It is an infinite comfort to us ordinary pulpiteers to know that even an Archbishop may sometimes have a bad time! And, on the occasion of which I write, the poor prelate must have had a very bad time indeed. For—tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon!—none of his hearers knew what he had been talking about! They could make neither head nor tail of it! ‘I have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about,’ wrote one of his auditors to a friend. It is certainly most humiliating when our congregations go home and pen such letters for posterity to chuckle over. And yet the ability of the preacher at this particular service, and the intelligence of his hearers, are alike beyond question. For the preacher was the famous Richard Chenevix Trench, D.D., Professor of Theology at King’s College, Dean of Westminster, and afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. The sermon was preached in the classical atmosphere of Cambridge University, principally to students and undergraduates. The theme was the Incarnation—‘The Word was made flesh.’ And the 266young fellow who wrote the plaintive epistle from which I have quoted was Alfred Ainger, afterwards a distinguished litterateur and Master of the Temple. He could make nothing of it. ‘The sermon, I am sorry to say, was universally disappointing. I have not been able to find one man yet who could discover what it was about. It is needless to say I could not. He chose, too, one of the grandest and deepest texts in the New Testament. He talked a great deal about St. Augustine, but any more I cannot tell you.’

Now Christmas will again come knocking at our doors, and many of us will find ourselves preaching on this selfsame theme. And we have a wholesome horror of sending our hearers home in the same fearful perplexity. ‘What on earth was the minister talking about?’ All the cards and the carols, the fun and the frolic, the pastimes and the picnics will be turned into dust and ashes, into gall and wormwood, into vanity and vexation of spirit to the poor preacher who suspects that his Christmas congregation returned home in such a mood. His Christmas dinner will almost choke him. There will be no merry Christmas for him!

But let no minister be terrified or intimidated by the Archbishop’s unhappy experience. His ‘bad time’ may help us to enjoy a good one. We must take his text, and wrestle with it bravely. It is the ideal Christmas greeting. There is certainly depth 267and mystery; but there is humanness and tenderness as well.

‘The Word was made flesh.’ Words are wonderful things, to say nothing of ‘the Word’—whatever that may prove to be. This selfsame Archbishop Trench, whose sermon at Cambridge proved such a universal disappointment, has written a marvellous book On the Study of Words. Here are seven masterly chapters to show that words are fossil poetry, and petrified history, and embalmed romance, and that all the ages have left the record of their tears and their laughter, of their virtues and their vices, of their passion and their pain, in the words that they have coined. ‘When I feel inclined to read poetry,’ says Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘I take down my dictionary! The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of age. Bring me the finest simile from the whole range of imaginative writing, and I will show you a single word which conveys a more profound, a more accurate, and a more elegant analogy.’ Words, then, are jewel-cases, treasure-chests, strong-rooms; they are repositories in which the archives of the ages are preserved.

‘The Word was made flesh.’ We never grasp the Word until it is. Let me illustrate my meaning. 268Here is a bonny little fellow of six, with sunny face and a glorious shock of golden hair. His father hands him his first spelling-book, with the alphabet on the front page, and little two-letter monosyllables following. But what can he make of even such small words? He will never learn the A.B.C. in that way. But give him a teacher. Make the word flesh, and he will soon have it all off by heart!

Five years pass away. The lad is in the full swing of his school-days now. But to-night, as he pores over his books, the once sunny face is clouded, and the wavy hair covers an aching head.

‘Time for bed, sonny!’ says mother at length.

‘But, mother, I haven’t done my home lessons, and I can’t.’

‘What is it all about, my boy?’ she asks, as she draws her chair nearer to his, and, putting her arm round his shoulder, reads the tiresome problem.

And then they talk it over together. And, somehow, under the magic of her interest, it seems fairly simple after all. In her sympathetic voice, and fond glance, and tender touch, the word becomes flesh, and he gra............