Jerusalem who, when he beholds the city, weeps over it as
he sees its crime and shame and notes the tempest gathering to burst
over its "cloud-capp'd towers, its solemn temples, its airy palaces."
The preacher, like his Lord, must be "a man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief." It must be true of _him_ that for "the hurt of the
daughter of My people was He stricken." His heart must have bled for
the tragedy of the world!

And into the delivery of the message this pity must find its way and
have expression, if not always in word, certainly in tone. In tone, we
say, for the tone of the preacher's utterance is almost, if not quite,
as important as its words. Lacking the accent of pity, the accusations
of the preacher will degenerate into scolding, and of all scolds the
pulpit scold is the most objectionable. Without a pitiful heart his
exposure of human nature will become mere fault-finding, and a
fault-finding ministry is a ministry of desolation. Again, without a
pitiful heart the preacher's utterance of the divine judgment will be
but more or less terrifying threats, and the pulpit is not set up to
threaten but to pronounce. We have heard preaching of this order. "I
am not at all well to-night," said a clergyman of whom we once read,
"and I shall give it 'em hot." Men are sometimes reminded of their
sins, not out of a sense of duty borne in upon a reluctant spirit, but
because the wind happens to be in the east, or the preacher's nerves
are badly out of order. The Church is told of her coldness, her
indolence and unfaithfulness, her narrowness, bigotry and greed, not
because, after a struggle to win permission to tell a more flattering
tale, the preacher comes forth under a divine compulsion to "cry aloud
and spare not," but because his digestion is upset, or his temporal
concerns are awry, or even because his personal ambitions have been
disappointed and himself unappreciated. There is such a thing as
bad-tempered, ill-natured preaching, in which the weapons of the Bible
armoury are borrowed for the expression of the preacher's chagrin and
spite. In a literal sense every word he speaks may be true, but the
spirit of the message destroys all possible good effects and turns the
word of God into an angry snarl. It might, therefore, be well to
decide to preach along lines of accusation, exposure, judgment or
warning only on those days when the heart is happiest, when life goes
well and the cheek of health glo