This connection of the Christian minister's office contrasts on the one hand with the priestly theory. Paul had known in Judaism a religion of which the altar was the centre, and the official function of the "minister" was to sacrifice. But now he has come to see that "the one sacrifice for sins for ever" leaves no room for a sacrificing priest in that Church of which the centre is the Cross. We sorely need that lesson to be drilled into the minds of men to-day, when such a strange resurrection of priestism has taken place, and good, earnest men, whose devotion cannot be questioned, are looking on preaching as a very subordinate part of their work. For three centuries there has not been so much need as now to fight against the notion of a priesthood in the Church, and to urge this as the true definition of the minister's office: "we preach," not "we sacrifice," not "we _do_" anything; "we preach," not "we work miracles at any altar, or impart grace by any rites," but by manifestation of the truth discharge our office and spread the blessings of Christ.
This conception contrasts on the other hand, with the false teachers' style of speech, which finds its parallel in much modern talk. Their business was to argue and refine and speculate, to spin inferences and cobwebby conclusions. They sat in a lecturer's chair; we stand in a preacher's pulpit. The Christian minister has not to deal in such wares; he has a message to proclaim, and if he allows the "philosopher" in him to overpower the "herald," and substitutes his thoughts about the message, or his arguments in favour of the message, for the message itself, he abdicates his highest office and neglects his most important function.
We hear many demands to-day for a "higher type of preaching," which I would heartily echo, if only it be _preaching_; that is, the proclamation in loud and plain utterance of the great facts of Christ's work. But many who ask for this really want, not preaching, but something quite different; and many, as I think, mistaken Christian teachers are trying to play up to the requirements of the age by turning their sermons into dissertations, philosophical or moral or aesthetic. We need to fall back on this "we preach," and to urge that the Christian minister is neither priest nor lecturer, but a herald, whose business is to tell out his message, and to take good care that he tells it faithfully. If, instead of blowing his trumpet and calling aloud his commission, he were to deliver a discourse on acoustics and the laws of the vibration of sonorous metal, or to prove that he had a message, and to dilate on its evident truth or on the beauty of its phrases, he would scarcely be doing his work. No more is the Christian minister, unless he keeps clear before himself as the guiding star of his work this conception of his theme and his task--_Whom we preach_--and opposes that to the demands of an age, one half of which "require a sign," and would again degrade him into a priest, and the other calls for "wisdom," and would turn him into a professor.
II. We have here the varying methods by which this one great end is pursued. "Admonishing every man and teaching every man in all wisdom."
There are then two main methods--"admonishing" and "teaching." The former means "admonishing with blame," and points, as many commentators remark, to that side of the Christian ministry which corresponds to repentance, while the latter points to that side which corresponds to faith. In other words, the former rebukes and warns, has to do with conduct and the moral side of Christian truth; the latter has chiefly to do with doctrine, and the intellectual side. In the one Christ is proclaimed as the pattern of conduct, the "new commandment"; in the other, as the creed of creeds, the new and perfect knowledge.