Page:Heralds of God.djvu/211

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE his ministry is supernaturalized, and through him the Spirit can act with power. "In Love's service," says the Angel in Thornton Wilder's play, "only the wounded soldiers can serve." And only those who have been wounded in the region of their human confidence, whose self-sufficiency has been shattered into supplication, only they can be the healers of this ailing world. Be sure of this, that if men are to be blessed by your ministry, prayer must be its alpha and its omega. "Our sufficiency is of God."

III This brings us to the third characteristic note of the preacher's inner life. He will be a man marked by a great humility of heart. Nowhere surely are pride and self-importance and conscious striving after effect more incongruous and unpardonable than in the servant of the Cross, Yet pride would not be the basic sin it is, if it did not possess this demonic quality, that precisely where you would expect to find it lying dead for ever, there it reappears, insinuating itself in even subtler guise. "The final human pretension," Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, "is made most successfully under the aegis of a religion which has overcome human pretension in principle." "I am an apostle," wrote Paul to the Romans; "I magnify mine office"-for it is right to think greatly of a calling so momentous in its issues for the Kingdom of Christ and the souls of men. But that there can be a false magnifying of the 205