of the sword of the old Samurai class. Infinite pains were taken with it; a man's whole life often went to the making of a knight's sword. And we dare not be careless with the forming of the word, the sword of the Spirit.

Dr. John Watson believed that what could be done to make style and manner winsome ought to be done. We know what distinction he gave to his truth, how he laboured to make his message simple and persuasive. Yet he confessed to a lack. "He came to think that he had spent too little time on the form of his sermons. The want of distinction in the case of a speaker dealing with the most majestic ideas he thought a crime. 'It is a species of profanity. It is an act of intellectual indecency.' He said that if he went back he would seek more earnestly a becoming dress for the message of God."

I have spoken of the cost of true preaching not to make it seem so difficult that men will shrink from the task, but to make it seem so great that men will seek divine help and the discipline of life for it. No man is worth much in the Kingdom of God who is not beaten out of all self-conceit, and made to see that in preaching also the way of the cross is the way of growth and of power.

But the man who stands as the true interpreter of the word and the lives of men and comes to this at whatever cost has a sense of privilege in his hardest work, and an assurance of ministering to the highest wants of human life that nothing else can give. The pain of discipline is nothing to the joy of service.

Henry Drummond said that he had had some of the finest joys of earth, the joys of books and of art, of nature and of travel and sport, of friends and honour; but there was no joy like the assurance that your word had brought the life of faith to men.

LECTURE XIII. THE SENSE OF

MESSAGE

I COR. 9:16. "For if I preach the Gospel, I have nothing to glory of; for necessity is laid upon me; for woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel."

LECTURE XIII

THE SENSE OF MESSAGE

THE sense of message is the prophetic element in preaching. It is the mark of the preacher, - the inner witness of his call, the imperative reason for his vocation. Amid the various voices of the world stands the man who claims to speak for God. It is not the question whether the pulpit has declined or not, whether other work has attracted the most gifted sons of the Church, whether other means of teaching are multiplying the work formerly done by the pulpit alone; it is the question of its distinctive claim and authority and influence. The preacher is the man with a message. He believes that he has a word of God, the message of God's presence and working in human life. It is a truth that has found him and masters him; he feels it to be God's truth to his own life, and so he must speak it to other lives. It is an absorbing, possessing, impelling word; it is a "fire in the bones," a "woe is me" in the heart, a "love constraining" on the lips.