PREACH BY THE LIFE by Rev. John Caird

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 3, 1860

PREACH BY THE LIFE.

By Rev. John Caird

Let your life be an unuttered yet perpetual pleading with man for God. Let men feel, in contact with you, the grandeur of that religion to whose claims they will not listen, and the glory of that Saviour whose name you may not mention. Let the sacredness of God's slighted law be proclaimed by your uniform sacrifice of inclination to duty, by your repression of every unkind word, your scorn of every undue or base advantage, your stern and uncompromising resistance to the temptation of appetite and sense. Preach the preciousness of time by your husbanding of its rapid hours, and your crowding of its days with duties. Though eternity with its fast-approaching realities, be a forbidden topic to the ear, constrain the unwilling mind to think of it by a spectacle of a life well ordered with perpetual reference to the hopes and destinies beyond the grave. Though no warning against an unspiritual, no exhortation to a holy life, might be tolerated, let your own pure, earnest, unworldly character and bearing be to the careless soul a perpetual atmosphere of spirituality, haunting and hanging round it. And be assured, the moral influence of such a life cannot be lost. Like the seed which the wind wafts into hidden glades and forest depths, where no sower's hand could reach to scatter it the subtle germ of Christ's truth will be borne on the secret atmosphere of a holy life, into hearts which no preacher's voice could

penetrate. Were the tongues of men and of angels to fail, there is an eloquence in living godliness which will often prove persuasive.

For it is an inoffensive, unpretending, unobtrusive eloquence; it is the eloquence of the soft sunshine when it expands the close shut leaves and blossoms—a rude hand would but tear and crush them; it is the eloquence of the summer heat, when it basks upon the thick-ribbed ice—blows would but break it; but beneath that softest, gentlest, yet most potent, influence, the hard, impenetrable masses melt away.—Rev. John Caird.