Bible Commentaries

Chapter24

The Necessity of Judgment—Sowing and Reaping—Censoriousness Is the Beam—the Dogs and Swine of Society—the Mockery of Love

Prayer

Almighty God, we know that thy word is truth, and that the entrance in of thy word doth give light to every heart. There is no light without thy word, nor is there any truth. We humbly pray thee to send upon us the glory of thy Matthew 7:1-6

1. Judge not, that ye be not judged.

2. For with what judgment ye Matthew 7:6. "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast your pearls before the swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." Now here is the spirit of judgment; how am I to know which is the dog, how am I to know how to classify those who are no better than swine—is not this the very spirit that has been condemned? No, we are not now talking about men who belong to the same universe. We have been speaking, or hearing Christ speak, rather, about brother's treatment of brother; we are now hearing him speak about the treatment of those who neither understand nor appreciate our heart's best life. The word brother now drops out of the criticism and other words are imported into the consideration of the case. Jesus Christ when he went before Herod would not give that which was holy unto the dogs, neither would he cast his pearls before swine. You must speak your deepest thinkings to the ear of sympathy, you must find out who has the spirit of communion with your spirit, when you come, to utter the profoundest feelings and highest aspirations of your heart. Speak not in the ears of a fool; for he will despise the wisdom of thy words. Reprove not a scorner lest he hate thee, rebuke a wise man and he will love thee.

You know what it is to be in want of sympathy. You have a great grief, and you say, "To whom can I tell this?" If I tell it, to one, I get it all back again, as if I had spoken to a rock; if I tell it to another kind of heart, why the very telling of it seems to be a kind of evaporation by which my oppressed spirit is relieved. Do not speak the deepest secrets of your soul to those who have never been in the same mental or spiritual condition: they will think you erratic, romantic, eccentric—they will pity you: when they go away from hearing your tale they will intimate that your mind is a little unsettled, and that they have their fears about you. They do not understand the graphic language of your tragic experience, they have never been in the same darkness, never fought the same battle, never drunk of the same bitter cup; therefore, when you come near them, speak not: silence is better than speech in such society—give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you, and you hear that your most sacred feelings have been travestied and your most solemn words have been mocked.

We have all had experience of this kind, it may be, in some degree: we have told what we thought was a friendly heart some bitter thing that was troubling us very much, and it has actually come back to us in the form of a falsehood, that has turned again and rent us. Hast thou a friend? Treat him as such, bind him to thine heart with hooks of steel, tell him everything: he will divide thy burdens, he will double thy joys. Beware of the unsympathetic ear, beware of the unsympathetic heart: thou wilt get nothing from those but trampling and rending.

Now some may say, having heard this preaching of Jesus Christ, "Where is the gospel? There is not a word of gospel in all the sermon which Jesus Christ has preached to us this morning. There is nothing evangelic, there is nothing doctrinally savoury, there is no old wine of blood. Seneca might have said this, it might have been written in old Latin." You think so? You try to carry out the injunction of the text, and ere you have gone two steps in the direction of its accomplishment you will want Christ and the cross, and the blood and the Holy Ghost, for this is the last and chiefest of the divine directions.

This teaching, some may say, is purely negative; it is telling us what not to do. You try to realize the doctrine and you will see how far it is merely negative. If you sit within the narrowness of the letter you may call it a negative kind of teaching, but if you try to carry it out in your life, if you never more have to slander a Matthew 7:7-12

7. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:

8. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

9 Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?

10. Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent?

11. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?

12. Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

Matthew 7:13-14

13. Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat14. Because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

This is rather a mournful view, not only of human life, but of the kingdom of heaven itself; as if it would be thinly populated, and give us at last rather a representation of infinite failure on the one side than of red success and completeness on the other. That, however, would be a wrong exposition of the text. There is more light in it than seems to flash upon the eye at the first look. There is really nothing novel or unintelligible in the principle which is here laid down, namely, that, because strait is the gate and narrow is the way, few there be that find it. We know that to be a true principle in the common walks and ranges of life. It is the principle which applies at home, in the school, in the marketplace, everywhere in fact; the principle, that Matthew 7:15-29

15. Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

16. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

17. Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.

18. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit.

19. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.

20. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

22. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not phrophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

23. And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me ye that work iniquity.

24. Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise Mark 7:16

This is a common expression in the Scriptures. "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." The text says, "If any man have ears." All men have ears, but that is not the meaning of this particular text. He must not only have ears, he must have ears to hear, ears that can hear, and that do hear. It is not enough to have the sense of hearing, it must be put into exercise, and it must be kept at the highest point of attention. Many persons have ears who never hear anything worth hearing. You cannot hear unless you listen. If you were in earnest you would listen—are you? Do not leave all the work upon the preacher: meet him half-way, give him your attention, and he cannot fail; his message is such as to protect him from failure, but he cannot do many mighty works among you if you shut the door of your ear. Take a thousand men listening to a sermon; probably not one in ten hears the sermon as the preacher meant it to be heard. Every man hears a voice, a sound, a noise—he hears one sentence following another; but that inner music which seeks the soul in its loneliness, to heal it with the love and hope of God, who hears in its ineffable meaning and its sweet benediction! Nor is this much to be wondered at. Consider how the ear has been treated all the week. Do not condemn the ear unheard. Let it plead its own cause, and it will mitigate the harshness of our judgment. "All the week long," says the ear, "I have heard nothing throughout the day but the clang of money, the tumult of bargaining, the uproar of commerce, the clamour of selfish controversy; and at night I have heard nothing but gossip, and twaddle, and childish remarks on childish topics—I cannot easily liberate myself from these degradations, and listen to words most ghostly and to gospels that seem to come from other worlds. Have patience with me, for I need awakening first out of an entangled and troubled dream." Verily there is sense in that fair speech; then it should have due weight. But the sense of the speech imposes a corresponding responsibility upon the speaker. We should prepare ourselves to hear the Divine voice. The reader of an immortal play asks, and asks in reason, that the audience should be seated ten minutes before the reading begins. It is a sensible stipulation. Shall I be unjust if I ask that my friends should be an hour with God before coming to hear the public proclamation of his word? Is it decent that we should wait on Shakespeare and leave the Eternal to wait on us? The ear should have a little prayer all its own. I will teach it one: "Lord, still the waves that are heaving and foaming in me, or I shall miss all that is tenderest in the music of thy voice. Quiet the mean noises which fill me with a worldly din, and let me hear the words, every one of them, which will bless the life. Circumcise me: yea, put thy sharp knife upon me, thou God of the circumcision, and make me hear. Then speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." There would be no poor sermons if we came thus; we should be all ATTENTION. As a matter of fact, how does the case stand? What was the last word you spoke at the door? Some mean word about the cold wind, some poor little narrow word of criticism upon a neighbour's reputation, some childish remark upon a puerile topic, chaffer and chatter, and hollowness, and nothing, and then rushing in you sing, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts." It cannot be done; such miracles are beyond your power. Can you be draggling your wings in the mud this moment, and in the flash of an eye spreading them out in the sun? Then say not that the age of miracles is past! I cannot do it. I must have time. I must think and pray, and then the banquet is always more than enough, abundant to redundance, the lavish generosity of God!

That I am not speaking unjustly of the ear, I may refer to your own proverb, "Believe nothing you hear." Why? Because you do not hear it. The first man did not hear it: he twisted it; in passing through his corkscrew hearing, the straight line got a twist, and he never can straighten it out. So it has come down to him a marvellous story, a wondrous narrative of self-contradiction, utter and palpable absurdity. Then men say, "I thought he said so and so; I understood him to mean thus and thus; O, I beg pardon, I did not catch then what he said." And out of such foul springs do the streams of conversation rise, carrying their mud with them all through the acreage of our social economy. Thus we tell lies without lying; we are carriers of falsehood, though we never mean to be untrue. How is this? Because we do not hear. The ear is preoccupied; invisible speakers are addressing it, lovers unseen are soliciting its attention, or it is asleep or on a journey, or under a spell. Hardly a man in this congregation can listen. It takes a Judge to listen. How the Judges do listen! We are buying and selling all the time the man is preaching; yea, we are doing a little business in the middle of his prayer! To listen—who can do it? God knew this, and therefore again and again he says, "He that hath an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches." "If any man have ears to hear, let him hear." Who would attempt to deliver a message to a man asleep, or propose to speak to a man a mile off? There are men in this house who are just now three thousand miles away!

Many a message has been lost because the speaker has not first roused the attention of his hearers. There is a man standing a little averted from you—his back is partly towards you—he is engaged in doing something, and you say, "Bring me three volumes of the "Family Magazine," John." He hears his own name at last, and says, "Sir?" Poor rhetorician thou! That was beginning at the wrong end. You should have said, "JOHN! Bring me three volumes of the "Family Magazine" out of the library." "Yes, sir." See? Is that in the Bible? Every word of it—as to purpose and philosophy. How does God speak? First, attention. "Moses, Moses," and he said, "Here am I." "Samuel, Samuel." "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." "O earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord." There is a science herein; study it, speaker and hearer.

The first thing to be done is to compel the ear to listen for the right thing. When I enter the house of God, it is to hear the word of God. If I went to hear a professional elocutionist I should go to judge of the balance of his voice; I should look out for the colouring of his tones; I should measure the velocity and the weight of his articulation; I should make an elocutionary study of the man. But in going to hear God's preacher, I go to hear God's word, how I may be saved, redeemed, purified, and fitted for Divine uses in this world. I want to hear how I may get home again after many weary wanderings in stony places; I want to hear what Christ said about sin, and pain, and woe, and want, and pardon; I want to hear about those who have gone up, who cares for them, what do they, how near are they; I want to hear about the secret place where the light is pure and the rest is without shock, or pain, or dream. My soul being alive with expectation and aflame with hope, God will not disappoint it, or he will expunge from his own book the sweet promise "Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled."

It is said that the manner of the speaker has a good deal to do with the attention of the hearer. That is true, but an earnest hearer will care very little about the manner if he is deeply interested in the matter itself. Just look at that company of men, and listen to that person with a long paper standing at the head of the table. He seems to have chronic bronchitis. How he chammers his words, how hoarsely he utters his sentences, how poor his enunciation! he calls a bush a bash, and a foot a fut. Listen to him and see how the people are all on the qui vive. What is the matter? He is reading a WILL, and every man in the company expects to get something. How choice they are about the elocution! They say to one another, "Rather a bad manner, don"t you think? His manner is much against him, don"t you think?" No, no. "What is there for me? and how much for me?" and they would go twenty times a day to hear that wheezy, asthmatic, non-elocutionist read a WILL, if they had any hope of getting anything out of it. Now I have a will; hear it:—"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." That is your portion. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." That is yours. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." Claim your inheritance and enjoy it! "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." Take it all. Have you heard the will? Claim your property!

You say that manner has a good deal to do with speaking. So it has. Let me remind you that manner has a good deal to do with hearing. Our Saviour is reported in the Gospel of Luke to have said, "Take heed, therefore, how ye hear." There is an art of hearing; attention is not without a science of its own. Hear for eternity, hear for your soul's good. Do you want to hear the gospel now? Then you shall. "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." You hear that? "The blood of Jesus Christ, God's Matthew 7:24-29

24. Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them I will liken him unto a wise Matthew 7:28

In what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ's preaching was shown to be profoundly doctrinal. There is many a figure here and there—the figures being points of gold that glitter in the infinite mass of rock, the rock being the doctrine which is expounded with so marvellous and astounding an authority. Yet there is hardly any hint of the parable of which Jesus Christ was to make such copious use in his after-ministry, until we come, indeed, to the closing sentences, and there, in the image of the two builders and the two foundations, we have a hint of the more vivid and popular method of teaching which was coming. In this sermon Jesus Christ was profoundly and vitally doctrinal. In his opening discourse he was pre-eminently the WORD. Hence the deep thinking, the benedictions that seem to come up from eternity, and the whole doctrine of the individual inspiration of character, until we reach the very holiness and perfection of God. This is, indeed, the very mystery of the Logos, the Word, the ineffable and infinite thought. This is the divine meaning, incarnated in plain human words. In this discourse we are quite out of the region of finite speculation; here are no happy guesses, no striking suggestions which startle the speaker quite as much as they startle the hearer. We have here the deep things of God, spoken with an unction which makes the very hearing of them the most solemn responsibility we ever incurred. To have heard some sermons is to have laid up wrath against the day of wrath, or to have added to the joy of the day of supreme gladness. It were better for us that we had not heard some sermons—our life was never the same after the hearing.

Now the servant must herein be as the Master, according to the measure and degree of his capacity. His speech must be, above all things, religious. Not religious because of surrounding circumstances, as, for example, the Sabbath, the sanctuary, the pulpit—but in itself, its origin, its tone, its meaning, it must be profoundly religious, it must be from above. It must not be literary, clever, piquant, or anything else that is of the quality and limitation of art. It must come with all the sacredness of a divine origin, bringing with it the living air of the upper world, and bearing the thought of the hearer upward to the holy elevation and sympathy which come of the presence of God. The danger is, and the people make that danger greater every day, that preaching be mere literature, made peculiar by a religious accent. The danger is that preaching becomes one of many things all standing upon a level, and if it should become so, the hearer will be to blame quite as much as the speaker. The preacher must be like no other man. Every other speaker you may be able to measure and estimate; you know where he begins and where he ends, and you can weigh out his merit in scales, and announce his stature in inches; but the preacher must be a weird man, without beginning of days, without father or mother, a secret, a mystery, a voice, a flash of light, a revelation, a burning bush, and the great question must always be: Whence hath he this? It is not in the lockers of the rich man, it is not in the treasures of the literary student—Whence this wisdom? And the answer must be, God-begotten, Heaven-born, its roots deep in the rock and its pinnacles flashing beyond the stars!

If preaching can be traced back to a school, a teacher, a custom, it is shallow and barren. It must come from eternity, from the invisible God, being at once so simple as to excite the interest and curiosity of little children and so profound as to abash the wise. The first thing, therefore, the preacher has to do is to renounce himself. He must not limit himself to his own little power of invention and expression; he must not dig wells in the sand of his own cleverness, or they who drink thereof will thirst again. He is a messenger: he must deliver God's message. If he do not deliver God's message, blame the hearer. The congregation creates the pulpit. The earnest hearer comes to hear God's word, but how many earnest hearers are there in any assembly? If I had one man here, and he wanted to hear God's word, I dare not speak my own. But I have a thousand men here who want to hear my word and not God's. If a soul were here affrighted by its own sin, asking me, with eye and voice and trembling fame, to reveal the Gospel, I dare not keep back any part of it. But you are not here for that purpose—I speak of the multitude, not of the individual here and there whose object it may be, indeed is, to hear what God the Lord will say.

But if a sermon be charged with God's messages, will it be dull and heavy? Look at the Sermon on the Mount for answer. What variety, what penetration, what liveliness, what startling application and appeal! How restful the benedictions, quieting the soul, soothing all fear, encouraging all goodness, and watering the very roots of life from the river of God! Now the great Teacher must be figurative. He has not begun the great parabolical fancy and use yet. Still I see the beginnings of it in that very initial discourse. He cannot be dull. He says, Ye are the light of the world, ye are the salt of the earth, ye are a city set on a hill." Then he tells about the candle and the candlestick, and the bushel, and then he tells about the beam in one man's eye and the mote in another"s, and then he winds up with the two hearers, the two foundations, the two houses, and the two destinies. A wonderful sermon, and yet so doctrinal. It is not dry doctrine, but doctrine vitalised, illumined, glittering all over with diamonds of the first water. How solemn the lessons to the lustful, the angry heart, the violent tongue, the anxious spirit; what a review of the past, what an outlook upon the future? Verily this is not a sermon in our sense of the term. You might describe it by great figures, call it the very Ganges of truth, illustration, philosophy, moral teaching, and appeal; call it a sky which seems to have been built to cover our little world, and yet which encloses within itself unnumbered millions of planets.

Was the sermon, then, dull and heavy? It was an infinite beginning. That is the marked peculiarity of Christ's preaching; it never ended. Persons sometimes said, "What, is he done?" What did that curious question arise from? Not from the abruptness of the speaker, but from the infinitude and immeasurableness of his message. Others can round off their discourses: from the pipe of their wit they can mould and sphere the soap-bubbles of their cleverness, and let them float on the air—done! But the speaker of infinite secrets and infinite gospels, conclude as he may, can never be done. There may be a comma, a semi-colon, and even a colon, in this high mystic literature, but the period is never wanted, for the conclusion is never accomplished.

Yes, this sermon on the mount is emphatically the WORD—the Word made flesh and dwelling among us, the Word showing itself in our mean syllables, illuminating but not consuming them. It took all that time to get the speech of the world ready to receive the gospel, even in the degree in which it was preached in the Sermon on the Mount You cannot tell how much time is required, or would be required, if you yourself had everything to do in order to enable you to accomplish the simplest act in civilisation. O, ingrates are we, and most thoughtless inheritors of inheritances all but infinite! If you had to do everything for yourself in the simplest act of civilisation, it would be seventy years before you could dine. It would be a hundred years and more before you could travel from one capital to another. But to-day we take all these things as a right. We grumble at the roads, of course; poor fool, dost thou know it, that if thou hadst to make a road it would take thee twenty years to get from here to thy mother's house? It took a thousand years to get human speech ready to take in the gospel and utter it in poor broken syllables. For God's difficulty is our language. He cannot tell us what he means because the dewdrop is not big enough to hold the sun. So we have suggestion and hint and flash of light and sudden large glimpse, as we suppose it to be, of things divine. But our human speech is an inn too small for the birth of God into our human imagination and individual grasp of thought.

Jesus Christ had something distinct and definite to say to mankind. He was not one teacher amongst many How often shall I insist that the preacher is not one amongst many, yet the foolish virgins and more foolish men will compare the preacher with the lecturer. The preacher has nothing to say to you; the lecturer lives on his own vitals, spins his own cleverness, and works marvellous jugglery with his own ability, and eloquence, and wit, and fancy and fun. It is beautiful, and instructive, and useful. But the preacher plucks no word from his own tree. What am I—a lecturer? A man with so many yards of foolscap on which he writes beautiful sentences and telling stories? Have I fallen to that? The minister is an errand-bearer; he has to tell what he has been told. Do not find fault with him; you want to hear something else; he has nothing else to tell. How I could please you sometimes if I were in tolerably good health, if you would allow me to talk my own nonsense; it would be easy to gratify you then. I would weave coloured clouds around you, and call those coloured clouds sermons. I would salute your ears with witty stories, I would mock you with intellectual taunt, and I would speak severe things to the man in the next pew, and you would be so delighted! But I dare not put in a single word of my own without initialing it. Ah, me! if the manuscript is initialed all over, it is not God's sermon, but mine. Paul once or twice ventured to say something, and he always initialed it, put a large and most legible P under it—said, "I speak this of myself." He need not have said so. We knew it to be so at once; the discrepancy was infinite. Still, conscientious man as he was, he put down a very large P against his own suggestions, and it was as well he did so, for they are most impracticable.

When Christ's sermon was done the criticism passed upon it was, "Not as the scribes." That is the criticism with which every sermon should be listened to, not as the speculatists, not as the guessers, not as the lecturers, not as the inquirers, not as the gropers—but with authority, with all the momentum of an eternal and infinite impulse. How can a finite creature give such an impulse? He cannot: this is the gift of God, and always goes along with the word of God. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. Search the Scriptures. Preach the preaching that I bid thee, and let the hearers come to hear God's word and they will assuredly receive it.

The Sermon on the Mount is emphatically what is termed a dogmatic discourse, that is to say, it was positive, definite, practical, final. It was not a paper read before a religious debating society, for the purpose of eliciting opinions—that is the idea of a modern sermon, and therefore we say when we get away from church, "Aye, aye, it is all very well, you know, for him to be standing up there and having it all his own way." Indeed! If he has it all his own way he is an unfaithful servant. A sermon is not a paper read before a number of equals for the purpose of the reader's saying afterwards, "Now, my fellows, men of equal understanding will you be kind enough to tell me what you think of all this?" If it admits of an appeal of that kind, it is not a sermon, it is a lecture out of the lecturer's own brain. If it is the word of God, pure, simple, unadulterated, absolute, that is to say, if it is quoted from the Book which we, by the very fact of our assembling here, accept as God's Book, then the preacher has it not all his own way; he is an errand-bearer, he is a deliverer of holy messages, and the messages are not to be measured by his personality, but by the degree in which they can be substantiated from the volume which he is set up to open and expound.

I do not wonder at this word dogmatic falling into a bad reputation. I do not like the word myself. In itself it is an innocent word. Turn it into Greek, turn it into Latin, beat it into English, it is still an honest, a pure word, in itself; but it has been made such bad use of that I do not wonder that people should avoid it. I do not suppose that you would be very fond of using a rope in which somebody has been hung. This word dogmatic is therefore a word which has in some relations a bad or an unwelcome meaning. So is the word casuistry a very innocent word in itself, and expressive of a very proper intellectual process, but it has been so badly used that I have begun to distrust and disown it. So is the word catholic a simple and beautiful word, but it has been tied up in such wrong relations that, like a rope which has hanged somebody, we feel as if it might hang us too if we did not take care of it. So have words been debased, prostituted, defiled, so that I do not wonder at many persons looking askance upon those words and avoiding dogmatic teaching, casuistical reasoning, and catholic divinity.

Looking upon this Sermon on the Mount as a model for preachers through all time, it justifies the preacher in laying down a definite doctrine. The preacher does not invite his hearers to talk over something with a view to a settlement, That of course would be very comfortable if we could meet here and lay our arms upon a table and say, "Now what do you think about it?" Well, it would be chatty, and nice, and sort of friendly, and almost convivial it might become. We do not assemble to make a Bible, but to read one. We are HEARERS: let that word be emphatic. Observe its limit, its meaning; we are hearers, we do not speak, we listen. We say, "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth." How far from this our congregational discipline! The very first word you would have said this morning, if I had not made this remark, would have been, the moment you got outside, "How did you like him this morning, eh?" How did you like him—poor hireling performer, poor miserable clerk of all work—how did you like him? What about the substance, the doctrine, the call, the appeal, the tears, the unction, the consequences? Ask how you like the electric light as compared with the poor half-drunken gas flame, but do not ask how you like the infinite, the complete, the divine, the eternal. Hear it—listen—the Lord is in his holy temple, let all the earth keep silence before him. To be a good hearer is to be a good learner. Hearing is an art of the soul, an accomplishment of the heart, Sir Isaac Newton said the only difference he knew between himself and others was that he seemed to be able to pay more attention than some of them. The power to pay attention is a gift from God. Some of us cannot pay attention. All the while we are making running commentaries in our mind, doing business, entertaining anxieties; we hear the word, we do not hear the music; we hear the syllables, we do not catch the meaning. To hear, a man should pray an hour before he comes into God's house.

Looking at this as a model sermon for all time, the preacher is justified in preaching practically. A mistake is often made about this matter of practical preaching. If a man denounce the iniquities of his day he is thought to be a practical preacher. To a certain extent he is entitled to that designation. If I were to denounce theatres (as usually understood), racecourses, public-houses, gambling tables, I should be thought to be a most practical preacher, and within a given limit—a very small one, albeit—I should be preaching practically and usefully. That work needs to be done, must be done. If it is not done, a very solemn duty remains undischarged. But he, too, is a practical preacher who encourages men to try to be better and to do better. He also is a practical preacher who says, "Young man, you failed there, but pluck up your spirits; try again; God bless you; try to do better next time." He also is a practical preacher who recognises the sufferings of those who come to God's house to hear his word. Sorrow is as great a fact as sin. There is not a heart here to-day that is not aching, or that will not ache by-and-by, or perhaps that has not already had days and nights of aching. I take you man for man, pew after pew, and the mourners outnumber those who have nothing but gladness. The preacher, therefore, is a practical preacher who recognises that fact, and speaks comfortably, who delivers healing gospels to broken hearts, who deals out bread to the hungry, and who gives the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. I often want to hear such a preacher myself, namely, the man who takes the high and bright view of things, who shows me that my pain is for my good, that my loss is the beginning of my riches, that all discipline and chastening, though for the present anything but joyous, yea, truly grievous, will afterwards yield me results that will make the soul nobler and tenderer.