0.2. INTRODUCTION

Introduction

For forty years, beginning in the first decade of our century, the entire Christian world acknowledged that the greatest Biblical expositor known in the pulpits of both England and America was Dr. G. Campbell Morgan. As far back as 1896, when Dr. Morgan was only thirty-three years old, D. L. Moody, who knew most of the great preachers of the Western world, brought him to the Moody Bible Institute to lecture. In 1904, at the age of forty-one, Dr. Morgan went to London to begin the most epochal ministry of Biblical exposition, covering a thirteen-year period, that London had witnessed for a century. I am speaking here strictly of Biblical exposition, not simply preaching or Gospel preaching, though Dr. Morgan could preach the Gospel with tremendous power. I am fully aware that for many years Charles H. Spurgeon drew larger crowds and that Canon Liddon was recognized as the greatest preacher of London in his day (his ministry at St. Paul’s having closed a few years before Dr. Morgan came) and that there was a certain brilliance about Joseph Parker (whose ministry at City Temple also closed just before Dr. Morgan came to Westminster Chapel); but I must say that for sheer Biblical exposition Dr. Morgan stood above all of his contemporaries.

It was not long before Westminster Chapel, seating some 2,500 persons, was filled to the second gallery. Soon after coming to London Dr. Morgan began his famous Friday night Bible class, probably the largest and most fruitful Bible class London had ever seen, when, week after week, with note-books and Bibles, from 1,500 to 1,700 people moved across that great city to sit for an hour at the feet of this master teacher.

Dr. Morgan began to publish books as early as 1897, when thirty-four years of age, with his little book, Discipleship. In 1903 appeared what is probably his greatest work, The Crises of the Christ’97a volume that every minister should read and study early in his life as a preacher. Altogether, more than seventy volumes came from his pen. The greatest series of pulpit messages for which he was responsible are those which appeared in what was entitled, "The Westminster Pulpit." These appeared annually for about forty Sundays each year from 1906 to 1916. Here are the foundations of many of Dr. Morgan’s books. These volumes contain some of the greatest Biblical preaching of the twentieth century. Now they are exceedingly scarce. In twenty years I have known only one volume of the series to appear in any catalogue of secondhand books. The set just cannot be purchased. The Fleming H. Revell Company, therefore, deserves the deepest gratitude of all ministers of our generation for making these glorious messages available once again.

In rereading these messages and remembering the unique ministry of Dr. Morgan, one cannot help but ask, "What made G. Campbell Morgan the greatest Bible expositor of his day? Why was it that in his prime he could draw more people with sheer Biblical exposition than any other man in the Western world?" In the first place, he gave himself utterly to the Word of God day and night. He himself said in 1937, "I began to read and study the Bible in 1883, and I have been a student ever since, and I still am." Once he told a close friend that when he was asked by young ministers what was the secret of his success, he replied, "I always say to them the same thing’97work, hard work, work." The title of one of his greatest books, The Ministry of the Word, might be taken as the clue to all he did.

I have always felt that of all the various gifts named in the New Testament Dr. Morgan possessed two: he was both teacher and prophet. In addition, there was something about his public ministry that we can only call magnetic, which Jill Morgan (Mrs. K. J. Morgan), in the truly great life of her father-in-law, A Man of the Word, refers to as "the intangible atmosphere of union between teacher and taught." Still vivid in my mind are those winter afternoons in Baltimore, now a quarter of a century past, when I heard Dr. Morgan unfold the opening chapters of Luke’s Gospel: we felt a tenseness, a magnetic pull, a lift, an atmosphere saturated with terrific intensity; our souls were confronted with eternal and transforming truths that sent us out of that sanctuary cleansed, ennobled and determined to go back to the Book. I have been moved by others, in one way or another, but no Bible teacher in the world, in the twentieth century, could cast over his audience, without flash, without show, that mystic spell that Campbell Morgan cast when he was at his best. In reverence, I think it can be truly said that after attending one of Dr. Campbell Morgan’s meetings, a most appropriate comment would have been to quote the words of the two disciples returning to Jerusalem from the walk to Emmaus with our Lord, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us by the way and while he opened to us the scriptures?"

This very day in which I am writing this introduction a letter came to my desk from a faithful Christian worker of years of service in our country who had gone to a Bible Conference for greatly needed spiritual refreshing, but had found only a deadness in the meetings and the poorest kind of spiritual food, which led this servant to ask, "What is happening in the Christian Church today?" How wonderful it would be if the republication of Campbell Morgan’s masterly, moving, Biblical, passion-born messages should be used of God to lead hundreds of ministers into a new life of the study of the Word of God, if they could be led to say, with the Apostles of old, "We will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the ministry of the word."

Fuller Theological Seminary

Pasadena, California

Wilbur M. Smith

(http://www.docin.com/p-154946417.html)

Autor: G. CAMPBELL MORGAN