 CHAPTER XVI A writer of discernment has confidently asserted that all women are vain, and men more so. If ministers are not vain, it is not because of any lack of provocation. A preacher's gifts are exercised in public places. He is preeminently a speaker, and those who speak stand, as it were, on a pedestal, the observed of all observers. No matter how modest by native disposition the clergyman may be, publicity is thrust upon him, and if he be a man of gifts, he stands perpetually in a golden shower of praise. Every gift, no matter what it is, has a coiled serpent in it. A man's deadliest danger lies ever at the center of his greatest strength. If a minister's most conspicuous gift is a rich and interpreting voice, then of his voice let him beware. Many a man has had his usefulness destroyed by the very gift which should have carried him on to power. The ability to utter sweet and thrilling tones may lead one into a habit of indulging in vocal parades full of music but void of the gospel. It is doubtful if there is a more luxurious intoxication than that experienced by a man who, gifted with a voice of compass and passion, knows how to use it in mastering an audience. Not only do the tones soothe and entrench the hearers, they also mesmerize the speaker. Under the spell of his own utterance a man sometimes loses sight of his argument, and instead of working to lift his congregation to the level of a high ideal, he falls into playing with his voice, tripping up and down the scale to exhibit its flexibility, exploding in thunder-claps to display its volume, rolling melodious modulations out over the heads of his hearers to test and exercise the marvelous organ with which a generous God has endowed him. Every acute-eared churchgoer has heard men preach who showed by their entire vocal behavior that they cared less for their ideas than for their cadences and intonations. One cannot hear these elocutionary peacocks in their stermanic strut without wanting to cry out, quit your fooling and come down. Sometimes the conceit is ridiculous to the verge of nauseating, for a man may be flushed over tones of which he has every reason to be ashamed. What spectacle more ludicrous and sickening than a man attempting with pompous mouthings to give expression to a message so sweet and simple as the gospel of that plain man of Galilee? If the men who indulge in starched and sonorous sounds with pompous self-complacency and amusing solemnity and fervor only knew how grotesque and silly their whole performances they would throw aside for ever their elocutionary heirs and be content to be just, sensible, plain-spoken men. All preaching rests upon a physical foundation. A commanding presence is a gift of the Almighty. Big-boned men, framed in the Cyclops' size, have an immeasurable advantage over men of equal intellect but of slighter girth and stature. A handsome man in the pulpit woos and wins the eyes, and winning the eyes is almost half the contest of the heart. We are predisposed to listen to the messenger who comes to us with a majestic bearing. Some men subdue an audience before they speak a word, but this physical preeminence is not without its dangers. It raises expectations difficult to meet. The men look like Apollo, we anticipate something divine. When they resemble Webster, we demand that their thoughts shall match their looks. A dwarfed and bloodless sermon from a man with the mean of Jupiter is resented as an insult. A glorious body may induce a vanity in its possessor which manifests itself in the form of self-confidence. Good looks will carry a minister far but not to the end of the day. A congregation can be impressed for a season by a massive body and by the ponderous tones of a commanding voice. But if the man in the pulpit is only a well-groomed animal, repeating pious platitudes, with the final tones of a son of thunder, he will early lose his church and find it hard to get another. Let all the pulpit's soles beware. They are undoubtedly of the elect, but like their thin-chested, low-statured brethren, they must work to make their calling and election sure. A man of superb physique is under special obligation to fill his sermons with virility and mental fire. If because upon his body every god has set his seal to give the world assurance of a man of power, he becomes inflated and shirks the tough, hard toil which sermon creation inexorably demands. He is like the fool who built his house upon the sand. The storm is coming, and there will be a fall. Literary style is even more dangerous than good looks. The last has killed its thousands, the first its tens of thousands. Men too noble to be vain of a comely body succumb to this adductive power of success in using words. To speak and write one's language with elegance and precision is an achievement which rightly brings a sense of satisfaction. Using thought with distinction and grace is an art so difficult that men work for it as those who dig for hid treasures. With certain men the cultivation of style becomes a mania. For literary finish they are willing to sacrifice all the weightier matters of the law. Clearness and force and effectiveness they pass over as trifles, while they give tithes to the anise and the kuman which grow in the garden of speech. It is not slander but truth to say that there are men now preaching the gospel to whom the ideas of their next sermon are of less moment than the literary costume in which the ideas are to be dressed. These men wear their life out on their rhetorical finery, widening the fringes and multiplying the tassels, seeking like similar pedants of an earlier day, the praise of men and not the honor which comes from God only. And even these verbal fancy work preachers have their admirers. No matter what a minister does someone is sure to commend him. No other man in the town is so praised as he. He may have a host of enemies but he is never without his friends. He may be criticized and abused but he will also be complimented and flattered. No matter how poor his sermon someone will find in it the word of God and tell him so. His prayer may be feeble but some saint will thank him for it. Through the mail he receives notes of appreciation and thanksgiving. To some people he is surpassingly great. There probably never lived a preacher who was not to at least one soul the greatest man since Paul. All this is sweet and dangerous. To many it is fatal. Praise humbles some men, other men it spoils. They become conceited, lazy, reckless, unbearable. Puffed up by the eulogies of sentimental admirers they lose the figure of manliness and degenerate into clerical fobs. Popularity is the most fearful of all tests. If any man thinks he stands let him take heed. End of Chapter 16. Chapter 17 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Marianne. Quiet hints to growing preachers in my study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 17 Discontent. When Paul assured the Philippians that he had learned in whatever state he was there with to be content, he confessed a higher state of grace than many of the successors of the apostles have yet attained. Discontent may be said to be one of the prevailing sins of the ministerial world. How prevalent it is, the public does not fully know. For ministers who are discontented do not shout their dissatisfaction from the housetop. They write it in bulky letters and send it in sealed packages to their ministerial brethren. The number of preachers now wishing a change of pastorate cannot be accurately computed. But if all the facts were known, the world would be astounded. Men in the east, fretted by the stereotyped customs of fossilized communities, look with longing toward the west with dreams of the blessedness that must belong to ministers who can take a forward step without cracking their skull against a precedent. Toilers in the west, sick of the uncharted freedom of a population disinclined to submit to yokes either of God or men, wish themselves in the east, where church-going is an established custom and life runs smoothly in channels made for it by the fathers. Preachers in rural places look with hungry eyes toward the city where pulpit gifts and graces meet with grateful appreciation, and preachers in one city look toward another city where the mountains have been apparently leveled and the ways of the Lord have been made straight. Of a host of clergymen it may be said, as one has written of the patriarchs, that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth and declare plainly that they seek a country. In justice to the clergy it must be said that ambition is not generally the inciting cause of this restlessness. The popular impression that the average clergyman stands on tiptoe, eager to heed the beckoning of the first parish which offers a larger salary or a softer bed of roses, is as malicious as it is false. The explanation of the desire to escape from one parish to another may usually be found in the fact that ministers, like other mortals, do not like to be uncomfortable, and one sees fewer brambles in a garden which some other men has cultivated than in the garden in which one works himself. Every parish has in it men and women with whom it is difficult to live, and every church has problems which are a burden to the heart. Some men are so constituted that they cannot carry heavy burdens or face circumstances which prick like thorns. Their first impulse on the sight of any difficulty is to run. A man never knows a parish until he gets fairly settled in it. The years bring out the skeletons as the night brings out the stars. A few church skeletons are as terrible to a timid clergyman as graveyard ghosts to a small boy after dark. He may find to his dismay ancient quarrels which have been smoldering several generations and which, at his first important movement, blaze out in a conflagration which threatens to burn up the church. He may find a set of rogues in his official board, or a good-sized pharaoh in the broad aisle. The church may be tied hand and foot by the pagan notions of a heathen clique, or the choir may be in a state of ferment sufficient to drive the spirit of devotion from every service. Gray-headed men with antique ideas may frown down every suggested step of progress. Capitious critics may carp at his theology, rhetoric, or necktie. Eodias and Scythike may heat the atmosphere to torrid temperatures because they cannot be of the same mind in the Lord. Prominent pew-holders may give up their pews and disgruntled workers may resign their offices. In short, the church may have so many devils in it as to lead the unhappy preacher to question whether by any amount of prayer and fasting on his part the unhallowed brood can be cast out. A man in such circumstances may honestly wonder whether he is the one who is intended to redeem Israel, or whether this particular parish ought not to look for another. There are times when the trouble is the outcome of an evident misfit. When this is the case the minister should promptly shake the dust from his shoes, for there are other towns and cities in which the gospel must be preached. When a minister should not too hastily conclude that because things are not altogether pleasant the Lord has need of him elsewhere. Unless the signs of an irreparable misfit are numerous and unmistakable the minister ought to set his hand resolutely to the plow and not look back until the furrow has been finished. It is not becoming in a profit to run at the site of trials. It shows fickleness of heart to accept a church and then drop it in the first fit of despondency. If he accepts the care of a parish in need of a surgical operation let him perform it and give the wounds time to heal before he turns the patient over to a new practitioner. Honorable men will not toy with churches. There is something of the sacredness of marriage in the pastoral relation and when once entered on it is for better or for worse. Short pastorates are unfortunate both for pastors and people. They develop inclergymen and laymen dispositions hurtful to spiritual growth. If a man knows he has but a short time in a parish he is tempted to do the things which are easiest and cheapest. He will not enter deeply into the hearts of his people but will be in danger of looking upon all laymen as so many pawns to be manipulated in an interesting game of ecclesiastical chess. It is the long pastorate which draws on the fountains which are deepest and which builds up in congregation and pastor those elements of character in which the New Testament exalts and rejoices. A man who expects to live with the same people through many years will have every incentive to be sane and industrious, farsighted and true. He will not hesitate to enter upon schemes of education and training which can be completed only in long periods of time and his life, blending more and more with the life of his people, will grow richer and fuller unto the perfect day. Be content wherever you are, my brother, and whether you abound or are in want, be not hasty to take up arms against a sea of troubles and attempt to end them by running away. For in that change of place what dreams may come and rough awakenings who knows. It may be your present parish is obscure, but blessed is the man with grace sufficient to grow in the shade. It is said that the chief reason why the sugar maple makes up a great part of the native forest of New England is that the maple is willing to grow in the shade. It is taking precedence of all other trees because a young maple is always in training ready to take the place of any tree which may die. Go to the maple, young preacher. Consider her ways and be wise. In a few years the great trees of the clerical forest will lie low and your final place will depend in large measure on your present willingness to grow in the shade. End of Chapter 17. Chapter 18 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Marianne. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 18. Pettyness. Certain vices only mar, others lacerate and kill. Not one of them kills more surely than a petty disposition. Some weaknesses eat into the husk and bark of a man's life, but leaving the core untouched, they do not fatally interfere with his preaching. But pettiness is a sin which blasts life at its center and takes out of preaching the spirit which gives power. The Christian religion is nothing if not large. It spreads over us an infinite sky and throws around us horizons whose diameters cannot be measured. The men to whom it introduces us are large men who revere the maker and who have fetched their eyes up to his style and manners of the sky. Their temper is heroic, their sympathy all embracing, their spirit, godlike. The ideals which hang before them shine as with the glory of celestial worlds and the motives which fire and impel their hearts are lofty as those which move archangels. At the center of this immortal company stands the man of Galilee from whose lips the minister must take his message and from whose heart he must draw the inspiration by which he is to prevail with men. Only a man of magnanimous spirit can be loyal to such a master and proclaim effectively so grand a message. A man with meager sympathies and stunted spirit may attempt to preach the gospel but it will shrivel on his lips. No man truly preaches unless through him the truth can make its way and if the channel is choked or narrowed the man may go on talking but a preacher he cannot be. A sermon is the lifeblood of a man baptized into the spirit of the Lord and every syllable of all he utters must have in it the weight of a full-statured Christ-like man. It is only words thus weighted which are able to find the blood. The gospel from many a pulpit goes forth void because proclaimed by too small a man. Pettiness sometimes manifests itself in pernureousness. Money stirs up strange fevers in the blood and in some men it creates a parsimonious disposition which is contemptible in any man and doubly so in a minister. It is no excuse for him to say that his salary is small and that therefore he must pinch and screw and haggle over the price of everything he buys. Poor men can be large-minded in money-matters if they will and it is always possible to be economical without being mean. Men of ability have thrown away their influence with their people simply by the display of a picayunish, closed-fisted disposition which rendered them despicable to all who had financial dealings with them. Businessmen can no more receive the gospel from such a man than from the lips of a libertine or drunkard. Clergymen are as a class the most generous and self-sacrificing of all men. But if all secrets could be revealed it would probably be discovered that many a man while urging his people to be generous has forgotten the value of the contribution box to his own soul. Pettyness takes many forms. It may crop out as envy and envy means impotence and death. Who can stand before envy was a question propounded by the philosophers of Israel and the answer is, no one, not even the man in whose heart the hateful sin has built its nest. It is rottenness in the bones and any man afflicted with it will find his spiritual life crumbling down into a shapeless mass of ruins. Not all preachers can be equally talented or equally successful and blessed is the man who can see his brother marching grandly on in advance of him and join in the Hosannas which proclaim his coronation. Envy is a sin of weakness and whoever is guilty of it confesses his inferiority. It is a viper which cannot fasten on the soul of a man genuinely strong. The only deliverance from its poison is a new infusion of the blood of him to whom desire for preeminence was and is and ever shall be ridiculous. And who is able to heal his heralds in these latter times as he cleansed his disciples in the upper chamber on that great night when he used the basin and the towel. This hankering for first place sometimes leads to something akin to insanity. It calls forth bursts of peevishness and childishness which bring a blush to the cheek of every manly hearted man who is called upon to witness them. Some men are so conscious of their own rights and so punctilious in regard to the payment of a pound of deference which the world owes them that half the time they are in a huff because someone has unwittingly slighted them or refused to pay them the last farthing of etiquette which was their due. The date of the invitation, the affixes and suffixes, the place on the program, the rank in the procession, these certainly are not matters of life and death but some men make them such to their own condemnation and the chagrin of their fellows. This touchiness often increases with age and men with gray hair are sometimes guilty of a crotchety and morbid insistence on trifles which stirs up insensible people both anathemas and tears. The hoary head is a crown of glory if it can be found in the way of righteousness but when it is found in the way of babyishness the gray hair is only a bleached dunce cap on the head of a fool. Some men cross the deadline in the pulpit early because they become in their interior life so insufferably petty and foolish. It was Goethe who said that as we grow older it is difficult to remain as wise as we were. Occasionally this miserable disposition develops the poison of malice. The slight is too serious to be overlooked. The insult is too keen to be forgiven and so the miserable man goes on preaching the New Testament with an unforgiven wrong rankling in his heart. Of all wretched mortals none is more to be pitied than the minister of Christ who attempts to preach the gospel with a quarrel on his conscience not yet made up and an enemy on his heart not yet forgiven. Such a spirit curdles the milk of the word and reduces every sermon to a mockery. The poor man cannot open the New Testament without reading there his condemnation. He cannot read the sermon on the mount without stumbling over leave thy gift before the altar go and be reconciled to thy brother. He cannot read Peter's question. Lord, how oft shall my brother offend me and I forgive him? For the Lord's answer will loom up before him terrible as Elijah before Ahab at the gate of Nabah's vineyard. He cannot read Paul without receiving such dagger thrusts as be ye kind to one another tenderhearted forgiving one another even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. He cannot read John's letters without being stricken down with such bludgeons as he that loveth not his brother abideth in death. He cannot even join his people in repeating the Lord's prayer without being dragged to the judgment bar by forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. A minister of the gospel of love who has an enemy whom he is unable or unwilling to forgive ought to repent or resign. End of Chapter 18 Chapter 19 of quiet hints to growing preachers in my study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mary Ann. Quiet hints to growing preachers in my study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 19, foolishness. It was the opinion of the wise men of Israel that even though a fool be braided in a mortar, yet his foolishness will not depart from him and even men who are not fools often fall into forms of folly from which it is well-nigh impossible to deliver them. For instance, beginning a speech with an apology is a piece of nonsense, unprovoked and inexcusable. But if you wish to break a man of that habit, he must be caught young. There are ministers who seem incapable of giving an address without an elaborate explanation of their inability to do justice to the theme or the occasion. But why squander time in announcing what will become perfectly clear before one sits down? When a man is allotted a limited number of minutes in which to unfold an important subject, it is his business to begin at once upon his task and not squander people's time in weary some explanations of his inadequate preparation or with egotistic intimations of the wonderful things he could do if he had only been given a fair opportunity. It was a shrewd reader of the human heart who said that an apology is only egotism turned wrongside out. But the apologetic devil has a method in his madness beyond the reach of reason. The larger the subject and the shorter the time, the sure is our excuse-making brother to enter upon minute lamentations over the limitations under which he must speak. When the program is extended and every moment is golden, the explanatory dunce is at his best. It is then that he performs prodigies in the way of murdering time and multiplying words. Instead of plunging into his subject without a syllable of explanation and packing into the fleeting moments the solid gold of his thought, he uses up the patience of his hearers and his own opportunity to prove himself a sensible man. Every theological student on his graduation day ought to paste in his hat the stern dictum of Emerson, no sensible man ever made an apology. This sort of tomfoolery may be carried into the pulpit where it manifests itself in long drawn-out introductions and exhausting preparations for great things which never come. If a man cannot say anything in the first 10 minutes of his sermon, he ought to drop the first 10 and begin with the second 10. Even when the introduction is excellent, it may be out of all proportion to the argument it leads up to. Building the porch larger than the house is a blunder peculiar to the builders of sermons. It is at the beginning and ending that one is most tempted to waste time. Such expressions as, in conclusion, finally, one word more are forms of speech not only useless but full of mischief. What is gained by telling a congregation that the end is drawing near when the one word more becomes like the widow's cruise of oil, the hearts of the faithful faint within them? A blunderbuss, after saying, finally, is sure to catch a glimpse of a new idea and straightway pursuing this, he will forget all about the promise he has made his hearers and will go off on expeditions more extended than any ventured on in the body of his discourse. A sermon with two finales in it is a monstrosity and a plague. Let the preacher speak right on with full momentum till he stops. On railway trains it may be necessary on approaching stations to whistle down breaks. In the house of God the sermonic train may be brought to an unannounced and instantaneous stop without fatality. Humor is a rich gift of heaven and fortunate is the man to whom it has been given in abundance. A little nonsense now and then is relished by all sorts of men, including preachers. Pleasantries and happy hits and jokes unstained and stingless. These are not unbecoming at proper times in a spiritual leader of men. But when a man is so full of funny stories that his stories are in greater demand than his sermons, it is time for him to reflect. The ability to keep a dinner party in a roar is not to be despised. Neither is the sobriety essential to influencing men in their attitude toward noble things to be neglected. Many a man in trying to be a jolly good fellow has abdicated his position as leader of the higher life of his parish. There is one sort of fun in which a minister should never indulge and that is fun in which the Bible plays the part of the clown. A Bible sentence joked about becomes a withered leaf on the tree of life. The preacher can never use it for healing a soul in whose presence he has done his joking. Shallow and godless men may indulge in stories and conundrums in which the words of saints and prophets are prostituted to the frivolous task of provoking laughter. But this is hardly proper for a man who is dependent on these very words for food supplies with which to feed the deepest hungers of his people. The noblest words are always most delicate and lose their bloom when played with by the tongues of punsters. A sentence of Christ may be so stained by the breath of laughter and so wrapped round with grotesque and sordid associations as to lose forever to the Christian, the high and holy music with which it once came freighted to the soul. Many of us on looking through our Bible find sentences here and there which some joker in our presence once twisted into a lower meaning and which can never be to us all they might have been had they never been blasted by a joke. A minister who sports with the Bible in the homes of his people need not be surprised to find them indifferent to its beauties when he invites them to study at dawn Sunday. Men who shrink from the profane handling of the scriptures do not hesitate, in many cases, to deal jacosely with noble feelings and lofty thoughts. There is a trick of passing from the sublime to the ridiculous of reading frivolous meanings into stately words. Of giving soaring sentences a downward twist. Of dragging down high things to low levels which is often cultivated because of the hilarity produced by it in circles incapable of appreciating higher forms of width. But which, when indulged in by the preacher, is one of the most ruinous of blunders. There are ministers who have lost all helpful influence over the men who have come closest to them solely because of this fatal habit of cheapening the most sacred objects of thought by the profane sportiveness of the mind. The man who jokes straight through the week will be suspected of joking on Sunday. If he constantly reads ridiculous meanings into sober words in the presence of those who enjoy his intimate acquaintance, these persons will read jacose interpretations into the statelyest periods of his most earnest sermons. By acting the fool so constantly when out of the pulpit he will seem to be playing the same role even when preaching the crucifixion or celebrating the last supper. Alas for the man who is so incorrigibly and irresistibly funny that even in the pulpit he seems less of a prophet than a clown. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Mary Ann. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 20. Meanness. A modern John the Baptist has condensed his message to his generation into the pungent exhortation, quit your meanness. It was the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders of their nation, upon whom the ancient John the Baptist laid his hand with heaviest pressure and possibly a few of their successors now alive would receive no milder treatment at his hands if he, returning from the dead, should subject them to the sifting, searching fires of eternal righteousness. When a minister of the gospel has a disposition to be mean, he has unparalleled opportunities and no other man is so shielded from rebuke. His ministerial brethren hesitate to reprimand him. His people mutter condemn nations but do not strike. How to reach a mean man when once entrenched in a pulpit is indeed a problem. Meanness is of diverse varieties and shadings. Sometimes it is rough, raw, boorishness. It is required in ministers that a man be found a gentleman but the marks of gentle breeding are occasionally lacking. When a man seated in full view of an audience holds an animated conversation with his neighbor during the rendering of an anthem or bustles from place to place attending to odds and ends of business when he ought to be listening to the solo or fidgets and looks bored while another man is preaching or holds up his watch and shuts it with a snap which sounds like a cannon shot to the man who has not yet finished his address, he shows a lack of thoughtfulness and refinement which brings a blush to the cheeks of those who like to see in ministers a resemblance to that supreme gentleman whose messengers they are. This disregard for the rights of others often takes appalling forms. There are ministers who have no conscience in their treatment of the men who follow them on the program. If given a chance to speak first they take all the time there is leaving those who come after them the ravelled fragment of a ruined hour. A mental state capable of such conduct deserves the investigation of the psychologist. Why the work of preaching the gospel should develop in certain minds the disposition of a brigand and break down all fine scruples of equity and honor is one of the problems for the new century. The facts are clear and incontrovertible. There are men of intelligence and piety who when asked to go with an audience one half hour will invariably go with it twain and when asked to divide an hour with a brother minister will greedily devour the first half of it and take a huge bite out of the second who will steal every moment they can wrap their tongue around and then apologize to their outraged victim with the blandest of smiles. I did not realize how long I was speaking. A Christian worker who has had experience in the making of programs is inclined to think that if five speakers are wanted to grace an important occasion it would be safer to trust five men chosen at random from the penitentiary to do unto one another in the division of time the thing that is right than five eloquent clergymen taken from as many Christian pulpits. This reckless overriding of all the proprieties and restraints is indulged in sometimes by men whose praise is in many churches but the more conspicuous the offender the more lamentable the transgression. Men who would not stoop to filch moments have been known to steal people. Denominationalism has flooded the world with blessings but by intensifying rivalry among religious bodies it has led to evils not a few. The undue multiplication of churches within narrow boundaries sets ministers into competition with one another and a sensitive man of honor sometimes finds himself outdistance by a clerical rogue who uses underhanded methods to swell the number of his flock. Ecclesiastical fences are no longer high and some men are adepts in the neck of inducing sheep to jump from one field into another. Sometimes the work of prosoliting is carried on slyly and with great adroitness. At other times it is prosecuted with boldness in the full glare of noon. Even men of dignity and undoubted piety have engaged in the unhallowed business displaying among many graces of the spirit the strategy of the kidnapper and the cunning of the fox. But whenever and wherever and however and by whomsoever the work of building up one church by the tearing down of another is attempted the minister who lends a hand is guilty of one of the most contemptible and dastardly of all ministerial sins. What shall it profit a man to build up his church membership and lose his own soul? This lack of principle sometimes crops out in a wanton disregard of the sacredness of a promise. The word of a minister should be as binding as his bond. Whatever he says he will do he should perform. Wherever he promises to go he ought to go. If the men who stand in the community as the anointed priests of conscientiousness and good faith say one thing and do another to many men the pillared firmament will seem only rottenness and earth's base built on stubble. A minister of the gospel is under everlasting obligations to be a man of his word. But it is at this crucial point that an occasional minister falls. There are men who are swift to promise and slow to fulfill. Invitations are accepted and then forgotten. Engagements are entered into only to be broken. With smiling assurances and fatal alacrity more work is promised than can possibly be performed. It is men of shining gifts who are most likely to be thus ensnared because talented they are incessantly and urgently impotuned to give their time and strength to plausible and needy suitors. Because thus pressed they say yes. After the invitation has been accepted there comes a new invitation and this for the moment more attractive than the first crowds out its predecessor only to be shoved aside by a third invitation yet to come. Not a thought is given to the havoc thus wrought at the eleventh hour in the programs of innocent people who supposed it was safe to rely upon the promise of a clergyman. Not a tear is shed over the mortification and ache of disappointed hearts. Fires of resentment are thus sometimes kindled in which one's primal faith in human nature is in danger of being consumed. One man of this stamp does more to undermine confidence in Christianity and its defenders than the arguments of a legion of infidels. His sermons will be but sounding brass and clanging cymbal to every man with whom he has dealt unfairly or to whom the story of his perfidy has been brought. When a minister gives his promise, let him keep it. Action must evermore keep pace with word. An engagement once made should be scrupulously fulfilled unless the Lord God Almighty raises up obstacles which no human ingenuity or strength can possibly surmount. If a minister cannot be a saint or a hero he can at least be decent. End of chapter 20. Chapter 21 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This lipovox recording is in the public domain recording by Marianne. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 21. Manorisms. Every man must have a manner and when the manner is peculiar to himself it becomes a mannerism. Not every mannerism is offensive. There are tricks of gesture and of speech which because of their very oddity have a pleasing fascination and seem to be a fitting and completing part of a man's own personality. They give us in fuller measure the aroma of his soul. But mannerisms as a rule are veritable dragons which throwing themselves between the preacher and his hearers must be warred against and slain. Eternal vigilance is the price the man of God must pay for deliverance from this plague of pulpit pests. There is scarcely an organ of the body which will not enter into conspiracy to cripple the minister in his work. His eyes may roam above his hearer's head or dart periodically toward the floor or hang themselves to a peg in one corner of the room or shut themselves up as if afraid of the light or stare steadfastly into vacancy like the eyes of Macbeth on beholding the dagger. Refusing to do what all sane eyes are intended to do will look an audience in the face. His nose, if unregenerate, may sniff and snort, punctuating the glad tidings of great joy with indescribable sounds which are hardly fit for music for the house of the Lord. His face may break loose from all restraint and indulge in grimaces wonderful to see. It may look solemn as death when there is no reason for solemnity and wrathful when there is no call for indignation and amused when there is no justification for mirth and it may twist itself in the contortions which if reproduced by the kinetoscope would furnish interesting diversion for the ungodly or his entire head may become unmanageable, wagging and wobbling, jerking and bobbing as though ideas are nails which must be driven in by the skull used as a mallet. The hands also may become unruly cutting capers behind their owner's back, fumbling and twitching, grasping and groping, expending nervous energy which ought to be poured into the voice or boulder in action they may gamble incessantly before the eyes of the congregation, doubling themselves into fists when the sermon is breathing the spirit of peace or pounding the unoffending pulpit until the exhibition of physical vigor makes a deeper impression than the unfolding of the spiritual idea. Some men get more dust out of the pulpit cushion than light out of the text. The legs may prove recreate to their trust. They may bend at the knee at every downward gesture of the arm or one leg may run away from the other and lounge about in slovenly attitudes. The very toes may behave unseemly, lifting the preacher up and down, increasing and shortening his stature, giving the congregation the impression of a man unstable in all his ways. As there are kickers in the pews, so there are men who kick in the pulpit. To some ministers the most effective of all exclamation points are those made by the boot. But no matter what absurdities and crudities a minister's body may be guilty of, these can be endured providing the good man can manage his mouth. Whoso keepeth his mouth and his tongue keepeth his soul from troubles and also saves his congregation from a multitude of woes. If a man clears his throat at the end of every fifth sentence there will be persons in his congregation who will want to clear it out of the pulpit altogether. If he hems and haws whenever an idea gets away from him he irritates both his throat and the nerves of his people. If he yells at the top of his voice in the utterance of feeble ideas he is a nuisance which ought to be abated. When finally organized Christian men and women cannot attend church without receiving a headache from the stentorian tones of the preacher it would seem that yelling like other forms of sin ought to be made a cause for church discipline. If a congregation were a colossus to be attacked by rhetorical bludgeons or a mammoth baby to be tickled by vocal pyrotechnics or a monster to be tricked and trapped by oratorical devices yelling might not be without justification. But as a congregation is nothing but a big sensible man waiting to be spoken to by a little man in the pulpit anything in the nature of a howl from his lips is as vulgar as it is absurd. But a yell is scarcely worse than a tone. A tone is a clerical wine, a pulpit twang and oily, sanctimonious vocal monstrosity. A tone is can't vocalized. It is affectation coined into breath. It is the most disgusting sound which the universe emits. It is better that a minister should be afflicted with a yellow fever than with a tone. With a yellow fever he might die. Some ministers have several tones. One for the prayer, one for the scripture, one for the sermon and still another for the religious conversation. They talk like Mr. Hyde in the pulpit and Dr. Jekyll at the foot of the pulpit stairs. Oh, for a looking glass for the voice. This has been the cry through the centuries and in the fullness of time there came the phonograph. What part in the evolution of the clergy this little instrument shall play is too early to declare. But the courage and fidelity of the phonograph prove that it is an angel of the Lord. Before its arrival no preacher could hear himself as others heard him. This metallic angel insists on telling the whole truth without the suppression of a vocal jot or tittle. If the minister smacks his lips at the end of paragraphs, especially delicious. If he clips his inks or hisses his esses. If he smothers his vowels or magnifies his consonants. If he meters his sentences or builds a sing song into his climaxes, the faithful phonograph will tell the round unvarnished story and it will tell it without apology or compunction. The story may bring bitter tears, but if they lead unto repentance the world will find another man willing to preach the gospel in the tones in which men are born. Probably no defect of public speech is so common and so difficult to cure as the habit of monotony. There is a monotony of pitch, another of force, another of rate, another of inflection, another of emphasis, another of cadence, and the speaker who is not in any way monotonous is one man picked out of 10,000. To Hercules undying honor has been given because he accomplished 12 stupendous labors. But the minister who can meet and conquer all the lions, boars, and hydras, which infest the road which leads to effective speaking is a mightier hero than the laurel demagogue of Greece. End of chapter 21. Chapter 22 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mary Ann. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 22. Thy Speech for Reeth Thee. Discontent with theological seminaries is one of the conspicuous phenomena of our time. The discontent expresses itself often in blind and vindictive ways, and men and methods are struck at which merit only praise. But when congregations prefer men, as they often do, on whom the seminary has not left its mark, it is not because congregations are perverse or stupid, but because they instinctively feel a difference in men which, however difficult to define, is no less real and controlling. In some cases, it is sheer native ability which more than compensates for lack of scholastic straining. But in more instances, it is a difference in speech which causes one man to be chosen and the other left. The greatest danger to which a young man is subjected in the seminary is not, as many timid folks imagine, heretical interpretations of the scriptures, but a style of language which the plain people do not understand. The seminary is a world of itself, and in this little world a dialect is spoken which one does not hear on the streets. The books which the student reads are written either in German or French, or in English almost as foreign as either. The lectures to which he listens are couched in terms which, however expressive and delicious to the trained scholar, have little meaning to the unlettered. No part of a man is more sensitive to his surroundings than his vocabulary, and when naturally speaks in the language with which his ears and eyes are most familiar. Unconsciously to himself, the student acquires a vocabulary and diction totally different from those which belonged to him in earlier years, and which will be a serious barrier to him in his efforts to reach the hearts of men. Many a man has come from the seminary with his vocabulary so Latinized and his style so Germanized that though his heart still beaten sympathy with the common people, he seemed to them a foreigner or a pedant. The first essential of effective preaching is that every man shall hear it in the language in which he himself was born. No Pentecosts have ever been or can ever be where this condition is lacking. No man truly preaches who does not reach the heart and language is the instrument by which the heart is reached. Learning is good but it is not essential. People care nothing for learning in preachers unless much else goes along with it. What is demanded is a man capable of communicating thought and feeling. If the preacher throws over his ideas thick verbal veils and muffles his feelings in sentences which quench their heat, the congregation may call him learned but it will not care to hear him preach. Next to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the most indispensable gift for every American preacher is a mastery of the English tongue. No time should be begrudged spent in the perfecting of the preacher's style. Language is the tool with which he does his work and it is a tool which demands a deal of toil. Any style is good which does its work. The work of the preacher is to make glorious to the hearts of men the facts and principles of revelation in order that by this vision they may be impelled to a closer walk with God. The first thing that a preacher must demand of himself is that he shall be understood. Unless he is understood all this vanity and vexation of spirit, his words should be clear as crystal and his sentences should shed light. His paragraphs should cut like swords and flash like torches. His language should be what John Milton said the best poetry ought to be. Simple, sensuous and impassioned. The sermon should be free from opaque and clouded phrases and should abound in words which the heart knows. The preacher's aim is to move the will. To do this he must stir the emotions. His language therefore must be the language of the conscience and the heart. His style must be pedestrian. It must fit down close around the skins of things. If he waits his sermons with technical and abstract terms he becomes insufferably tedious and heavy. Hundreds of good men are failing in the pulpit today because handicapped by their language. Let every man who wishes to preach with conquering power work in season and out of season on his style. It is a lifelong enterprise and no other labor is more profitably expended. The advice of Charles Lamb to Cooleridge, cultivate simplicity, is almost as important for the preacher as any statement in the sermon on the mount. Preachers as a rule are not simple enough. They imagine that deep thought and big words must go together. Let them read the first chapter of John's Gospel. No profounder piece of composition was ever written and most of it is in monosyllables. All of your sermons should be of the simplest, said Martin Luther to a growing preacher and all successful preachers have acted on that advice. Bookish words which have not been domesticated in the speech of the average member of the congregation ought to be avoided. The great words are nearly all short words. God and man, heaven and home, wife and child, life and love, faith and hope, joy and grief, pain and death. All these and a hundred like them drop easily from the tongue. The words which lovers know and which mothers speak in soothing and instructing little children and which fathers whisper in the chamber of death and sob beside the grave and which all men use in carrying on the life and business of the world are all simple words and these are the words which should be most frequent on the preacher's lips. These words are stained through and through with the hard experiences of many generations. They carry with them a light and fragrance which fill all the room in which they are spoken. He to whom the world's heart warms must speak in wholesome homebred words. Foolish is the man who discards all these for the frigid patois of the latest literary or scientific school. But a clear and moving style is not to be had for the asking. It is an attainment bought by most men by agony and sweat of blood. A man must feed his vocabulary constantly or it will lose its vigor and ardor. The vocabulary of a minister is subjected to a tremendous wear and tear which soon leaves it impoverished unless constantly replenished. A preacher's style should be full of color and music. Faded and threadbare language is not fit Raymond for the message of the king. Too many preachers use a language which is colorless and tasteless and dead. There are no vivid adjectives, no picturesque phrases, no paragraphs which give fresh splendor to familiar ideas. A minister must deal constantly with moral commonplaces but these become irksome and revolting unless expressed in language which has on it the dew of the morning. Love must always say the same things but it never repeats itself. How can a man freshen and enrich his style? Read and reread the Bible and Shakespeare and Defoe and Swift and Bunyan and Tennyson. For all of these have a genius for pouring the water of life into the clay jugs of Saxon's speech. But reading is not enough. A man must himself be simple and true. Schopenhauer is right in thinking that style is a physiognomy of the mind and a safer index to character than the face. Whatever tones up the spirit and cleanses and sweetens the heart impart straightforwardness and vigor and bloom to a man's speech. The purest, noblest English ever written is that of our King James Bible. Its unfading glory is no mystery to those who have come to know the beautiful and saintly soul of William Tyndale. End of Chapter 22 Chapter 23 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Mary Ann. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 23 Books and Reading There are preachers who would be stronger in their ministry if they read fewer books. There is every provocation to read too much. Books are numerous and cheap and no other working man in the town has so many hours in a week which can be given to reading as the minister. Even if he had no taste for reading he would be driven to it by the nagging question hurled at him from every side. Have you read blank? A man who values a reputation for being up with the times hesitates to say no more than half the times the question is asked him. Moreover it is pleasant to talk about books. Ministers and people can come together on common ground in the books they have all been reading but a parish gulps down an enormous amount of printed papulum in a calendar year and the minister who tries to read everything his people are reading is in danger of fatty degeneration of the mind. When he passes from his parish into the circle of his ministerial brethren he is pelted with another set of interrogations which call for acquaintance with an entirely different set of books. His brethren have read the last six volumes from Germany and the latest twelve from England and two or three from France and the ambitious man anticipating the discussion which is coming has also read them every one. A minister is thus spurred on by the world the flesh, the devil and the saints to swallow a larger mass of printed material than his mental stomach can digest. A loud, long warning should be sounded against the intemperate use of books. It is commonly taken for granted that reading is of necessity, a blessing. Not infrequently, it is a curse. A reader of many books is countered wise. His reading may make him a fool. Many a man would be saner, stronger, more effective in his work had he read but a fraction of the books to which he has given strength and time. This habit of omnivorous reading begets mental habits which are blighting to the preacher's work. Men addicted to it often become painfully superficial. By the constant skimming of ephemeral volumes they become incapable of constructive and continuous thought. They are men of thoughts but not of thought. To string thoughts together is one thing. To develop a thought is another. Men best first in the thoughts of other men may become shallow in their own. This superficiality sometimes displays itself in a mania for quotation. Every book is pounced upon for the sake of the homiletic material it contains and this is thrown into the sermon as a substitute for thinking which the preacher should have done. By the skillful weaving together of striking sentences from a group of miscellaneous writers a preacher may gain among ignorant people a reputation for vast and varied learning but to the discerning he is not so learned as he seems. A sermonic crazy quilt of purple patches may furnish entertainment and even instruction for a season but preaching such as this does not furnish the solid and nutritious food which growing souls demand. If preaching is the bringing of truth through personality then the incessant lugging in of the ideas of other men must be a destructive if not fatal blunder for it must of necessity check the flow of the preacher's soul upon the hearts of those who hear him. Men are best helped not by being told what the preacher has been reading but by having poured out upon them the hopes and convictions which have become so vital in his heart as to shape themselves into a message which must forthwith be uttered. Reading makes a full man and it may fill him to his undoing. One may be so full as to become incapable of effective utterance. Men sometimes degenerate as preachers in proportion to their advance in the realm of learning. While building increasingly spacious barns in which to store their sermonic goods a mental paralysis steals upon them and in the day of plenty they find themselves unable to feed the souls entrusted to their keeping. The constant dumping of miscellaneous material into the mind breaks down the powers of assimilation and leaves the gormand a mental wreck. The juices of the mind dry up and instead of a man behind the pulpit there is only a library bound in human skin. No human being can be so stale and flat and unprofitable as a man who has lived too exclusively with books. A sermon which smells of the lamp can be endured but never enjoyed. Excessive reading may ruin a man as a preacher and also as a pastor. The love of books like the love of wine may grow until it becomes a consuming fire in which all obligations are burnt to ashes. When a minister neglects the sick and dying when he ignores the stranger and the man in need of counsel when he goes toward his people with repining and returns to his books with a sigh of relief he has entered on the road which leads down to the chambers of death for it is his spiritual manhood which is in process of disintegration. He is losing the temper without which no man can be a true servant of Christ. Such a man becomes increasingly fastidious, dainty and critical. The more he reads the less he knows and so he reads still more. With accumulating knowledge comes a loftier standard. This higher standard renders him increasingly impatient with himself and especially with his brethren. He becomes unsympathetic, sensorious, conceited. He measures every man by his scholastic and literary yardstick. Better men than he who have a different kind of knowledge obtained by other methods become to him only objects of pity or derision. No pride can be more scornful and cruel than the pride of a man who has lived with his books until he has lost his sympathy with men. But with all his learning he is wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Killed by his books would be an epitaph fitting for the tombstone of many a ruined prophet of the Lord. But books must not be undervalued, alas for the congregation whose minister has ceased to read. Men who would grow must be diligent students of the best books. They will not read every book of which 100,000 copies may be sold but will shut themselves up with the supreme books, the literature of power. These books will be reread many times. Benjamin Jewett in one of his letters says he has just completed the 50th reading of Boswell's Johnson. It is not advisable to give exclusive attention to technical studies even though they relate to the Bible. The work of tracing tendencies and spotting interpolations and detecting redactors is interesting but debilitating. Let the man of the pulpit re-poetry for language and vision, biography for impulse and comfort, history for proportion and perspective, and the Bible for fire. He who keeps constant company with the kings and queens of human thought will have a keenness of insight, a delicacy of touch, and an energy of persuasion which his indolent newspaper, magazine, novel reading brother may envy and marvel at but never possess. End of chapter 23. Chapter 24 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Marianne. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 24, Near to Men, Near to God. It is not good for a man to live alone. He belongs to humanity and only in close relation with his fellows as he realized the life for which he was created. The highest virtues and sweetest graces grow only in an atmosphere made warm by human fellowship. Isolation, like a blighting frost, nips spiritual aspirations in the bud. A man may be a pagan alone. He cannot be a Christian. It is where two or three are together that Christianity promises a life which is divine. A preacher of Christianity must live as close as possible to men. Isolation to him is fatal. If he has a disposition which shrinks from the society of others, his disposition must be born again. Young men in whom the literary instinct is strong and the literary ambition stronger still sometimes enter the ministry determined to be strong as they say in the pulpit and suppose that it is by the constant pouring over learned volumes that pulpit greatness can be achieved. Shutting themselves up in their study, they proceed to dig in a dozen different fields of learning, leaving untouched the very field in which the pearl of great price is hid. It is with reluctance that they lay aside their books to go among their people and every hour given to parochial visitation is bitterly begrudged. Among their books, they are serene and happy. Among God's children, they are restless and forlorn. By pampering this disposition a man may come at last to have a horror of entering the homes of his people and may secretly despise the very souls he has sent into the world to love. Knowing men is the preacher's first and most important business. To know them he must be with them. It is not enough to know man, he must know men. He can study man in his library but he must study men in his parish. It is one thing to know human nature as portrayed in books and another thing to know it at first hand. Europe in books is not more different from the Europe which the tourist sees and hears and feels than is the man whom we read about different from the man whom we meet in the streets. It is the man in the street whom the preacher must know and if he does not know him, no other sort of knowledge will make him a successful preacher. There are two volumes to which a preacher must give his days and nights, his Bible and his parish. A knowledge of the second is not a wit less important than is a mastery of the first. According to the New Testament the minister is a servant. His rank in the kingdom is determined by his proficiency in service. A man who desires to be great in the pulpit must be first of all a minister and if he has an ambition to be chief he must be the servant of all. If a preacher really deserves to serve his people he will not count time lost which is spent in their company. The closer he comes to them the larger his opportunity to give them what they need. What they are fearing and hoping, feeling and thinking, enjoying and suffering, loving and hating, reading and dreaming all this can become known to him only as he comes into contact with them and to know these things is more important than to know nine tenths of all the books can teach. It is because men love to luxuriate in the quiet air of delightful studies and to suck the sweets of sweet philosophy or are ambitious to shine as oratorical or literary stars that they come to underestimate the value of pastoral visitation and place a knowledge of books above the love of men. But it is for the preacher's own advantage that communion with his people may be most strongly urged. He needs the people even more than they need him. As a preacher he is maimed unless he have warm and tender sympathies and how are these to be maintained unless he lives close to men. Men who aim to keep the God word side of their soul open while the man word side remains shut aim at the impossible. It is the fundamental doctrine of the New Testament that we approach God only through humanity. According to Jesus, right relations with man precede all the forms of worship. According to John, we know we have passed from death to life only when we love the brethren. If the world is to know that men are Christ's disciples because they love one another then a minister's self-denying affection for his people is the one supreme test of his right to be counted a faithful servant of the Lord. From his parish he will glean ideas and also gather nutriment with which to feed all his powers of feeling. One half days spent close to ordinary mortals will give a man more clear and helpful thoughts than can be found in the last learned book no matter who the author. Men are better any day than books. They are written all over by the finger of God and happy the man who can read this living revelation edited down to date. If a pastor neglects his people for his books he pays dearly for his sins. Not only does he lose that keenness of sensibility and tenderness of sympathy which gives sparkle and warmth to the sermon but like a man who has lost his way he wanders in the realm of ideas foreign to the lives of his people. His vocabulary will sound like that of a man from far off regions. By his mouth he is condemned. He may try to induce his congregation to believe that he cares for it but the telltale words with which he builds his sermons will cry out against him. Worst of all he will have in his own heart to hunger which is never satisfied and will find the satisfactions of the ministry grow less with the increasing years. The joy of life lies in one's relations with his fellow men. If a minister is not taking his people deeper into his heart and if he is not constantly growing deeper into theirs his life will grow increasingly monotonous and he will be likely to be one of the notorious one hundred who apply for every vacant pulpit. To sit in one's study grinding out great ideas that to a young man seems the road to pulpit greatness but in later years he learns that pulpit greatness is not the knack of playing with ideas but the power of expressing a loving message in familiar words and throwing around it an atmosphere of fire. In short it is the gospel of love which the preacher is most in need of. Not until he loves is he truly born of God. In the government of nations said Cromwell that which is to be looked after is the affection of the people and no less is true in the government and leadership of churches. A recluse made by unusual gifts of speaking when a short lived admiration by extraordinary pulpit feats but it is the man who sincerely loves his people and who is sincerely loved by them who most surely molds their temper and turns their feet into the way of life. End of chapter 24. Chapter 25 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Mary Ann. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 25, Eagles, Race Horses and Plotters. The climax of God's redeeming grace according to Isaiah 40, 31 is found in the strength which enables men to plod. To soar like an eagle is difficult, to run like a race horse is more difficult still but to walk and not faint. This is the greatest feat which the power of God can enable any man to do. The high art of walking is one which the minister must master. Of all men he can least afford to indulge in the luxury of flying or running. These only put him out of breath and unfit him for his work. His usefulness depends upon the evenness and continuousness of his labors. He is a shepherd and shepherds neither fly nor run. A shepherd's work is prosaic, tedious, slow and obscure. Feeding sheep is his daily task and for this he needs neither the metal of the racer nor the buoyancy of the eagle. He must have a genius for plodding. The clergyman who is able to trudge bravely through the years, filling the months with quiet, honest work, pressing himself close upon his people and holding his people and himself close to the heart of Christ, may cause little stir in the world but he will make an impression which will be felt in heaven. The farmer and preacher have need of the same patience, fidelity and pluck. The laws of the soil and the soul are inexorable and processes of growth in matter and spirit are orderly and slow. There must be hard plowing, faithful sowing, patient waiting and skillful harvesting if the Lord of the harvest is to give a reward. A man who only prances or flies is a failure both in pulpit and field. But this gift of plodding has not been given to all men. It is a form of genius, almost as invaluable and rare as that of the artist and poet. If a man does not possess it, let him keep out of the ministry. He will be unhappy all his days and at eventide it shall be dark. The parish will be a cage against whose bars he will beat and bruise his impatient wings. The church will be a dre in whose shafts he will chafe and fret, repining always over imaginary races which he might have run and won. Some men cannot brook obscurity. They covet popular attention. They live on public favor. Unless they can attract and hold the eye of the community, they are of all men most wretched. To be ignored by the press is to them, Gahana. To glorify God and enjoy him forever is not enough. They must cut a figure along with other notorious characters in the public eye. For this also is a part of the chief end of man. And so, instead of going quietly about their work doing good to all men according to their opportunity, they attempt to play the eagle. They soar into the heavens of dazzling rhetoric and spread their wings on the broad realms of sensational devices. To make a show either in the pulpit or in parochial activity becomes a consuming, devastating ambition. These would-be eagles of the pulpit have brought the clergy in many quarters into irretrievable disrepute. Not a few newspaper men hold ministers in contempt because of their unhappy dealings with pulpit eagles who have clamored incessantly for the privilege of soaring in their columns. A minister itching for public recognition not only makes himself ridiculous but throws suspicion on all his brethren. Or if a man is too shrewed to thrust himself upon the lords of the press, he may display his eagle instincts in other ways. He may prepare great sermons, possibly three or four, just to let his people know what tremendous heights he can reach when he cares to spread his pinions. But these aerial flights use up so much vitality that for a month after one of them he is as tame and weak-winged as an aged barnyard fowl. No man can fly all the time, or even one day in seven. I am worst of all this mad desire to imitate the eagle but gets and nourishes a deep-seated discontent. The man afflicted with it is always brooding over imagined slights and neglects. The community does not appreciate him. His own church underestimates his ability. And out of this sense of injustice proceed vague and feverish dreams of other parishes where eagles are appreciated at their full value and of other people whose eyes are open to the gifts and graces which his own people fail to see. It is the misfortune of ministers who want to fly like eagles that most of them have only the wings of a more humble bird. What seems to them a gust soaring appears to those who behold them nothing more than the awkward flopping of a gander which does not know his place. To be a clerical racehorse is as disastrous as to be an ordained eagle. Some men are always running races and attract the public notice by their snorting and perspiration. They look upon all the ministers around them as so many rivals in a race and laying aside every weight, sometimes even ethical obligations. They run with fury the race which is set before them, looking not unto Jesus but at the man who seems most likely to outstrip them. This race becomes more furious if the ministers chance to be of the same denomination. For in that case, the speed made by the racers will be entered on the same page in the denominational church record and a clergyman stands branded in the eyes of church committees who is unable on the racetrack to leave all competitors behind. Sad indeed is the story if one had the heart to tell it. What will ministers not do when the fever of the race course is once in their blood? They will lie about the size of their congregation and pad the role of their church membership and drop subtracting insinuations about the man ahead of them and carry into the pulpit a heart full of envy and bitterness and become a hypocrite as deep-stained and damnable as were the hollow-hearted miscreants at whom the Lord hurled thunderbolts 19 centuries ago. The salvation of the minister, like that of other men, lies in his willingness to do his duty without fuss or feathers up to the level of his strength and opportunity. Fame is nothing. Publicity is nothing. Popularity is nothing. Serving God by helping men is all. Most of the best work done in the world is done by unnoticed toilers in obscure fields. Most of the best preaching is done in pulpits which have no halo around them in the public eye. The best sermons do not as a rule get into the papers, nor is there any mention made of them by the reporters. The most influential preachers are not those most talked about, but those whose words go deepest into the consciences and hearts of men. The church can afford a few eagles and racehorses of the nobler sort, but after all, the solid and enduring work must be done largely by the plotters. My brother, if you are capable of walking without fainting, thank God and take courage. You are a man of gifts and have in yourself indubitable evidence of the presence and favor of the Almighty. Other men may astonish the nation by flying over every celebration, but at the end of the day, you have sown precious seed and will come home rejoicing, bringing your sheaves with you. End of Chapter 25 Chapter 26 of Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Mary Ann. Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers in My Study by Charles Edward Jefferson. Chapter 26, Unconscious Decay. It is the nature of many of the most vital and transforming of the spiritual processes to take place below the reach of consciousness. A man growing better does not measure the stages of his progress, nor does a man becoming worse realize the headway of his descent. There are things which are hidden from the vision of both saints and sinners. Their eyes are holding so they cannot see them. Thus Moses, after his long communion with the Eternal, came down from the mountain with a glory on his face, but Moses wist not that his face shone. What was evident to others was concealed from him. Likewise Samson, after the spirit of the Lord had departed from him, wist not that the Lord was departed. This awful fact did not break upon him until by the failure of doing things which formerly he had done with ease, he found himself impotent and humiliated in the presence of his foes. The processes of life and death run on today, held in the grip of laws established at the beginning, and many a Moses illumines his people with a glory of which he himself does not dream, while many a Samson, with great deeds behind him, still marches boldly against the Philistines, not realizing that the spirit of the Lord goes with him no more. It is for this reason that many of the professional apostles of the so-called higher life do not win the confidence of the discerning. They talk too much. The man who says, look at me, see how my face shines, closes our ears to his argument for holiness by the impudence of his vanglorious invitation. Self-consciousness and lofty spiritual attainments do not go together. Men who live nearest to the heart of God do not pray of their visions nor boast of the light in their face. We cannot fail to be suspicious likewise of the Samson's who lose the power of conquering, but in their weakness go on boasting as if they were still able to carry off the gates of Gaza. Because a man is once a preacher, it does not follow that he is always a preacher. A man may lose his heavenly credentials although he continues to write reverend in front of his name. The descent to Sheol is easy, and for the minister, as for all mortals, the way is always open. It is not closed on Sundays, and no broader entrance opens into it than from the pulpit platform. It is the truth, even as Father John has written it. Our old man is constantly present with us, tempting us, snaring us, corrupting us, destroying us. The deterioration of spiritual life in men ordained to preach the gospel is one of the saddest of all the mysteries of sin. Like Judas, men for a while cast out devils and then fall by a devil themselves. Always some one besetting sin lies at the root of the tragedy. The wages of sin is death in all circumstances and generations. Ministers escape exposure longer than most men because their sins are in general sins of the spirit rather than of the flesh and hence bring only spiritual retribution. They who sow to the flesh reap corruption, gluttony and drunkenness and licentiousness. These sins are evident going before to judgment, but these are not the sins which entrap and slay the leaders of the church. Ministers, with rare exceptions, fall by the hands of enemies no less fatal but far more insidious and respectable. Pride, selfishness, envy, covetousness, laziness, ambition, these and a host of others. The sinner is not exposed to sudden and spectacular ruin. He dies piecemeal, unconscious of the progress of the processes of moral disintegration. He suffers as the paralytic suffers by a progressive loss of sensibility and power. Who does not know ministers of the gospel who once were favored and mighty men and of whom the world now says, how the mighty have fallen. They are still in the pulpit but their usefulness has ended. Their sermons are sounding brass and worse. Their prayers are useless as the prayers of the priests of Baal. What they say has no influence on their congregation for their voice has lost the subtle and commanding accent of spiritual veracity. When one comes to know these men in the privacy of their own personal life, the cause of the decay of spiritual power becomes clear. They are ministers but they are not good men. They are petty or niggerly or stingy or lazy or sensorious or pretentious or pessimistic or sour. The light and joy have gone out of their own soul and therefore power has gone out of their preaching. Their failure in the pulpit is to them a mystery but it is not a mystery to anyone who knows them and understands the conditions of spiritual power. The deadline then is a terrible reality which ministers of all ages need fear and shun. Some men die earlier, others die later. The date is determined by the rate of progress of their sin. Only a man genuinely good can be a minister of power to the end of the day. All others are sooner or later overtaken and overwhelmed. Nothing is more tragic than the spectacle of a minister who began his career with men eager to hear him preaching at last to a world unresponsive to his message. The world to such a man is an insoluble enigma. Why he should fail while other men succeed is a tormenting problem. He compares himself with his successful brethren and in no wit does he seem to fall behind the chief of them. He has gone through college and completed a seminary course and read shelves of books and studied elocution under a dozen teachers and therefore why should he not succeed? He frames his diplomas and reads over his ordination papers. These are regular and valid and therefore wide doors of usefulness ought to open. He compares his sermons with those of men to whom the world seems glad to listen and in illustrations, ideas, rhetorical finish, logical force, homilical art, his sermons are fully equal and in many points superior to all. He picks up the name of a favored preacher and says, why should his name be sounded more than mine? Speak them, mine doth become the mouth as well. Weigh them, mine is as heavy. Now in the name of all the gods at once, upon what meat doth this our chrysostom feed that he is grown so great? Poor man, he has left out of consideration the one thing essential, the spirit of God. It is not by rhetorical might nor by logical power but by the breath of the spirit that congregations are swayed and the gates of the kingdom thrown open and this only a good man can have. Sermons are like salt. They have a color and texture and weight but all these are as nothing unless there goes along with them a savor. If the sermons have lost their savor, no matter what may be their rhetoric or logic or thought they are good for nothing but to be trodden under the foot of men. For ministers then as well as for laymen the words of the Hebrew preacher have abiding significance. Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole duty of man. End of chapter 26 an end of quiet hints to growing preachers in my study. Recorded by Mary Ann Spiegel in Chicago, Illinois February 6th, 2010. Thank you to Mama Thrichoowas for proving the audiophiles and to Kilted Dragon for emceeing this project for LibriVox. For more information or to join us in volunteering please visit LibriVox. L-I-B-R-I-V-O-X dot org.