Page:Heralds of God.djvu/219

THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE no face of man. To quote Donne again—"So the Apostles proceeded; when they came in their peregrination to a new State, to a new Court, to Rome it selfe, they did not enquire, how stands the Emperour affected to Christ, and to the preaching of His Gospel? This was not their way; They only considered who sent them; Christ Jesus: And what they brought; salvation to every soul." This is the note that modern preaching must recapture. For this is no time for Christ's accredited servants to be soft-pedalling their distinctive message; no time for that peculiarly unpleasant form of servility which regards it as a feather in the Church's cap if some scientist or philosopher or Brains Trust specialist speaks approvingly and patronizingly of our holy religion; no time to be watering down the radical and challenging content of the Christian faith to suit the taste of any vague indeterminate humanism that boggles at the supernatural. We shall never do Christ's work to-day unless-like our Master-we dare to speak with authority, and not as the scribes. But whence comes this authority? It springs, first, from the fact that it is God's Word, not our own, that we proclaim. When that noble ambassador of Christ, Temple Gairdner of Cairo (whose life-story is one of the classics of missionary biography), was an under-graduate, he took some share in student meetings organized by one of the religious societies in the University. "Do I speak at a meeting?" he wrote in a letter to a friend, "I am asked, 'Are you better than 213