II.
(Continued from page 464.)
4.
Even the accurate and eloquent presentation of evangelical doctrine, however, does not constitute the whole of what is included in evangelical preaching. There is such a thing possible as the preacher’s own heart being out of harmony with his compassionate message; and where there is little of this sacred sympathy with his theme, even the man who in the mere letter announces Christian doctrine will not unfrequently have to look back upon a ministry of little spiritual fruit. It was in the possession of a heart which the teaching of the Spirit had attuned to His lessons, and which frequent prayer kept in tune, that much of the power of Ralph Erskine’s ministry was to be found. There are passages in his sermons, and especially in his closing appeals and “uses of reproof,” which remind us of Bunyan’s immortal sermon on the Jerusalem sinners, and in which we see a heart in true sympathy with that of Him who wept over the doomed city. What a true and noble blast of the silver trumpet is this, for example, fitted to carry hope even to those who are lying bound in the prison of despair:—
“The person to whom Christ is offered in the gospel is no other than a lost sinner. Christ came to seek and to save them that were lost: I mean not only those who are sensible of their lost state, but those in a lost state, whether they be sensible of it or not. If the gospel come to them, the offer of Christ comes to them. ‘To you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of men.’ We are warranted to preach the gospel to every rational creature (Mark xvi. 15). The offer of Christ comes to you. Why, may not sin exclude us from the offer? By no means; for Christ came to save sinners (1 Tim. i. 15). If sinners were excepted, all mankind would be excepted; for all have sinned. But is it to gross sinners? Yes, to gross sinners. ‘Come, let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool’ (Isa. i. 18). To murderers of the Lord of glory was the offer made (Acts ii. 41). But are mockers and scorners under the offer? Yes; as you may see, Prov. i. 22, 23. But what if a person cares not for the offer, and thinks himself happy enough without Christ, is Christ offered to such a person as this? Certainly he is: ‘Wherefore do ye spend money for which is not bread, and your labour for that which satisfieth not? Harken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good; and let your soul delight itself in fatness’ (Isa. lv. 1, 2). But if a man be convinced neither of sin nor of misery, nor see any need of Christ, is Christ offered to him? Yes, undoubtedly He is, Rev. iii. 18: ‘I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment that thou mayest be clothed.’ Let them venture to shut the door of the gospel offer who will, we must open it in God’s name to all who hear this gospel, and tell them that Christ is offered to them that He may be received by them: and if there were no offer, it would not be their duty to receive, and so unbelief would not be their sin. I say to lost souls, Christ is offered to those who are spoiled by the sentence of the law, arraigned, convicted, and condemned and accursed: the hand of the gospel promise holds out Christ to you; for where Moses leaves you, there Joshua finds you; where the law ends, there the gospel begins: the law ends in the shipwreck of the sinner, in splitting him upon the rock of its terrors, and drowning him in the ocean of divine wrath, and sinking him into the depths of despair; and just there the gospel begins—it comes to the bottom of the pit of sin and misery, and offers a Christ, a Saviour! Thus, where Moses leaves you, there Joshua finds you. The soul that is shipwrecked by the law, and as it were all to pieces, to such an one the gospel offer is most welcome; for the hand of grace holds forth Christ, like a plank after shipwreck, a plank to swim ashore upon. Such a soul is encouraged to see no other qualification required of him to come to Christ and receive Him, but just that he is lost, which he finds himself to be; and there is no other condition or qualification required, but that you be a lost man, a sinful, miserable person. Some will offer Christ upon such and such terms, saying, You must be so and so humbled, so and so penitent before Christ can be offered to you; so that a man that finds himself a lost, sinful, unhumbled, impenitent, wretched creature, can never come to their hand or meddle with what they offer: just like a man holding out a cup of excellent wine to his friend and offering him a drink, but in the meantime he hath made the wine scalding hot upon the fire, so as the man to whom the offer is made dare not touch it with his lips; even so many offer Christ, and hold forth the cup of salvation to the people, but they heat their gospel liquor as it were red hot upon the fire of the law; I mean with so many legal terms, conditions, and qualifications, that the poor soul that finds himself a lost sinner, every way sinful, destitute of all good qualifications, dare not come near, and thinks he may not, he ought not to come near with his lips to taste it. We need be at no pains to hinder sinners from coming to Christ, to receive the offer, for they are unwilling enough of themselves. Besides that, they will never have a good qualification till they come to Him and receive Him and all good in Him; all grace and glory, all holiness and happiness. Thus you see to whom the offer of Christ is made in the gospel.”
5.
We have yet to mention an additional quality which contributed not a little to the power and attractiveness of Ralph Erskine’s preaching, namely, his own experimental acquaintance with the truths which he taught to others. When he discoursed to his hearers of the power of indwelling sin, of the connection between free justification and personal holiness, of spiritual joys and sorrows, of the blessing of assurance, of everything that enters essentially into the Christian life, it was no blind theorizing with him. He had travelled all that way himself. He was reading off the experience of other believers as he saw it reflected in the mirror of his own. There is a story related in the memoir of his elder brother, Ebenezer, which best illustrates our meaning. Seated in a garden-bower beneath the window of Ebenezer’s study, Ralph and his brother’s wife, Alison Turpie, were conversing with each other on their religious experience. Ebenezer, seated near the open window, was enchained by the conversation, and could not withdraw himself from listening. He immediately thought with himself—”They have ideas and feelings to which I am yet a stranger—they possess a valuable something which I have not,” and the thought told him that, compared with his brother, he was yet only a babe in Christ. Now this rich Christian experience, which so overflowed in his sermons as to obtain for him the designation of the “experimental preacher,” was of incalculable advantage to him, as it is to every minister who possesses it. It explained many a text to him, which would have remained a riddle to the man of mere lexicons and grammars. It is a profound truth, that the best scriptural interpreter is the man with a scriptural mind. And so it was that many a Christian paradox, before which the mere man of learning would have sat for days vainly guessing and groping at its meaning, sweetly opened itself at once to the mind which had long “tasted that the Lord was gracious,” and disclosed all its golden stores. Such passages as, “I by the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God;”—”Sin shall no more have dominion over you, for ye are not under the law, but under grace;”—”I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,” found a sure and ready key to their meaning in the preacher’s own heart. Indeed, it is in describing the gospel method of sanctification even more than that of justification, that the Erskines and the Marrowmen have done the greatest service to our popular theology; and many modern preachers who are in the main evangelical, but do not yet fully comprehend “the perfect law of liberty,” would do well to clear their mental vision with eye-salve gathered from the discourses of those masters in Israel.
And there was another benefit which his preaching derived from the same cause. It enabled him to speak on his great themes with all the immovable confidence of deep conviction, as one who “testified what he had seen.” Has not much modern preaching been addressed in answer to the metaphysical questionings of the speculative, rather than to the honest difficulties and perplexities of the guilt-burdened and the conscience-stricken? We have too often preached as if we only half believed, or as if we knew that some ingenious doubter was standing at our side. And there are occasions, doubtless, when this class of men are to be grappled with by the preacher. But when this becomes our custom, we set our Christianity too much on its defence, and forget that the gospel, in its divine adaptations to our moral nature, carries with it to the sinner’s bosom much of its own evidence, and warrants in our common ministry a more direct and authoritative method of appeal.
6.
Were we specifying, in addition to these personal qualities of the preacher, incidental circumstances that helped his influence, we should mention the remarkable popularity of his “Gospel Sonnets,” especially among the Scottish peasantry of his own age. Ralph Erskine was an early versifier, and though, in common with all others who have made the attempt, he failed in a metrical version of the Psalms; “the harp of David,” as has been finely said, “disdaining the touch of any hand less skilful than his own,” he won for himself a most valuable influence by his Sonnets. They are the rich “Marrow Divinity” versified, retaining much of the paradoxical form in which the Marrow divines delighted to express their doctrines, and though to the more refined taste of our own age they occasionally sound rude and inharmonious, yet, like the cocoanut when the rugged shell is broken, there is found within not a little of “the sincere milk of the word.”
7.
Nor must we overlook the circumstance that Ralph Erskine and his evangelical associates were not called to preach to a people who, in Baxter’s strong and significant phrase, were “gospel-hardened.” In contrast with the Moderatism which prevailed in many of the parishes of Scotland, their preaching came to thousands with much of the freshness of a new thing. Men came shivering forth from the ice-houses of the negative theology of those times, glad to sun themselves in the warm beams of evangelical truth. And these historical circumstances must be held as accounting in part for the minute subdivisions in the discourses of those preachers, which mar so much the flow of their eloquence as presented in their printed works. No doubt, this was in part an evil habit, which had been inherited from the Puritans; but it should be remembered that it was only at distant intervals that multitudes had opportunities of hearing the gospel preached at all, and those numerous “particulars” were used as valuable helps to memory—all the more needed when the sand-glass was sometimes more than once turned ere the preacher had closed.
But reverting now to the more personal explanations of Ralph Erskine’s success as a minister of Christ, our remarks will have gained their end if they have revealed to some the secret of their own comparative failure. Is not much modern preparation for the pulpit too simply intellectual, a performance of the weekly task, rather than a joyous and prayerful toil with the hope of saving souls? Has there not been with some a kind of eclipse of faith, a diminished confidence in the doctrine of the cross, as if its “eye had become dim and its natural force abated?” Has the preacher’s heart been commonly in sympathy with his message? has he magnified his office and gloried in his theme with the feeling that to treat this faithfully was the great work of his life? And as he has become older in his ministry, has his own heart, taught by the divine Spirit, interpreted to him many an otherwise dark text, and shown him “how the secret of the Lord is with them that fear Him?” It should be remembered that unbelief or little faith is usually conjoined with little success, and that, in moral as well as in outward miracles, the law often operates, “According to your faith, so is it unto you.” A ministry like Ralph Erskine’s, pursued in his spirit and with his ardent desire and devotedness, would attract the heavenly showers and benedictions, and the cry would not long ascend in vain, “Awake, as in the ancient days, as in the generations of old.”