368

THE VALUE OF A CAPABLE AND

ter and manhood. Including in its ranks, in considerable proportion in every age, men of light and leading, the ministry of the church has already left a splendid record in the history of civilization, and the glory is not yet on the wane. God has never blessed humanity copiously and abundantly but by raising up men and sending them forth in His name to do His work,-men of piety and faith, men of grace and culture, men of God; and the man Christ Jesus stands in the annals of Time as the unique and unparalleled divine yet human benefactor of our race. For it is not books or pictures, it is not alembics, crucibles, steam engines or telegraphs, it is not newspapers, legislation or school-drill, that are going to save the world, but at the back of all, and as the strength and inspiration of all, manhood, Christian manhood, manhood that reflects the glory and diffuses the spirit and preaches the salvation of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, a capable and competent ministry knows how to interpret to the men of the present time the eternal truth of God. That truth is of inexhaustible fulness and wealth. No age has yet grasped it in all its wide circumference, or penetrated to its profound and infinite depths. Men can only see and touch what they have the power to see and touch, and human power is limited, but grows by experience. In all ages, and in almost all apprehensions of Truth, there may be deliverance from sorrow and selfishness, from secularity and sin; in all ages, and almost all apprehensions of Truth, we may see that salvation is found; but the point of view, the ideas of men, the modes of thought and expression shift and change. The men of to-day do not live in the same intellectual atmosphere or the same social and political world as the men of past centuries. It is really another heaven that overarches us, another horizon that encircles us, another earth that lies at our feet. We have our special ways of looking at things, our own conceptions of man and governments, of the universe and human history, and, so to speak, our own coinage and currency of thought. The gospel and truth of God do not change, but man does, and his apprehension and view of things. The gospel of Christ, in all its fulness and power, must be a larger and more wondrous revelation to us than it was to the monks of the dark ages, to the schoolmen and Reformers of subsequent times. The idea that a minister is an automaton who gets off a lesson from a book nearly two thousand years old and mechanically repeats it, is confessedly not a sound and worthy idea. Nor is it sound and worthy to think of him as best fulfilling the functions of his office when he reiterates the commonplaces of a venerable systematic theology, and speaks to the men of to-day in terms that were vital and current three or four centuries back. We must not confound loyalty to the eternal truth of God with loyalty to the forms and terms of thought of mediæval or Reformation times. The gospel of Christ must be preached in the nineteenth century in the language of the nineteenth century, and its divine and imperishable truths must be taught in their relation to the forms of thought of the nineteenth century. It is the miracle of Pentecost in its deeper sense that we need repeating to-day. Every man conditioned as he is by the age in which he is born, more or less the child of his time, must hear in his own tongue wherein he is born the wonderful works of God. A capable and competent ministry, the ministry of its own age, speaks the language of its own age, thinks accord

COMPETENT MINISTRY.

369

ing to the best thought of its own age, and translates the everlasting gospel of Christ into the coinage and currency of its time. Thus its hold upon the hearts of men never ceases; its interpenetration of the thoughts of men never ceases; its regenerative work amid the play of the forces that make up the history of the world never ceases.

What is it, I would ask, in corroboration of this position, what is it that gives such exceptional power to Moody's evangelistic addresses and Spurgeon's evangelical preaching? Is it the scholastic mould of their theology? Is it the ceaseless unwearied reiteration of the commonplaces of a venerated dogmatism about an infallible book, about eternal decrees, about imputed sin and imputed righteousness, about unconditional election and eternal reprobation? Not at all. It is the vigorous and racy translation of the great imperishable truths of God's love and mercy, of man's need of redemption and Christ's power and readiness to give it, into the English vernacular: the translation of the old gospel into the common conceptions and ideas and language of the people they address. There is in each of them a splendid faculty of illustration, and in their preaching a wealth of imagery and anecdote drawn from familiar and everyday experiences. The strains of the old divine, eternal melody, are there; but they make their music on the common strings with which the world is strung. In other words, the old heavy shekels of the sanctuary and the schools,—an interesting and curious study for the theological numismatologist,-are changed into the lighter and more portable pence and shillings of the common currency of to-day.

This is what the minister who is capable and competent ever does, though not with their exceptional power and genius. But it is necessary to do it all round, not simply with respect to the familiar ideas of every-day life, but also with respect to the new point of view, the new conceptions with which modern science and modern criticism are making us familiar. Our present way of looking at the universe and at human history will not allow us to regard the kosmos as a great autocratic realm dominated by imperial decrees like a Roman or a Russian Empire; nor will it allow us to determine and measure our religious beliefs, our spiritual experiences and life, by legal fictions or devices especially invented in the practice of certain law-courts and the settlement of private disputes between man and man centuries ago. A higher generalization has been reached, and the moral government of God, in our modern way of looking at it, and God's spiritual dealings with man, far transcend the working and aims of national human governments. The great truths of the gospel are read more and more in the light, and uplifted into the sphere of the higher moral and spiritual relations. Christian doctrines are grouped and systematised round the person and work and teaching of Christ, whose mission and gospel are great spiritual facts in the moral history of mankind, the divine flower and fruit of the grand historic life of the world; and the truth and grace of God are taught as the eternal power by which the individual life, and social life, and the great life of our race, may be lifted up to the divine ideal, and transfigured and saved by the divine salvation. The ministry that thus stands among men in living connection with the best thought and life of the times, and preaches to men in their own tongue the wonderful

370

THE VALUE OF A CAPABLE AND

grace of God, the capable and competent ministry, is sure of a hearing, and sure, by God's help, of success, is of untold worth to the church, and an unspeakable blessing to mankind.

For such a ministry, being a living present-day ministry, forms a powerful check against the secularisation of humanity-one of the special and pressing perils of our time. Free and growing commerce, the inventions of physical science, the wider and readier intercourse of nations, tend to multiply material resources and increase worldly prosperity. With advancing intelligence, greater sobriety, higher morality, there is yet creeping over Europe, and especially over the populations of great cities, a growing spirit of secularity. The net and drag devotion of men which called down the fervid denunciations of the prophet, is a temptation to-day. Utilitarianism in philosophy, and a one-sided cultivation of physical science, favour it. The mad race for riches in which Christian virtues are often recklessly ignored, and every weight of modesty, truthfulness, honesty, self-respect, is sometimes laid aside; the vulgar love of display in certain wealthy circles, and the persistent, irrepressible impudence of blatant advertising in which the weaker side of human nature is laid hold of for paltry pelf by quacks and adventurers, by leading journals and even prominent tradesmen and manufacturers, all these are only so many unhappy and lamentable proofs of it. To "sacrifice to our net and burn incense to our drag because by them our portion is fat and our meat plenteous," is one at least of the dangers and perils to which our modern age, in its science as well as its business and popular life, is peculiarly exposed. Were this secularity to spread, the gains of the loftier thought and chivalrous aspiration, the high moral culture of centuries would be imperilled; and civilization, instead of advancing to its goal of full spiritual manhood, of nobler character, purer motives, and gentler life, would become only a hard, refined, and selfish barbarism. Now a cultured, enthusiastic, Christian ministry, with its prophet-like moral fervour and poetic religious sensibility, with its high moral ideals and gracious spirit and Christ-like character and aims, breaks in upon this secularizing tendency at least once a week, and contributes a strong and powerful counter influence that makes for the spiritualization and ennoblement of mankind. In speaking with prosperous business men I have often been struck with the fact that all the best part of their experience comes of their connection with an earnest, stimulating, and elevating ministry. Almost the only poetry and philosophy of their life, nearly all their susceptibility to the finer sentiments and emotions, as well as the cherishing of those mighty hopes and impulses that make us men, are associated with the ministry of the word of God. Of what large and incalculable value to civilization is this counteraction of the secularising tendency of too much of our daily life by a capable and competent Christian ministry!

If, then, our witness for eternal truth, our apprehension of its essential principles, our salvation from the perilous tendencies of modern life, all our better spiritual and human interests, are dependent now and here in large measure upon the ministry of the gospel, let that ministry be estimated not simply as a means of future, invisible, and other worldly good, but as indispensable to the progress of humanity, and the enrichment and ennobling of our present life. It is only the living

COMPETENT MINISTRY.

66

371

voice of living Christian men that can effectually, by God's grace, promote the perfection and happiness, the full salvation of mankind. Our churches devoutly desire this end; it is for them to help to strengthen and make more efficient the appointed means to it. Architecture, however classical or chaste, will not secure it; psalmody and organ music that take the prisoned soul and lap it in Elysium will not suffice; God's truth and grace in Christ Jesus set forth by living and competent men is the chief divinely-appointed means. Let us value and seek to make more powerful and effective this ministry of man's salvation. Let us not begrudge its cost. It is worth more than money can measure, or figures can tell. Sometime back I saw an estimate of the cost per annum of our Baptist Colleges. £20,000 a year," was the astonished exclamation, "for the education of the Baptist ministry!" Why this astonishment? How much, I would ask, is spent annually in bricks and mortar, in stones and stained glass, in all the elaborate adornments, at which our fathers would have stood aghast, for our modern Baptist sanctuaries? Four times as much was spent last year, and an enormous sum besides in paying off old debts. Yet architecture, however beautiful, cannot preach the gospel of God's love, and declare Christ's salvation, as the living voice of the living preacher can. Instead of astonishment at the cost of the ministry, I rather sympathize with the preacher who deplored that so much money had been spent upon the edifice in which he ministered that his own poor frail human body was hardly sufficiently relieved from painful anxiety about its maintenance and upbuilding; and as he saw the costly structure towering to heaven, and considered his own resources, could not at times but sigh, "O God, that stones should be so dear and flesh and blood so cheap." As you consider, then, who are the men whose words have touched your highest sympathies, and awakened your best aspirations, and filled life for you with its richest and most abiding good; as you contemplate what the history of the churches we represent would have been-if indeed they could have had a worthy history or an existence at all-without our early preachers and evangelists, without the founders of our great institutions and the inspirers and organizers of our denominational activity; as you look still wider and imagine what aspect the history of our country would have presented, and the history of the world, without its great religious teachers and guides, without Chrysostom and Augustine, without Luther and Calvin, without Knox and Latimer and Jeremy Taylor, without John Howe, John Bunyan, and Robert Hall, without Wesley and Whitfield, and a whole host of equal or lesser lights that have filled our heavens with their radiancy, you will concede, I doubt not, that no pains can be too great, no liberality too munificent, no devotion too lavish, which are needful and necessary on our part to perpetuate the succession and maintain the efficiency, from age to age, of a godly, enthusiastic, capable and competent ministry of the gospel of Christ.

THE FAITH THAT SAVES.-"The degree of faith in the gospel which is necessary to salvation, is so to believe the sum and substance of it, by which He is represented as a complete and compassionate Saviour, perfectly able and entirely ready and willing to receive me, make me happy, for His own sake, that my mind is hereby brought to rest upon Him, and place my confidence in Him, without any recommendation or worthiness whatever."-Dan Taylor.

It is eleven o'clock. The evening is calm and the stars are bright. We are on board the Arendal—a fine steamer bound for Bergen, with a complement of passengers. A large number of persons have come to say farewell to their departing friends. And now, for the last time, the bell rings, the gangway is taken up, and there is such bowing and waving of handkerchiefs, and other demonstrations of affection, as are surely seen nowhere else in such perfection as in Norway. As we glide away we see the city by night, and the reflections of countless lamps glimmering in the clear water, and the white mansions of the suburbs just visible amid the dark foliage that surrounds them; and, by degrees, these become more and more dim, till we see nothing but the foam in the wake of the vessel, and the outline of the shore and the stars. We remained awhile on deck, and looked on the scene with wonder and delight, till, wearied with the toils of the day, we, like others, went down to our cabin and sought the relief of

"Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep."

CONVERSATIONS ON THE JOURNEY.

The early morning was pleasant. The scenery was varied, and every few miles brought us within sight of objects of new interest. Here is dense forest; there rocks of fantastic shapes jutting out of the water; further on the grass sloping down to the water's edge, with the mountains in the distance veiled in mist; and then a town, with its piles of timber on its quays, and its vessels in the docks. The passengers now came from their cabins one by one, and as Norsk was to me an unknown tongue, it was pleasant to find some who could converse in English; especially one, a gentleman of education, who had lived ten years in Kent. It seemed to give him pleasure to tell me what I desired to know, and it may be well to recall some of his sayings.

แ

The sun only just disappears below the horizon in the middle of summer, and we can sit outside the house and read the newspaper at midnight."

"The people of Norway are very well educated. There is in operation the system of Board Schools, and the attendance is compulsory. The children are instructed in the doctrines of the Lutheran Church, and are required to pass an examination in religious knowledge. They are then presented for confirmation, and are received at their first communion ; and until then no boy or girl is considered fit to take a situation, or to enter into any engagement for life."

"There are Sunday-schools. They are not, however, schools for children. These receive their religious education in the day-schools, and the Sunday-schools are for adults who desire an increase of religious knowledge. The instructions are given by the school-master, who is paid for his services; and, as a rule, the Sunday-schools are well attended."

Time would fail to tell of other things said; of the fog that settled