HERALDS OF GOD
The great Thomas Chalmers, as Professor Hugh Watt in a recent study has reminded us, preached with a disconcertingly provincial accent ("the bruising barbarism of his pronunciation," to use Professor Masson's phrase), with an almost total lack of dramatic gesture, tied rigidly to his manuscript, with his finger following the written lines as he read. Yet vast congregations hung breathlessly upon that preaching, and those sermons went like fire through the land. In that very striking account of a spiritual pilgrimage, A Wanderer's Way, Dr. Charles Raven has described an incident which occurred during his student days at Cambridge. It was the visit of a well-known preacher at whose methods and message some were inclined to scoff. "The sermon was as an argument puerile," writes Raven, "but the man was aflame, radiating a power of loving that filled his simple words with meaning and with an atmosphere of worship. Here was a man not only passionately convinced of his gospel, but, for whatever the words mean. God-possessed. … Here surely was the real Christianity, that had changed the course of human history: if this man were deluded, I should almost be content to share this delusion. The scoffer stayed to pray," Is it not manifest that the ultimate secret of true preaching—the preaching which begets worship and mediates a Presence and wields converting power—is something quite apart from any rules of logical structure or artistic form? "The wind bloweth where it listeth: and thou canst not tell whence and whither."
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