The preacher among the poets

THE preacher is wise who spends much time in the company of the poets, for various reasons. His familiarity with the poets will enable him the better to understand the poetical books of the Old Testament. Much mischief has been done by the dull, prosaic, literal interpretation of highly poetical expressions. Figures of speech have been commented upon, and systems based upon them, as if they were statements of hard fact.

Poetry further gives the preacher a sense of the colour and music of words, it awakens what latent poetry there may be in his own soul, it refines his thought and expression and gives wings to his imagination. The poets are themselves preachers and prophets, and their method of preaching is largely the method of illustra- tion. The poet is often the seer, the watchman on the tower, who stands above the crowd and the dust and the noise of the streets, and sees and hears things that are invisible and inaudible to those engaged in the rough-and-tumble of the struggle for existence.

He is the voice of the best thought and aspiration of the crowd. Who like Milton interpreted what was loftiest and most enduring in the Puritanism of the seventeenth century? Who like Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning interpreted the nineteenth century to itself and to all future ages? They were the prophets who purged its thought of all that was vulgar, frivolous, and temporary, and set to music what was noblest and most divine in the hearts and minds of its deepest and purest thinkers.

The supreme poets have always been deeply religious men, for only to the man whose heart is pure comes “the vision and the faculty divine” that makes the poet whose name is to be enrolled among the classics. Among the poets the preacher in search of illustra- tions will find rich material, but it needs a skilful hand to use the material wisely in preaching.

The preacher may take a poem that is a story, and tell the story in his own way. In Browning and in Tennyson there are many stories that are really parables, or easily conver- tible into parables, on which the preacher can lay a reverent hand. Here, for instance, is how one preacher utilises the story of “Enoch Arden.”