HERALDS OF GOD
to brotherhood and neighbourliness and the observance of the Golden Rule! Cannot we hear the hearts of men crying for the living God? Do we think Christ purchased the Church with His blood that it should be only a depository of doctrine, only a social conscience, only a glorified discussion group? Nothing about a Church—no culture or enlightenment, no assiduous attention to the details of organization, no elaborate machinery of good works—can avail anything or compensate one atom for the radical defect, if it is not a place where men and women can come quite sure that their hungry hearts will find the living bread.
Have you that gift to offer? In the last resort, everything depends on the inner certainty of your own soul. Two hundred years ago, George Whitefield preached a sermon in Glasgow on The Duty of a Gospel Minister. "You will never preach," he said, "with power feelingly, while you deal in a false commerce with truths unfelt. It will be but poor, dry, sapless stuff—your people will go away out of the church as cold as they came in. For my own part," he cried, "I would not preach an unknown Christ for ten thousand worlds. Such offer God strange fire, and their sermons will but increase their own damnation." Izaak Walton has described John Donne in the pulpit of St. Paul's, "preaching the Word so, as shewed his own heart was possest with those very thoughts and joyes that he labored to distill into others." Does not that lay bare our deepest need? We want something
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