The G. Campbell Morgan Archive

NSIGHT, imagination, large discernment, human sympathy and broad, charitable understanding, combine with certain natural gifts, clarity of expression, lucidity of definition and the like, to make of Dr. Morgan a Biblical expositor almost without a peer. In his hands, the Bible-its pages, precepts, characters-is made positively to live and to exude an enheartening, a vital force. Incidents, apparently insignificant, are shown to possess unsuspected values; chapters and books, to outward seeming entirely unconnected, are discovered to be in close relation, one to the other, and to the whole. This latter element, now so conspicuous in Dr. Morgan's work, was given a prominent place in his modus operandi, at the very beginning of his public work and ministry which prominence it has since been permitted to retain. Implying, as it does, the unbroken continuity and underlying unity of Holy Scripture, Dr. Morgan regards a successful and rightful teaching of the Bible, as being of first importance. He has spoken so repeatedly of its being "The Divine Library" and of the absolute imperativeness of so regarding it, that the phrase has come to be inseparably associated with his name. The term is not his, of course, but Sir Thomas Browne’s, as all lovers of Religio Medici are well aware. Yet Dr. Morgan has given it a new emphasis and significance for the Bible students of this generation.
ut the Bible is not only a Divine Library to Dr. Morgan; it is a veritable world of men and women in which he enters and laves to dwell. In that world he has encountered a remarkable group of personalities-a delectable company which he has come to know intimately, to understand, to love. We hear him speak of the men of the Bible; of Isaiah, of Hosea, of Amos; of John, of Peter, of Paul, and we feel that he is talking of intimate friends. He knows these men-their strength and weakness, their frailties and their loyalties. They are his companions with whom he has walked and held converse. In that world, too, he has seen the face of Jesus Christ; he has walked and talked with his Lord, and daily learned of Him that which he has imparted to a listening generation. In all probability- when all else has been said that can be concerning Dr. Morgan's gifts as an expositor-it is just here that we come upon the secret of his success. His Bible-talks are heart-talks-the Book lives in the heart of this man, and he lives in the heart of the Book.
t is my business [Dr. Morgan has declared] to give myself to the work of expounding the teaching of the Bible concerning God and man in its entirety. But I believe that I am to preach only what is revealed therein. There are many secrets not revealed in the Bible; there are many problems not solved there. My conception of my work gives me no right to offer solutions of these problems which, I have evolved from my own thinking, or speculations which I have made concerning these mysteries. As a matter of fact I have solutions of my own to many of these problems, but I never offer them to my congregations. A man whose ministry is wholly Biblical, does not approach the chaos he finds around him with the intention of discovering how to deal with it. He goes to it with the authoritative word and instruction of God. To put it in another way, his business is that of interpreting, and applying to life the eternal principles revealed in the Bible, which being obeyed, all other things fall into their proper place and proportion.
It is my business. . . .
nd surely there can be none-none, that is, sufficiently familiar with Dr. Morgan's life and work to entitle them to pass judgment-who are prepared to assert or maintain that he has failed to live up to that declaration both in spirit and letter. "It is my business!" The expounding of God's holy Word has been and is, the paramount passion of his life.
eyond the contention of all tenable controversy, the Bible is Dr. Morgan's main reliance. Not only does he open the treasure-house of Scripture to thousands and make the Bible a new book for them, but he imparts to great numbers the yearning to become Bible students-which yearning they crystallize into action. He shows men and women how to mine for hidden riches; how to study a given book, as a whole, and chapter by chapter; how to become keen, observant, thorough readers of familiar texts; how to make the Bible contributory, not only to a man's spiritual development, but to his work as a servant of Christ. He drives straight to the heart of the Scripture that is being considered, laying it bare, and riveting the attention of his hearers upon it, by the compelling character of his interpretations. He startles, challenges, exalts, and convinces those to whom his words are given, who find it next to impossible to escape the impression he intends them to convey. In the hands of Campbell Morgan the Bible becomes a new book, and belief in Jesus as Saviour and Lord an essential and a vital thing in the life of mankind.
n his chosen work of expounding the Scriptures Dr. Morgan (in the main) adheres to the old methods-first, the central idea, out of which grow the divisions, which he arranges with lucidity and graphically elaborates. His word-pictures of Old and New Testament incidents and scenes are marvellously vivid and striking, abounding in colour and vitality. And the spiritual message of it all goes straight to the heart, so that its influence is felt, and the fruit of it seen, after many intervening days.
f I were asked to name the salient characteristics of Dr. Morgan's expositions of Holy Scripture [says Dr. Marvin Dean] they would be these: First, the experience of a great mind in action. To follow the processes of that mind as revealed in his expository work is fascinating to thoughtful people. Next, there is the fact of his having been a born teacher. He is a man who does not despise elemental, pedagogical work. His addresses average an hour and a quarter in length. He begins at a lower point than almost any other preacher I have ever heard, and rises to a higher point, and he carries substantially his every hearer all the way through.
hen there is his inexorable habits as a student. What he gives out is the product of his own hard thinking and close application to the theme in hand. His marvellous messages on the historic Christ consist of a study of each one of the Four Gospels prefaced by a preliminary look at the entire four in one address. This does not sound original, but it should be supplemented by the statement that for hundreds of people these Gospels will be forever transformed. One secret of his ability to take a Gospel and give it out as though it were an utterly new production just issued from the press is found in the fact that Dr. Morgan begins his study of any book of the Bible by first reading it aloud fifty times. Following these fifty or more readings, he begins the microscopic study of the book, and then prepares his outline. After he has come through to his distilled essence of the book he turns to exegetical works, even to the expositions of other preachers. The vital thing is this: he pays the price of expository power by the hardest kind of general and special study of the theme to be considered.
r. Morgan finds-he will always find-in Holy Scripture the peculiar and authoritative disclosure of the mind and will of God, from which he educes that which is profitable for the building up of men in righteousness. He has an unequalled faculty for grasping the content and import of a single book; on the other hand, he communicates to his hearers an hitherto unrealized sense of the unity, the sweep, the high spiritual significance of the Old and New Testaments. In addition he is able to deal with "old" texts and familiar passages so that they shine in so revelatory a way as to make them instinct with new meaning, and to lead a listener to say to himself, "I never saw it after that fashion before," and to realize that, as the result of this illuminating moment, life, for him, is never quite so common again.
his latter trait is, in one man's judgment, the choicest of Dr. Morgan's manifold gifts. There are Christian men and women out of count, who are simply steeped in Biblical terminology. It is part and parcel of their common speech and pervades every avenue of their lives. During the hours of public worship it is the medium of corporate expression and mutual intercourse. So familiarized are they with it that the conventional, lifeless reading given it in their hearing by perfectly well-intentioned yet utterly static preachers, leaves them quite untouched by the wizardry of its message, and renders them almost oblivious of its voice, which reaches their inner consciousness much as the humming of a tune carried on in a distant room reaches the organ of their physical hearing. Apathy, born of continual but mechanical contact descends upon their souls; spiritual realities are obscured and rendered harder of access, while the familiar words of Holy Scripture appear to have become as an idle tale, to have yielded their every mite of counsel, their every grain of comfort, their final word of cheer.
hen Dr. Morgan swings into the ken of these sated folk lending freshness to the familiar, making the Bible breathe again, with a new and human interest. For how many thousands in this, and his native land, has he accomplished just this very thing! In his hands, the Bible becomes less a cabinet of precious coins of truth than a landscape with figures that are alive and in motion. The revealed Word, as he expounds it, drips with human kindness rather than bristles with august authority.
olemics and exegesis are subordinated to a fine spirit of persuasiveness. Dr. Morgan is an advocate, more anxious to win assent than to silence contradiction. He is less a Bombastes Furioso running amok than a Fra Angelica reflecting in face and speech the beams of love and devotion. It is not invidious to say, moreover, even when all his work has a surprisingly and satisfying quality, that Dr. Morgan rises to his best in his treatment of the relation of reason and faith. Here there is a penetration of thought, a beauty and pungency of expression, a triumphant march of argumentation that compels a surrender of mind to the poignant appeal. In a word of his own, he enables his hearers to realize that "reason and faith are the warp and woof in the fabric of the life of the spirit," and that "the faith that does not come from reason is to be doubted, and the reason that does not lead up to faith to be feared."
ne cannot listen to Dr. Morgan's expositions of Holy Scripture without feeling the futility of the activities of the human mind when attempting an elucidation of spiritual problems, outside the certainties and realities of revealed Truth,--of the folly of
"Dropping buckets into empty wells
And growing old in drawing nothing up."
ut with this feeling, comes also the assurance that the Truth is safe, while Time endures.
"The waves of unbelief mount and recede,
And jar the century with strong unrest;
They carry back the sands of many a creed,
But only leave the Rock more manifest."
r. Morgan gives us all to see that the abiding wonder of the Holy Scriptures is their universality. They cover the length and breadth, the depth and height of human experience. There is no attribute of God; no phase of the myriad aspirations, sorrows, burdens, perplexities, doubts and duties of the human soul; no relationship of God and man or of man to man, that is not touched upon in the Book of books. There is even no social, civic, national or international problem that does not there find its answer. Fifty-sixty-years of preaching cannot exhaust the themes of the Bible. There is as much truth as humour in Ian Maclaren's old Scotch preacher in Kate Carnegie, who started to expound one of the Epistles but never got beyond the first chapter, so rich was its lode of truth.
et despite the inexhaustible character of the Bible as sermonic material, it is a notorious fact that many present day preachers confess themselves as being sorely put to, to discover subjects on which to base discourses, which can be depended upon to attract the people to public worship, and to keep them coming to church with any reasonable degree of regularity.
t has been charged, too, that after the first two years or so, the average preacher constantly repeats himself. No matter what are the texts he chooses, he harks back to pretty much one set of ideas, before his sermon is concluded. In the course of a couple of years, any regular member of his congregation-one, that is, paying some little attention to the character of the preaching given it knows, even before he goes to church, what he will be almost certain to hear-a particular preacher's gospel. Whole areas of life are left untouched, multitudes of problems left unsolved, while the preacher grows tiresome and the hearer thoroughly fatigued. What is the remedy for this state of affairs? It is no hypothetical malady that is here outlined; on the contrary, it is a very real, a very wide-spread ailment and something or other requires to be done about it, and that right early.
t is the profound conviction of the present writer that the remedy is not far to seek. It is to be found in a return to Biblical, to expository preaching, to preaching such as Campbell Morgan has given his congregations for more than a generation-such as he is still giving those who sit at his feet. It is inconceivable that there should be any such a thing as sameness or monotony in a man's preaching, if he address him to, and pilot his congregation through, the books of the Bible. Dr. Morgan is a case in point. Nobody, one supposes, doubts the fine quality of his mind, nor the unusually fine forensic and histrionic gifts that are his. Dr. Morgan has never suffered from any lack of appreciation nor has he known the soul-numbing experience of those compelled to eat the black, bitter bread of neglect. His worth is known and the honourable place he has so splendidly won for himself, is universally and ungrudgingly conceded him. But can anyone imagine Dr. Morgan retaining unimpaired for close upon forty years the enviable qualities of versatility, suggestiveness, and whole-heartedness that, unquestionably, are his, had he become, and having become, elected to remain, a topical preacher? If there be such an one in the world, he is endowed with imaginative faculties far greater than those to which the present chronicler can pretend.
ne cannot dissociate Dr. Morgan from the Scriptures, nor conceive of him in any other r61e, whether in the pulpit or on the rostrum, than that of a preacher, an expositor of the Bible. In the study of the Word he has found the mind of the Spirit, which discovery has enabled him to expound that Word more freshly and suggestively than any other man of his time.
r. Morgan is the brilliant leader of a race of preachers apparently fast dying out [says Frederick Atkins]. In a recent article, "What Is the Matter With Preaching?" a certain well known modernist has rather ridiculed expository preaching. Am I far wrong in assuming that virtually all our greatest preachers Joseph Parker, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and Alexander Maclaren, for example were expository preachers? This writer declares that the Bible is a searchlight not so much intended to be looked at, as to be thrown upon a shadowed spot." But I should say that the definite objective of all good expository preaching is not, as has been playfully suggested, "to find out what happened to the Jebusites," but to discover the meaning of God's message to mankind and apply it to contemporary human problems.
or some years, it was the privilege of the writer of these pages to hear Dr. Morgan deliver his expository sermons with fair regularity-sometimes, for weeks together. He has heard him, for example, take his people through a comprehensive study of the teachings of Jesus, bringing together (or seeming to) everything the Master had to say about God, man, and human relationships to both. Even the dullest member of his congregation must have been conscious in every service of being present on a great occasion- must have felt, too, that Dr. Morgan was dealing with the greatest truths ever uttered-the words of Jesus. There was an unmistakable bigness in the preaching, a kaleidoscopic variety in every sermon. Week by week Dr. Morgan spoke about what Jesus taught concerning His Father; with the question of who were one's neighbours; with the cure for sin; with the secret of a happy life. Expository preaching, all of it, yet of a character so choice and enheartening as to render the thought of exchanging it for any other known, or possible to the art of preaching the wide world over, an unthinkable eventuality.
imilarly, when Dr. Morgan piloted his congregation through the Parables of the New Testament. Here again, a conspicuous variety of truth would be unveiled. Not a phase of human experience appeared to be left undealt with, not a shadowed corner of life remaining unillumined; not a human merit unrecognized or unadorned. Or it would be the Epistles. Here again, one saw how every deliverance differed, by a world's breadth, from the others, save in the one unifying particular which rendered them irrevocably akin.
gain, it could be the Old Testament-especially the books of the prophets and the Psalms. In Dr. Morgan's hands both the one and the other were given a Divine import, and a human appeal. The stories of the ancient seers, the cry of the Psalmist's heart, were made to breathe the assurance of the soul seeking God and finding Him; of a Divine redemption which reaching down to the most abysmal depth to which human nature can descend, lifts it to the very gates of heaven. No emotion felt by man in subsequent ages remains unvoiced in the Old Testament, and there Dr. Morgan lifted up, in order to demonstrate to those who listened to him that all emotion and suffering of humanity is shot through and through by the light of God.
nd there were other courses, through which Dr. Morgan steered the people of his flock. Upon every theme they watched the play of a mind richly stored, yet literally saturated with the spirit of one Book. They were given the benefit, in the matters of spiritual guidance, of a vivid yet chaste imagination, a gift of crystal-clear expression, an assurance- a conviction-which doubt could not assail, a moral earnestness which swept down like a desert-storm, a piercing discernment of the follies of humanity, an even deeper penetration of the truth of God and an unfailing declaration of a burning message of hope and reconciliation for the erring soul and the doubting heart. All these rich and fruitful qualities Dr. Morgan brought to his great Biblical expositions during the period with which this part of our narrative has to do. But that is not all. It is precisely these choice and truly wonderful qualities that he still brings to bear upon his work of preaching the truths and teachings of the Holy Scriptures. Those who listen to him are always sure of wideness, scope, universality, comprehensiveness which makes understandable to gentle and simple alike, the truths of the one Book, which still remains the myriad-voiced revelation of God and man.