MlDlfi^ri'iViT C'^LIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 
 
 3 1822 00856 1375
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OP 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 
 
 822668561375 
 
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 PURITAN PREACHING IN 
 ENGLAND 
 
 A STUDY OF PAST AND PRESENT
 
 THE LYMAN BEECH ER LECTURES ON PREACHING 
 AT YALE UNIVERSITY, OCTOBER, i8gg
 
 PURITAN PREACHING 
 IN ENGLAND 
 
 ^tuD^ of pa0t anD ^ttsitm 
 
 BV 
 
 JOHN BROWN, B.A., D.D. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "JOHN BUNYAN, HIS LIFE, TIMES, AND WORK," 
 
 "THE PILGRIM FATHERS AND THEIR PURITAN 
 
 SUCCESSORS," ETC. 
 
 LonHon 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 27 PATERNOSTER ROW 
 MDCCCC 
 
 [AN righti reserved}
 
 Copyright, 1900, by Charles Scribner's Sons 
 for the United States of America 
 
 Printed at The University Press, John Wilson and Son 
 Cambridge, U.S.A.
 
 TO THE 
 
 REV. GEORGE P. FISHER, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Dean 
 of the Faculty of Theology in 
 Yale University, 
 
 IN GRATEFUL REMEMBRANCE OF A PLEASANT 
 AND GREATLY VALUED FRIENDSHIP.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 Lectuke Page 
 
 I. Introductory. — The Preaching of 
 
 THE Friars 3 
 
 II. John Colet and the Preachers of 
 
 THE Reformation 35 
 
 III. The Cambridge Puritans .... 67 
 
 IV. Thomas Goodwin and the Cambridge 
 
 Platonists 99 
 
 V. John Bunyan as a Life-Study for 
 
 Preachers 131 
 
 VI. Richard Baxter, the Kiddermin- 
 ster Pastor 165 
 
 VII. Representative Preachers of Mod- 
 ern Puritanism. — (i.) Thomas Bin- 
 ney and Charles Haddon Spurgeon . 199 
 VIII. Representative Preachers of Mod- 
 ern Puritanism. — (ii.) R. W. Dale, 
 
 of Birmingham 231 
 
 IX. Representative Preachers of Mod- 
 ern Puritanism. — (iii.) Alexander 
 Maclaren, of Manchester 263
 
 INTRODUCTORY — THE PREACHING 
 OF THE FRIARS
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 INTRODUCTORY— THE PREACHING OF 
 THE FRIARS 
 
 Gentlemen op the Divixity School : 
 
 TN entering upon the series of Lectures I 
 -*- begin to-day let me do^o with a prelimi- 
 nary word of personal sort. When a preacher 
 consents to lecture on Preaching he is very 
 apt to be haunted by a fear lest that consent 
 should be interpreted to mean that he pre- 
 sents himself as an example of the ideal he is 
 about to hold up to others. Lest my consent 
 to speak to you should be so construed let me 
 hasten at once to shelter myself behind the 
 modest words with which even so great a 
 Church Father as Augustine felt it needful 
 to conclude the fourth book of his treatise on 
 Christian Doctrine. This work, intended as a 
 manual for preachers, thus concludes : " I give 
 thanks to God that with what little ability I 
 possess I have in these four books striven to 
 depict not the sort of man I am myself (for 
 my defects are very many), but the sort of
 
 4 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 man he ousfht to be who desires to labor in 
 sound, that is, in Christian doctrine, not for 
 his own instruction only, but for that of 
 others also." 
 
 The men who have been longest engaged 
 in the work of preaching Avill be those most 
 ready to understand the feeling expressed in 
 these words. They are painfully conscious 
 how imperfectly they have been able to 
 realize their own ideal. For the work of the 
 Christian ministry grows greater to our 
 thought the longer we are in it, and with this 
 growing sense of the greatness of the work 
 there comes a deepening consciousness of our 
 own insufficiency for it. One of the greatest 
 — perhaps the greatest — personality in the 
 pulpit of English Congregationalism during 
 the forty years between 1829 and 1869 was 
 Thomas Binney, the well-known pastor of' 
 the Weigh House Church in London. During 
 the years I have mentioned he not only 
 largely shaped the character of some of our 
 foremost laymen, but also inaugurated a new 
 era of preaching for the younger generation 
 of preachers. Year after year students for the 
 Christian Ministry gathered round that far- 
 famed pulpit to catch the living inspiration he 
 gave them for their own life-work. Among
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 5 
 
 those often found there in that earlier time 
 was one now known on both sides the Atlan- 
 tic as the great Manchester preacher — 
 Alexander Maclaren. Indulging in some 
 early reminiscences on the occasion of his 
 Jubilee as a minister, he spoke of Thomas 
 Binney as " the man that taught me to 
 preach." He went on to say : " I remember 
 when once, with the enthusiasm of the student, 
 I went to him to thank him for all that I had 
 learned from him, he said to me with tears in 
 his eyes — ' Don't speak about it ! It 's all 
 such a poor thing — it 's all such a poor 
 thing.' " After being for fifty years a 
 preacher himself. Dr. Maclaren said, " I 
 understand his point of view now as I did 
 not then." In like manner the late Dr. Dale 
 after preaching Christ's Gospel to his people 
 for forty years, wrote to them at the end of 
 that time, saying: " It seems to me sometimes 
 that I am only just beginning to catch a faint 
 glimpse of the glory and power of the redemp- 
 tion which God has wrought for us through 
 the Incarnation, Death, Resurrection, and 
 Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 When the invitation came to me to deliver 
 the present series of the Lyman Beecher 
 Lecture, there came with it the suggestion
 
 6 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 tliat some historical theme such as Puritan 
 Preaching (or Preachers) woukl be well with- 
 in the scope of the Founder's purpose. To 
 speak quite frankly, this suggestion really 
 decided me to consent to come to you. For 
 I could not but remember how many and 
 comprehensive have been the counsels of 
 those who have preceded me in this Lecture- 
 ship ; with what practical wisdom they have 
 treated such subjects as the training and 
 equipment of the preacher, the preparation 
 and delivery of the sermon ; and the best 
 methods of conducting church worship and 
 church affairs. I remembered, too, what 
 earnest words have again and again been 
 spoken on such still closer matters as that of 
 the divine call in the preacher's own soul, and 
 the watchful heed he must needs keep over 
 his own spiritual life. I felt that I could not 
 hope to add anything of value to what had been 
 already so powerfully said by so many distin- 
 guished men both from your side of the 
 Atlantic and ours. But when the subject of 
 Puritan Preachers and Preaching was sug- 
 gested to me, it seemed, first of all, to fall 
 in with a line of study which has always been 
 pleasant to me : next that it would be some- 
 what of a variation from lines previously
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 7 
 
 travelled ; and finally that something might 
 be gained to the present by a brief historical 
 review of the preaching of the past, and of 
 the forces which made it what it was. 
 
 Such review will, I venture to think, tend to 
 deepen your own sense of the importance of the 
 work in which your own life is to be spent. In 
 any department of service it is good for the 
 worker himself to feel that the work to be 
 done has always been felt to be well worth the 
 doing. And he who realizes the living place 
 which preaching, in its most vital forms, has 
 ever taken in the spiritual life of the Church 
 will need no further assurance of its great 
 importance. He will not fail to note that the 
 preacher's message and the Church's sj^iritual 
 condition have risen or fallen together. 
 "When life has gone out of the preacher it is 
 not long before it has gone out of the Chui'ch 
 also. On the other hand, when there has 
 been a revived message of life on the preach- 
 er's lips there comes as a consequence a re- 
 vived condition in the Church itself. The 
 connection between these two things has 
 been close, uniform, and constant. 
 
 Such a look-back as I propose to take may 
 also serve, I think, to quicken a holy am- 
 bition. The least and lowliest may be trans-
 
 8 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 figured and lieightened by the grandeur of 
 inherited associations; and if it be so, the 
 Christian preacher may well be inspired with 
 a noble enthusiasm. For as he looks back 
 into the past he finds himself standing in the 
 ranks with men of the most varied ability, 
 and with many of the highest genius, who 
 have consecrated their powers to this high 
 and noble service. It has been well said that 
 there is true stimulus to be gained from the 
 greatest masters of speech dealing with the 
 greatest of all themes — God, the soul, eter- 
 nity, sin, salvation, Clirist. And it may well 
 fill the humblest worker in the vineyard with 
 a just and holy ambition to do his best in this 
 high service, by God's help, and to prove him- 
 self not unworthy. 
 
 Then, too, a brief historical review not 
 merely of Preaching, but of Puritan Preach- 
 ing in England may have one other advantage 
 in this place. It may serve to strengthen 
 those bonds of brotherhood between America 
 and England which of recent years have been 
 growing so much closer, to the joy of all right- 
 minded and God-fearing men. For it can 
 scarcely fail to remind us of our oneness as a 
 people, not merely in our Anglo-Saxon speech 
 and lineage, but also in the deepest and most
 
 THE PREACH IX G OF THE FRIARS 9 
 
 sacred things of all. The makers of New 
 England were what they were in holy courage 
 and splendid daring for God and truth, because 
 before they reached the New England shores 
 they had sat side b}^ side in the old parish 
 churches of England, and listened to the 
 same Puritan sermons with the men who re- 
 mained on the other side the sea. Theologi- 
 cally and spirituall}^ the Pilgrim Fathers and 
 Cromwell's Ironsides had a common ancestry. 
 Some of the best elements in your national 
 life as well as ours may be traced to the men 
 of strong faith and masculine intelligence 
 who occupied the English pulpits at the end 
 of the sixteenth and the beginning of the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 In the hope, therefore, that we may gain 
 something of practical guidance and spiritual 
 stimulus as preachers, I will ask you to go 
 back with me into the past. And while the 
 requirements of time and space will necessi- 
 tate that we keep to one definite line, that 
 of Puritan Preaching and Preachers, I will 
 take leave to give a somewhat wide latitude 
 to the term " Puritan " as meaning thereby 
 those preachers who have laid more stress 
 upon Scripture than upon ecclesiastical in- 
 stitutions. Such men there were even before
 
 10 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the days of that Protestantism out of which 
 Puritanism came. It may be well, therefore, 
 to glance briefly at the Preaching Friars of 
 the Middle Ages, and at such men as John 
 Wicldiffe and John Colet, who made Protes- 
 tantism possible, before we reach Puritanism 
 proper. 
 
 In a remarkable essay on " The Tendencies 
 of Religious Thought in England," written 
 now more than thirty years ago, by Mark 
 Pattison, then rector of Lincoln College, 
 Oxford, he maintained that we ought to 
 apply the laws of thought and the succession 
 of opinion to the course of English theology. 
 He contended that there is a law of continuity 
 in these things which, whatever we may wish, 
 is never broken off ; that the religious opin- 
 ions prevailing in any given age largely 
 determine, either directly or by way of 
 reaction, those prevailing in the age that 
 follows; and that if we would hold any 
 clue through the maze of the present we 
 cannot neglect those immediate agencies in 
 its production which had their origin in the 
 century previous. This being so, and all 
 will admit that so it is, we shall not be 
 wandering aimlessly in this historic review 
 of Puritan Preaching, if first, by way of
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 11 
 
 introduction, we step back for a moment or 
 two and trace tlie influences at work in the 
 pre-Reformation Church which were more 
 or less preparing the way for it. If we do 
 so we shall find, I think, there were three 
 movements of considerable significance all 
 bearing on the revival of the preaching 
 function in the Church — the movement 
 initiated by Charles the Great at the begin- 
 ning of the ninth century ; the rise of the 
 Preaching Friars in the thirteenth ; and the 
 propaganda carried on by John Wickliffe and 
 his followers in the fourteenth. Let me 
 briefly advert to each of these. 
 
 Perhaps the darkest period in the history 
 of the Church is that from the eighth century 
 to the twelfth, when the living voice of the 
 preacher was but rarely and feebly heard, if 
 heard at all. Wherever missionaries labored 
 they were of necessity compelled to preach to 
 the people, but where Christianity had been 
 established for some time, preaching was 
 almost entirely superseded by ceremonial and 
 ritual service. To meet this evil condition 
 of things the vigorous mind of Charlemagne 
 earnestly engaged itself, and among his other 
 schemes for the improvement of his Empire 
 was one for the revival of preaching as the
 
 12 PURITAN rREACnfNG TN ENGLAND 
 
 means of religious elevation. The institutions 
 he set forth on this behalf show the import- 
 ance he attached to the office of the preacher, 
 and at the same time expose the miserable 
 unfitness of the clergy generally for the work 
 needing to be done. In the records of the 
 various Councils of the time, also, we find 
 repeated enactments issued, commanding 
 bishops and presbyters to preach to the 
 people in their own proper tongue ; instruct- 
 ing them also to preach diligently the 
 Catholic faith to all the people, and them- 
 selves to understand the Lord's Prayer, and 
 expound it to all, that each may know what 
 to ask of God. To help the weaker sort of 
 preachers the Emperor employed Paul Win- 
 fried to make a Collection of Homilies from 
 the writings of the Fathers, "culling some 
 flowers from their most pleasant fields ; " and 
 these Homilies, one hundred and seventy-six 
 in number, were for generations the main 
 source of pulpit instruction for all. The 
 clergy, the men most concerned, res2:)onded 
 with but little zeal to the earnestness of the 
 Emperor. Some of them idly read the pas- 
 sage from the Fathers in the original without 
 taking the trouble to translate it into the lan- 
 guage of the people, as it was intended and
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 13 
 
 ordered they should. With but few excep- 
 tions the religious teachers of the time occu- 
 pied themselves with mere ceremonies and 
 superstitious legends of the idlest sort. Such 
 preaching as there was consisted for the most 
 part of mystical and allegorical interpretations 
 of Scripture. The preacher who could only 
 give two or three meanings to a text was 
 looked ujDon as rather a weak brother. The 
 clerical homiletical canon prescribed at least 
 seven and if possible eight meanings for every 
 passage. Besides the literal meaning they 
 felt themselves bound to give, in addition: 
 the allegorical or parabolic ; the tropological 
 or etymological ; the anagogic or analogical ; 
 the typical or exemplar ; the anaphoric or 
 proportional ; and the mystical or apocalyptic- 
 As William Tyndale said of such men in 
 later days, they divided the scripture into so 
 many senses that the literal sense had become 
 nothing at all. " Twenty doctors," said he, 
 " expound one text twenty ways, and with an 
 antetheme of half an inch some of them draw 
 a thread nine days long." It was a curious 
 result of their rigid belief in the verbal in- 
 spiration of the sacred text that it led them 
 into a condition of mind in which they practi- 
 cally ignored the Scriptui-es altogether.
 
 14 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 At the beginning of the thirteenth century 
 we come to one of the most interesting periods 
 in the history of Latin Christianity, previous 
 to the Reformation — the time of the rise of 
 the Mendicant Orders of Preaching Friars, 
 Dominican and Franciscan, Among tlie 
 regular clergy actual preaching had fallen 
 into disuse. In theory it had come to be 
 regarded as the special privilege of the 
 bishops, and there were but few of these who 
 had either the gift, the inclination, or the 
 leisure to preach even in the cathedral cities. 
 In the rest of their dioceses their presence 
 was but occasional ; and then only in the 
 shape of a progress or visitation of pomp and 
 form rather than for any purpose of popular 
 instruction. For the people the services of 
 the Church took the form of ceremonial and 
 the only general teaching was the ritual. 
 
 The earlier monastic orders, the monks 
 who preceded the friars, withdrew themselves 
 from an evil world into the seclusion of the 
 cloister, leaving that world to go on its way 
 while they devoted all their care to the salva- 
 tion of their own souls, as the one great end 
 of life. It was their business to be the salt 
 of the earth, but they were more concerned to 
 guard the salt from losing its savor than
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 15 
 
 that the earth should be sweetened by it. 
 Meantime while the sacerdotalists within 
 the Church were sleeping, there were anti- 
 sacerdotalists outside who were preparing to 
 give them trouble and rouse them from their 
 slumbers. Secret forces were at work, and 
 soon a cry of distress arose from the clergy 
 that heretics outside the Church were by 
 their teaching drawing the people away from 
 them. There were those connected with this 
 revolutionary movement who held to the 
 creeds of the Church, while rejecting its 
 ritual, and repudiating the sacerdotal au- 
 thority of the clergy. Bernard found "the. 
 churches of Toulouse without people, the 
 people without priests, the priests without 
 respect." There were many who rejected 
 the whole hierarchical and ritual system as 
 well as the priesthood. The virtuous lay- 
 man, said they, is a priest, while the sanctity 
 of the priest is not in his priesthood but in 
 his life, and transubstantiation in the Euchar- 
 ist takes place not in the hands of the priest 
 but in the heart of the believer. 
 
 It was at this juncture when torpor had 
 seized upon the Church within and revolt 
 was raised against her without, that simul- 
 taneously and without concert, in two differ-
 
 16 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 ent countries the Friars Preachers, Dominican 
 and Franciscan entered upon their self-deny- 
 ing career. While not unconscious under 
 how many restrictions and with how many 
 reservations the description may be allowed 
 to stand I am disposed to describe them as 
 Puritans before Puritan times. Gathered 
 from every country and speaking therefore 
 various languages and dialects, Christendom 
 was soon overspread by a host of zealous, 
 active, devoted men whose great aim was the 
 religious instruction and elevation of the 
 people. While within monastic rules and 
 ■bound by the common vows of chastity, pov- 
 erty, and obedience, seclusion in a walled- 
 up monastery was no part of their discipline. 
 They were bent, not on fleeing the world, but 
 on subjugating or winning it. Their work was 
 among their fellow-men in village and ham- 
 let, in town and city, in market and camp. 
 One of their founders, St. Francis of Assisi, 
 has been called the John Wesley of the thir- 
 teenth century and he and his followers went 
 forth without purse or scrip, relying entirely 
 on the voluntary principle for maintenance. 
 The apostles of poverty and pity and an all- 
 embracing love, they went forth by two and 
 two to build up the ruined Church of God.
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 17 
 
 Moving about among the people and ask- 
 ing to be allowed to help them, like their 
 Master they had compassion on the multitude 
 and began to teach them many things. Com- 
 passion is the strength of the true teacher, 
 and instruction is a work of true compassion. 
 Above all things, these men aimed at being 
 effective preachers, and in the course of the 
 movement we find Hubert de Romanis, Gen- 
 eral of the Dominican Order, issuing a work, 
 entitled De Eruditione Prcedicatorum^ in which 
 he speaks of preaching as above the Mass and 
 all liturgical services. " For," says he, " of 
 the Latin Liturgy the laity understand noth- 
 ing ; but they can understand the sermon ; 
 and hence by preaching God is glorified in a 
 clearer and more open manner than by any 
 other act of worship. " This work of Hubert's 
 on preaching may be described as epoch-mak- 
 ing, appearing as it did after long centuries 
 of comparative silence. It sets forth to the 
 members of the Order the obligation under 
 which they were placed to preach the Gospel ; 
 the gravity and dignity of this great work; 
 and the qualifications necessary for its effective 
 discharge. Of all spiritual exercises in which 
 monks employed themselves, preaching was 
 set forth as the highest, and whoever pos- 
 
 2
 
 18 PURITAN PRE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 sessed the talent for it, was bound to culti- 
 vate it to the utmost. Hubert points out 
 that when once Christ had commenced preach- 
 ing, He spent His whole life at that employ- 
 ment; and from this he argued what great 
 effects might be produced in their own times ; 
 and maintained that the crowds who followed 
 some of those who did preach showed that the 
 people were ready to receive the spoken mes- 
 sage of truth. 
 
 While thug urging the importance of 
 preaching he also set before the members of 
 the Order the most effective way of doing it, 
 and the best way of making the most of them- 
 selves as preachers. " Though," says he, 
 " the talent for preaching is obtained through 
 the special gift of God, yet the wise preacher 
 will do his own part of the work, and dili- 
 gently study that he may preach correctly." 
 He warns Ihe brethren against making a mere 
 display of their own ingenuity and eloquence, 
 as, for example, deriving the theme of their 
 discourse from a text altogether foreign to the 
 matter in hand. Such devices, he thinks, are 
 more likely to excite derision than promote 
 edification. As for those who looked more 
 to fine words than true and noble thoughts, 
 they seemed to him to be like people who
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 19 
 
 were more concerned to display their beauti- 
 ful dishes than to provide food for their 
 guests. Looking through this book of his, 
 we find, as we might expect, that human 
 nature was very much the same then as now. 
 Then as now there were impressible and shal- 
 low hearers who had no root in themselves. 
 Many heard the word of God with great 
 delight, but it was only as if they were listen- 
 ing to a beautiful song. Others were kin- 
 dled to momentary glow to little purpose, for 
 after the sermon they became immediately 
 cold again. We find too from Hubert's book 
 that the ancestors of some of our present-day 
 critics were already to the fore. Others, said 
 he, are, or think they are, good judges of 
 preaching. He has spoken well or ill, say 
 they. Shaking their wise heads over the ser- 
 mon, they pronounced it too long or too short, 
 too abstruse or too trivial. But though these 
 illuminati of the thirteenth century never 
 failed to criticise the sermon, there was one 
 thing he said they never did — they never 
 applied what was said to their own lives. 
 
 It serves further to illustrate the awakened 
 interest in oral and vernacular teaching in 
 those times when we find the abbot of a mon- 
 astery, Guibcrt of Novigentum, also writing
 
 20 PURITAN PEE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 a book on the best method of preaching, and 
 declaring it to be the general duty of all 
 Christians, and not of bishops only, to labor 
 for the advancement of the Christian life in 
 others, according to the proportion of each 
 man's knowledge and gifts. In this work he 
 urges the preacher to have respect to the 
 wants of the simple and uneducated, as well 
 as the better educated, and to strive in his 
 preaching to unite depth with lucidity and 
 plainness of meaning. Both intellect and 
 heart should be united in this great work. 
 Also says he : " Let the sermon be preceded 
 by prayer ; so that the soul, fired with divine 
 love, may utter forth what it feels of God 
 with glowing words ; so that the preacher, as 
 he burns in his own heart, may enkindle a 
 flame also in the hearts of his hearers." He 
 would have the preacher enter into the very 
 souls of men, track sin through all its meshes 
 of deceitf ulness and show them to themselves. 
 " The preacher," he says, " should treat con- 
 cerning the motions of the inner man. This 
 was a thing so common to the experience of 
 all men that such a sermon should be ob- 
 scure to none." Every man could read in his 
 heart, written as it were in a book, what the 
 preacher told him of the various kinds of
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 21 
 
 temptation. No sermon he held to be more 
 useful than that which showed men to them- 
 selves, and led back to the secret recesses of 
 their own hearts those who, by the distraction 
 of outward things had become strangers to 
 themselves, presenting their own selves as 
 in a mirror before their own eyes. Heart- 
 experience on the part of the preacher is, he 
 says, his best equipment for speaking to the 
 hearts of others. As he who has been in the 
 heat and fierceness of the battle knows more 
 about it than he who has only heard about it 
 from others, so is it in spiritual warfare. He 
 whose own deepest inward consciousness bears 
 witness to the words he speaks will be able to 
 deal with spiritual conflicts with an altogether 
 different sort of authority from the man who 
 only repeats what he has heard, and he can 
 lay his finger on the precise inward details of 
 the soul. 
 
 It is clear from the facts which have come 
 down to us that great moral and spiritual 
 effects resulted from the preaching of the 
 Friars in the earlier, that is, the better days 
 of the movement. We read, for example, of 
 the Franciscan Berthold, a sort of John the 
 Baptist preacher of repentance in the cities 
 of Augsburg and Regensburg. From Thu-
 
 22 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 ringia to Bavaria and far into Switzerland he 
 travelled as a herald of the truth. First in 
 one city and then in another he was invited 
 to preach till at length no church was large 
 enough to hold the multitudes who came to 
 hear him. Many a time in the open fields he 
 preached with more than sixty thousand 
 people gathered round him. Fearlessly re- 
 buking the vices of all ranks in society, high 
 and low, rich and poor, many were conscience- 
 stricken under his searching words and came 
 to him, as the like sort came to John the 
 Baptist, freely confessing their sins. 
 
 The Preaching Friars soon passed over into 
 England with which we are now more imme- 
 diately concerned, — the Dominicans, a partj^ 
 of thirteen, arriving in 1220, and the Francis- 
 cans, nine in number, in 1224. So completely 
 did they revolutionize the mode of popular 
 address and make their way to the heart of the 
 people that within the space of thirty years 
 the nine Franciscans had multiplied to 1242 
 and were possessed of forty-nine convents in 
 various parts of the country. In England, 
 as on the continent, the Church had stood 
 coldly aloof from the mass of the people, a 
 favorite illustration with churchmen being 
 that the clergy and laity were as distinct
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 23 
 
 elements as wine and water. The Preaching 
 Friars changed all that. Getting right in 
 among the people whom the Church had so 
 long neglected, they adopted a style of ad- 
 dress more suited to their audiences, appeal- 
 ing as it did more directly to the feelings, 
 being more popular and more dramatic. The 
 indolent, lifeless secular clergy resented the 
 intrusion of these new-comers whom they re- 
 garded as mere fanatics and troublesome in- 
 novators. The charges, however, which they 
 brought against the Friars tend rather to exalt 
 them in our opinion than otherwise. They 
 accused them of studying eloquence and the 
 art of rhetoric in the composition of their 
 sermons ; of transgressing the precept of the 
 Apostle who laid it down that preaching was 
 not to be with wisdom of words ; of making 
 their addresses agreeable to the people ; and 
 finally they said that by mixing with the people 
 as they did, they dragged down the dignity of 
 the clerical office. Better be select and genteel, 
 thought they, even though you die of gentility. 
 One significant fact about this thirteenth 
 century movement is that while aiming at 
 what some would call mere popular preach- 
 ing it allied itself with an enlightened love 
 of learning. The scientific speculative spirit
 
 24 PURITAN PRE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 of tliat time, so far as it was imbued with 
 religious feeling, was powerfully influenced 
 by leading Franciscans and Dominicans. As 
 in the first century the greatest missionary, 
 the Apostle Paul, was also the greatest theo- 
 logian, so in the thirteenth century the most 
 effective teachers of the people were the 
 most ardent metaphysicians and theologians. 
 Among them we find the great schoolmen 
 of the continent — Albertus Magnus, Bona- 
 ventura and Thomas Aquinas ; also the great 
 Enjxlish schoolmen — Alexander of Hales, 
 John Duns Scotus and Roger Bacon. The 
 Franciscans had true poets among them. 
 Thomas of Celano was the author of the 
 terrible, sublime hymn. Dies Irae ; and Jaco- 
 pone, the greatest poet of the Franciscan 
 school, endowed with true poetic genius 
 and penetrated with the fire of creative pas- 
 sion, composed the celebrated Stabat Mater. 
 Then, too, when we visit the memorable 
 monastery of San Marco in Florence we 
 cannot forget that in later years Fra Angel- 
 ico, the gentle painter whose atmosphere 
 seemed to be innocence, holiness, and purity, 
 was a Dominican, as was also Savonarola, the 
 great Florentine preacher of righteousness 
 to an age of dissolute worldliness.
 
 THE PREACHING OF TEE FRIARS 25 
 
 The late Mr. Brewer, a scholar deeply 
 versed in the knowledge of original sources 
 of English history earned our gratitude by 
 bringing to light the remarkable series of 
 documents published under the title of Mo- 
 nu7ncnta Franciscana. In an introduction to 
 that work he asks : "Is it not remarkable 
 that the Friars, the most ardent upholders 
 of scholastic theology, were precisely the men 
 who constituted the most popular preachers 
 of the age? that their sermons are far from 
 being dry expositions of scholastic philoso- 
 phy? that instead of being appeals to the 
 reason against authority, they contain the 
 most direct appeals to the imagination and 
 the feelings of the people to whom they 
 were addressed?" It is certainly a note- 
 worthy fact for all time and for every gen- 
 eration of preachers that in the case of the 
 Friars we have the most effective popular 
 preaching of the thirteenth century associ- 
 ated with the best learning to which the 
 human mind had attained in that century. 
 The combination must ever be maintained. 
 Mere popular appeals are apt in time to be- 
 come shallow and evanescent ; on the other, 
 hand, mere scholarship without broad popu- 
 lar sympathies becomes dry and poAverless.
 
 26 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 The combination of the two is the ideal for 
 every preacher to aim at in his work. The 
 truest simplicity, the most effective putting of 
 the revelations of God may best be associated 
 with the most solid learning attainable by man. 
 
 I am not giving you a liistory of the Friars ; 
 if I were I should have to admit that the 
 Franciscan and Dominican orders, like the 
 older monastic orders before them, became 
 corrupted by the very wealth they professed 
 at the outset to abjure. They fell from their 
 high estate, the gold became dim, the most 
 fine gold changed. We cannot dwell on the 
 utter decay of their ideal, or speak of the 
 fetters of stupid servitude which in a later 
 period of their history they imposed on the 
 freedom of thought and science. We can 
 only mourn over it. It has been well said 
 that, had not ambition corrupted them, they 
 might have revolutionized society, and been 
 the precursors of a far gentler and more 
 spiritual Reformation than that of the six- 
 teenth century. But, the salt having lost its 
 savor, how could it preserve the world ? 
 
 But though the ardor of popular sym- 
 pathy displayed by the Friars at first died 
 down under the corrupting influence of 
 wealth and sensual indulgence ; and though
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 27 
 
 their scholastic philosophy dwindled at last 
 into mere meaningless and wearisome subtle- 
 ties, falling by the weight of its own 
 dialectic, they were not without great and 
 lasting influence.' Taking their best days, 
 that is, the first twenty-five years of their 
 history, we can see how they form a link 
 between modern and mediaeval times. The 
 unreservedness with which as Schoolmen they 
 ranged through every region of metaphysics 
 and divinity led in turn to equal freedom 
 of discussion, equal unreservedness on politi- 
 cal lines of thought. Paradoxical as it may 
 seem, it is nevertheless true that the Domini- 
 can and Franciscan orders, established for 
 the purpose of strengthening the Papacy, pre- 
 pared the way in no slight degree for that 
 Reformation which shattered the Papacy. 
 With truth it may be said that even John 
 Wickliffe himself, the Morning Star of the 
 Reformation, as he has been called, is the 
 genuine descendant of the Friars Preachers, 
 turning their wisdom against themselves, and 
 carrying out the principles he had learnt 
 from them to their legitimate conclusions, 
 both ecclesiastical and political. The con- 
 tinuity of history may sometimes be traced 
 along the most unexpected lines.
 
 28 PURITAN PRE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 The preaching of the Friars during the 
 time they were most active and zealous not 
 only produced its own direct effect on the 
 popular mind, but, by way of rivalry, it had 
 the effect of stirring up the bishops and 
 clergy themselves. The Synod of Oxford of 
 1223 enjoined the clergy "not to be dumb 
 dogs, but with salutary bark to drive away 
 the disease of spiritual wolves from the flock." 
 The Bishop of Coventry required all his 
 clergy to address their people assembled on 
 the Lord's day, or other festivals, in certain 
 words which constituted a rhetorical sermon 
 on the seven deadly sins. The Bishop of 
 Lincoln gave directions to his clergy to 
 preach on Sundays, and gave them the heads 
 of their teaching ; and the Bishop of Exeter 
 drew up a similar book for his diocese of 
 which he required every parish to have a 
 copy under penalty of a fine. Canon X, of 
 the Provincial Synod of Lambeth of 1281 
 A, D., gives us some insight into the sort of 
 teaching prevailing in the Church itself, half 
 a century later than the coming of the Friars. 
 The preamble first speaks of the ignorance 
 of priests and the consequent debasement of 
 the people. For the remedy of such mis- 
 chiefs, the Canon goes on to say : " We ordain
 
 TEE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 29 
 
 that every priest who presides over a people 
 do four times a year, that is, once in each 
 quarter of the year, on one or more festival 
 days, either by himself or by another, ex- 
 pound to the people in popular language, 
 without any fanciful subtleties the fourteen 
 Articles of Faith, the Ten Commandments 
 of the Lord, the two Evangelical precepts of 
 Charity, the seven works of Mercy, the seven 
 deadly sins with their progeny, the seven 
 principal virtues, and the seven sacraments 
 of Grace." 
 
 It is during this period of the Church's 
 history we come upon two or three manu- 
 script specimens of certain Metrical Homilies, 
 which took the place of sermons, and which 
 there is reason to believe were extensively 
 used in the churches, especially in the north- 
 ern counties. They are interesting as giving 
 the English popular speech of five or six 
 centuries ago ; as among the earliest literary 
 efforts of the period immediately preceding 
 that of Chaucer ; as illustrating the religious 
 life and habits of a time long gone by ; and 
 as being the only remains extant of mediiseval 
 popular preaching in the fourteenth century. 
 As respects the substance of these Homilies 
 they consist of portions of Scripture selected
 
 30 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 from the Gospels. The homilist first goes 
 over the narrative with such reflections as 
 may best convey the practical lesson to his 
 hearers, and then enforces some point of doc- 
 trine or practice by a " narracio," that is, a 
 story taken from the Gospels themselves, or 
 from ecclesiastical legends, or the popular 
 tales of the day. Their peculiarity lies, of 
 course, in their being in metrical form, though 
 this was not altogether a new departure, since 
 metrical versions of Scripture had been 
 known in England from the time of Caedmon 
 in the seventh century onwards. While there 
 is much in these Homilies which is coarse 
 and foolish there is much also of sound 
 gospel truth and wholesome moral teaching. 
 They contain faithful, pointed rebukes of 
 evildoers without respect of persons, and 
 earnest calls to righteousness of life ; while 
 of the grace, condescension and saving power 
 of our Lord, and of the need of faith in 
 Him and repentance toward God, the various 
 writers of the Homilies sj)eak strongly, fre- 
 quently and clearly. 
 
 The preaching of the Friars was followed 
 by the zealous propaganda of John Wickliffe 
 and his successors ; who, while working on 
 much the same lines as the Friars, set forth
 
 THE PREACHING OF THE FRIARS 31 
 
 a more scriptural and evangelical faith. Tins 
 Lollard movement was instinct with life. 
 As preachers they went forth through the 
 realm from county to county, and from 
 town to town; preaching from day to day, 
 not only in churches and churchyards, but 
 also in open market-place and public thorough- 
 fare. The life thus created, under the bless- 
 ing of heaven never really died out ; and it 
 may be safely maintained that without the 
 Lollards of the foui-teenth century the Refor- 
 mation of the sixteenth would not have 
 been possible. Long after Wickliffe himself 
 had passed away, as John Foxe tells us, 
 " there were secret multitudes who tasted 
 and followed the sweetness of God's Holy 
 Word, and whose fervent zeal may appear 
 by their sitting up all night in reading and 
 h.earing." The fruit of the labors of those 
 godly, self-denying preachers was to be seen 
 in after days in what is ever the true 
 preacher's highest reward — in the " earnest 
 seekings, the busy zeal, the watchings, the 
 sweet assemblies, the love and concord, and 
 the godly living " of those who heard them.
 
 II 
 
 JOHN COLET AND THE PREACHERS 
 OF THE REFORMATION
 
 LECTURE II 
 
 JOHN COLET AND THE PREACHERS 
 OF THE REFORMATION 
 
 IN the lecture of yesterday I asked you to 
 review with me the influence exerted by 
 the preaching of the Friars — Franciscan and 
 Dominican, and by the earnest propaganda of 
 Wickhffe and the Preachers he sent forth. 
 This brings us to the border-land of the 
 Reformation time in England. Before we 
 quite pass within that time and onward to the 
 Puritan period which followed, there is one 
 man who stood midway between the old 
 time and the new — John Colet the Oxford 
 Reformer — whose work and influence de- 
 serve our careful attention. 
 
 The effect upon Europe of the taking of 
 Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, has 
 often been pointed out. Dark were the 
 prophecies and dire the forebodings which 
 followed that event, and which there was 
 much in the previous history of the Moslem 
 to justify. To the men of that time it 
 Seemed as if the end of the world had come,
 
 36 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 or at least, that the death-knell of civilization 
 had sounded. Yet, strangely enough, that 
 which was feared would be the destruction 
 of learning proved to be its revival. For, 
 fleeing before the ruthless Turk, scholars of 
 great reputation migrated from the East to 
 the West, bringing their manuscripts with 
 them. Then, too, as God so willed it — for 
 it is He who determines the time when new 
 and powerful forces shall enter into the life 
 of nations — just then came the invention of 
 the printing press, bringing within the reach 
 of the many the great works of literature 
 once only accessible to the few. In this way 
 Italy became once more the seat of learning ; 
 and the city of Florence especially, under the 
 patronage of a De Medici, drew to itself 
 the younger and more enthusiastic spirits of 
 the new time now dawning. Among these 
 was John Colet, an Oxford student, the son 
 of a wealthy London merchant, and the friend 
 of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More. 
 
 He seems to have left Oxford about 1493, 
 and travelled to Italy at a time when in 
 Rome the crimes of Pope Alexander VI. and 
 the Borgias were the scandal of Europe on 
 the one side; and when in Florence the 
 powerful preaching of Savonarola set all men
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 37 
 
 thinking of the evil of the times on the other. 
 We have now no means of knowing how 
 the change was brought about while he was 
 abroad, but we do know that John Colet, 
 who while he was at Oxford had "devoured 
 Cicero " and diligently read Plato and Ploti- 
 nus, now "gave himself up entirely to the 
 study of the Holy Scriptures." Erasmus, who 
 tells us this, tells us also that alongside this 
 main pursuit he paid diligent attention to 
 such chronicles and English classics as he 
 could lay hold of, with the object of master- 
 ing their style, and so preparing himself for 
 the great work of preaching the Gospel in 
 England. After being abroad some three 
 years he returned to Oxford in 1496, and 
 though not in Orders and without a doctor's 
 degree, he astonished the University circles 
 b}^ announcing a free course of lectures on 
 St. Paul's Epistles. 
 
 In those days a venture like this was new, 
 required courage and created a stir. Doctors 
 and abbots, men of all ranks and titles, were 
 seen mingling with the students in the lecture 
 hall ; and having come once they came again 
 and again, "bringing their note-books with 
 them." The venture was entirely successful 
 and tliere were various reasons why it should
 
 38 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 be. First of all the lecturer was endowed 
 with that clear and vigorous mode of speech 
 which always tells. In one of his letters 
 Erasmus says to Colet : " You say what you 
 mean, and mean what you say. Your words 
 have birth in your heart, not on your lips. 
 They follow your thoughts instead of your 
 thoughts being shaped by them. You have 
 the happy art of expressing with ease what 
 others can hardly express with the greatest 
 labor." The toil of mastering the English 
 style from the English classics had gone first, 
 and this facility which seemed so natural and 
 so easy was the outcome of th-e toil. But 
 while from this letter of Erasmus we learn 
 one of the secrets of Colet's success, it was 
 not the only one. For, for the first time he 
 made the Bible to these men a living book. 
 Taking the Epistle to the Romans and show- 
 ing the logical sequence of thought, the con- 
 nection of part with part, he made them feel 
 the spirit of the whole; so that they were 
 conscious not merely of being in contact with 
 the Epistle, but still more of being in contact 
 with the man who wrote it. More after the 
 manner of the nineteenth century than the 
 fifteenth, he brought out the personal traits 
 of the apostle's writings, — his " vehemence of
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 39 
 
 speaking," which did not give him time to 
 perfect his sentences ; the rare prudence and 
 tact with which he balanced his words to 
 meet the needs of the different classes ad- 
 dressed ; his " modesty," " toleration," self- 
 denial and consideration for others ; and the 
 reality of application there was in many of 
 his sayings to the circumstances and needs of 
 the time. He stepped aside, too, from the 
 old time-worn ruts of those who furbished up 
 authorities and illustrations merely from the 
 Church fathers. He sought these in the 
 broad fields of the best literature and from 
 the scholars of his own time. The men who 
 listened to him felt that he made the Bible to 
 be altogether a new thing to them, a living 
 force entering into the current of their life. 
 
 After carrying on this work from 1496 to* 
 1505 Colet was made Dean of St. Paul's, and 
 the sphere of his influence was thus trans- 
 ferred from Oxford to London. By this 
 change his work was made to tell more 
 directly upon the people at large, for in the 
 same earnest spirit that work was still con- 
 tinued. The chief citizens of London filled 
 the places round his desk hitherto filled by 
 University men. While there was a change 
 of place there was no change of purpose, or
 
 40 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 of method either. The only change there 
 was lay in the fact that he now seemed 
 drawn rather to the Gospels than to the 
 Epistles. The place in his mind hitherto 
 filled by Paul was now yielded more com- 
 pletely to the Person and teachings of Christ. 
 But his method was the same, for his dis- 
 courses were not upon isolated texts, but 
 continuous expositions of the facts of the 
 Saviour's life and of the substance of His 
 teaching. That which had made the Bible a 
 new and fascinating book to the men of lit- 
 erature in Oxford, made it a new and fascin- 
 ating' book for the men of business in London 
 also. 
 
 Is there not in these facts a certain suggest- 
 iveness for ourselves ? Colet's method of so 
 dealing with the Scriptures as to make them 
 living books to the men of his time, bringing 
 out the richness and fulness of their teaching, 
 starts again the question, often started be- 
 fore, as to the desirability or otherwise of 
 continuous expository preaching. One can 
 only say that it depends how a man does it 
 as to whether it is desirable or not. It may 
 be made a refuge for idleness, the man flitting 
 over many things because he has not thought 
 out one thing ; or, it may be the outcome of
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFOR.VATIOX 41 
 
 the best work a man can do. It has been 
 objected that exposition of continuous sort 
 tends to unutterable tedium and weariness, 
 and men will point you to a folio volume of 
 Arthur Hildersam's, for example, containing 
 a hundred and eight lectures on the fourth 
 chapter of John's Gospel, and to another 
 folio of his containing a hundred and fift}-- 
 two lectures on the nineteen verses of the 
 51st Psalm; and they will tell you that 
 Joseph Caryl began his Exposition of Job 
 with eiofht hundred hearers and ended with 
 only eight, the patience of his audience not 
 being equal to that of the patriarch on whose 
 experiences he descanted so long. The late 
 Mr. Spurgeon said that he never dared enter 
 upon a continuous course of teaching, that 
 brethren of extraordinary research and pro- 
 found learning might do it, but he could not, 
 for he was obliged to owe a great deal of his 
 strength to variety rather than profundity. 
 It seemed to him that to go through a long 
 epistle must require a great deal of genius in 
 the preacher, and demand a world of patience 
 on the part of the hearers. He never could 
 preach, he said, till he met with a text that 
 gripped him by the hand ; that when a text 
 gets a hold of us, we may be sure that we have
 
 42 PURITAN PRF.ACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 a hold of it and may safely deliver our souls 
 upon it. For his part, he must take the text 
 that God sent him and he knows which it is by 
 these signs, that it grew before his eye like 
 the fabled seed which developed into a tree 
 while the observer watched it ; that it charmed 
 and fascinated him or weighed him to his 
 knees, loading him with the burden of the 
 Lord. He must wait for that elect word, 
 he said, even if he had to wait till within an 
 hour of the service. 
 
 Well, that is one side of the question, no 
 doubt, but there is another side. I am con- 
 vinced, for my own part, that the great w^ant of 
 many Christian people in our time is a more 
 thorough and systematic knowledge of the 
 Word of God. They need it for spiritual 
 enlio-htenment and also for Christian stead- 
 fastness. I have spoken with people who 
 have listened to sermons all their lives and 
 nothing surprises me more than to hear them 
 relate their spiritual perplexities. They are 
 often such as never would have arisen had 
 they read their Bibles more intelligently. A 
 man who has grasped the central idea of a 
 book, mastered its main principles, must of 
 necessity see its details in a much clearer 
 light than the man who has not. I am not
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 43 
 
 contending for an elaborate and exhaustive 
 treatment of every line of every verse like 
 that which John Owen has given in his Ex- 
 position of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Life 
 is not long enough, and things move too fast 
 nowadays for that. But even the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews, as Dr. Dale has shown us, may 
 become instinct with life, when a living man 
 takes it in hand and holds it up to the light. 
 His exposition of that Epistle, as his biogra- 
 pher tells us, was the work of a busy man, 
 and for that very reason comes close to prac- 
 tical life and its daily needs. The truths 
 taught in the Epistle are translated into the 
 speech of our own day ; there is nothing about 
 it merely academic and no remoteness in the 
 teaching. I venture to think that people of 
 average intelligence who paid anything like 
 fair attention to that exposition would feel at 
 the end that not only had light been shed on 
 the Epistle itself, but also on the whole of 
 their Bible such as they had never had before. 
 Every man must be a judge for himself and 
 take the gauge of his own powers, but if now 
 and again in the course of a ministry — to 
 say no more — the preacher would give some 
 amount of systematic instruction as to the 
 mind of the Spirit, he would go far to estab-
 
 44 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 lish his people in the truth, strengthen their 
 shaken faith and revive their spiritual passion. 
 And so far as he himself is concerned he 
 would come to know as never before some 
 of the deepest joys of the Christian student's 
 life. Mr. Spurgeon has told us how a single 
 text may grip, may charm and fascinate you. 
 But a whole book of Scripture may grip you 
 closer and charm and fascinate you even 
 more. By way of illustration let me again 
 refer to Dr. Dale. In 1882 he published a 
 series of Expositions of the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians which he had first given to his 
 own people. Twelve years later, only a few 
 months before his death, writing to a corre- 
 spondent he says : " If I can lay my hands on 
 a copy of my lectures on the Ephesians this 
 afternoon I shall take the liberty of sending 
 it to you. It is the book of mine that I like 
 best : Paul found me the material, and I had 
 nothing to do but to say over again what he 
 had already said." Yes, but in another letter 
 he shows us that he not only said over again 
 what Paul had said but that he also saw 
 over again the streaming glory which Paul 
 had seen. Referring to the same epistle and 
 writing to another expositor, he says : " I 
 hope that you had as much delight in work-
 
 TEE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 45 
 
 ing at the Epistle as I had. Some parts of it 
 intoxicated me ; whether I was in the body 
 or out of the body I could hardly tell." So, 
 there are joys not of this world to the preacher 
 himself as well as to his people when he digs 
 deep into the rich mine of sacred truth. 
 
 Passing from John Colet and his exposi- 
 tory methods let us now place ourselves in 
 thought in that Reformation time which he 
 lived not to see but for which he did much to 
 prepare. After the Reformation had become 
 an accomplished fact, and men had time to 
 realize the true state of affairs, it was found 
 that the most urgent need of the nation was 
 that of preachers for the people. For under 
 the Papacy preaching had been made to give 
 place so almost entirely to mere ceremonial 
 and ritual in worship that there were very few 
 who could preach. In 1535 the Archbishop 
 of York said that in all his province, which at 
 that time included the northern part of Lan- 
 cashire, he did not know of twelve ministers 
 who were able to preach. In many parishes 
 there had been little of any religious teaching 
 of Scriptural sort for generations. The Presi- 
 dent of the Council of the North informed 
 the Privy Council that there were churches 
 and churches where there had literally never
 
 46 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 been a sermon for years. The prophet had 
 given place to the priest, and always Avhen 
 that is the case, the people's ignorance be- 
 comes the nation's danger. It was felt that 
 something must be done, and done at once, 
 and the remedy which seemed to lie nearest 
 to hand was to order the preachers in the 
 Cathedral churches to divide themselves in 
 the dioceses where they dwelt, and travel 
 from place to place preaching the Word to 
 the people. Parts of the province of Can- 
 terbury were quite as benighted as some of 
 those in the province of York. There, too, 
 there were parishes in the churches of which 
 a sermon had not been heard for years. There 
 were some who thought it to be a great step 
 in advance when it was laid down by au- 
 thority of the State that a sermon must be 
 preached in each church once every quarter. 
 While on the other hand there were others 
 who replied with disappointment that four 
 sermons in a year, and only four, were as little 
 likely to make perfect men in Christ Jesus as 
 four strokes of an axe were to fell a mighty 
 oak, or as four showers of an hour long were 
 to moisten the hard dry earth and make it 
 fruitful the whole year long. 
 
 In Lancashire men were appointed who were
 
 THE PREACUERS OF THE REFORMATION 47 
 
 called King's Preachers, whose duty it was 
 to itinerate, preaching the doctrines of the 
 Reformation in the more benighted parts of 
 the country. Foremost among these was 
 John Bradford, who was afterwards one of 
 the martyrs of Queen Mary's time, a man of 
 bold and daring energy who had great power 
 of command over an audience. Filled with the 
 spirit of God and with a passionate love for 
 Christ and the souls of men, wherever he was 
 announced to preach the people crowded round 
 him, their beating hearts responding to his 
 burning words. A contemporary of his who 
 often heard him preach sets him before us in a 
 way which may make him serve as a model in 
 some not unimportant respects. " He was," 
 he says, " in those times a master of speech ; 
 but he had learned from his Master not to 
 speak what he could speak, but what his 
 hearers could hear. He knew that clearness 
 of speech was the excellency of speech ; and 
 therefore resolved with a good orator to speak 
 beneath himself rather than above his audi- 
 toiy. Otherwise his eloquence was confessedly 
 great, that is, native, masculine, modest, in 
 one word, heavenly. For if you mark him 
 he savors and breathes nothing but heaven ; 
 yea, he sparkles, thunders, lightens, pierces
 
 48 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the soft, breaks only the stony heart. Whether 
 he were better preacher or scholar, is to me a 
 great question. He was of a most sweet, 
 humble and melting spirit, who ( I know not 
 how ) will be in a man's bosom ere he be 
 aware, and willingly win him from himself to 
 Christ." 
 
 There is one other man of that time, Brad- 
 ford's colleague in service and afterwards his 
 fellow-sufferer in the fires of martyrdom, Hugh 
 Latimer, who also stands before our minds 
 as a sturdy English preacher, and one of the 
 heroes of the Reformation time. Not many 
 years ago an elm tree shed its autumn leaves 
 over the spot in St. Paul's churchyard where 
 once stood in London city a cross wliich sui*- 
 mounted the most celebrated pulpit in Eng- 
 land. The tree has disappeared, like the 
 structure it was planted to commemorate, 
 but in Hugh Latimer's sermons we can still 
 recall some of the glowing sentences which 
 in the bygone time made the old cathedral 
 walls to echo. Other preachers have excelled 
 him in passion, stirring rhetoric, refinement, 
 and accuracy ; but few have proved his equals 
 in broad forceful influence over all classes of 
 people, and his sermons remain as the prose 
 classics of his day. There was a racy fresh-
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 49 
 
 ness, often a strong sense of humor, and 
 always a sturdy vigor about his utterances 
 which in days when the newspaper had not 
 yet appeared and the public meeting was not 
 yet organized, dealt trenchantly with the vices, 
 the follies, and the superstitions of the time. 
 While faithfully proclaiming Bible fact and 
 truth he was vigilant and urgent against all 
 sorts of abuses both in Church and State, in 
 private and in social life. With his homely 
 invective he spares no class, passes by no form 
 of oppression. His sermons were often defi- 
 cient in method, but as you might see by the 
 faces of the people they always hit the mark 
 and made the target ring. No one reads them 
 now for theological instruction, but they are 
 still fresh and living, which is more than can 
 be said for a good deal of that kind of litera- 
 ture. The lordly bishops of the time who 
 sat in lofty dignity on their cathedral thrones, 
 or indulged the love of ease in stately palaces, 
 leaving other people to do the preaching, 
 must have winced under a passage which is 
 familiar enough, but which mil bear repeat- 
 ing. "Who is the most diligentest bishop 
 and prelate in all England, that passeth all 
 the rest in doing his office ? I can tell, for 
 I know him who it is — I know him well. 
 
 4
 
 50 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 But now I think I see you listening and 
 hearkening that I should name him. There 
 is one that passeth all others and is the most 
 diligent prelate and preacher in all England. 
 And will you know who it is? I will tell 
 you — it is the devil. He is the most dili- 
 gent preacher of all others. He is never out 
 of his diocese, he is never from his cure ; ye 
 shall never find him unoccupied ; he is ever 
 in his parish ; he keepeth residence at all 
 times ; ye shall never find him out of the 
 way ; call for him when you will, he is 
 ever at home ; he is ever at his plough ; no 
 lording nor loitering can hinder him — you 
 will never find him idle, I warrant you. And 
 his office is to hinder religion, to maintain 
 superstition, to set up idolatry. When the 
 devil is resident and hath his plough going, 
 then away with books and up with candles ; 
 away with Bibles and up with beads ; away 
 with the light of the Gospel and up with the 
 light of candles, yea, at noonday. . . . Down 
 with Christ's cross and up with purgatory 
 pickpurse — the Popish purgatory, I mean .... 
 Up with man's traditions and his laws, down 
 with God's traditions and His most holy 
 Word; down with the old honor due to 
 God, and up with the new god's honors."
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 51 
 
 That was living talk straight from the soul of 
 a living man, and if you could always get 
 these two things together, no one wo aid ever 
 dream of saying that the time will come when 
 the pulpit will be superseded by the press. 
 For the great work of the Church of God in 
 the world a living man must always be more 
 than a printed sheet. 
 
 Hugh Latimer was what other prophets of 
 God have been — both martyr and prophet, 
 and with his martyrdom came the downfall of 
 Protestantism for a while. During the five 
 years Queen Mary sat on the English throne 
 there is nothing to be said about the preacher 
 or his vocation, for he was supplanted by the 
 priest and hunted from one hiding place to 
 another. The priests of the Romish Baal 
 were in the high places of the land, and the 
 prophets of the Lord were either burning at 
 the stake or wearing out their lives in exile. 
 The history of those five years is stained with 
 the blood of brave and saintly men and 
 women ; but all noble self-sacrifice for truth 
 and right leaves a blessing behind. Those 
 years have made it impossible that ever such 
 years should come again. They have left 
 memories behind them which Rome with all 
 her craft and cunning will never be able to
 
 52 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 wipe away ; and they explain why it was that 
 when they came to an end at hxst tlie wheel 
 swung full cycle round and Protestantism 
 was once more the religion of the realm. 
 
 Out of a restored Protestantism came that 
 Puritanism which is Protestantism in its more 
 fully developed form. And now that we have 
 reached this point, it may be well before pro- 
 ceeding to speak of the preachers of Puritan 
 times, to define what we mean by Puritanism 
 and to try to reduce to something like mental 
 order the religious and ecclesiastical phenom- 
 ena of the Elizabethan Church. Speaking 
 generally it may be safely said that in the 
 beginning of Elizabeth's reign that Church, 
 so far as its leaders were concerned, was not 
 only Protestant but Puritan and Calvinistic. 
 The Roman Catholic bishops — all but one 
 who faced about — had disappeared ; and the 
 Anglican divines who took their places were 
 all of them stanch Protestants. During the 
 troubles of the Marian time the latter were 
 living as exiles for their faith in Frankfort, 
 Strasburg, Geneva, Zurich and elsewhere, 
 where they were hospitably received by the 
 Foreign Protestants, between whom and 
 themselves warm friendships still continued 
 to subsist even after the return of the exiles,
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 53 
 
 as the Zurich Letters remain to testify. If 
 these men could have had their way they 
 would have set up forms of worship not far 
 removed from those of continental Protes- 
 tantism. Bishop Jewell may be taken as a 
 thoroughly representative man of the earlier 
 time, and, writing to his friend BuUinger at 
 Zurich in 1566, speaking of the vestments and 
 the ceremonies he plainly says : " I wish that 
 all, even the slightest vestiges of popery, 
 might be removed from our churches, and 
 above all from our minds. But the Queen is 
 unable to endure the least alteration in matters 
 of religion." In a still earlier letter to Peter 
 Martyr he had spoken even more contemptu- 
 ously of the attempt some were making to 
 set up ceremonial display in the worship of 
 God. He says : " The scenic apparatus of 
 Divine worship is now under agitation ; and 
 those very things which you and I have so 
 often laughed at are now seriously and sol- 
 emnly entertained by certain persons, as if 
 the Christian religion could not exist without 
 something tawdry." Clearly this Anglican 
 bishop was a Puritan of the Puritans, so far 
 as the externals of worship were concerned. 
 Even in Convocation, in 1563, when a resolu- 
 tion was brought forward to put away the
 
 54 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 vestments and ceremonies to which the Puri- 
 tans objected, there was actually among those 
 present a majority in its favor, and it was 
 only when proxies were called for that it was 
 lost by one vote. It was the steadfast resis- 
 tance of the Queen alone, who liked pomp and 
 ceremony in church as she did elsewhere, 
 that prevented Protestantism taking a more 
 puritanical form than it did in the earlier years 
 of its history. Even to the end of her reign, 
 so far as doctrine was concerned, the Anglican 
 Church remained strongly Calvinistic. As 
 late as 1595, one William Barret — "a bold, 
 corrupt and unlearned young fellow," as the 
 Heads of Colleges at Cambridge described him 
 — in a sermon before the University expressed 
 himself unfavorably against Calvin's doctrine 
 of predestination. The authorities of the 
 University were unanimous in their condem- 
 nation of the preacher. And though Arch- 
 bishop Whitgift is justly regarded as the 
 bitter enemy of the Puritans, he showed him- 
 self as resolute a Calvinist in doctrine as any 
 Puritan in the land. He at once sent down 
 to Cambridge nine propositions, commonly 
 called the Lambeth Articles, the first of which 
 declared that "God from eternity has pre- 
 destinated some persons to life, and repro-
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 55 
 
 bated others to death ; " the third affirmed 
 that " the number of the predestinated is fixed 
 and cannot be lessened or increased ; " and 
 the ninth and last proposition stands abso- 
 lutely alone in its appalling simplicity, for it 
 goes so far as to say : " It is not in the will 
 and power of every man to be saved." Clearly, 
 so far as predestination is concerned no Puri- 
 tan could go beyond the doctrinal position of 
 this archbishop who persecuted the Puritans. 
 Yet while the doctrines of Calvin were ac- 
 cepted by the Anglican Church right on to 
 the end of the reign of Elizabeth they were 
 never really at home in the Anglican system. 
 They were a foreign element brought in with 
 the first great impulse of Protestantism and 
 have never been assimilated. To this day 
 Evangelical Churchmen have never been 
 able to make the Articles of the Prayer Book 
 harmonize with the Rubrics of the Prayer 
 Book. Sooner or later it was inevitable that 
 Puritan and Anglican should part company, 
 for they Avere not agreed in their conception 
 of the standard of final authority in religion. 
 The Puritans fell back upon Scripture and 
 Scripture alone. The Anglican, while accept- 
 ing Scripture as the original depository of 
 Christian truth, acknowledged ecclesiastical
 
 56 PURITAN riiEACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 tradition as its legitimate expositor. He ap- 
 pealed less to personal experience than to the 
 general judgment of antiquity. Accepting 
 Scripture and tradition as joint witnesses 
 and authorities in matters of faith, the idea 
 of the Church came to be tliat of an external 
 institution with an elaborate system of means 
 for connecting heaven and earth. The Thirty- 
 Nine Articles were still retained in the 
 Prayer Book, but in the early days of James 
 I. they were more and more left out of the 
 sermon until it was true, as Lord Chatham 
 said, that the Church had a Calvinistic creed, 
 an Arminian clergy, and a Popish liturgy. 
 
 The Puritan discarded tradition and would 
 have nothing to do with a priestly hierarchy. 
 He boldly claimed to be able to draw nigh to 
 God through Christ for himself ; maintained 
 that separate communities of believing men 
 were true churches of Christ resting on a 
 divine foundation. The Puritan minister 
 held that his authority came direct from the 
 Lord and was valid as recognized by believ- 
 ing men in whom dwelt the Spirit of God; 
 and believing that faith cometli Ijy hearing 
 not by church ceremonies, and that salvation 
 means personal submission of heart and life 
 to Christ, he felt himself under solemn obli-
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 57 
 
 gation to labor unceasingly to bring men to 
 God. The Puritan layman on his part also 
 felt that he must bring his own understand- 
 ing into patient and thoughtful exercise in 
 the study of Scripture and not let the Church 
 do his thinking for him. As a natural con- 
 sequence the search after truth carried on 
 thus under a high sense of personal responsi- 1 
 bility to God issued in the formation of 
 habits of mental independence, profound 
 seriousness, and manly self-reliance. What- 
 ever may be said as to the aesthetic or non- 
 sesthetic side of Puritanism — and much 
 more has been said than is borne out by the 
 facts of history — Puritan principles gave to 
 Puritan men an indomitable love of freedom, . 
 high courage, stern integrity, and unbend- 
 ing faithfulness to the deepest convictions of 
 the soul. The men who at the beginning of 
 Elizabeth's reign seemed to be substantially 
 one, at the end of half a century, by the sheer 
 force of the idea of the Church they had sev- 
 erally accepted, found themselves wide asun- 
 der. Tliey were asunder politically as well 
 as ecclesiastically. For under the Stuarts the 
 Anglo-Catholic, believing in authoritj^, took 
 sides with absolutism in political government, 
 and in his blindness proclaimed the divine
 
 58 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 right of kings to govern wrong. On the 
 other hand the Puritan, as we might expect, 
 cast in his lot witli the political party con- 
 tending for freedom and constitutional gov- 
 ernment. He became the effective force of 
 that party ; and when the two systems came 
 at last, as they did, to open conflict in the 
 Great Civil War of the seventeenth century, 
 victory was finally declared on the side of 
 Freedom by the great battles of Naseby and 
 Marston Moor. It will be seen from this 
 rapid summary that a process of change was 
 going forward ; that therefore what was true 
 of church parties at one period was only par- 
 tially true ten or twenty years later ; and 
 that it would be correct to describe as Puri- 
 tan preachers men who were still strongly 
 attached to the Anglican Church. 
 
 At the latter end of Elizabeth's reign it 
 was urgently felt that there was need of more 
 and more regular religious instruction among 
 the people; and in Convocation "order was 
 taken" in the matter of preaching. Every 
 licensed preacher was to give twelve sermons 
 every year in the diocese where his benefice 
 lay; and six or seven preachers were ap- 
 pointed to minister " by course " in parishes 
 where no licensed preacher was. What took
 
 TEE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 59 
 
 place in Manchester may perhaps be taken as 
 typical of what was clone elsewhere. There 
 the bishop of the diocese set up a public exer- 
 cise to be held on the second Thursday in every 
 month ; and nominated certain grave, godly, 
 and learned ministers to preach in rotation. 
 And as the clergy needed teaching almost as 
 much as the people, all parsons, vicars, curates, 
 readers, and schoolmasters within the deanery 
 were commanded to be present. Further they 
 were to be ready in the afternoon to be more 
 privately conferred with, examined, instructed, 
 and directed, under pain of censure. 
 
 Subsequently the lords of the Council or- 
 dered the farther enlargement of these exer- 
 cises and their extension to other parts of the 
 diocese. In accordance with this direction 
 similar exercises were established in several 
 large towns of the county, usually once a 
 month on the market day. It is evident from 
 some of the facts which have come down to 
 us that these preachings or " prophesyings " 
 met a want among the more earnest-minded 
 of the people. On the Thui'sday of the 
 monthly exercise in Manchester many of the 
 inhabitants of the neighboring towns, long 
 before the commencement of the service, 
 crowded the Collegiate Church, which must
 
 60 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 have presented a somewhat animated appear- 
 ance. The Hve moderators — the five nom- 
 inated grave, godly, and learned ministers, 
 were there in grave and sober apparel, for in 
 spite of all orders to the contrary the surplice 
 was scarcely ever worn by the Puritan clergy 
 of Lancashire. The bishop also was fre- 
 quently present in his robes, for, Puritan as 
 he was, he usually distinguished himself from 
 his clergy by wearing his canonicals. Now 
 and then the Earl of Derby attended in some 
 state with a considerable retinue, and the 
 Puritan magistrates generally occupied a 
 conspicuous place in the church. As to the 
 discourses of the first five of the preachers, 
 we have not much information, but a con- 
 temporary tells us of one William Bourne, 
 who succeeded the last of the five, that he 
 " seldom varied the manner of his preaching, 
 which after explication of the text, was doc- 
 trine proof of it from Scripture, by reasoning 
 and answering more and more objections ; and 
 then the uses, first, of information, secondly, 
 of confutation of popery, thirdly, of reprehen- 
 sion, fourthly, of examination, fifthly, of ex- 
 hortation, and lastly of consolation." 
 
 To show you, however, that all the preach- 
 ers of that time were not quite so stereotyped
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 61 
 
 in method, let me, by way of concluding this 
 lecture, introduce you to " that eloquent di- 
 vine of famous memory Thomas Playfere," 
 who was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity 
 at Cambridge in Queen Elizabeth's time, and 
 afterwards court preacher to King James. 
 In a sermon entitled " The Pathway to Per- 
 fection" based on Philippians iii. 14, he 
 begins by saying that as Solomon went up 
 six steps to come to his great throne of ivory, 
 so must we ascend six degrees to come to 
 this high top of perfection. He therefore pro- 
 ceeds to divide his text into six parts. On 
 that part which deals with the Apostle's for- 
 getting those things which are behind, Play- 
 fere says : " He that remembers his virtues 
 hath no virtues to remember, seeing he wants 
 humility, which is the mother virtue of all 
 virtues. For this is the difference between 
 the godly and the wicked : both remember 
 virtues, but the godly remember other men's 
 virtues, the wicked remember their own. 
 Wherefore though thou have conquered king- 
 doms yet crake not of it as Sennacherib did : 
 though thou hast built Babel yet brag not of 
 it as Nebuchadnezzar did ; though thou hast 
 rich treasures yet show them not as Hezekiah 
 did ; though thou hast slain a thousand Phil-
 
 62 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 istines 3'et glory not in it as Samson did ; 
 though thou give alms yet blow not a trum- 
 pet ; though tliou fast twice a week yet make 
 no words of it, (remember it not but) Forget 
 that which is behind." 
 
 On the prize of the high calling mentioned 
 in the text he pours out his soul in rapture 
 thus : " O happy, happy man art thou, and 
 thrice happy man art thou ! For when we 
 shall see God, we shall see, and what shall we 
 see ? That which no mortal eye hath seen 
 that we shall see. We shall see our own as 
 sitting and shining at the right hand of the 
 throne of Majesty. We shall see all our dear 
 friends which we have not seen this many a 
 day, embracing us and welcoming us into 
 Christ's kingdom. We shall see all the noble 
 army of martyrs, of apostles, of prophets, of 
 patriarchs day and night singing out the 
 praises of the Lord. We shall see all the 
 invincible host of angels, of archangels, of 
 principalities, of dominions reverently attend- 
 ing upon the King of Glory. We shall see 
 the King himself disparkling and displaying 
 those beams of beauty which are the Heavens' 
 wonder and all tlie angels' bliss." 
 
 In a sermon entitled " Heart's Delight " on 
 the text " Delight thyself in the Lord," he
 
 THE PREACHERS OF THE REFORMATION 63 
 
 thus exclaims : " Nay, I cannot hold my heart 
 for my joy ; yea, I cannot hold my joy for ray 
 heart; to think that He which is my Lord is 
 become my Father, and so that He which was 
 offended with me for my sin's sake, is now 
 reconciled to me for His Son's sake. To 
 think that the High Majesty of God will one 
 day raise me out of the dust, and so that I 
 who am now a poor worm upon earth shall 
 hereafter be a glorious saint in heaven. This, 
 this makes me delight myself in the Lord, 
 saying, O Thou that art the delight of my 
 delight, the life of my life, the soul of my 
 soul, I delight myself in Thee, I live only for 
 Thee, I offer myself unto Thee, wholly to Thee 
 wholly, one to Thee one, only to Thee only. 
 For suppose now, as St. John speaketh, the 
 whole world were full of books, and all the 
 creatures in the world were writers, and all 
 the grass piles upon the earth were pens, and 
 all the waters in the sea were ink ; yet I as- 
 sure you faithfully all these books, all these 
 writers, all these pens, all this ink would not 
 be sufficient to describe the very least part, 
 either of the goodness of the Lord in himself, 
 or of the lovingkindness of the Lord towards 
 thee."
 
 Ill 
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS
 
 LECTURE III 
 THE CAMBEIDGE PUKITANS 
 
 IN this lecture I will ask you to go back 
 with me to the earlier years of the Pur- 
 itan movement, of which I have already 
 spoken, that I may introduce to you some 
 of the preachers who were the makers of 
 Puritanism. The men who were the leaders 
 in that movement, who gave it its distinctive 
 character, were almost all of them University 
 men, and for the most part Cambridge men. 
 In the second half of the sixteenth century 
 Cambridge was described as " a nest of Pur- 
 itans." Emmanuel is usually regarded as 
 the one distinctively Puritan College of that 
 University ; but it should be noted that, 
 twenty years before Emmanuel was founded, 
 Christ's College led the way, being strongly 
 Protestant almost as soon as Protestantism 
 was re-established under Elizabeth. A young 
 man named Laurence Chaderton, coming up to 
 Cambridge from one of the old Roman Cath- 
 olic families of Lancashire and entering at 
 Christ's in 1564, found himself at once in
 
 68 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the midst of men who had zealously embraced 
 the doctrines of the Reformation, It was a 
 new world to liim and opened up new ways 
 of thinking; and, as one who knew him well 
 tells us, he went through severe mental 
 struggle ; deliberately examined the points 
 in dispute between the adherents of the new 
 faith and the old, and with many and earnest 
 prayers decided in favor of the Reformers. 
 The result came, as he says, from various 
 sources — study of the Bible, the conversation 
 of his fellows, and that mental agitation and 
 movement which men look upon as a " call " 
 from God. His Roman Catholic father, away 
 up in Lancashire, heard with consternation 
 the news of this change of faith on the part 
 of his son, and wrote at once to say that if 
 he would renounce the new sect he had 
 joined, he would care for him as an indul- 
 gent father ; " otherwise," said he, " I enclose 
 in this letter a shilling to buy a wallet with. 
 Go and beg for your living. Farewell I " 
 Undaunted by difficulty, however, Chaderton 
 held on his way, gained a fellowship and 
 became a successful tutor at Christ's. 
 
 But it is in this man as a preacher we are 
 specially interested, and it was in this work 
 he exercised his most memorable influence.
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 69 
 
 Before liis time preaching had become a rarity 
 in the University, but now, for nearly fifty 
 years, as afternoon lecturer at St. Clement's 
 Church, he gathered large congregations both 
 from the town and the university. With 
 natural gifts, acquired attainments, and a 
 wonderful zeal for winning men, Chaderton 
 obtained great influence in the pulpit. He 
 seems to have had pre-eminent qualifications 
 for the work. In the investigation of Scrip- 
 ture he displayed great acuteness of mind 
 and keen spiritual insight ; and he had the 
 not too common faculty of being able to seize 
 upon and forcibly present the main aspects 
 of a subject. As a speaker his style was 
 eminent for purity, lucidity, manliness, and 
 sincerity ; and it was specially noted that 
 when in prayer, he became affected with 
 such ardor himself as not only to fire the 
 souls of his hearers, but to carry and raise 
 them with him to heaven. Possessed of a 
 voice clear and pleasing and of much flexibil- 
 ity ; with great dignity of manner, and that 
 propriety of action which Cicero has called 
 " the eloquence of the body," he seems to 
 have been an almost ideal preacher. But 
 while many things contributed to his success, 
 the main power of the man was spiritual;
 
 70 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 and it was a fine tribute to his influence that 
 when late in life he thought of resigning his 
 lectureship, he received no fewer than forty 
 letters from as many Christian ministers urg- 
 ing him to continue, if he could, alleging 
 that they themselves, every one of them, 
 while they were at the university had been 
 brought to a knowledge of the truth under 
 his ministry. 
 
 Besides the forty ministers who thus wrote 
 letters of entreaty to Laurence Ghaderton, 
 two other preachers, in whom we are inter- 
 ested, came under his influence. One of 
 these was his own brother-in-law, Ezekiel 
 Culverwell, who, on leaving the university, 
 went to be minister at Groton Manor near 
 Sudbury. Here he had a memorable hearer 
 in his congregation, a young man of eighteen, 
 John Winthrop afterwards better known to 
 the world as Governor Winthrop. The com- 
 ing of Culverwell proved to be to this hearer 
 of his an important event in his spiritual 
 history, for now, as he tells us, the Word 
 came home to him with potver, he having 
 found only light before. " Now came I," says 
 he, " to some peace and comfort in God and 
 in His ways ; loved a Christian and the very 
 ground on which he trod ; honoui'ed a faith-
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 71 
 
 ful minister in my heart, and could have 
 kissed his feet." 
 
 The other man besides Culverwell, both 
 intellectually and spiritually influenced by 
 Chaderton was William Perkins, a Puritan 
 preacher of more than ordinary spiritual 
 power. John Cotton of Boston came under 
 his influence and fought hard against it at 
 first, from a fear that if he became a godly 
 man it would spoil him for being a learned 
 man. But God's truth as ministered by 
 "William Perkins proved to be stronger than 
 John Cotton's wilfulness, and eventually he 
 left the university both godly and learned to 
 do a great work for God in both Bostons, 
 that of the Old Country and that of the 
 New. Then again, John Robinson, of Pil- 
 grim Father fame, was among the under- 
 graduates who listened to the burning words 
 of William Perkins in the University 
 Church. He, too, carried this influence 
 with him through life. He quotes this 
 man again and again in his works and 
 also reprinted one of his books at William 
 Brewster's press for the benefit of liis own 
 people in the Leyden chui'ch. I mention 
 these facts in passing because they show 
 us who are preachers that we do not always
 
 72 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 know in our own life-time what we are doing 
 when faithfully working for God. The man 
 to whom you pass the torch of heaven's light 
 hands it on to another and he again to others 
 after him. Laurence Chaderton, for example, 
 who never set- foot on your shores, is yet 
 living in the religious life of America to-day. 
 For, as we have seen, he imparted his own 
 spirit to Ezekiel Culverwell, who under God 
 begets a diviner life in Governor Winthrop. 
 The same man in another line of influence 
 powerfully sways William Perkins, who, in 
 his turn again, shapes both John Cotton of 
 Boston and John Robinson the honored pastor 
 of the Pilgrim Fathers' church. And thus 
 in a very real sense both these men are living 
 among you still. This is the true Apostolical 
 Succession — the only succession worth caring 
 for. 
 
 In the case of a man at once so learned 
 as a scholar, so able as a preacher, and so 
 widely influential as a spiritual force as 
 William Perkins, the preacher of to-day 
 may well be interested in knowing what 
 were his methods and what his ideals. 
 Phineas Fletcher the poet, author of " The 
 Purple Island," speaks of him thirty years 
 later as " our wonder though long dead ; "
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 73 
 
 and quaint Thomas Fuller pays him the 
 compliment of saying that " his sermons 
 were not so plain but that the piously 
 learned did admire them, nor so learned 
 but that the plain did understand them." 
 Theology, Perkins described as "the science 
 of living blessedly for ever;" and he dis- 
 cussed its main doctrines in such sort as 
 to abandon abstruse and unprofitable topics, 
 and with such solemn and impassioned dis- 
 course as to win the ear of the most varied 
 audience, method and fervor presenting 
 themselves in rare combination. 
 
 As to his ideals — what the Christian 
 preacher should strive to be and to aim at, 
 he has told us himself in certain addresses 
 which he delivered publicly in the university 
 and which were taken down and preserved 
 for us by his loving disciple William Crashaw. 
 I shall help you, I think, and furnish true 
 inspiration, if I briefly summarize for you 
 the main points of addresses given by a 
 master-workman to certain university divin- 
 ity students and preachers now three hundred 
 years ago. The subject of these addresses 
 was "The Calling of the Ministry, describ- 
 ing the Duties and Dignities of that Call- 
 ing." Speaking within the bounds of the
 
 74 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 university, Perkins begins by saying: Most 
 of us in this place are either prophets or the 
 sons of prophets. If we are prophets we are 
 God's messengers and must preach God's 
 Word as God's Word and deliver it as we re- 
 ceived it. For as many men mar a good tale 
 in the telling, so we must see to it lest we take 
 away the power and majesty of God's Word 
 in the manner of delivering it. Every true 
 minister is a double interpreter — God's in- 
 terpreter to the people by preaching to them 
 from God, and the people's interpreter to 
 God, laying open their wants, confessing 
 their sins, craving pardon and forgiveness 
 for, and in their names giving thanks for 
 mercies received, thus so offering up their 
 spiritual sacrifices to God. So that every 
 one who either is, or intends to be a minister 
 needs that tongue of the learned of which 
 Isaiah speaks, by which he may be able 
 to speak a word in season to him that is 
 weary. To be able to speak with this 
 tongue the minister must first be furnished 
 with human learning, next with divine knowl- 
 edge, and besides these with that inward 
 learning taught by the Spirit of God. The 
 two first he must learn from men, the third 
 from God : a true minister must be inwardly
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 75 
 
 taught by the spiritual schoolmaster, the Holy 
 Ghost. He must not only have the knowl- 
 edge of divine things flowing in his brain, 
 but engraven in his heart and printed in his 
 soul by the spiritual finger of God. After 
 all his own study, meditation, conference, 
 commentaries, after all human helps he must 
 pray with the Psalmist, ' Open thou mine 
 eyes that I may see the wonders of thy 
 Law.' Then too he must labor for sanctity 
 and holiness of life. A minister is to declare 
 the reconciliation betwixt God and man, and 
 is he himself not reconciled ? Dare he present 
 another man to God's mercy for pardon and 
 never yet presented himself? Can he com- 
 mend the state of grace to another, and never 
 felt the sweetness thereof in his own soul? 
 Dare he come to preach sanctification with 
 polluted lips and out of an unsanctified 
 heart? Let all true ministers of God first 
 be God's interpreters to their own con- 
 sciences, and their own souls' interpreters 
 to God, then shall they know more perfectly 
 how to discharge the office of true inter- 
 preters betwixt God and His people. And 
 while they must privately confer, visit 
 admonish and rebuke, yet principally they 
 must preachy and that in such good manner
 
 76 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 and in so diligent measure as they may 
 redeem and win souls — the end they must 
 aim at must be to win souls. Some preach 
 for fear of the law, to avoid censure or 
 punishment ; some for fashiori's sake^ that 
 they may be like others; some for ostenta- 
 tion's sake to win credit and praise ; some 
 for ambition, to rise in the world : All these 
 forcet their commission, which is to deliver a 
 ma7i from going down to hell. 
 
 In dealing further with the duties and 
 dignities of the ministry Perkins spoke of 
 the making of a prophet as set forth in the 
 vision of Isaiah. At the sight of the Eter- 
 nal the man of God was humbled to the 
 dust and cried, Woe is me for I am undone ! 
 " Yes," says he, " this is God's way. All true 
 ministers, especially such as are deputed to 
 the greatest works in His Church must be 
 first of all stricken with a great fear in con- 
 sideration of the greatness of their function, 
 yea, into an amazement and astonishment, 
 in the admiration of God's glory and great- 
 ness, whose room they occupy and whose 
 message they bring. And the more they 
 are afraid and shrink, so it be under the 
 contemplation of God's majesty and their own 
 weakness the more likely it is that they
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 77 
 
 are truly called of God, and appointed for 
 worthy purposes in His Church." Looking 
 round upon his audience he went on to say : 
 " The use of this, as it is for all ministers, 
 so especially for us who live in the Univer- 
 sity. We, many of us, are hereafter by God's 
 grace to be framed to the ministry, as some 
 of us already are. Now here we have many 
 occasions to be put up in self-conceit. We 
 see ourselves grow in time, in degrees, in 
 learning, in honor, in name and estimation, 
 and to many of us God gives good portions 
 of His gifts. What are all these but so 
 many baits to allure us to pride and vain 
 opinions of our own worth? But let us 
 remember that our purpose is to save souls 
 and that our weapons in this warfare must 
 not be carnal as pride, vainglory and self- 
 conceit. If therefore we ever look to be 
 made instruments of God's glory in saving 
 souls let us set before our eyes not only the 
 honour but also the danger of our calling 
 and humble ourselves under the mighty 
 hand of God that He may exalt us in due 
 time. Let us be content that God give any 
 occasion or means to pull us down either 
 by outward crosses or inward temptations, 
 and let us rejoice when we are thereby so
 
 78 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 far cast down that we cry out in the aston- 
 ishment of our spirits, as the prophet did: 
 ' Woe is me, for I am undone.' Those men 
 do pronounce the most powerful blessings 
 on other men's souls, and speak the best 
 word to other men's consciences, who often- 
 est say unto themselves, ' Woe is me, for I 
 am undone ! ' 
 
 "The prophet specially exclaimed that he 
 felt himself to be a man of unclean lips — 
 why unclean of lips rather than of heart or 
 hands? Because he was a prophet and his 
 tongue was to be used as a principal instru- 
 ment of God's glory. Every man is to be 
 tested what he is by his calling rather than 
 by something collateral ; therefore the honor 
 or dishonor of a minister, is the use or abuse 
 of his tongue, and his comfort or discomfort 
 is the well using or not using of it. If he 
 use not, or abuse his tongue, the unclean- 
 ness of his lips will be the heaviest burden 
 of all. They therefore are greatly deceived 
 who tliink a minister to discharge sufficiently 
 his duty, though he preach not, if he keep 
 good hospitality, and make peace amongst 
 neighbours and perform other Avorks of char- 
 ity and good life. For if a minister have not 
 this virtue, he hath none. If he preach not,
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 79 
 
 if he abuse his lips, or if he open them 
 not, he hath no conscience, nor can have 
 any comfort; for that is the principal duty 
 of a minister, though all the other be re- 
 quired to make him complete. 
 
 " Still while good words are good, good 
 words are vain where there is no good life. 
 Let not ministers think that their golden 
 words shall do so much good as their leaden 
 lives shall do hurt. It is a vain conceit for 
 men to imagine there is any force in elo- 
 quence or human learning to overthrow that 
 sin in others which ruleth and reigneth in 
 themselves. Let the churches take note of 
 this. For it is the glory of a church to 
 have their doctrine powerful and effectual 
 for the winning of souls ; therefore it con- 
 cerneth them to take order, as well that their 
 ministers be godly men as good scholars : 
 and their lives be inoifensive as well as their 
 doctrine sound ; or else they will find in 
 woeful experience that they pull down as 
 much with one hand, as they build up with 
 the other. But while this toucheth the 
 churches it more nearly concerns ministers 
 themselves, who must know their case is 
 most fearful of all men's, if they come into 
 God's presence in their profaneness. For
 
 80 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 as no man is more honorable than a learned 
 and holy minister, so none is more con- 
 temptible in this world, none more miser- 
 able for that to come than he who by his 
 loose and lewd life doth scandalize his 
 doctrine, 
 
 " While sin, even the least sin, nay a very 
 sinfulness of man makes a man afraid of God's 
 presence the way to true courage and bold- 
 ness before God is to repent daily of sin and 
 labor to grow in true holiness. Wealth nor 
 wit, learning nor authority can do this for 
 thee, but only a good conscience, made good 
 by grace and repentance. Then shalt thou 
 rejoice in God's presence in this world, and 
 delight to think of God, to speak of God, to 
 pray unto Him, to meet Him in His Word and 
 Sacraments, and at the last day shalt thou 
 stand with confidence before the throne of 
 His glory," 
 
 On the matter of the touching of the 
 prophet's lips with a burning coal from the 
 altar, he says " This signifies that the apt and 
 sufficient teacher must have a tongue of fire, 
 full of power and force, even like fire to eat 
 up the sins and corruptions of the world. For 
 though it be a worthy gift of God to speak 
 mildly and moderately, so that his speech
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 81 
 
 shall fall like dew upon the grass, yet it is 
 the tongue of fire that beats down sin and 
 works sound grace in the heart. It may be 
 there are some who need the tongue of 
 fire. But it must be fire taken from the altar 
 of God, it must be fire from heaven, his zeal 
 must be a godly and heavenly zeal. He that 
 hath a malicious and contentious tongue hath 
 a tongue of fire, but if a man stand up to 
 preach with this tongue God will never suffer 
 any great work to be done by him in His 
 Church, though his tongue be never so fiery 
 and his speech never so powerful." 
 
 The prophet having purged lips heard 
 the voice of the Lord, saying : Whom shall 
 I send, and who will go for us ? " We who are 
 in the Universities," Perkins says, " are here 
 admonished to look to ourselves. By God's 
 blessing we are many, and daily grow more 
 and more ; let us therefore so furnish ourselves 
 as that when God or His Church shall say 
 Who will go for us? He may find many 
 among us whom He may send to that great 
 work of the ministry. 
 
 " Then if He send them they are His ser- 
 vants and if they are His servants they are not 
 their own masters. They xn^y not therefore 
 please tlicmselves, nor serve their own pleas-
 
 82 PURITAN PREACTIING IN ENGLAND 
 
 ures, nor seek their own credit or profit. If 
 they be God's messengers and servants it 
 follows too that they must not be the servants 
 of men to please or to flatter or satisfy fancies 
 of theirs. It is not for God's servants to be 
 slaves to the persons, or pleasures or humors 
 of men. In all their undertakings they must 
 forthwith call to mind the question Who 
 sent me hither and for whom am I come? 
 Even from and for God, and therefoi-e am I 
 to jdeld to notliing or aim at anything but 
 what may be both to the Avill and for the 
 glory of Him who sent me. If ministers be 
 God's servaats then let them regard their 
 Master's glory, and be ashamed to do any- 
 thing either in doctrine or life which may 
 dishonor Plim. If, too, they be God's am- 
 bassadors, then must they not deliver their 
 OAvn fancies or inventions, but that message 
 they received ; and as they received it so must 
 they deliver it. If they do this, if they do 
 their duties faithfull}^ they may take their 
 pains with joy for they have a master who 
 will reward them ; they may speak freely, so 
 it be with discretion, for they have a master 
 who will make it good ; they may stand boldly 
 in the face of their enemies for tliey have a 
 master who will defend tliem. Every faith-
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 83 
 
 fill minister may say to himself, I will do my 
 duty and deliver my embassage : He whom I 
 serve and whose I am, He who sent me and 
 for whom I come, will bear me out." 
 
 The years when William Perkins's influence 
 was greatest both in the town and in the 
 university — the years from 1590 till his 
 death in 1602 — were the golden age of Eng- 
 lish Literature. It has been truly said that 
 there are no such ten years either in that or 
 any other literature as the nineties of tlie 
 sixteenth century, when you can point to an 
 equal number of masterpieces and masters. 
 For taking not the time of writing luit of 
 publication as the criterion, we associate tliese 
 years with the production of Spenser's " Faerie 
 Queene," and the earlier certain plays of 
 Shakespeare ; the historical poems of Draj^ton 
 and Daniel ; the satires of Hall, Lodge and 
 Marston ; the earliest plays of Ben Jonson, 
 Chapman and Dekker ; the Essays of Bacon 
 and the " Ecclesiastical Polity " of Hooker. 
 The mere enumeration of these works may 
 well fill us with wonder. It was an outburst 
 of tropical luxuriance after a time of dearth. 
 
 As we might expect, all this affluence of 
 mind told both directly and indirectly upon 
 the pulpit of the time. If it wei'e in our
 
 84 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 power now to travel over the whole ground 
 other names might be cited in proof that it 
 did, but there are two preachers to whom I 
 may refer who are not unworthy to stand out 
 even in the searching light of that brilliant 
 time. One of these was Henry Smith, known 
 as the silver-tongued preacher, and therefore, 
 as Thomas Fuller says, only one metal below 
 Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, himself. 
 After a brief time at Cambridge we find him 
 living as a student with a quaint Puritan 
 preacher of the time, Richard Greenham, 
 rector of Dry Drayton in Caml^ridgeshire, 
 who seems to have thoroughly imbued him 
 with Puritan principles. It was probably 
 through his influence that Smith, from con- 
 scientious scruples on the matter of subscrip- 
 tion, declined to undertake a pastoral charge, 
 and contented himself with one of those Puri- 
 tan lectureships, common then and later, 
 which combined opportunities for preaching 
 with more than ordinary freedom for the 
 preacher. Elected in 1587 as Lecturer at St. 
 Clement Danes, London, he quickly rose to 
 great popularity, and came to be spoken of as 
 the " prime preacher of the nation." Wood 
 tells us that he came to be "esteemed the 
 miracle and wonder of his age, for his prodi-
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 85 
 
 gious memory, and for his fluent, eloquent 
 and practical way of preaching." He was, it 
 may be, all the more welcome to his hearers 
 from the fact that his sermons were almost 
 entirely free from those numerous divisions 
 and subdivisions of his subject, and from 
 those elaborate statements of doctrine in 
 which other preachers of the time indulged. 
 They were free also from that " churchiness " 
 of tone in which later Anglican divines 
 abounded ; they were practical, pungent, and 
 interspersed with vivid and luminous char- 
 acter sketches. 
 
 His theory of simplicity in preaching will 
 commend itself to you. " There is," said he, 
 " a kind of preachers risen up of" late which 
 shroud and cover every rustical and unsavory 
 and childish and absurd sermon under the 
 name of the simple kind of teaching. But 
 indeed to preach simply is not to preach 
 rudely, nor unlearnedly, nor confusedly, but 
 to preach plainly and perspicuously that the 
 simplest man may understand what is taught, 
 as if he did hear his name." And while he 
 has thus a word for the preacher he has one 
 for the hearers too. In a sermon on " The 
 Art of Hearing," he says there are divers 
 ways of hearing : '• One is like an Athenian
 
 86 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 and liearkenetli after news ; if the preacher 
 say anything of onr armies beyond the sea, 
 or Council at home, or matters at court. 
 Another cometh to gaze about the church; 
 he hath an evil eye which is still looking upon 
 that from which Job did avert his eye. An- 
 other cometh to muse ; so soon as he is set 
 he falleth into a brown study ; sometimes his 
 mind runs on his market, sometimes on ]iis 
 journey, sometimes of his suit, sometimes of 
 his dinner, sometimes of his sport after dinner, 
 and the sermon is done before the man thinks 
 where he is. Another cometh to hear, but so 
 soon as the preacher hath said his prayer, he 
 falls fast asleep, as though he had been 
 brought in for a corpse, and the preacher 
 should preach at his funeral." He is equally 
 keen and sarcastic on those who admire the 
 cleverness of a man who can take in his 
 neighbors and make money at their expense : 
 '' He who can go beyond all in shifts and 
 policy is counted the wisest man in court and 
 city. Oh, if Machiavel had lived in our 
 country what a monarch should he be ! To 
 what honor and wealth and power and credit 
 might he have risen unto in short time, 
 whether he had been a lawyer or a courtier, 
 or a prelate ! Methinks I see how many
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 87 
 
 fingers would point at liiin in the streets and 
 sa}^, There goeth a deep fellow ; he hath more 
 wit in his little finger than the rest in their 
 whole body." 
 
 From liis character sketches here is one 
 of the Flatterer : " He is like your shadow 
 wliich doth imitate the action and gesture of 
 your body, which stands when you stand, and 
 walks when you walk, and sits when you sit, 
 and riseth when you rise : so the flatterer doth 
 praise when you praise, and finds fault wlien 
 you find fault, and smiles when you smile, 
 and frowns when you frown, and applauds 
 you in your doings, and soothes you in your 
 sayings, and in all things seeks to please your 
 humor, till he hath sounded the deptli of 
 your devices, that he may betray you to your 
 greatest enemies. As the sirens sing most 
 sweetly when they intend your destruction, so 
 flatterers speak most fair when they practise 
 most treachery. Therefore every fair look is 
 not to be liked, every smooth tale is not to 
 be believed, and every glozing tongue is not 
 to be trusted. We must try the words 
 whether they come from the heart or no ; and 
 we must try the deeds whether they be answer- 
 able to the words or no." 
 
 On the more solemn aspects of life this
 
 88 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 preacher can speak solemn and searching^ 
 words, as for example, when he speaks of 
 repentance as a matter of urgent need: 
 " Whether thou be old or young, thy repent- 
 ance cannot come too soon, because thy sin 
 is gone before. If thou lackest a spur to 
 make thee run, see how every day runneth 
 away with thy life. Youth cometh upon 
 childhood, age cometh upon youth, death 
 cometh upon age, with such a swift sail, 
 that if all our minutes were spent in morti- 
 fying ourselves, yet our glass would be run 
 out before we had purged half our corrup- 
 tions." These again are lurid and terrible 
 words with which he describes the anguish 
 of remorse : " There is a warning conscience 
 and a gnawing conscience. The warning con- 
 science cometh before sin, the gnawing con- 
 science followeth after sin. The warning 
 conscience is often lulled asleep, but the 
 gnawing conscience wakeneth her again. If 
 there be any hell in this world, they which 
 feel the worm of conscience gnaw upon their 
 hearts may truly say that they have felt the 
 torments of hell. Who can express that 
 man's horror but himself? Nay, what 
 horrors are there which he cannot express 
 himself? Sorrows are met in his soul at a
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 89 
 
 feast ; and fear, thought and anguish, divide 
 his soul between them. All the furies of 
 hell leap upon his heart like a stage. 
 Thought calleth to fear; fear whistleth to 
 horror ; horror beckoneth to despair, and 
 saith. Come and help me to torment the 
 sinner. One saith that she cometh from this 
 sin, and another saith that she cometh from 
 that sin, so he goeth through a thousand 
 deaths and cannot die." 
 
 Alongside of Henry Smith, and to be 
 accounted even greater than he as a Puritan 
 preacher, must be placed that Thomas Adams 
 who has been called the Shakespeare of the 
 Puritans. Southey seems to have been the 
 one to start the comparison when he pro- 
 nounced him to be the 'Uprose Shakespeare 
 of Puritan theologians, scarcely inferior to 
 Fuller in Avit or to Taylor in fancy." This 
 judgment of Southey's may be qualified and 
 at the same time extended by saying that 
 while Adams is not so sustained as Jeremy 
 Taylor nor so continuously sparkling as 
 Thomas Fuller, he is surpassingly eloquent 
 and much more thought-laden than either. 
 He is like Shakespeare in one thing at least ; 
 while we have his works we know extremely 
 little about the man himself. In 1612 he
 
 90 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 was a " preacher of God's Word at Willing- 
 ton," a village in Bedfordshire, four miles 
 from Bedford town. And it may be noted 
 by the way that a walk of twenty minutes 
 from his vicarage door would have brought 
 this Puritan Shakespeare to Cardington vil- 
 lage, where, in the previous centuiy, George 
 Gascoigne, our earliest English satirist, was 
 born, and that if he had extended his walk 
 some fifteen minutes more he might have 
 looked in at the cottage in Elstow i)arish 
 where sixteen years later John Bunyan, our 
 greatest English allegorist, first saw the light. 
 Adams was afterwards vicar of Wingrave in 
 Buckinghamshire and then preacher in one 
 or two London churches, and when we have 
 said this we have said nearly all that can be 
 said to purpose about the man himself. It 
 is with his work as "a preacher of God's 
 Word," as he styles himself, rather than with 
 his own personal history "we are now con- 
 cerned. As such we may describe him as 
 one of the doctrinal Puritans, though he 
 differed widely from many of the Puritans 
 on the ecclesiastical and political q uestions of 
 the time. ]\Iany of his sermons, like others 
 of the period, were sermons on manners 
 rather than on doctrine and lead us to think
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 91 
 
 of him as a divine moralist rather than as 
 a theologian. Yet a theologian he was, his 
 theology being Calvinistic and Evangelical. 
 He has a great belief that God will make that 
 sure which we cannot make sure. He was 
 not far wrong there, though we may not 
 always be able to accept his way of stating 
 this conviction of his as when he says that 
 the Church is a number of men whom God 
 hath set apart by an eternal decree. Still, he 
 tempers even this when on the other side we 
 find him saying : " It was not one for one 
 that Christ died, not one for many : but one 
 for all . . . and this one must needs be of 
 infinite price." " Some affirm," says he, " that 
 I have made the gate of heaven too narrow, 
 and they hope to find it wider ; God and the 
 Scriptures are more merciful. True it is that 
 heaven-gate is in itself wide enough and the 
 narrowness is in respect of the man who 
 enters ; and though thy sins cannot make 
 that too little to receive thee, yet they make 
 thee too gross and unfit to get in." 
 
 As for the preacher himself, he would have 
 him consecrate to the service all gifts and the 
 ripest scholarship : " Learning," says he, 
 " as well as oifice, is requisite for a minister. 
 An uidearned scribe, without his treasure of
 
 92 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 old and new, is unfit to interpret God's ora- 
 cles. The priest's lips shall preserve knowl- 
 edge, is no less a precept to the minister 
 than a promise to the people." Then, too, 
 the life must correspond to the teaching : 
 " He that preaches well in his pulpit but lives 
 disorderly out of it, is like a young scribbler : 
 what he writes fair with his hand, his sleeve 
 comes after and blots." He who serves 
 Christ must not be too eager after the ap- 
 plause of man : " I do not call thee aside to 
 ask with what applause this sermon passeth, 
 but (it is all I would have and hear) with 
 what benefit ? I had rather convert one soul 
 than have a hundred praise me." 
 
 In a sermon on the Fatal Banquet to wliich 
 Satan invites his guests, he has, he says, 
 many bidders to his feast. Take a short 
 muster of these inviters, these bidders to 
 this banquet of vanity: they have all their 
 several stands. In the Court he hath set 
 Ambition to watch for base minds, that would 
 stoop to any villany for preferment, and to 
 bring them to this feast. This is a principal 
 bidder. In the Law Courts he sets inviters 
 that beckon contention to them, and fill the 
 world with broils. I mean the libels of the 
 law, pettifoggers, Satan's firebrands which he
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 93 
 
 casteth abroad to make himself sport, and 
 wlio do more hurt among the barley, the 
 commons of this land, than Samson's foxes 
 with the fire at their tails. " Oh," says he, 
 " that they were shipped out for Virginia, for 
 they cannot live without making broils " — 
 which is a little hard upon Virginia, as we 
 cannot but think. Pride is another bidder, 
 and keeps a shop in the city. You shall find 
 a description of her shop and take an inven- 
 tory of her wares from the prophet — " the 
 tinkling ornaments, the cauls, and the moon- 
 tires." She sits upon the stall, and courts 
 the passengers with a What lack ye ? " Mak- 
 ing a corner " in the market seems not to 
 have been so modern an invention as we had 
 supposed, for Adams tells us that Engrossing 
 is another of Satan's inviters and hath a larore 
 walk ; sometimes he watcheth the landing of 
 a ship; sometimes he turns whole loads of 
 corn besides the market. This bidder pre- 
 vails with many a citizen, gentleman, farmer, 
 and brings in infinite guests. Bribery too is 
 an officious fellow, and a special bidder to 
 this feast. He invites both forward and 
 f roward : the forward and yielding, by prom- 
 ises of good cheer, that they shall have a fair 
 day of it ; the backward lionest man, by ter-
 
 94 rURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 rors and menaces that his cause shall else go 
 westward. This kind of talk from Puritan 
 books is now three centuries old, but I think 
 you will feel with me there is a very modern 
 rinsf about it and that it would not be much 
 out of place even in some of the pulpits of 
 to-day. 
 
 We remember how Shakespeare makes 
 Hamlet exclaim, " What a piece of work is a 
 man ! how noble in reason ! how infinite 
 in faculty ! in form and moving how ex- 
 press and admirable ! " Here is an excla- 
 mation by this other Shakespeare — this 
 Shakespeare among the Puritans, not unworthy 
 to stand beside it. " Oh, how goodly this 
 building of man appears Avhen it is clothed 
 with beauty and honor ! A face full of 
 majesty, the throne of comeliness wherein the 
 whiteness of the lily contends with the san- 
 guine of the rose ; an active hand, an erected 
 countenance, an eye sparkling out lustre, a 
 smooth complexion arising from an excellent 
 temperature and composition. Oh, what a 
 workman was this, that could raise such a 
 fabric out of the earth, and lay such orient 
 colors upon dust ! " 
 
 Yet on the other hand this same preacher 
 has to pour forth his sorrowful lament that a
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PURITANS 95 
 
 being so nobly formed as man sh(iuld yet 
 spiritually be so insensible, " Isaiah," he 
 says, " had not more cause for Israel than we 
 for England to cry — 'We have labored in 
 vain, and spent our strength for nought.' 
 We give God the worst of all things that 
 hath given us the best of all things. We 
 give God measure for measure, but after an 
 ill manner. For His blessings ' heapen and 
 shaken and thrust together,' our iniquities 
 ' pressed down and yet running over.' " With 
 his pleading words we will close our words 
 to-day : " Come, then, beloved to Jesus Clu-ist, 
 come freely, come betimes. The flesh calls, 
 we come ; vanity calls, we flock ; the world 
 calls, we fly ; let Christ call early and late. 
 He has yet to say : ' Ye will not come unto 
 me that ye might have life.' "
 
 IV 
 
 THOMAS GOODWIN AND THE 
 CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS
 
 LECTURE IV 
 
 THOMAS GOODWIN AND THE 
 CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 
 
 TN the last lecture our thoughts were turned 
 -*• to the sermons of two eminent preachers 
 of Puritan times — Henry Smith, " the silver- 
 tongued," and Thomas Adams, " the Shake- 
 speare of the Puritans." Wliile these ser- 
 mons, however, are notable examples of 
 intellectual and oratorical power, perhaps 
 they can scarcely be accepted as typical il- 
 lustrations of the ordinary Puritan discourse 
 which was more doctrinal in form, and in 
 spirit more experimental and evangelical. 
 Coleridge said of certain Anglican authors 
 that the cross, shines but dimly in their writ- 
 ings, and this remark would apply to some 
 extent to the two men just named. For more 
 characteristic types of the Puritan of the first 
 half of the seventeenth centurj'- we should do 
 better to turn to such men as Robert Bolton, 
 the author of " The Four Last Things," or to 
 Richard Sibbes, the writer of the book entitled
 
 100 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 " The Bruised Reed." But perhaps a better 
 example than even these may be found in the 
 person of Dr. Thomas Goodwin, whose dis- 
 courses and treatises in many volumes have 
 come down to us. During his life-time he 
 filled various positions of influence. After be- 
 ing a student of Christ's College, Cambridge, 
 and a Fellow of Catherine Hall, he became a 
 licensed preacher of the University, a London 
 pastor, a member of the Westminster Assem- 
 bly of Divines, and, under the Protectorate of 
 Cromwell, President of Magdalen College, 
 Oxford. It was by the merest chance that 
 at one time he did not take his place among 
 the Puritan Fathers of New England. Re- 
 ceiving in 1647 an urgent invitation from 
 John Cotton of Boston to come and labor 
 with him, he so far yielded as to secure liis 
 passage ; a large part of his valuable library 
 was actually on board the vessel ; and it was 
 only at the last moment that the earnest en- 
 treaties of an attached people prevailed with 
 him to remain among them as their pastoj-. 
 
 Naturally a preacher's own religious ex- 
 perience largely determines the style of his 
 preaching. Thomas Goodwin had been 
 brought to God in a way he could never 
 forget. Comparing him with eminent con-
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 101 
 
 temporaries like John Owen and Richard 
 Baxter, it has been said that Owen preached 
 earnestly to the understanding, reasoning 
 from his critical and devout knowledge of 
 Scripture ; Baxter preached forcibly to the 
 conscience, reasoning from the fitness of 
 things ; while Goodwin appealed to the 
 spiritual affections, reasoning from his own 
 religious experience and interpreting Scrip- 
 ture by the insight of a renewed heart. He 
 has told us himself how a more than ordinarily 
 definite and decisive religious experience in- 
 fluenced his religious beliefs, and disposed 
 him to accept the decided, though not exag- 
 gerated Calvinism for which he was distin- 
 guished. It seemed to him that he was laid 
 hold of by an invisible hand which he felt to 
 be the hand of God, and from which he could 
 not free himself. Urged one day by a fel- 
 low-collegian to enter a church where a ser- 
 mon was to be preached, he says, " I was loath 
 to go in, for I loved not preaching, especially 
 not that kind of it which good men used, and 
 which I thought to be dull stuff." But as 
 other scholars were going in he went too, and 
 once in, though he would have been glad to 
 be out again, shame made him stay. " I was 
 never," he says, " so loath to hear a sermon in
 
 102 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 my life ; " yet that sermon, so unwillingly 
 listened to, as it went on laid hold of heart 
 and conscience, and changed all his life for 
 him. Both in the conviction of sin, the en- 
 trance into forgiveness and peace, and in the 
 making of a full surrender and consecration 
 of himself, he seemed to be in other hands 
 than his own. " I thought myself to be as 
 one struck down by a mighty power. I was 
 strangely guided in the dark. I was acted 
 all along by the Spirit of God being upon me, 
 and my thoughts passively held fixed. An 
 abundant discovery was made to me of my 
 inward lusts and concupiscence. This new 
 sort of illumination gave discovery of my 
 heart in all my sinnings, searched the lower 
 rooms of my heart, as it were, with candles, 
 as the prophet's phrase is." 
 
 As with the work of conviction, so with 
 that of deliverance. In this, too, he felt him- 
 self in the hands of God. The word of 
 promise, softly whispered to his soul, filled 
 and possessed all the faculties of his being. 
 He was borne up by an assurance that God 
 would pardon all his sins, though never so 
 srreat for boldness, hardness of heart and hein- 
 ousness of sinning, as He had pardoned Paul. 
 Yet further : in the effort after full surrender
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 103 
 
 of himself, and perfect consecration of heart 
 and life it seemed to him that he had but to 
 stand still and see the salvation of God : " I 
 observed of this work of God on my soul that 
 there was nothing of constraint or force in it, 
 but I was carried on with the most ready and 
 willing mind, and what I did was what I 
 chose to do. With the greatest freedom I 
 parted with my sins, formerly as dear to me 
 as the apple of my eye, yea, as my life, and 
 resolved never to return to them more. And 
 what I did was from deliberate choice ; I con- 
 sidered what I was doing, and reckoned with 
 myself what it would cost me to make this 
 great alteration. What the world thought of 
 these things hindered me not at all. The 
 weeds that entangled me in those waters, I 
 swam and broke through with as much ease 
 as Samson did with his withes ; for I was made 
 a vassal and a captive to another binding, 
 such as Paul speaks of." 
 
 Possibly to some people this may sound 
 like old-world talk, which has grown obsolete 
 in these later days. Even different Christian 
 men may look upon and explain it differently. 
 Still there is more in it of living reality and 
 firm grasp of spiritual fact than some may be 
 prepared to admit. And one thing is certain:
 
 104 rURlTAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 lit) iii.ui will evtii- undei-stand liow Puritan 
 j)reacliing laid hold of men as it did ; made 
 such heroic, courageous, commanding souls 
 as it did, till he has accurately gauged a pro- 
 found religious experience like that which 
 Thomas Goodwin has laid bare for us in 
 himself. 
 
 And now, it may lead to wholesome search- 
 inofs of heart in those who are devoting' their 
 lives to the ministry if we follow Thomas 
 Goodwin a step further and see the effect of 
 tliis great spiritual change upon the deepest 
 motives of his life. No one can put this as 
 he has put it himself. " Having been," he 
 says, " devoted by my parents for the work of 
 the ministry, I considered what it was did 
 serve most to the glory of God in the work of 
 the ministry, and that overturned all the pro- 
 jects and designs of my heart hitherto, which 
 were the dearest of all to me ; so dear, that I 
 would certainly rather not have lived than 
 have forsaken that interest. The University 
 in those times was addicted in their preaching 
 to a vainglorious eloquence, wherein the wits 
 did strive to exceed one another ; and that 
 which I most of all affected, in my foolish 
 fancy, was to have preached, for the matter 
 thereof, in the way that Dr. Senhouse of St.
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 105 
 
 John's, afterwards made bishop, did exceed all 
 men in. I instance him to explain the way 
 and model that I set up, because his sermons, 
 five or six of theni, are in print, and because 
 it is the eminentest farrago of all sorts of 
 flowers of wit that are found in any of the 
 fathers, poets, histories, similitudes, or what- 
 ever has the elegancy of wit in it ; and in the 
 joining and disposing of these together, wit 
 was the eminent orderer in a promiscuous 
 way. His way I took for my pattern, not 
 that I hoped to attain to the same perfection, 
 but I set him up in my thoughts to imitate as 
 much as I was able. . . But my heart, upon 
 this my turning to God and setting his glory 
 as my resolved end of all my actions and ways, 
 did soon discover to me the unprofitableness 
 of such a design ; and I came to this resolved 
 principle, that I would preach wholly and 
 altogether sound and wholesome words, with- 
 out affectation of wit and vanity of eloquence. 
 And in the end, this project of wit and vain- 
 glory was wholly sunk in my heart, and I 
 left all, and have continued in that purpose 
 and practice these three-score years ; and I 
 never was so much as tempted to put in any 
 of my own withered flowers that I had 
 gathered, and valued more than diamonds,
 
 lOf) PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 nor liave they offered themselves to my mem- 
 or}^ to the brhigiiig them into a sermon to this 
 day, but I have preached what I thought was 
 truly edifying, either for conversion, or bring- 
 ing them up to eternal life." 
 
 These heart-utterances from the pen of an 
 old. man in the evening of an honored life, 
 one feels are almost too sacred for public 
 speech. They are rather to be pondered by 
 the minister of Christ when he is alone with 
 God and upon his knees. It is good for us, 
 even though it humble us, to bare our hearts 
 before the Lord, and ask ourselves what it is 
 we really preach for. Is it to make a liveli- 
 hood, or to display real or supposed abilities, 
 or to indulge such pleasurable feeling as the 
 orator may enjoy in some excited mood, or to 
 win some passing applause and gratify a mis- 
 erable vanity ? The question of motive is vital 
 to the minister of Christ. Even in ordinary 
 life, puiity and sincerity of intention carry 
 power with them and no counterfeit can take 
 their place. The light enshrined in the centre 
 of the character is sure to reveal itself and 
 shed its radiance over everything the man 
 does. And while this is true of every man, it 
 is especially true of the minister of Christ. 
 Surely it is a solemn thing to speak for God,
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 107 
 
 to set forth the cross of Christ to men who 
 have but a little span of life to live, and to do 
 this in a spirit of empty vanity, for our own 
 glory rather than for His who sent us. How 
 such a ministry must shrivel before the search- 
 ing gaze of Him whose eyes are as a flame of 
 fire ! Let every man take heed not only what 
 but hoio he builds upon the foundation. " For 
 each man's work shall be made manifest : for 
 the day shall declare it because it is revealed 
 in fire ; and the fire itself shall prove each 
 man's work of what sort it is. If any man's 
 work shall be burned he shall suffer loss : 
 but he himself shall be saved ; yet so as 
 through fire." 
 
 The profound sense he had of the living 
 presence of God with him, guiding his steps 
 and shaping liis deepest religious experience, 
 led Thomas Goodwin, as Ave might expect, to 
 concern himself in his preaching with the 
 divine facts of revelation rather than with 
 the subtleties of human speculation. There 
 is a characteristic sermon of his entitled, 
 "The Heart of Christ in Heaven to sinners 
 on earth," which is a good example of his 
 method. The purpose of this sermon was to 
 make intensely real to the men to whom he 
 spoke the Christ who had gone beyond the
 
 108 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 region of sight into the heavens — to make 
 them feel that He was as closely one with 
 them in sympathy, and personal relations of 
 helpfulness as though they could look into 
 His face. This is not an easy thing to ac- 
 complish; an eminently intellectual man of 
 our time has indeed declared it to be impossi- 
 ble. In Dr. Dale's life there is the following 
 quotation from Dr. Jowett, late Master of 
 Balliol College, Oxford : " Is it possible," he 
 asks, " to feel a personal attachment to Christ 
 such as is prescribed by Thomas a Kempis? 
 I think that it is impossible, and contrary to 
 human nature that we should be able to con- 
 centrate our thoughts on a person scarcely 
 known to us, who lived 1800 years ago." 
 On the other hand, in the same biography, we 
 are told that Dr. Dale was once writing an 
 Easter sermon and when half-way through, 
 the thought of the risen Lord broke in upon 
 him as it had never done before. " Christ is 
 alive," I said to myself ; " alive ! and then I 
 paused ; — alive ! and then I paused again ; 
 alive! Can that really be true? living as 
 really as I myself am ? I got up and walked 
 about repeating ' Christ is living ! Christ 
 is living!' At first it seemed strange and 
 hardly true, but at last it came upon me as a
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 109 
 
 burst of sudden glory; yes, Christ is living. 
 It was to me a new discovery, I thought that 
 all along I had believed it ; but not until that 
 moment did I feel sure about it. I then said, 
 " My people shall know it ; I shall preach 
 about it again and again imtil they believe it 
 as I do now.' " Now that which Dr. Dale 
 resolved to set about doing for his people in 
 Birmingham in the nineteenth century was 
 precisely that which Thomas Goodwin set 
 about doing for his people in London two 
 centuries and a half before. The problem of 
 the modern Englishman was that of the 
 ancient Puritan — how to make the Christ of 
 Eternity a living and helpful personality to 
 men who had not seen Him. Let me in a 
 few sentences show you how Thomas Good- 
 win sought to solve this problem. 
 
 Proceetlinsr from the known to the un- 
 known he demonstrated what Christ is to his 
 followers now, from what we know He was 
 to His disciples once. The first part of this 
 demonstration is taken from Christ's last 
 farewell to His disciples. With great tender- 
 ness of feeling he shows that Our Lord's 
 symbolic act of washing the disciples' feet was 
 meant as a token that, having loved His ov/n 
 which were in the world. He loved them to the
 
 110 rURITAX PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 end; and further that lie woukl carry on in 
 the heavens the purifying j)rocess lie had fore- 
 shadowed on the earth. The expression by 
 deed of the overflowing love there was in His 
 heart was followed by expressions of the 
 same thing in words. He told them that it 
 was for their good He was leaving them ; 
 that they should not be left orphans, for He 
 would send the Comforter ; that meantime 
 He would be preparing a place for them in 
 the many mansions of the Father's House, 
 and He would come again and receive 
 them to Himself. Because He lived they 
 should live also. He then presently goes 
 apart and alone to His Father and speaks 
 over all again unto Him that which He had 
 said unto them, saying behind their backs of 
 them as much as He had said before their 
 faces to them. 
 
 The second stage of Goodwin's demonstra- 
 tion takes us from the scene of sacred feelinor 
 in the upper chamber before the Crucifixion 
 to what took place immediately after the 
 Resurrection. Though these disciples in the 
 hour of crisis had forsaken Him and fled, 
 and Peter had even foully denied Him yet 
 His first word after his reappearance concern- 
 ing them was "Go, tell my brethren,'' even
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 111 
 
 as Joseph said to those who had so cruelly 
 wronged him — "I am Joseph your brother." 
 Thus He owns them as brethren still. This 
 was the message sent on to them beforehand ; 
 and when He came Himself His salutation 
 was " Peace be unto you ; " and later in that 
 interview He repeats the salutation. Then 
 too when He was leaving He further assured 
 their hearts, for He lifted up His hands and 
 blessed them. It was while He blessed them 
 He was parted from them, and thus His last 
 act was one of benediction. 
 
 Then, again, no sooner had He left them 
 than He proceeded to make good the promise 
 He had made when with them. The 
 Spirit came down at Pentecost and the 
 Apostles were enabled to work signs and 
 wonders as He said they should. The 
 two Apostles Paul and John, afterwards 
 saw Him personally, receiving revelations 
 of His unchanging interest in and love 
 for those who were His. And His very 
 last words in the very last book of Revelation 
 were words of welcome. Earth calls upon 
 heaven, and heaven calls upon earth as the 
 prophet speaks. The bride from earth says 
 unto Christ : " Come to me ; " and the Spirit 
 in the saints' hearts below say " Come " unto
 
 112 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Him also ; and Christ cries out as loud fiom 
 Heaven " Come " in answer unto this desire 
 in them. What an. echoing and answer- 
 ing of hearts and of desires — heaven and 
 earth ring again of it ! 
 
 All this Goodwin sets forth as the external 
 demonstration of Christ's feeling for men, 
 from which he passes to speak of the inter- 
 nal demonstration. By this he means the 
 known feeling of Father, Son, and Spirit for 
 man's salvation ; the relationships of closest 
 and most sacred kind among men by which 
 Christ shadows forth his union with His own. 
 He is the subject of all relations, which no 
 creature is ; and He is the pattern and exem- 
 plar of these relations, for they are all but 
 copies of His. And what He has already 
 suffered for His own makes them more dear 
 to Him. What zealous love there was in the 
 heart of Paul towards the converts he made ; 
 and what passionate devotion in the heart of 
 Moses towards the people of Israel whom he 
 led, and shall Christ be less devoted, less 
 loving than they? We need never fear that 
 Christ's great advancement in heaven should 
 any whit alter His disposition : for this His 
 very advancement engageth Him the more. 
 Although He be entered into the heavens it
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PL AT ON IS TS 113 
 
 is to be a liigh-priest there, so that the highest 
 preferment that heaven itself can bestow upon 
 Him engageth Him unto grace and mercy. 
 
 I need not pursue this examination further, 
 though Thomas Goodwin himself carries his 
 argument and demonstration into other de- 
 partments of thought. Enough has been said 
 to show how by the force of divine facts the 
 men of the past sought to produce divine 
 results in their appeals to men. Perhaps, 
 also, enough has been said to show that the 
 facts of divine revelation, when marshalled 
 and set in order before the minds of men, are 
 likely to be more powerful than mere spec- 
 ulations of ours, however ingenious. No 
 doubt, sermons like those of Thomas Good- 
 win's, as read now on the printed page, have 
 an archaic and old-world appearance about 
 them to us because they were spoken in the 
 language of the time. That kind of speech 
 was in the air of the seventeenth century ; 
 and in this matter no man can overstep the 
 limits of his time. He would be simply use- 
 less if he could. The only language which 
 will reach men is that to which they are 
 accustomed; and possibly our speech of to- 
 day may sound as primitive and archaic to 
 the men of three centuries hence as that of 
 
 8
 
 114 PUR/TAX PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the men of the seventeenth century sounds 
 to us. What we have to see to is that it 
 shall be as effective. 
 
 And now, partly by way of contrast, and 
 partly also for other reasons, let me introduce 
 you to a body of religious teachers, who, 
 while living in the same century as Thomas 
 Goodwin, belonged to a widely different school 
 of thought. Any study of Puritan preaching 
 in the seventeenth century would be incom- 
 plete without some reference to that small 
 body of remarkable men known as the "• Cam- 
 bridge Platonists," or, the " Sect of Latitude 
 Men," or the " Latitudinarians," as they were 
 variously called ; including Benjamin Which- 
 cote, Ralph Cudworth, Nathanael Culver- 
 well, John Smith, and Henry More. Though 
 separating themselves from much that was 
 distinctively Puritan, they yet started from 
 Puritanism and were greatly influenced by 
 it. With the exception of Henry ]\lore they 
 were all of Emmanuel College, which was 
 founded with an object as openly Puritan 
 as it was safe to confess, and on to the time 
 of the Restoration it was the chosen resort of 
 the Puritan party and the training-place of 
 Puritan divines. It was there that Bradshaw, 
 the president of the Court which condemned
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 115 
 
 Charles I., was bred ; it was there, too, that 
 Cromwell placed his ablest son, Henry ; from 
 it came Sir Philip jNIeadows, one of Crom- 
 well's Latin Secretaries ; and also a long list 
 of ejected rectors and Nonconformist preach- 
 ers. It was tliere, also, that John Harvard 
 was trained and many other of those di- 
 vines who sought over here that freedom 
 in preaching tliey could not have in their 
 own land. 
 
 The year 1644 marks the rise of the nevi 
 school of Cambridge Platonists. In tliat year 
 the Long Parliament having overthrown the 
 Laudian party proceeded to remodel Cam- 
 bridge University in a Puritan direction, 
 John Cotton's Cousin, Anthony Tuckney, 
 who succeeded him as Vicar of Boston, was 
 made Master of Emmanuel ; Dr. Hill who 
 was of Emmanuel, and who also had been 
 John Cotton's colleague at Boston, was placed 
 at the head of Trinity College ; and Benja- 
 min Whichcote, who, in his undergraduate 
 days, had had Anthony Tuckney as his tutor 
 at Emmanuel, was made Provost of King's, 
 succeeding Dr. Collins, who had been ejected 
 by Parliament. Thus these friends, "very 
 dear to each other," and all of them Emman- 
 uel men, became the leading spirits, and
 
 116 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 largely the formative influence, of the Uni- 
 versity. Up to this point, therefore, wq may 
 assume that Benjamin Wliichcote, afterwards 
 the foremost man among the Cambridge Pla- 
 tonists, stood higli in repute with the Puritan 
 autliorities of the time. 
 
 He is described as the great University 
 preacher of the Commonwealth. What Chad- 
 erton and Perkins had been in the days of 
 Elizabeth, Whichcote was half a century later. 
 Archbishop Tillotson, in his younger days 
 one of Whichcote's admirers, tells us that 
 his regular Sunday afternoon lecture in the 
 chapel of Trinity College drew crowds " not 
 only of the young scholars, but of those of 
 greater standing, and best repute for learn- 
 ing in the University," and that he contrib- 
 uted "more to the forming of the students 
 of that University in a sober sense of religion 
 than any man in that age." His great sphere 
 of influence was the pulpit. He had the 
 true oratorical temperament which is at its 
 best when face to face with an audience. 
 In preaching he used "no other than very 
 short notes, not very legible," and, as with 
 Frederick Robertson, the sermons we have 
 of his were either printed from his own 
 rough notes, or from shorthand reports of
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 117 
 
 admiring hearers, and did not appear till 
 after his death, the most complete edition 
 being that published in Aberdeen as late as 
 1751. 
 
 So completely was Whichcote identified 
 with the Puritans in public estimation that 
 at the Restoration he shared the fate of the 
 Puritan leaders, being removed from the 
 provostship by especial order of the King. 
 Yet on the other hand so widely had he 
 separated from the Puritans in his theologi- 
 cal system that in 1651 Anthony Tuckney 
 who, as we have said, had been his tutor at 
 Emmanuel, and who was his senior by ten 
 years, felt it right seriously to remonstrate 
 with him. In the autumn of that year 
 Tuckney, writing to him, says : " I desire to 
 be so ingenuous with you as out of that 
 ancient and still continued love I bear you, 
 to have leave to tell you that m}-- heart hath 
 been much exercised about you ; and that 
 especially since your being Vice-Chancellor 
 I have seldom heard you preach but some- 
 thing hath been delivered by you, and that 
 so authoritatively, and with the big words — 
 sometimes of 'divinest reason,' and some- 
 times of 'more than mathematical demon- 
 stration ' — that hath very much grieved me,
 
 118 rURlTAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 and I believe others with me ; and yesterday 
 as much as any time." 
 
 As we read these words of the ekler to the 
 younger man, breathing an ancient affection 
 and at the same time an anxious fear, we 
 feel inclined to ask what are the matters in 
 controversy between them? While both are 
 regarded as Puritans by the authorities of the 
 time, how is it that the Master of Emmanuel 
 feels it his duty gravely to protest against 
 the religious teaching of the Provost of 
 King's, who is also Vice-Chancellor of the 
 University? Is this one of those controver- 
 sies which are now dead and done with, or 
 is it one which has still important lessons 
 for the preachers of our own time ? For an 
 answer to these questions let us briefly exam- 
 ine this Cambridge movement of the seven- 
 teenth century, and find out, if we can, Avhat 
 Avere its strong and attractive points, and in 
 what directions its weakness lay. 
 
 That there were many attractive featiu-es 
 about the Cambridge Platonists no one can 
 deny who has at all caught the spirit of their 
 lives and teaching. There is an undoubted 
 charm about them while, as' spectators of the 
 world only through the loopholes of retreat, 
 they dwelt upon the visions of the " supreme
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 119 
 
 Beautiful and Good," and left us a legacy 
 of noble thoughts. We cannot but admire 
 the calm philosophic spirit of men who 
 "studied to propagate better thoughts, to 
 take men off from being in parties, or from 
 narrow notions, from superstitious conceits 
 and a fierceness about opinions." In days 
 when so many writers are pessimistic we 
 cannot but envy the optimism of men who 
 were wholly strangers to the gloom and the 
 pain and the self-annihilation of other mys- 
 tics ; who permitted no clouds, no threaten- 
 ing darkness to dim their eyes as they ascend 
 the hill of vision; and for whom, as it has 
 been said, the prospect expands as they go 
 on their way rejoicing, until the enlightened 
 spirit sees the shady city of palm-trees, and 
 beyond, the sparkling towers of the New 
 Jerusalem. 
 
 The object of Whichcote and his followers 
 was to unite philosophy and religion in their 
 scheme of thought and to confirm the union 
 on the indestructible basis of reason and the 
 essential elements of our higher humanity. 
 Their admirers claim for them that theirs was 
 the first elaborate attempt to wed Christianity 
 and philosophy made by any Protestant school, 
 and indeed the first true attempt of the kind
 
 120 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 since tlie days of the great Alexandrine 
 teachers. Their experiment therefore should 
 be of the deepest interest to us who are 
 preachers, who are convinced ourselves and 
 wish to convince others, that the highest truths 
 'in revelation are conformable to the highest 
 reason in man ; that, as they put it, " nothing 
 is true in divinity which is false in philos- 
 ophy." Did they succeed, and if not, how 
 may we account for their failure ? As to the 
 fact, at all events of his comparative failure, 
 we have the admission of Whichcote's own 
 admirers. It is admitted that he failed to 
 influence English speculation permanently; 
 that, while he inspired his hearers, men of 
 great and varied power — Smith and More, 
 Worthington and Cudworth, Patrick and Til- 
 lotson, he founded no school, and left no suc- 
 cessors in the third generation. My own 
 impression is that if his influence lingered on 
 into the eighteenth century it merely strength- 
 ened that cold rationalism which for nearly 
 a whole century went far towards killing all 
 spiritual religion in the Church of England. 
 The causes of failure are not without in- 
 struction to the preachers of to-day. Let me 
 briefly point out what they were. 
 
 1. It appears to me that Whichcote did
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 121 
 
 not sufficiently discriminate between man's 
 natural reason and his spiritual faculty. We 
 should all be disposed to accept his cen- 
 tral principle, which was — the essential 
 unity of all truth, natural and revealed, 
 and its affinity to the constitution of man. 
 We should maintain with him that what- 
 soever things are to be found in any of 
 the wise teachers of the past, that are true, 
 were in God before they were in them, and 
 have their place in that Kingdom of truth, 
 of which our Lord is King. We quite go 
 with him too when he says that " a man has 
 as much right to use his own understanding 
 in judging of truth, as he has a right to use 
 his own eyes to see his way ; " and we feel 
 that he utters a pungent truth which all 
 preachers would do well to remember when 
 he says : " I have always found that such 
 preaching of others hath most commanded 
 my heart which hath most illuminated my 
 head." But we pause and dissent when in 
 the matter of the religious life he so glorifies 
 the natural reason as to say that " to go 
 against reason is to go against God ; " tliat it 
 " is the Divine Governor of man's life ; it is 
 the very voice of God ; " that it " discovers 
 what is natural, and receives what is super-
 
 122 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 natural." On pldlosophical grounds we should 
 be disposed to argue with Martineau that we 
 cannot credit the intellect with the moral 
 apprehensions ; that there is nothing in the 
 mere presence of intelligence to supply the 
 defect of moral consciousness ; and that the 
 moral sentiments cannot be resolved into 
 modes of intellectual apprehension and de- 
 duced from the essentials of Reason. For 
 knowledge is the apprehension of what is^ 
 while morality (on its cognitive side) is the 
 apprehension of what ought to he — and these 
 are different spheres. Then, too, on religious 
 grounds Whichcote's theory will not stand 
 the test of facts. He meant by ' reason ' very 
 much what Paul meant by ' wisdom ' and 
 Paul affirms that after centuries of experi- 
 ment it was clearly proved that " the world 
 through its wisdom knew not God." After 
 all, experience goes to show that "spiritual 
 things are spiritually discerned," and the sin 
 of man's life has an awful power in dimming, 
 and even in destroying, his spiritual discern- 
 ment. Since men while knowing God, glori- 
 fied Him not as God, they became vain in 
 their reasonings and their senseless heart was 
 darkened. Before man's reason, therefore, 
 can become a perfect instrument for the dis-
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 123 
 
 covery of spiritual truth man himself must 
 be spiritually reconstructed and divinely 
 illuminated. 
 
 2. Another explanation of Whichcote's 
 comparative failure is to be found in the fact 
 that he sacrificed, or at least minimized, im- 
 portant truths in order to secure intellectual 
 unity of expression. His system of thought 
 was a reaction from that of Puritanism, which 
 had become too rigid and creed-bound, and 
 the tendency of all reaction is to go to an 
 opposite extreme. In the second stage of 
 the Reformation the principle of authority in 
 the Church had too much superseded the 
 principle of enquiry; and Whichcote felt 
 that Theology as systematized with logical 
 precision in the Westminster Confession was 
 not the final word. It did not entirely cover, 
 or completely meet, the actual facts of daily 
 experience. It seemed to him, therefore, that 
 the real test ot truth of which he was in 
 search was to be found in character and 
 conduct, that truth was the soul in action. 
 For the formula : " I think, therefore I am " 
 he would substitute : " I act, therefore I am ; " 
 " I do, therefore I have being," and affirmed 
 that it is by action answering to knowledge 
 that character is slowly shaped according to
 
 124 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 an inevitable law. This being so, he would 
 have said, Let us not trouble ourselves about 
 dogma, let us unite in worship. Unity of 
 religious opinion is evidently impossible ; 
 there is the more need, therefore, of commu- 
 nity of religious life. The true Church is not 
 the Church resting in this creed or that, pro- 
 claiming this type of doctrine or that, but the 
 company of the faithful owning Christ as 
 their Lord. The Church subsists in commun- 
 ion of spirit, not in coincidence of doctrine. 
 It has a common faith — it may have a 
 common worship ; but it is not bound to any 
 definite type of theology — any argumenta- 
 tive or theoretic creed. 
 
 Coleridge said that the Cambridge Platon- 
 ists were not so much Platonists as Plotinists 
 and here is one of the signs of it. For Neo- 
 Platonism sought to reduce all forms of truth 
 to one general amalgam. Plotinus, looking 
 round upon Platonist and Aristotelian, Sophist 
 and Sensualist, Epicurean and Stoic, would 
 have said: " Repudiate these partial scholars. 
 Leave them to their disputes, pass over their 
 systems, already tottering for lack of a foun- 
 dation, and be it yours to show how their 
 teachers join hands above them. In such 
 a spirit of reverent enthusiasm you may
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 1^5 
 
 attain a higher unity. You mount in specu- 
 lation, and from that height ordain all nobler 
 actions for your lower life." Again the 
 same thing was repeated when in the fifteenth 
 century there was in Florence a revival of 
 Neo-Platonism under Gemisthus Pletho and 
 his companions, Nicholas of Cusa and Pico 
 of Mirandola. These men dreamed that it 
 was possible to set up a philosophic worship, 
 emasculated and universal which should har- 
 monize in a common vagueness all the re- 
 ligions of the world. It has been well said 
 that they forgot that lip-homage paid to all 
 religions is a virtual denial of each, and that 
 it is possible so to combine religion and phil- 
 osophy as to rob philosophy of its only princi- 
 ple and religion of its only power. It was 
 so in another form with the Cambridge Pla- 
 tonists. The attempt to separate religious 
 worship from religious conviction landed 
 them in intellectual unreality. Contemporary 
 writers dwell upon the hearty subscription 
 which these men gave to the Thirty-nine 
 Articles of the Church of England. But 
 it turns out that this hearty subscription was 
 very much like that which John Henry 
 Newman gave to these same Articles some two 
 centuries later when in Tract No. XC. he
 
 126 PURITAy PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 showed that they meant only what he per- 
 sonally wanted them to mean. The subscrip- 
 tion of these Cambridge divines merely implied 
 acceptance of the Articles as " instruments 
 of peace." Bishop Fowler defends tliis un- 
 reality — we may go further and say this 
 double-dealing — by quoting these ominous 
 words from Archbishop Ussher : " We do 
 not suffer any man to reject the Thirty-nine 
 Articles of the Church of Engfland at his 
 pleasure ; yet neither do we look upon them 
 as essentials of saving faith, or legacies of 
 Christ and His Apostles ; but in a mean, 
 as pious opinions fitted for the preservation 
 of unity : neither do we oblige any man 
 to helieve them, but only not to contradict 
 them." You will probably feel with me that 
 this kind of talk is not calculated to win our 
 respect, and that if a man in ordinary- busi- 
 ness signed a contract in the easy-going 
 fashion in which these men are said to have 
 subscribed the Articles we should know what 
 to think of him. 
 
 All this has its instructive side for the 
 preachers of to-day. It shows us that nothing 
 permanently succeeds in the way of religious 
 teaching except a clear and unreserved set- 
 ting forth of the distinctive facts and truths
 
 THE CAMBRIDGE PLATONISTS 127 
 
 of God's own revelation. Every true man, 
 of course, will try to see these facts and truths 
 with his own eyes but he must never substi- 
 tute his own speculations, however original 
 and ingenious, for the authoritative revela- 
 tions of God. To the extent to which he 
 yields to this temptation his ministry will be 
 powerless. Man's speculations change with 
 changing times, but the Word of the Lord 
 endureth forever. Thrice has the effort been 
 made to render the abstractions of a philoso- 
 phized religion a power among men, and 
 thrice it has failed. Earnest-minded men feel 
 that it is puerile and powerless, and they will 
 have none of it ; while the careless and super- 
 stitious remain careless and superstitious still. 
 Man's passions and worldliness of heart are 
 not to be beaten down by mere straws of our 
 making. They can only be overcome by that 
 which has God's own power in it. For a 
 preacher to refine away what is most distinc- 
 tive of divine revelation and then to subtilize 
 the rest into a mere sentimental theism is to 
 court predestined failure. It has been tried 
 under the most favorable conditions by some 
 of the ablest and most learned of men. If 
 it failed in their hands, and it did fail, it is 
 not likely to succeed with others. A religion
 
 128 FUIiJTAN PREACHING JN ENGLAND 
 
 that can only live in the study and on the 
 heights of intellectual speculation, that de- 
 mands philosophic culture as an indispensa- 
 ble condition may suit men of an aristocratic 
 spirit, but it will never meet the wants of 
 the great body of the people who, often under 
 hard and sorrowful conditions, are fighting 
 the battle of life. There is room and need 
 in the Christian pulpit for the loftiest genius 
 and the profoundest learning, but the word 
 to be delivered must be that which went 
 forth from the carpenter's lowly roof, and 
 was first published abroad by fishermen and 
 tent-makers of old.
 
 V 
 
 JOHN BUNYAN AS A LIFE-STUDY 
 FOR PREACHERS
 
 LECTURE V 
 
 JOHN BUNYAN AS A LIFE-STUDY 
 FOR PEEACHERS 
 
 HITHERTO in these lectures we have fol- 
 lowed the unfoldings of Puritanism, so 
 far as the preaching of the Puritans was con- 
 cerned, on to the middle of the seventeenth 
 century. To-day we pass from the Common- 
 wealth period to that which followed the 
 Restoration of the monarchy in England, 
 during which, through the passing of the Act 
 of Uniformity in 1662, Puritanism almost 
 ceased to be described as such and came to 
 be more generally known as Nonconformity. 
 Looked at on one side — the side of the suf- 
 ferings and hardships endured, the twenty- 
 eight years between 1660, the year of the 
 Restoration, and 1688, the year of the Great 
 Revolution, may be described as the period of 
 the wilderness wandering of the Church of 
 God in England. Looked at on the other 
 side — the side which displayed the bravery 
 and steadfastness of the men who were loyal 
 to conscience, even to bonds and imprison-
 
 132 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 ment, it may be described as the heroic period 
 of Free Church life. The men who mainly 
 were the makers of that period are eminently 
 worthy of our consideration also from the 
 point of view of the preacher and the pastor : 
 I propose, therefore, setting some of the fore- 
 most of them before you for purposes of sugges- 
 tion and instruction. As to who shall be the 
 first of these, the choice seems largely deter- 
 mined for me by my own personal surround- 
 ings. For the last five-and-thirty years I have 
 had the honor to be the minister of the church 
 at Bedford of which John Bunyan was minister 
 during the last sixteen years of his life. As 
 circumstances have thus made me somewhat 
 familiar with the work he did and the spirit 
 in which he did it, I ventured to think that 
 you would not be impatient with me if be- 
 fore you who are to be ministers of Christ, 
 I were to set forth John Bunyan as a life- 
 study for preachers. 
 
 The methods of great artists are charged 
 with instruction for those to whom Art is to 
 be the masterwork of life. It is the province 
 of genius to touch life livingly, as by a sort 
 of instinct, to open out new paths of light 
 which other feet may traverse. No doubt 
 every man will do his best work by simply
 
 JOHN BUN Y AN 133 
 
 being himself, and no mere copy of some one 
 else. Imitations are usually failures. Still, 
 even the most original artist may find it 
 worth while to make a study of color and 
 form as exemplified in the best works of the 
 Great Masters ; and true men may receive 
 stimulus and help by carefully noting how 
 true men have done their work before them. 
 John Bunyan is chiefly thought of as a 
 Dreamer of wonderful dreams, but he was 
 also, as his contemporaries have told us, one 
 of the most living preachers England has ever 
 known. His own intense religious experi- 
 ence largely aided his genius in this. As he 
 tells us himself, he had tarried long at Sinai 
 to see the fire and the cloud and the dark- 
 ness, that he might fear the Lord all the days 
 of his life upon earth, and tell of his wonders 
 to others. So that when, in after days, he 
 spoke with kindling eye and tongue of fire 
 the things he had seen and felt, men bent to 
 his words as the corn bends to the wind. No 
 piler-up of mere rhetoric was this Dreamer 
 of Bedford, but one deeply learned in the 
 lore of human souls, heaven-taught in the 
 great and wonderful art of laying hold of 
 men. 
 
 It so happens that in the memorable
 
 134 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Dream by which Bunyan will always be 
 best known he has in several ways given us 
 his conception of what the minister of Christ 
 ought to be and to do. Few tilings are more 
 characteristic of this man than the high ideal 
 he had formed for himself of the office and 
 work of the Christian minister. It was not 
 the ecclesiastical greatness of the man which 
 impressed' him, for he had a withering scorn 
 for the mere priest, for those unreal men who 
 had come into the priest's office for a piece of 
 bread and whom he was wont to describe as 
 ' the carnal ministry ' — not the ecclesiastical 
 greatness of the man as a mere official, but 
 the greatness of his work as one dealing with 
 human souls as the messenger of God. Of 
 this work, I say, Bunyan had a very high 
 ideal, let me first show you what that ideal 
 was, as we gather it from various scenes and 
 characters in his Pilgrim story, and then let 
 us see how he worked out his ideal in his 
 own life and ministry. 
 
 You will remember that part of the Pil- 
 grim's Progress where Christian arrives at 
 the house of the Interpreter. "Come in," 
 said the Interpreter, " I will show thee what 
 will be profitable to thee." Whereupon he 
 had him into a private room and bid his man
 
 JOHN BUNTAN 135 
 
 open a door — " the which when he had done, 
 Christian saw the picture of a very grave 
 person hang up against the wall; and this 
 was the fashion of it : It had eyes uplift to 
 Heaven, the best of Books in his hand, the 
 law of Truth was written upon his lips, the 
 world was behind his back ; it stood as if it 
 pleaded with men, and a crown of gold did 
 hang over its head." When, five-and-twenty 
 years ago, a statue of Bunyan was set up to 
 his honor in Bedford town, the sculptor took 
 that picture from the House of the Interpreter 
 and embodied it in the bronze statue. So to 
 all passers-by to-day Bunyan in his efifigy 
 stands there with eyes uplift to Heaven, the 
 best of Books in his hand, and as if he pleaded 
 with men. Thus, so far as sculpture is .con- 
 cerned, he is made to realize his own ideal, 
 which, also in life, he largely did. " What 
 means this ? " asks Christian, as he looks at 
 that picture on the wall. Let us, in a sen- 
 tence or two, see what it means : 
 
 The Preacher, as Bunyan conceives of 
 him, "has eyes lifted up to Heaven," for 
 from thence comes his commission, and from 
 thence also his sufficiency and strength: 
 " The best of Books is in hand," for he is 
 the setter-forth of a divine revelation: "his
 
 136 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 work is to know and unfold dark things to 
 sinners ; " he has not to tell men merely 
 what he thinks, but what God thinks, what 
 God has said and done. " The law of truth 
 is written upon his lips," for he aims ever at 
 reality, he is a genuine man through and 
 through, transparently sincere, having no 
 faith in pious make-believes, or unreality of 
 any sort or kind. " The world is behind his 
 back ; " which is as much as to say that the 
 spirit of the world is not his spirit, its ambi- 
 tions are not his, and the rewards it can offer 
 have little attraction for liim, for a greater 
 world is risen to his view, and the less fades 
 before the greater. " He stands as if -he 
 pleaded with men ; " he has in his heart the 
 love, the divine compassion for men which 
 were in Christ's heart; he pleads with them 
 for their own souls' sake, and for the sake of 
 Him who died for their souls — pleads as the 
 mother pleads with her boy whom she loves 
 as her own life. Finally, over the head of 
 the man seen in the Picture "• there did hano- 
 a crown of gold; that is to show thee that, 
 slighting and despising the things that are 
 present, for the love that he hath to his j\Ias- 
 ter's service, he is sure in the world that 
 comes next to have glory for his reward."
 
 JOHN BUN Y AN 137 
 
 When the long day's work is done and " the 
 Chief Sheplierd shall appear ye shall receive 
 the crown of glory that fadeth not away." 
 May I not, as I pass on, say to every Divinity 
 student what the Interpreter said to Christian 
 — " Wherefore take good heed to what I 
 have showed thee, and bear well in thy mind 
 what thou hast seen." 
 
 But besides this instructive picture on the 
 wall, in the Pilgrim's Progress Bunyan pre- 
 sents a many-sided ministry in action and 
 life. He supplements that picture by a 
 varied succession of characters which appear 
 on the scene of his story, and sustain help- 
 ful, relations to one and another of the many 
 pilgrims whom we see on their way to the 
 City of God. First we have Evangelist^ who 
 is the Christian Minister scarcely, if at all, 
 transformed by the requirements of the alle- 
 gory. As his name implies, he is the pro- 
 claimer of an Evangel, he has good tidings to 
 tell. The story opens before us with the 
 sight of a man greatly distressed in mind, 
 and out of whose lips as he wanders the fields 
 there comes the pitiful cry, "What must I 
 do to be saved ? " He is, he says, not willing 
 to die nor able to come to judgment, and he 
 is afraid the burden upon his back will sink
 
 138 rURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 him lower than the grave. This is the sort 
 of man with whom, of all others, Evangelist 
 loves to deal. With brotherly heart he says 
 to him — " Do you see yonder wicket gate ? 
 No. Then do you see yonder shining light ? 
 You think you do. Well, keep that light in 
 your eye and follow it till you see the gate." 
 There you have the Christian Minister in the 
 character in which I trust it will be the pleas- 
 ure of your own life to be found through the 
 years God may spare you to work for Him — 
 as the guide of sin-stricken, salvation-seeking 
 souls. All things are of God, who reconciled 
 us to Himself through Christ, and gave unto 
 us the ministry of reconciliation. 
 
 And now let me take you to the Palace 
 Beautiful for another phase of your life-work 
 as the ministers of Christ. There at the gate 
 stands Watchful, the porter, with kindly word 
 giving welcome to the man who, with timid, 
 trembling step, has just come past the lions in 
 the way. Before introducing the pilgrim to the 
 rest of the household he has free and friendly 
 talk with him ; finds out what sort of man he 
 is, where he comes from, and whither he is 
 bound. vSo that in Watchful we have the 
 Christian minister in his function as president 
 of the church ; feeling liimself responsible,
 
 JOHN BUN Y AN 139 
 
 as to some extent he is responsible, for the 
 spiritual character of the community com- 
 mitted to his charge. He is right brotherly 
 and kind, still his name is Watchful. He 
 knows that he is only a steward, and that it 
 is required in stewards that a man be found 
 faithful. He is conscious that he has no 
 authority to make a church of Christ other 
 than Christ meant it to be : and he is aware 
 that when churches cease to be made up of 
 spiritual men they cease to be churches at 
 all; that if you bring the world into the 
 Church you have destroyed the Church and 
 you have not benefited the world ; that if the 
 salt have lost its savor there is nothing on 
 earth more pungent than itself to give it back 
 its saltness. 
 
 Yet again : while the minister of Christ is 
 to be Evangelist^ the proclaimer of truth, and 
 Watchful^ the porter at the gate, he is also to 
 sustain certain important relations towards 
 the brotherhood within. He must be a man 
 among men, the guide of pilgrims, the cham- 
 pion of right, the consoler of sorrow, the 
 inspirer of hope — in short, according to 
 Bunyan's idea, he must be the Greatheart of 
 the Christian pilgrimage. Mr. Greatheart is 
 the man-servant of Interpreter, the guide,
 
 140 PURITAN FEE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 conductor, and protector of pilgrims : " I am," 
 said he, " at my Lord's commandment. I 
 have it in commission to comfort the feeble- 
 minded, to support the weak." Other work 
 also has he to do at times, not more manly, 
 but more resolute, for again and again there 
 comes to him the call to go into action against 
 wrong. " I have a commandment to resist 
 sin, to overcome evil, to fight the good fight 
 of faith." The Christian pastor, then, in the 
 character of Greatheart, is to be the leader of 
 men, as manly as he is Christian, humanly 
 touching life at all points, a living, large- 
 hearted man among living men, women, and 
 children. While being the preacher and 
 teacher he is also to be the spiritual guide of 
 human souls amidst the perils and perplexi- 
 ties of their pilgrimage. It is a great gift, 
 and a greater privilege to be this wisely, and 
 men are grateful indeed when they meet a 
 real man, who, to use George Foxe's phrase, 
 can speak to their condition. Some men who 
 are not ministers have this gift, and there are 
 ministers who have it not. There is a divine 
 art in dealing Avith men not to be learnt all 
 at once, not to be acquired in lecture halls or 
 from books, but on your knees in communion 
 with God, and in the daily experiences of
 
 JOHN BUN TAN 141 
 
 life in living sympathy with men. It comes 
 only in its fulness with the process of years, 
 and with deepening heart-experiences of our 
 own. It requires a large and varied knowl- 
 edge of men, their motives, their sorrows, 
 their temptations. The man who can do this 
 well must be both loving and wise — loving 
 with the love of Christ, wise with the wisdom 
 of God. 
 
 There is also another side to Greatheart's 
 work: while he is to be the spiritual guide, 
 he is also to be the spiritual warrior, fighting 
 with weapons of proof the battles of the Lord. 
 The Episcopal Church, established by law in 
 England, makes it its boast that, sending forth 
 its clergy, it places "a gentleman in every 
 parish." That may be a good thing or it may 
 not. Everything depends upon who and 
 what-like the gentleman is. On the whole 
 it may be safer for our churches to try to place 
 in every community a true jnan, who, as op- 
 portunity offers, shall show himself on the 
 side of the oppressed, and speak up for every 
 righteous cause. Every here and there on 
 the road to the Celestial City there are power- 
 ful enemies lying in wait ; it is well, therefore, 
 that there should be on the road also a man 
 with manhood enough in him to challenge
 
 142 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 them, to confront them with some hope of 
 victory, to proclaim the divine authority of 
 right over wrong. 
 
 If you have followed me thus far; have 
 taken into your mental vision that picture 
 hanging upoii the wall in the Interpreter's 
 House; and have placed alongside it the 
 characters of Evangelist, Watchful and Great- 
 heart, you will have nearly realized to your- 
 selves Bunyan's conception of the ideal 
 Christian minister, — nearly but not quite. 
 One other scene from the Pilgrim story is 
 still needed to complete the whole. When 
 Christian and Hopeful arrived at the Delect- 
 able Mountains, where were gardens and 
 orchards, vineyards and fountains of water, 
 they found there Shepherds feeding their 
 flocks. The Pilgrims, going to them " and 
 leaning upon their staves (as is common with 
 weary Pilgrims, when they stand to talk with 
 any by the way)," asked what mountains 
 these were and whose were the sheep that 
 fed upon them. In reply the Shepherds told 
 them that these mountains are Emmanuel's 
 Land, within sight of the City, that the 
 sheep feeding on them' are His, and that He 
 laid down his life for them. Further, the 
 Shepherds said that the Lord of these moun-
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 143 
 
 tains had given them a charge, not to be for- 
 getful to entertain strangers : therefore the 
 good of the place was before them. The 
 names of these Shepherds were Knowledge^ 
 Experience^ WatchfiU, and Sincere. This is a 
 pastoral scene, quiet and restful, the meaning 
 of which it is not easy to miss. These Shep- 
 herds are pastors of the flock of Christ, and 
 their four names denote four qualities, all of 
 which should be found in every good minis- 
 ter of Jesus Christ. And, whereas the other 
 names we have had before us — Evangelist, 
 Watchful, Greatheart, set forth the outward 
 activities of the minister's life, these names, 
 Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sin- 
 cere, describe the inward qualities and spiri- 
 tual equipments of the man divinely called 
 to feed the flock of God. 
 
 He is to have Knowledge^ the learning, the 
 intelligence obviously required to feed the 
 people of God with knowledge and under- 
 standing. He is to have a mind ever alert 
 to see and learn, especially the best things, 
 intermeddling with all wisdom, especially that 
 which relates to God and things of God. 
 Then, too, he must acquire Experience. It is 
 dear-bought. It can only come through un- 
 dergoing temptation, trial, heart-sorrow. But
 
 144 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 it is worth all it costs, for it brightens many 
 a Scripture otherwise obscure, sends a thrill 
 through many a prayer, and wings many an 
 arrow to the conscience. He is also to be 
 Watchful. He who bore that name as porter 
 of the Palace Beautiful was to watch over 
 the Church and its arrangements without ; 
 this man of the same name is to keep guard 
 over heart and life within. He is to watch 
 over his own soul, and also to watch for the 
 souls of his people — to watch as they that 
 must give account. Finally he must be Sincere. 
 Simplicity and purity of intention in him will 
 soon be felt by his people and will give him 
 wonderful power over their hearts. They 
 will let him say anything to them when once 
 they are sure that he is real and that he loves 
 them. " In holiness and sincerity of God," 
 says the Apostle, " we behaved ourselves in 
 the world, and more abundantly to you- 
 ward " — no unreal words on the lips in 
 daily converse ; no false fire on the altar in 
 prayer and sermon, no affectation of a sym- 
 pathy the heart does not feel ! 
 
 And now, having thus given you, from Bun- 
 yan's Dream, Bunyan's ideal of the minister 
 of Christ, let us turn to see how he tried to 
 realize that ideal in his own life and ministry.
 
 JOHN BUN Y AN 145 
 
 First, let us see how he tried to realize it 
 in his preaching. As to literary form Bunyan's 
 sermons naturally took much of their character 
 from the time in which he lived. But while 
 these were arranged after a seventeenth- 
 century manner there was that about them 
 which was peculiarly his own. To begin 
 with, he was a master of grand and noble 
 Saxon speech. It came to him as naturally 
 as song to a bird. And it was not meant 
 for mere rhetorical display. He meant to 
 do something with his sermons when he 
 had made them. He was bent on seeing 
 spiritual realities for himself and on making 
 other people see them. He would take 
 notliing at second-hand. Lithographed ser 
 mons, such as so many of the English clergy 
 buy at so much a dozen, would not have 
 been in his way. Says he ; " I never en- 
 deavored to, nor durst make use of other 
 men's lines (though I condemn not all that 
 do), for I verily thought and found by ex- 
 perience that what was taught me by the 
 Word and Spirit of Christ could be spoken, 
 maintained and stood to by the soundest and 
 best established conscience." He sought, 
 as we all should, to stand on reality in 
 everything. To Him both sin and salva- 
 
 10
 
 146 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 tion were as real as the very earth on 
 which He trod. As He spoke of sm He 
 spoke of it with a shudder such as that 
 with which men speak of a (hmger from 
 which they have barely escaped with their 
 lives. This part of my work," he says, 
 ^" I fulfilled with great sense ; for the terrors 
 of the Law and guilt for my transgression 
 lay heavy on my conscience, I preached 
 what I felt, what I smartingly did feel, 
 even that under wdiich my poor soul did 
 o-roan and tremble to astonishment. Indeed 
 I have been as one sent unto them from 
 the dead. I went myself in chains to preach 
 to them in chains ; and carried that Fire in 
 my own conscience that I persuaded them 
 to beware of." So also, when he passed 
 from conflict to the calm of soul which 
 forgiveness brings, he was just as real. 
 " When the Lord came upon my soul with 
 some staid peace and comfort through Christ, 
 then too I still preached what I saw and felt." 
 In this intense directness and reality lay the 
 secret of this man's power. He found his 
 way to other men's hearts because he spoke 
 so truly out of his own. He not only told 
 the truth, but he made the truth to tell. 
 Said a preacher who knew how to do it
 
 JOHX BUNYAN 147 
 
 himself, there must be that in our sermons 
 which will both strike and stick. A man 
 may part with truth and not communicate 
 it. An important part of communication 
 is reception, and that may not have taken 
 place. An arrow all wing but no point is 
 worthless. Augustine was determined to 
 get right into the minds of the people to 
 whom he spoke. " I would rather," said 
 he, " that the grammarians should criticise 
 me than that my people should not under- 
 stand me," An important rule to bear in 
 mind is that you must keep touch with your 
 audience and carry them along with you. 
 Said Alexander VIII. to Cardinal Polignac, 
 " You always commence by agreeing with 
 me, and you finish by making me agree with 
 you." There is nothing so unreal as to see 
 a man speaking before his hearers but not to 
 them. Some men get into an unreal pro- 
 fessional way of speaking in public. In 
 private converse they are very sensible men 
 and worth listening to, but directly they get 
 on to their feet their common sense seems to 
 have left them. Said a Frenchman of his 
 priest, " When M. le Cur6 gives advice he 
 does it admirably, but when he wishes to 
 make a sermon he is unbearable." " Now
 
 148 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 doctor," said a shrewd-witted patient, " don't 
 be professional but tell me the truth." Arch- 
 bishop Magee used to say that all preachers 
 may be divided into three classes — preachers 
 
 ' you cannot listen to, preachers you can listen 
 to and preachers you cannot help listening 
 
 / to. Judging from his writings and from 
 what his contemporaries have told us of him, 
 Bunyan belonged to that class of preachers 
 men cannot help listening to. His reading 
 and thinking, his experience of life and 
 knowledge of men, his observation of 
 character in the forming and of motive 
 in the working — all were made to bear on 
 the great work on which his heart was set 
 and to which his life was consecrated. A 
 ministry having such elements of power and 
 reality will be successful in tliis century as 
 well as in the seventeenth ; while mere made- 
 up men, pieces of artificiality and officialism, 
 preachers who say things merely because they 
 are expected to say them, will be successful 
 in none of the centuries and if the truth 
 must be told they do not deserve to be. 
 
 Simplicity and directness of speech are 
 great qualities in a preacher. It does not re- 
 quire much genius, so to speak, as that no man 
 can for the life of him make out what you
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 149 
 
 are driving at. It is a mark of real power 
 when you can so put a thing as that one man 
 shall wonder that he never saw the subject in 
 that light before, and to another it shall seem 
 so simple and obvious that he falls into the 
 natural mistake of supposing that he could 
 have preached that sermon himself. It is a 
 difficult problem, no doubt, and one that 
 every preacher has had to face, how to speak 
 to a miscellaneous audience so as to secure 
 the interest of widely different orders of 
 mind. There can be no better aim for a 
 preacher than to try so to present the truth of 
 God that the common people shall hear him 
 gladly, and at the same time the most intelli- 
 gent members of his congregation shall feel 
 that their understandings have been respected 
 and their interest secured. " Think with the 
 wise," said Aristotle, "but s;peak with the 
 common people." 
 
 On the matter of literary form we may note 
 that Bunyan seems carefully to have avoided 
 one sin not easily forgiven — the cardinal sin 
 of dulness. Neither in his character sketches 
 nor in his illustrations does he ever grow 
 tedious. The various people in his allegories 
 step out into the open — they interest you or 
 they amuse you, or they instruct you ; there
 
 150 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 is one thing they never do, tliey never weary 
 you. They do all they were meant to do 
 and then they disappear. Yet in that brief 
 space they have left a distinct impression of 
 their own individuality upon you. Many of 
 the illustrations in his sermons, too, are simply 
 exquisite. Take for example this of Christian 
 fellowship : " Christians are like the several 
 flowers in a garden that have upon each of 
 them the dew of heaven, which being shaken 
 with the wind, they let fall their dew at each 
 other's roots, whereby they are jointly nour- 
 ished and become nourishers of each other." 
 That is an illustration which is a word-picture, 
 a poem in prose. The most refined feel the 
 charm of it, and the plainest man is conscious 
 of its beauty and force. Moreover it is an 
 illustration winch is not draffored in for its 
 own sake. It really does illustrate, that is, it 
 throws light on the subject in hand. More- 
 over it is not overdone. It leaves off at the 
 precise point at which it ought to stop. It is 
 well sometimes to have the moral courage to 
 leave out something. The leaving out may 
 really increase the value of that which remains 
 in. There are times when the half turns out 
 to be more tlian the whole. 
 
 Then, again, in realizing his own ideal as a
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 151 
 
 preacher, Bunyaii tells us that he intentionally 
 laid the chief stress on universal and central 
 truths. One of the first things that strikes us 
 about the Pilgrim's Progress is its universality. 
 Dean Stanley said of it that " it is one of the 
 few books which act as a religious bond to 
 the whole of Christendom ; that it is, perhaps 
 with six others, and equally with any of those 
 six, the book which, after the English Bible, 
 has contributed to the common religious cul- 
 ture of the Anglo-Saxon race." The forms 
 which rise before us are essentially represen- 
 tative in their character. While drawn from 
 the ordinary middle-class burghers of an ordi- 
 nary Midland town in the seventeenth century, 
 men of all nationalities consent to recognize 
 them as fellow-citizens and contemporaries. 
 Not only were they living in Bunyan's time, 
 they are living still. Only a little time ago I 
 travelled myself with that brisk young man 
 Ignorance from the country of Conceit. Pli- 
 able is to be found in many a congregation. 
 Talkative does not confine himself to any one 
 of the Christian denominations. Mr. Facing- 
 both-ways found his way into the British 
 Parliament at the very last election ; and for 
 anything I know he may also be met with 
 in Senate and Congress, even in the United
 
 152 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 States. Mr. By-ends has not ceased to be a 
 prominent figure in certain religious circles. 
 He is still true to his old principle, which is 
 never to go against wind and tide ; he still 
 likes Religion best when she goes in the sun- 
 shine and walks in silver slippers ; and his 
 grandfather the waterman still gets his living 
 by looking one way ■ and rowing another. 
 And if such men as these are with us still, so 
 also are others of widely different sort. 
 Christian, still faring forward, through storm 
 and sunshine, to the city of God ; Faithful 
 still staunch and true even in Vanity Fair ; 
 Hopeful with his word of sympathy and cheer 
 even in the dungeons of Doubting Castle ; 
 Standfast, still winning victories upon his 
 knees; Mr. Fearing, timid, trembling soul, 
 not afraid of the lions, but only afraid of his 
 acceptance at last ; Old Honest, too, sturdy as 
 an oak, and true as steel — we know them 
 all, for they are all with us, and all represent 
 types of character which are permanent and 
 world-wide. 
 
 And as with the characters , Buny an de- 
 picted so with the truths he most of all de- 
 lighted to preach — they were permanent and 
 universal also. He aimed mainly, he tells us, 
 at that which was central and vital. " I did
 
 JOUN BUN7AN 153 
 
 labor with great diligence and earnestness," 
 he says, " to find out such a word as might, 
 if God would bless, lay hold of and awaken 
 the conscience." Elsewhere also he says : 
 " I never cared to meddle with things that 
 were controverted, and in dispute among the 
 saints, especially things of the lowest nature ; 
 yet it pleased me much to contend with great 
 earnestness for the Word of Faith and the 
 remission of sins by the Death and Sufferings 
 of Jesus ; but I say as to other things I 
 should let them alone, because I saw they 
 engendered strife, and because that they, 
 neither in doing nor in leaving undone, did 
 commend us to God to be His." Take this 
 again : " It pleased me nothing to see people 
 drink in opinions if they seemed ignorant of 
 Jesus Christ, and the worth of their own sal- 
 vation, sound conviction for sin, especially 
 for unbelief, and a heart set on fire to be 
 saved by Christ, with strong breathings after 
 a truly sanctified soul. That it was that de- 
 lighted me ; those were the souls I counted 
 blessed." There is much of wisdom in all 
 this, in keeping truth in true perspective, 
 and in giving their due prominence to the 
 mountain heights of Scripture and of human 
 life.
 
 154 PURITAN PRE AC H IX G IN ENGLAND 
 
 Further, while Banyan aimed at central 
 things in his teaching, he spoke of them with 
 an honest ring of clear conviction. No 
 preacher of doubts was he, but of divine 
 certainties. In his view a man who has no 
 convictions of his own, no living grasp of 
 God's truth, was an impertinence in the pulpit 
 and something worse. " 1 have been in my 
 preaching," says he, "especially when en- 
 gaged in the doctrine of life by Christ, as if 
 an angel of God had stood at my back to en- 
 courage me. Oh, it hath been with such 
 power and heavenly evidence upon my own 
 soul, while I have been laboring to unfold it, 
 to demonstrate it, and to fasten it upon the 
 conscience of others, that I could not be con- 
 tented with saying / lelieve and am sure; 
 methought I was 7nore than sure (if it be law- 
 ful so to express myself) that those things 
 which I then asserted were true." Now 
 herein lay part of the secret of this man's 
 power as a preacher. Let me not be misun- 
 derstood. There is a vain-confidence of ig- 
 norance as well as an assured conviction of 
 faith, and we must not mistake the one for 
 the other. But there is another side to the 
 question. There is great outcry now and 
 again against dogmatism by some very dog-
 
 JOHN BUXYAN 155 
 
 matic people, and there are cases, no doubt, 
 where a man may be too sure, but on great 
 questions, and in the ministry of the Gospel 
 some men fail because they are not sure 
 enough. There are, of course, some moot 
 questions on which an honest man may think 
 it best to keep an open mind ; such questions, 
 for example, as those which relate to the 
 literary structure, date or authorship of cer- 
 tain books of Scripture. All that we want to 
 get at in these matters is the truth, whether 
 it squares with our preconceived opinions or 
 not. For in the long run the truth will al- 
 ways turn out to be our best friend and truest 
 helper. But on central verities — on God and 
 Christ and the Divine Spirit, on sin and sal- 
 vation, on the formation of character and the 
 shaping of destiny — on these let there be no 
 faltering speech or lisp of hesitancy. " In 
 my preaching," says Bunyan, " I have really 
 been in pain, and have, as it Avere, travailed 
 to bring forth children unto God ; neither 
 could I be satisfied unless some fruit did 
 appear in my work. If I were fruitless it 
 mattered not who commended me ; but if I 
 were fruitful I cared not who did condemn." 
 If I have not already trespassed too far on 
 your patience I should like to say a word or
 
 156 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 two as to the way in which Bunyan seems to 
 have realized the ideal minister, not only in 
 his preaching, but also in the spirit of his 
 life. I need not remind you how bravely 
 and with what unshrinking fortitude he held 
 on his way in spite of the storms and sorrows 
 of life. Long weary years in gaol did not 
 break his spirit or embitter his heart. " I 
 have determined," said he, " the Almighty 
 God being my help and shield, yet to suffer, 
 if frail life might continue so long, even till 
 the moss shall grow on mine eyebrows rather 
 than to violate my faith and principles." In 
 those days of persecution our fathers passed 
 through stern discipline. Our sorrows are 
 light indeed by the side of theirs. He had 
 also troubles which every true minister of 
 Christ has to share with him. He had heart- 
 sorrows, as we have, too, over some who ran 
 well once but were hindered. " If," said he, 
 " any of those Avho were awakened by my 
 ministry did after that fall back, as some- 
 times too many did, I can truly say their loss 
 hath been more to me than if my own chil- 
 dren, begotten of my own l)ody, had been 
 going to their graves. I think, verily, I may 
 speak it without any offence to the Lord, 
 nothing has gone so near to me as that.
 
 JOHN BUN Y AN 157 
 
 unless it was the fear of the loss of the sal- 
 vation of my own soul." 
 
 Besides this sorrow, of which every min- 
 ister knows something, he had experience of 
 others also. He was bitterly assailed by evil 
 men. The ignorant and malicious loaded 
 him with slanders and reproaches. "What 
 shall I say to those who have thus besjDattered 
 me?" asks he. "Shall I threaten them? 
 Shall I chide them ? Shall I flatter them ? 
 Shall I entreat them to hold their tongues ? 
 No, not I ! I bind these tilings to me as an 
 ornament ; it belongs to my Christian pro- 
 fession to be vilified, slandered, reproached, 
 and reviled. Wanting these I should want 
 one siofu of a Christian and child of God. 
 I rejoice in reproaches for Christ's sake." 
 
 Judging, then, from other men's experience 
 you are not to be surprised if in coming days 
 you now and then meet with trouble and 
 trying discipline in the exercise of your min- 
 istry. Indeed I know no walk of life where 
 a man may altogether expect to escape, and 
 I know no man who would be the better 
 for it even if he could escape. We have to 
 go through the deeps, both for our own sake 
 and for the sake of others. We are to "com- 
 fort them that are in affliction through the
 
 158 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 comfort wlierewitli we ourselves are comforted 
 of God." But I am not going to dwell too 
 much on the shadows in the picture. For 
 there is another and a brighter side. I believe 
 that a man who has even moderate capacity 
 for the work of the ministry, a love for his 
 work and real Christlike sympathy with men, 
 will in time gather about himself so much 
 kind feeling from those he has helped, and 
 who love him for his work's sake, that there 
 may even be danger the other way. He may 
 need to be saved from the enervating influ- 
 ence of too much kindness. Fortuiiately, if 
 this should be your case, you may rely upon it 
 that the Lord, in His mercy, will raise up some 
 good brother in the church who will make it 
 his business to see to it that you are not 
 exalted above measure. My advice is that 
 you should look upon that brother as one of 
 your best friends. He has one talent at 
 least, and though you may have preferred 
 that he should have wrapped that one talent 
 in a napkin and buried it in the earth, you 
 may yet find tliat it has valuable uses. 
 
 In future years, then, you may have your 
 trials and sorrows, no man is entirely with- 
 out, but do not think too much of them ; do 
 not be always trying to run away from them
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 159 
 
 to some other church — some church not yet 
 created — where all is unbroken and un- 
 clouded peace. If you have your sorrows 
 you will also have your joys : you will have 
 meat to eat that the world knows not of. 
 And the joys you will find to be most precious 
 are not those which can be set forth in the 
 religious journals of the day, but those you 
 take to your secret place of communion, and 
 spread before the Lord with a thankfulness 
 too deep for words. If there are those you 
 have helped to see the light of God, to bear 
 their life-burdens, to go forward under hard 
 conditions with new courage and hope — if 
 there are those whom God has given you to 
 be your children in the faith and whom you 
 have the honor of building up to a noble 
 Christian manhood, you will care very little 
 for the troubles of the way. " I have," says 
 Bunyan, " counted as if I had goodly build- 
 ings and lordships in those places where my 
 children were born ; my heart hath been so 
 wrapped up in the glory of this excellent 
 work that I counted myself more blessed and 
 honored of God by this than if He had 
 made me the Emperor of the Christian world, 
 or the Lord of all the glory of the earth with- 
 out it."
 
 160 PURITAX PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Bunyan's experience is interesting to us in 
 another way, inasmuch as with all his genius 
 he knew as much as most of us of those ups 
 and downs, those exaltations and reactions of 
 feeling of which every preacher, indeed every 
 public speaker, knows the meaning. He had 
 his temptations, he says, and that of divers 
 kinds. Sometimes when he was on his way 
 to preach he was haunted by a fear that he 
 should not be able to speak to edification, 
 nay that he should not be able even to speak 
 sense to the people ; at which times he 
 would be seized with such strange faintness 
 and strengthlessness of body that his legs 
 would scarce carry him to the place of exer- 
 cise. Sometimes, again, when he had begun 
 to speak the word with much clearness, evi- 
 dence and liberty of speech, before the oppor- 
 tunity was over he has become so straitened 
 in speech and bewildered that he has not 
 known what he has been about; or to use 
 his own expression, he has felt as if his 
 "head had been in a bag all the time of 
 the exercise." Let this be your comfort if 
 such experiences should ever be yours, and 
 remember that the people have not always 
 seen the sermon as you have yourself. 
 Sometimes when you thought you have
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 161 
 
 done well you have not done so well as 
 you thought. On the other hand when 
 you have felt humbled God has taken your 
 weakness and filled it with his strength. 
 " Sometimes," says Bunyan, " when I thought 
 I did no good then I did most of all; and 
 at other times, when I thought I should 
 catch them, I have fished for nothing." 
 
 Like all true men, this man in his work 
 felt he was nothing and God was everything. 
 He knew his own heart too well ever to be 
 proud or vainglorious. "I have also," he 
 says, " while found in this blessed work of 
 Christ, been often tempted to pride and lift- 
 ings up of heart ; and though I dare not say 
 I have not been infected with this, yet truly 
 the Lord of His precious mercy, hath so car- 
 ried it towards me, that for the most part 
 I have had but small joy to give way to such 
 a thing. For it hath been my every day's 
 portion to be let into the evil of ray own 
 heart, and still made to see such a multitude 
 of corruptions and infirmities therein that it 
 hath caused hanging down of the head under 
 vl\ my gifts and attainments. I have felt 
 this thorn in the flesh the very mercy of God 
 to me." 
 
 Thus this divinely-gifted and heaven-illu- 
 11
 
 162 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 mined soul was taught the great secret of 
 spiritual strength; found out that the way 
 to the heights is ever through the depths: 
 that when we are weak then are we strons- : 
 and so with an ever-increasing sense of his 
 own insufficiency came to feel more and 
 more that his sufficiency was of God. Such 
 pastors the churches need in every genera- 
 tion. From age to age they seem to say: 
 
 '' We want our Bunyan to show the way 
 Through the Sloughs of Despond that are round us 
 
 to-day, 
 Our guide for straggling souls to wait, 
 And lift the latch of the wicket-gate. 
 We fain would listen, O Preacher and Peer, 
 To a voice like that of this Tinker-Seer, 
 Who guided the Pilgrim up, beyond 
 The Valley of Death and the Slough of Despond, 
 And Doubting Castle and Giant Despair, 
 To those Delectable Mountains fair, 
 And over the River, and in at the Gate 
 Where for weary Pilgrims the Angels wait."
 
 VI 
 
 RICHARD BAXTER, THE KIDDER- 
 MINSTER PASTOR
 
 LECTURE VI 
 
 EICHAKD BAXTER, THE KIDDER- 
 MINSTER PASTOR 
 
 IN recent utterances of mine your attention 
 has been called to certain English 
 preachers of the seventeenth century who 
 were, in an especial sense, characteristic of 
 the time and notable in themselves. I should 
 like, still, to detain you in that century a 
 little while longer that we may receive 
 further instruction and stimulus from the 
 life-story of a distinguished preacher and the 
 record of a memorable ministry which you 
 will recognize as falling within the century I 
 have named. 
 
 If I were asked what, in the year 1646, 
 was one of the most unpromising towns in 
 England to which a young man could be 
 sent, who was starting his career as preacher 
 and pastor, I should feel inclined to point at 
 once to the town of Kidderminster in Wor- 
 cestershire. With a population at that time 
 of between three and four thousand, mainly
 
 166 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 carpet-weavers, it had been, morally and 
 spiritually, so grossly neglected as almost 
 to have sunk into practical heathenism. 
 Few, indeed, were those in whose hearts 
 any seeds of godliness had taken root. The 
 majority of the people were ignorant beyond 
 the ignorance of the time, debased beyond its 
 defilement, disorderly beyond its rudeness. 
 It was an illustration of the old adage — like 
 priest like people. For the vicar of the 
 town had been proceeded against before the 
 Committee for Scandalous Ministers as being 
 in character and attainments utterly unfit for 
 his position. Ignorant of the very elements 
 of Christianity, he preached but once a 
 quarter, and that in so feeble a fashion as to 
 expose him alike to the ridicule and the pity 
 of the people who listened to him. It was 
 also alleged against him that he was a fre- 
 quenter of ale-houses, and had sometimes 
 been seen drunk. Such was the vicar, and 
 his curates were like himself. One of these 
 was in the town, and, in common with his 
 vicar, was accused before the Committee; 
 the other had charge of a subordinate chapel 
 in a distant part of the parish. This last 
 was described as a common tippler and drunk- 
 ard, as a railing quarreller, and an ignorant
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 167 
 
 insufficient man who had scarcely knowledge 
 enough to understand a Child's Catechism. 
 Almost the only book he had was Musculus's 
 "Commonplaces in English," out of which 
 he used to string a few platitudes for the 
 people; and the trade by which he chiefly 
 lived was that of celebrating unlawful mar- 
 riages. If the people strayed away to neigh- 
 boring parishes they found themselves no 
 better off. For the poor ignorant curate of 
 the parish on the one side got his living by 
 cutting fagots, and the curate of the parish 
 on the other side by making ropes — " their 
 abilities being answerable to their studies 
 and employments." This was the condition 
 in which scores of parishes were left after the 
 best preachers had been driven by persecution 
 either into Holland, or over here into New 
 England. To undertake the pastoral care of 
 a town like Kidderminster after such teachers 
 as these was like undertaking to cultivate 
 a farm which for time out of mind had been 
 overrun with briars and thorns, and aban- 
 doned to thistles and weeds. 
 
 Again, if I were asked, who of all men — 
 taking merely physical reasons into account 
 — would seem to be the most unlikely man 
 to be sent as pastor to this most unlikely and
 
 168 PURITAN PREACTIJNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 unpromising place, I should have said that 
 man Avas Richard Baxter. Scarcely ever 
 has a man who has done any work at all, 
 done it under circumstances of such difficulty 
 and pain as this man did his. For fourteen 
 years he had scarcely a working hour free 
 from pain. He was engaged in one long 
 conflict with diseases like " pleurisy, nephritic 
 and cholic." "I had at several times," he 
 says, "the advice of no less than six and 
 thirty physicians, by whose order I used 
 drugs without number, almost all of which 
 God thought not fit to make successful for a 
 cure." Twenty several times he was near to 
 death; again and again he was brought to 
 the very gates of the grave, and again and 
 again he returned to life through the long 
 and wearisome ascent of slow and difficult 
 recovery. If Richard Baxter had done noth- 
 ing but take care of himself as an invalid, 
 no one would have had the heart to blame a 
 man to whom life was thus one long and 
 weary battle with disease and pain. 
 
 And yet once more: If I were asked to 
 single out one English town of the seven- 
 teenth century which more almost than any 
 other came under the influence of the Spirit 
 of God; and one preacher who, more than
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 169 
 
 most, was successful in winning men for 
 Christ, and in organizing a vigorous church 
 life under his pastorate, I should say that 
 town was Kidderminster and that preacher 
 was Richard Baxter. A quarter of a century 
 ago that town did honor to itself by erecting 
 a statue to that preacher; and on the occa- 
 sion of the unveiling, Dean Stanley said: 
 "There have been three or four parishes in 
 England which have been raised by their 
 pastors to a national, almost a world-wide, 
 fame. Of these the most conspicuous is 
 Kidderminster: for Baxter without Kidder- 
 minster would have been but half of himself ; 
 and Kidderminster without Baxter would 
 have had nothing but its carpets." Let us 
 first look at the extent of the work this man 
 did, and then at his methods of work. 
 
 With grateful heart he tells of the success 
 God gave him in his ministry. And though 
 the story is his own, we may safely trust him. 
 There is an unmistakably honest ring about 
 the man. "I would as soon doubt the 
 Gospel verity, " said Coleridge, " as I would 
 doubt Baxter's veracity." "Let me," says 
 he, "to the praise of my gracious Lord, 
 acquaint you with some of my success." 
 He will not suppress the story, though he
 
 170 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 knows beforehand that some will impute the 
 mention of it to pride and ostentation, for it 
 is the sacrifice of thanksgiving which he owes 
 to his most gracious God, which he will not 
 deny Him for fear of being censured as 
 proud, lest he prove himself proud indeed. 
 
 He had not long been preaching in the 
 town before the large and capacious church 
 became so full that gallery after gallery had 
 to be added to the interior. And as years 
 went by the preaching in the church told 
 powerfully upon the life of the town. Let 
 him tell the wonderful story himself; "On 
 the Lord's days there was no disorder to be 
 seen in the streets, but you might hear a 
 hundred families singing psalms and repeat- 
 ing sermons, as you passed through the 
 streets. In a word, when I came thither 
 first there was about one family in a street 
 that worshipped God and called on his name ; 
 and when I came away there were some 
 streets where there was not past one family 
 in the side of a street that did not do so; and 
 that did not by professing serious godliness 
 give us hopes of their sincerity." The teach- 
 ing in the church elevated those carpet- 
 weavers intellectually as well as religiously: 
 "Some of the poor men did competently
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 171 
 
 understand the Body of Divinity, and were 
 able to judge in difficult controversies." 
 But, better still, they became gifted spirit- 
 ually: "Some of them were so able in prayer 
 that very few ministers did match them in 
 order and fulness, and apt expressions and 
 holy oratory with fervency." And, best of 
 all, their lives were even better than their 
 prayers : " The temper of their minds and the 
 innocency of their lives was much more 
 laudable than their parts. The professors 
 of serious godliness were generally of very 
 humble minds and carriage; of meek and 
 quiet behavior unto others, and of blameless- 
 ness and innocency in their conversations." 
 The sermons of the minister in the pulpit 
 were preached over again by the people in 
 their lives. They made the Gospel beautiful 
 by showing it in action. Says Baxter: " The 
 holy, humble, blameless lives of the religious 
 sort was a great' advantage to me : the mali- 
 cious sort could not say — your professors 
 here are as proud and covetous as any. 
 But the blameless lives of godly people did 
 shame opposers, and put to silence the igno- 
 rance of foolish men, and many were won by 
 their good conversation." Moreover, this 
 good work of God stood the test of time, was
 
 172 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 no mere flash in the pan. When the Resto- 
 ration brought in the reign of persecution 
 this true shepherd of men was driven from 
 the people he loved so well, and who loved 
 him; yet long afterwards he writes : "Though 
 I have now been absent from them about six 
 years, and they have been assaulted with 
 pulpit calumnies and slanders, with threaten- 
 ings and imprisonments, with enticing words 
 and seducing reasonings, they yet stand fast 
 and keep their integrity. Many of them are 
 gone to God, and some are removed, and 
 some now in prison, and most still at home; 
 but not one that I hear of who has fallen off 
 or forsaken his uprightness." 
 
 Now this is no mere ideal picture of some 
 "sweet smiling" Auburn, with pastoral rela- 
 tions depicted after the fancy of the poet, 
 but not easily to be met with in real life. It 
 is a simple narrative of facts as they took 
 place, not in some abode of rustic innocence, 
 but in a manufacturing town where the 
 weavers were often as busy with religious 
 discussions as they were with their looms; 
 where working-men have usually keen 
 tongues, and are not over-sparing in their 
 criticisms of preachers and sermons and 
 churches. What is there to explain the
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 173 
 
 exceptional success of this Kidderminster 
 pastor ? 
 
 That success certainly did not depend 
 upon any mere adventitious aids. It did not 
 lie with him in a comely presence, for he was 
 weak and gaunt in form. He had no per- 
 sonal advantages except — and I must admit 
 the exceptions I am about to name are not 
 without significance — except that he had an 
 eye which caught its fire from the ardor of 
 his soul, and that he had as a natural gift a 
 familiar moving voice, — a voice which a 
 loving heart toned into the music of pathetic 
 entreaty. A great analyst of the art of 
 public speaking as it was brought to perfec- 
 tion in Greece said that a speaker must 
 convince his hearers at the very outset: first, 
 that he has their interests at heart, next, 
 that he is competent to interpret these inter- 
 ests, and, thirdly, that he is free from the 
 taint of self-seeking. It is scarcely likely 
 that Richard Baxter gathered the precepts of 
 the art of speaking from the great work of 
 Aristotle, for Greek was not much in his 
 way, but he certainly always had these pur- 
 poses before him. He had that true genius 
 for public speaking, that most effective form 
 of eloquence which you see in a man when,
 
 174 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 in conversation on some serious subject, he 
 is intent on convincing his neighbor of some 
 important truth, or persuading him to some 
 decisive course of conduct. Of public men 
 in recent times in England, so far as I have 
 had the opportunity of hearing them, I 
 should say that John Bright had this true 
 genius, this true oratorical instinct in the 
 highest degree. The most cultured and 
 intellectually-gifted men were conscious of 
 an indescribable pleasure in listening to him 
 when he was at his best, and the most 
 studious and shrewd of the working classes 
 made his speeches a household book. It is 
 difficult to describe the style, but you recog- 
 nize it at once, whether it is addressed to the 
 eye or the ear. It is characterized by that 
 brief, rapid, familiar and natural manner 
 which a mind in earnest ever assumes. It 
 shrinks instinctively from what is merely 
 ornate or glittering. It is jealous of piled- 
 up epithets, aims at a highly-idiomatic and 
 homely diction, has a love of brevity and 
 condensation, and keeps itself free from stiff 
 stateliness and empty formality. 
 
 A competent witness in our time has ex- 
 pressed the opinion that of all the English 
 preachers of the past, probably those who
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 175 
 
 have been most strongly marked by the 
 peculiarities of the true genius for public 
 speaking are Hugh Latimer, Robert South 
 and Richard Baxter. Of the quality of 
 Hugh Latimer we had some taste in a former 
 lecture. But South seems to this writer to 
 furnish, in point of stylc^ the truest specimen 
 of the most effective species of pulpit elo- 
 quence. Of course he is speaking simply of 
 his style, offering no opinion as to the truth 
 or error of the doctrines he taught, and no 
 apology for his unchristian bitterness and 
 often unseemly wit. He merely points out 
 that his robust intellect, his shrewd common 
 sense, his vehement feelings, and his fancy, 
 always more distinguished by force than by 
 elegance, admirably qualified him to be a 
 powerful public speaker. There is a sermon 
 of his in which he pours scorn on the florid 
 declamation, the mere tinsel rhetoric which 
 some people think to be so very fine. He 
 mentions no names, but you can see that he 
 is speaking for the especial benefit of his 
 illustrious but too fanciful and too ornate 
 contemporary, Jeremy Taylor. The passage 
 is worth quoting : " ' I speak the words of 
 soberness,' said St. Paul, and I preach the 
 Gospel not ' with the enticing words of
 
 176 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 man's wisdom.' This was the way of the 
 Apostle's discoursing of things sacred. Noth- 
 ing here ' of the fringes of the north star ; ' 
 nothing 'of nature's becoming unnatural;' 
 nothing of the ' down of angels' wings, or 
 the beautiful locks of cherubims ; ' no starched 
 similitudes introduced with a ' Thus have I 
 seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion, ' and 
 the like. No — these were sublimities above 
 the rise of the apostolic spirit. For the 
 Apostles, poor mortals, were content to take 
 lower steps, and to tell the world in plain 
 terms that he who believed should be saved, 
 and that he who believed not should be 
 damned. And this was the dialect which 
 pierced the conscience and made the hearers 
 cry out, Men and brethren, what shall we 
 do ? It tickled not the ear, but it sunk into 
 the heart, and when men came from such 
 sermons they never commended the preacher 
 for his taking voice or gesture ; for the fine- 
 ness of such a simile or the quaintness of 
 such a sentence; but they spoke like men 
 conquered with the overpowering force and 
 evidence of the most concerning truths, much 
 in the words of the two disciples going to 
 Emmaus : ' Did not our hearts burn within 
 us while He opened to us the Scriptures.'
 
 EICBARD BAXTER 177 
 
 In a word, the Apostles' preaching was there- 
 fore mighty and successful, because plain, 
 natural and familiar, and by no means above 
 the capacity of their hearers • nothing being 
 more preposterous than for those who were 
 professedly aiming at men's hearts, to miss 
 the mark by shooting over their heads." 
 
 Passing from South to Baxter, we have in 
 both, in large measure, those endowments 
 essential to the best kind of popular elo- 
 quence. Baxter has the same combination 
 of vigorous intellect and vehement speech 
 which distinguished South ; but he has what 
 South had not, — a devotion pure and ethe- 
 real, a benevolence ardent and sincere. The 
 vigorous, direct style of speech was inspired 
 by the earnest soul. His weak health seemed 
 always to keep him within sight of the 
 things eternal. He says: "Doing all in 
 bodily weakness, as a dying man, my soul 
 was all the more easily brought to serious- 
 ness, and to preach as a dying man to dying 
 men; for drowsy formality and customari- 
 ness doth but stupefy the hearers and rock 
 them asleep. It must be serious preaching 
 which must make men serious in hearing and 
 obeying it." The same earnestness of spirit 
 is manifest in an appeal he makes to ministers 
 
 12
 
 178 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 themselves. "I confess," he says, "that 
 Necessity should be the great disposer of a 
 minister's course of study and labor. If we 
 were sufficient for everything we might 
 attempt everything, and take in order the 
 whole Encyclopaedia; but life is short, and 
 we are dull, and eternal things are necessary, 
 and the souls that depend on our teaching 
 are precious. I confess, necessity hath been 
 the conductor of my studies and life. It 
 chooses what book I shall read, and tells me 
 when and how long. It chooseth my text, 
 and makes my sermon, both for matter and 
 manner, so far as I can keep out my own 
 corruption. Though I know the constant 
 expectation of death hath been a great cause 
 of this, yet I know no reason why the most 
 healthy man should not make sure of the 
 most necessary things first, considering the 
 uncertainty and shortness of all men's lives." 
 This man's power, then, and the secret of 
 his success lay in the natural human way he 
 spoke to men, and the divine earnestness 
 which possessed his soul. He spoke directly 
 from Christ to the people. Christianity was 
 to him no mere set of doctrines to be received 
 or a code of ethics to be followed; it was 
 the power of an endless life. Go and listen
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 179 
 
 to him in that crowded church in Kidder- 
 minster any Sunday you like, he is the same 
 man with the same theme. No one suspects 
 that this soldier of the Cross fights uncertainly 
 as one that beats the air. You feel that his 
 message is not so much about his Master as 
 from Him; and it is not a message that 
 might do for any audience at any time, but 
 it is clearly intended for the living men and 
 women then and there before him. The 
 minutes are not loner enough for all he 
 wants to say, and his most fervent words are 
 not expressive enough to satisfy his eager 
 soul. And even when he seems drawing to 
 a close he is unwilling to turn and leave. 
 He has yet one more argument, if, haply, 
 one more soul may be persuaded. The 
 people in those pews, listening, do not need 
 to be told that the man who stands there 
 speaking is not there merely because he has 
 to go the round of his professional duties, 
 but because in loyalty to God and his own 
 soul he could be nowhere else. He feels and 
 they know that he feels that necessity is laid 
 upon him, yea, that woe is unto him if he 
 preach not the Gospel. Like an apostle who 
 went before him, he can truly say : I hold not 
 my life of any account, as dear unto myself,
 
 180 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 SO that I may accomplisli my course, and the 
 ministry which I received from the Lord 
 Jesus, to testify the Gospel of the grace of 
 God. 
 
 But Baxter's preaching, earnest and telling 
 as it was, was not the only means he em- 
 ployed for the instruction of his people, and 
 for the grounding of them in the truth. We 
 have quickened the pace of life since his 
 time, and manners and customs have greatly 
 changed; but we may yet learn much from 
 the business-like way in which he set about 
 getting at the people. Once more we will 
 let him tell the story himself: 
 
 "Every Thursday evening," he says, "my 
 neifrhbors that were most desirous, and had 
 opportunity, met at my house, and there one 
 of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards 
 they proposed what doubts had any of them 
 had about the sermon, or any other case of 
 conscience, and I resolved their doubts. 
 And, last of all, I caused sometimes one and 
 sometimes another of them to pray (to exer- 
 cise them), and sometimes I prayed with 
 them myself ; which (besides singing a psalm) 
 was all they did. And once a week, also, 
 some of the younger sort, who were not fit to 
 pray in so great an assembly, met among a
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 181 
 
 few more privately, where they spent three 
 hours in prayer together. Every Saturday 
 night they met at some of their houses to 
 repeat the sermon of the last Lord's day, and 
 to pray and prepare themselves for the follow- 
 ing day. Once in a few weeks we had a day 
 of humiliation on one occasion or other. 
 Two days every week my Assistant and I, 
 myself, took fourteen families between us for 
 private catechising and conference (he going 
 through the parish and the town coming to 
 me). I first heard them recite the words of 
 the catechism, and then examined them 
 about the sense, and, lastly, urged them 
 with all possible engaging reason and vehe- 
 mency to answerable affection and practice. 
 If any of them were stalled through igno- 
 rance or bashfulness I forbore to press them 
 any further to answers, but made them 
 hearers, and either examined others or turned 
 all into instruction and exhortation. I spent 
 about an hour with a family, and admitted 
 no others to be present, lest bashfulness 
 should make it burthensome, or any should 
 talk of the weaknesses of others. So that all 
 the afternoons on Mondays and Tuesdays I 
 spent in this (after I had begun it, for it was 
 many years before I did attempt it) ; and my
 
 182 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Assistant spent tlie morning of the same days 
 in the same employment." 
 
 Further on in his narrative Baxter adds: 
 " When I set upon personal conference with 
 each family, and catechising them, there 
 were very few families in all the town that 
 refused to come : and those few were beggars 
 at the town's-ends, who were so ignorant 
 that they were ashamed it should be mani- 
 fest. And few families went from me with- 
 out some tears, or seemingly serious promises 
 for a godly life." 
 
 Truly this was a consecrated life. This 
 man was not willing to go to heaven alone. 
 Of him we may say, as jNIatthew Arnold 
 said of his illustrious father: — 
 
 " Thou wouldst not alone 
 Be saved, my Father! alone 
 Conquer and come to the goal, 
 Leaving the rest in the wild. ... 
 Therefore to thee it was given. 
 Many to save with thyself ; 
 And at the end of thy day, 
 O faithful Shepherd ! to come 
 Bringing thy sheep in thy hand." 
 
 The arrangements which Baxter tells us he 
 carried out for coming into personal contact 
 with his j)eople suggest a subject of practical
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 183 
 
 importance to the effective working of the 
 Christian pastorate. His plans would scf^rcely 
 fit in with the modes of modern life. The 
 demands of business on the elders and of 
 education on the juniors of the household, to 
 say nothing of other aspects of the intense 
 life of our time, make it difficult, if not im- 
 possible, to take family after family an hour 
 at a time, two days in every week. More- 
 over, the engagements of public life on the 
 part of the minister himself have multiplied 
 to an extent of which our forefathers had but 
 little experience. Still, after all such pleas 
 have been listened to and duly weighed, it 
 nevertheless remains true that for the effec- 
 tive working of our churches and the further- 
 ing of the kingdom of God among them it is 
 of first importance for the minister to know 
 the people and come into personal contact 
 with them. And that not merely for social 
 and friendly intercourse, which has its value, 
 but also for direct spiritual purpose. Locali- 
 ties differ, and plans which succeed in one 
 place may be inapplicable in another; but in 
 every place the true-hearted minister of 
 Christ will find some way of getting at his 
 people and dealing with them with spiritual 
 intent.
 
 184 PUlilTAX PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 For one thing, it will give point and 
 directness to his preaching. A minister can 
 always preach to people to greater purpose 
 when he knows them. This is the explana- 
 tion of the fact that many of our best minis- 
 ters preach better to their own people than 
 they do anywhere else. You must know 
 people if you would help them, and you must 
 love them if 30U would know them. Love 
 is the one power that opens the secrets of 
 life, meets its reserves and calls forth its con- 
 fidences. You can almost say anything to a 
 man if he knows and feels that you really 
 care for him and want to serve him. Sym- 
 pathy, true heart-love for men, such as 
 Christ manifested, will give clear insight, 
 delicate touch and enduring patience in deal- 
 ing with those under our care. It is twice 
 blessed. It gives power to the minister and 
 it is precious to the flock. There is enough 
 sorrow in life, enough weakness and suffer- 
 ing, enough heart-yearning after better things 
 to make men value the kindness which 
 enters into their sorrow and would help 
 them. The pastor may sometimes wonder 
 why the people should care so much for his 
 coming and for his entering into their expe- 
 riences; but true brotherliness of soul will
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 185 
 
 always be precious in a world like this, and 
 will often do much to prepare the way of 
 the Lord and make His paths straight. 
 
 And we may not only give much to others, 
 but also gain much for ourselves. The sick- 
 chamber, where saintly men and women face 
 the realities of life and death alone with 
 God, is a fine school for the minister. And 
 even in the midst of the activities of life you 
 meet with worthy Christian people who have 
 gone through no university, taken no divin- 
 ity course, who yet have been diligent scholars 
 in the school of Christ, and are deeply 
 learned in spiritual lore. It will be good 
 for you to know them. You will feel nearer 
 to heaven when you are near to them, will 
 find your religious convictions intensified, 
 and you will learn some inward truths which 
 will qualify you more than ever to be the 
 teacher of others. Inexperienced at starting, 
 you will yet, in some sense, have to rule, 
 and that, too, over the free minds of men 
 educated in the freest of communities. You 
 will need, therefore, to be a careful student 
 of life and character. Both to teach well 
 and to rule well you will need to know the 
 living people about you. We who live so 
 much with books need to be kept from the
 
 186 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 mistakes into which bookish men are only 
 too apt to fall. The only way to keep clear 
 of such mistakes is to come ever and again 
 into contact with actual life. 
 
 In setting forth the causes of his success 
 at Kidderminster, Baxter mentions one fact 
 worthy of consideration. He says : " It much 
 furthered my success that I stayed still in 
 this one place (near two years before the wars, 
 and above fourteen years after). For he that 
 removeth oft from place to place may sow 
 good seed in many places, but is not like to 
 see much fruit in any; unless some other 
 skilful hand shall follow him to water it. It 
 was a great advantage to me to have almost 
 all the religious people of the place of my 
 own instructing and informing; and that 
 they were not formed into erroneous and 
 factious principles before; and that I stayed 
 to see them grown up to some confirmedness 
 and maturity." These seem to me wise 
 words on the part of this preacher of the 
 olden time. It is a pity when a minister 
 comes under the dominion of what Bernard 
 calls "a vagabond and unstable heart," for 
 no unsettled life can truly thrive. When 
 the learned Jeremiah Marsden, one of the 
 ejected ministers, wrote godly meditations
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 187 
 
 on his twenty-second removal, one does not 
 wonder that he exclaimed : " O my soul, 
 what a sojourning state hath thy life been! 
 Now here, then there, and in no abiding 
 posture!" And it is not surprising that he 
 should express a longing to reach the city 
 which hath foundations of God's laying. 
 This is an exceptional case, of course, and 
 occurred in troublous persecuting times. 
 There is much to be gained by steadfast hold- 
 ing on so long as a man can do so with 
 usefulness and hopefulness. If I may be 
 pardoned a local and personal reference, I 
 may mention that the church of which I 
 have the honor to be minister lost its illus- 
 trious pastor, John Bunyan, by death, in 
 1688, that is, two hundred and eleven years 
 ago, and I am only the sixth in succession 
 since then, and all my predecessors remained 
 in charge till death called them to the higher 
 service; so that the average duration of these 
 six pastorates is thirtj^-five years each. Well, 
 I will say nothing of the present occupant of 
 the pastorate, but of my predecessors I will 
 say that they one and all acquired influence 
 for good not only in their own congregation, 
 but in the town at large, which they never 
 would have had if, like some men, they had
 
 188 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 always been restlessly looking out for some 
 other attractive sphere of service. Around 
 them there gathered one of the most sacred 
 possessions a minister can have — the loving 
 affection of those who had grown up from 
 childhood and youth to manhood by their 
 side. No absolute rule can be laid down. 
 There are times when a change may be best 
 both for minister and people. Another place 
 may call out powers in him which are only 
 latent where he is, and another minister may 
 do better work there than he is doing. Still 
 I would say to you, with all brotherly affec- 
 tion when 3'ou leave the Divinity School of 
 this University, to enter upon actual work, 
 do not accept a charge with a reserved inten- 
 tion of finding a better when you can. No 
 man can do justice to any people when he is 
 always looking wistfully at the list of vacant 
 churches and revolving a possible flight. 
 Take the place meaning to do your best by 
 it, as you are in honor bound to do. Do not 
 make too much of your discouragements ; do 
 not let trifles shake your stability so long as 
 you have the love of your people. Some of 
 them may even leave you, but it is no dis- 
 paragement to any minister that he does not 
 suit every order of mind. God has many
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 189 
 
 children, and they feed in different ways. 
 " Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stead- 
 fast, un movable, always abounding in the 
 work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that 
 your labor is not in vain in the Lord." 
 
 Up to this point I have been speaking of 
 Baxter's preaching, his methods of work, and 
 his persistence in the same sphere of service; 
 I should like to say a word or two on the 
 spirit of his life as a minister of Christ. 
 There was a breadth of mind in the man 
 not common in his day. He brought to the 
 study of the Bible not only deep spiritual 
 feeling, but also much independence of 
 thought. His name is now a synonym for 
 orthodoxy of belief, and he is held up as an 
 example by those who bid us stand in the 
 ways and see and ask for the old paths. It 
 may surprise some people, therefore, to find 
 that he was looked on with suspicion as 
 heterodox, by the men of his own time. He 
 was neither Calvinist nor Arminian, as these 
 terms were understood then. The views he 
 held on the theory of redemption were his 
 own individual conclusions rather than the 
 accepted formulas of some theological school. 
 He would not deny a thing because it was 
 incapable of demonstrative proof, nor reject
 
 190 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 seemingly opposite statements of Scripture 
 because he could not reconcile them. He 
 could neither agree with the ultra Calvinist 
 nor with the violent Arminian ; and though 
 they both turned against him, they have each 
 since then been approaching nearer and 
 nearer the ground on which he took his 
 stand. Whether we agree with his opinions 
 or not we cannot but feel that he exercised a 
 healthy influence on the Christian Church, 
 that he initiated that opposition to extreme 
 opinions which has been growing ever since, 
 and that, as some one has said, his eclecticism 
 was one of the first stones laid in that temple 
 of theological unity which takes so many 
 generations to build. 
 
 When past middle life Baxter wrote a kind 
 of review of his earlier self, and of the ways 
 he had of looking at things when he was 
 younger, which is still fresh and racy to 
 read. Dean Stanley tells us that Sir James 
 Stephen once recommended him with his own 
 peculiar solemnity to read the last twenty- 
 four pages of the first part of Baxter's 
 "Narrative of his own Life." "Lose not a 
 day," said he, "in reading it. You will 
 never repent of it." And says the Dean: 
 " That very night I followed his advice, and
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 191 
 
 I have ever since Dublicly and privately 
 advised every theological student to do the 
 same." If at any time you should turn to 
 those twenty -four pages in that old folio of 
 1696 you will feel that this praise is not ill- 
 bestowed. There is in them the note of clear 
 sanity of mind and the ring of honest sincer- 
 ity of heart, and they show how we may all 
 grow from less to more. He has learnt to 
 be more tolerant, he says, as life has gone 
 on. He sees that good men are not so good 
 as he once thought them, and that few are so 
 bad as their enemies imagine. In his youth 
 he was quickly past fundamental questions 
 and ran into a multitude of controversies. 
 But the older he grew the smaller stress he 
 laid upon these controversies and curiosities 
 — though still his intellect abhorred con- 
 fusion — as finding greater uncertainty in 
 them and less usefulness where there is cer- 
 tainty. If he had any influence with younger 
 men he would persuade them to study and 
 live upon the essential doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity and godliness. He is going against 
 the grain of the natural man in saying this: 
 "I presume to say that in this I as much 
 gainsay my natural inclination to subtility 
 and accurateness in knowing, as they are
 
 192 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 likely to do by theirs, if they obey my 
 counsel." He thinks that most controversies 
 have more need of rirfht stating than of 
 debating, and that if his skill is increased in 
 anything it is in separating the real from the 
 verbal, and proving to the disputants that 
 they differ less than they think they do. lie 
 has grown also more modest about himself: 
 "Heretofore I knew much less than now, 
 and yet was not half so much acquainted 
 with my ignorance. I little knew how im- 
 perfectly I understood the points whose dis- 
 covery delighted me, nor how many things I 
 was yet a stranger to. But now I find far 
 greater darkness upon all things, and per- 
 ceive how very little it is that we know in 
 comparison of that which we are ignorant 
 of." 
 
 Coming to yet closer matters still, he 
 has a deeper sense of sin than once he had. 
 Once his sins troubled him, now it is his 
 sinfulness. " In my younger years my trouble 
 for sin was most about my actual failings in 
 thought, word or action. But now I am 
 much more troubled for inward defects^ and 
 omission or want of the vital duties or graces 
 of the soul. Had I all the riches of the 
 world how gladly would I give them for a
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 193 
 
 fuller knowledge, belief and love of God and 
 everlasting glory! These wants are the 
 greatest burden of my life, which oft maketh 
 my life itself a burden. To have sinned 
 while I preached and wrote against sin, and 
 had such abundant and great obligations from 
 God, and made so many promises against it, 
 doth lay me very low; not so much in fear of 
 hell as in great displeasure against myself. 
 When God forgiveth me I cannot forgive 
 myself." But on the other hand, he has 
 learnt to look less to himself and more to 
 God: "Heretofore I placed much of my 
 religion in tenderness of heart and grieving 
 for sin and penitential tears ; and less of it in 
 the love of God, and studying His love and 
 goodness, and in His joyful praises than now 
 I do. And now I am less troubled for want 
 of grief and tears — though I more value 
 humility, and refuse not needed humiliation 
 — but my conscience now looketh at Love 
 and Delight in God and praising Him, as the 
 top of all my religious duties, for which it is 
 that I value and use the rest. ... I was once 
 wont to meditate most on my own heart, and 
 to dwell at home, and look little higher; I 
 was still poring either on my sins or wants 
 or examining my sincerity. But now I see 
 
 13
 
 194 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 more need of a higher work; and that I 
 should look oftener upon Christ and God and 
 Heaven than upon my own heart. It is 
 above that I must find matter of delight and 
 joy and love and peace itself. Therefore I 
 would have one thought at home upon myself 
 and sins, and many thoughts alove upon the 
 high and amiable and beatifying Objects." 
 
 I have explained Baxter's marvellous suc- 
 cess at Kidderminster by calling attention to 
 his direct and powerful speech, his close con- 
 tact with his people, and his going on steadily 
 year after year urging men to come into the 
 Kingdom of God. But may I not now say 
 that all these things rested on something 
 deeper still — that they gathered point, fire 
 and force from the deep heart experiences 
 revealed in the confessions I have read to 
 you? This man got his power by being 
 alone with God and by looking into the face 
 of God ! And it is there we must get power 
 too. There is no substitute for this power 
 and no other way of getting it. It is the 
 soul that has caught fire from the altar which 
 sets other souls on fire. Let me from 
 Baxter's " Reformed Pastor " — which should 
 be every pastor's companion — close with the 
 burnincf words he addressed to his brethren
 
 RICHARD BAXTER 195 
 
 in the ministry now more than two centuries 
 ago. Speaking of the preacher's message as 
 an ambassador for Christ, he says: "O the 
 gravity, the seriousness, the incessant dili- 
 gence which these things require! I know 
 not what others think of them, but for my 
 part I am ashamed of my stupidity, and 
 wonder at myself that I deal not with my 
 own and others' souls, as one that looks for 
 the great day of the Lord; and that I can 
 have room for almost any other thoughts or 
 words, and that such astonishing matters do 
 not wholly absorb my mind. I marvel how 
 I can preach of them slightly and coldly ; and 
 how I can let men alone in their sins; and 
 that I do not go to them, and beseech them, 
 for the Lord's sake, to repent, however they 
 take it, and whatever pains or trouble it 
 should cost me! I seldom come out of the 
 pulpit but my conscience smiteth me that I 
 have been no more serious and fervent in 
 such a case. It accuseth me not so much for 
 want of ornaments or elegancy, nor for let- 
 ting fall an unhandsome word ; but it asketh 
 me ' How couldst thou speak of life and 
 death with such a heart? How couldst thou 
 preach of heaven and hell in such a careless, 
 sleepy manner? Dost thou believe what
 
 196 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 thou sayest? Art thou in earnest or in jest? 
 Shouldst thou not weep over such a people, 
 and shoukl not thy tears interrupt thy words ? 
 Truly this is the peal that conscience doth 
 ring in my ears. O Lord, do that on our 
 own souls which Thou wouldst use us to do 
 on the souls of others ! "
 
 VII 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 I. THOMAS BINNEY AND C. H. SPURGEON
 
 LECTURE VII 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 I. THOMAS BIXNEY AND C. H. SPURGEOIf 
 
 IN the last lecture we came under the speL 
 of the devout and fervid spirit of Richard 
 Baxter, a man it is good for every Christian 
 minister to know. The literary form the 
 Puritan sermon took in the seventeenth cen- 
 tury may be unsuited to our time, but the 
 spirit of the men who made Puritanism the 
 force that it was and is, is a thing for all 
 time. For many of them walked with God 
 with a fervor of devotion and a closeness of 
 fellowship all too rare in human life. The 
 Two Thousand ejected from the ministry of 
 the Church of England, for Nonconformity, 
 in 1662, though cast out by man, were elect 
 souls of God. Their unfaltering loyalty to 
 conscience; the Christlike spirit in which 
 they accepted the stern discipline of persecu- 
 tion, entailing the loss of liberty and home 
 and means of livelihood; their subdued sor-
 
 200 PURITAN PRK ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 row over enforced silent Sabbaths, and over 
 separation from the flocks they had loved and 
 served — all these things make them still a 
 spiritual force, and their influence a posses- 
 sion for ever to the Church of God. 
 
 There were others of these men in those 
 days, besides Richard Baxter, well worth our 
 knowing. It is good for us still to commune 
 in quiet hours with men like good Philip 
 Henry, of Broad Oak in Shropshire, who 
 hallowed all things by prayer; whose family 
 life was sweet with a divine fragrance ; and 
 who lived in the spirit of that godly mother 
 of his, who said, ere she left him, " My head 
 is in heaven, and my heart is in heaven; it is 
 but one step more and I shall be there too." 
 We should find it helpful, also, to walk at 
 times in loving converse with such saintly 
 souls as Isaac Ambrose, the minister of 
 Preston, who, not many miles from Standish 
 village and Duxbury Hall, from which Miles 
 Standish came, retired, to quiet woods for 
 meditative thought and wrestling prayer. Of 
 this good man's communion with heaven we 
 get such glimpses as these: "May 13: I 
 retired to a solitary and silent place to prac- 
 tise especially the secret duties of a Chris- 
 tian;" "May 15: I fell on the duty of
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 201 
 
 self-trial, and in the morning confessed my 
 sins before and since conversion, wherein the 
 Lord sweetly melted my heart." He found, 
 as many have found, that the way to the 
 heights is through the depths; for he says: 
 " In the conclusion the Lord struck me with a 
 reverence of His majesty and presence, filled 
 my soul with spiritual refreshings, enlarged 
 my heart with praises of Him and desires to 
 live unto Him." So, again, not to dwell too 
 long on these things, we feel how times have 
 changed from restful repose to hasteful speed 
 when we turn in with John Angler, the min- 
 ister of Denton, in Lancashire. Born at 
 Dedham, on our side the sea, his relatives 
 founded the old church at Dedham, on your 
 side; converted under the great Puritan 
 preacher, John Rogers, trained at Emmanuel 
 College, and continuing his preparation for 
 the ministry under John Cotton, at Boston, 
 he settled at Denton, where the spirit of his 
 life seemed to diffuse the fragrance as of 
 heaven itself. With his ministerial brethren 
 from the neighborhood round he kept what 
 were called "private days," for the purpose 
 of deepening their own spiritual life, — days 
 which were long remembered for the holy and 
 solemn impressions produced upon the hearts
 
 202 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 of all. We feel we are but feeble folk in 
 these days, when we find the great Noncon- 
 formist, Oliver Heywood, telling us how in 
 the days of persecution, on one of these occa- 
 sions in John Angier's house: "I continued 
 about three hours in prayer, pouring out my 
 soul before the Lord, principally on behalf of 
 His church." This may be one extreme, but 
 in this restless age we are perhaps in danger 
 from the other, for it is the life which is 
 lived with God which has power with men. 
 
 These men belonged to the heroic age of 
 Nonconformity in England, and as they 
 gradually passed away, unfortunately, they 
 were not succeeded by men of the like kind. 
 After the first quarter of the eighteenth 
 century, and, indeed, during its course, a 
 wave of lifeless Arian teaching passed over 
 the pulpits of the land, and, as certainly as 
 the night follows the day, slowly and insen- 
 sibly there came a period of spiritual reaction 
 and decline. Christless preaching is always 
 followed by desolated sanctuaries and crumb- 
 ling walls. First there came silence as to 
 the great Evangelical truths so forcibly 
 preached in an earlier time, — a silence which 
 was explained at first as not arising from 
 dislike to the old truths themselves, but only
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 203 
 
 from dislike to the old modes of stating them. 
 Definite teaching was objected to as dogma- 
 tism, and as being offensive and unprofitable. 
 Stress came to be laid more on the natural 
 and moral grounds of religion and less on the 
 supernatural and spiritual. The old phrases 
 still continued to be used, but they were 
 emptied of their former meaning. It has 
 been well said that both preachers and people 
 continued to speak their fathers' language 
 after they had lost their fathers' faith. There 
 were many and honorable exceptions, of 
 course ; still, both in the Established Church 
 and in the Nonconformist communities, the 
 mere preaching of moral duties, apart from 
 that grace of God in salvation by which alone 
 they can be fulfilled, left the land mourning 
 and desolate. The experiment of trying to 
 make men better without the Cross of Christ 
 for them and the Spirit of God within them 
 was tried on as large a scale as it is ever 
 likely to be tried again ; and the result was 
 a nation largely given over to coarseness and 
 sensuality. 
 
 The awakening of religious life in the 
 nation commenced when Wesley and White- 
 field brought back the almost forgotten Gos- 
 pel to the people. Men and women who had
 
 204 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 gone to sleep under the droning, drowsy 
 preachers in the churches began to weep over 
 their sins when there was brought to them 
 the Gospel of God's love to us in Christ. 
 And the revival among the people outside 
 the churches told upon the life and preaching 
 within. The Congregationalists received 
 considerable accessions to their membership 
 from among those converted under the fervid 
 appeals of the field preachers. Still, even 
 these churches, while retaining the Evangelic 
 faith, looked somewhat doubtfully upon the 
 revival movement. Respectability was dear 
 to their hearts, and staid propriety sat in the 
 chief seats of the sjaiagogue. Many looked 
 upon Wesley and Whitefield in those days 
 very much as some people look upon the Sal- 
 vation Army now; and Dr. Doddridge was 
 censured by some of his brethren of the 
 extremely proper sort for permitting George 
 Whitefield to preach in his pulpit at North- 
 ampton. Even those ministers who had 
 remained true to the Evangelic faith preached 
 in set, formal manner, and in a rotund, 
 rhetorical style which they had only too dili- 
 gently imitated from Dr. Johnson, then re- 
 garded as the great master of style. It was 
 Johnsonese without Johnson's vigor and
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 205 
 
 point. One can only wonder now at the 
 enduring patience of the good people who 
 sat out some of the sermons of even some of 
 the foremost men at the end of last century 
 and the beginning of this. Samuel Palmer, 
 for instance, the editor of the Nonconformist 
 Memorial, was the successor of Matthew 
 Henry at Hackney, and one of the predeces- 
 sors of Thomas Binney at the Weigh House 
 Church in London. He was also a consider- 
 able author and a preacher of influence in the 
 city; yet as one reads his sermons now we 
 fail to see how that influence was acquired. 
 Platitude succeeds to platitude with dreary 
 monotony. Some one has advised all preachers 
 to avoid the obvious, but this man seems to 
 ride across country in eager search of it. As 
 an illustration let me give you the divisions 
 of a sermon of his from the text : " And His 
 commandments are not grievous." Referring 
 to these commandments, "I shall apply," 
 says he, " this commendation of them, and a 
 high commendation indeed it is, which sug- 
 gests a very cogent motive to obey them, tiie 
 justice of which I shall now endeavor to 
 evince by the mention of six particulars. 
 Christ's commandments cannot be justly 
 esteemed grievous, for (1) they are not
 
 206 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 unreasonable ; (2) tliey are not impracticable ; 
 (3) they are not dishonorable; (4) they are 
 not dangerous; (5) they are not unpleasant; 
 and (6) they are not unprofitable." I think 
 you will agree with me that the man in tlie 
 pew who heard such a programme as that set 
 forth in the pulpit, might well be pardoned 
 if he either at once settled himself com- 
 fortably down to sleep or precipitately made 
 for the door.^ 
 
 In the early years of this century, as well 
 as in the closing years of the century before, 
 there were London preachers, really able men, 
 and exercising wide influence as ministers, 
 who were stiff and stately in their conduct 
 of religious services, unreal and conventional 
 past all bearing. A keen and not unkindly 
 observer of the time has told us of a Congre- 
 gational minister, south of the Thames, who 
 sometimes had the honor of having even royal 
 dukes in his congregation, and who in dig- 
 nified manner employed a page to carry his 
 sermon into the pulpit, arrange it carefully 
 for his convenience on the cushion, and, 
 
 ^ Principal Caird was severe yet not far from the truth 
 when he said that " the pattern sermou of the Georgian era 
 seems to have been constructed almost expressly to steer 
 clear of all possible ways of getting human beings to listen 
 to it." — University Addresses, p. 201.
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 207 
 
 when the service was over, carry it safely 
 back to him to his carriage. We are not 
 surprised to be tokl that the preacliing of 
 this divine was especially attractive to people 
 who did not wish to have their minds 
 troubled with much thought nor their hearts 
 excited with much feeling. His hearers were 
 led along the path of easy description through 
 green meadows, flowers blooming on every 
 side. For them there were no rugged steeps 
 to climb, neither were there any sublime out- 
 looks over grand and distant scenes. 
 
 In this same first quarter of the present 
 century a father and two sons occupied three 
 of the most famous London pulpits, of whom 
 it is said that they never forgot that they 
 were "Reverend." One who knew them 
 well tells us that all three alike were carefully 
 precise, exact, regular, orthodox ; never utter- 
 ing a word they would wish to retract, or 
 that would excite any feeling of suspicion or 
 surprise in the minds of their hearers. Every 
 text was treated as the orthodox commenta- 
 tors expounded it, every doctrine as the great 
 divines proposed it. Calvin, Owen, Good- 
 win spoke through their lips, although they 
 were not as learned as Calvin, nor so pro- 
 found as Owen, nor so argumentative as
 
 208 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Goodwin. The introduction of eacli sermon 
 consisted of four or five appropriate sen- 
 tences. The divisions were carefully ex- 
 pressed and deliberately enunciated. They 
 consisted of a like number of nouns, adjec- 
 tives and verbs corresponding in their order 
 and arrangement so as to be immediately 
 apprehended and easily remembered. One 
 division was never allowed to encroach upon 
 the space appropriated to another. They 
 were so perfectly arranged that there was 
 no occasion to suppress a thought or to pass 
 hastily over any part of the subject. All 
 was exact, precise, regular, just as propriety 
 required, and as the hearers expected. The 
 preacher knew exactly when to finish, and 
 just as exactly his hearers knew when to 
 expect the concluding sentences. 
 
 This regular round of staid propriety and 
 kid-gloved gentility had gone on so long, 
 year after year, that it had almost come to be 
 looked upon as part of the system of the uni- 
 verse. Happily, however, in the earlier half 
 of the present century there came a change 
 to a broader and more living spirit in the 
 churches. Indeed, the spirit of change was 
 abroad in many departments of human 
 thought before that. A wave of feeling
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 209 
 
 passed over Europe after a time of stagna- 
 tion. We see it in poetry as well as in 
 political life. The ruling spirits in English 
 Poetry, previous to 1770, were Dryden, 
 Pope, Swift, Prior, and men of their school 
 who, while maintaining that "the proper 
 study of mankind is man," approached that 
 study from the side of cold speculation and 
 with the pen of satire. After a pause 
 Gowper appeared with his "Task," bringing 
 a kindlier and truer spirit; teaching men to 
 love Nature for her own sake, and to sym- 
 pathize with human life irrespective of caste 
 and convention. Three years later came 
 Burns, with his earlier poems, restoring that 
 jDassion to our poetry which it had lost since 
 the days of Elizabeth. The way having thus 
 been prepared for him, Wordsworth appeared, 
 looking at Nature lovingly and at man's life 
 sympathetically; he, in his turn, again pre- 
 paring the way for Tennyson and the rest 
 who were to follow. The change accom- 
 plished was nothing short of a revolution. 
 
 Not merely in politics and in poetry, but 
 still more in religious life and thought we 
 seem to pass from one world to another when 
 we pass from the eighteenth century to the 
 nineteenth. The Puritan theology of the 
 
 14
 
 210 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Congregational churches had been nioclified 
 by the great Evangelical revival, and also 
 by the necessity of conflict, long continued, 
 with Arian and Socinian teaching. The 
 revival, bringing a new wave of spiritual 
 influence over the churches, created new 
 spiritual activities. Missionary societies were 
 organized, a Bible society was formed, and 
 a craving- came over Christian men for more 
 brotherly communion and greater unity in 
 service than they had known before. It was 
 impossible that the pulpit should remain 
 untouched by the combined force of these 
 various waves of influence. Of necessity it 
 caught the freer inspiration of this new birth- 
 time, and to some extent broke away from 
 the stiff conventionality, the formal precision, 
 and the wearisome wordiness which had too 
 long cramped its message and its life. It is 
 to this Renaissance of Preaching which came 
 into the modern Puritanism of England I 
 wish to invite your attention now. We will 
 look at it in the persons of some of its charac- 
 teristic representatives. 
 
 During the first quarter of the present cen- 
 tury the pulpit of one of the foremost Con- 
 gregational churches in the city of London 
 was occupied by John Clayton, perhaps the
 
 PREACHER'S OF MODERN PURITANISM 211 
 
 most conspicuous of the formal, precise and 
 genteel ministers I have described to you. 
 He had a wealthy congregation to which he 
 ministered for more than forty years; and 
 his all-too-complacent biographer tells us, 
 with a little flutter of delight, how, at the 
 close of every service, there might be seen at 
 the door of his church "from sixteen to 
 twenty equipages, or full-ajDpointed gentle- 
 men's carriages, waiting to convey their 
 owners, after service, to suburban villages." 
 For years and years this ministry went on; 
 but at length, like all things earthly, it came 
 to an end at last, and with it, so far as that 
 church was concerned, "the age of silk and 
 lavender, and of successful suppression of 
 thought under decorous phrases, came to an 
 end," also. Then, in 1829, like a breeze 
 from the hills, there came to the vacant 
 pulpit a preacher who was every inch a man, 
 and who cared very little indeed for " equip- 
 ages or full-appointed gentlemen's carriages." 
 This preacher was that Thomas Binney 
 whom, as I have already told you, Alex- 
 ander Maclaren described as "the man who 
 taught me to preach." 
 
 This new celebrity had been quietly matur- 
 ing for five years in the seclusion of an
 
 212 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 obscure pastorate in the Isle of Wight. 
 Though not physically robust in those days, 
 he was yet a striking personality, tall, erect, 
 commanding, one of Nature's aristocracy — a 
 born king of men. We may say of him as 
 Calamy said of John Howe : " There is that 
 in his looks and carriage which discovers 
 that he has something within him which is 
 uncommonly great and tends to excite vener- 
 ation." It would be exaggeration to say 
 that this man, by himself, ushered in a new 
 era; for, as we have seen, it was a time of 
 national upwaking in many directions. It 
 would be true, however, to say that so far as 
 the Congregationalists of England were con- 
 cerned, he was the foremost and strongest of 
 those who delivered the pulpit from artifi- 
 cially-constructed sermons and stilted rhet- 
 oric, and began to speak to men from the 
 preacher's desk in human, familiar, everyday 
 speech. 
 
 Speaking generally, the preaching before 
 his time largely consisted of ethical disqui- 
 sitions or abstract discussions of Christian 
 doctrine. In a style which at once arrested 
 attention, Mr. Binney sought to bring God's 
 revelation in Scripture and man's life into 
 vital and fruitful relations, and to make the
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 213 
 
 one interpret the other. To him the spiritual 
 universe as revealed in the Scriptures, and 
 unfolded in the Christian experience of the 
 Church, was as real as the natural world is 
 to the man of science; and in scientific 
 manner he investigated the laws of that uni- 
 verse, applied its facts and verified his con- 
 clusions by the facts. To him the Scripture 
 was a living and authoritative word from 
 God, declaring not speculations but divine 
 facts, and revealing divine forces which, like 
 the leaves of the Tree of Life, were for the 
 healing of the nations. He was not himself, 
 he would not have any Christian minister to 
 be, the merely cloistered student, immersed 
 in books, and knowing but little of the ways 
 of men. On one occasion when addressing 
 some divinity students, he said to them: 
 "As you walk through the streets, having 
 prayed in the study, keep your eyes open 
 there ; look at all things, prices and people, 
 how they buy and how they sell, the sellers 
 and the purchasers, the hours of labor and 
 the hours of rest; try to look at all, try to 
 know the whole tariff of trade, and do not be 
 afraid to find in it all matter for your ser- 
 mons. You are to be teachers — commend 
 yourselves to every man's conscience in the
 
 214 PURITAN rREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 sight of God. Know the world's thoughts 
 and the world's ways, that you may be the 
 world's masters and ministers." 
 
 But while thus conversant with actual life 
 himself, as he would have all preachers to 
 be, the great purpose of Mr. Binney's min- 
 istry was to make vital to the people the 
 Scriptures of God. From the first he was 
 recognized by the men of his own time as a 
 lineal descendant of the men of Puritan days. 
 His great sermons were treatises after the 
 old Puritan plan as regards extent of discus- 
 sion ; but that discussion was carried on with 
 such freshness and vividness that the old 
 familiar truths were clothed with new and 
 living power. I may instance, for example, 
 the Annual Missionary Sermon he preached 
 in the May of 1839. It was an occasion 
 which, year by year, was counted great and 
 drew memorable audiences. In the year I 
 have mentioned, Mr. Binney was the preacher, 
 taking for his subject: "Messiah Suffering 
 and Messiah Satisfied " (Isa. liii. 11). One 
 who heard him that day tells us that for 
 nearly two hours he enchained the attention 
 of that vast audience by the force of his 
 arguments and the fervor of his appeals — fire 
 flashing out sentence after sentence ; electric
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 215 
 
 life, as it were, flowing not only from his 
 lips, but from face and form, from look and 
 gesture, in short, from the whole man. And 
 while thus remarkable for sermons of great 
 massiveness and force, of rich imagination 
 and highly-cultured beauty; and while able 
 to enthrall for hours one of the most repre- 
 sentative audiences of thoughtful men, he 
 could also keep his hold on simple village 
 folk quite as effectively as on the most cul- 
 tured congregation. One who went with 
 him says that he could never forget a sermon 
 he heard him preach in a little country 
 chapel from the text: "The Lord God is a 
 sun and shield." His audience might num- 
 ber between one and two hundred, and there 
 he stood talking familiarly, but with singular 
 wisdom and beauty, on the light and defence 
 which the Lord God is to His people. He 
 gathered fitting illustration from the sunshine 
 pouring that summer's day through the win- 
 dows of the ivy-mantled walls; and then, 
 comparing Jehovah to a shield of strength, 
 a tower of protection, he spoke of the be- 
 liever as a child within the impregnable for- 
 tress of his father, and looking, without fear, 
 upon foes assailing its gates. 
 
 You will probably gather, from what I
 
 216 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 have said, that this preacher did not read 
 his sermons. As a rule he did not even 
 write them, although after thinking them 
 out, he carefully, by writing, prepared them 
 for speaking. He admitted that reading has 
 its advantages, and in an early book of his 
 even advocated that mode of preaching, con- 
 tending that there is no reason why a written 
 composition should be tame or its delivery 
 inanimate. For with a view to oral delivery 
 the sermon may be written with freedom and 
 force, with vigorous images and fervid decla- 
 mation; it may be composed for the hearing 
 of numbers and delivered with the earnest- 
 ness of nature, sincerity, and zeal. Still, 
 these expressed opinions of his earlier time 
 notwithstanding, except on very rare occa- 
 sions," Mr. Binney did not read his sermons. 
 If he had done so he certainly would not 
 have been the preacher he was. Reading, no 
 doubt, secures self-possession, but sometimes 
 self-abandonment is more powerful than self- 
 possession. The preacher's eye fixed on his 
 paper is missed by the people, and the grander 
 swell of the soul is missed also. When a 
 man is master of his subject he can watch the 
 effect of his words on his audience, can con- 
 tract or expand his arguments and vary his
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 217 
 
 illustrations according as he sees that he is 
 holding or not holding his audience. Some 
 of the happiest flights of a preacher are those 
 which are born of the occasion, the success 
 of which goes far to atone for any defects of 
 style there may happen to be. The whole 
 history of preaching revivals points in the 
 same direction. The appeal has always been 
 from the scribes to the teacher who seems to 
 speak with authority. "I like that man," 
 said a Canadian trapper after hearing a cer- 
 tain preacher. " He 's the first preacher I 've 
 ever met who could shoot without a rest." 
 This man's illustration was drawn from the 
 line of his own experience. The trapper 
 who required a rest for liis gun before he 
 could fire would probably not carry home 
 much game at nightfall. 
 
 Be that as it may, and while every man 
 will determine for himself on this point, 
 Mr. Binney's greatest triumphs in the pulpit 
 were those of free speech. Generally speak- 
 ing, without a note and with characteristic 
 attitude, the forefinger of the right hand now 
 and again laid upon the palm of his left, he 
 made his way along the path he had previ- 
 ously intended to travel. Sometimes, for a 
 moment, he would seem to hesitate or delib-
 
 218 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 erate, as if casting about for the best way of 
 marshalling- his aiguments or presenting his 
 thoughts ; at other times he rose on the swell 
 of some great utterance or inspiring truth, 
 and having gained some lofty eminence would 
 step back and look round upon his audience 
 as if to see how far he was carrying them 
 with him. He has been described as a great 
 master of accent in speech. While some men 
 run their words along like engines on a line 
 of rail, by accent of voice and hand, which 
 has entrance into soul, he carried his people 
 with him, and threw in tender effects which, 
 without any mere artifice of emotion, would 
 sometimes melt men to tears. Great in 
 delineations of character, he made the men 
 and women of Scripture story live and move 
 before you. He seemed to carry his audience 
 to the very heart of things, compelled them 
 to listen, and made them feel that he was 
 dealing with their deepest, truest life. The 
 moral earnestness with which his preaching 
 was charged showed itself in the subjects he 
 chose, the manner of their treatment, and 
 the way he brought them home to the hearts 
 and lives of men ; and his appeals gathered 
 into themselves all the potent elements of the 
 sermon by which they were preceded.
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 219 
 
 One thing specially noticeable about Mr. 
 Binney's ministry was the devout and ele- 
 vated spirit which marked the prayers of the 
 sanctuary. Someone described him as "a 
 devotional man talking intellectually." The 
 author of the "Life of Chatterton," himself 
 a poet and critic, once turned in to hear this 
 preacher in his early London days, and he 
 tells us he was as much struck with the 
 prayers as with the sermon. "The prayer," 
 he says, " which succeeds the reading of the 
 chapter in the Bible is eminently devotional. 
 The voice of the minister is deep and solemn, 
 and his manner that of one who feels how 
 infinitely great is He with whom he has to 
 do. There is no familiarity, no bawling, no 
 hurry; all is calmness, earnestness, and quiet 
 supplication." Mr. Binney laid great stress 
 on the importance of this part of the service, 
 and his people felt, many a time, that he 
 seemed to carry them in prayer to the very- 
 gates of heaven. Extempore prayer may 
 sometimes suffer from the distempered mood 
 of the minister, but it also gains by embody- 
 ing the highest inspirations of the Spirit of 
 God. 
 
 Let me now pass from one who was among 
 the earliest to bring a living spirit into the
 
 220 PURITAN r REACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 English pulpit of the nineteenth century, to 
 set before you a representative of modern 
 Puritanism, who was certainly one of the 
 most striking personalities of the century, 
 and who, by the sheer force of his own in- 
 dividuality made a conspicuous place for him- 
 self among the preachers of the time. I refer 
 to the late Mr. Spurgeon. He was, what 
 Mr. Binney was not, a popular preacher, 
 followed from first to last by thousands. 
 The common people, as usual, came first, 
 but while they remained they were soon 
 joined by men of higher social grade. Pro- 
 fessional men, senatorial men, ministers of 
 State and peers of the realm were to be seen 
 among his audience. On the other hand, 
 some of the cultured heathen assailed him 
 relentlessly. The weekly journal which 
 John Bright described as "the great Satur- 
 day Reviler," made him the perpetual butt 
 of jibe and jeer. He simply smiled and said : 
 " Give me the love of God and the hatred of 
 the ' Saturday Review, ' and I shall be sure 
 to succeed." So he went on his way, prov- 
 ing, beyond a doubt, that no one can write a 
 man down but himself. 
 
 It would be interesting to inquire what is 
 the secret of a success, admittedly well de-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 221 
 
 served, and certainly unparalleled in England 
 since the days of Whitefield and Wesley. 
 Mr. Spurgeon's ecclesiastical relationships 
 cannot account for it, for he began his min- 
 istry in London in an obscure place of wor- 
 ship belonging to one of the straitest and 
 narrowest of Baptist sects; and the congre- 
 gation to which he went had dwindled almost 
 to the point of extinction. Then, too, so far 
 as the man himself was concerned, there was 
 nothing about his personal appearance to 
 account for his success. His face, it is true, 
 could light up wonderfully when he was 
 fairly under weigh ; but when he first stepped 
 to the front of his vast audience his appear- 
 ance was that of a man, short, stout, com- 
 monplace, and perfectly innocent of the 
 aesthetics of dress. While his face, of round, 
 homely Saxon cast, indicated a rude strength 
 of purpose, and dogged power of endurance, 
 it gave scant sign indeed of high intellectual 
 expression. Further, he owed nothing to 
 systematic academic training. He was by 
 no means an ignorant man; for he had been 
 an usher in a school, knew something of 
 Latin and French, and had diligently made 
 the most of his opportunities. Still those 
 opportunities had been scanty enough. In
 
 222 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 metaiDhysics and theology his mind was in a 
 somewhat crude condition, and his hick of 
 acquaintance with the original languages of 
 the Scriptures sometimes led to havoc in his 
 exegesis. A public man who went to hear 
 him in his early days attributed much of his 
 popularity to his remarkable voice, and 
 prophesied that so long as that voice lasted 
 the popularity would last. Yet, from all one 
 hears, Whitefield's voice must have been im- 
 measurably superior in point of compass and 
 richness. Mr. Spurgeon's was a compara- 
 tively level voice, its principal attributes 
 being distinctness and force. It took a clear, 
 sound, bell-like ring along with it, but it had 
 few rich notes either of loftiness or tender- 
 ness. After all, the mere fact that ten thou- 
 sand people could hear him when he spoke 
 does not explain how he came to attract ten 
 thousand people to hear him speak. 
 
 The explanation is to be sought elsewhere. 
 And, first of all, it is largely to be found in 
 the fact that his way of speaking to men was 
 so perfectly natural. There was pathos and 
 humor in him, as men have when they talk 
 together in private life, and his preaching 
 was as when one man is talking with his 
 neighbor. No pulpit twang had he, none of
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERX PURITANISM 223 
 
 the wearisome sing-song by which some 
 preachers generate clerical sore-throat. He 
 was as natural in the pulpit as John Bright 
 was on the platform, and often more racy. 
 He was what the common people call a born 
 preacher; his mind readily taking in all he 
 saw and heard and read, giving it out again 
 with fulness and freshness, and without a 
 faltering word. 
 
 Coming to the style of the man, there was 
 nothing hackneyed about it even when he 
 took a commonplace subject. If there is one 
 thought more hackneyed than another by 
 moralists and preachers it is perhaps that of 
 the flight of time. But see how this man 
 handles it: "Only a few Sabbaths ago," says 
 he, "I was talking to you of Ruth in the 
 harvest-fields, and of the heavily-laden wagon 
 that was pressed down with sheaves; and 
 now the leaves are almost gone; but few 
 remain upon the trees; these frosty nights 
 and strong winds have swept the giants of 
 the forest till their limbs are bare, and the 
 hoar frosts plate them with silver. Then, 
 before we shall have time to burn the winter's 
 log, we shall see the snowdrops and the 
 yellow crocus heralding another spring! At 
 what a rate we whirl along! Childhood
 
 224 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 seems to travel in a wagon, bnt nianliood at 
 express speed." There is nothing liackneyed 
 or stilted about that. So, again, with his 
 illustrations. Listen to this : " Have you 
 ever read Coleridge's 'Ancient jNIariner'?" 
 asks he. " I dare say you have thought it 
 one of the strangest imaginations ever put 
 together, especially that part where the old 
 mariner represents the corpses of all the dead 
 men rising up — all of them dead, yet rising 
 up to manage the ship; dead men pulling 
 the ropes, dead men steering, dead men 
 spreading the sails. I thought what a strange 
 idea that was. But do you know I have 
 lived to see that true: I have seen it done. 
 I have gone into churches, and I have seen 
 a dead man in the pulpit, and a dead man as 
 a deacon, and a dead man holding the plate 
 at the door, and dead men sitting to hear. 
 ' No ! ' says one, ' you cannot mean it. ' Yes, 
 I do; the men were spiritually dead. I have 
 seen the minister preaching, without a par- 
 ticle of life, a sermon which is only fresh in 
 the sense in which a fish is fresh when it has 
 been packed in ice. I have seen the people 
 sit, and they have listened as if they had 
 been a group of statues — the chiselled marble 
 would have been as much affected by the
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 225 
 
 sermon as they. I have seen the deacons go 
 about their business just as orderlj, and with 
 as much precision as if they had been mere 
 automatons, and not men witli hearts and 
 souls at alL Do you think God will ever 
 bless a church like that? Are we ever to 
 take the kingdom of heaven with a troop of 
 dead men? Never! We want living min- 
 isters, living hearers, living deacons, living 
 elders; and until we have such men who 
 have got the very fire of life burning in their 
 souls, who have got tongues of life and eyes 
 of life, and souls of life, we shall never see 
 the kingdom of heaven taken by storm. 
 ' For the kingdom of heaven suffereth vio- 
 lence, and the violent take it by force.' " 
 
 Another important element in Mr. Spur- 
 geon's success lay in the fact that he was a 
 speaker of superb English: a master of that 
 Saxon speech which somehow goes warm to 
 the hearts of men. While the common 
 people followed him in ctowds, and heard 
 him gladly, he had no more delighted listener 
 or warmer personal friend than John Ruskin, 
 the great master of a glowing and gorgeous 
 English style. More than any man I know 
 of in this century, he has shown us what a 
 powerful weapon noble English speech may 
 
 15
 
 226 PURITAN rREACIIING IN ENGLAND 
 
 be wlien a man knows how to use it. Be- 
 cause of this he is worthy of prolonged and 
 careful study on the part of every preacher. 
 He had this much-to-hc-desired })Ower of 
 racy English by native endowment, no doubt. 
 He had it when he first opened his lips to 
 speak to simple village folk in the fen-lands 
 of Cambridgeshire. But, also, it is to be 
 noted that the power grew — grew by deep- 
 ening acquaintance with the writings of men 
 conspicuous for the strength and grandeur of 
 their English style. Like John Bunyan, he 
 gained both the grandeur and the simplicity 
 of his English prose from his English Bible ; 
 and also by being much in company with 
 writers hke Bunyan. There is something 
 here worthy of every preacher's heedful care. 
 The great classics of Greece and Rome must 
 ever remain among our foremost instruments 
 of intellectual culture; at the same time a 
 broad-minded and careful study of our own 
 best English writers must be among the first 
 duties of him who would be a pleader with 
 men in their English tongue. 
 
 It is but scant space I have left myself 
 in which to speak of one other element 
 in Mr. Spurgeon's success, as a preacher 
 of Christ's Gospel, without which, I ven-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM Til 
 
 ture to think, in spite of his great gifts, he 
 would not have done the work he did. It 
 is that there was profound truth in the great 
 substance of his teaching, and he himself 
 believed that truth with all his heart. His 
 message embraced the great Catholic truths 
 of the Gospel — the yearning love of God 
 for men, sinful as they are; the Incarnation 
 of the Son of God; the Atonement for 
 sin made by Christ's sacrificial death upon 
 the cross ; the influence of the Holy Spirit in 
 the conversion and upbuilding of the human 
 soul. All these truths and those which 
 spring out of them he held with an unwaver- 
 ing grasp. No one could make him believe 
 that the age of the supernatural had passed; 
 for he boldly declared that the Gospel comes 
 from the supernatural, is supernatural, and 
 does its appointed work in the presence and 
 by the power of the supernatural. On all 
 these subjects his mind was made up past all 
 misgiving. Forty years ago a reviewer, who 
 was not insensible to such defects as Mr. 
 Spurgeon certainly had, especially in the 
 early years of his career, wrote what may 
 still be repeated after these forty years have 
 come and gone: "The philosophical pre- 
 cision, the literary refinements, the nice dis-
 
 228 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 criminations between what we may know of a 
 doctrine, and what we may not, leaving us, 
 in the end, perhaps scarcely anything to 
 know about — all this, which, according to 
 some, is so much needed by the age, is Mr. 
 Spurgeon's utter scorn. He is the direct 
 dogmatic enunciator of the old Pauline truth, 
 without the slightest attempt to soften its 
 outline, its substance, or its results — and 
 what has followed? Truly, Providence 
 would seem once more to have made foolish 
 the wisdom of this world. While the gentle- 
 men who know so well how people ought to 
 preach are left to exemplify their profound 
 lessons before empty benches and in obscure 
 corners, this young man can point to six 
 thousand hearers every Sunday, and ask — 
 Who, with such a sight before him, dares 
 despair of making the Gospel — the good old 
 Gospel — a power in the great heart of 
 humanity?"
 
 VIII 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 II. DR. R. W. DALE
 
 LECTURE VIII 
 
 EEPKESEXTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 IT. DR. R. W. DALE 
 
 IN my last lecture I called your attention 
 to two men who may be regarded as typi- 
 cal representatives of the English Puritan 
 preacher of the nineteenth century, — Thomas 
 Binney and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. I 
 pass now from these to the late Dr. Dale of 
 Birmingham, a preacher of whom a compe- 
 tent witness has said that "he had the real 
 soul of the Puritan in him," and that as a 
 theologian " our generation has had no abler 
 interpreter of Evangelical thought." We 
 may go one step farther and say that not 
 merely this generation but this century has 
 seen no abler man in the ranks of the Eng- 
 lish Congregational Ministry. 
 
 It is not necessary for me, here and now, 
 to explain Dr. Dale's methods of work as a 
 preacher, inasmuch as some years ago, as a 
 former Yale lecturer, he practically did this
 
 232 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 for himself. Upon his characteristic qualities 
 as a man and a minister I therefore do not 
 propose to dwell. But Dr. Dale was not 
 merely a preacher; he was also an indepen- 
 dent and constructive theologian, which, it is 
 scarcely necessary to say, all preachers are 
 not. As the foundation of his preaching, 
 there was a strong, compact, and solid basis of 
 theological thought which gave real unity to 
 all his teaching. With sweat of brain and 
 earnest wrestling of soul he wrought out for 
 himself, from divine revelation, a doctrinal 
 system, which he sought to verify at every 
 step by his own actual religious experience 
 and by that of the Christian Church at large. 
 One who had exceptional means of knowing 
 him tells us that "he thought himself into 
 the mind of the sacred writers, taking his first 
 principle from John, and working it into a 
 theology by means of terms and processes he 
 derived from Paul, so that his theological 
 method was at once Biblical and constructive." 
 The important place which theological 
 study should hold in a preacher's life and 
 teaching was emphasized early b}^ Dr. Dale 
 in what has always seemed to me to be one 
 of the greatest of his sermons, that which 
 he preached at Stratford-on-Avon in 1864,
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 233 
 
 on the occasion of the tercentenary celebra- 
 tion of Shakespeare's birth. The sermon 
 is entitled "Genius the Gift of God." In 
 eloquent terms he spoke of the magnitude of 
 the blessing God conferred on the English 
 people when he endowed their great poet with 
 gifts so vast and so rare; and also of how 
 much that poet had done to give to the Eng- 
 lish tongue its force, its picturesqueness, its 
 majesty, splendor, and beauty. But all this 
 genius he seemed almost to covet for still 
 higher service. He had sometimes tried, he 
 said, to imagine what would have been the 
 preciousness of that legacy which Shakespeare 
 would have left to the world had his genius 
 been wholly devoted to illustrate and enforce 
 relio-ious truth. He maintained that the 
 highest ministry of all in which the intellect 
 can be engaged, the ministry to which by its 
 divine origin it is most urgently and impera- 
 tively called, is in direct connection with 
 religion. He held it a crime against God and 
 man to relegate the intellect to inferior 
 provinces of thought and to forbid or discour- 
 age its activity in the investigation and mas- 
 tery of religious truth. For it is in the 
 revelation of God to man that the human 
 mind finds the grandest materials for the ex-
 
 234 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 ercise of its energy. It seemed to liira that 
 the vague uncertainty of theological thought 
 with which some men ask us to be satisfied is 
 virtually to cast dishonor on the dignity of 
 human nature and to impeach the sincerity of 
 divine revelation. He returned to this point 
 towards the end of his life, and in a letter to 
 a friend said that for years he had felt that 
 the vagueness of thought which prevails 
 among intelligent people with regard to 
 Christian doctrine is a serious injury to the 
 vigor of religious life; and that the injury 
 was all the graver because of the increasing 
 precision with which men are thinking about 
 natural phenomena. In one region of the in- 
 tellectual life there is granite, above it are 
 clouds. 
 
 There are those who are afraid of dogmatic 
 theology. Dogma is a word that scares 
 them. Abusive epithets are so continually 
 being applied to it that they think they show 
 culture and breadth of mind by keeping clear 
 of it. Yet what is dogma, rightly looked at, 
 but the way a sensible man has of summing 
 up his knowledge on a given subject ? The 
 necessity for dogma arises from that other 
 necessity there is in the human mind for con- 
 structive movement and systematic thought.
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 235 
 
 There must be some sort of order in the way- 
 different parts of a subject hang together in 
 the mind of an active thinker. Therefore, 
 just as there may be a true and constructive 
 science of the material universe, there may 
 also be a true and constructive dogmatic the- 
 ology, that is, a science of the spiritual uni- 
 verse. Neither in the one case nor the other 
 may that science be perfectly complete and 
 absolutely final. Natural science is continu- 
 ally seeking to adjust itself more and more 
 closely to the facts ; it is therefore no dispar- 
 agement to spiritual science, that is, dogmatic 
 theology, to say that it may have to do the 
 same. The facts in both worlds, natural and 
 spiritual, remain ever the same, unchanged 
 and unchangeable, but man's way of express- 
 ing them and setting them forth must neces- 
 sarily change as his knowledge of those facts 
 becomes closer and more accurate. The 
 spiritual world with its divine facts, laws, and 
 processes is as real as the natural world, in- 
 deed the two are forever interlacing, and if 
 the scientific study of the natural world is a 
 high and honorable pursuit, so also is the 
 scientific study of the spiritual. As men 
 who desire to take life seriously, we must 
 give some account of spiritual facts to our-
 
 236 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 selves and to others. There must be an intel- 
 lectual expression of the contents of faith. 
 
 Possibly some men reject dogma because 
 they dislike the facts with which dogma 
 deals, but also very much of the opprobrium 
 heaped upon it arises from the attempt too 
 often made to stereotype in creeds for all 
 time, the way some men had of expressing 
 divine facts at some one given time. The 
 attempt to stereotype natural science would 
 not succeed. It would be very unfortunate 
 if it did. So with the science of the spirit- 
 ual universe. While its facts abide and are 
 eternal, the form of stating them has changed, 
 and indeed must change, if it is to have life 
 in it and be of any value. The intellectual 
 methods of the Middle Ages, as Dr. Dale 
 points out, governed the speculations of the 
 Schoolmen as to the invisible and spiritual 
 universe just as they governed the specula- 
 tions of their contemporaries in their re- 
 searches into the visible and material uni- 
 verse. And in the interests of advancing 
 knowledge those methods had to be left 
 behind. So again, the Protestant attempt to 
 recast theological thought after the Reforma- 
 tion, while substantially sound and strong, 
 has undergone change and modification as the
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 237 
 
 spiritual consciousness of the Churcli in com- 
 munion with God has entered more fully into 
 the spiritual heritage of truth. The men of 
 thirty and forty years ago who urged us to be 
 faithful to the theology of the Puritans were 
 hardly conscious how far they themselves had 
 travelled from the Puritan position. Mr. 
 Spurgeon flattered himself to the end of his 
 life that he was a sound Calvinist, yet John 
 Calvin was much too great a theologian to 
 have accepted Mr. Spurgeon's way of preach- 
 ing: Calvinism. As the Schoolmen of the 
 Middle Ages, and the Protestants and Puri- 
 tans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- 
 ries thought and spoke in the idiom of their 
 own time, Dr. Dale contended so must we. 
 We in our turn have to give our own account 
 of the great objects of faith, to construct our 
 own conception of them, to conceive of them 
 according to our own intellectual methods, 
 and under our own forms of thought. We 
 may not for a moment let go any of the divine 
 facts or truths revealed to us. We dare not 
 modify any traditional Christian doctrine to 
 conciliate hostility. But neither are we to 
 shrink from modifying any expression or tra- 
 dition of the past which misrepresents the 
 eternal fact. A recent writer has forcibly
 
 238 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 said that the right thing to do with dogma is 
 not to reject it but to vitalize it. "It is a 
 poor thing," he says, for example, "to preach 
 ' Predestination ' in such a way as to set men 
 wondering whether they are predestinated or 
 not, and which of their neighbors are. A 
 man who inquires so is not predestinated very 
 much. What we need is to put men in direct 
 contact with Divine Power and Reality, to 
 make life so serious to them that they will 
 have the feeling which first made men throw 
 out this word ' Predestination ' — the feeling 
 that they are arrested for a divine purpose, 
 and must do a divine work. Predestination 
 is man interpreting the ' must ' of his inner 
 nature as the eternal word and will of God." 
 Dr. Dale not only felt it needful to work 
 out a system of Christian doctrine for his own 
 intellectual and spiritual requirements, but 
 he held it to be a foremost part of his duty to 
 preach sermons on Christian doctrine to his 
 people. In the preface to the latest book he 
 himself issued from the press, he tells us 
 that early in his ministry some other minis- 
 ter, in friendly fashion, said to him, " I hear 
 that you are preaching doctrinal sermons to 
 your congregation; they will not stand it." 
 To which he replied, " They will have to stand
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 239 
 
 it." Commenting upon this late in life, he 
 admitted there was too much of the insolent 
 self-confidence of youth in both the temper 
 and form of his reply; at the same time he 
 still held that the conception of the ministry 
 which it expressed was a just one — as far as 
 it went; and it was a conception which with 
 more or less fidelity he had endeavored to 
 fulfil. But while it is true that Dr. Dale felt 
 it to be his duty to preach doctrinal sermons 
 to a miscellaneous congregation, it is import- 
 ant to remember, what Dr. Fairbairn points 
 out, that he never could regard a doctrine as 
 a dogma which he was bound to believe be- 
 cause the Church had formulated it. Doc- 
 trine, while shaping his experience, was also 
 verified by the experience which it governed. 
 It may be asked, however. Is it competent for 
 any man to limit divine truth within the 
 bounds of his own experience ? Is not this to 
 resolve Christianity into mere subjective feel- 
 ing? This, as Herrmann saw, was the vice 
 of mysticism, that it disregarded the link 
 between the inner life of the Christian and its 
 real foundation in that which is outside itself, 
 and so came to allow feelings which have 
 no distinct character to usurp the place of 
 thoughts concerning faith. Pietism, by dis-
 
 240 PURITAN PHE ACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 paraging intellectual activity, as Dr. Dale 
 himself plainly saw, encourages a feeble relig- 
 ious sentimentalism. He was saved from that 
 not only because, as Dr. Fairbairn says, his 
 nature was large and rich, but because he was 
 strongly intellectual, with a reason that was 
 more ratiocinative than speculative. There 
 was, to quote the far-seeing words of Herr- 
 mann, a further and more important safe- 
 guard: "The new state of feeling into which 
 the Christian enters clings to something richer 
 than itself. It needs an objective reality 
 which it distinguishes from its own nature. 
 Greater and higher than all religious emotion 
 within the Christian, there rises and towers 
 religious thought, which points away beyond 
 all that we have already felt and experienced 
 on to a boundless wealth which lies beyond." 
 Thus while experience illumined and made 
 real the truth of revelation, that truth guided 
 and enriched the experience. Out of mutual 
 interaction came enlargement of thought and 
 life. 
 
 From what I have said, you will have gath- 
 ered that Dr. Dale made it his habit to preach 
 doctrinal sermons, in turns with sermons of 
 other sort, because he held it to be his first 
 and foremost duty to instruct his people as to
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 241 
 
 those great divine facts of the spiritual uni- 
 verse which have been revealed to us. He 
 felt it was not enough to give mere ethical 
 teaching on the daily conduct of life. He did 
 this, did it more effectively than most preach- 
 ers, as his published sermons remain to shew. 
 But he realized that eternity was the solemn 
 background of time, and that no life is truly 
 noble till it is rooted in divine relationships. 
 
 But while setting forth the great doctrines 
 of revelation in-his regular ministry, he did so 
 in no merely technical or academic fashion. 
 He made doctrinal preaching living by bring- 
 ing it into close connection with, and verify- 
 ing it by, the actual experience of living men. 
 This is the one instructive thing about it for 
 other preachers. Let me, in the briefest pos- 
 sible way, give instances of this. 
 
 For example, while proclaiming the foun- 
 dation truth of the Divine Existence, he ex- 
 plained the difference between helicving that 
 God is, and knowing that He is. The helicf 
 may come from parents and teachers or as a 
 national tradition. We know that God is by 
 coming into personal contact with Him. 
 One man remembers a summer's day when 
 the wonderful beauty of nature filled him 
 with exultation and delight. Suddenly 
 
 16
 
 242 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 through all that he saw there came the very 
 glory of God. He knew that He was there. 
 His presence and His goodness took possession 
 of him and held him for hours. Another man 
 comes to the same knowledge by finding an 
 intelligible order in nature, by recognizing a 
 mind not his, but like his, by finding that he 
 can think God's thoughts after Him. Not 
 by reasoning, but by experience is God's ex- 
 istence made certain to us. As the material 
 world is perceived and known by the organs 
 of sense, so God is perceived and known by 
 the organs of the mind. The World, Self, 
 God, — these are the ultimate realities ; and 
 each must be known by experience, if known 
 at all. So again with the moral sense. 
 When a man has done wrong, in the remorse 
 and wretchedness which follow he has to do 
 not with a mere idea, but with an awful 
 force. It is more than a Power. It deals 
 with him as a living Person deals with a liv- 
 ing person. Righteousness is the attribute 
 of a Person not of a mere Power; the Power 
 which insists on Righteousness must have a 
 living Person behind it. God has come to 
 him, — the Living God. He knows there is 
 a God ; he knows it for himself. 
 
 But more commonly the traditional belief
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 243 
 
 in God's existence passes into the immediate 
 and certain knowledge of Him under the 
 power of the Christian Gospel, and the mani- 
 festation of the divine glory in the earthly 
 history of our Lord Jesus Christ. A man 
 becomes conscious of failure, or in other ways 
 is led to the supreme life. There follows the 
 great venture of faith. A cry goes up to 
 God from the very depths of the soul, a 
 cry of faltering trust and hope. The cry 
 is answered, sometimes suddenly, sometimes 
 after long delay. But whether earlier or later, 
 the answer comes ; and the man knows that 
 it comes from the Living God. The faith of 
 the Church in the Divinity of our Lord does 
 not rest merely upon authority, — whether the 
 authority of councils or of the original apos- 
 tles. Under the illumination of the Holy 
 Spirit, and as the result of the experience of 
 the Christian life, Christian men, in one gen- 
 eration after another, see for themselves the 
 glory of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 So again with the doctrine of the Holy 
 Spirit. Dr. Dale said he knew he was inter- 
 preting the experience of Christian men accu- 
 rately when saying that we are conscious that 
 it is in the strength of a Divine Power that 
 we trust in the infinite love of God in Christ
 
 244 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 for the remission of sins, submit to His 
 authority, and rejoice in His grace. But 
 where there is a Divine Power there must 
 always be a Divine Person; tliis is not an 
 inference from experience, but a part of 
 experience. 
 
 Again also when he comes to the great doc- 
 trine of the Atonement, he comes to fact and 
 experience. He points out that in spite of 
 the corruptions which have enfeebled the 
 faith and dishonored the morals of the 
 Church, this great truth, though often 
 obscured, has never been dislodged from its 
 place and authority in Christian thought. 
 Theologians have given varying and conflict- 
 ing explanations of it, but its power over the 
 hearts of the faithful has remained unbroken. 
 That the Death of Christ was a sacrifice for 
 the sins of the world, and that through the 
 blood of Christ we have the forgiveness of 
 sins has been verified in the actual experience 
 of the Christian Church. Nothing is more 
 real than the sense of guilt, and when men 
 have found no relief in tears and sorrow, or 
 from attempts to amend their lives, they have 
 seen that Christ had died for their sins, and 
 then the shadow broke and passed away ; the 
 light of God shone upon them; they knew
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 245 
 
 that they were forgiven. It is a wonderful 
 experience, an experience that seems impos- 
 sible until it is actually known ; and then the 
 reality of it is one of the great certainties of 
 life. The blessedness of the remission of sin 
 has been verified in the experience of Chris- 
 tian men through sixty generations. 
 
 In this living way Dr. Dale set forth Chris- 
 tian doctrine to the living men and women 
 who gathered round his pulpit from week to 
 week. "I find," he says, "'the pillar and 
 ground of the truth ' in the actual life of those 
 who have received the Christian salvation. 
 The biography of saints is a higher authority 
 than the decrees of councils. . . . For me 
 the doctrinal authority of the Church lies 
 in the experience of the Church. Its expe- 
 rience constitutes its authority — the experi- 
 ence of the commonalty of those who have 
 received the Christian redemption. . . . The 
 actual experience of penitents and saints is 
 sacred to me ; when we are in immediate con- 
 tact with the divine life of man, we are in 
 contact with the presence and power of the 
 Spirit of God. The ' Confessions ' of Augus- 
 tine are of more authority than his theolog- 
 ical treatises; Bunyan's ' Grace Abounding' 
 than Calvin's ' Institutes. ' I believe in the
 
 2-iG PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 inspiration of the Church, and I find that 
 inspiration in its life." 
 
 And now let us pass from substance to form 
 and st)/lc. Dr. Fairbairn has said that Dr. 
 Dale's spoken discourse recalled the heroic 
 age of the English sermon. This spoken 
 discourse, so far as style is concerned, was 
 largely influenced by that of Edmund Burke. 
 From Dale's biography we learn that his ad- 
 miration for Burke, which began at college, 
 lasted on till his latest years. When sleep- 
 less nights were upon him, he had always a 
 pile of books by his bedside, and invariably a 
 volume or two of Burke might be found 
 among them. Other books came and went, 
 but Burke remained a faithful friend not to 
 be dispossessed. In view of this fact, it is 
 curious to notice how many points of similar- 
 ity there were between the two men. Many 
 of the things said by Hazlitt and John Mor- 
 ley about Burke might be said with almost 
 equal truth about Dr. Dale. Hazlitt, com- 
 paring Burke with his great contemporary 
 the Earl of Chatham, says that while Chat- 
 ham's wisdom was altogether plain and prac- 
 tical, Burke's was profound and contempla- 
 tive; while Chatham led men to act, Burke 
 made them think; that while Chatham's elo-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 247 
 
 quence roused the multitude and enabled him 
 to wield their physical energy as he pleased, 
 Burke's carried conviction into the mind of 
 the retired and lonely student ; and that while 
 Chatham supplied his hearers with motives 
 to immediate action, Burke furnished them 
 with reasons for action, which might have little 
 effect upon them at the time, but for which 
 they would be wiser and better all their lives 
 after. In short, if Burke did not produce the 
 same effects on ordinary minds as some others 
 have done, it was not from want of power, 
 but because his subjects, his ideas, and his 
 arguments were less common. John Morley, 
 too, in his "Life of Burke," says that he 
 combined his thoughts and knowledge in 
 propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong 
 that the minds of ordinary hearers were not 
 on the instant prepared for them. Else- 
 where also he says that in the coolest and 
 dryest of Burke's writings there is the mark 
 of greatness, of grasp, of comprehension ; that 
 he had the style of his subjects, the ampli- 
 tude, the weightiness, the grandeur proper to 
 a man dealing with imperial themes, — the 
 freedom of nations, the justice of rulers, the 
 fortunes of great societies, the sacredness of 
 law.
 
 248 PURITAN r REACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 If we pass over from the domain of political 
 philosophy to that of tlieology, the substance 
 of what is here said about Burke might be 
 applied without reserve to Dr. Dale. Upon 
 all 7m best work, too, there is the mark of 
 greatness, of grasp and comprehension; and 
 no one can read the books he has left us with- 
 out feeling that he had the style of his sub- 
 jects, — the amplitude, the weightiness, the 
 grandeur proper to a man dealing with great 
 and sacred themes. It is because he is such 
 an admirable example of literary style, be- 
 cause his sermons were literature rather than 
 sermons, that I wish to make use of him to 
 raise a very practical and important question 
 of interest to all preachers. The question is 
 this: Even if a man can attain to a very 
 high degree of excellence in a purely literary 
 style, is it the most effective form of pulpit 
 address ? May it not be that the very quali- 
 ties which are excellencies in literature may 
 prove drawbacks to spoken discourse? Al- 
 most the same things have been said of both 
 these men. Hazlitt was of opinion that 
 Burke's writings are better than his speeches, 
 and that indeed his speeches are writings. 
 Similarly Dr. Fairbairn says that Dr. Dale's 
 words, "though written to be spoken, are
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 249 
 
 even more fitted to be read than to be heard; 
 for his books are as firm in texture, as 
 weighty in matter, as vigorous in expression 
 as the concentrated thought of a strong man 
 could make them." So far as public speech 
 is concerned, how far may this compact liter- 
 ary style be said to be a success? Let us 
 take first the one man and then the other for 
 the purpose of this inquiry. 
 
 John Morley, as his latest biographer, is of 
 opinion that though as an orator Burke was 
 transcendent, yet in that immediate influence 
 upon his hearers which is commonly sup- 
 posed to be the mark of oratorical success, all 
 the evidence is that he generally failed. Per- 
 haps the greatest speech he ever made was that 
 on conciliation with America: the wisest in 
 its temper, the most closely logical in its 
 reasoning, the amplest in its appropriate 
 topics, the most generous and conciliating in 
 the substance of its appeals. Yet, as a matter 
 of fact, Erskine, who was in the House when 
 it was delivered, said that it drove everybody 
 away, including people who, when they came 
 to read it, read it over and over again, and 
 could hardly think of anything else. Burke 
 is held fortli as a memorable instance of more 
 than adequate means of commanding success
 
 250 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 resulting in a very inadequate share of it. 
 The greatest political philosopher of his clay, 
 he yet commanded no adherents; the greatest 
 orator, he yet commanded no converts, and 
 could scarce command an audience. He was 
 the best-informed man in Parliament, the 
 most exact and ready in las information. In 
 addition, he had the means of pleasing as well 
 as convincing; for his language was choice 
 and classical and copiously various, while 
 imagery the most bountiful and most beauti- 
 ful set off his homeliest wares. Yet we are 
 told that he was tiresome, that his name passed 
 into a parliamentary proverb, and that the 
 signal for his rising to speak was the signal 
 for his audience to quit their benches. It is 
 clear from this conspicuous instance that 
 literature and spoken discourse are not quite 
 the same thing. The spoken discourse meant 
 to be heard and the written composition in- 
 tended to be read, should be prepared on 
 widely different lines. Otherwise such qual- 
 ities as profundity of thought, closeness and 
 consecutiveness of reasoning, elaborated with 
 refinement and beauty of style, may serionsly 
 mar the effectiveness of what is addressed to 
 the ear. For if a man who is reading a book 
 cannot quite follow the writer's argument,
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 251 
 
 he can turn back and go over the paragraph 
 again. But the man who is hearing a speech 
 or a sermon must understand it at the first 
 hearing or not at alL It has been well said 
 that an average audience cannot be fed with 
 intellectual pemmican. It is a form of food 
 too concentrated for general use. Therefore 
 what is tiresome in a book may be desirable 
 in a sermon. Without ceasing to be viva- 
 cious and interesting, the argument may pro- 
 ceed at somewhat slower pace; the same 
 thought may be presented in varied language 
 and diversified aspects; and there is larger 
 room for the use of pictorial forms and famil- 
 iar illustrations. The speaker should make 
 sure as he goes along not only that the ideas 
 are there, but that they are presented in the 
 way best calculated to strike and tell. 
 
 In the case of Dr. Dale, the admirable biog- 
 raphy given us by his son deals with this 
 question of his style quite frankly, and, so far 
 as preachers are concerned, seems to me one 
 of the most interesting and instructive parts 
 of the book. In a footnote to one of the 
 pages a portion of a letter is quoted from one 
 of Dr. Dale's most intelligent hearers, in 
 which the writer says : " In my own estima- 
 tion he always ranked higher as a teacher
 
 252 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 than a preacher of the truth. If I read a ser- 
 mon which I had previously heard him 
 preach, it always proved superior to what was 
 expected. The delivery had too little variety 
 of tone, and was too impassioned, as a rule, 
 and until his later years was destitute of 
 pathos." The defects in delivery, this gen- 
 tleman points out, may be traced, I think, to 
 Dr. Dale's stjde of composition. A close, 
 compact, and weighty style of writing leads 
 almost necessarily to monotony of delivery 
 and lack of pathos. It leaves too little room 
 for play of tone and feeling. 
 
 It must not, however, be inferred from what 
 has been said that Dr. Dale did not often 
 produce almost sublime effects even with this 
 condensed literary style of his. It is now 
 thirty years ago, but I vividly remember the 
 profound impression created by his address on 
 "Christ and the Controversies of Christen- 
 dom," delivered from the Chair of the Con- 
 gregational Union. A friend of mine also 
 who heard him preach his great sermon on 
 "The Theology of John Wesley," in connec- 
 tion with the celebration of the centenary of 
 John Wesley's death, told me that the effect 
 of the sermon upon that great audience was, 
 at certain points, simply overwhelming. It
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 253 
 
 seemed as if the people would rise to their 
 feet and give vent to their feelings in excited 
 acclaim. Of course the occasion was special, 
 and so was the audience. Then, too, the 
 more abstract parts of the sermon were broken 
 up by passages of historical narrative, in 
 addition to which there was much that was 
 concrete in the setting forth of the religious 
 experience of the Founder of Methodism. It 
 will be seen at once that the ordinary condi- 
 tions of a Sunday after Sunday ministry are 
 necessarily different from those of a special 
 service such as I have referred to. And while 
 no one can doubt for a moment that Dr. 
 Dale's regular ministrations among his own 
 people were effective and instructive in a high 
 degree to many of his hearers, he himself 
 seems to have felt that the elaborate literary 
 style he had acquired, and which had become 
 part of himself, and which has made his 
 books so valued a possession to the Church 
 of God, was, to some extent, a drawback to 
 his usefulness as a preacher. His self- 
 revelations on this point, as given in his biog- 
 raphy, seem to me very instructive. 
 
 In a letter to his colleague and senior, the 
 Rev. John Angell James, written some three 
 years after his settlement in Birmingham, he
 
 254 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 says : " The present church and congregation 
 are on the whole, I believe, more than satis- 
 fied with my ministry. Many are personally 
 attached to me and believe that they derive 
 strength and instruction from my ministry. 
 . . . On the other hand : but twelve or fifteen 
 months ago there was very considerable dis- 
 satisfaction on the part of the wisest, strong- 
 est, and best people in the Church, occasioned 
 by my preaching doctrines which I still hold, 
 and by the influence on my ministry of men- 
 tal and moral habits too deeply rooted ever 
 to be wholly destroyed." 
 
 Farther on in the same letter he confides to 
 Mr. James that his most cherished ambition 
 had been to gather a congregation of his own 
 from the artisan class, and he says: "Sadly 
 but slowly, I have come to the conviction 
 that I cannot do it. My preaching must 
 always be to a large extent speculative and 
 doctrinal. To reconstruct one's mind and 
 completely transform one's habits is hard, 
 almost an impossible task. Such men as Mr. 
 Beaumont — ■ whose head appears to me to be 
 one of the finest I ever met with — complained 
 that it was hard work to follow my sermons 
 on ' Romans. ' Wherever I go, I must strive 
 against the excessive tendency to abstractions
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 255 
 
 by which ray preaching raust have been char- 
 acterized for such a man to speak so of it." 
 
 Thirty years later circumstances led to his 
 returning to the subject again. The occasion 
 was this: there had been a Church Fellow- 
 ship Conference in his congregation, at which 
 one of the members read a paper offering sug- 
 gestions as to what could be done to contribute 
 to the strength and efficiency of their Church 
 life. He began with the pulpit, and the con- 
 versation at which Dr. Dale was present was 
 very much arrested at this first part of the 
 paper. Kindness was the dominant element 
 of the criticism offered, and it was cheerfully 
 granted that their minister's sermons had in- 
 tellectual, literary, and spiritual qualities 
 which commanded the sympathy and grati- 
 tude of the best and most cultivated of his 
 hearers. At the same time it was urged by 
 several that Dr. Dale's preaching moved at a 
 height — intellectual and spiritual — far above 
 that of the congregation generally. 
 
 This conference took place a short time 
 before he left home for quiet sojourn at his 
 country house by the sea. He now for the 
 first time began to keep a diary in which to 
 write his thoughts about himself and his 
 work, and this is what he says as to the
 
 256 PURITAN PREACH ING IN ENGLAND 
 
 course of the conversation at the Church Con- 
 ference in question : " I have been thinking 
 much, and with much concern abqut my 
 preaching. It has a fatal defect. It is 
 wanting in an element which is in(lispensal)le 
 to real success. I do not think that I should 
 state the exact truth if I said that I was not 
 anxious for the conversion and perfection 
 of individual men, and cared only for setting 
 forth the truth. But I fear that the truth 
 occupies too large a place in my thought, 
 and that I have been too much occupied 
 with the instrument — the divine instrument 
 — 'for effecting the ends of the ministry." 
 
 On this important point of effectively get- 
 ting hold of the people he says further: "I 
 felt rather strongly towards the close of last 
 year that in one respect among others my 
 ministry — especially of late years — had been 
 gravely defective. I have striven to press 
 home upon men and to illustrate the very 
 central contents of Christ's Gospel; but I 
 have not recognized practically the obligation 
 to use in preaching all those secondary powers 
 which contribute to create and sustain intel- 
 lectual and emotional interest in preaching. 
 The more strenuous intellectual effort in 
 order to make truth clear, and put it strongly,
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 257 
 
 has not been neglected; but there has not 
 been the legitimate use, either in the choice 
 of subjects or their treatment, of those ele- 
 ments which are of a rhetorical character, 
 and which raise the audience into a condition 
 which is perhaps friendly to the reception 
 of Christian truth. I have a dread of aim- 
 ing at the ' popular ' method of treatment, 
 arising from a dread of aiming at ' j)opu- 
 laritj, ' but the two aims are wholly distinct, 
 and it has been a fault not to aim at the 
 first. " 
 
 Yet again he has a significant sentence or 
 two in reference to his style. He says: 
 "The word which has been often used to 
 denote what critics regarded as the excel- 
 lence of my preaching and speaking really 
 suggested the qualities in which both had 
 been defective, and the preaching more than 
 the speaking — ' stateliness.^ That is not the 
 characteristic of effective preaching; and it 
 suggests a whole set of intellectual, ethical, 
 and spiritual elements which account for 
 failure." 
 
 So we come to this: the lesson other 
 preachers may learn from Dr. Dale's self- 
 revelations is that stateliness of style, elaborate 
 literary finish, even in the hands of a master, 
 
 17
 
 258 PURITAN PREACniNG IN ENGLAND 
 
 is not the most effective style for the pulpit. 
 That which may make a man's work good as 
 liteiature may mar it for spoken discourse. 
 At the same time it does not follow, on the 
 other hand, because a public speaker had 
 better not put on the stiff brocade of stateli- 
 ness, that he must needs fail into a style 
 loose and slipshod. Some of the greatest 
 masters of speech sufficiently prove the 
 contrary. John Bright's speeches, for in- 
 stance, have, by some of the ablest judges, 
 been admitted to be among the noblest exam- 
 ples of oratory in our time ; yet though often 
 characterized by eloquence and even gran- 
 deur, no one would say they had the defect 
 and drawback of stateliness; and certainly 
 they were never loose or slipshod. They 
 were never below the dignity or the import- 
 ance of the subject on the one hand ; and they 
 never overstrained the minds of the audience 
 on the other. There were familiar passages 
 which gave a sense of rest to the hearer, and 
 also passages which at times bore him along 
 on the current of strong emotion. Variety, 
 unexpectedness, interest, instruction were so 
 blended with convincing argument, touching 
 pathos, and stirring appeal, that the audi- 
 ence were only sorry at the end that all was
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 259 
 
 over. This leads me to say, in conclusion, 
 that for preachers such speeches are better 
 models of style than the most stately sermons, 
 or the most elaborate compositions of the 
 great masters in literature.
 
 IX 
 
 REPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 m. DR. ALEXANDER MACLAREN
 
 LECTURE IX 
 
 KEPRESENTATIVE PREACHERS OF 
 MODERN PURITANISM 
 
 III. DR. ALEXAXDER MACLAREN 
 
 THE three preachers I have already 
 brought to your notice, as typical re- 
 presentatives of Modern Puritanism in our 
 own century, have all passed from the ranks 
 of the living to the higher service. In this 
 concluding lecture I should like to set before 
 you one man in the English pulpit of to-day, 
 still spared to us, — long may he be spared, — 
 whose career as a minister and whose methods 
 as a preacher seem to me more than usually 
 suggestive to younger men. I refer to Dr. 
 Alexander Maclaren of Manchester, whose 
 sermons are, I believe, almost as well known 
 in America as they are in England. It so 
 happens that before going to my present 
 pastorate in Bedford I was, for six years of 
 his Manchester life, minister of another 
 church in* the same city, and am therefore 
 able, from personal knowledge to some extent,
 
 264 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 to speak of the beginnings of his work in the 
 sphere he has served and adorned so long. 
 From 1858 to the present time, a period of 
 more than forty years, his intellectual and 
 spiritual influence as a preacher, in one of 
 the foremost of English cities, has never 
 wavered or waned. 
 
 I hesitate to apply the word " popularity " 
 in his case simply because it is an equivocal 
 word and has come to be applied to men of 
 whose methods one cannot always think with 
 pleasure. We may, however, use it in Dr. 
 Maclaren's case in the noblest sense, for his 
 popularity is based upon solid and lasting 
 foundations, has been won by legitimate 
 means, and is such as all good men can un- 
 feignedly rejoice over. He instinctively 
 shrinks from everything that may be called 
 playing to the galler}'-, and declines to lower 
 his own ideal for the sake of securing the 
 favor of his audience. His unbroken career 
 as a minister for more than half a century, 
 his marvellous instructive and incisive power 
 as a preacher, make him and his method of 
 more than ordinary interest to those whose 
 vocation is to be that of the preacher. Let 
 me try to show what we may learn from him. 
 
 In 1846, at the early age of twenty, Alex-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 265 
 
 ander Maclaren went from college to be min- 
 ister of a comparatively small congregation 
 on a very modest stipend in the town of 
 Southampton. There is this to be noted, 
 that though the congregation was small at 
 starting, he felt it to be worthy of the best 
 he could give to it. He held faithfully and 
 tenaciously to his work, and there is no better 
 way of turning a small place into a large one 
 than that of making the most of it and doing 
 your best to it while you are in it. He occa- 
 sionally took up work aside from his main 
 line of service. During that first pastorate 
 he found time to lecture to the general public 
 of the town on such subjects as " John Mil- 
 ton's Prose Writings," "Martin Luther," 
 "John Knox," "The Covenanters of Scot- 
 land," "Realized Utopias," and "The Wis- 
 dom of Boldness." But he never neglected 
 the pulpit for the lecture hall or the plat- 
 form. First of all, and above all things 
 else, he was a preacher of the Eternal Word. 
 The survivors of his Southampton congre- 
 gation, while willing to admit that he is more 
 forceful and more cultured in the 'nineties 
 than he was in the 'fifties, still contend that 
 he has never reached higher levels than he 
 frequently did in the days when he was their
 
 266 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 minister. The result of honest, steadfast, 
 painstaking work in that early pastorate was 
 such that at the end of twelve years he left 
 at Southampton a congregation which filled 
 the church building ; and he took with him 
 to Manchester an established reputation as 
 one of the ablest, most interesting, and most 
 instructive of Nonconformist preachers. 
 
 This preliminary word about Dr. Maclaren 
 will probably make you willing to know more 
 about his style of preaching and his methods 
 of work. Let us begin with his method of 
 preparation first, and, of course, on this he 
 himself can give us the most reliable informa- 
 tion. He says : " I began my ministry with 
 the resolution that I would not write sermons, 
 but would think and feel them, and I have 
 stuck to it ever since. It costs quite as much 
 time in preparation as writing, and a far 
 greater expenditure of nervous energy in de- 
 livery ; but I am sure that it is best for me, 
 and equally sure that everybody has to find 
 out his own way." Going more into detail 
 he says : " I write my sermons in part. The 
 amount of written matter varies. When I 
 can, I like to write a couple of sentences or 
 so of introduction, in order to get a fair start, 
 and for the rest I content myself with jot-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 267 
 
 tings, fragmentary hints of a word or two 
 each, interspersed here and there with a fully 
 written sentence. Illustrations and meta- 
 phors I never write. A word suffices for 
 them. If I have ' heads ' I word these care- 
 fully, and I like to write the closing sen- 
 tences. That is my ideal, a sufficiently 
 scrappy one you will think, but I seldom 
 attain to it, and am most frequently obliged 
 to preach with much less preparation. The 
 amount written varies from about six or seven 
 pages of ordinary note paper — widely written 
 into short lines, each line only holding a 
 word or two — to the barest skeleton, that 
 would go in half a page. I do not adhere to 
 what is written, as there is very little of it 
 sufficiently consecutive. I make no attempt 
 to reproduce more than the general course of 
 thought, and constantly find that the best 
 bits of my sermon make themselves in preach- 
 ing. I do adhere to my introductory sen- 
 tences, which serve to shove me off into deep 
 water; but beyond that, I let the moment 
 shape the thing. Expressions I do not pre- 
 pare. If I can get the fire alight, that is 
 what I care for most."/ 
 
 Such is Dr. Maclaren's own account of 
 himself. Probably young beginners would
 
 268 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 be afraid to trust themselves to such daring 
 methods as these at first, just as young 
 swimmers would be afraid to trust themselves 
 in deep waters at the start. Even in the case 
 of Dr. Maclaren himself, one who has long 
 known him, tells us that in his earlier time 
 his fastidiousness in the choice of words led 
 often to long pauses, which lasted till he 
 found fitting expression for his thought and 
 that the refusal to accept any but the best 
 language in which to clothe his ideas goes far 
 to explain his skill in the use of the choicest 
 English. Further, that his mode of prepa- 
 ration had this effect sometimes, that his 
 material did not always last as long as he 
 expected. In such cases, when his wool was 
 done, he had the courage to leave off spin- 
 ning. He would never condescend to empty 
 talk merely for the sake of filling up what 
 has come to be regarded as the canonical 
 time. He has been known to sit down at the 
 end of twelve minutes, simply remarking 
 that he had no more to say. And I do not 
 know why a minister should go on talking 
 when he has no more to say, though there 
 are some ministers who do. 
 
 And now let us look still more closely into 
 Dr. Maclaren's methods, and ascertain if we
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 269 
 
 can the secret of his substantial and long- 
 continued success. We shall have to assume, 
 as taken for granted, very much of personal 
 sort, — his natural endowment, his keen intel- 
 lect, and that intense nervous force which 
 quickens and intensifies all his thinking and 
 speaking. These are the gifts from Heaven, 
 the sovereign bestowal with which he started 
 life. Every man hath his own proper gift, of 
 which we say he hath nothing which he hath 
 not received, and of which it is true that " a 
 man's gift maketh room for him." All this, 
 I say, we take for granted, and we are now 
 concerned rather with the use the man has 
 made of the gifts with which he set out in life. 
 In the forefront of the causes of Dr. Mac- 
 laren's success as a preacher, I should be 
 disposed to place the fact that his teaching 
 is firmly based upon and is a careful exposi- 
 tion of the revelation God has given to us in 
 the Scriptures. Beyond most men, he seems 
 to have resolved that his one mission shall be 
 to make clear to men's understandings, and to 
 bring home to men's hearts, the mind of the 
 Spirit of God as given to us in the Word of 
 God. All through his public life he has con- 
 tinued to be a careful student of the original 
 languages of Scripture, and his popular
 
 270 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 teaching is based upon an accurate examina- 
 tion of the grammatical structure of every 
 text he takes. The text is never used as a 
 mere motto for the sermon, but the sermon is 
 an exact exposition of the text. The context 
 is taken into careful account; each word has 
 its due place in arriving at the meaning of 
 the whole; and the niceties of distinction 
 between the different tenses of the verb are 
 duly recognized. Yet all this takes place in 
 no mere pedantic fashion. The preacher is 
 no slave to grammar and lexicon ; but when 
 he has laid his foundation in absolute verity, 
 the superstructure raised thereupon is in- 
 stinct with life and soul. Every man who 
 listens to him may feel quite sure that the 
 meaning he gives is, so far as he can find it, 
 honestly brought out of Scripture and not 
 unlawfully thrust into it. If he ever takes 
 a text simply by way of accommodation, 
 which he very rarely does, he frankly tells his 
 audience that he is doing so, and at the same 
 time he seems half-disposed to apologize for 
 the fact. On one occasion, for example, he 
 took for the subject of his sermon the cham- 
 bers of imagery spoken of by the prophet 
 Ezekiel, and started by saying : " Now I take 
 this text in a meaning which the prophet had
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 271 
 
 no intention to put on it. I do not often do 
 that with my texts, and when I do I like to 
 confess frankl}' that I am doing it. And so 
 I take the words as a kind of symbol which 
 may help to put into, perhaps, a picturesque 
 and more striking form some very familiar 
 and homely truths." After thus frankly 
 putting himself right with his audience, he 
 then proceeded to use Ezekiel's vision as 
 symbolizing the dark painted chamber in 
 men's hearts, the idolatries that go on there, 
 and the way that Heaven's light is sometimes 
 flashed into the midst of these idolatries. He 
 seems to hold Scripture as much too sacred 
 a thing to be used merely for popular effect, 
 or the display of oratory. I cannot conceive 
 of him making use of it for purposes of per- 
 sonal vanity by showing how cleverly he can 
 bring out a meaning from an obscure text 
 which no one ever suspected to be in it, and 
 which was probably not in it. The mere 
 suggestion of such a thing would, I think, 
 give him pain. If ever a prophet of God 
 stood in the midst of our modern nineteenth 
 century life with the burden of God upon 
 his heart, and a "Thus saith the Lord " upon 
 his lips, this preacher of whom I am speaking 
 is that prophet.
 
 272 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 Ilis intelligent reverence for Scripture is 
 accompanied with, or rather grows out of, his 
 firm belief in the historical facts related in 
 Scripture. Human speculations which change 
 with the changing years are with him as the 
 small dust of the balance when placed by the 
 side of that Word of the Living God which 
 abideth forever. Take, for example, that cen- 
 tral fact of Scripture, the resurrection of our 
 Lord from the dead. This to Dr. Maclaren 
 is as certain as any of the facts of ancient 
 or modern history. For his part he is sure 
 that if that resurrection had not taken place 
 we should have heard no more of Jesus and 
 his religion than we do of John the Baptist, 
 after his disciples took him up and buried 
 him. He is confident that if there had been 
 no resurrection of Christ, there would have 
 been no Church of Christ. So sure is he of 
 the fact in question, that even if he consented 
 to yield up everything that the most craving 
 and unreasonable modern scepticism can de- 
 mand concerning the date and authority of 
 the books of the New Testament, he would 
 be content to rest the matter on the evidence 
 contained in the four Epistles of Paul, the 
 genuineness of which no one has ever ques- 
 tioned. In his view, next to proclaiming the
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 273 
 
 Gospel, the main work of the Apostles was 
 not to pass on spiritual power and authority 
 in one unbroken chain of Apostolical Suc- 
 cession, hut to be personal witnesses of the 
 resurrection of Christ. That one fact with 
 its consequences formed the substance of the 
 first sermon recorded in the Acts of the 
 Apostles so far as the Twelve are concerned ; 
 and Paul in his turn delivered unto his hear- 
 ers, first of all, that which he also received, 
 that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and 
 had been raised again on the third day. In 
 this preacher's belief, as in Paul's, there is 
 nothing but that message between us and the 
 darkness of despair. 
 
 Further, he is equally sure that the death 
 which preceded that resurrection was in a 
 real, profound, and far-reaching sense an 
 Atonement for the sin of the world, a means 
 of Reconciliation between God and man. 
 All the agony of Gethsemane, and all the 
 striking peculiarities of the death on the 
 Cross are to him inexplicable except on this 
 understanding. For him the Cross of Christ 
 reveals to the world for all time, and for 
 eternity too, a love which shrinks from no 
 sacrifices ; a love which is capable of the most 
 entire abandonment; a love which is diffused 
 
 18
 
 274 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 over the whole surface of humanity, and 
 through all ages; a love which comes laden 
 with the richest and highest gifts, even the 
 turning of selfish and sinful hearts into its 
 own pure and perfect likeness. It is all this 
 because in that death something is done 
 which was not completed by the life, how- 
 ever fair, by the words, however wise and 
 tender, by the works of power, however re- 
 storative and healing. Here is something 
 more than these present. What more ? This 
 more, that His Cross is the propitiation for 
 the sins of the whole world. Take up Dr. 
 Maclaren's sermons when and where you will, 
 in his earliest as in his latest ministry, — there 
 is no hesitation, no wavering, even for a 
 moment, on this central and most vital matter. 
 In his inmost soul so sure is he that the death 
 on the Cross effected something real and 
 permanent for the salvation of the world, that 
 he declares, again and again, that if any 
 preacher leaves this out of his message his 
 ministry will be futile and fruitless. To use 
 his own expression, a Christianity without a 
 dying Christ is a dying Christianity. 
 
 To pass on another step: What has im- 
 pressed me very powerfully about Dr. Mac- 
 laren's preaching is its intensely ^practical
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 275 
 
 character, and that, too, in a special and 
 somewhat unusual sense of the word. Let 
 me explain what I mean, for I lay much 
 stress upon his preaching as a model for all 
 preachers in this one respect. 
 
 When we speak of practical preaching, we 
 usually associate with the words the idea of 
 ethical instruction in the duties of daily life, 
 or an attempt to deal with the social problems 
 of our time. But this is not the precise idea 
 which is in my mind just now. Here and 
 there in the sermons I am reviewing you will 
 find incisive and instructive utterances on 
 these subjects. But I have an impression 
 that so far as social problems are concerned 
 this preacher is of opinion that if you could 
 get men made right within — spiritually right 
 — it would not be long before social problems 
 would right themselves. When therefore I 
 describe Dr. Maclaren's sermons as practical 
 preaching, I attach a much profounder mean- 
 ing to the words than that of mere guidance 
 in the matter of ethical duty. I mean thereby 
 clear and definite instruction as to the 
 rationale of the divine life in the souls of 
 men, — its nature, its beginnings, its after-de- 
 velopments, and the spiritual forces by which 
 it is begun and carried on. I quite recognize
 
 276 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the fact that other preachers deal with such 
 questions as these, — many of them ably and 
 to the advantage of their people. But I am 
 not able to recall any other preacher, either of 
 Puritan or modern times, so clearly construc- 
 tive in his teachings on the New Life Christ 
 canie to give us. There is surely what may 
 be called a science of the spiritual life, deal- 
 ing with the facts and forces of the inner 
 world as revealed from God, and verified and 
 confirmed by the experience of man. What 
 is this life? How do we get it? In what 
 way is it related to the already existing life ? 
 Along what lines is it developed, and by what 
 supernatural forces? Heaven-illumined and 
 carefully thought-out instruction on matters 
 so vital and practical is always needed, and 
 will always be welcomed by the most earnest- 
 minded of our people. Some kind of teach- 
 ing is called for which shall be equally 
 removed from the shallow, easy-going plati- 
 tudes of the mere revivalist on the one hand, 
 and the too vague, commonplace utterances 
 of many ordinary preachers on the other. 
 And it is here, as it seems to me, that Dr. 
 Maclaren's distinctive excellence as a preacher 
 shows itself. Through a long public life he 
 has been a continuous, profound, accurate,
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 277 
 
 and prayerful student of God's revelation, 
 and at the same time a close observer of the 
 actual facts of religious experience as found 
 in the living men and women who make up 
 the Church of God to-day. In this way, so 
 far as the nature of the subject permits, he 
 has attained to something like a clear and 
 coherent science of that spiritual life which 
 is derived from Christ and maintained in the 
 soul by the Spirit of God ; and, as we might 
 expect, this science underlies all his teachings. 
 Let me try to show this in briefest manner 
 and in merest outline. 
 
 Dr. Maclaren finds both in Scripture teach- 
 ing and in the facts of actual life a real and 
 unmistakable contrast between what we may 
 call the natural man and the spiritual; or, to 
 use another Pauline expression, between the 
 old man which waxeth corruj)t after the lusts 
 that deceive, and the new man which, after 
 God, has been created in righteousness and 
 holiness of truth. Under all superficial 
 differences a Christless life is neither more 
 nor less than a life shaped according to and 
 under the influence of those passionate de- 
 sires in our nature which were meant to be 
 the driving power, but not the guiding power. 
 Given the immense variety of tastes, likings,
 
 278 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 and desires which men have, the point and 
 characteristic feature of every godless life is 
 that, be these what they may, they become 
 the dominant power in that life. There may, 
 of course, be every now and then remon- 
 strances of conscience, considerations of pru- 
 dence, occasional dim desires after something 
 better; but apart from Christ it is not con- 
 science that rules the life ; it is not the sense 
 of duty that is strongest, — the real directing 
 impulse to which the inward proclivities, if 
 not the outward activities yield in the man, 
 is, — the things that we like, the passionate 
 desires of nature, the sensuous and godless 
 heart. Yet the fact remains, as I have already 
 intimated, that these likes and dislikes, these 
 passionate desires of nature were never meant 
 to be men's guides. They were meant to be 
 impulses having motive power; but the de- 
 struction of all true manhood comes of their 
 being made the directing power. Things 
 must be kept in their right places, and the 
 divine order stands thus: lowest down are 
 the strong impulses of our nature; above 
 them, the enlightened understanding; above 
 that, the conscience; and above that again, 
 God Himself, irradiating and hallowing all. 
 In the case of the unspiritual man, this order
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 279 
 
 is reversed. The depravity of his nature 
 does not mean that there is no good in him, 
 that in every form of evil he has gone the 
 greatest lengths he could, — but that the 
 bent of his nature is wrong — he is ruled by 
 his natural desires. And the thing to be 
 noted is that these desires deceive the man, 
 never yielding the satisfaction they promise ; 
 and they corrupt as well as deceive. The 
 spiritual nature is gradually destroyed by the 
 eating leprosy of sin. 
 
 The facts being thus, the practical question 
 arises, How is all this to be changed ? How 
 shall the old nature, corrupt according to the 
 desires that deceive, become the new nature 
 which, after God, is created in righteousness 
 and holiness of truth? The new man is not 
 our work, it is God's creation. But how is it 
 brought about ? The answer is — by the re- 
 ception of a new life from above, a life from 
 Christ imparted to the soul through the 
 avenue of a trusting faith, and by the mys- 
 terious action of the Spirit of God. The past 
 is blotted out by forgiveness, and a new force 
 is started to be the force of the future. The 
 law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus sets 
 the man free from the law of sin and of 
 death.
 
 280 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 But now as to the part which the man 
 himself has to take in the matter, how 
 does he get this life? The answer given 
 is that which comes from Christ Himself 
 — "by Faith that is in Mc^ Thus the 
 starting-point is reached, which is faith, — 
 personal trust in a personal Saviour. When 
 it is said that faith saves a man, this is true 
 and yet not true. It is not faith which saves, 
 but that to which faith clings. It is Christ 
 that saves. Faith is simply the hand that 
 takes the gift, the channel along which the 
 water of life flows into the soul. If it were 
 not for the gift, the hand would be nothing ; 
 if it were not for the water, the channel would 
 be useless. Faith saves by getting a living 
 hold of the Christ who saves. The object of 
 faith is not a creed, but a Person, whom it is 
 the work of the creeds to make known to us, 
 since we cannot trust without knowing some- 
 thing about Him whom we trust. And the 
 Person thus made known is not merely one 
 who is set forth as our example or teacher. 
 The Christ, trusting in whom is salvation, is 
 the Christ whose blood cleanses from all sin, 
 whose righteousness makes us righteous — 
 Christ Himself in the sweetness and gracious- 
 ness of His character, but also in the sacrifice
 
 PRE ACHE RS OF MODERN PURITANISM 281 
 
 of His death and in the glory of His risen life. 
 This is the Christ, trusting in whom we live. 
 
 The value of faith then consists in the gran- 
 deur and fulness of the object to which faith 
 is directed. And as for faith itself, it is not 
 something occult and mysterious which be- 
 longs to the sphere of religion and is found 
 nowhere else. It is strictly parallel with the 
 trust which we have in one another in daily 
 life. The feeling which knits us to Christ, 
 and to God in Christ, is the same as that 
 which knits us to one another, and which 
 makes it possible that the world should go 
 on at all. The same confidence which men 
 have with one another in business, the same 
 confidence with which we, in our families, 
 safely trust in the love and truth of wife or 
 husband, friend or child, when directed to 
 Jesus Christ, becomes the spring and heart of 
 all religion. 
 
 The union thus brought about by this trust 
 between Christ and the soul carries with it 
 two results, — one dealing with the past, the 
 other with the future. It brings with it the 
 forgiveness of sin and the transformation of 
 the one life into the likeness of the other. 
 The forgiveness of sin is a real thing to the 
 man, a veritable blotting out of transgression.
 
 282 PURITAN rREACIIING IN ENGLAND 
 
 This is something more than the remission of 
 penalty, the deliverance from condenmation; 
 though all this is most surely in it. It ex- 
 tends to the removal of all hindrances to the 
 outflow of our heavenly Father's love, and to 
 the actual communication of that love as 
 being the very heart of His forgiveness to us. 
 Notwithstanding the black barrier which we 
 have flung across the stream by our sin, the 
 pure and deep flood of the love of God rises 
 and surges over the impediment and fills our 
 souls. This forgiveness does away with the 
 penalty of sin. What is that penalty? The 
 wages of sin is death, — the wrenching away 
 of a dependent soul from God, — your sins 
 have separated between you and God. How 
 is that penalty ended ? By the union of the 
 soul with God in a threefold bond of trust, 
 love, and obedience. The real penalty, which 
 is separation from God, passes away when 
 the love is welcomed and received. The 
 outward consequences of sin in the life may 
 still remain to humble the man and make him 
 watchful. A man who has been immoral in 
 the past may have to carry the consequences 
 of his ain with him in his body to the grave, 
 and yet be a forgiven man. For our worst 
 sins, there is plenteous redemption, and yet
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 283 
 
 our least sins may, in our lives, our charac- 
 ters, our memories, our consciences, our 
 worldly position, reputation, and health, 
 leave their traces and consequences. 
 
 Such, so far as the past is concerned, is the 
 result of faith in Christ to the soul that 
 trusts. There is also further result. Christ 
 comes and lives in that man. There is a 
 divine indwelling of Christ in the man by 
 His Spirit. Just as light and beauty travel 
 into the soul through the eye, and the har- 
 monies of music through the ear, so through 
 the avenues of trust and love comes Christ 
 by His Spirit into the innermost depths of the 
 life. And this is an indwelling which fits 
 for further indwelling. Christ in the heart 
 makes the heart more fit for Christ. If we 
 let Him in. He makes us temples meet for 
 Himself. The indwelling issues in transfor- 
 mation. As iron near a magnet becomes 
 magnetic, so souls in which Christ dwells 
 become Christlike. The likeness extends, 
 becomes deeper, truer, every way more per- 
 fect; comprehends more and more of the 
 faculties of the man; enters into him until he 
 is saturated with the glory; and in all the 
 extent of his being, and in all the depth pos- 
 sible to each part of that whole extent, is
 
 284 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 like his Lord. That is the hope for heaven, 
 towards which we may indefinitely approxi- 
 mate here, and at which we shall absolutely 
 arrive there. 
 
 Such, in brief and as gathered from various 
 discourses, is Dr. Maclaren's putting of the 
 facts of the spiritual life in man, — what that 
 life is, how it comes, how it is developed, 
 and to what issues it tends. No doubt much 
 of what I have stated sounds familiar enough, 
 yet few indeed are the preachers who have 
 made the laws of that life so clear to our 
 apprehension, so living, so real, who have 
 studied them with such keen insight of 
 human intelligence joined to such depth of 
 divine illumination. 
 
 Then, too, not only so far as the substance 
 of his teaching is concerned, does this great 
 preacher of our own time serve as a model to 
 us, but also in the crystal clearness of his 
 way of putting the truth before the minds of 
 his audience. His first aim seems to be to 
 see straight into the very heart of the subject 
 before him. He makes what is most vital 
 and central stand out with most distinctness. 
 He does not burden the mind or distract the 
 attention by too -many details, and he so 
 arranges his thoughts that, in the most natu-
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 285 
 
 ral manner, one part of the subject prepares 
 the way for that which is to follow. So that 
 it must be a dull mind indeed which cannot 
 follow him along the path he travels. He 
 never descends to little tricks or devices in 
 stating the divisions of his sermon. His sole 
 aim, evidentl}-, is to present the truth in its 
 very simplest form. These divisions are 
 serious and seriously meant, and they are 
 arranged in such manner as to show that one 
 of the clearest and most far-seeing intellects 
 has been keenly at work. By way of illus- 
 tration, take his sermon on the text (Rom. 
 viii. 17): "If children then heirs, heirs of 
 God and joint-heirs with Christ." Premis- 
 ing first that God Himself is His own great- 
 est gift, and that the richest blessing we can 
 receive is to be made heirs of God, posses- 
 sors of God in the only way one person can 
 possess another, by love and living inter- 
 course, he proceeds to point out the condi- 
 tions upon which the possession of this great 
 inheritance depends. He shows that in the 
 condensed utterance of the text we have the 
 following series of truths : There is no inheri- 
 tance without sonship; there is no sonship 
 without a spiritual birth ; there is no spiritual 
 birth without Christ: there is no Christ for
 
 286 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 US without faith. Such is his lucid way of 
 putting things. It is the great merit of Dr. 
 Maclaren's preaching that the most ordinary 
 minds can follow him with interest from first 
 to last, and at the same time the most intel- 
 lectual feel, on after-reflection, that there was 
 more in what they heard than they saw at 
 the time. Speaking generally, there are in 
 his sermons no ragged edges, no confusions 
 of thought, no signs of struggle as of a man 
 making his way through mental fog. You 
 feel as you listen that this preacher has mas- 
 tered his subject, has clearly seen his way 
 right through before he stood up there face 
 to face with the people. Addressing himself 
 to preachers, he once said: "Don't try to be 
 eloquent or mind very much about words." 
 But he himself is eloquent without trying to 
 be, — eloquent with the eloquence of strong 
 conviction and clearly ascertained truth. 
 
 And I must not fail to notice that the great 
 literary and intellectual qualities of this man 
 are suffused with intense spiritual earnestness, 
 — earnestness which is not merely assumed 
 for the hour he stands up there, but which is 
 of a piece with his whole life. During the 
 few times I have had the opportunity of hear- 
 ing him in his own church, I have come away
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERX PURITAXISM 287 
 
 from the midst of the crowd pouring through 
 the doorways, feeling that it must be a solemn 
 responsibility for any congregation to listen 
 constantly to such preaching as that. Either 
 it must lead to great enlightenment and ele- 
 vation of cliaracter, or to great callousness of 
 soul, according as it is received or rejected. 
 The explanation of this man's power is that 
 he dwells in the secret place of the Most High 
 and abides under the shadow of the Almighty. 
 In the most unaffected way, he tells us: "I 
 have always found that my own comfort and 
 efficiency in preaching have been in direct 
 proportion to the frequency and depth of 
 daily communion with God. I know no way 
 in which we can do our work but in quiet 
 fellowship with Him; in resolutely keeping 
 up the habits of the student's life, which needs 
 some power of saying. No ; and by conscien- 
 tious pulpit preparation. The secret of suc- 
 cess in everything is trust in God and hard 
 work." 
 
 In these direct and manly words you have 
 the spirit of this man's life and the secret of 
 his success. How much of spiritual good has 
 been accomplished under God by this hon- 
 ored and faithful ministry of now more than 
 fifty years, no man knows. You can no
 
 288 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 more tabulate spiritual results than you can 
 weigh the fragrance of flowers in scales, or 
 the beauty of the landscape in a balance. 
 But the day shall declare it. And in that 
 day "they that be wise shall shine as the 
 brightness of the firmament; and they that 
 turn many to righteousness as the stars for 
 ever and ever." 
 
 To-day I bring my task to a close and take 
 my leave of you. It would gladden me much 
 to think that I had been in any degree hon- 
 ored of God to exalt your ideal of the min- 
 istry, and strengthen a worthy ambition to be 
 found faithful therein. I congratulate you 
 on the career which may open up before you 
 as ministers of Christ when your studies in 
 this place have reached their end. If I may 
 allow myself a personal reference, I would 
 say, after nearly five and forty years spent in 
 the Congregational ministry, were life to 
 begin again I could wish it to be spent along 
 the same pleasant path of honorable service, 
 with this difference, that it might be more 
 faithfully spent. The work never seemed 
 so great as it does now, — now as the shadow 
 lengthens on the plain, and the day wears on 
 to evensong. 
 
 As one by one you leave the college gates
 
 PREACHERS OF MODERN PURITANISM 289 
 
 at the end of your college course, to think of 
 something like forty or fifty years' service 
 ahead may seem like looking along an inex- 
 haustible vista of time. You will be sur- 
 prised hereafter, if spared, to find how quickly 
 all these years are gone. With all your heart 
 throw yourselves into your work from the 
 first. You will find it deepen in interest. 
 Apart from your public service, or rather 
 growing out of it, your lives will become in- 
 tertwined with other lives in the most sacred 
 relationships. You will be Avitli your people, 
 not only in sanctuary worship, but also in 
 all the varied scenes of personal and family 
 life. You will be with them, not only along 
 the quiet levels of routine, but also in times 
 when God is dealing closest with them, in 
 hours of great sorrows and deep heart experi- 
 ences, when it seems as if all God's waves 
 and billows were going over them. It is at 
 such times that the most sacred ties are 
 formed. As you enter with brotherly sym- 
 pathy into the various joys and sorrows of 
 their life, your people will grow to be much 
 to you, — how much you will never know till 
 you are called to leave them, or they to leave 
 you. An apostle of Christ who was a true 
 shepherd of souls in the olden time, spoke of 
 
 19
 
 290 PURITAN PREACHING IN ENGLAND 
 
 the people to whom he had ministered in the 
 Gospel as " my brethren beloved and longed- 
 for, my joy and crown." "For what is our 
 hope, or joy or crown of glorying? Are not 
 even ye, before our Lord Jesus at His coming ? 
 For ye are our glory and joy." 
 
 In saying farewell to you, let me leave this 
 good wish for you, that you may have many 
 years of happy service among a people knit 
 to your hearts by ties as sacred as these thus 
 exultingly set forth; and at the end may both 
 they and you be numbered with God's saints 
 in glory everlasting!
 
 AA 000 814 733 2 
 
 CENTRAL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 University of California, San Diego 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 MAR 2 3 1973 ._ 
 
 
 MAR 1 .^ 1973 
 
 
 NUV :.. ^y/^ 
 
 
 wo^is^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 CI 39 
 
 UCSD Libr.