would not care to sit under the preaching of a minister who lugged into every sermon something about what he saw when he was in Europe. Somebody said that he could stand seventy or eighty meals of hasty pudding, but he did not want it for a regular diet. Another element of effective preaching is earnestness. To be earnest one must be sincere; he must be intellectually honest, believing with all his heart what he preaches, and believing that it is vitally important for others to believe it. This begets enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, as one has said, does not necessarily foam at the mouth. It may be a quiet enthusiasm and yet very effective. Sincerity and enthusiasm make one earnest. It is a high compliment to our preaching when any one says: "He preaches as though he believed what he said." There may not often be tears in our eyes, but if we are in earnest, there will be genuine tears in the voice. Earnestness is necessary to effective preaching, because warning men of their danger is so important a factor in preaching. "Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at My mouth, and give them warning from Me. When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand" (Ezek. iii. 17, 18). Our warnings to men of danger to life or limb are not effective if they see that we are not earnest in tone and manner. college president was in an upper story of a city business block that was on fire. He heard someone below say, "Fire!" But it was so faint that he paid no attention to it. The slight delay cost him his life. Had the cry been a ringing one he would have heeded it. For three years Paul preached publicly and from house to house in Ephesus, and warned men, with tears, night and day. It is needless to say that such preaching was effective. A Earnestness is far better than faultlessness of style and delivery. There is a certain kind of faultlessness in preaching which is in itself a fault, and which is a great detriment to success. The want of true heart-earnestness is an awful fault, for which no other kind of faultlessness can atone. Earnestness covers a multitude of faults. Add the element of earnestness to a clear conception of the truth and there will be an effective delivery. It may not always be elegant, but effectiveness is better than elegance. "The God that answereth by fire, let Him be God," and, adds Spurgeon, The man who has the tongue of fire let him be God's minister." Says the same writer: "Be earnest and you will seem to be earnest." A burning heart will soon find for itself a flaming tongue." "We should be clad with zeal as with a cloak." "We ought to be all alive and always alive -a pillar of light and fire should be the preacher's fit emblem." 66 The last element of effective preaching that we mention is spirituality. This is closely related to earnestness and yet distinct from it. A person may be earnest without being very spiritual. Wicked men are sometimes am re tremendously in earnest. A business man said to the writer: "I an ligious but not spiritual." That is the trouble with many ministers and with much of our preaching. Such preaching is not apt to be effective. We are told to be spiritually minded; and every minister needs to obey that exhortation. But what is spiritual-mindedness? It is difficult to tell. There are some gems that have a color of wonderful beauty and richness which attracts attention at once. But it is very difficult for the chemist to lay his hand on the substance that gives the color and tell what it is. So it is difficult to define in precise terms that aroma of Christliness which is so marked in the preaching of the spiritually-minded minister, and which is so effective in commending the Gospel message. It is the quintessence of all the Christian graces, especially of the gentler ones. It is Christ shining through us, causing our faces to glow and our very words and tones to vibrate with His love. It may not lead us to pound the pulpit, or saw the air, or scream at the top of our voices, but there is power in it nevertheless, a power that goes to the heart, such power as there is in the gentle rain, the balmy wind, the life-giving sunshine. Preaching that is saturated with spirituality has a penetrating power, like some kinds of oil. It will often penetrate the hardest crust of indifference and worldliness. harsh asperities of the human heart, and disarm criticism, for no one feels like criticising the warm-hearted brotherly love which goes with it. It will soften the How shall we get this element of spirituality? By abiding with Christ. By saturating our sermons and the preparation of them with prayer. By isolating ourselves at times from the world and from worldly affairs, and becoming surcharged with the Divine electricity, filled with the Holy Ghost, so that when we come before the people that Divine power shall flow from us to them, and on its current carry the living truth to their hearts. There are other elements of effective preaching, but these are among the chief ones, and our preaching will be more effective than it is to the extent to which we make it more scriptural and illustrative, introducing more of the right kind of personal element, and by not seeming merely, but being, more earnest and more spiritual. Individuality, so much in demand now, is constantly becoming more difficult. The school, society, politics, socialism tend to repress individuality and peculiarity. Of Schliemann, Professor Virchow says: "It always fills us with admiration and joy if, in this era of the richest development of human activity the world has ever seen, persons succeed, by means of their own effort, in working their way through the masses, and at the same time fully retaining their peculiar individuality, and even developing it."-Stuckenberg. SERMONIC SECTION. THE DIVINITY IN HUMANITY.* BY LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D. [CONGREGA TIONAL], BROOKLYN, N. Y. Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods? If He called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken; say ye of Him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God.-John x. 34, 35, 36. THE context and argument is this: Jesus Christ has declared that He will give unto His sheep eternal life; and that no one can pluck them out of His hand, because He and His Father are one; and the Father who gives these sheep to His care and keeping is greater than all the forces that are leagued against them. Thereat the Jews took up stones to stone Him, saying, Being a man, Thou makest Thyself equal with God. And Christ answers with our text. He refers them back to the Old Testament, which, He says, declares of the judges of Israel, of the men to whom the inspiration of God came, that they are divine. “Why, then," He says, do you accuse Me of blasphemy because I claim divinity ?" It is impossible to consider this a mere play upon the word; that Christ uses the word God in one sense in one paragraph and in another sense in the paragraph immediately following. It is impossible to conceive that this is a kind of sacred pun. No, no; the argument is clear and unmistakable. According to your Old Testament scripture, He says, the men in whom and to whom and through whom the power and grace of God are manifested are themselves the partakers of the divine nature. If that is so, if the men of olden times, patriarchs and prophets, through whom the divine nature was manifested-if they are divine, do not accuse me of *Copied by permission from the Christian Union. blasphemy because I claim myself divinity. If in this passage, on the one hand, Christ claims kinship with God, on the other He lifts the whole of humanity up with Him and makes the same claim for them. The religion of the Old Testament and the New Testament, the religion of Christianity and of Judaism, is a religion of faith in God. But it is not less truly a religion of faith in man, and of faith in man because man is a child of God. And the one faith would be utterly useless without the other. For faith in God is effective because it is accompanied with faith in man as the child of God. And in this faith in man is the inspiration of all humn progress. Faith in man, I say. Faith sees something which the eye does not see. Faith sees something which the reason does not perceive. Faith is not irrational, but it perceives a transcendent truth, over beyond that which the sense perceives. Faith is always intermixed with hope and with a great, great expectation. Either with a hope because it sees something which is not yet but will be, or else with a hope because it sees something which is not yet seen but will be seen. Faith in man is not a belief that man is to-day a great, noble character, but it is a perception in man of dormant possibilities of greatness and nobility which time and God will develop. It is only the man that has faith in man who can really interpret man. It is faith in man that gives us all true human insight. The difference between a photograph and a portrait is this: The photograph gives the outward feature, and stops there and most of us, when we stand in a photograph saloon to have our picture taken, hide our soul away. The artist sees the soul behind the man, knows him, understands something of his nature, and paints the soul that looks out through the eyes. He sees in the man something which the sun does not exhibit, and makes that something shine on the canvas. The artist in lit erature sees an ideal humanity, and interprets it. Realism in literature does not portray the real man. Anthony Trollope pictures the Englishman as he is to-day, and society as any man may take it with a kodak; but Dickens gives us Toby Veck and Tiny Tim; George Eliot, Adam Bede and Dinah Morris. Men say that no such boy ever lived as MacDonald has portrayed in Sir Gibbie. In every street Arab is a possible Sir Gibbie; and MacDonald has seen the possible and shown us what Christianity may make out of the street Arab. In this perception of a possible in man lies the spirit of all progress in science. The mar of practical science laughs at the notion of an iron railway on which steam-cars shall travel faster than Eng. lish coaches. But the man of faith in men, who believes that it is in the power of men to dominate the powers of nature, builds the road. The man of practical science laughs at the notion that we can reach up our hand into the clouds and draw down the lightning. But Franklin does it. The man of faith is sometimes mistaken, but he is always experimenting, because he always believes that man to-morrow will be more than man is to-day or was yesterday. And all progress in civilization has its secret in this great faith in man as a being that has a mastery, not yet interpreted, not yet understood, not yet comprehended in its fulness, over all the powers of nature. Now, is there any ground or basis for this faith in man? Have we a right to believe that man is more than he seems to be, as we see him in the street to-day? Have we a right to build our institutions and our fabrics on this belief? Have we a right to think that man can govern himself, or must we go back and say with Carlyle and Ruskin and Voltaire that the great body of men are incompetent to govern themselves, and a few wise rulers must govern them? Have we a right to believe that all the progress that has thus far been made in science is but an augury of progress far greater, reaching into the illimitable? Have we a right to say that these portraits of a possible humanity, this Portia, this Toby Veck, this Tiny Tim, this ideal man and woman, are real men and real women in possibility, if not in the actualities of life? Or are we to think of them as simply phantasmagoria hung up for the delectation of a passing moment? The Bible makes answer to that question. The Bible pre-eminently, but the great poets and the great prophets of all religions. The Bible, because the poets and the prophets of the Bible transcend the poets and prophets of all other religions. And that declaration is that man is made in the image of God, and that God dwells in man and is coming to the manifestation of Himself in growing, developing, redeemed humanity. Our Bible starts out with the declaration that God made man in his own image. The poets take the idea up. MacDonald tells us, in that beautiful poem of his, that the babe came through the blue sky and got the blue of his eyes as he came; Wordsworth, that the child's imaginings are the recollected glory of a heavenly home; and the author of the first chapter of Genesis, that God breathed His own breath into the nostrils of man and made him in the image of God. All fancy, all imaginings. But, my dear friends, there is a truth in fancy as well as in science. We need not believe that this aspiration that shows itself in the pure mind of a little child is a trailing glory that he has brought with him from some pre-existent state. We need not think it is a physiological fact that the sky colored the eyes of the babe as the babe came through. Nor need we suppose that historically man was a clay image into which God breathed a physical breath, so animating him. But beyond all this imagery is the vision of the poet-God in man; a divine life throbbing in humanity; man the offspring of God; man coming forth from the eternal and going forth into the eternal. This is the starting-point of the Bible. Starting with this, it goes on with dec laration after declaration based on this fundamental doctrine, that man and God in their essential moral attributes have the same nature. It is human experience which is used to interpret divine experience. According to pagan thought, God speaks to men through movements of the stars, through all external phenomena, through even the entrails of animals. Seldom so in the Bible, save as when the wise men followed the star, and then that they might come to a divine humanity. In the Old Testament God speaks in human experience, through human experience, about human experience, to typify and interpret and explain Himself. God is like a shepherd that shepLards his flock. God is like a king that rules in justice. He is like the father that provides for his children. He is like the mother that comforts the weeping child. All the experiences of humanity are taken in turn and attributed to God. The hopes, the fears, the sorrows, the joys, the very things which we call faults in men-so strong and courageous are the old prophets in this fundamental faith of theirs that man and God are alike--the very things we call faults in men are attributed to the Almighty. He is declared to hate, to be wrathful, to be angry, to be jealous; because, at the root, every fault is a virtue set amiss; and the very faults of men have in them something that interprets the power and will of God, as the very faults of a boy interpret the virtues of his father. All through the Old Testament God manifests Himself through human experience. He speaks in the hearts of men; He dwells in the experience of men; He interprets Himself through the life of men; and, finally, when this one selected nation which has a genius for spiritual truth has been so far educated that there is no danger that it will go back and worship man, that it will become a mere heroworshipper, when it has been so far educated that there is no danger of that, then Jesus Christ comes into the world -God manifest in human life. And Who, then, is Jesus Christ? Let John tell us. The Oriental world was puzzled about the question of the origin of evil. They said, in brief, a good God cannot make a bad world. Out of a good God, therefore, there have emanated other gods, and out of these gods still other gods, until at last there came to be imperfect gods or bad gods. the world was made, some of them said, partly by a good god and partly by a bad one; and others, by an imperfect god who was an emanation of the perfect one. Of these emanations one was Life, another was Light, another was the Word. And John, writing in the age of Oriental philosophy, uses the phrase ology of Oriental philosophy in order that he might tell mankind who and what Jesus Christ is. "In the begin ning was the Word, and the Word was God." God never was an abstraction; from the very beginning He was a speak. ing God, a living God, a manifesting God, a forth-putting God. "The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. And this Word became flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth." Let me put that into mod. ern language. What is it but this f From eternity God has been a manifesting God. When the fulness of time came, God, that He might manifest Himself to His children, came into a human life and dwelt in a human life. He that had spoken here through one prophet, there through another prophet; He that had sent one message in this direction and another in that; He that had spoken through signs and tokens as the author of the Epistle to the He brews says, in divers manners and in fragmentary utterances-when the ful ness of time had come, He spoke in one perfect human life, taking entire pos session of it and making it His own, that He might manifest Himself in terms of human experience to humanity. Or turn to Paul and let me read you hi |