HERALDS OF GOD
Beware, however, of any lecturer who—on the Warrack foundation or any other—should announce a course on "How to Preach: By One who Knows." The creature is an impostor! No man knows how to preach. You will have to reckon with this significant, disconcerting fact, that the greatest preachers who have ever lived have confessed themselves poor bunglers to the end, groping after an ideal which has eluded them for ever. When you have been preaching for twenty years, you will be beginning to realize how incalculably much there is to learn. There will be days when the Socratic knowledge of your ignorance will desolate and overwhelm you. Even if Providence should spare you to this work for fifty years, your thought will be, as the gloaming closes in around you, "If only I could start all over again now!" There is no vocation in all the world which has such rewards to offer of deep and satisfying joy. But it is also true that there is no vocation so perpetually humbling to a good man, no task in which failure is so inescapably the fate appointed. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?
Rejoice Thy word is unexpressed;
And inexpressible must be
On this side of Eternity;
And I with all my travail vast
Am glad that I must fail at last.
If I had found the Word complete,
No glory could I march to meet:
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