The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891Stalker, James
Religion
The Preacher and His Models: The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891
Stalker, James
Preaching
But the connection is far closer than this. In St. Paul's mind all the
great doctrines of the Gospel were living fountains of motives for
well-doing; and even the smallest and commonest duties of every-day
life were magnified and made sacred by being connected with the facts
of salvation. Take a single instance. There is no plainer duty of
every-day life than telling the truth. Well, how does St. Paul treat
it? "Lie not one to another," he says, "seeing ye have put off the old
man with his deeds." Thus truthfulness flows out of regeneration.
Treating of the same subject again, he says, "Lie not one to another,
for ye are members one of another," deriving the duty from the union
of believers to one another through their common union with
Christ.[66] Thus does St. Paul everywhere show great principles in
small duties and stamp the commonest actions of life with the image
and the superscription of Christ.
This balance between the doctrinal and the moral is difficult to
maintain. Seldom has the mind of the Church been able to preserve it
for any length of time. It has oscillated from one kind of
one-sidedness to another, sometimes exalting doctrines and neglecting
duties and at other times preaching up morality and disparaging
doctrine. To which side the balance may be dipping at the present time
among you I do not know; but among us, I should say, it was from
doctrines towards duties.
Perhaps in the last generation we had too much preaching of doctrine,
or rather I should say, too little preaching of duty. Younger
preachers are beginning to dwell much on a nobler conception of the
Christian life, and there is a strong demand for practical preaching.
Undoubtedly there is room for a healthy development in this direction.
Yet this is a transition about which our country has good cause to be
jealous; because it passed through a terrible experience of the
effects of preaching morality without doctrine. I question if in the
whole history of the pulpit there is a document more worthy of the
attention of preachers than the address which Dr. Chalmers sent to the
people of his first charge at Kilmeny, when he was leaving it for
Glasgow. It is well known that for seven years after his settlement in
this rural parish he was ignorant of the Gospel and preached only the
platitudes of the Moderate creed; but, the grace of God having
visited his heart, he lived for other five years among his people as a
true ambassador of Christ, beseeching them in Christ's name to be
reconciled to God. This is his summing up of the results of the two
periods:--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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