THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE
haunting sense of anticlimax overwhelms him. It is one thing to set out gallantly when the flags are waving and the drums summoning to a new crusade, but it is quite another thing to keep plodding on when the road is difficult and the initial impetus has spent its force and the trumpets of the dawn have ceased to blow. It is one thing to have inspirations: it is another to have tenacity. "My little children," wrote Paul to the Galatians, "of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you": a swift and startling turn of phrase giving a profoundly moving insight into the price of true Christian ambassadorship. For—
it is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with
death!—
and if ever a man finds the work of the ministry becoming easily manageable and surmountable, an undemanding vocation without strain or any encumbering load of care, he is to be pitied, not congratulated: for he has so flagrantly lost touch with One whose ministry of reconciliation could be accomplished and fulfilled only through Gethsemane and Calvary. "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sins." Unless something of the evangelist's life-blood goes into his quest for souls and into the word he brings them from the Lord, the quest remains fruitless and the word devoid of delivering power.
That the ministry should be regarded (as in fact it has sometimes been regarded) as a profession—a career whose main qualifications are a certain amount of
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