REASON AND EMOTION
If we do not feel strongly about our message, we shall make very bad preachers. If something of our emotion does not appear in what we have to say, we may provoke neither hatred nor enthusiasm, but we are unlikely to bring conviction. Our " lectures " should partake more of the burning utterances of Jesus and the Apostles, than of the calm and detached analyses of the schoolroom. We ought not to be able to speak of the sin of the world without disapproval and distress; of the hypocrisy of confirmed enemies of the Word (such as the Pharisees of Jesus's day) without repugnance; of the stedfastness of Paul without admiration; or the love of God in the work of Jesus without (at the least) appreciation and a sense of debt; of the Kingdom in which righteousness will reign without desire. Our message should be so earnest, so intimate in its appeal to those who listen, that our words cannot fail to convey what we feel. In this we are in good company, and we have only to compare the words Jesus did use in his preaching, with the ones he might have used had he been concerned to cultivate scientific detachment, to see how inevitable it is. Thus:

THE PLEA
" O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate . . . Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."44

THE STATEMENT
Jerusalem, notwithstanding your reputation for maltreating those who try to teach you, I have attempted often to bring you to agree with me, but I have failed. You will have cause to regret this. You will not see me again from now on until you come to recognise the truth of what I have said to you.

THE PLEA
" Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls."45

THE STATEMENT
Those of you who are in trouble should come to me. If then you follow the example of humility I set before you, you will find the effort well within your power.

We must speak with feeling, and we must speak to the people we address. Let there be fewer general remarks about " mankind being mortal," " the human race being sinful," " God's purpose with the earth and man upon it," and more powerful calls to each one who labours and is heavy laden, addressed personally to him, more pressing messages of personal sin and death, and the hope of personal reconciliation and life, addressed in our words to those persons there present, so that each of them feels himself to be concerned.

We must speak with feeling, but we need to keep watch upon ourselves. To speak acceptably with feeling, we must really feel. Worse, perhaps, than the detachment of the mere lecturer, is the insincere synthetic emotion which is pumped from a shallow mind. There are sober men and women who shy at the word " evangelical " from its evil association with the frenzied utterances of certain " evangelical " preachers, and the name Jesus has been sullied by the repulsive fluency with which it is uttered in empty adoration from foaming lips. We will therefore never manufacture feeling which we do not possess. Another warning is needed too. It is possible for the servant of the Lord to attain to a depth of realization of the glory of his calling, approaching that which was the experience of Paul46, which is his alone. That feeling is for him infinitely precious, but as evidence to others it has no value at all. Those who share it dare not boast of it, and those who do not cannot understand. " Religious experience," so freely used in evidence by those who lack any other, has no evidential value at all, and the Apostle Paul, who could speak to his brethren of the love of God which passeth knowledge, spoke to the world of facts.

One more caution is needed. When we preach, it may not always be either possible or necessary to prove all that we assert. In a lecture on Baptism we need not prove that Jesus will return to the earth, though we can very properly say so; in one on the Return of Jesus we may well wish to insist that it holds out hope only to those who have been baptized, without then shouldering the burden of providing the proof. It may even happen that a whole lecture is devoted to developing a theme which is not positively proved at all, though it is given throughout in its scriptural setting47 in order to insist upon its importance rather than its basis. Indeed, much of our public preaching must consist, not in laborious establishment of everything we say, but in commanding attention to its import.

This being so, we must sacredly observe this obligation: whatever we assert, we must know to be true. If we omit the proof, it must never be because we have no proof, nor because we do not know it. When we mount the platform, Reason must go with us, and Truth within; when we open our lips to speak, Truth must speak through them, and Reason must hold our hand.

We must have power of indignation and anger. Yet our indignation must never degenerate into bombast, nor our anger into malice, and if we denounce, we will be sure to do justice to what we condemn. We may speak a hard truth if we have the proof, but sneers, dark hints and insinuations must be shunned. If we find it necessary, for example, to contrast the faith and practice of the early church, in all its simplicity, with the pomp and complexity and compromise of established apostasy, we will not embellish this with slighting and irrelevant allusions to the salaries of Archbishops or the " holy tones " of officiating ministers. If we must question the beliefs of others-as sometimes we must-we can usually well do without impugning the sincerity of those who hold them, which does not concern us, and of which we have frequently no evidence. To do so is not likely to further our cause.

Jesus, who knows men's hearts, could both denounce the practice and condemn the men. As we preach the gospel, we may clear our path of the obstacles of the former, but leave to Jesus still the burden of the latter.