Book Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE GIFTS OF THE PREACHER There are certain qualities in every preacher, certain gifts, on which the success of his work depends. They are gifts of nature and of grace, developed by assiduous culture. The man who undertakes to preach must have some of them or he is no preacher. But an ideal combination of these gifts has of course never been realized. There is no ideal preacher, never has been and never will be. Indeed it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive the ideally-gifted preacher. There are many conceivable ideals. To combine them all into one supreme type, and to conceive of them as realized in any one man is an impracticable, not to say an impossible mental task. The best preachers represent different types. They suggest typical ideals, correspondent, but they hardly suggest the possibility, even ideally of combining them all into one supreme type. No one man has ever combined all the gifts of the great preacher. Augustine must have combined many of them in generous measure. Tertullian, Cyprian, Chrysostom and the Cappadocians in larger measure. The classic preachers of the Gallic Church, Bossuet, Bour- daloue, Massillon and Saurin among the Protestants, Luther among the Germans, and among the moderns, Robertson and Beecher?all these were great preachers. But how varied and how different their gifts, so varied and so different that their points of contrast are quite as striking as their points of likeness. But it is not necessary that one possess the gifts of these great masters, either in degree or in type of combination, in order to be a respectable preacher. It isnot necessary to be a great preacher in order to be a preacher at all. The work of the church is done and well done by ordinary men. It is only the elect few that possess many and grea...