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Background

Horton Davies was Putnam Professor of Religion at Princeton University where his teaching was focused on the history and liturgics of Christianity. It was in relation to his interest in and knowledge of the Western church that he considered the art of preaching. Beginning with his Oxford University doctoral dissertation, “The Worship of the English Puritans,” published in 1948, Davies demonstrated his acute understanding of the Free Church tradition of Christian worship in England, especially at its beginnings in the 16th and 17th centuries. Chapter 12 considers Puritan preaching as central to the tradition. He wrote:

The importance of preaching consisted in the fact that it was the declaration by the preacher of the revelation of God, confirmed in the hearts of the believers by the interior testimony of the Holy Spirit. (Page 182)

This declaration was rooted in a theological base which included the awareness of “the great abyss that separated God from man.” It was of infinite importance that “God should cross that abyss and speak to the Christian through the sermon,” rather than that the Christian “should traverse it in prayer or praise” (Page 183).

For the 16th century Reform Theologians, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, the sacraments were the “invisible words of God,” serving in dramatic form, as it were, but for many the preaching of the Word of God was preeminent, not in place of the sacraments but as with ingredients of the sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

Nevertheless the Puritan emphasis was on the sermon and the preacher. Davies wrote: “The preacher was the man of God, the prophet, who declared to the congregation the ‘mystery’ of the Gospel, unfolding the whole plan of salvation, under compulsion to bring men to the parting of the ways that lead to salvation or damnation” (Page 185). For the Puritan “the exposition and discussion of the Scripture” was “the outstanding feature of their worship” (Page 190).

Beyond and beneath Davies’s study of Puritan worship is the Free Church tradition, with its influence on his understanding of preaching, was the example of his father, the Reverend David Dorian Marlais Davies, who for more than fifty years served congregations of the Congregational Church “in Wales, England, Scotland and the Channel Islands.” In his book Varieties of English Preaching: 1900–1960 (1963), Davies remembers his father fondly and with great respect for the man and for the dedicated and talented preacher. With such a father “how could one doubt that the ministry was a high calling and preaching a pre-eminent calling?” (Pages 13 & 14). He witnessed a wide range of people, from Welsh miners to doctors, professors, and naval officers arrive at church worried and hearing David Davies preach the word “leave with a clearer conviction and the courage of faith” (Page 14).

In Varieties of English Preaching Horton Davies discusses the task of the preacher. First is apologetical preaching, vindicating the Christian faith, refuting barriers to that faith and “demonstrating that the Gospel of God as transforming truth fulfills “the nature and destiny of man.” Examples of such preaching are to be found in the sermons of Archbishop Temple and Professor Herbert Farmer (Page 29). The second task is “to deepen the congregation’s understanding of God and, assisted by the interior power of the Holy Spirit in preacher and congregation alike, to awaken and confirm faith” (Page 30). Thus there is a teaching function and the task of arousing faith in the worshipers hearing the preacher. As the sermons in this volume affirm, Davies was both a preacher and a prophet, challenging his auditors to believe and to act in accordance with belief. This is “the expository type of preaching” exemplified in the sermons of Dr. W. Sangster, in England, Dr. James Stewart of the Church of Scotland, and the Rev. John R. W. Stott of the Church of England” (Page 30–31). The third task of the preacher, related to the second, “is to teach the holy love of God so as to elicit the response of adoration” (Page 31). Examples of such preaching are to be found in the sermons of Dr. J. H. Jowett and Dean Inge, proponents of Christ in mysticism. Davies also points to the Roman Catholic tradition as a whole in which devotional preaching flowers “in the rich loam of the Roman liturgy.” Davies came to possess a wide and rich knowledge of liturgy in the various denominational expressions and viewed his own preaching not in isolation from but in the context of liturgical worship as a whole. The fourth task is to assist the members of the congregation “to rediscover that their near or remote neighbors of every race and class are brothers in Christ. The motivation is compassion (literally a suffering with others), not sentimentality” (Page 32). Such moral or ethical preaching, exemplified by Henley Henson and William Temple, with their quest for social justice, was inspired in part by Davies’s experience preaching in London during the horrors of World War II, in South Africa during the apartheid regime, and in the United States during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.

Davies’s sermons in this volume exhibit the realization of these four tasks. Under the title of apologetic preaching there are many examples. I think of his sermon on “The Hidden God” expositing Isaiah 45:15. Here, during World War II, he remembers the pain and agony, the 10 million deaths of World War I, the Great War, and asks “Where was God then? Where is God today?” and seeks to answer the question in terms of God’s “dwelling in light unapproachable,” God’s transcendence, but also in relation to the profound insight into God’s respect for humanity. “He will not thrust himself upon men. If He did, He would undo His own works in us: He would take from us the most precious thing we have—our freedom of choice and will.” But, God, though hidden, is not absent. The Incarnation speaks to how God came hidden in the form of Christ, for us and for our salvation.

In sermons on the Incarnation Davies exhibits the challenge of the second task, teaching faith to arouse an awakening faith. He speaks in plain terms, teaching that at Christmas time “we celebrate not the rising of man to deity: but the infinite condescension of God to mankind. The Virgin Birth is simply a poetical and pictorial way of suggesting that the birth of Jesus was no ordinary birth. It was the spirit of divine intervention, with human cooperation, of the spirit of God and of Mary.” And so he proceeds ending with the assertion that the last word is not “argument: it is adoration in the presence of Christ.” To adore is to feel faith awakening, belief affirmed as we fall down before the One who is God incarnate. Here is evidence to the third task: to respond is properly adoration resulting in the life of the devout mystic or the ordinary way of life transformed by the Holy Spirit working in us.

Davies’s involvement in the fourth task was focused on realizing the effects of faith in life individually and corporately. His sermon called “A Victorious Faith: Conquering Racial Tension” given at the Congregational Church of Brookfield, Connecticut, on July 15, 1959, was clearly exemplary of the fourth task. Beginning with St. Paul (Galatians 3:26–28), Davies set forth the two great classes of the church’s inter-racial Charter that we are all God’s adopted children and that “Christ’s new family, the new ‘Christian race’ has overcome racial prejudice, class prejudice, educational prejudice and sexual prejudice.” It is not surprising that the world seeks to destroy such revolutionary affirmations. The preacher was clearly inspired by the Holy Spirit, stating with various illustrations that to be a disciple of Christ is to affirm the infinite worth of all people, to fight for justice for all.

This does not mean that Davies ultimately focused on social justice. Such justice was the fruit of faith in God, in Christ, by means of the Holy Spirit. A vital faith was integrally relational. First, it was so in relation to the church. Davies could be severely critical of the church when it mirrored the faulty society around it rather than reflecting the Kingdom of God. But, he affirmed that it was still, under God, the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic church. Believing is mainly belonging to a community that affirms the Lordship of Jesus Christ. And this affirmation leads to relationships to the world, the society to which it is sent by Christ with the message of love, reconciliation, forgiveness, peace and justice. Davies quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer as writing: “The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.” Davies adds:

In the past the church has been an institution alongside, not the leaven within the world it is meant to change . . . Christ is the man for others; the church is men and women for others. This is the suggestion of the central Christian affirmation of the Incarnation where we see the Supreme as servant.

Christian joy according to Davies involves “a good conscience”: freedom “from resentment against others or against life,” the affirmation of faith, the realization of trust, and finally “the deepest source of joy is a selfless spirit that forgets itself and its worries in seeking the good of others.” He recalls a newspaper photograph taken during the fire raids on London during the second World War, showing two elderly nuns in the midst of the smoke and terror delivering “trays of tea to the exhausted fire-fighters, unaware of their own danger, heroic, undisturbed.” He concludes, “They had all four secrets of Christian joy.”

In so speaking, Davies was bidding his listeners “to follow Christ, thus receiving that which the ever-living Christ promises you in his service, a clear conscience, the removal of bitterness, the faith and love that cast out fear and the selflessness of the Cross.”

Admittedly, reading the sermons of Horton Davies is not the same as hearing him preach them. But reading the few sermons that follow in this book gives you, and all of us, an opportunity to benefit from his inspiration, as in all good preaching, as spirit speaks to spirit, inspired by the Holy Spirit of God.

Artistry

Although most of the sermons in this collection were often youth sermons, yet one can find in them the artistry that led Horton to write later about the Puritan sermons and about the “metaphysical preachers.” Indeed Davies took sermons very seriously as the exposition of the Word of God. His family would know that on the morning of his preaching they had to make themselves scarce, so high was the level of intensity of the preacher. When in the pulpit, the sermons were delivered with controlled Welsh passion, the voice strong and persuasive, trying to keep his voice from falling at the end of sentences. This was a completely different manner from the humble and gentle delivery of his lectures or precepts. He preached with great conviction, very much aware of the responsibility that preaching entailed, on truth, the human condition and the turmoils of the world he lived in.

Typically a sermon would be 4 to 6 single-spaced typewritten pages in length and very compact. Davies preferred the plain style of the Puritans, designed to move his flock to repentance and transform them into soldiers of Christ or saints. However, if judgment was passed, Davies rarely resorted to invective. In “Eternal Life: Heaven and Hell” he said:

That kind of preaching has gone. It has gone because it is not the purpose of our Faith to offer men salvation as a fire-escape. It has gone because its conception of God and of our Lord was vindictive, cruel and unworthy. But, and here lies the mistake, we have rejected the Christian doctrine of judgment because the imagery in which it was clothed was liable to be crudely used.

As an ecumenist, he alternatively followed the Christian calendar without necessarily adhering to the lectionary, or took up the Creed and atypically for modern Puritans, did not pursue the expository of one of the books of the Bible. He adhered faithfully to Christological themes, in exegesis and applications of Scripture related to contemporary situations. As in other sermons, we find that he is not heavy on Patristic learning or on citations from the Greek, Latin and Hebrew, or even on wit, since he was speaking to a regular congregation, mostly during a period of duress, the Second World War, the time of Apartheid in Africa, the time of racial unrest in America. The tone in general was honest and earnest; he used empathy and imagination and the application was understandable for all.

The Use of History

History appears in many sermons under various forms.

For church history Davies has sympathy for doubting Thomas. He refers to Martin Luther, William Temple and William Carey, Barth and Gibson Winter, but also to St. Francis of Assisi and St. François Xavier. In a conversion story, he expresses admiration for Count Zizendorf, the founder of the Moravians. His modern saints are mainly Albert Schweitzer, Father Damien and an unnamed priest who spent the whole of Holy Week in jail, preaching to the inmates. He makes interesting rapprochements as between Aeschylus and Niebuhr in “A victorious faith conquering racial tension,” as they both believe that it is in suffering that we learn.

Quotes

Davies also likes to quote from the learned. Many of the sermons start with a quote from Scripture, and sometimes the sermon itself is strewn with repetition of the initial scriptural text, as in “Essentials of Happiness.” More often, he cites some of the expositors of Scripture. He often refers to Victor Murray and quotes him in “The Holy Spirit” and to Canon Cockin in “The harvest of the Holy Spirit” and John Wesley in “The Atonement” and “Authentic non-conformity.” Expositors do not mean for him only church historians. He practices the belief in the priesthood of all believers by quoting writers and poets: in the “Atonement” he cites William James and G. K. Chesterton (also in “Terminus becomes tunnel”), in the “Incarnation” the poet Charles Lamb. In the same breath, in “God’s covenant with men,” Davies cites John Calvin and Hugh Lyon on the importance of belonging to a church to be a Christian. At the time of war, in “Christianity as the Servant Church” he expresses his admiration for the German Bonhoeffer’s views on the true spirit of the church and both for him and Niemoller for their resistance to the Nazis. Sensitive to those of his church who come to church with honest doubt in “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief,” he hopes that The Rev. Leslie Tizard’s meditations on the subject will be useful. And yet he does not condone those who might use doubting as an excuse. He lashes them with the irony of Dr. J. S. Whale who satirizes those Christians who tend to take pictures of Christ instead of kneeling in front of him and serving. Using Dr. James Stewart in “Wanted a permanent Pentecost,” and Katherine Mansfield in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism,” he scoffs at the perpetual seeker.

For hymns, his favorite authors are Charles Wesley: “For all the saints . . . ” (“Saints Alive”) (“The Hidden God”) (“The Verdict”), Isaac Watts (“Why I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church”) and Baxter’s “Christ leads me through no darker rooms” (“Lord I Believe, Help My Unbelief”).

Hymns appealed to the sensitivity he had developed as English major in Edinburgh, before taking his theological degree. So it is not surprising to find many references to literary figures from different backgrounds and convictions, in the craftsmanship of the sermons. Ahead comes Shakespeare, which Davies knew by rote since he had in his young days learnt the whole of the bard by heart and won the Shakespeare prize. He quotes Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice to awaken the conscience of those who might have some Nazi sympathy, Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene to show the need of a good conscience (“Essentials of happiness”), Henry Vth rallying his troops as an example of the need for courage (“The Living Union of Christ and his disciples”), Prospero’s last will and testament at the end of The Tempest (“The Meaning of the Resurrection”) and the Sonnets to show that there is only a matter of degree between human and divine love (“The Harvest of the Holy Spirit”).

G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers and Katherine Mansfield have already been mentioned. He also uses modern novelists and dramatists. For instance in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism” he summarizes the plot of Harold Frederic’s The damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination as an example of shallow skepticism and contrasts it with Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere as an example of earnest skepticism. In “The Severity of God” he summarizes Sutton Vane’s play, Outward bound, made into a film called Between two worlds as an example of the divine Assize and the concept of judgment and retribution. In “The Verdict on the Cross” comes this quote from John Masefield The trial of Jesus: to the question of where is Christ now is answered: “Let loose in the world, lady, where neither Jew nor Roman can stop his truth.” He also refers to the poets Hamilton King, Charles Lamb and David Thoreau, the American lover of Nature.

Historical References

Historical references are used in various contexts. For explanation of the Covenant, for instance, he refers to an exhibition of medieval charters between the King of England and his subjects, on sight at the Bodleian Library. As an indirect encouragement to resistance under tyranny in a mixed congregation which might have contained Nazi-sympathizers, he refers to the Spartans or to the early Christians in the catacombs of Rome. There are many examples.

Davies is therefore aware of the particular strain imposed by the modern world on the faith of his congregation. There are three main historical situations he addresses.

The first is World War II. The allusions are frequent: to the Battle of Britain in “Terminus becomes tunnel,” to Ann Franck in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism.” He does not launder the atrocities of the day. In “All things work together for those who love God,” he says:

Sodom and Gomorrah, Nineveh and Tyre, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And, as I speak, starvation’s specter haunts Berlin and Calcutta. The death of the soul, creeping spiritual paralysis, has its fatal grip on the black-marketers and profiteers, who by their greed condemn others to death.

He advocates la Résistance indirectly by alluding to the Spartans’ defiance in front of Philip of Macedonia’s threat to crush them and Torquemada who led the Inquisition. In “The meaning of the Cross,” he shows the power of forgiveness in staging a young nurse healing an officer who had been her torturer and that of her family during the Armenian atrocities. In “Essentials of happiness,” he gives as an example of trust in God two nuns walking around, under the Bombing of the Blitz of London, carrying food to children.

He speaks against the Holocaust and against German romanticism in a reference to Bismarck putting some flowers into a little girl’s hand and yet wanting to turn France into pulp (“The Harvest of the Holy Spirit”). He advocates and praises the churches for opposing the death-camps in Germany and the caste system in India (“Why I Believe in the Catholic Church”).

The second is racism. Having lived in Africa for 7 years, he naturally took a stand against slavery. In the texture of the sermons there are references to both life and literature. He names William Wilberforce who dared oppose and defeat the slave trade and Michael Scott who fought for the Zulus and the Indians oppressed in Durban, South Africa. He summarizes Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country to show the sadness and compassion of the two fathers of different racial background weeping over their sons’ fighting (A Victorious faith conquering racial prejudice). From the radio or the newspapers, he includes scandals caused by the inconsistency of the church regarding segregation in America and admires modern martyrs like the Presbyterian Robert B. McNeill of Columbus, Georgia, and the Reverend Mr. Fred B. Manthey of the Congregational Church of Levittown, Pennsylvania. Both were removed for preaching integration and took their downfall with courage.

Thirdly, other contemporary references in the sermons touch social issues: the improvement of prisons by Elizabeth Fry and of working conditions for small boys by Charles Kingsley in “Why I Believe in the Catholic Church”; the struggle of racist Governor Long of the State of Louisiana whilst trying to implement social programs for the schools and the poor in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism”

Finally he uses biographical references as examples, foils or consolations. In “Saints alive,” he presents a rainbow of saints from Francesco Bernadone, Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, to John Bunyan and John Woolman. In “The divinity of our Lord” he contrasts Mohammed and Buddha to Jesus in physical and mental strength. In “The meaning of the Resurrection today” he endeavors to console the congregation for the loss of young casualties, by referring to the famous Mozart, Schubert and Keats, who all died young, but lived full lives, with meaning and purpose.

Logic

Sermons, by their nature are mostly argumentative. They appeal to reason in order to provoke action. Apart from the usual pattern of Doctrine, Reason and Use, common to all Puritan sermons, Davies uses logic to compare and contrast as well as categorize in explicative discourse. “God’s Covenant with men” spends much time explaining the word covenant by analogy with contract and agreement, and most of the sermon is argumentative. In “The meaning of the Cross” he dwells on the similarities and the contrasts between Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and opposes, by quoting Dorothy Sayers, a ludicrously superficial to a deeper view of Christianity. In “The Severity of God,” he uses logical arguments to show why people should come to church on a regular basis. This may be one of his rare moments when he uses invective, considering absenteeism as “blasphemy,” at the same time as gentle humor, disclaiming that he is ONLY begging for his salary. “Essentials of happiness” gives four recipes for a good conscience in prescriptive order and within each category, there is a list of advice. Finally “Christianity as the Servant Church” deviates from the usual pattern of doctrine, reason and use to denounce the major changes in the twentieth century both in art and in religion and attempt to correlate the two.

Let us take as an example “Why I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church.” The sermon starts with objections to the church. It starts with 1.) The reality of the church: criticism of the church; why indeed have a church at all; religion is private, but it is also corporate; the failures and successes of the church; hypocrisy in the church; concluding with reform the church from inside. Then Davies delineates 2.) The ideal church: as divine society; as undivided society despite the schisms, beyond space and time; as a holy society of redeemed and dedicated men and women.

Rhetoric and Imagery

Sermons, to appeal to the congregation in a twenty minute span or so, need to be wrought with rhetoric and imagery; so we find references to classical lore, many historical references to the past, church history, and the contemporary; his examples are taken out of the Bible or out of life to illustrate his points. Scenes are particularly vivid, as one might expect of someone who took art as a full-time occupation during much of his retirement. Because of his imagination both examples and scenes sometimes become interesting dramatizations, of which there is less of a sample here, but which are even more obvious in two series called Jesus Monarch of Men and in the Cross-examination sermons.

Rhetoric

To appeal to a mixed audience, the logical progression is often carefully dressed in rhetoric and craftsmanship. Because Davies adheres to the plain style, there are very few, if any, allegories, personifications, metonymies or periphrases; because of the compassion of his tone and clarity of message, there are few examples of figures of substitution like antiphrasis, litotes, or euphemisms or of omission like ellipses. On the other hand figures marking opposition and figures designed to amplify and insist abound. We find parallelisms and antitheses, anaphora and repetition, enumerations, rhetorical questioning and exclamations, an occasional use of hyperbole and hypothesis, and a plethora of imagery in comparisons, similes and metaphors.

Davies’s rhetoric was aimed at being persuasive rather than coercive: parallelism, repetitions and anaphora abound: In “Immortality” we hear:

Sometimes that judgment comes in History, as it comes today with a rising crescendo of fury, terrible as an army with banners. Sometimes that judgment waits until the Judgment Day of Christ. Sometimes that judgment of God comes in personal life, where the soul has so neglected the spiritual help of Christ and his church, that it is an empty vault, a mask of a face covering sheer emptiness.

In “The Verdict on the Cross” the repetition “You are poor Peter . . . You are poor Judas . . . You are the frightened disciples . . . “is last combined with an antithesis: “You are there and I am here.”

In “Wanted a perpetual Pentecost,” repetition is mixed with progression and accumulation: “It was an empty church, a church in a graveyard, a church which modernity had left in a backwash of history, building its town in a new quarter, a church of inner darkness, a church of spectators.”

And to show that he is aware of the difficulties of the splitting church, we hear in “Why I believe in the Holy Catholic Church”: “Well, I can tell you of some of the splits: the Roman Catholics, the Church of England, the Methodists (all three brands of them), the Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren.”

In “All things work together for those who love God” we find enumeration combined with rhetorical questioning, as if pounding into his flock’s hearts:

Do you love God? Do you love God and serve Him above all other masters; do you love Him more than your own life? Or do you live with one eye on God and the other eye on the main chance? Tonight I am challenging youth in the morning of life; do you love God? I am challenging men and women here in the middle busy years of life; do you love God? I am challenging men and women in the evening of life; do you love God?

To wake up the congregation from its sleep, apostrophe and rhetorical questioning are quite common. It was used by Christ a few times as he asked: “Who do you think I am?” and “Do you love me?” Davies asks in “Saints Alive,” “Where is your Rome?”

Sympathetic to the degrees of faith in his parishioners, the preacher often starts his sermons with questions: “What is Christian love? Is it the sense of pity?” (“The harvest of the Holy Spirit”) or “Why did Jesus come to earth? (“Essentials of happiness”) or “Is the Christmas story a lovely legend? Or is it eternal truth?” (“The Incarnation”).

Questions and oppositions are shot at the listener in the hope to elicit an inner response before stating the truth. In “Sin is rebellion against God,” Davies attempts to put some backbone into the usually bland view that sin is only psychological error. He asks about the concept of Original Sin, inherited from the mother’s womb: “An extravagance? An attempt to shift the blame? A refuge in talk of heredity and environment? No, a deep perception of spiritual truth.”

There is no pussyfooting in Davies’s sermons, but clear definition as to what he saw as the truth. Antitheses can be flippant as in “I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church” when the preacher affirms, as he admits the shortcomings and dissentions and the occasional cruelty in and perpetrated by the Christian church: “I believe in the Holy Catholic church and I regret that it does not exist.”

Speaking of the effect the Saints of the church have on us in “Victorious faith conquering Skepticism” he expresses ambiguity: “We are attracted by what contradicts us most. But this is only half the truth. The other half is that we are condemned by what contradicts us most. St. Francis, Dr. Schweitzer, and supremely their Lord and ours, shame us, humble us.”

The sermon “Christianity as the Servant Church” is particularly resonant with oppositions, as Davies tries to show the evolution of the church for the needs of the modern world. Describing Christ as the man for others, Davies states: “He is not the pre-existent Christ but the pro-existent Christ.” Defining the social role of the church, we hear: “It is to be a holy secularity, not set apart, but sent serving into secularity” and later, according to Gibson Winter, it is neither a “cultic organism . . . nor a confessional fortress . . . but . . . a prophetic fellowship.”

Questioning can occasionally become hypothesis to convince the unbeliever. In “The Hidden God,” Davies has to defend to a stricken congregation the choice of God to give us free will to do good or bad. To the question: “Why doesn’t God intervene and stop the war?” he retorts: “Suppose God had chosen the former way: then there would be no moral evil in the world . . . But what would be the value of such service, when the creature who gave it was not free to do otherwise?” But this is a rare occurrence.

What is not rare is the use of exclamation as a way to reach the heart in assent or indignation. In “Immortality” Davies expresses the liberation brought by the assurance of immortality in these terms:

It is the eternal home-coming! What are twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years compared with eternity! What is liberation from the evil clutches of the Gestapo, compared with liberation from death, the last enemy that shall be destroyed in our passing hence! Death is abolished, liquidated, annihilated by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . What great glory to God!

In “A victorious faith conquering racial prejudice,” exclamation is used as irony. Color-blindness in a country with racial tensions like Africa or the America of the fifties and sixties is viewed thus by its detractors: “This is revolutionary! Crush it! Away with troublemakers! Crucify them! These are they that have turned the world upside down!”

Illustrations and Examples

Davies was convinced that the only thing most people remembered in a sermon was the illustration, hence his care in choosing examples and coining imagery. He refers to musicians, but analyses paintings. He admired the luminosity of Rembrandt’s paintings and speaks of his Ecce Homo in the anecdote of a little girl who challenged the master. As he expressed his admiration for the sacrifice of Christ and she realized the profound gratitude of the painter, she asked him bluntly what he had done for Him. This, tradition says, was the origin of the famous painting. This, Davies argues, is the question one should ask all Christians.

There are also two references to Raphael whom he liked for a different kind of luminosity, that of the Italian sky. One is to the paintings in the rooms of the Vatican. The other mixes description and drama. In “Lord I believe, help my unbelief” Davies first depicts Raphael’s painting of Christ healing the epileptic boy, with its human drama, to contrast it with the peace of the mountain of the Transfiguration. Then, to make the picture come to life, he dramatizes the dialogue between the humble and worried father and the healing Jesus. There are other references to visual art, as in “Saints alive,” a reference to stained-glass windows and MGM pictures. In “Christianity as a Servant Church” he goes over the gamut of changing fashions in art from post-impressionism to “Op” art and proceeds to correlate art and religion.

Examples are taken out of the Bible, of history, literature or real life. He correlates the learned to everyday life, and human experience to the biblical testimony. For instance in “The Harvest of the Holy Spirit,” in a discourse of the three forms of love, Eros, Philia and Agape, he explains Eros by the statue erected on Piccadilly Circus.

Further human and humorous instances include in “Why I Believe in the Holy Catholic Church” the anecdote taken from Victor Murray, when a schoolboy expresses pride in his school, but confesses that he is a bad representative, or in the same sermon, the story of the poor man who is promised a crown in England and would prefer the modest sum of half a crown in the immediate present, with the pun on the word “crown.”

In “Immortality” he uses quid pro quo to lighten the mood in the time of war:

The story is told that an American soldier was walking along Whitehall. He had only recently arrived in London and it was therefore unfamiliar to him. He saw a British colonel approaching in his red hat. Undaunted he asked him: “Which side is the War Office on?” The Colonel’s eyes twinkled as he gave the laconic reply, “On our side I hope.”

In “The severity of God,” there is the story of the old lady who thought that her friend knocking at the door in love was the owner come to collect her rent, to show the fear that people have of letting God into their lives, and that he might take over. There is the story of Bishop Quayle preaching about “trust in God,” but incapable of letting go of his daily worries and go to sleep at night. And there is the little girl who gives an ethical lesson to Rembrandt. Other prominent examples have already been dealt with.

Imagery, Metaphors and Similes

Besides these stories we find also an amazing number of images and metaphors drawn from all areas of life. Some are expected: the Holy Spirit as a bird, for instance; but most are vivid. Many are taken from nature, many are mixed metaphors.

In “The Harvest of the Holy Spirit” he uses a scatological image to show the cleansing of Christ: “see Him turn the cesspool of Corinth into a well of water undefiled. A church of God in Corinth, it was like creating a Christian community out of the brothels of Paris!” Or he can be gruesome as in “Wanted a perpetual Pentecost”: “Without the presence of the Spirit of God, in the souls of members, the church becomes a human museum, a collection of stuffed-human beings, dead.” In “The meaning of the Resurrection” he states: “It would be blasphemous for me to think of the Ruler of the Universe as a giant Hooper, impersonally conveying the carcasses of humanity to the great refuse-heap of time.”

His images can be unusual either because of their coining or their application. In “Sin is rebellion against God,” we read that these words seem “as remote as old rusty Roman coins, or a Victorian penny-farthing, or a fossil.” Later he uses an image from apparel: “He has confessed his sin as he might acknowledge the color of his socks or the size of his hat,” to show the levity with which sin is taken in the psychologist’s world. In “Wanted, a perpetual Pentecost” he speaks of the desiccated souls of men with a mixed death metaphor: “They are pressed petals in a botanist book, preserved fruits bottled in a dark larder.” And in “The Verdict,” the bereaved are “barricaded behind the door of fear.” Of Christ he uses a colloquial metaphor: “Jesus did not seem to have bees in his bonnet,” we read in “The Divinity of our Lord.”

The way between death and life is described in coruscating fashion. In “The meaning of the Cross” the weather image is brought forth as a storm:

Have you ever been on a hill-top in a storm? Once I was. The black cumulus clouds were piling up, filling the valley below me with darkness. The landscape soon was blotted out; the sky and land were deep in mourning, and the wind whistled and shrieked like a soul in pain. But suddenly, for an instant, the clouds parted, and a golden arrow of sunlight broke through the dense darkness.

The Cross is like that. At history’s darkest point, there breaks forth history’s most blinding light. Where sin abounds, grace does much more abound. The occasion of man’s blackest crime and deepest degradation, reveals the blazing wonder of God’s holy, forgiving, and reconciling love.

And in “Terminus becomes tunnel” we visualize:

The impenetrable curtain dividing the end of this life from the inscrutable mystery beyond has been drawn back for an instant. Christ’s crimson sunset on Calvary followed by the midnight of human hopes, has been succeeded by a resplendent dawn. A full-stop had become a comma; a terminus becomes a tunnel; in the very centre of the black wall of death there opens the golden-gate and out of it walks the prince of life.

Consolation can be found in remembering the past and that way was always rocky. In “The harvest of the Holy Spirit” he uses another image from nature:

Time, like a dim haze, softens the rugged features of the landscape, so that even the jagged edges of a rock seen in midsummer seem smoother than they are. We must not let the mists of the centuries blind us to the terrific problems that the first Christian community had to face, how jagged were its rocks. Nor must we forget how the Holy Spirit produced terrific fruits of love in them, enabled them, like pioneers, to surmount the jagged precipice to achievement.

In “Wanted, a perpetual Pentecost” and in “Saints alive” he appeals to the army of the soldiers of Christ: the first martial metaphor unites the faith of judgment with the faith of forgiveness for those who are trying to divorce Christianity from Judaism: “Everyone of them had given himself up to Christ up to the hilt” and “We have the marching orders in the Ten Commandments.” The latter, drawn from animal imagery, describes the swarm of underground Christians trying to gain Rome to their cause: “Christianity’s attempt to gain this citadel must have been like the attempt of mosquitoes to subdue a lion.” In “Terminus Becomes Tunnel” there is a vision of the great and final battle, a reference to Revelation, not unrelated to the hopes of the allied armies of the time:

The Home of the Caesars and the Church of Christ are locked in a death-grapple. The mailed fists of Nero and Domitian are smashing their way through the dreams of the saints. Here you have the second Babylon, mother of all the abominations of the earth, drunk with the blood of the friends of Jesus, laughing in the intoxication of her triumph, shrieking with fiendish laughter to see the poor pathetic body of Christ being crushed and mangled and battered out of existence. That is what the author of Revelation sees over his shoulder as he writes. What will he say? Will he write: “The battle is lost? Our cause is ruined. There is only one thing to do, which is to sue for mercy.” Does he write this? No. He writes: “Hallelujah! Babylon is fallen, is fallen.” And why? At the back of the visible world, behind all his pomp and pride and power, he had seen something which Caesar had never seen, something that spelt the doom of Caesar and of all tyranny; he saw a throne up reared above the earth and, sitting on the right hand of the throne of God, the risen and reigning Christ.

And yet Davies insists that the battle is not won for ever. In “Wanted . . . ” Davies uses a nautical image to show the demise and rebirth of the church. It is depicted as an old ship lying down in the shipyard on the Clydebank in Scotland, a place familiar to Davies who had worked many summers as a purser on the Clyde steamers. Revamped, the vessel sails the seas again. Then the Christian church becomes a flotilla of ships, according to each denomination, to serve, as he is called in “Terminus becomes tunnel,” “Christ the explorer,” who fulfills God’s offerings in his covenant with men by three alliterating words: “power, pardon and peace.”

Life, for Davies, can only be expressed in poetry, as in hymns and vivid images. He says: “Life is a rare poem from a foreign land” in “The Divinity of our Lord.” He uses his eyes as a painter both for description and evocation of living tableaux: such as a vivid portrait of Jesus’s physical appearance or showing Christ in action. In “The living union of Christ and his disciples” we see Jesus ambling along the dark streets and entering the precinct of the Temple Court. Then follows symbolic scenery: “gleaming in the light of the full moon was the great Golden Vine that trailed over the Temple Porch . . .” In “The Harvest of the Spirit” Davies describes the ruby-red love of Christ: “What was this new love? It was a love such as was exhibited by our Lord, a deep, constant, sacrificial love for the sons and daughters of men, love with the blood-red stamp of cross upon it.” The image is contrasted to the simplicity of the followers, by the use of simple phraseology: “The disciples and the apostles knew that God was always like that.”

Finally one has to sense the rhythm of Davies’s prose, at times, not unlike that of the Baptist preachers. In “Why I Believe in the Catholic Church” we hear the quick pace of the conquering church:

More facts also amaze me about the church. It stretches across space; it stretches across time. Its mighty span reaches across the five continents. It embraces the pale-faced Eskimo in his igloo and the swarthy African in his kraal. There is in Christ no East or West; no North nor South.

And in “Victorious faith conquering prejudice” one could almost hear Martin Luther King in the delivery of the force of his convictions:

When my brother for whom Jesus Christ died, suffers insults, and the Jews and the Negroes and Africans are the races that Christians (so-called) have insulted most in the modern world, when my white brethren who are suffering for Christian color-blindness are jailed or have heart-attacks or are kicked out of the ministry, I am insulted; but more, this nation is insulted and supremely God is insulted.

And:

Next time, recall Jesus was a Jew, Paul was a Jew, Peter was a Jew, Einstein was a Jew, Ann Frank was a Jew, and Arthur Miller is a Jew.