Psychic power in preaching

Contents

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In Memoriam vii

I. A Pulpit of Power the Need oe the Times . . i

Chapter I

OF the Italian Renaissance, no figure, not even that of Lorenzo the Magnificent, looms up so commandingly as that of Savonarola, the preaching friar. He stands there in the pulpit of the vast Cathedral of Florence, a city brilliant with art and luxury, and full of social corruption, gorgeous religion and graceless living. He had been summoned there by the entreaties of the despairing Signoria and people, from the seclusion of his cell into which his disgust at the seeming failure of his gospel of reform had driven him. He came forth to preach to that vast multitude of starving, hopeless Florentines, besieged at once by powerful armies, pestilence and famine , suffering and desperation marking every face. To that miserable throng, lately his enemies, Savonarola spoke as an ambassador of God ; he won them to penitence, cheered them with promises of divine mercy, and lo ! while leading them in a procession of tearful humiliation through the streets, a messenger galloped into the midst proclaiming that 1 ' salvation had come ! ' ' Friendly ships, driven by a tempest which scattered the blockading fleet, had brought food and reinforcements. The surging multitudes cried out: "The friar's preaching has saved us once more ! ' ' Then followed those wonderful years in which the preacher successfully disputed with the Medicean despot the moral dominion of Florence ; I^orenzo clothed in luxurious unrighteousness — Savonarola armed with the scepter of truth and flaming zeal for God's honor and man's salvation. And when we see him at last summoned to Lorenzo's dying bed and ministering there in the spirit of Elijah, we say : ' ' There is a man of power — a man for the times ! ' ' He transformed Florence, at least for the time ; literally enthroned Christ as King in Florence, and inscribed his title, ' ' King of kings and I^ord of lords" over the door of the Palazzo Vecchio, where it still remains, a testimony of what once was done by a Pulpit of Power.

Four centuries have passed since then, but human nature has not changed. Freedom, law, intelligence have wrought vast revolutions in society such as in that day were only the dream of poets, and this morn of the Twentieth Century is pregnant with a new history, with mightier issues and higher political and social ethics than any that has preceded it, but no age more imperatively needed a Pulpit of Power — a Prophet voice proclaiming Him who, for man and the nation and the age, is ' ' The Way, the Truth and the Iyife." Are there not, now, social despotisms that need dethroning, a social life that needs purifying, a church that needs a Renaissance of primitive faith and sacrifice, revolutionary forces that need a controlling hand no less than Divine ? Are the School, the Press and the State proving their ability to deal with these perilous times and these transcendent issues? On the 400th anniversary of his martyrdom, Florence celebrated, with solemn pomp and festival of joy, the memory of Savonarola. Flowers strewed the place where the flames had swathed his dead body. From a stage where his gallows had stood in the Piazza Signoria eloquent lips eulogized him as preacher and patriot for all time. And the hope of Italy, the hope of America, the hope of humanity, to-day, is such a ministry of heroic daring and spiritual power.

Twenty years ago a smart writer in the London Times asked, " Why this preaching ? Why does this man talk to us ? Why not be content to worship only when we go to church ? ' ' About the same time, in a more serious vein, the Edinburgh Review said, ''Divinity fills up her weekly hour by the grave and gentle excitement of an orthodox discourse, or by toiling through her narrow round of systematic dogmas, or by creeping along some low level of school-boy morality, or by addressing the initiated in mystic phraseology ; but she has ceased to employ lips such as those of Chrysostom or Bourdaloue. ' ' And these utterances have had many an echo since, from sources of more or less importance. An English Church clergyman, a few years since, referring apparently to his own National Church, elaborately argued "The Failure of the Pulpit," and a New England religious periodical invited a symposium on the solemn problem, ' ' Shall we go on preaching ? ' ' These voices, which are quite representative of a class not altogether frivolous, cannot be silenced by indifference or apology. A radical and fearless reconsideration of the position and function of the preacher in this Twentieth Century — which is neither the apostolic nor the mediaeval — is demanded. It need not be feared but that it will appear, whether from a religious or philosophical, a socialistic or humanitarian, a patriotic or a practical, an ethical or an evangelical point of view, that the pulpit is neither obsolete nor obsolescent. The preacher is, and should continue to be, a paramount power in human society.

The pulpit no longer rules as it did when, allied with the State, it was the chief fountain of learning and authority ; when the preacher alone raised questions, ethical and social, and answered them, with none to dispute his verdict ; when the seminary where the minister was educated was the mystic treasury of most of the learning, and his library contained the rest.

To-day a continuous stream of information and discussion of all subjects, and in popular form, rolls through the land and finds its way to every door. The most vital questions affecting human life and destiny are affluently treated, not only in books, but upon every platform, in religious and in secular newspapers, side by side with politics and trade. Everybody knows everything now-a-days, or thinks he does, and the awe which the pulpit once inspired has disappeared. In saying, however, that the power of the pulpit as an institution has declined, we would by no means concede that the power of the preacher has gone with

A PULPIT OP POWER THE NEED OF THE TIMES. 5

it. On the contrary, as the peculiar awe which invested the office has lessened, the greater is the demand that the man himself, as a living force among men and called to a supreme function, should heroically attain and maintain a personal power unaided by the buttressing of the State or the mystic authority of the Church.

The highest and most enduring elements of power remain the same in all the mutations of the ages, and owe little to environment. They are at their best when called to conquer without the alliance of favoring conditions. If illustrations of this were needed, the career of that man who, in our generation, has divided with the world's greatest statesmen and princes the interested gaze of his cotemporaries — Charles Haddon Spurgeon — would be sufficient. Nay, the beneficent and acknowledged forcefulness of a Moody among the masses and a Phillips Brooks or a Maclaren among the cultured, would prove that this strenuous, conceited and materialistic age, not less than any former one, confesses the preacher's power. I go further ; I affirm that it is historically and rationally demonstrable that times of enlightenment and progress, like these, are more favorable to the preacher's power, more hospitable to it, more fruitful of the best results than any since the dawn of Christianity. In fact the preacher's power is as much nobler and more enduring than that of the Savonarolas or the John Knoxes of a former day, as that of the electrician, the biologist and the statesman of these times is nobler than that of the alchemist, the thaumaturgist and the

*s feudal lord of an age of ignorance and superstition. * ' Is he a physician of souls ? He can better operate on wakeful than on torpid patients. Is he an advocate ? He can better plead before an educated jury than a clownish one. If his appeal is to men's will, it is, at least to one unfettered by fear ; if to the conscience, it is to one unclouded by superstition ; if to the heart, it is to one never more aching with unrest or hungry for reality and love."

The philosopher and poet declare that the times are barren of enthusiasm and heroism ; and that a frivolous materialism in its dance of death is trampling out the torch of the soul. There is some truth and much folly in this despondent view of things. It springs from a shallow skepticism which looks only at the worst features of an age whose field of Christian activities shows divinest enthusiasm and heroism for humanity. But whatever truth there be in the pessimist's view of the times, it is all but a challenge to the best exercise of the preacher's power.

If never before were men so utterly ' 'without God and without hope ;" if, according to the poets of despair, materialistic curiosity has "ripped, one by one, the world's pretty dolls and scattered the sawdust along its starless path," then it is surely the fullness of time for the true Prometheus to appear again, if he but carry in his reed the celestial fire ; it is time for the herald who has a real message of life and immortality, who has seen God face to face and gotten his message from Him, to lift up his voice like a trumpet.

In a word, if a man know how to preach the everlasting gospel, if he be himself a living incarnation of its perennial freshness and force, its life and peace and joy, if he be a voice that can speak, not only the seminary lore, but the Saviour's love, then there never was a time when he could have a more open and inviting field, or a more grateful welcome among thronging men, or a fairer hope of success in the highest sense. If there is weakness in the pulpit in our day, it is not the fault of the ' 'spirit of the age." The preachers of the apostolic era faced such pharisaic pride, such religious obstinacy, such depravity and frivolity, such fortified selfishness as is not equalled in our age ; but they were not dismayed — by the power of their words they conquered. If the pulpit to-day is lacking in power, the sin lies at its own door and cannot be shifted to the shoulders of society. The people, the press, public opinion in whatever way expressed, so far from antagonizing, would eagerly welcome a pulpit of greater power, in fact are insisting upon it. The living preacher never had so many aids and openings ; men's hearts and homes and lives were never more hospitable to his message, and all the more as he approaches them simply as a man sent from God with a practical hope and help upon his lips.

In saying this I would not ignore those palpable facts which tend to repress pulpit power. One of these is found in the very process of ordinary theological training in our seminaries. In spite of the elevation of religious scholarship, the development of pulpit power shows in our graduates little advance. The seclusion of the student, for the six or eight years of his classical and seminary course, from contact with the real life of the toiling world to which he is at length to minister, and his constant dealing with abstract thought, and breathing a scholarly atmosphere, is not conducive to that "love of the people" which the Abbe* Mullois tells us is the first qualification, or that "sympathy with their wants" which Vinet makes the foundation of the preacher's efficiency. His preaching is apt to be scholarly, theological, apologetic, classical, dogmatic, correct — everything but simple, natural, vital, enthusiastic, familiar, vehement, or, in other words, powerful.

Nor can we ignore the temper and trend of the age, its crowding of material activities and lack of moral earnestness, its abundant inventions, sciences, discoveries, enterprises, and its few spiritual lives ; everything superficial — except human discontent, and that very deep, and not without volcanic mutterings. It is an era of fads, of laughter at everything, from Heaven's law and love to Hell's penalties. Life seems stripped of solemnity and sublimity, men's brains and hearts becoming taverns for the revels of le jeune Steele novelties rather than the home of truth and happiness. There is a strong temptation, with such surroundings,. to accommodate our teaching to the mood of the people ; to make the Word only scintillate when it should shine and burn ; to consult people's whims rather than their wants, to be popular rather than powerful, and to avoid sinking into insignificance, not by the strength with which we breast the tide, but by the lightness with which we float on the current. The very familiarity of the preacher's themes may put his soul to sleep, while the panorama of the gay world may distract him, like the rest, from the pulpit's chief work. Is it any wonder if power wanes, and the preacher almost loses enthusiasm for humanity, and with scarcely self-reproach sees the vanishing of his early ideal ?

It is against such demoralizing and enfeebling influences he is boldly to strive ; his nobility obliges him to this ; his responsibility is imperative. The objects which the preacher seeks to attain remain as unutterably and inconceivably great as ever. God, eternity, the soul, all that concern man's duty here and his destiny hereafter — these are his themes, and are as unfading as the blue of heaven, as inexhaustible as the sorrows and joys of humanity. What power ought that man to have who stands before an audience on whom he looks as immortal souls for whom he must give account, unto whom those men look with intelligent reverence, predisposed to be influenced for good, where prayer lends its inspiration and music its wings to the soul ! He stands in a relation the most solemn of all this side the judgment ; he speaks, as Heaven's ambassador, to the conscience, the heart, the life, of every one beneath his gaze; he pours the affluence of God's love, and light, and life, over dark and tempted and struggling and weary natures, probes the depth of human guilt, unveils the glories of salvation, and performs his work environed consciously by the powers of the world to come ! What a boundless wealth of materials he has out of which to

IO PSYCHIC POWER IN PREACHING.

weave the net in whose meshes the ' 'fisher of men" is to catch souls ! The whole field of man's experience in history, the whole field of current life in the world, the realms of nature, science and art, he may lay under contribution to illustrate and enforce the teachings of God's Word, which in themselves abound as much in variety as they do in sublimity. His divine call involves his right to summon all the powers of Heaven and earth as allies, but his own personal power is, under the Divine Spirit, the chief element of success.

What Pere L,acordaire, in his illustrious defence, said of Genius may, with modification, be said of the power and inspiration the preacher needs. ' 'Genius," said he, "is formed by two things — God and a dungeon. ' ' If genius may be defined as energy exalted by inspiration, then we may say that the power by which we are to win and constrain the world to prostrate itself before the Cross is the outgrowth of three things — God and Solitude, and the I^ove of Souls. Panoplied in the learning of the schools and the skill of culture, we stand in the very focus of illumination and illustration. On all the subjects we are called to teach, and all the work we are called to do, we have books, periodicals, conventions, symposia, examples — what do we not have to make us a ministry of power ? Only these we seem not to have, at least in impressive evidence — God, and Solitude, and the Sacrificial I^ove of Souls. We are responsible for the men of our generation ; Heaven is expectant of their conversion ; their blood will God require at our hands ! Science

A PUIvPIT OF POWER THE NEED OF THE TIMES. II

has not convinced us that they are the children of apes ; neither are they the children of the Devil. Many of them are his bondservants, but they have wants, hungerings, fears, hopes that are deep, surgent and dominating as instincts, and these make them susceptible to God when he is rightly presented. But when is he so presented ?

We offer to these lost brethren, who with a blind and dumb and aching instinct feel after Him if so be they may find Him ; needing Him though they shun Him — we may offer to these bewildered men an orthodox God, a theological God, a historical God, a transcendental God, nay, even a rational and scientific God, and it may still be a dead God that we offer. We may paint him as liberal and complaisant as the Western Jupiter, or as dogmatic and cruel as the Eastern Moloch, and, failing to attract by the one or to terrify by the other, we will still have to cry to the heedless and far-off throngs, "We have piped unto you and ye have not danced ; we have mourned unto you and ye have not lamented. ' ' Even Jesus Christ Himself, who appropriated these words to His own ill-success, did not get Himself believed and beloved while simply in the body, though He was the fullness of the Godhead incarnate. Crowned with a constellation of miracles and speaking as never man spake, He preached of God, yet ended His ministry with the bitter cry, "How oft would I have gathered you — but ye would not." A few days after and those same Jewish peasants filled the air with their penitential cries, and by thousands surrendered to God. Behold the reason ?

God must be seen upon a Cross ere men will be attracted to Him. "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me" — and He will not thus be seen except as He is made to live while He dies in the eyes of all the people.

The world will not be drawn to a crucifix, but it may be drawn to a crucifixion, and its vital presentation in the burning words of a living ministry has never failed to command and convert a multitude of men. We must see Christ ere we can make others see Him. We are to inspire our souls with the silent, adoring, sympathetic contemplation of the Christ whom we are to preach, transfigured by the Holy Ghost, and blending His image with all our thoughts and feelings. His cross must be erected in the sanctuary of our hearts ere we can convince men of its reality. We can preach about Christ if we have some fine words in a paper book on the pulpit, but we can preach Christ only when He dwells in us as a living and luminous presence, possessing, engrossing, constraining by His ineffable beauty, and sorrow, and love, all our powers into the expression by which we •offer Him to men. Even in our highest efficiency we are compelled to utter the sigh of I,acordaire to his friend Montalembert, when the eloquent priest was restoring to faith thousands of the young men of Paris by his wonderful preaching in Notre Dame, "How powerless is man for his fellow-man ! Of all his misseries, this is the greatest ! " We are doomed to see the stream of humanity rush past us, in its pride and passion, its gaiety and sadness, without hope and without God ; and even while we gaze a multitude have vanished ! But we need not stand with paralyzed faith and fettered energies. L,et the scene drive us to our knees and keep us there till we be endued with power from on high. We must command time, much time for solitude, contemplation of Christ and prayer. It is always from lonely heights of meditation men have come down to move the world. The human soul that dreams of spiritual power and revelation betakes itself naturally to solitude. Not only the prophets of Israel, saints of the Thebaid and founders of Religion in the mystic Bast have done so ; even the Greek Meneander recognized, though he sneered at, the phenomenon : ' 'The desert, they say, is the place for discoveries. ' ' The Forerunner was there prepared for his heraldship and the Son of Man for his gospel and His Cross. The singer of the ' ' Divina Commedia ' ' betook himself to the lonely convent of Fonte Avellana and meditated there the cantos of his " Purgatorio, ' ' and St. Francis chastened and replenished his soul for his mission of sacrificial love in the caves and forests of Umbria. We must dwell more with God and gain power with Him if we would have 1 ' power with men. ' '

It was by such solitary communion with God and the study of the Bible that Savonarola acquired that massive personal power, that energy of soul, that imperial will force by which, from his pulpit in the Duomo, he ruled Florence. He had little rhetorical culture, a bad voice, and, at first, indistinct expression ; but he was at home with his Bible and his God ;

he loved his people, he believed in his divine mission. One of his biographers, Burlamecchi, says : ' 'The effect of his preaching, both on his hearers and himself, was wonderful. He soared into ecstasy and electrified men as with sudden shocks. Once, when he preached on the Deluge, as he ascended the pulpit, the people saw he was laboring under the strongest emotion. Gazing across them, he gave out the text, ' Behold I, even I do bring a flood of waters upon the earth ! ' The words and tone struck terror into every heart. ' ' Pico della Mirandola, who was present, relates that a shudder ran through his whole frame and his hair seemed to stand on end; and Savonarola declares that he himself was not less moved than his hearers. Thus Savonarola demonstrates that soul-power counts for more than any other constituent element in eloquence. It was not his learning nor his logic, but the eager embrace of his soul and the vehement pressure of his will upon the hearts of the rapt audience that conquered and led them in the way of his divinely inspired purpose.

If the study of this little book shall shed any light

upon this element of pulpit preparation and inspire any of my brethren with a determination to develop and employ this latent Psychic force, something will have been done for the furtherance of the Gospel after the author has been forgotten.

Chapter II

WHAT depths of mystery and miracle dwell in that word ''Power." Who can define it? Who tell us where its seat or fountain is ? Who measure its dimensions or paint its features or analyze its substance ? It dwells in the flashing lightning and falling dew, in imponderable air and moving glacier, in growing seed that lifts the rock and electric current that drives the train. It swings the planets in their cycles and wings a whisper around the globe. Physical power is a mystery, but Psychical power works greater miracles. A sentiment upheaves a nation ; a passion overturns an empire. Soul-power ! Who can sing its epic ? What science determine its measure or method ? In what ultimate brain-cell or blood-corpuscle does it reside ? ' * God hath spoken once, twice have I heard this ; that power belongeth unto God." And man, whom He has created in His own image, humbly shares in this divine endowment. I,uther said, ' ' He that can speak forcefully to men is a man. ' ' That solitary monk who shook the world ought to know. Doubtless he meant by ' ' a man ' ' not simply a scholar, nor a homilist, nor a theologian, nor a rhetorician, but, in the full, radical and robust sense of the word — a man.

Much of the ineffective preaching that courts drowsy ears or falls upon the pleased inertness of a congregation is lacking in none of the features usually assigned in the schools to the model sermon. There is truth well and definitely expressed, logically compact, adequately illustrated and rightly applied. Yet the people are listless. The defect in many instances is in the want of the man behind the sermon to give it propulsion or the man in the sermon to give it human vitality and a grappling, victorious energy. Preaching is divine truth plus a man. For half a century the science of preaching has accumulated a large and opulent literature. To the garnered wisdom of earlier times it has added standard works, periodicals, reviews, text-books and lectureships. Yet, it has not kept pace with other sciences or with the periodical press, much less with the higher secular literature, in its grasp of public attention and control of public opinion.

It is a hopeful sign that the pulpit of to-day is less ruled by a bigoted fear of new ideas and methods than ever before, and more prompt to recognize and utilize whatever discoveries or results real science may offer to its hand.

It is profoundly significant to note the increasing interest of our ministry in the New Psychology. Emerging from the nebulous condition in which empiricism and superstition rule, psychic phenomena and laws are assuming the features and authority of a science, and surely in no field may they more properly have influence than in the development of the preacher's power.

The doctrine of the storage, conservation and transmutation of energy, in the physical realm, is one of profound interest and importance. It has furnished a new working hypothesis and larger views of God and man. But there is an energy invisible but of infinite potency in the psychical realm, whose operations are none the less real, and whose study is of paramount importance and fraught with stupendous results.

As the sources and conditions of psychic energy are being uncovered, they are sure to be brought more and more within the scope of the preacher's studies. The relation between psychological facts and forces and the science of preaching is so intimate and vital that their consideration cannot be neglected without irreparable loss, both in pastoral and pulpit work. These facts and forces are, by the scientific men of our time, carefully separated from whatever is visionary, fraudulent and empirical, and are accessible to fruitful investigation. The occult power which produces the phenomena grouped under the designations of hypnotism, mesmerism, animal-magnetism, clairvoyance and telepathy is not a modern discovery. Traces of its empirical handling may be found in the East many centuries ago. The ' ' seer " is as old as human history ; the ''magician " has always been a recognized fact. His persistence and success are by no means to be accounted for on the theory of skilful deception practiced on the credulous, the superstitious and the weak, or to physical laws unknown to the mass of men. There may be — and the experiments of Mr.

Tessla and his co-workers point that way — physical media and physical laws yet to be revealed, explaining certain marvelous discoveries in the physical realm of electrical action ; so in the psychical realm there is a power, a medium and a law, whose phenomena are abundant, but whose form and content are yet to be searched out. It is claimed by skeptics that the investigation of these psychical phenomena will be fatal to the teachings of Christianity ; but as other developments of real science, such as astronomy, geology, biology and antiquarian discovery have, in turn, been announced as oracles of doom to the Bible, and as each has, in due time, blest what it was expected to curse, so will the " New Psychology " and the " Society for Psychical Research ' ' and all conscientious Science prove to be the handmaid of the pulpit. The truth has nothing to fear from the truth.

Experiments, conducted for the last quarter century by many eminent scientists, prove the marvelous power which one soul may exercise over another, producing not merely physical movements but mental processes and moral emotions in the subject. ' ' If it be true," a distinguished psychologist has said, " that one mind can influence another and convey thoughts and ideas to it without using the ordinary avenues of the senses, such a fact is far more scientifically extraordinary than would be the destruction of this globe by another heavenly body." Nevertheless, there is abundant and indisputable evidence of the fact produced by the several " Societies for Psychical Research," as well as other reliable testimony. If mind can thus influence mind independently of the senses (just as we know electrical transmission can be made independently of the wire) certainly when we can call in the vehicular aid of sight and hearing, with their boundless resources, the pulpit should receive a new impetus in the evolution of power. This evolution should be in two directions — the increase of psychic force and the growth of spiritual power ; and these two are intimately related.

By the preacher's Psychic Force I mean his personal force as distinguished from the force of his logic, his rhetoric or of the truth itself, on the one hand, and from the supernatural power of the Divine Spirit on the other. It is the energy of the preacher* s soul in contact with that of the hearer. Says H. W. Beecher : 1 ' The living force of the living soul upon living souls for the sake of their transformation is the fundamental idea of preaching. ' '