The Church Pulpit Commentary

The Church Pulpit Commentary was published in twelve volumes by James Nisbet and Company of London in 1908. The publisher's name is the module's abbreviation in SwordSearcher, and the module's own title page speaks of the work as edited by James Nisbet, but no single author stands behind it. It is a collection of short expositions and sermon outlines on selected verses, contributed by more than a hundred preachers, chiefly clergy of the Church of England, and arranged in Bible order from Genesis to Revelation. Each outline takes a text, states its theme, divides it into two or three heads, and closes with an illustration or a quotation. Many of the outlines are tied to the readings of the church year, and the headings in the Psalms note which day and service each psalm was appointed for.

The outline on John 3:16, headed "The Magna Charta of Christianity," begins:

That is the great Magna Charta of Christianity. What is the meaning of it? I believe that it meets with a response not only in your hearts but in all the hearts of all mankind. We believe in God, and we believe in love. Not only in the beginning there was God, but God is, and if there is a God men ask that that God shall exhibit:— I. The highest quality known to human nature.—What is that quality? It is the theme of all the poets, it is the inspiration of the greatest pictures of art, especially Christian art. What is the meaning of it? There is only one meaning of it—that the biggest achievement of man, springing from the deepest parts of his human nature, is love.

It goes on under three more heads: "Christianity not a new thing," "Love manifests itself," and "Salvation by faith." A second outline on the same verse follows it, built instead on three "mysteries": the divine love of the world, self-sacrifice in God, and God's individual care for the soul. That is typical; a well-known text may have several treatments.

The SwordSearcher module has more than 3,500 entries spread across all sixty-six books, each attached to the verse it treats. The Psalms and the Gospels are the most fully covered. For a preacher or Sunday school teacher this is a source of ready outlines and illustrations; for a reader it is a way to see how a text was preached a century ago. It belongs with the other homiletical sets in the library, The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary, the Biblical Illustrator, and Hastings' Great Texts of the Bible.

The contributors were a mixed company, including men of the broad church as well as evangelicals, and the reader should take the outlines as sermon material to be tested rather than as settled exposition. Searching the module by word or phrase is the quickest way to find every outline on a given subject.