it is an infinite comfort to us ordinary pulpiteers to know that even an archbishop may sometimes have a bad time! and, on the occasion of which i write, the poor prelate must have had a very bad time indeed. for—tell it not in gath, publish it not in the streets of askelon!—none of his hearers knew what he had been talking about! they could make neither head nor tail of it! ‘i have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about,’ wrote one of his auditors to a friend. it is certainly most humiliating when our congregations go home and pen such letters for posterity to chuckle over. and yet the ability of the preacher at this particular service, and the intelligence of his hearers, are alike beyond question. for the preacher was the famous richard chenevix trench, d.d., professor of theology at king’s college, dean of westminster, and afterwards archbishop of dublin. the sermon was preached in the classical atmosphere of cambridge university, principally to students and undergraduates. the theme was the incarnation—‘the word was made flesh.’ and the 266young fellow who wrote the plaintive epistle from which i have quoted was alfred ainger, afterwards a distinguished litterateur and master of the temple. he could make nothing of it. ‘the sermon, i am sorry to say, was universally disappointing. i have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about. it is needless to say i could not. he chose, too, one of the grandest and deepest texts in the new testament. he talked a great deal about st. augustine, but any more i cannot tell you.’
now christmas will again come knocking at our doors, and many of us will find ourselves preaching on this selfsame theme. and we have a wholesome horror of sending our hearers home in the same fearful perplexity. ‘what on earth was the minister talking about?’ all the cards and the carols, the fun and the frolic, the pastimes and the picnics will be turned into dust and ashes, into gall and wormwood, into vanity and vexation of spirit to the poor preacher who suspects that his christmas congregation returned home in such a mood. his christmas dinner will almost choke him. there will be no merry christmas for him!
but let no minister be terrified or intimidated by the archbishop’s unhappy experience. his ‘bad time’ may help us to enjoy a good one. we must take his text, and wrestle with it bravely. it is the ideal christmas greeting. there is certainly depth 267and mystery; but there is humanness and tenderness as well.
‘the word was made flesh.’ words are wonderful things, to say nothing of ‘the word’—whatever that may prove to be. this selfsame archbishop trench, whose sermon at cambridge proved such a universal disappointment, has written a marvellous book on the study of words. here are seven masterly chapters to show that words are fossil poetry, and petrified history, and embalmed romance, and that all the ages have left the record of their tears and their laughter, of their virtues and their vices, of their passion and their pain, in the words that they have coined. ‘when i feel inclined to read poetry,’ says oliver wendell holmes, ‘i take down my dictionary! the poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. the author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of age. bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and i will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more elegant analogy.’ words, then, are jewel-cases, treasure-chests, strong-rooms; they are repositories in which the archives of the ages are preserved.
‘the word was made flesh.’ we never grasp the word until it is. let me illustrate my meaning. 268here is a bonny little fellow of six, with sunny face and a glorious shock of golden hair. his father hands him his first spelling-book, with the alphabet on the front page, and little two-letter monosyllables following. but what can he make of even such small words? he will never learn the a.b.c. in that way. but give him a teacher. make the word flesh, and he will soon have it all off by heart!
five years pass away. the lad is in the full swing of his school-days now. but to-night, as he pores over his books, the once sunny face is clouded, and the wavy hair covers an aching head.
‘time for bed, sonny!’ says mother at length.
‘but, mother, i haven’t done my home lessons, and i can’t.’
‘what is it all about, my boy?’ she asks, as she draws her chair nearer to his, and, putting her arm round his shoulder, reads the tiresome problem.
and then they talk it over together. and, somehow, under the magic of her interest, it seems fairly simple after all. in her sympathetic voice, and fond glance, and tender touch, the word becomes flesh, and he grasps its meaning.
five more years pass away. he is sixteen, and a perfect book-worm. looking up from the story he is reading, he exclaims impatiently:
‘i can’t think why they want to work these silly love-stories into all these books. a fellow can’t pick 269up a decent book but there’s a love-story running through it. it’s horrid!’ he has come upon the greatest word in the language; but it has no meaning for him!
but five years later he understands! he has been captivated by a pure and radiant face, by a charming and graceful form, by lovely eyes that answer to his own. that great word love has been made flesh to him, and it simply gleams with meaning. and so, all through the years, as life goes on, he finds the great key-words expounded to him through infinite processes of incarnation. ‘ideas,’ says george eliot, ‘are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in their vapour and cannot make themselves felt. but sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hand, they look at us with sad sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame.’
and if this be so with other words, how could the greatest, grandest, holiest word of all have been expressed except in the very selfsame way? ‘the word was made flesh.’ there was no other way of 270saying god intelligibly. i should never, never, never have understood mere abstract definitions of so august a term. and so—‘in the beginning was the word, and the word was god, and the word was made flesh.’ i can grasp that great word now. bethlehem and olivet, galilee and calvary, have made it wonderfully plain. the word god would have frightened me if it had never been expressed in the terms of ‘a face like my face’—as browning puts it—and a heart that beats in sympathy with my own. and so tennyson says:
and so the word had breath, and wrought
with human hands the creed of creeds
in loveliness of perfect deeds,
more strong than all poetic thought;
which he may read that binds the sheaf,
or builds the house, or digs the grave,
and those wild eyes that watch the wave
in roarings round the coral reef.
and thus the most awful, the most terrible, and the most incomprehensible word that human lips could frame has become the most winsome and charming in the whole vocabulary. god is jesus, and jesus is god! ‘the word was made flesh.’
the same principle dominates all religious experience and enterprise. generally speaking, you cannot make a man a christian by giving him a 271bible or posting him a tract. the new testament lays it down quite clearly that the christian man must accompany the christian message. the word must be presented in its proper human setting. our missionaries all over the planet tell of the resistless influence exerted by gracious christian homes, and by holy christian lives, in winning idolators from superstition. i was reading only this morning a touching instance of a young japanese who trudged hundreds of miles to inquire after the secret of ‘the beautiful life’—as he called it—which he had seen exemplified in some christian missionaries. the word, made flesh, is thus pronounced with an accent and an eloquence which are simply irresistible.
‘i said, and i repeat,’ says mr. edwin hodder, in his biography of sir george burns, the founder of the cunard steamship company, ‘i said, and i repeat, that if the bible were blotted out of existence, if there were no prayer-book, no catechism, and no creed, if there were no visible church at all, i could not fail to believe in the doctrines of christianity while the living epistle of sir george burns’ life remained in my memory.’ that was whittier’s argument:
the dear lord’s best interpreters
are humble human souls;
the gospel of a life like his
is more than books or scrolls.
272from scheme and creed the light goes out,
the saintly fact survives;
the blessed master none can doubt,
revealed in holy lives.
we have reached a very practical aspect now of the message that the christmas bells will soon be ringing. the thoughts of men are only intelligibly communicable by means of words; and the words of men only become pregnant with passion and with power when they are made flesh. and, in the same way, the thoughts of god to men are only eloquent when they are so expressed. revelation became sublimely rhetorical at bethlehem, and we can only perpetuate its eloquence through the agency of lives transfigured.
