HERALDS OF GOD
those here, that you speak to them?' Nay, but Christ is better—I do not speak of myself but of Him." It is this that redeems our stammering lips from con- fusion, and gives the veriest sinner words that ring like iron and shine like flame. "You have not chosen Me," says Jesus—that would be too flimsy and fortuitous to be a basis for apostleship—"but I have chosen you": that rallies all the latent courage of the soul. It is "in Christ's stead," declared St. Paul, that we who in ourselves are fallible and sinful creatures announce the Gospel of reconciliation; and the preacher across whose consciousness that thrilling word—"in Christ's stead"—has pealed needs no other apostolic succession to invest him with the insignia of authority. He is not diffidently offering men the dubious results of his private speculation: he is standing on his feet to deliver to them, in the name of the King of kings, a word that cannot return void. He preaches as if the Lord God omnipotent were there at his right hand: as indeed God is. The keynote of his preaching is not "Thus I think": it is "Thus saith the Lord." The late Sir George Adam Smith has described the early years of Dr. Alexander Whyte's ministry in St. George's, Edinburgh, and the great preacher's influence on the student community in particular, to which at that time Smith himself belonged. "I remember how one of us coming out of church one day said: 'Well, till hearing Whyte I never realised that paradox of St. Paul, I … yet not I.' There was the natural man himself, the strong, gifted, ardent personality with his own features,
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