Page:Heralds of God.djvu/216

HERALDS OF GOD the crowning revelation and breaks loose from its fetters and enters the Kingdom; but he will give God the glory. Flesh and blood have not revealed it, but only the Father in heaven.

IV In the light of what has just been said, the fourth mark of the true preacher, to which we now pass, may appear at first sight paradoxical. He will be a man of authority. It is quite mistaken to suppose that humility excludes conviction, G. K. Chesterton once penned some wise words about what he called "the dislocation of humility." "What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table." Humble and self-forgetting we must be always, but diffident and apologetic about the Gospel never.

When D. L. Moody first carried his evangelism into one of our great University centres, there was some initial opposition. His first meeting was persistently interrupted, punctuated with scoffing epithets. At last Moody broke out. "You jeered at the hymns," he exclaimed, "and I said nothing. You jeered at the 210