The Windows
The Fragile Preacher
The preacher is only cracked, brittle glass, yet God graciously gives him the glorious place of a window in the temple.
Lord, how can anyone preach your eternal word? He is brittle, cracked glass; yet in your temple you give him this glorious and transcendent place—to be a window, through your grace.1
Fire and Light Together
When God's story is fired into the preacher's life, doctrine and life combine like colors and light, producing reverence and lasting impact, unlike empty speech.
But when you fire your story into the glass, making your life shine within the holy preachers, then the light and glory grow more worthy of reverence and win more, whereas otherwise they look watery, bleak, and thin.2 When doctrine and life, colors and light, combine and mingle as one, they bring a deep respect and awe. But speech alone vanishes like a flaring thing, and rings in the ear, not in the conscience.
Read the original English
LOrd, how can man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse: Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window, through thy grace.
But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie, Making thy life to shine within The holy Preachers; then the light and glorie More rev'rend grows, & more doth win; Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin.
Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and aw: but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the eare, not conscience ring.
Notes
- 1 ↩Source 'crazie' (of glass) means crazed/cracked or flawed, not mentally unwell; rendered as 'cracked' to keep that Early Modern sense without modern misreading.
- 2 ↩Herbert's 'anneal' is the glassmaker's term for fixing color into stained glass by heat. Rendered here as 'fire…into the glass' to keep that craft sense in plain English: God permanently sets his story into the preacher as window.
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