My subject this morning is William J.
the Preacher, or William J.
perhaps, and the Art of Preaching.
There are some preachers of the past whose
lives we cannot study, for the only record
of them is in heaven.
There are others whose lives are set down
in literature, and we shall never get time
to study them.
And finally, there is a third group of
ministers of the past whose biographies we both
can and we must study, because they contain
information which is calculated to be of outstanding
help to ministers of the gospel in all
ages.
This third category is the category in which
William J.
is to be placed.
When he was 74 years old, he wrote
his autobiography, and it was published along with
his personal reminiscences, and in doing this, he
tells us, he was prompted by the desire
to set down those lessons of his life
which might especially aid a following generation of
ministers.
Many years ago, I found William J.'s autobiography
in the Epworth Press in City Road.
There was a shelf of his works.
I didn't buy one of them.
I lament to this day.
But I bought the autobiography, and this is
the volume from which I will largely speak
this morning.
J.'s autobiography is one of the most valuable
ministerial records of the last century.
We should all be far more effective preachers
of the gospel if we made it our
business to work at the lessons which he
commended to his brethren who would follow him
in the ministry in later years.
And our purpose then this morning is largely
to let William J.
speak to us himself on the subject of
preaching.
Now let me first remind you who William
J.
was.
He was born in a humble country cottage
in the month of May in 1769.
1769, on the edge of the Salisbury Plain
in Wiltshire in the village of Tisbury.
His father was a stonemason.
His parents were poor, hard-working religious people.
They went to the Presbyterian church in Tisbury
where the minister was an Arian.
They, like so many others in that century,
they looked up and they were not fed
as they went week by week to church.
William J.
had a very meagre education which finished when
he was 14 years of age and at
that age he became an apprentice stonemason working
with his father.
Just a short time after that an evangelical
gentleman moved to the village of Tisbury and
he commenced services in his own home.
He would invite a visiting preacher and this
man would take a service on Saturday evening
and then at 7 o'clock on Sunday
morning.
They did not conflict with the times of
the other churches but in the home of
this evangelical Christian, William J.
was brought to a knowledge of Christ.
He sat there in this little group of
people with his leather apron on and his
flannel jacket.
I suppose perhaps the only young person in
the gathering.
And there, at about the age of 14
or just 15, he came to an experience
of the grace of God.
Now a little while after that, there was
a visiting preacher in this home one weekend.
A man by the name of Cornelius Winter.
Now Cornelius Winter himself is a fascinating man.
He was, in the latter years of George
Whitefield, his personal associate.
You know, when Whitefield became an old man,
he became very shy of friendship.
I think he had been let down so
many times and it was quite proverbial that
Whitefield was a very difficult man to get
access to.
But Cornelius Winter, in about the last eight
years of Whitefield's life, had the privilege of
serving him, of living with him.
Whitefield was his counsellor and guide in many
respects.
Winter was converted under Whitefield.
Well, at this date, in the 1780s, Cornelius
Winter lived in Marlborough, which is a small
country town, for the sake of some of
you who come to us from abroad.
It's a small country town in Wiltshire.
You can go through it on the way
to Wales from London.
And living in Marlborough, he had a theological
academy.
Now Winter then was the visiting preacher on
this weekend and as he arrived in the
home and the people were gathered, here he
saw this young apprentice.
And conferring with the Christians of the household,
he learned who William Jay was and Cornelius
Winter had the very distinct and decided impression
that Jay was called for a life of
great usefulness in the Church of God.
You remember how Richard Nill met Spurgeon when
Spurgeon was ten years old and Nill was
convinced that Spurgeon was raised up for a
great ministry.
Well, Cornelius Winter had that same kind of
conviction.
So he encouraged William Jay to come to
Marlborough and to study at the academy.
And so William Jay came in the early
summer of the year 1785 and he remained
for just over three years until mid-summer
of 1788.
Now, Cornelius Winter's academy was not exactly a
theological seminary in the sense that we know
it.
Its greatest merit lay in Winter himself.
In later years, William Jay wrote a biography
of Cornelius Winter and he made this comment.
He was, in fact, speaking of John Newton.
He said of John Newton, I deem him
the most perfect instance of the spirit and
temper of Christianity I ever knew, shall I
say with the exception, no, but with the
addition of Cornelius Winter.
So that the students at Marlborough had as
their teacher a man whose daily work was
to indicate by his own example that a
spiritually-minded Christian is the only man who
can prepare himself in any sense for the
work of the gospel.
In addition, then, to Winter's own life, he
had a great fund of practical wisdom on
the subject of preaching.
And what would happen is this.
The area around Marlborough, Wiltshire, was destitute of
the gospel at that time, very largely.
And Winter was exercised often to be about
in the villages and the countryside.
And he would say to Jay, Billy, he
would say, come up with me on my
horse.
And young Jay would climb on the back
of the horse.
And while they were on the road, journeying
to a place where Winter would preach, while
they were on the road, Jay says, he
would examine me upon Latin syntax, made me
scan some of the verses in Virgil, and
he says this was his invariable practice.
I'm sure it wasn't like that at Princeton,
this degree.
The teacher on the horse and the young
man behind him scanning Virgil and Latin syntax.
Well, that gives you a pretty good idea
of what kind of man Winter was.
He was a thorough scholar.
And yet he was also an earnest preacher.
And somehow, in this rather chaotic way, he
sought to do the two things at his
little academy in Marlborough.
Well, William Jay himself preached his first sermon
when he was 16 years of age.
And by the time he was 19, he
had preached 1,000 sermons.
And some idea of his early preaching can
be gained by noting the way in which
he was received in London when he first
preached in London in July 1788.
Now, I think that probably at that date,
London was better supplied with evangelical ministers than
probably any city in the world.
People could still hear John Wesley preaching in
the city road.
William Romaine was preaching at St. Anne's in
Blackfriars.
John Newton was at St. Mary Woolnoth.
Cross the Thames, and Rowland Hill was preaching
in Surrey Chapel.
Rowland Hill was so like Whitfield.
And these were just a few of the
many evangelicals preaching in London at that day.
And yet, coming into that city, when he
was only 19 years of age, William Jay
was heard with something akin to a sensation.
And he was almost immediately put on a
pinnacle of popularity.
And Cornelius Winter, even far away in Marlborough,
heard news of this, and he wrote two
letters to his young friend, and they included
this advice.
I am thankful, he says, to hear you
are acceptable.
I hope the Lord will continue to make
you so daily, and keep you low and
humble before him.
If you really have performed your appointment for
Mr. Hill, now Jay was preaching at the
Surrey Chapel, if you have really performed your
appointment for Mr. Hill, I would advise you
to attend no further invitation, but leave London
immediately.
Come into the country to pray and reflect,
and wherever you go, set the picture of
your mortality before you, and consider that he
who has raised you can sink you, and
will, unless you give him the glory of
the gifts he has given you.
And Jay accepted the wisdom of this exhortation,
and he refused invitations to settle in London,
and instead he went to a pastorate in
a tiny village at Christian Malford, near Chippenham,
on a salary of £35 a year, and
there he settled in the autumn of 1788.
He remained about one year, and then he
went to Bristol, where he ministered for two
years, and finally, in January 1791, he settled
in the charge where he was to remain
until the last year of his life.
This was the independent congregation meeting in the
Argyle Chapel in Bath.
Jay's ministry at the Argyle Chapel was remarkable
in many respects, but in terms of long
-sustained usefulness, it can scarcely have any parallel
in English church history.
After forty years at the Argyle Chapel, during
which time the building had been twice enlarged,
an anniversary meeting was held in 1831, and
at this time Jay reported that there were
only three members of the congregation who had
signed his call in 1791 still alive.
In his physical and spiritual preservation, he saw
only the grace of God.
He says, And
Jay went on to see both his fiftieth
and his sixtieth anniversary, and only after completing
sixty-two years in the pastorate at Bath
did he retire in January 1853, when in
his eighty-fourth year of age.
His determination was not to outlive his usefulness,
and the last page of the last book
which he wrote was collected by him in
the proofs just a week before his death.
He died on December the twenty-seventh, 1853.
The last sermon he preached was on the
text, Behold, I am vile.
To those around him on his deathbed he
said, Oh, none of you know what it
is to die.
And again, The language of the publican did,
does, and ever will befit me, and even
down to death must be my cry, God
be merciful to me, a sinner.
Turning from these few facts on Jay's life
to the question of his influence as a
preacher, it can be said that for all
round usefulness, he was for nearly half a
century one of the best-known preachers in
England, and through his published volumes he was
possibly the most widely read of them all.
I was astonished the other day in the
Evangelical Library going through their catalogues to see
the extent of the publications which they have
of his, and it was said that his
books sold even more widely in the United
States.
He preached the annual sermon for the foremost
Evangelical society of that age, the London Missionary
Society, more frequently than did any other minister.
Such was his popularity in London that for
more than 50 years he preached for two
months every summer at Surrey Chapel.
Surrey Chapel was an extraordinary building.
I told you Roland Hill was there until
his death in 1834.
It seated, I suppose, approaching 4,000 people.
There were regularly up to a dozen police
officers in the congregation.
All the riffraff was there.
There were pickpockets and so on.
The police were scattered about.
And there was a great Evangelical body of
people.
The missionary collection that was taken there every
year was never less than 400 pounds at
the Surrey Chapel, and bear in mind the
difference in money in those days.
So it was the largest non-conformist church
in London, larger even than Whitfield's Tabernacle in
Tottenham Court Road.
And here, Jay preached every summer for two
months for over 50 years.
And at Bath, which of course at that
time was the heyday, in its heyday as
a resort for nobility and members of Parliament,
William Wilberforce had a house there, who became
a great friend of Jay's.
It was a great centre of influence.
Now, in all these spheres, William Wilberforce Jay
was certainly one, if not the most, prominent
preacher in England.
In fact, some people thought he was the
latter.
A certain Dr. Johns, who was rector of
Christ Church Baltimore, visited this country and Bath
in 1852, and this is what he wrote.
In reply to the inquiries of American friends
as to whose preaching I like best of
all that I heard while in England and
Scotland, my answer has uniformly been the old
preacher at Bath, whom you all know as
the author of The Morning and Evening Exercises,
Jay's best-known book.
His sermon was full of Christ, discriminating and
searching, while in point of style I did
not notice a sentence out of joint from
the beginning to the end.
C.
H.
Spurgeon prized the memory of hearing Jay preach
in Cambridge in 1851, and he later urged
Jay's writings upon the attention of all his
students who trained at the pastor's college.
William Williams, you know, I'm sure you know
that lovely book, William Williams' Personal Reminiscences of
C.
H.
Spurgeon.
Williams was a student at the college, and
he says, Jay of Bath was ever a
great favourite with Spurgeon.
He often read a chapter or two from
Jay in college and advised each student to
get his works.
And then Spurgeon himself, in commenting and commentaries,
when exhorting us to make the best use
of Matthew Henry, does so by indicating how
greatly William Jay had been aided by Henry.
He says Mr. Jay's sermons bear indutible evidence
of his having studied Matthew Henry almost daily.
Matthew Henry is Jay writing.
Jay is Matthew Henry preaching.
What more could I say, he says.
What more could I say in commendation of
the preacher or the author?
Matthew Henry is Jay writing.
Jay is Matthew Henry preaching.
Judged by any standard, William Jay of Bath
certainly belonged to the front rank of the
preachers of the past.
But why, it may be asked, should we
be interested in the reviving of his memory
at the present time?
And to that question I offer these three
answers.
First, Jay belonged to one of the most
stimulating periods in British church history.
He was born in the last year of
Whitefield's ministry in England and he was buried
in the first year of C.H. Spurgeon's
ministry in London.
And between those two dates, 1769 and 1854,
the reign of George III, and a date
in Queen Victoria's reign when Victoria had reigned
for some 17 years, between these two dates
there was enormous spiritual growth in this country.
Churches grew, the work of foreign missions bounded
forward, evangelical literature multiplied, the slave trade was
broken, and in short, there was in many
areas of religious and public life a thrilling
testimony to the power of the gospel.
It is customary to explain all this as
the aftermath of the great evangelical revival of
the mid-18th century.
And certainly the momentum of that revival was
a continuing reality.
Nonetheless, we are in danger of underestimating the
caliber of the men like William Jay who
God raised up to consolidate and to carry
forward his work.
These men were no mere echoes of Whitefield
or Wesley.
They deserved study in their own right, and
if we neglect such study we shall lose
the benefit of the lessons of a truly
great period in history.
That's my first answer to the question, why
revive Jay's memory?
Second, there is a parallel between the situation
at the time of Jay's birth and our
own days.
Two hundred years ago, Calvinistic belief was almost
everywhere on the increase.
The Wesleyan Methodists alone were Arminian.
Elsewhere, both in church and chapel, the doctrines
of sovereign grace were in the ascendancy in
practically all evangelical pulpits.
Yet because a minister professes the tenets of
Calvinism, he does not necessarily become an effective
preacher.
On the contrary, his preaching may lose biblical
proportion and produce stunted and unattractive Christians.
And there was a good deal of this
in the late 18th century.
A school of men arose who believed that
John Wesley would end in hell, and they
hated him as much as they did any
Unitarian.
If you want evidence of that, consult the
life of Walker of Dublin, who was one
of the representatives of this school.
This not inconsiderable group of high Calvinists had
been rightly charged with antinomianism.
Their theology was lopsided and in measure erroneous.
They preached election without insisting sufficiently upon the
practical effects of election in the life.
They preached faith but said little of work.
They taught the perseverance of saints as a
privilege but not as a duty which the
Bible enjoins upon all who profess to be
saints.
What relevance has this to ourselves?
I think it may be said that we
are living in the first resurgence of Calvinism
in England since the 18th century.
Today Calvinistic theology is gaining ground steadily among
evangelical ministers.
But a great issue has not yet been
decisively settled.
It is the issue whether this theology is
going to produce attractive, compelling preaching which will
win the ears and the hearts of the
people.
It is no use our saying that the
way that issue is settled depends entirely upon
God and that we cannot be held responsible.
There are definite reasons why the high Calvinistic
preaching of the late 18th century ran to
seed and developed or led to dwindling congregations.
Now I do not say this because I
think that we are afflicted with antinomianism but
I think that many of us are conscious
of the problem how to give a biblical
theology its full weight in the pulpit and
at the same time see to it that
we are not simply supplying our people with
propositions and intellectual principles simply to stretch their
minds.
To preach doctrinal ideas even though those ideas
be true will never lead to attractive preaching.
This was the danger which John Newton had
in view when he said with his usual
wisdom he says Calvinism was one of the
worst systems preached theoretically but one of the
best preached practically.
And this is why I mention this.
It is not the parallel between antinomianism but
it is the danger of the theoretical preaching.
You see, these high Calvinists began with the
theoretical preaching and that led on in time
to the lopsidedness of the antinomianism.
But the danger of the theoretical preaching of
the Calvinistic system is certainly a danger which
will always occur when there is a revival
of this theology.
Of course, some men escape from this simply
by diluting the theology.
And here, I think, is where Jay is
so helpful.
He was fully cognizant of this danger and
he was a thorough, committed Calvinist of the
Puritan school.
He was a great reader of John Owen,
of Flavel, of Thomas Watson.
And yet he knew and he cultivated the
art of preaching as John Newton says, preaching
Calvinism practically.
And this is my second reason then for
believing that he is worthy of our attention
today as a guide and mentor.
My third reason is connected with the last
and has to do with the whole question
of the art of preaching.
By the term art, I refer to that
skill which makes sermons more likely to obtain
the right effect.
The art of preaching has to do not
so much with the message itself nor with
the spirit in which the message is delivered
but with the form and shape of the
sermons.
Now, many of us have an almost instinctive
hostility to this phrase that I am now
using.
We have the suspicion that those who taught
most of the art or the craft of
preaching are those who have lost the truth
for which the pulpit exists.
And we are prone to treat the art
of preaching as a type of cleverness which
has no place in sacred things.
The term art suggests to us human ingenuity
and over against this we have insisted that
the prerequisites to powerful preaching are purity of
doctrine and holiness of life.
This insistence is right but in our zeal
against the misuse of skill in the pulpit
we are far overreacted.
The form of a sermon is not the
first consideration yet that does not mean that
we are justified in treating it as an
irrelevance or almost an irrelevance.
We must surely recognize that a minister may
be orthodox and a converted man and yet
in his pulpit be comparatively ineffective.
Are we right in assuming that such ineffectiveness
has nothing to do with the form of
the sermon?
Could it not be connected with a neglect
of the art of preaching?
Now the history of preaching can throw light
on this question.
We know, for instance, that in the 17th
century when the pulpit exercised such power the
Puritans gave a great deal of attention to
the form in which Scripture is preached.
If you read a great book by William
Perkins The Art of Prophesying you'll see that
this is his great theme or in the
section on the Directory for Public Worship in
the Westminster, or appended to the Westminster Confession
and Catechisms, in the Directory on the public
preaching of the Word there again you have
this insistence upon the form and the skill
of preaching.
The Puritans believed that it was not enough
that a preacher should simply know the truth
and be a spiritual man.
He had also to acquire an art in
regard to the way he preached.
Now when we come to the 18th century
the scene has altogether changed.
The regular non-conformist ministers who of course
were the successors of the Puritans the dissenters,
as they were sometimes called they retained much
of the old form of preaching.
But William Jay makes this severe criticism of
their sermons.
He says, the dissenters were educated ministers themselves
for at that time there was scarcely a
lay preacher among them and their sermons were
not only orthodox but studied, grammatically correct and
methodical but with a very few exceptions pointless,
cold and drawled off from notes.
With the great evangelical revival in the late
1730s there came a new type of preaching.
It rejected the formal style of the non
-conformist pulpit and proclaimed evangelical truth with spirit
and with fire.
The characteristic of the preachers in the Methodist
tradition was their liveliness and in the type
of preaching which they popularized there was little
and sometimes practically no study given to form.
They preached the truth feelingly vehemently and earnestly
but their sermons were too often unstudied rambling
and even incoherent.
The Methodist lay preachers nearly all belonged to
this type but some of the leading preachers
in the revival including Whitefield himself were in
measure responsible for encouraging this pattern by their
own example.
So you see, you had in the first
half of the 18th century this strong contrast.
You had the old dissenters continuing the form
the Puritan form but drawing it off from
their notes and then you had the fire
and the life of the new Methodist type
without any form scarcely at all.
And this was the kind of contrast which
existed when William Jay began his ministry and
to it he gave a great deal of
thought.
He was near enough to the Evangelical revival
to know both the strengths and weaknesses of
the preachers whom God had so greatly used.
He also observed that Rowland Hill probably the
most popular preacher in London followed the rambling
Methodist style.
To Rowland Hill's lively sermons there was scarcely
any form at all.
You know the story no doubt.
After one such sermon one of his hearers
said to him, well Mr Hill you have
taken us over the whole land from Dan
to Bathsheba.
And Rowland Hill entirely unrepentant said yes he
says and it is all holy ground.
Now William Jay no doubt aided by the
wisdom of Cornelius Winter made an early decision
not to fall into this style.
He saw that what was needed was preaching
that was both arousing in its spirit and
in form adapted to achieve the maximum usefulness.
In other words he believed as the Puritans
believed that the work of the pulpit involves
an art to be learned.
Of all the reasons why William Jay deserves
studying today I think that this is the
key.
He took the lead in giving currency to
a form of preaching which did enormous good.
When C.
H.
Spurgeon suddenly came into prominence in the 1850s
and there were many of these newspaper articles
written as you know it was commonly said
of Spurgeon that his plan and method were
those of William Jay and that he was
following William Jay in that respect.
And I think there's a large measure of
truth in that.
We all tend simply to take the form
of Spurgeon's sermons for granted without realising how
utterly different his sermons would have been had
he adopted Roland Hill's method.
Indeed had he done so very few would
be reading Spurgeon today.
The great usefulness of Spurgeon's sermons has much
to do with the fact that he preached
the truth with due regard to both spirit
and form.
This was not achieved off the cuff.
It was following a tradition which Jay and
others had worked hard to establish in England.
I turn now more directly to William Jay's
own thoughts on preaching.
It should at once be said that his
concern about the form of preaching was far
removed from any desire to make the pulpit
a place where we show our ability.
I quote, The end of preaching should always
be regarded to win souls to Christ.
When I preach I want to preach Christ.
When I invite the sinner I wish to
invite him to Christ.
When I persuade men I want to persuade
them to flee to Christ.
When I warn the careless I warn them
to beware of neglecting Christ.
When I apply the truth I do it
only to glorify Christ.
This is our business as ministers.
Yet it is often lost sight of.
That is the end of Jay's quote.
Now this spiritual concern with Jay was closely
connected with the form of preaching.
For, if our objective is to help our
hearers we must necessarily be anxious that our
sermon should be planned in a form most
likely to attain that end.
Human nature has to be studied in this
regard.
And the art of preaching means that we
so understand men that our preaching proceeds upon
the lines most likely to do them the
maximum of good.
This in no way implies a lack of
dependence upon God.
It has to do with our responsibility to
be as efficient as we can be.
There are, I believe, upstairs quite a number
of copies of an old Banner of Truth
magazine with this splendid article by J.C.
Ryle on simplicity of preaching.
And some of you will remember in it
that he refers to a friend of William
Jay, Richard Cecil.
And Cecil was once counselling a young man
who came to him and was concerned about
his preaching.
He said to Cecil that...
He said, I need...
He said, I think I want more faith.
No, said the wise old man.
You want more works.
You want more pains.
You must not think that God will do
work for you though he is ready to
do it by you.
This is the point I'm making now here.
All William Jay's axioms upon preaching flow out
of his insistence that we study our people.
And if we do that thoroughly, he believed,
then the following things will mark our preaching.
So that flowing out of our understanding, our
consideration of our hearers and their nature, if
we consider them aright, then these things will
follow.
First, we shall aim at being both intelligible
and interesting.
The chief business of the preacher, says Jay,
is to strike and stick.
That is to say, he must both gain
the attention of his hearers and then deliver
the truth to them in forms which will
stick and abide when his preaching is done.
In his autobiography, Jay writes of the benefit
it was for him to begin preaching among
plain English villagers because it taught him the
necessity of simplicity and also led him to
the conviction that genuine simplicity in preaching is
only attained by real labour.
He knew very well that a congregation can
stare intently at the preacher and yet scarcely
follow a word he says.
Speaking of his village sermons, he writes, I
always peculiarly studied for these occasions, only my
study was how to be intelligible and interesting.
The minds of the rustics are not inaccessible,
but you must take the trouble to find
the avenues to them.
There are modes of making them look eagerly
and hang upon the preacher's lips and the
preacher who secures their attention, whatever some think,
has the honour of resembling him of whom
it was said the common people heard him
gladly.
To be intelligible, Jay employed language plain and
penetrating.
His style was not ornate or flowery.
In that way, he's not really Victorian.
Of course, he was pre-Victorian for most
of his life.
but he has this pithy plainness about him.
At the same time, he aimed, in every
sermon, to strike his hearer's emotions and imaginations
as well as their minds.
He believed that intellectual preaching, which deals only
in abstract ideas and lengthy arguments, is seriously
deficient.
Sermons without description, without illustration, without similes and
anecdotes will in most cases fail.
Upon this he writes, John Bunyan's motto, borrowed
from Hosea, could never be adopted by some
preachers.
I have used similitudes.
But such a usage is sanctioned by the
example of him who spake as never man
spoke.
Dr. Carey, Jay goes on, is reported to
have said to a young minister who had
preached before him, My young friend, I have
much approved of your sermon, but it had
one deficiency.
It had no likes in it.
And when asked for an explanation, he said,
Why, when you read our Lord's discourses, you
constantly meet with the expression the kingdom of
heaven is like unto leaven, like unto mustard
seed, like unto a net, like unto a
marriage, and so on.
Now Carey said, Now never preach again, my
young friend, without some likes in your address.
And Jay goes on, God, the only wise
God, who having made us, knows what is
in man and what is necessary to him,
has given us the largest proportion of the
Old and New Testament in the form of
history and biography.
Is it not, therefore, strange that public instructors
should lose sight of God's method and be
always getting into the commonness of declamation or
the dryness of speculative discussion?
A story, says Cecil, will hold a child
by the ear for an hour together, and
men are but children of a larger growth.
So that's the first point.
If we study our hearers, we will work
at being intelligible and interesting.
In the second place, Jay considered that a
proper appreciation of our hearers will lead us
to arrange the matter we put into sermons
with careful regard to order and division.
It was for him a capital error to
suppose that liberty and freedom in preaching means
that we dispense with planning the structure of
our subject matter under well-selected heads.
These two things are not antitheses.
A sermon should have a few specific points
to make, and the whole should be arranged
to enable the hearer to see clearly what
these points are.
To preach a rambling discourse, as Ryle says
in that article referred to, is like sending
a disorderly rabble into battle instead of a
well-regimented army, or like serving a meal
on one plate with soup, meat, dessert, and
coffee all mixed up together.
Now the main argument which Jay uses to
enforce this, the necessity of division and a
few straight points, his main argument is that
divisions are indispensable aids to the memories of
our hearers.
In preparing sermons, we should never think that
benefit will only come during the time when
the message is delivered.
A preacher may hold a congregation with fervor
and fireworks for forty minutes, but that is
no indication of the effectiveness of his preaching.
Within another forty minutes, the whole thing can
be forgotten.
The truth has to be presented so as
to stick in men's minds.
And on this he writes, I always loved
arrangement and division.
The lower orders peculiarly need it.
It relieves and quickens their attention.
It aids their apprehension and understanding.
It also enables them, the better, to retain
and carry away what they hear.
And how limited is the efficiency of what
pleases and interests in the act of hearing
only.
He says, how utterly inefficient is our preaching
if just in the time when we are
preaching we please our hearers, and that is
all.
How desirable it is that our people should
keep in memory what is preached unto them
that they may not believe in vain.
Hence, he says, it is much to be
wished that the divisions should be short, simple
and easy, the language everywhere plain, natural and
familiar.
Few can imagine how much I have always
made this my aim and effort.
And there's one quote from Ryle.
Ryle says, to the same effect, I find
it of the utmost importance to make people
understand, remember and carry away what I say.
And I am certain that divisions help me
to do so.
They are, in fact, like hooks and pegs
and shells in the mind.
If you study the sermons of men who
have been and are successful preachers, you will
always find order and often division in their
sermons.
And then Ryle goes on on a very
nice piece about Spurgeon which I will not
give you.
Try to get this for yourself.
Now, in the case of William Jay, there's
abundant evidence that he was blessed in this
respect.
Let me give you an illustration of it.
Two men once met each other.
One was a Dr. Bowie who tells this
story.
And Bowie asked this other man had he
ever heard a piece about Spurgeon which I
will not give you.
Try to get this for yourself.
Now, in the case of William Jay, there's
abundant evidence that he was blessed in this
respect.
Let me give you an illustration of it.
Two men once met each other.
One was a Dr. Bowie who tells this
story.
And Bowie asked this other man had he
ever heard William Jay preach.
Yes, the man said, I have heard him.
Had he preached, he said, on Psalm 16,
verse 3.
And then the man proceeded to give Dr.
Bowie the whole outline of his sermon.
And Dr. Bowie said, and when did you
hear him preach on that verse?
He said it was 35 years ago.
And he had the whole structure of the
sermon in his mind.
Now, that is just one illustration, but there
are many others that could be given.
Jay worked at this with all his might
to give his hearers a structure of three
to five points, never more than five, which
he expected them to carry away in their
memories.
That's what he meant by this word, stick.
That's my first reason then for divisions.
Culled out of Jay.
It's an amazing preacher who can really preach
so as to be remembered in years to
come if his sermon is not ordered.
There is another reason why sermons need to
be prepared with clear divisions.
This is my second reason.
Namely, that it facilitates the memory of the
preacher and makes him more largely, if not
entirely, independent of written notes in the pulpit.
To be bound to notes is crippling for
a preacher.
If we cannot remember our own message, how
can we expect our hearers to remember ours?
It really is as simple as that.
If we are staring at our notes in
the pulpit, we are really telling the people
that we are not remembering the very message
which we are supposed to be delivering to
them.
But if we are not to be tied
to paper in the pulpit, we are faced
with only two other alternatives.
Either we have to ramble and wander about
the land from Dan to Beersheba in Hill
style, or we must have an orderly structure
clearly in our minds.
In William Jay's case, it was not until
he was in his seventies that he took
any note into the pulpit, and even then
it was only a slip of paper.
We have no doubt all wrestled with the
problem of how far we need to have
our eye upon notes when we are preaching.
It may not have occurred to us sufficiently,
however, that our over-dependence upon notes may
be too easily excused on the grounds of
our weak memories when in fact we are
to blame for not planning our sermons so
that they can be retained in our minds.
So this, you see, is the second argument.
The division of the sermon greatly facilitates the
freedom of the preacher.
Can I digress for one moment?
When I was reading Jay at large on
this, I envied him in one point.
He says, we are to do most of
our study in the open air.
Now, brethren, I don't know how you do
it, but I don't do that.
But you see, neither, perhaps, will we be
preaching when we're in our mid-eighties.
These men did their work more in the
open air.
And how did they do it?
Well, because of their whole sermon structure.
You see, they had their divisions, their heads.
With those heads, they proceeded to walk in
the open air, and there they hammered out
and filled out their heads.
Mr. Greer was mentioning earlier this morning Mr.
McCrae Stornoway, who did so much for this
conference at its beginning.
And Mr. McCrae Stornoway did exactly the same
as William Jay.
His structure was more or less identical.
I don't know that he ever read Jay.
I suppose he had.
But then he would take his head and
he would proceed round his manse by the
mile on Saturdays.
I remember him very clearly telling me this.
From the front door round to the back,
and he would go round and round by
the hour.
And, of course, he was completely oblivious of
where he was, but he was working on
his sermon.
And Mr. McCrae was also preaching in his
80s.
And here we are, often bowed over our
desks.
These men, this is a third argument which
I haven't put on paper, their health was
improved.
Ah!
I draw a third and a last comment
from Jay on how a wise consideration for
our hearers will influence the form of our
preaching.
It will lead us to aim at variety
and to avoid wearying our people.
Preaching as he did for 63 years in
one charge William Jay is surely entitled to
speak to us on this point.
We may suppose that in Jay's day it
was comparatively easy to gain and keep a
congregation.
Yet that is not true.
In fact, in his long lifetime he saw
not a few comparatively able and orthodox men
who were pulpit failures.
And the reason for their failure was often
the monotonous character of their preaching.
The peril is that we unconsciously lose our
awareness of the reality of this danger.
And when this happens we can fall into
modes of preaching which too easily lend themselves
to wearying our congregations.
For example, the preacher who usually preaches an
expository series is vulnerable at this point.
William Jay was not blind to the benefits
of preaching that is expository and consecutive rather
than textual.
But, like Spurgeon, he believed that the average
minister may be hard put to it not
to weary people with this method.
You may recall even Spurgeon believed that he
would have wearied a congregation with that method.
Jay regarded it as utterly reprehensible that a
preacher known to him preached for 19 Sundays
on the list of evil characters listed in
the four verses of 2 Timothy chapter 3.
Now, I don't know what you've heard, brethren,
but I've sometimes heard men and it becomes
almost a point of ambition how long have
you preached on a few verses?
And that is the very thing that Jay
strikes at here with great force and he
does it elsewhere.
He was equally critical of another who, he
says, though not young in age not green,
he says, in years was nevertheless three years
in going through the Ten Commandments.
Well, to him such a man was utterly
ignorant of these basic principles connected with the
art of preaching.
The preacher who does not take a series
may equally tax his hearers if he keeps
to the same themes.
Jay instances the case of Dr. Thomas Howis
or Howis as sometimes he is pronounced who
for many years was the minister of the
Countess of Huntingdon's Chapel in Bath.
He says, the doctor's style of address was
all too invariably terrific and derived from such
texts as these.
It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God who among
us can dwell with everlasting burnings.
Depart ye cursed etc.
Not surprisingly he tells us Thomas Howis' chapel
was emptied and Howis, great man though he
was, finished his days sitting as a hearer
in William Jay's congregation.
Undue length in preaching Jay also treated as
a failure in consideration towards our hearers.
He rejected entirely the idea that powerful sermons
are in any way synonymous with long sermons.
He writes, Whitfield and Wesley and most of
the early Methodists were short.
Writing of Richard Cecil, who we've referred to
earlier, and who he regarded as one of
the most useful preachers of the late 18th
century, this is what Jay says, Among many
other excellences in his preaching he was always
brief.
I never heard him exceed 40 minutes.
This is an excellence which did not distinguish
our forefathers and it is, I fear, very
unlikely to be a characteristic of the moderns,
especially our younger preachers who show in their
long harangues the confidence they have in their
own ability and acceptance.
There is no excuse for a long sermon.
If it be good, it need not be
long.
And if it be bad, it ought not
to be long.
He goes on.
Queen Anne, after hearing Dr. South, said, You
have given us an excellent sermon, Dr. South.
I wish you had had time to make
it longer.
And our hearers can still say that to
us when they don't always mean it.
Nay, he said, nay, please your majesty, I
wish I had had time to make it
shorter.
Jay's own practice was generally to take 45
minutes for a sermon on Sundays and 35
minutes for a weekday sermon in his own
congregation.
Now I've run out of manuscript and I
have just a few words and then I
will close.
But my conclusion is just to say and
speak briefly on how Jay attained to his
skill as a preacher.
I have spent the great bulk of the
time on what I think is the greatest
lesson of his ministry this whole question of
the art based upon a proper understanding of
our hearers.
As I say, a last point in just
a few words, how did he attain to
this excellence?
Well, in the first place it was his
deliberate aim from his earliest days in the
pulpit to excel in this way.
And he quotes these words of Richard Baxter.
There is much truth in the remark of
Richard Baxter that our success commonly bears a
much more exact proportion to our design, our
desire, and our hope than we are apt
to imagine.
Let this thought be enthroned in the mind.
Many times he says that there are very
few men who can excel in more than
one thing.
And the one thing which pastors and ministers
are to excel in is in this art
of preaching.
Let me give you one illustration.
One summer's day he was leaving Bath on
the morning coach to address students at the
Theological Academy in Bristol.
He was speaking to them on this subject
of preaching.
And it was a fine morning and I
think he wanted more time to meditate and
reflect.
So instead of going into the coach in
the lower part he climbed up behind the
coachman on the box and they were joined
by another man who sat himself down next
to the coachman.
Now unfortunately for Mr. J this other man
was a very talkative gentleman and had a
great deal to disturb the peace of the
scenery with.
But the coachman on the other hand had
very little to say.
He was a very withdrawn kind of doer
fellow.
And this led to almost a contention on
the box of the coach because what developed
was this.
This talkative gentleman would say to the coachman
he would say and who lives in that
villa over there?
And the coachman would shake his head and
he said I don't know.
And a few moments later and where does
that new road go there?
He would say pointing up the hill.
And the coachman would return exactly the same
answer I don't know.
Then again and whose house is that?
He would say pointing down in the valley.
And the coachman again would say I don't
know.
By this time this gentleman was thoroughly aggrieved
by this situation and he said to the
coachman is there anything you know?
He said I know he said how to
drive a coach.
And when William Jay got to Bristol he
told this to the students.
There are many things which they cannot and
they need not know.
But the one thing that they must know
they must like the bath coachman he says
they must know how to drive that is
to do their work and that is to
preach the gospel of Christ.
And how do you learn to do that?
Well my only answer which I take from
Jay but it's his greatest answer everywhere he
says by hard work.
We have different natural gifts being given to
us as we have been considering already.
We are dependent upon the measure of aid
given to us by the Spirit of God
but the labour and the work which God
enables us to do will in almost every
instance be the measure of our success.
And Jay to an old man was a
working preacher.
I don't know what time he went to
bed and that doesn't matter but he started
his study work soon after five in the
morning and from that hour until lunch midday
he was alone.
And he was altogether intolerant of anything that
would draw a preacher from that seclusion.
Let me give you this quotation.
He says I have no opinion of a
pastor that is not very studious but study
demands leisure and retirement and quoting Scripture and
through desire a man having separated himself seeketh
and intermedleth with all wisdom.
He should therefore as much as possible avoid
publicity and be covetous and niggardly of every
fragment of time.
A man who has some degree of talent
especially an easiness and fluency of speech may
do for an itinerant or an occasional preacher
by his brisk superficialities but let him become
stationary and have to preach three or four
times a week to the same people and
he will soon abound with sameness and become
sapless and unedifying.
The young will feel little attraction the intelligent
will be tempted to withdraw the dull will
become drowsy and the ignorant that remain will
be ignorant still.
And if you get his autobiography as I
hope you will you'll see how very much
he says on this.
I would commonly ascertain before I left the
study how I should succeed in the pulpit.
With me the tug of war was always
alone.
If I felt that I had grasped my
subject and could gain a certain frame of
spirit made up of the solemn and the
tender I rather longed for the service than
dreaded it.
Just one more.
He says it is a bad case when
a man has acquired the knack of preaching
and can talk on for an hour in
the pulpit without effort and without effect.
It is well he says for a young
minister to feel difficulties and if these induce
him to retirement to study and prayer he
will in time surpass at least inefficiency and
usefulness many who proudly towered above him at
the beginning.
This is one of the cases in which
the first shall be last and the last
first.
And I close with this quotation from the
editors of Jay's autobiography.
In a qualified sense they say Mr. Jay
was born a preacher but this was not
all.
He owed much to those gifts lavished upon
him by the hand of God but he
owed much also to his own sagacity diligence
and unwearied endeavours after improvement.
He saw the pulpit he saw the power
of the pulpit as God's great instrument for
accomplishing this end.
And almost from the time of his first
entering in he made it as we have
already seen the object of his ambition to
excel there.
To be a useful preacher was his aim
and it was thus by constant and unwearied
effort that he became one.
And if this were the habitual study of
all who are called to occupy the pulpit
if with an intense longing after the salvation
of immortal souls and an unwavering determination to
know nothing among men but Jesus Christ and
him crucified if with a truly philosophical view
of the adaptation of preaching to awaken attention
and produce impression if with a recollection of
what has been done by the great masters
in the art of preaching all ministers were
to study the best models of evangelical pulpit
eloquence and were to take extraordinary pains to
acquire by the aid of divine grace a
commanding and interesting style of pulpit address and
while cherishing a sense of absolute dependence upon
the work of the spirit they were to
recollect that the spirit works by appropriate means
and took half the pains to make their
speaking in the pulpit as impressive as the
actor does to make his successful upon the
stage if concerning the powerful preaching of the
gospel they said this one thing I do
and called in all collateral aids to do
it in the best manner we should not
hear as we sometimes do of the declining
power of the pulpit it is for a
wonder a lamentation and a reproach that they
who have to do the most momentous work
under the sun give themselves the least pains
to do it effectually