THE PREACHER'S THEME
bind up the broken-hearted may lead to a preaching of the wrong kind of comfort. There is a type of consolation which tends to romanticize the burden of the mystery, and to interpose religion as a cushion against the blows of fate. Beware of all such expedients: they are far removed from what the New Testament means by comfort. They serve only to hypnotize the troubled mind and to enervate the soul; and in the end they reduce efficiency for the battle of life. "The noblest specimen in existence" according to Principal W. M. Macgregor, "of the preaching of consolation is found in the First Epistle of Peter "True Gospel comfort never plays down to natural weakness: it lifts up to supernatural strength. There is nothing enfeebling or demoralizing about it, no flying to the drug of fantasy: it is essentially virile, bracing, reinforcing. And what gives it this character, preserving it from the risk of sentimentalism, is the Cross at the centre of it. In the last resort, the human heart is too big to find its comfort in any soothing anodyne of consolatory words. There is no comfort short of victory. And it is this, nothing less, that the preacher of the Gospel is empowered to offer to all who turn their faces to the Cross—the comfort of mastering every dark situation, and triumphing in every tribulation, through the grace of Him who conquered there.
IV
But the herald of the Cross has a further task. He must present his theme, not only in the setting of
79
