day, Thomas Fuller tells us, the Temple pulpit preached pure Canterbury in the morning and pure Geneva in the afternoon. And you will get the highest Calvinism off the last card in one pulpit, and the strictest and most urgent morality off the same card in another; but never, if the devil can help it, never both in one and the same pulpit; never both in one and the same sermon; and never both in one and the same minister. You have all heard of the difficulty the voyager had in steering between Scylla and Charybdis in the Latin adage. Well, the true preacher's difficulty is just like that. Indeed, it is beyond the wit of man, and it takes all the wit of God, aright to unite the doctrine of our utter inability with the companion doctrine of our strict responsibility; free grace with a full reward; the cross of Christ once for all, with the saint's continual crucifixion; the Saviour's blood with the sinner's; and atonement with attainment; in short, salvation without works with no salvation without works. Deft steersman as the devil is, he never yet took his ship clear through those Charybdic passages.
One thing there is that I must have preached continually in all my pulpits and expounded and illustrated and enforced in all my lectureships, said Emmanuel, and that is, my new example and my new law of motive. My own motives always made me in all I said and did to be well-pleasing in My Father's eyes, and at any cost I must have preachers and lecturers set up in Mansoul who shall assist Me in ****** Mansoul as well-pleasing in My Father's sight as I was Myself.
'For I am ware it is the seed of act God holds appraising in His hollow palm, Not act grown great thence as the world believes, Leafage and branchage vulgar eyes admire.'
Motives! gnashed Diabolus. And he tore his last card into a thousand shreds and cast the shreds under his feet in his rage and exasperation. Motives! New motives! Truly Thou art the threatened Seed of the woman! Truly Thou art the threatened Son of God!--Let all our preachers, then, preach much on motive to their people. The commonplace crowd of their people will not all like that preaching any more than Diabolus did; but their best people will all afterwards rise up in their salvation and bless them for it. On reformation also, let them every Sabbath preach, but only on the reformation that rises out of a reformed motive, and that again out of a reformed heart. And if a reformed motive, a reformed heart, and a reformed life are found both by preacher and hearer to be impossible; if all that only brings out the hopelessness of their salvation by reason of the guilt and the pollution and power of sin; then all that will only be to them that same ever deeper entering of the law into their hearts which led Paul to an ever deeper faith and trust in Jesus Christ. With a guilt, and a pollution, and a slavery to sin like ours, salvation from sin would be absolutely impossible. Absolutely impossible, that is, but for our Saviour, Jesus Christ. But with His atoning blood and His Holy Spirit all things are possible--even our salvation.
Let us choose, then, a minister like Mr. John Menzies. Let us read the great books that make salvation difficult. Let us work out our own salvation, day and night, with fear and trembling, and when Wisdom is justified in her children, we shall be found justified among them. We shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment, and made perfectly blessed in the full enjoying of God to all eternity.
