Preaching and Worship

Extract

It is not with the details of homiletics that this paper will occupy itself—how to write a sermon or how to behave in church. These profitable lessons it will dismiss to the class-room or the Sunday School, and will then hold itself free to expand in joyous exaltation of the magnitude and dignity of the training requisite for the fit discharge of the highest duties of the ministry. Every ability which one brings to it may help—those of the carpenter and the goldsmith, of him that smootheth with the hammer and him that smiteth the anvil. But all powers and all training will adjust themselves to its main purpose, the curve of which is determined by its two foci—for every great process is not circular but elliptical—the foci of preaching and worship. Around these the details of a theological curriculum will revolve. The Pentateuch and the Synoptic Problem, the Nicene Council and the Social Settlement House, the Anselmic theory of the Atonement and the Malthusian theory of population, all will have in view their ultimate end of preaching and worship, and all will come bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.