age that he fed the flock of God in Israel according to the integrity of
his heart, and guided them by the skilfulness of his hands. But what
years and years of shortcoming and failure in private and in public life
lie behind that fine word 'integrity'! as also what stumbles and what
blunders behind that other fine word 'skilfulness'! But, then, how a
lightest touch of a preacher's own dear-bought experience skilfully let
fall brightens up an obscure scripture! How it sends a thrill through a
prayer! How it wings an arrow to the conscience! How it sheds abroad
balm upon the heart! Let no minister, then, lose heart when he is sent
back to the school of experience. He knows in theory that tribulation
worketh patience, and patience experience, but it is not theory, but
experience, that makes a minister after God's own heart. I sometimes
wish that I may live to see a chair of Experimental Religion set up in
all our colleges. I fear it is a dream, and that it must have been
pronounced impracticable long ago by our wisest heads. Still, all the
same, that does not prevent me from again and again indulging my dream. I
indulge my fond dream again as often as I look back on my own tremendous
mistakes in the management of my own personal and ministerial life, as
well as sometimes see some signs of the same mistakes in some other
ministers. In my dream for the Church of the future I see the programme
of lectures in the Experimental Class and the accompanying examinations.
I see the class library, and I envy the students. I am present at the
weekly book-day, and at the periodical addresses delivered to the class
by those town and country ministers who have been most skilful in their
pastorate and most successful in the conversion and in the character of
their people. And, unless I wholly deceive myself, I see, not all the
class--that will never be till the millennium--but here and there twos
and threes, and more men than that, who will throw their whole hearts
into the work of such a class till they come out of the hall in
experimental religion like Sir Proteus in the play:
Their years but young, but their experience old,
Their heads unmellowed, but their judgment ripe.
It is quite true, that, as my old minister shrewdly said to me, even the
Holy Ghost cannot inspire an experience. No. But a class of genuine
experimental divinity would surely help to foster and develop an
experience. And, till the class is established, any student who has the
heart for it may lay in the best of the class library for a few
shillings. Mr. Thin will tell you that there is no literature that is
such a drug in the market as the best books of Experimental Divinity. No
wonder, then, that we make such slow and short way in the skilfulness,
success, and acceptance of our preaching and our pastorate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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