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Christian thinkers and leaders of today are seriously concerned about the decline of reverence and love for the Bible, which is undoubtedly a characteristic of the age. And the gravest aspect of the question is found, not in the antagonism of the unbeliever, but in the sheer indifference of the average mind and the lack of interest in the conventionally religious and church going sections of the community.
Let a man find interest, suggestive and arresting power in the Bible, and the Word will have a chance with him: even curiosity is better than dullness, for it lays open at least the surface of the heart. What we need most sorely at the present juncture is not merely interpreters of the Word, but, first of all, those who can, as it were, let it shine with it's own revealing light. "The only genius we often want," said Dr. Parker, "is simply more light." The teacher who can hold up the Lamp of the Word where it's rays cannot but fall upon the path of life, is the interpreter who will create an interest in the Bible which shall have nothing in common with idle curiosity or unprofitable speculation. Men will say, "we thought this book was a dark and perplexing document which needed to have light thrown upon it, but we see now that it itself is a light piercing far down into the darkest caverns of a man's being."
An unusually striking illustration of this was given at Bradford some six years ago. Bradford is easily the most cool, hard-headed, unimpressionable city in England. Explicitly Rationalistic in thought and temper, it offers a difficult field for any sort of Evangelism. Neither Wesley , in the eighteenth century, nor Moody, in the nineteenth, succeeded in piercing through the granite surface.
It is the home of free and often bitter controversy, of flourishing sects and "isms," of an intelligent and restive democracy frankly antagonistic to Christianity. And when it was rumoured that a man from London was coming to inaugurate a Bible-school there- not a campaign of Bible defense, or a series of controversial discussions, but a Bible-school pure and simple, interpretive, not apologetic- failure speedy and complete was prophesied by those most concerned for the religious welfare of the people. But they were gloriously disappointed, for within four or five days the attendance had leapt from 400 to 2,500; and, when the brief campaign came to an end, it was decided to invite Dr. Campbell Morgan- for he was the bold pioneer- to organize another second occasion St. George's Hall, holding 4,000, was filled at night, while the afternoon Bible expositions drew between 1,000 and 1,500. At the end of three weeks, the first permanent Bible-study School was organized, with a regular membership of 400. The impossible had been accomplished. Bradford crowds had been attracted and held, not by argument concerning the Bible, but by letting the word be it's own evidence.
What is the secret of Dr. Morgan's expository power? Most people would say he was a born expositor, but one is inclined rather to lay emphasis upon the fact that he is a born preacher. It is precisely because he is a preacher first and foremost that he can make the Bible to glow and to shine. The teacher whose interests are purely didactic often fails in exact proportion to his excellence. Teaching that is mere teaching that can only instruct and drill: it cannot reveal, inspire, evoke. It is the preacher behind the expositor that is the dynamic force. An open-air speaker once found himself badly heckled by his captious audience. He stopped short. "My friends," he said, "I'm not out to win this argument: I'm out to win you." The key to Dr. Morgan's influence as a teacher is in the preacher's passion to win men. In the last resort, he is not of Scripture as to bring it to bear upon the inmost life f the student.
On the subject of his training and early experience, Dr. Morgan is delightfully frank. in a vivid piece of autobiography he tells how, in his early preaching days, a worthy brother came to him at the close of an address, saying in tones of mingled encouragement and warning, "You can preach, and you know it." "Certainly," was the somewhat disconcerted rejoinder. "Why did you think I accepted your invitation?"
From his earliest days he lived in an atmosphere of preaching. His father was himself a preacher whose one recreation lay in listening to preaching. "He would walk many miles to hear preachers." records his distinguished son, "and take me with him: and to this day the spell of the services, and the power of the preachers I heard with him, are memories so vivid that I seem to be living through it all again. In those days I never imagined that I could be anything other than a preacher. His first address at an actual service was given we was a mere boy, and from that day the passion for preaching flamed in him, and he preached in the open air, in cottages, among his school fellows, wherever opportunity offered, his schoolmaster giving wise guidance and help. He had his share of the sublime confidence of youth, and likes to tell of a six-mile moonlight walk, after a cottage meeting, with one David smith, a saintly colporteur, who revealed to him the uselessness of speaking before people in order that they might discover one's ability. "I rebelled; I was convicted; I owned up!A few weeks later I went again with the self-same man and spoke in the self-same cottage. There had been much exercise of soul in the intervening time, and in the middle of the address i utterly broke down: but ere we left, under the guidance of David Smith, two or three had obeyed the call of Christ. It was to me an experience the effect of which has never wholly left me.
A university course naturally presented itself as the next step, but circumstance arose which made it necessary for these golden dreams to be laid aside, and the aspiring preacher settled down to the grind of a schoolmaster's routine, turning his holidays into evangelistic campaigns and making a brave fight against the rebellious uprising of baffled ambitions. Then there came an impulse which was more than ambition- a growing conviction that he was called to the work of evangelism.