1922

When I sit in my study and meditate upon men and events I am critical and circumspect. Why is it that when I arise in the pulpit I try to be imaginative and am sometimes possessed by a kind of madness which makes my utterances extravagant and dogmatic? Perhaps this change of technique is due to my desire to move the audience. Audiences are not easily moved from their lethargy by cool and critical analyses. An appeal to the emotions is necessary and emotions are not aroused by a careful analysis of facts but by a presentation of ideal values. I do not mean that I disavow the critical method entirely in the pulpit. Indeed many of my friendly critics think I am too critical to be a good preacher. Nor am I ever very emotional. Nevertheless there is a distinct difference between my temper in the study and my spirit in the pulpit.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Let the study serve to reveal the relativity of all things so that pulpit utterances do not become too extravagant, and let the pulpit save the student from sinking in the sea of relativities. However qualified every truth may be there is nevertheless a portion in every truth and value which is essentially absolute and which is therefore worth proclaiming. “All oratory,” declares a Greek scholar, “is based on half truths.” That is why one ought naturally to distrust and to discount the orator. On the other hand, oratory may be the result of the kind of poetic gift which sees a truth dissociated, for a moment at least, from all relativities of time and circumstance and lifted into the light of the absolute.

I notice that the tendency of extravagance in the pulpit and on the platform increases with the size of the crowd. As my congregation increases in size I become more unguarded in my statements. Wherefore may the good Lord deliver me from ever being a popular preacher. “Why is it,” asked one of my elders the other day, “that your Sunday evening sermons are more pessimistic than your morning sermons?” I think what he really meant is that they were more critical in analyzing life’s problems. I told him that I tried to give inspiration in the morning and education in the evening.

But the fact is that circumstance probably affects the quality of the message as much as purpose. A full church gives me the sense of fighting with a victorious host in the battles of the Lord. A half empty church immediately symbolizes the fact that Christianity is very much of a minority movement in a pagan world and that it can be victorious only by snatching victory out of defeat.