_Pulpit Form._ Respect your hearers. Do not gird at them; angle for them--and agonize. Address yourself to one at a time--first to the man in the pulpit. He who has hit himself first will not miss others. He who trembles at the word of the Lord, men will tremble at his word. (Borrowed) A preacher must either be afraid of his audience or his audience of him.
_Janua Domini._ Always enter the pulpit by the Door (John x. 7).
_Contents and Omissions._ Put everything you can into every address. Omit everything you can from every address.
"_Faith cometh by hearing._" Therefore, to begin with, be audible. The Sermon on the Mount commences thus: "He opened His mouth" (Matt. v. 2).
_Time and Eternity._ Speak to men's fleeting hopes and passing interests; speak also to their grey hairs and to their midnight hours.
_Ultimata._ Desire to prophesy (1 Cor. xiv. 1); covet to prophesy (_ib._ 39); do not preach if thou darest be silent (1 Cor. ix. 16).
Gentlemen, in the two last lectures we have investigated two of the principal sources--perhaps I might say the two principal sources--of a minister's power--his manhood and his Christianity. These may be called the two natural springs out of which work for men and God proceeds. Out of these it comes as a direct necessity of nature. If anyone is much of a man--if there be in him much fire and force, much energy of conviction--it will be impossible for him to pass through so great an experience as the reception of Christianity without making it known; and, if he be much of a Christian--if there be in him much of the spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of self-sacrifice and benevolence--it will be impossible for him to refrain from approaching men in their sin and misery and endeavouring to communicate to them the secret of blessedness. He will make but a poor minister who would not be an earnest worker for God and man, even if he were not a minister.
These impulses were conspicuously strong in St. Paul. Yet there was also another source from which he drew the motives of his ministry. This was the fact that God had appointed him to the office of an apostle and allotted him a specific sphere of activity as the apostle of the Gentiles.
The other two sources of motive are, as I have said, natural; this one, on the contrary, is official. This may raise a prejudice against it. So many and such grave mistakes have been made through regarding official appointment as the only warrant for Christian work, to the prejudice of the antecedent qualifications of a genuine and sympathetic manhood and a deep personal Christianity, without which it is nothing, that there is a disposition to ignore this kind of motive altogether. But St. Paul acknowledges it. Although he was always, no doubt, far more of a man and a Christian than an official, yet, in reply to opposition, he insists with great vehemence on his apostolic rank; and evidently he felt that this imposed on him additional obligations to be earnest and faithful in the work to which his manly and Christian instincts prompted him.