From Rev. Dr. Geoff Pound [12 November 2002]:

F W Boreham wrote many things about preaching. I am encouraging one of my students to write a thesis on the preaching style of FWB.

He gave a series of lectures in South Australia on preaching. I have searched libraries but this magazine account is the best I can come up with:

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THE BEVAN LECTURES

DR F W BOREHAM ON PREACHING

The Bevan Lectures in connection with Parkin Congregational College, Adelaide, were delivered in Stow Church from June 11-16, by Dr F W Boreham, of Melbourne. The attendances throughout were extraordinarily good, and in addition to students and ministers, large numbers of the general public were attracted to hear this eloquent preacher-author. On the concluding occasion Dr G H Wright, Chairman of the Parkin Trust which governs the College, expressed in well-chosen words the debt under which Adelaide had been placed to Dr Boreham, who in reply said that he regarded his visit as one of the happiest and most privileged incidents in his life.

THE PREACHER'S VISION The opening lecture was entitled "The Preacher's Vision." There are, Dr Boreham said, only three fine arts. Every respect in which men excel in their various crafts, sports and vocations can be comprehended under one or other of these three. There is the Art of Seeing Clearly, the Art of Feeling Rightly and the Art of Acting Nobly. The three arts are, therefore, the Arts of Vision, Emotion and Action. In each of these Arts, Jesus, the Prince of Preachers, the Ministers Model, sublimely excelled. He saw things as nobody else saw them. Take, for example, His view of the mob, the crowd, the rabble. Nobody else ever noticed in the pushing, jostling, struggling multitude, anything particularly charming. But He did. He looked upon the Eastern crowd: it ravished His eyes: and straightway He likened it to a flock of shepherdless sheep and to a field of golden corn. To the average man, the mob is the most prosaic of all prosaic things. But, in His vision, it became a pastoral idyll: the mob became white sheep on a green and graceful hillside. It became an agricultural idyll: the mob became a field of standing corn, flecked with crimson poppies, over which the clouds were scudding. And, since, in fields and flocks, and Eastern told His wealth, the mob became transformed into a commercial idyll. In the rabble He saw fields and flocks - His fields and flocks - and it was to Him a stately vision of His own abounding affluence. Everything sordid would suddenly drop from human life and experience if the preacher could acquire the art of seeing the world through such eyes. Dr Boreham closed by showing that vision is based upon character. What a man sees depends upon what a man is. In the same way the loftiest emotions are stirred by the clearest visions. If a preacher has an exalted view of humanity, he will be activated by an intense sympathy with its struggles, it sufferings and its aspirations; and his busy ministry will be the natural expression of those fine emotions.

THE BEVAN LECTURES (2)

THE PREACHER'S DEVELOPMENT

In his second lecture, Dr F W Boreham said that every minister emerged from his ordination service with a beautiful and exalted ideal. But the tendency was to lower that ideal as the years went by. It is rightly important, the lecturer said, that the preacher should not only preserve his early ideal, but that he should steadily advance toward its realisation. We are all in danger of losing the best as life goes by. The years are great thieves: they creep upon us with stealthily footsteps and filch away our choicest treasure. Life, and especially the ministerial life, so far from being a constant subtraction, a continuous depletion, a steady draining away of spiritual vitality, should be an uninterrupted growth, a graceful and obvious ripening, a steady enrichment. Since he cannot lift others above his own level, he must himself be ever climbing, ever ascending. Dr Boreham closed by applying the principle to the minister's impact upon the life of the community. No ministry can thrive on negations. It cannot consist merely in criticism, fault-finding and assaults on public evils, however glaring. The minister whose life becomes redolent of the most fragrant spiritual graces, and who, in his pulpit, leads his people to a radiant experience of heaven's most shining treasure, will exercise a ministry that will represent a really valuable contribution to the wealth of the community about him.

THE BEVAN LECTURES (3)

THE PREACHER'S AIM

"Whatever the by-products of ministerial influence may be," said Dr F W Boreham, in the course of his third lecture, "the supreme objective of his sublime enterprise is the capture and conversion of the individual soul." As illustrations of the psychology of conversion, Dr Boreham quoted from Shakespeare and George Eliot. In "As You Like It" Shakespeare describes the complete transformation of the character of Oliver through the suffering, on his behalf, of his brother, Orlando. He becomes a new man: he speaks of himself as a converted man: and he says that his conversion tastes very sweetly to him. George Eliot's story occurs in "Middle-March." To save the shallow and volatile Fred Vincy from making shipwreck of his life, the young vicar, Mr Farebrother, makes the greatest sacrifice a man can make and compasses the desolation of his own heart for Fred's sake. When Fred discovers what Mr Farebrother has done, he is moved to the depths of his being. "For," George Eliot says, "the contemplation of a sacrificial act produces a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame, making one ready to begin a new life." In order that the ministers present might become experts in precipitating that regenerating shudder, Dr Boreham urged them to four intellectual and spiritual exercises. "Keep fresh in your memory," he said, "the details of your own conversion: revive as frequently and vividly as possible the recollection of every conversion brought about by your ministry: encourage others to relate as fully and as simply as possible the story of their own initiation into Christian life and service: and inflame your devotion at least once a week by reading some classic record of a notable conversion." Dr Boreham suggested, in closing, a number of literary sources from which such glowing chronicles could be obtained.

THE BEVAN LECTURES (4)

THE PREACHER'S FAITH

Dr F W Boreham concluded the last of his lectures by a quotation from Sir Philip Gibbs. "An open mind is all very well," Sir Philip makes one of his characters say, "but it doesn't get you anywhere: I want certainty!" It is for some measure of certainty, Dr Boreham said, that all human hearts are aching: and it is to satisfy that deep and incessant craving that the minister exists. He cannot impart what he does not possess; he cannot infect others with a confidence that he himself does not feel. In order to attain to the shining table-lands of spiritual certainty three things must be frankly recognised.

One must recognise, first of all, that faith very seldom reaches her goal by way of argument, proof and demonstration. The things that really matter, the vital things of life, are seldom capable of proof. No man can prove that the sun will rise next morning: no man can prove that his mother loved him: no man can prove that his wife is true to him. Yet no man would wish to linger on after his faith in such things had forsaken him.

He must recognise, too, that the soul can live and flourish on a very frugal store of certainties. No man needs to be sure of everything. The captain of a steamer, enveloped in haze, does not need to make out every house and object along the coast. If he can see clearly one or two fixed landmarks, he can proceed with confidence. The charm of Paul's epistles, Dr Boreham said, lies in the fact that, whilst he confesses to doubt and uncertainty on many minor matters, there are a few stately verities on which he speaks with the most unwavering confidence. "I know whom I have believed: I know that nothing can separate me from the love of Christ: I know that all things work together for good: I know that, if my earthly house be dissolved, I have a house eternal in the heavens," and so on. With a few stupendous certainties like these in his intellectual store a minister can proceed with his work very comfortably.

Dr Boreham closed by showing the certainty without which no minister can work effectively, is only to be attained a profound and irradiating spiritual experience.