so to control it as never to forget his character and office as a minister of God. ”

“ The importance of a deep, all-pervading missionary spirit in the church can hardly be overrated. Its value is not to be estimated only in the work done and the money raised for the spread of the Gospel, but also in the enlarged and enriched life of the church itself, and the higher and nobler type of Christian character it thus presents to the world. A pastor who fails in this is failing at once to make his church a power for Christ in the world, and to secure within it the fulness of life which Christ intended it should possess. ”

“ Much of God’s book is in poetry addressed to the imagination, and the universe around us is crowded with endless forms of the beautiful. Where a cold, impassive logic fails, truth often comes with resistless power through the imagination and the sensibilities. The cultivation of this side of our nature is essential to the development of a full manhood and is important alike to pastoral and pulpit power. For this, one of the best means is the careful reading of the greater poets, the mighty creative minds whose works have stood the test of ages. ”

“ It ensures against sameness. Instead of growing stale, the preacher becomes more rich and varied in his range of thought and illustration with every added year. It gives, moreover, familiarity with the forms of Scripture thought and expression, and thus adds simplicity and force in addressing the Christian heart. Above all, it brings the preacher’s soul into constant, living communion with the spirit of the Bible, and the study becomes in this way a fountain of religious life ever flowing into his heart, and out of it into the hearts of the people. ”

“ Here nothing will overcome but a profound conviction that study—persistent, regular, life-long study—is the solemn, first duty of every man who ventures to stand up in the pulpit as an instructor of the people. ”

“ SECTION XX. THE PASTOR’S INNER LIFE.
Ancient asceticism, in demanding for the ministry a hidden life of communion with God, gave voice not only to one of the profoundest intuitions of the Christian consciousness, but also to one of the clearest teachings of Scripture. The men who deal with spiritual things must themselves be spiritual. Our age, while rightly rejecting a perverted asceticism, is tending to the opposite error. It is intensely practical. “Action!” is its watchword. This practicalness often becomes mere narrowness and shallowness. ”

“ In every subsequent age the indwelling Spirit of God has been the fountain of power in the ministry; and the mightiest men in the pulpit, renouncing self-sufficiency, have confessed, with Paul: “Our sufficiency is of God, who also hath made us able ministers of the New Testament” (2 Cor. iii. 5, 6) . Conscious of need, they have turned their souls upward to God, and this Divine Helper has entered and filled them; and all the faculties and culture of the man, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, have been transfused, elevated, enlarged, by this invisible but mighty Power. ”

“ As an educated man and a Christian minister, this duty naturally devolves on him; and his influence, rightly and quietly used, may often determine the question whether the schools shall be under Christian or non-Christian instruction, or whether the lecture-course shall be filled by men who revere God’s Word or by those who hate and traduce it. No minister ought to be indifferent to the public sentiment around him; for it is the intellectual and moral atmosphere in which his people live, and which must needs tend either to poison or to purify their souls. ”

“ Without this the very message the pastor is charged to preach he himself will fail to apprehend. He may, indeed, see the Christian doctrines through the eye of an impassive logic, but such a lifeless intellectualism, even when abstractly correct, has no power. The theology of the pulpit is a theology vitalized by prayer and glowing in the heart as a great, living reality. The hearts of men are most surely moved by living truths vividly realized in the speaker’s soul. ”

“ A kindly, unselfish heart, a quick, keen sympathy, a sensitive regard for others’ rights and feelings; a ready, generous appreciation for the excellences of others, and a tender charity for their faults and foibles—in short, a well-developed Christian manhood, with refined sensibilities, noble, pure, upright, transparent, touching life on every side, and fitted to bless whatever it touches,—this is the only real basis of correct manners. ”

“ If we preach Him as He is, we must proclaim His enthronement in heaven, His intercession with the Father, and His Headship of the church, with all the laws and ordinances He has instituted for it. And if we preach Him as He shall be, we must affirm the final triumph of His Gospel, His second coming, the resurrection and the judgment, and the glory to which He will raise His people with Himself. It is not possible to preach Christ apart from doctrine ”

“ It removes none of their perplexities; it touches none of their special sins; it discusses no questions vital in their life; it is not Ithuriel’s spear, to touch and expose the masked tempter charming and deluding their ears. The preacher is not in sympathy with the actual life of the congregation, and the sermon, however abstractly true and beautiful, does not move and bless them. ”

“ The contempt into which church disciplinary action sometimes falls is often due to the fact that few members are present, and the moral power, therefore, of the church is not behind their action, and that the manner, if not the spirit, of their proceedings befits rather the secular character of a political gathering than the seriousness and dignity of a church of Christ. Especially should the reception, the discipline, the exclusion of a member, or the election of a deacon or a pastor be an act of solemnity, and, as far as possible, be done by the whole body. ”

“ The pulpit, without doubt, has the highest claim. The pastor is there surrounded by his whole flock, and stands forth before the world as God’s ambassador, the accredited expositor and defender of the Gospel. No private duty can rise to the dignity and responsibility of this great public work, and no plea of pastoral exigencies or pastoral usefulness can excuse an habitual neglect of thorough preparation for the sacred desk. ”

“ Finally, pastoral visitation is a chief means of blessing and cementing the pastoral relation. Of late years pastorates have become of short duration. Hardly is a minister settled and fairly at work before the question of a change begins to be agitated. May not the decline of pastoral visitation, so faithfully done by many of our fathers in the ministry, be in part an explanation of this? The pastor’s personal religious life is not brought into contact with his people; as the result, their religious confidence is not won, and his ministry is not in sympathy with their needs. ”

“ All the doctrines of Scripture thus center in Christ, and we preach Him only as we preach them. Here, therefore, is the true power of the pulpit. Only as the sermon lodges these great truths in the soul is it a living force for the salvation of men. They constitute the sole foundation of genuine experience and practical appeal. A merely hortatory ministry is of necessity a failure, since it lays no basis for experience and Christian life in the convictions of the people. ”

“ To secure natural variety, give each meeting its own keynote, now of thanksgiving and praise, now of confession and humiliation, now of Christian hope, and again of some great truth or some practical duty. If it becomes evident, as it sometimes will, that you have struck the wrong key and thought and feeling are running in another channel, throw yourself heartily into that and make the most of it. If a pause occurs, be ready with a passage of Scripture, a hymn or remark, or call on individuals either to pray or relate experience, or to state some interesting fact you may know they possess. ”

“ Some of the most brilliant men in the ministry have here made an utter and terrible wreck of life.
Right habits are, therefore, of primary moment. A man can respect himself and secure the respect of others only as he exercises habitual self-control, holding passion and appetite in thorough subjection; without this the pastor lacks that consciousness of independence and that true manhood in which alone resides genuine moral power ”