Ministration of the Gospel

 I would suggest the importance of a complete ministration of the Gospel. This would include three points suited to the complex character of man. There is doctrine for the head, experience for the heart, practice for the life and conversation. Take one or two of these things separately, and what a poor, starving, ineffective Ministration it is! What are doctrines without experience, but dry, abstract notions? What are they without practice, but Antinomian ungodliness? What, again, is experience without doctrine? It is a religion of feeling; a religion of delusion; fostered by excitement, instead of connected with principle; a mere ignis fatuus, 1 instead of the “light of life;” inducing a spiritual “confidence in the flesh,” instead of a “rejoicing in Christ Jesus.” What is experience without practice? It shows only the power of impulse, instead of permanent habit, and leaves the man the wretched victim of his own delusions. Thus, again, what is practice without doctrine, but “the body without the spirit, which is dead?” without experience—mere external formality, wholly destitute of the “joy and peace of believing in Christ?” We bring the matter to a very simple point, when we connect every feeling, and every obligation, with a continual contemplation of Christ, and an entire dependence on him, “rejoicing with joy unspeakable and full of glory,” that “all our springs are in him.” I am led to dwell upon this point, because, so far as my own observations have gone, I have uniformly marked that instability of profession is combined with partial views of Scripture, a sort of favouritism of Scripture. Sometimes it may be favoritism for doctrines, or for some particular doctrines. Sometimes it may be the prophetical parts of the Word—those parts that give occasion to the indulgence of speculation, or which act more directly upon the imagination than they do upon the conscience and the conduct. It is very difficult to preserve a well-balanced mind in the reception or dispensation of the Gospel. Where no positive error is introduced, important truths are too often misplaced, or stretched beyond their scriptural dimensions. It little matters which is the favourite point. A partial exhibition [of the truth] must be ineffectual. We can never uphold a steadfast consistency of conduct, except as it is connected with a whole Christ, and a whole revelation of God. I add one further responsibility on this point. We “beget our children in the Gospel;” but we do more; we educate our children in the Gospel, and we must expect our children to show the character of their education, whether it is a wise and sound education; or a defective and eccentric education. In the former case, we may expect them to set out the adorning of Christian perfection; in the latter case we observe the absence or, at least, the imperfect development of some feature 472 ADDRESS TO THE IRISH CLERGY. of godliness, if not some spiritual deformity in the profession of the Gospel. Does not this view—slight as it is—bring out the practical conviction that it is no light or trifling matter to preach the Gospel? See how it exercised all the wisdom 2 —all the energy 3 —of the great apostle! “Who is sufficient for these things?”