HERALDS OF GOD
come not merely through human lips, but out from the deeps of the eternal; if the preacher is sent (in St. Paul's expressive phrase) to "placard" Christ, to declare a Word which is not his own, because it Is the Word of God Incarnate—it follows that the attempt to segregate preaching from worship is fundamentally false. The fact is that the sermon is divinely intended to be one of those high places of the spirit where men and women grow piercingly aware of the eternal, and where a worshipping congregation—forgetting all about the preacher—sees "no man, save Jesus only," And ours must have been a singularly barren and unfortunate experience if we have never, when sitting in church listening to the preaching of the Word, been moved to adoration, never seen the angels ascending and descending on the ladder linking Bethel to the world unseen, and never whispered to ourselves, "This is none other but the house of God, this is the gate of heaven"
In this connection, I would recall to your minds the famous passage in Robert Wodrow's Analecta where an English merchant of three hundred years ago describes to his friends in London certain preachers he had heard during a business visit to Scotland. At St. Andrews he had listened to Robert Blair. "That man," he said, "showed me the majesty of God." Afterwards he had heard "a little fair man" preach—this was Samuel Rutherford: "and that man showed me the loveliness of Christ." Then at Irvine he had heard a discourse by "a well-favoured, proper old
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