HERALDS OF GOD
"born again" before you were born at all. You will be preaching to some who will always be "further ben" in the deep things of God than yourself. Must not that reflection replace false confidence with modesty? But ignorance and finitude are not, of course, the sum total of our unworthiness. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips: mine eyes have seen the King." "Only once," wrote Dr. Alexander Whyte, "did God choose a completely sinless preacher." Our doom it is that with no atom of personal merit or deserving, with nothing indeed but broken contrition and the shame of sin's radical corruption, we have to tell of Jesus and His love. Let the preacher, charged to mediate the word of God to men, pause ere he mount the pulpit-steps and breathe the secret prayer, "God be merciful to me a sinner." There will be days when the sense of personal unworthiness smites and shatters us, until we cry "My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" It is then, by some miracle of divine lovingkindness, at such a moment of desolation, that there comes the angel, touching a man's lips with a live coal from the altar of God.
There is a third reason for the humility which will always mark the servant of the evangel. This is the fact that anything his work may achieve is God's doing, not his own. If visible results attend his ministry if souls are brought out of darkness into lights if the faithful are strengthened and the apathetic awakened and the spiritually dead resurrected (and, mark you,
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