The Living Christ and The Four Gospels with Illustrations

With Illustrations
The Lectures printed in this volume were delivered to the Carrs Lane congregation, at irregular intervals.
Eleven or twelve years ago I was preaching at Augustine Church, Edinburgh, a few months after Dr. Lindsay Alexander, a scholar and theologian of distinction, had resigned the pastorate. As I walked home with one of the deacons after the morning’s service, he said some very gracious things, which I have unhappily forgotten, about the sermon; he also said some things, not so gracious, about the ministers who had served the Church since Dr. Alexander’s resignation; these, owing to some unamiable intellectual peculiarity, I remember. “Sir,” he said, “they have preached to us as if we were all Masters of Arts.” That was an error which I was not capable of committing, and therefore I deserved no credit for avoiding it. For if a preacher does something to form the habits of his people, the people do almost as much to form the habits of the preacher; and for thirty-seven years I have been the minister of a congregation in the heart of a great manufacturing community--a congregation in which there are never many Masters of Arts, although there are in it many men and women with an active, vigorous, and speculative intellect, and with, a keen interest in public affairs and in current theological controversies. For such persons the Lectures were prepared, and they are published with the hope that they may be of service to persons of the same description in other parts of England.
In delivering the Lectures to a popular audience, it was necessary to repeat in several of the later Lectures some things which had been said in the earlier. These repetitions are unnecessary in a printed book, but I have not found it possible to cancel them without reconstructing the whole argument.