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In Puvprr anp ParisH 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 NEW YORK - BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS 
 ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO 
 
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 LONDON + BOMBAY + CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
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 a hokhs 17 1925 i 
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 CPs H GICAL LL SEWRE 
 
 In Pucprr anp Parisy 
 
 Yale Lectures on Preaching 
 
 BY 
 
 NATHANIEL J. BURTON, D. D., 
 
 Once Pastor of Park Church, Hartford, Conn. 
 
 EDITED BY 
 RICHARD E. BURTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1925 
 
Printed in the United States of America by 
 WYNKOOP HALLENBECK CRAWFORD CO., NEW YORK 
 
“T am glad you are reprinting Nathaniel J. 
 Burton’s Lectures on Preaching. I have always 
 considered his lectures one of the very best courses 
 in the entire Lyman Beecher’s series. I was for- 
 tunate enough to come upon these Burton Lectures 
 near the beginning of my ministry, and they left a 
 mark on me which abides to thisday. One cannot 
 read them and ever forget them. They were juicy 
 when they were delivered, and at the end of forty 
 years, they are juicy still.” 
 
 [Stcnep] CHARLES E. JEFFERSON. 
 
 Broadway Tabernacle, 
 New York City, 
 December. 1924. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 THE CALL TO THE MINISTRY 
 MAKING SERMONS . 
 
 f aptinto vie IN THE PREACHER ' 
 
 ~ IMAGINATION IN MINISTERS 
 
 / IMAGINATION IN SERMONS 
 SHORT SERMONS 
 EXTRA-PARISHIONAL FAITHFULNESS 
 PARISH INCONVENIENCES 
 CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS 
 THe Ricut Conpuct oF PuBLIC WoRSHIP . a 
 LIRERTY OF THOUGHT WITHIN CONGREGATIONALISM 
 THE VAGUE ELEMENTS IN LANGUAGE 
 THE SERVICE OF Arr IN RELIGION (I) 
 THE SERVICE oF ART IN RELIGION (II) . 
 
 vd Sanne IN SERMON Topics - 
 
 a ASSIMILATION OF SERMON MATERIAL 
 VERACITY IN MINISTERS 
 
 vid ee viernes: IN THE MINISTRY 
 LEGITIMATE ELEMENTS OF VARIETY IN CHURCH SERVICE 
 
 ROUTINE: ITS PERILS AND 1TS VALUES . ; g . 
 
 103 
 121 
 139 
 157 
 175 
 192 
 217 
 236 
 254 
 276 
 296 
 321 
 339 
 
 357 
 
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PEC Abie Oubr hy MUNS GR, 
 
 My Brethren, as a matter of fact, men go into the Christian 
 Ministry—go in genuinely I mean—by the pull of numerous forces ; 
 sometimes in considerable blindness, sometimes in considerable illu- 
 mination ; sometimes by their own private cogitations in the main, 
 and sometimes with great quantities of advice (and sometimes 
 against quantities of advice) ; sometimes by a rational, prolonged, 
 and orderly process of investigation on the subject, and sometimes 
 hap hazard ; sometimes against the stress of external circumstances 
 and then again as drifted on by strong circumstances almost against 
 their own will. When the anniversary of this theological institution 
 comes around next May, and the ministers assemble in this chapel, 
 for a free discussion of some topic, as their fashion has been, I 
 should like to have them cease from topics for once, and each man 
 just honestly tell how he happened to become a minister. Of 
 ‘course some would not want to tell, because it might lead some 
 young man present (and I should want all you students there), to 
 feel that he might go into the ministry just as they did—that is with 
 as much uncertainty and solemn wondering whether he was not on 
 the wrong track. Of course too, numbers of the ministers, in the 
 present great joy of their vocation, and their present sense of what 
 a holy thing it is to be.in it, would be in danger of overstating signs 
 and tokens which are really necessary to a valid call ; and overstating, 
 too, perhaps, the number of tokens that they themselves had when, 
 in the days of their youth, they were considering the question, 
 ‘Shall I go in.” 
 
 But, taking all those clerical witnesses together, I feel sure that, 
 out of their miscellaneous biographies, you, my young brethren, 
 would get an enlarged view of the variety of God’s operations in 
 selecting and constraining his servants. That would overtake you 
 
2 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 which overtook me as I went on in my, ministry. [ went out of this 
 Seminary, as I had previously come out of the house of my father and 
 mother, with a distinct view of the mode in which souls come 
 into the kingdom of God; and of the spuriousness, of course, 
 of all incomings which had not on them the regulation marks of 
 that mode. But presently I began to discover scattered instances 
 of what appeared to be other modes of conversion. Then I found 
 more. And then more. For quite a while I dismissed them as un- 
 doubted spurious cases. They must be. But when they grew 
 thicker and thicker, and when on selecting some of the best cases of 
 ripe piety that I knew, and inquiring of them how they came in, I 
 learned one thing for certain—namely, that it was not by my way, 
 I gradually emerged into the idea that God was not so narrow as I 
 was, but worked in grace, as he does in visible Nature ; along cer- 
 tain great established lines, to be sure, as for example that 
 spring and summer shall come once in about so long, and with fixed 
 general ‘features ; but within those lines, in a most vast and beau- 
 tiful diversity, just as the spring and summer give us almost more 
 sense of diversity than of uniformity. 
 
 And as God calls men into his kingdom in more ways than one, 
 so does He into his ministry ; as you would find, I say, if you could 
 get a chapel full of honest men to tell their story. 
 
 I knew a man, who took it for granted always from his youth, 
 that he was to be a minister if he ever became a Christian. And 
 why did he take it for granted? God only knows. He had never 
 been so instructed by his father and mother. His father was him- 
 self a minister, but he had not conversed with this son as to what he 
 should be. For some reason, right or wrong, he had not. And so 
 far as the son knew, these parents had not been moved to ask God 
 that this particular one among their sons, should follow in the foot- 
 steps of his father. And yet, that young man was as settled in the 
 idea that, once a Christian, he should be a minister, as he was that 
 once born, he should have to die some day. And he was so disin- 
 clined to the profession that he refused to be a Christian, with such 
 a corollary attached to it. He refused until near the end of his col- 
 lege course. But then he yielded and moved easily and. without a 
 struggle to his predestinated work, and in that work had many most 
 clear and comfortable certifications that he was in the way of God’s 
 choice for him. Now that man was under a cutious bondage, and 
 the question is, was it a divine bondage. The conviction which held 
 
YALE LECTURES. 3 
 
 him was not rational, in the sense that it rested on percéived reasons, 
 but it may have been none the less a divine conviction. God is not 
 tied up to processes of rationalization in getting men to do what he 
 wants them to, ne means to have them. On the contrary, three- 
 quarters of his Work in ordering human affairs is covert, we must 
 suppose. If his power were put in only in those few instances 
 where we see it, or are conscious of it, all things would go to wreck. 
 No; he moves invisibly in the great kingdom of human wills, and 
 bears the creation on to his own issues ; notwithstanding the va- 
 poring of men, and their swollen self-consciousness, as though they 
 were lording it here, Hee: hee own destinies, and. preparing 
 the future of the race. , 
 
 Now I do not present the example of that young man as an ideal 
 towards which other youngymen are to strive. I will even admit, 
 if you insist on it, that his oA. was pretty nearly the minimum of all 
 calls—and dangerously small—but I name it as an encouragement 
 to any here who have’ not been able as yet to make their call as 
 large as > they. would like ; for this man of mine seems to have had 
 proof enough i in his ibberient experience, that that first dim expe- 
 rience, and blind energy of conviction which tied him to the Chris- 
 tian Ministry, was indeed God, choosing a blind way, rather than 
 an open one to accomplish his ends. 
 
 It were possible to prepare a whole lecture on God’s blind ways 
 with men—he preferring that way in numerous instances, in part, I 
 suppose, because if he undertook to explain to his small and 
 fumbling creatures, they would not half get hold of it; and in part, 
 because the way of faith as distfnguished from the way of sight, is 
 full of wholesome discipline for us ; and in part, too, because the 
 magnificent surprises of God’s eventual disclosures as to the benig- 
 nity of his obscure methods with us, will make us feel more than 
 contented that we were detained here in a long twilight, and stretch of 
 guess-work. We know that all our personal affairs are in his hands, 
 and all eternity will be filled with tokens of his most blessed man- 
 agement of them. 
 
 But I am discoursing on the numerous ways in which God gets 
 his ministers—and I wish to make them seem numerous in order 
 that I may comfort all earnest hearts here present, in which God is 
 really making out his call, whether distinctly or only darkly as yet ; 
 and while I am willing to acknowledge the value of a resounding call, 
 something full of symptoms supernatural and therefore full of im- 
 
4 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 perative persuasion, I much desire to bring out the unquestionable 
 facts of unresounding calls, thousands of them, calls that cannot be 
 heard at all except as you listen closely; but which, reverently 
 heeded, may grow at last to thunders of assurance. 
 
 Dr. Horace Bushnell, in tracing his own pedigree, and minis- 
 terial outstart, could not, with all his fine imagination, make out for 
 himself a regulation call. To be sure he had a mother, who carried 
 him in her heart, body, soul, and spirit, mother-fashion, but silently 
 in the main. He was in the way of knowing that she had great de- 
 sires for him of all sorts—or rather he was in the way of feeling that, 
 because she scarcely spoke of it, as I said :—these deep mothers 
 with their unfathomable, speechless broodings, are not without a 
 witness, especially where their boys are particularly clairvoyant ; and 
 their undeclared will and longing works like a fiat often, and makes 
 destiny for their beloved three times more than much hustling would, 
 and an officious clatter of teaching and entreaty. At any rate, Bush- 
 nell always felt a certain stress upon him, mother-born somehow, 
 and he became a Christian, and then a collegian, and then a gradu- 
 ate, and then after a little, he clearly settled his mind to be a law- 
 yer, and not a minister. And he wrote a decisive letter to that 
 effect. At that juncture, that long-silent mother broke silence. The 
 fact was, in all the mothering of that boy antecedent to his birth, 
 she had mortgaged him to a particular service and that service was 
 not the law, and she, being about to have all her sacred thoughts and 
 clear assurances thwarted, apparently, by the eccentric snap-judg- 
 ment of her mysterious Horace, took a sudden hand in the fulfill- 
 ment of her own prayers, and spoke out—all dumbness is not of 
 inability, but, as often as any way, of wisdom, and of God’s seal set 
 on the lips—she spoke, and said: ‘ You have settled this question 
 inconsiderately, so far as I can see. I ask you now to wait till you 
 can consult your own mind. I think you had best accept the tutor- 
 ship in Yale College that has been offered you.” There she 
 stopped in mid-volley. A lesser woman would have marched on into 
 an argument for the ministry—the opening for it seemed good— 
 but a person who could hold her peace twenty-six or seven years, 
 could wait on God a little longer; peradventure, the law being 
 staved off for a year sure, various gracious pressures would have their 
 chance to get in on her son (which they did) ; and so, on that 
 whiff of chance wind, one of our greatest men was lodged where he 
 belonged ; and was able to write nearly half a century afterwards: 
 
YALE LECTURES. 5 
 
 “As I look back on the crisis then passed, it seems very much 
 like the question whether I should finally be. No other calling but 
 this ministry of Christ, I am obliged to feel, could have any wise 
 filled my inspirations, and allowed me sufficiently to be.” 
 
 _ §o, this man was not misplaced among human callings, by the 
 wilfulness of his mother, moaning and wandering in false inspirations, 
 but he was set to his life task—well, by many things ; some of them 
 plain enough, some dim, some very dim, and some absolutely un- 
 discoverable at present, no doubt; but whether it was the constitu- 
 tion of his mind shaped in all sorts of gestations ante-natal and other, 
 or the many inworkings of the Holy Ghost, or the force of external 
 circumstances, all the causes head up in the far-away choice, selec- 
 tion, and will of God—this primal all-knowing will started for its 
 chosen and choice man by innumerable paths, by ten thousand inter- 
 mediates, by straight marches now, and now by the most laborious 
 and mysterious indirection, by delays, by reverses, by apparent total 
 defeats ; but like the tortuous river, it failed not to find its way, and 
 reached its end, and I insist that God not merely permits his minis- 
 ters to find their calling in these groping and accidental ways, but 
 delights in it—not as unable to delight in other ways more illumined 
 all along and more full of comfort, therefore, to the anxious man, 
 but as pleased to make his providence on earth a versatile thing. 
 And while I am on this subject of small calls, I might as well 
 mention to you that Dr. Bushnell, telling the story of his mother’s 
 mother, related that, up in the wilds of Vermont, whither she had 
 emigrated from these parts, she started a religious public service, 
 laying it on her timid husband to offer the prayers, and putting in, 
 to read printed sermons from Sunday to Sunday, an Unchristian 
 young man, whom she had quietly sized and sampled. She seems 
 to have been a woman who had some look of faith in her eyes, so 
 that men succumbed to her bidding ; and when after a time, she had 
 concluded that her young man had the natural making of a minister 
 in him, she proceeded to furnish the supernatural, by a notice 
 served on him one day as he came from the pulpit, that he must be 
 a Methodist minister. ‘But I am not a Christian,” said he. ‘‘ No 
 matter, you are called to be a Christian, and a preacher both, in one 
 call, as Saul was.” Of course, this peremptory woman did not 
 deliver this summons till she was sent to do it. This youth had 
 been much in her prayers, and she thought she knew what she was 
 about. Therefore, the blessed spirit, when he had caused young 
 
6 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Hedding to be assaulted in front in this way, did not fail to assault 
 him in his soul also, and he was not disobedient to his call, but fell 
 in straightway, and when I, a little boy, saw him as Bishop Hedding, 
 of the Methodist Episcopal Church, I thought he was the greatest 
 man I had ever seen, up to that date ; and he certainly was one of 
 the most respectable and serviceable men in the communion where 
 he spent his life. I do not deny that Bishop Hedding’s call grew to 
 be large enough, by and by, but when it was first delivered to him it 
 seemed to him little—too little to go on—only the sudden dictum of 
 one woman, and she not infallible, one would say. But, fallible or 
 infallible, God used her. And he used that sermon-reading to get 
 Hedding ready for the crisis that was to come. And, if we could 
 get back into all God’s secrecies, we should find that the fuse for 
 that explosion had been laid long ago, and had not been permitted 
 to be blown out by the thousand winds of heaven. 
 
 I give you these personal instances, my brethren, which might 
 be multiplied to any extent, because I would like to have it appear, 
 beyond a peradventure, that God uses his liberty, in moving men 
 along into his service ; uses it clear to the borders of eccentricity, 
 as men would say. If he wishes to secure an ambassador and 
 newsbearer of his grace, by a hand laid on him heavy as doom, he 
 does it—and oftentimes precisely that is his wish—but if he wishes 
 to secure you or me by a touch scarcely discernible, as some almost 
 unstatable impression in our feeling, an impression which we cannot 
 make seem tangible and solid to anybody outside of ourselves, or 
 some slight concurrence of circumstances which seems to have 
 omens in it, then He takes that way ;—and if a man’s ministerial 
 call takes the whispered and scarcely articulate form, let him not 
 despise it, and if it comes to him like seven trumpets, let him not be 
 made proud, and be brought to the conclusion that God’s whispers 
 have no authority in them. 
 
 But now, having said so much by way of leading you along 
 into an elastic conception of God’s ways in this great business of 
 multiplying ministers, Iam willing to spread out before you the ele- 
 ments and items of what is customarily considered a full-toned and 
 ideal call. I can see no hurt in mentioning them, especially as I shall 
 try to forestall all hurt from them by an occasional remark by the 
 way. . 
 
 First, then. If a man has gifts, he may be a minister—and 
 examining committees always feel bound to start the question of gifts. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 7 
 
 Has the candidate any intellect, and has the moral region of his 
 head any size? Can he think? And when he thinks does he pro- 
 duce anything, ordinarily? Is there any ethical sound to the move- 
 ment of his mind? Does he know anything? Can he tell to other 
 people what he knows? Can he tell it in an engaging manner, so 
 that if we start him out as a preacher, somebody will be likely to 
 want to hear him. 
 
 _ And then passing from his mind to his exterior make-up, what 
 physical gifts has he? Is he a person whom one can look at with 
 any comfort? What sort of a voice has he? Has he lungs, and a 
 degree of digestion, and an affirmative physique all around, rather 
 than a physique negative and peeping. 
 
 These, and the like, are the endowments that we like to see in 
 a young man who begins to surmise that the Christian ministry is 
 his proper pursuit. 
 
 At the same time, in order that we may not be too knowing in 
 this matter, and may not fall into the delusion that God is shut up 
 to ten-talented people, for the accomplishment of his works, behold 
 _ what mighty men some weak men are, in his kingdom and work-field. 
 
 I was considerably instructed by what I once heard from the 
 lips of the Rev. William Taylor, the Methodist evangelist who has 
 preached his way clear around the world, once at least, and has not 
 found even unknown languages any bar to great spiritual success. 
 He paused, in his journey, at South Africa, and soon found himself 
 at the head of a powerful movement of God among the natives of 
 that region. And one night down in the bush, there was heard a 
 phenomenal outcrying, the like of which no man ever heard before. 
 It created some alarm, as though some wild animal might be in the 
 woods there; but a company of the bravest men started for a 
 search ; and the animal proved to be a deaf and dumb Zulu, on his 
 knees, in great agony of guilt before God. They reverently withdrew, 
 and left him to his lonely wrestling ; and after two or three days, 
 and a few more religious meetings, the man came out in great joy, 
 a Christian convert. And they took him into the church, a clear 
 trophy, and baptised him William Taylor, And, after things had 
 gone on a little, William applied for a license to preach. He had 
 no conceit about it, as though he was a suitable minister for the 
 settlements, but he thought he could push out into the back country 
 among the dark-minded inhabitants, and do some good. After one 
 of the public services, the missionaries were discussing his strange 
 
8 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 case in the chancel, William standing by and earnestly watching their 
 faces to see what the upshot might be, when one of the ministers, 
 touched by the sight of him, handed him a testament as a present: 
 whereupon William was delighted as being now licensed, as he sup- 
 posed, and he pushed straight off for his preaching; and Mr. 
 Taylor testified that God used the man, most evidently. Of course 
 his oratory was meager. Many of you, young gentlemen, have felt 
 that yours is, but you are all very eloquent compared to him. He 
 could do nothing but pantomime. But what there was of his 
 oratory was so sincere and earnest that men heeded him, and 
 caught the sense of the few fundamental things that he tried to 
 teach ; and some were conscience-smitten, and sent to God for his 
 mercy, by this poor incapable soul, imprisoned in eternal silence. 
 To be sure, some of the back-country people came down to the 
 station at last for a change of ministers ; just as in the case of most 
 of us, a change of parishes is found to be best after a certain time ; 
 but so long as he lasted, William was as much sent as St. Paul was. 
 
 This is the strongest case of weak things made mighty in the 
 ministry of reconciliation, that I ever heard of; but I have heard of 
 a good many like it—and, in running over the list of my acquaint- 
 ances who have unquestionably succeeded in our calling, I have 
 found so many who had no natural right to succeed as being par- 
 ticularly able men, that the question of gifts has long ago ceased to 
 be the major question with me. It is one question, but not the 
 decisive one. Settle it either way, in any given case, and the exam- 
 ination had better proceed all the same. If the candidate is a 
 genius, very well, and if he is not a genius, very well; let us look 
 him over still further. 
 
 The second sign of a real ministerial call is found in a certain 
 convergence of the man’s circumstances towards the work ministerial. 
 Perhaps he has absolutely no money wherewith to get a suitable educa- 
 tion for the work. Perhaps he is tied to some present duty, which 
 hinders; as the care of his aged parents, for example, or the 
 carrying of a business from which he cannot withdraw equitably. 
 But these obstructions, and a hundred more, are not entirely deci- 
 sive, as many a strongly-resolved and powerfully-pushing man has 
 found. The ways of money-getting, if you are thoroughly con- 
 cluded in your own mind to get it, in order to the service of God, 
 are almost perilously numerous in these days. The young student 
 burning to be a minister is the delight of the Christian world. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 9 
 
 Societies are organized for him. Dying men remember to estab- 
 lish permanent funds for his benefit. Sewing circles consider 
 his case. Uneducated relatives take pride in it, that a person of 
 their own blood starts out to represent the family in the educated 
 walks of life. Adult ministers all about, recollecting their own early 
 struggles, are filled with pathos towards him. And in addition to 
 these ordinary, natural, calculable furtherances, if he be a true 
 man, he will have windfalls dropping in on him now and then in 
 such a curious way as to seem preternatural. They come from un- 
 known sources perhaps. Or they come from eminently unlikely, 
 and humanly impossible sources ; from the pocket of a life-long cur- 
 mudgeon it may be, a man never known to relent before, a man 
 whose relenting in the one case was the wonder of the town. I 
 knew an instance where a divinity student was overtaken by just that 
 phenomenon. Yes, all things are possible to God, and from the day 
 that the smitten rock opened out its floods for the watering of all 
 Israel, the men of God are entitled to look for dashes of the uncom- 
 mon in their own lives, together with many good strokes of the 
 common and the natural, so that our second sign of a real ministe- 
 rial call, namely, the co-operation of circumstances, is a good 
 enough sign if you have it, but not a cause of despair, if you do not. 
 What hosts of us can rise up and testify to that. The modern ma- 
 terialistic philosophy is pounding away on the imperative domina- 
 tion of circumstances, and we are all set, soul and body, in the rut of 
 a mechanical fatalism, but every living man of us knows, that while 
 the press of circumstances is very cogent sometimes, yet the chief- 
 est circumstance in the creation of God after all, is the free-born, 
 and puissant soul of man, and that the ordering of one’s own circum- 
 stances, especially as the individual man is yoked in with the will of 
 God, is the one splendor and the one zest of life; the heroism of 
 all heroism, and the magnetism of all living history. 
 
 The third indication of a young man truly called, is the 
 united advice of judicious friends. That is very valuable. Often a 
 man is better known by-others than he is by himself. He under- 
 rates himself—or perchance, he overrates himself—and which is 
 worst for a minister I hardly know. Sometimes I think that, in- 
 asmuch as exact self-measurement is just about impossible, the 
 exaggeration of conceit is more profitable than the exaggeration of 
 humility. But, take advice, brethren—take advice. Bystanders are 
 more unprejudiced than you are. People of large experience in the 
 
10 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 affairs of life—old ministers, and so on—know what sort of men are 
 fitted for affairs, and whether you are, even approximately, that kind 
 of man. 
 
 Find out, too, what the church in which you were reared 
 thinks of your adaptations—and what the congregations all about 
 think, to whom you have incidentally exposed your abilities, on whom 
 you have laid out your earnestness from time to time, and, possibly, 
 practiced your oratorical arts. When I came to the serious work of 
 shaping myself for life, I found that the rustic assemblies in several 
 _ country school-houses, before whom I had discussed questions 
 during the long winter evenings, for the relief of my own mind, had 
 rade up a silent verdict on my case, which they were now willing to 
 put in as a makeweight in my favor, on the whole—and I leaned 
 back on them, or rather on certain persons in those assemblies, with 
 a satisfaction, made up partly of pride, partly of gratitude, and 
 partly of an unanalyzable pathos towards the rank and file of human 
 nature. 
 
 But, friends, we must not lean too much on even so good a 
 thing as advice. I like the saying of one of our ministers: Advice 
 is to help a man do as he pleases. That is putting the matter un- 
 qualifiedly, but all the sententious and golden sentences of the 
 world, are made sententious by their heroic suppression of qualifiers. 
 
 Who advised our Lord to go on? What Christian in those 
 parts took any stock in Saul of Tarsus as a preacher, when he first 
 setup tobe one? Who was ready to license that deafand dumb Zulu? 
 Who could persuade the church-bishop of York to accept as candi- 
 date for deacon’s order that non-collegiate old slave-trader and 
 man of sin, John Newton? And when scores of us now living were 
 approbated as gospel ministers, what a considerable negative vote, 
 spoken or unspoken, was folled up against us. 
 
 On the other hand, what scores of men have been wafted into 
 the ministry on unanimous gales of judicious advice, and have 
 practically shown the miserable fallibility of that advice. I myself 
 once had under my hand a theological student in the first stages of 
 his education, over whose head all the stars of destiny seemed to 
 conjoin ; and we supported him, prayed for him, and boarded him 
 around in our houses, free board ; but the root of grace in his heart 
 proved feeble, there was a constitutional strain of unmanliness in 
 him, and he grew slovenly in his ethical distinctions ; and to tell the 
 truth mildly, we could not any longer put up with him. “I have 
 
YALE LECTURES. 11 
 
 entertained a Devil unawares,” said one of our Christians, where 
 our young man had had some months of good board for nothing— 
 and we all took back our judicious advice that he go into the Chris- 
 tian ministry. 
 
 The advice of mortal men is valuable, but not infallible. 
 
 Up to this point, now, I have delayed in the region of what 
 may be called the natural signs of a minister, but now, at last, I 
 propose to have a word with you on the signs supernatural. 
 
 There are men in the world, who hold that all the call into the 
 ministry a person needs, or had better exert himself to get, is a good 
 concurrence of those naturals on which I have discoursed. Let him 
 put his unexcited common-sense out among them, and see how they 
 stand, just as he would coolly settle any secular question on the hard 
 facts presented. Let him enter our holy calling in that reasonable 
 and not particularly inspired way, and do his work there conscien- 
 tiously ; and all the supernatural things that are desirable, lights, 
 warmths, empowerments, gifts of the Holy Ghost, will come in and 
 do their part to make him a success in the world. 
 
 Theoretically, the Protestant Episcopal Church, the Dutch Re- 
 formed Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist, the 
 Baptist, and I do not know but every church on earth, Greek, 
 Latin and Protestant, holds to the coefficient presence of the 
 natural and the supernatural in every veritable ministerial 
 call. And their offices for the ordination of ministers are all 
 shaped to that idea; but in the Greek or Latin branch of 
 the Catholic Church, and even in the Protestant Episcopal branch 
 of it, if all the requisites of good order, and church order, were 
 met and satisfied in the case of a young man, they would receive 
 him into their ministry with less supernatural marks upon him and in 
 him, than the Methodists, for example, would demand. And ifa 
 young man seemed to have any amount of those marks on him, and 
 in him, but at the same time, had somewhat disorderly and un- 
 churchly about him, or had in him any strong exuberances of mys- 
 ticism, those grave and cautious churches first mentioned would 
 want to look him over three times, before they admitted him to 
 holy orders—whatever of the Holy Ghost there might be in him, 
 they would disrespect to that extent; but the Methodists on the 
 other hand, and numbers of other denominations, would admit him 
 more easily—not doubting that so sane an influence as the spirit of 
 God in that young man would ultimately reduce his unbalance and 
 
 4 
 
12 '- YALE LECTURES. 
 
 his irregularities. Meanwhile, life, even in an occasional rampancy, 
 is better than the first-class property of death, and no inspiration at 
 all, they would add. 
 
 So easy is it, under much unity of abstract doctrine on this 
 subject, and much sameness of ordination forms, to have a certain 
 amount of practical diversity. 
 
 My brethren, having now stated the different particulars of a 
 valid call, as partly natural and partly supernatural, and having spent 
 some time on the naturals, I desire to put in an energetic testimony 
 in behalf of God’s direct and explicit part in the calling of his ser- 
 vants and ambassadors. Of course our natural gifts are his gift— 
 and our circumstances are of his providing and our good advices 
 are his messages—and therefore there is a sense in which these 
 natural things are all supernatural, and that sense of things we need to 
 bear in mind, with reverence and gratitude ; but over and beyond 
 all that, God may serve a noticeon a man in wonderful ways—in 
 ways that force the man to say, “Lo! God is here with me—in me 
 —all through me—through and through—calling me—pressing me 
 —making me seven times willing, expectant, and self-consecrate.” 
 The leading instances of that: sort of call in Holy Writ, are pretty 
 familiar to you. Abraham had one, when he left Mesopotamia to 
 become the father of us all ; and having had one, he went on to have 
 many—notably his summons to sacrifice Isaac. And inasmuch as 
 this stateliest of primitive men, and original corner-stone of a uni- 
 versal divine kingdom, was a man of repeated calls from the skies, 
 we naturally look to see his successors distinguished in the same 
 way, and so they were. Isaac was. Jacobwas. Joseph was. Moses 
 was most remarkably. He undertook to beg off from one of his 
 vocations, on the ground that he was no orator, just as many of us 
 plausibly might, and as that South African dumb man certainly 
 might. ‘I cannot go to King Pharaoh, I am slow of speech and 
 of a slow tongue,” said he, (Ex. 4, 10) ; whereupon his vocation 
 was reiterated upon him in a very moving and compulsory manner. 
 
 All the Prophets, too, had calls—calls marked by a strong array 
 of externals and naturals in some cases, but marked by supernatural 
 tokens and special inner movements in all cases. I wish there were 
 time to recite the picturesque accounts which numbers of them 
 have given of their own calls. Isaiah was in the temple when his 
 came—and he saw God there in visible, high enthronement, and 
 he heard God speak in the speech of men actual and understanda- 
 
YALE LECTURES. 13 
 
 ble ; and there were visible seraphim and seraphic voices, and the 
 poor awe-struck man’s lips were touched with a living coal by one 
 of those strange, superhuman personages ; and taking the whole 
 scene together, there was enough of the transcendental and amazing 
 in it to more than furnish forty modern men with a call of the 
 rather rationalistic and purely common-sense kind which some con- 
 sider sufficient. (Isah. 6.) 
 
 - Jeremiah too, had a similar elaborate call, wherein he was in- 
 formed that from a point anterior to his very birth the predetermi- 
 nations of God had lighted on him for the prophetic office. (Jer. 
 ry '52) 
 
 Which reminds me I ought to have said that Samuel, the first in 
 God’s line of official seers, was a very emphatically called man—or 
 boy rather, for God drew nigh to him when he was only a boy—and 
 looking back along the history of that boy we discover that Gud, 
 working through the prevision and the holy yearning of Hannah, 
 his mother, had him consecrated to His service ere he saw the light. 
 (1 Sam. 3, 14.) 
 
 And we are told that even the mechanics, and skillful workmen, 
 who were to put up and adorn God’s holy temple, had certain mysti- 
 cal empowerments vouchsafed to them. 
 
 Of course the stiff church idea of ministerial calls gets some 
 comfort for itself out of the fact that the Jewish priests were born to 
 their function, the office being hereditary ; but in the original conse- 
 cretion of the Aaronic priesthood, once for all, God came forth in 
 explicit marvels to give, on the spot, a supernatural authentication 
 to the proceeding, and make out a call that had in it every conceiv- 
 able aspect of a call; “which, when all the people saw,” (says the 
 history,) “ they shouted and fell on their faces ;” (Lev. 9, 24) ; they 
 were awe-struck by the miracle there wrought in sanctification of 
 Aaron and his posterity. Moreover, all along the line of those 
 priestly generations, God threw in his special attestations now and 
 then, and even in the routine of their priestly service, worked in asa 
 part of the structure thereof, there were incessant corruscations of 
 the supernatural. 
 
 But I must make haste into the New Testament period, and as 
 we enter it, are we not pressed upon by an irresistible preposses- 
 sion that the glory of the old system, in the matter of which we 
 have been speaking, will be at least kept up in the new, inasmuch 
 as the new is but the old brought on to its fullness and final re- 
 
14 ‘YALE LECTURES. 
 
 splendence. So we should naturally judge, and so it is.) The New 
 Testament conception of a call, is particularly strong on its super- 
 natural side. We have moved down now into the era of the Holy 
 Ghost, and, because we have, we notice a slackening of marvels ex- 
 ternal. There are enough of them—Saul had them in his call— 
 Jesus had them in his—all the Apostles had them sooner or later in 
 confirmation of their ministry—still, things went to the interior 
 more, and the idea of the inner light came to be more emphasized. 
 
 However, all I care now to insist upon, as in the line of my 
 subject, is that God’s ministers in those days did not get into their 
 ministry by a deliberate and business-like consideration of pru- 
 dentials on their part, and then a decision to go in, making out 
 their own call as it were ; but they had laid upon them a supernat- 
 ural compulsion, or a rather irresistible stress—a voice out of the 
 sky in Paul’s case—a personal call from Jesus in the case of the 
 Apostolic twelve—a solemn casting of lots in the case of Matthias 
 to take the place of Judas the Apostate, (which lot-casting was an 
 old time divinely accredited method of discovering God’s will, and 
 not a piece of mere hap-hazard, by any means) : these were the ways 
 of God in those times, when he would fill up the number of his ser- 
 vants—and on these New Testament and Old Testament data, the 
 church at large has always stood and preached the doctrine of min- 
 isters supernaturally called. Called of God as was Aaron, and not 
 self-sent, must they all be. ‘The doctrine has been carried over clear 
 into moonshine in individual cases ; and possibly whole denomina- 
 tions of Christians have landed in vagaries of mysticism on the 
 point, for the time—and these personal and denominational vagaries 
 have been such a standing warning to all beholders, that many, being 
 much determined to be thoroughly sensible, and a little more, have 
 studiously eliminated from God’s calls every least suffusion of the 
 direct supernatural. It is the indefeasible privilege of finite and 
 foolish man to swing from one exaggeration to another; but in the 
 midst of all extremes on this subject, the thunderous great voice of 
 the general church has persistently affirmed the right of God’s min- 
 isters to be called—by-earth-born voices no doubt, such as circum- 
 stances, mental gifts, personal piety, committees, councils, the arch- 
 bishop of York, and all the rest—but by heavenly voices as well, 
 and principally. 
 
 My brethren, I started this lecture on a low key, perhaps you 
 thought, but I have got it up now, you see. And yet not so far up, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 15 
 
 I hope, as to disavow my first thought, that men may become minis- 
 ters on a small and feeble call. I gave some instances of the small 
 call, you may remember, and I showed some sympathy with those 
 instances—but I have great sympathy with instances more sky-born. 
 Feeble calls are not things to be aimed at, and striven for, but 
 things to be put up with rather, when our higher aims and strivings 
 do not seem to bring us into the whole fullness of God. God’s full- 
 ness is what we want. Calls may begin feeble (they often do,) but 
 as the years go on, and our work goes on, the call ought to go on, 
 too, from strength to strength, being more and more articulate, 
 affirmative and inspiring. Men who are young, and of only a few 
 years of religious experience, and a few years of religious study, 
 may innocently have less vision, less sense of God, less ability to 
 tell a divine thing when they see it, or separate a still, small voice of 
 celestial authority from the ten thousand terrestial noises with which 
 it is mixed up—may innocently have less of everything, than those 
 who are far on in the ministry; but a minister whose call begins 
 feeble and stays feeble, never had a call in all likelihood. There 
 come lulls in everybody’s call. We are fearfully and wonderfully 
 made. And we behave fearfully and wonderfully sometimes. And 
 whether it be ourselves or our circumstances, or the machinations of 
 creatures invisible, the truth is we have sinkings, and collapses, and 
 comatose moods, and general retirements of our faculties, spiritual 
 and all—nevertheless, every minister ought to have a growing sense 
 of mission,,on the whole ; he must not be all lulls. If he loses his 
 call some day, he must get it again, and if he be a true minister, he will. 
 There is a band of music moving about the streets of the 
 city, and it is curious to notice in what alternating swells and falls it 
 comes to you. Now you hear it, and now you hear it not. A waft 
 of wind has caught it. A line of buildings intervenes. Or, possi- 
 bly, the musicians themselves have ceased from their strong blasts, 
 and are moving through their gentler and half-inaudible passages. 
 So is it with this other, and more heavenly music; the music of 
 God’s voice inviting us to be co-workers with him in the Gospel of 
 his Son. That great, authentic voice comes to us through this and - 
 that medium, even as the air at large is made to deliver itself melo- 
 diously through the several instruments of the band ; but for various 
 reasons, some innocent and some not, that one dearest music of our 
 life, as chosen men of God, finds its ways to our ear inconstantly. 
 Various unpardonable winds sweep in. Various infirmities, whereinto 
 
16 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 we were born, and from which we cannot wholly escape, interpose 
 their confusion. Possibly an occasionable miserable gust from the 
 outlying hells of the universe points this way, to hinder our hearing. 
 And, possibly, God himself, at intervals, for wise reasons, slackens the 
 clear vigor of his call and we are left to listen for his gentler tones. 
 All this is incidental to a life on earth. But no real minister will 
 consent, or will be called upon to consent, to a life-long loss of his 
 supernatural commission. By and by, the old music will come back. 
 In some watch in the night, in some moment of prayer and 
 mourning, in some studious hour, in some praying assembly of 
 God’s people, by some bed where a saint lies dying, in the uplifted 
 delivery of some sermon ; somewhere and before long, he will catch 
 again that voice of voices, that call of his Heavenly Father, and 
 straightway his work will be transfigured before him again, and he 
 will bear into it as with the strength of ten. 
 Blessed be God that he does not forsake his servants. 
 
MAKING SERMONS. 
 
 If almost any preacher should offer to tell me just how he 
 managed in making his sermons, I should certainly say: “Go on 
 brother, IJ am eager to hear you.’”’ I have heard quite a good many 
 tell, some common and some uncommon ones; and I have settled 
 my own habits so that no amount of testimony would be likely now 
 to make any serious improvement in me ; nevertheless, just as much 
 I should want to have that man give me his story. ‘“‘ Nothing apper- 
 taining to humanity is foreign to me,” said a Latin writer long ago ; 
 and in like manner, I do not know that there is anything on earth 
 so interesting as a preacher and his habits, to preachers. 
 
 So then I have concluded to raise courage to give you who are 
 here present my notions and my methods in sermon making. My 
 methods are the result of my notions, and my notions are the result 
 of my methods. There is a reciprocal motherhood there, which 
 does not seem quite natural at first, but is natural enough when you 
 look into it. 
 
 We start out into our methods in all fields of effort, under the 
 push of some preconceptions, there being no reason why we should 
 take one course rather than another, in sermon-making, or in any- 
 thing else, except those foregoing, and more or less established ideas ; 
 and then, if it so happens that those ideas, subjected to experiment, 
 are practically validated, behold they (the ideas,) get great refresh- 
 ment out of those validations, and are set up in their own conceit 
 as though they were made for the first time, self born; as’ is 
 copiously illustrated in the realm of science, where some tentative 
 thought, some bright hypothesis, starts a line of explorations, and 
 those explorations, in their turn, confirm the hypothesis. A mutual 
 motherhood you see. 
 
 Ah, well, mutuality is the greatest law we know of! 
 
18 ' YALE LECTURES. 
 
 I. The first thing to be considered in a sermon is the getting 
 of a topic ; and on that I would exhort you to a large range of free- 
 dom. Keep within the lines of Christianity ; you had better, no 
 doubt, because you are Christian preachers ; but be careful to see 
 those lines as sweeping a very large circuit, and be careful to hold 
 yourself privileged to plunder all creation beyond those lines for 
 material wherewith to enrich your truly Christian discourse. There 
 is a powerful and most miscellaneous immigration to these North 
 American shores, but there are forces here to Americanize these 
 multitudes ; it is all right, let them come. And if preachers are 
 energetically Christian, the immigration into their discourses of the 
 total population of the world will do no hurt, but, on the contrary, 
 will load them up with valuable stock. 
 
 I find that topics come to me from all points of the compass. 
 Time was when I preferred they should come to me from the Bible, 
 and I had a kind of guilty feeling if they did not, but I could not con- 
 trol the matter. Everything started my mind off in discoursings ; 
 my newspaper, my secular books, my contact with all sorts of men, 
 the accidental things of my life, and the accidental things of other 
 peoples’ lives, the talks of my.brethren in the prayer meetings,. 
 politics, my walks abroad on the face of nature, my summer 
 outings—a thousand things—the mind has front doors on all sides 
 —and pretty soon I began to keep a book of subjects, wherein I 
 put down everything that seemed to have large and discoursible 
 contents in it, whether Christian or heathen, I did it instinctively, 
 and I see now that I was right. Do not be afraid of a cosmopolitan 
 accumulation of material, but look out that you diligently grind it all 
 down in the hopper of a regenerate and Christianly determined mind. 
 
 II. Well, you have selected your topic I will suppose, and 
 what you now want is a host of thoughts on that topic—the more 
 the better. } 
 
 On reaching that crisis I do this ordinarily ; I go to my desk 
 and my pen and my paper, and there sit waiting for thoughts. I 
 open all my windows hospitably, so that if they want to come in 
 they can. And they almost always want to. Somehow they hear 
 that Iam there. Why do all the winds of heaven pour down towards 
 a vacuum? Why do all the birds of heaven pour down through 
 zones and zones seeking the summer? Why do all the waters of 
 the world drift down towards any hollow anywhere? And why does 
 all heaven move towards beseeching souls? No matter why. So it 
 
YALE LECTURES. 19 
 
 is, and that is enough. And it is enough for me to know that some- 
 how my waiting mind there in my study is universally advertised, 
 and excites a universal good will towards me, so that my windows 
 are filled with inflocking thoughts, according (I am compelled to 
 say,) to the size, and what not, of my mind. Exactly here, comes 
 in the differences between men. I can conceive of even a minis- 
 ter’s sitting there, with all his windows lifted, and no inflockings. 
 Some physical stupidity has hold of him. Some exhaustion has 
 come, some anxiety, some clatter in the street, possibly some mis- 
 chievous unembodied spirit from out the Somewhere that skirts this 
 life of ours. But a man cannot have been a minister a great while 
 without getting on to a point where, ordinarily, the currents of crea- 
 tion will begin to flow his way when he takes his place there at his 
 desk. His mind may be a plain one and not over-sizable, but if 
 there was enough of it to start in the ministry and get on a short 
 time—treally get on—it will have thoughts, more or less, when it 
 takes its position and waits for them. Sometimes they will come in 
 multitudes. Another day they will simply straggle in. And anoth- 
 er day, as I said, for special reasons, they may not come at all. 
 
 But, come they profusely, or come they very scattering, all that 
 do come I record on the spot. I record the large and magnetic 
 thoughts, of course (if any such happen along,) but I record the 
 little ones too. I record everything that. can be spoken of as 
 amounting to a thought on that chosen subject of mine. And I 
 keep on in that way so long as thoughts come at all. No doubt by 
 that time I have what some would call a very heterogeneous and 
 unusable mass of material—a perfect chaos precipitated there on my 
 paper. But they are mistaken. They know not the beautiful sanity 
 of the human mind and the beautiful coherencies on which it insists, 
 always and instinctively. All those items there recorded are strung 
 on one string, and are no hotch-potch at all, because the mind that 
 waited for them at the desk and got them, waited in a certain status 
 —it was not a vacuum by a good deal, but a mind occupied by a 
 chosen subject, as the love of God, or the ruin of man, or the pas- 
 sion of Jesus on Calvary ; and whatever thoughts come to a mind 
 thus preoccupied, and in that particular status, come they from 
 here or there or yonder, or from regions most remote, will assured- 
 ly be in every case, and without one exception to all eternity, 
 congruous to that mind in that particular state. A rather striking 
 fact when you look at it. I heard a lecture many years ago on The 
 
20 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Laws of Disorder, and this fact which I have just given you, the 
 profound fact that all minds have thoughts harmonious with their 
 nature, and on any given occasion harmonious to their special state 
 for the time being, so that the thoughts are not a medley, but an 
 affiliated multitude—that fact I say, may well come in as one illus- 
 trative item under that brilliant caption—The Laws of Disorder. I 
 energize on this point a little because I have heard of men objecting 
 that this way of securing the stuff of sermons secures a mass of 
 unrelated items, and makes a sermon just an omnibus of unclassifi- 
 able particulars. I say itis not so. And I give a good reason for 
 saying it, to wit: that, in the nature of things, only those ideas drift 
 into a waiting mind preoccupied by a subject, which are germane to 
 that mind in its special mood or state as thus preoccupied ; and if 
 all the ideas floating in are thus germane to one mind, they must 
 be germane to each other; and there is no getting around it. 
 
 When I speak of a waiting mind I do not mean a non-affirma- 
 tive, non-energized, Mr. Micawber sort of a mind, waiting for 
 something to turn up, but a mind intent, a mind that goes to its 
 windows and looks out and longs, and thrusts forth its telescope to 
 find something. A mind thus intense, investigatory, and practically 
 beseeching, amounts to a tremendous loadstone in the midst of the 
 tull-stocked creation—full-stocked with the materials of thought— 
 and when this or that comes into the windows of such a mind it is 
 stamped by that mind, and specialized to its uses, with a threefold 
 vigor, and all the incomes thus explicitly stamped are the more 
 explicitly germane to each other, and visibly of one species. 
 
 I insist on this original exertion, this doing of one’s best with- 
 out the help of books or-anything else ; I insist on that, as the first 
 step towards a sermon, because only by that kind of exercise does 
 a man grow to be a real and fertile thinker, whom endless produc- 
 tion does in no wise exhaust, but does continually replenish rather ; 
 the mind of man being not a pond that can be drained off by a few 
 years of sermonizing, but an artesian well, a constitutionally up-bub- 
 bling thing, so long as life and health hold out. I congratulate you, 
 young gentlemen, that you all have that practically infinite thing in 
 you ; and that as you go on in your ministry you may be more and 
 more conscious of this inexhaustible exuberance, and may move in 
 the joy and courage of that consciousness. 
 
 I insist upon original effort ; that, rather than reading to begin 
 with, for another reason. In every mental act there are two factors 
 
YALE LECTURES. 21 
 
 involved ; the thinking mind, and the external materials which it 
 manipulates ; and men may be classified as original and productive 
 thinkers, or as copyists, plagiarists, and forms of echo, according as 
 they dominate this their material, or are dominated by it. But the 
 most ignominious person in all the world, if so that he have one re- 
 maining spark, or last flicker, of manliness in him, desires to be a man 
 of supreme generative force and not an echo ever ; and this he can 
 secure only as in the handling of subjects he thinks with all his 
 might before he reads, as I have already described. Let him go 
 from that desk of solitary effort on his theme to any amount of 
 reading on it, and those readings instead of overloading him and 
 smothering him, and making his whole movement stupid and un- 
 wieldly, and giving every listener to his sermon to know that it 
 is in reality a borrowed one, will be athletically, victoriously appro- 
 priated, assimilated and turned to use, being coined and made his 
 own visibly in the mint of his own vigor. Moreover, coming to the 
 books bearing on his topic—the commentaries and all the rest—his 
 mind within him will be so vital and informed by his preliminary 
 meditations and creative acts, that it will gather up the parts and 
 elements of those books that are suitable to his purpose, and usable, 
 with a double rapidity. I have been surprised many times, after I 
 have diligently gestated a subject myself and then have started out 
 into my library for the say-so of other men on that subject, to 
 notice not merely in what a lightsome and expert way I handled 
 them, but‘also in what a swift facility I utilized their many volumes ; 
 —sometimes one glance will answer—and if I encounter a book 
 wherein the entire subject is opened out profoundly and in a com- 
 plete treatment, considerable portions of the book I catch up with 
 a touch and go, and the denser parts cannot very long delay me. 
 This sounds boastful, but it is not. Almost any man may make the 
 experiment for himself. And I advise you all to make it—and to 
 keep making it so long as you live. 
 
 Some of you perhaps would like to say to me, “ now that very 
 rule—first think and then read—does not apply equally well to all 
 kinds of sermons ;”’ so let us look at that. 
 
 If the sermon is purely expository, our one duty is to tell 
 exactly what the sacred writer meant to say in the passage before us 
 —where then does that original and generative effort of which I 
 have spoken set in, and can it come in at all? I answer, it is a 
 notorious fact that one man will find three times as much in a 
 
22 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 passage as another—find it, I say, not put it in, as the manner of 
 some inventive gentlemen is, whose spirit is imaginative more than 
 historical and to whom the Bible is a partially hollow vessel requir- 
 ing to be humanly filled. No, they will find large contents in the 
 passages that they expound ; because they are men well trained in 
 creative thinking, and bring that training to bear on scriptural passages. 
 My practice in expository work, is, at the start, always, to expound 
 the scripture in question myself with what strength I can muster at 
 the moment. Somehow that gives me a good glow, the Bible and I 
 get on to brotherly and joyful terms with each other, I have laid 
 myself down on the heart of it and felt its vigor first-hand ; and 
 now if any commentator wants to speak a word with me, very well, 
 let him speak ; it will not embarrass me at all. 
 
 Or, perhaps, the sermon to be produced is an altogether histor- 
 ical one; a sermon of information. Very well, in that case, I 
 acknowledge the first step is to get that information—and that brings 
 in reading. But there are two ways of reading; one the memoriter 
 way, the mere gathering up of facts, and the other the thoughtful, 
 brooding, creative way ; the way that finds great subjects all along 
 in the stark events.of history, so that they are not stark (not at all) 
 but eminently relational and prolific. The sand-atom is stark, the 
 seed-atom is not, and history is a seed-ground—it is so in fact, and 
 it is so as read by original and originating minds. 
 
 So I do not see but my—Think first, and read afterwards, holds 
 pretty well all around. 
 
 III. We have now reached the third step in the making of a 
 sermon. We have our topic; we have assembled our materials ; 
 and the next thing is to organize those materials ; for let it be said 
 to the credit of human auditors and congregations, they refuse to be 
 blessed to the full by unarranged and disorderly masses of sermon 
 matter, thrown out with whatever fine delivery, or whatever moral 
 earnestness. It must be organized. And in that business of. organi- 
 zation, a real master-workman has a good chance to show himself. 
 Anybody, almost, can drag together the timbers for a building, but 
 only a person of skill and invention can do the next thing. 
 
 Now, the materials which you have amassed, can be put together 
 and made an orderly unit, in half a dozen ways—perhaps more ; 
 on what principle therefore shall you select one way rather than 
 another? I reply, if you are going to organize your subject simply 
 as a subject, and not as a means of good influence on your hearers, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 23 
 
 perhaps there are a number of ways of doing it; but as God’s ser- 
 vant sent for the salvation of men, you do not want to be a man of 
 subjects and no more ; you will surely fall out of your vocation and 
 be a lecturer, and intellectualist, if you go on that principle—one of 
 the most mournful forms of suicide ever heard of; a called man 
 lapsed from his calling! God save you from that. 
 
 So you must ask yourself, in every case—what do I wish to 
 accomplish with this sermon-stock that I have on hand. When that 
 is settled, the form of the organization to be made begins to be set- 
 tled. Get your aim, and every least item of your stock of material 
 spontaneously shapes itself to that aim; as all things followed the 
 music of Orpheus. A clear aim, firmly held, works the following 
 results. | 
 
 It saves you from treating your sermon as a work of art, and 
 fashioning it under an artistic impulse merely. When it is finished 
 it may be a work of art, sermons frequently are ; but it has come to 
 be so incidentally and not of your set purpose. Your purpose was 
 to bless men, and in so far as your discourse is after the forms of art, 
 and is therefore beautiful, that high and lordly intention of yours 
 did it. Let it not be thought a strange thing that a God-fearing and 
 noble intention should thus show an esthetic result—the pitiful thing 
 is that such an intention does not always secure an esthetic result. 
 Every minister has a right to have his mind work beautifully as well 
 as truly, so that while truth-lovers shall admire it, people of taste 
 can too.’ In the several provinces of art, literature, painting, music 
 and sculpture, it is often said that the artist ceases from real art, 
 necessarily, the moment the thought of utility or human advantage | 
 in his work is permitted to take hold of him. If he undertakes to 
 be a preacher to men he is no longer an artist, and his work shows 
 it. That is the idea. 
 
 No doubt, many who were by nature preachers, and who greatly 
 desired to do good, have resorted to art-forms, as the means to their 
 end, and have marred and mutilated art by thus harnessing her in to 
 their purposes of utility; but that was because they were preachers 
 and not artists—it being possible (though not easy) to be preacher 
 and artist in one ; possible but not easy—not easy, for example if you 
 write a novel to impress a truth, and would never have thought! 
 of writing the novel excepting as that truth had possessed you ; 
 almost certainly the strenuousness of your moral intention will warp 
 you away from the absolute exactitudes of the beautiful—so that the 
 
24 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 safest rule for ministers and sermonizers is, take a good aim at the 
 needs of the congregation and let high esthetics take care of them- 
 selves, considerably. If they get into your sermon, very well, but 
 do you keep your utilitarian intention as a preacher, high up, 
 strong, steadfast and solemn. 
 
 The second use of getting an aim before you proceed to shape 
 the materials of your discourse is, that you thus save yourself from 
 all divergencies and rhetorical dallyings as you pass on, from all 
 unprofitable self-consciousness. Multitudes of sermons are much 
 occupied with their own selves. They stop to make nosegays. 
 They stop to posture and make themselves agreeable. They stop to 
 see how good an argument they can make. They fall into a mania 
 for minute elaboration. They are detained in forty allurements. 
 Meanwhile, the people out there who are listening to that sort of 
 sermon have a great deal of leisure to admire the fine points made 
 and praise the rhetoric, and say within themselves—‘“ What a tre- 
 mendous preacher we have.’”’ That preacher has forgotten to have 
 any aim. Those men in the pews, if really addressed and yearned 
 over, could not get a chance to make those leisurely remarks of 
 theirs. Preaching is in order to salvation, in God’s idea, and if the 
 sermon went for that point-blank and forever, it could not be 
 otherwise than a sermon of a certain sort—a sermon that is, free of 
 every dallying, every ambitiousness, all posy-work, all self-con- 
 scious smartness. . 
 
 And I may add, it would be likely ‘therefore to have unity, 
 which is an indispensable virtue in, all expression expected to take 
 a mighty hold on men. 
 
 And once more, in a single word—an explicit aim, as you begin 
 to consider your materials of discourse and try to pull them into 
 shape, will show you what paits of the mass may be omitted from 
 the organization you are about to make—omitted as not relevant to 
 the purpose which you have chosen. 
 
 I want to testify, though, from out of my own experience, that it 
 is curiously little of that material you will be called upon to discard 
 ordinarily. As arule, you can work in nearly the whole of it, and 
 make it serve an orderly use in your discourse—the reason being, I 
 suppose, that each item of the whole is related to every other item ; 
 that relation being caused by the fact mentioned by me before, 
 that the entire accumulated mass came in as brought in by a mind 
 in a particular state, as filled by a selected topic. It is a pleasure to 
 
YALE LECTURES. 25 
 
 know this, for when we have laboriously got our sermon together in 
 the crude stock of it, our feelings are hurt to be compelled to throw 
 away any of it. . 
 
 It has been the sin of my life that I have not always taken aim. 
 I have been a lover of subjects. If I had loved men more and 
 loved subjects only as God’s instruments of good for men, it would 
 have been better, and I should have more to show for all my labor 
 under the sun. As I look back upon this defect, the principal con- 
 solation I have is that a Christian subject, even when it is unfolded 
 simply for its own sake, may have some wholesome magnetism for 
 the people who have contact with it. 
 
 I have spoken thus far of a supreme aim at the welfare of your 
 hearers, as a very great advantage in several respects, but especially 
 in this fundamental business of getting your sermons organized ; 
 but that business is so fundamental, and your sermon is something or 
 nothing so entirely according as it has some good shape or not, that 
 you must pardon me if I din on organization a little longer. Given 
 an aim, some things are settled, but not all. It is settled that no 
 sort of stock and stuff must come into your discourse that is inhar- 
 monious with that aim. And it is settled that whatever stock and 
 stuff you do put in, shall be so put in as to consort with that aim, 
 and further it. 
 
 - But very likely there are several conceivable forms of organiza- 
 tion under which these necessary particulars will be reasonably 
 well-secured ; and we want to know now how, out of these several 
 forms, the right one may be hit upon. 
 
 Here I bring you face to face again with the differences be- 
 tween men—the differences original and the differences acquired. 
 In some kinds of mental work, one man is as good as another—just 
 as in the humdrum of ordinary life a coward is hardly distinguish- 
 able from a hero; but as in a great emergency, (in shipwreck, for 
 example,) the awful dissimilarity in men suddenly stands out, and a 
 day of judgment is come, so in certain sorts of intellectual perform- 
 ance there are men and _ men, and a single hero may be worth an 
 acre of ordinaries. 
 
 One sermonizer has but to look at his sermon-matter and it 
 straightway trots into organization, like the horses of a fire engine 
 when the alarm bell rings; but another man fumbles his materials 
 for hours, and then hasn’t much of a sermon. The first man’s 
 sermon is a shapely tree, the other’s just manages to be a tree, 
 
26 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 but in all sorts of disproportion. Still, the intuitiveness of that first 
 man, and his supernatural mastery over the stuff in hand, while at 
 first it may seem to you just an ultimate fact, and beyond all ex- 
 planation, a simple, direct endowment of God, it being God’s 
 prerogative to elect A to intuitiveness and Z to fumbling and the like ; 
 behold, it certainly is not altogether an unanalyzable fact. The out- 
 springings of intuition are the composite result of original en- 
 dowments, and of good training, and of much practice. 
 
 Millions of people had seen apples fall from trees before 
 Isaac Newton saw his apple and guessed the law of gravitation—a 
 magnificent out-jump into the unknown. Why did not they all 
 make the jump? First, I confess, because they were not the jumping 
 kind, perhaps, most of them. Weare notall born to the same thing. 
 But secondly, because Newton by long study, and a large ingather- 
 ing of scientific data had provided for himself a first-rate standing 
 place for a great and infallible jump. He did not launch forth from 
 the known into the immeasurably unknown, on the gush of a simple 
 impulse to launch. That sort of stone-blind irrepressibility is of no 
 account. ‘There is no law in its movement, and it never comes to 
 anything. It would not guess gravity in a hundred thousand years. 
 But Newton, I say, while he did not lack impulse, had a considerable 
 knowledge of the secrets of the physical universe, and quite an ac- 
 quaintance with the way things are wont to goon out there—just as I 
 can prophesy on the as yet unknowable parts of a man’s life, whom 
 I have summered and wintered with, and variously taken to pieces 
 in my analysis. 
 
 So then, your intuitive organizer of sermons, is thus expert 
 because he has studied his business, and has exercised himself a 
 good deal in experimenting on the principles he has discovered. 
 He has discovered that an aimless organization is void of one first 
 principle of organization in pulpit discourse. He has discovered— 
 perhaps some one told him and perhaps not, but he has found out, 
 some how—that there is a philosophical way of formulating a dis- 
 course, and an unphilosophical way ; a way in which one thing leads 
 on to another according to the eternal and universal laws of thought, 
 and (what is more), according to the profoundest of those laws, 
 and a way in which one thing springs out of another by a connection 
 so shallow as to amount to practical incoherency ; and he has dis- 
 covered that the incoherent way confuses the people who listen to 
 him, and thus steals away their right to get some good out of the 
 
YALE LECTURES. o7 
 
 time they spend together—also he has discovered that his own mind 
 when called to make a discourse on an unphilosophical plan, has 
 seven times the labor and affliction to get on, and get out, that it 
 need to have, just as you and I may tug ourselves to death trying to 
 handle great weights that a porter will manage easily, because he’ 
 applies his strength in a rational manner. Also, our sermonizer has 
 discovered, that if for any reason he or his people wish to remember 
 his sermon, if it is philosophically put together, they can remem- 
 ber ; whereas, if it is unphilosophically put together, neither he nor 
 they can retain it except by one of those absolute and stark acts of 
 memorization which may be very interesting as phenomena and as 
 showing what the human mind can do when thoroughly put to it, 
 but which are a dreadful strain to the average man, and are of no 
 special value, either, in the general development of the mind. Per- 
 haps the minister preaches memoriter, or perhaps he preaches from 
 a brief, and in either case his work of recollection is trebled if his 
 sermon is fortuitously thrown together, or is developed from point 
 to point under the lesser and more trivial laws of mental association, 
 rather than under the great laws ; as where his.score of memoranda 
 gathered by original effort at his desk, or gathered from books, are 
 made to root all in one comprehensive thought and sentence. 
 
 I could illuminate this matter much more, if I could take time 
 to spread out before you actual specimens of rational work, and of 
 incoherent work, in sermon-making. 
 
 But I was praising the intuitive organizer, and trying to let some 
 light in on his secrets. First, he has brains to some extent, though 
 not necessarily to any alarming extent ; and secondly, his discoveries, 
 one and another—such as I have just enumerated—he has experi- 
 mented on. He has made aimed discourses—and unaimed ones. 
 He has made discourses on philosophically articulated skeletons, and. 
 he has made them on ram-shackling and forbidden skeletons. 
 These forbidden and impossible skeletons he invented when he was 
 young and had not practically learned the differences of things, or 
 when he was too weak to do other than impossible things. Latterly, _ 
 since he became knowing, he has practiced the logical sort of plan, 
 the philosophical, the genetic plan, wherein one thought vitally out- 
 branches from the thought foregoing ; the plan rememberable, the 
 plan that is a plan (and the only one that deserves the name). 
 And now his mind walks in among his accumulated memoranda, 
 like a farmer into his harvest fields ; and lays things out in orderly 
 
 5 
 
98 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 swaths, in absolute unconsciousness of the principles on which he 
 operates. See that girl pound that piano! She knows the principles 
 on which she is operating—to her sorrow, and may be to the 
 sorrow of all listeners. But see her ten years later. She just 
 careers, without a thought of principles. She has passed out of 
 love into gospel and moves unlaboriously and lyrically. Likewise 
 there may be a lyrical organization of a sermon—a spontaneous 
 rightmindedness therein ; a philosophical movement full of melody 
 to the inner ear, because philosophical—for a profound orderliness 
 is always musical to the appreciative mind. | 
 The question is sometimes raised, how plainly a preacher had 
 better show to his congregation the skeleton in his sermons. I 
 should say, as a rule, just about as plainly as he shows his own 
 skeleton. If there should ever come up a serious doubt among a 
 people whether their minister has any skeleton, he had better show 
 one. A purely unformulated and gelatinous physique in a public 
 man were disagreeable, and fitted to give his congregation a painful 
 sense of insecurity. I have heard numbers of men complain of 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson, when they had just heard him lecture, that his 
 mind meandered from point to point in almost unmitigated hap- 
 hazard. Said a clerical friend of mine—a bright man too,—* it 
 sounded as though he had opened his scrap-book and given us page 
 after page of that, consecutively—for a lecture.”” I knew better— 
 for there was never born a more coherent man than Mr. Emerson 
 in all the substantials and profundities of coherency—and I never 
 could have had the face to ask him to appear any more consecutive 
 than he did ; but, perhaps preachers do well to show their skeletons 
 often enough to create a general feeling that they always have them. 
 In some instances it may be desirable, for some reason, that the 
 people carry away the sermon in a form to report upon; in those, 
 let your plan come forward into unmistakable visibility—the heads 
 and all the members, italicized and full-spoken. But more often than 
 anyway I think it is just as wellto keep your frame-work a little retired. 
 I do not believe that the highest kind of discourses, the intensely 
 vital and powerfully magnetic ones, the sermons that are most full 
 of their author, in his totality and his inspired vehemency—I do 
 not believe that kind enjoy being shown skeleton-wise. They do 
 not care to be remembered, in their details, by the people. If only 
 they can make all minds alert, and all souls warm and assimilative, 
 while they go on being delivered, they are satisfied—those sermons 
 
YALE LECTURES. 29 
 
 are—as convinced that they have thus accomplished their highest 
 possible good. Sermons of instruction, systematic courses of sermons 
 on points of divinity, may well be put into a form to be easily 
 remembered, but sermons of quickening are different. They can 
 quicken enough, without much display of structure. If a sermon 
 is a real birth and out of a man’s living interiors, and not a mere 
 mechanical result of the constructive intellect working among ob- 
 jective material, it will always have a thoroughgoing, reasonable 
 plan; precisely as each individual of each species of animals, as 
 being an outcome of life, will have an unmistakable, and specific 
 and satisfactory skeleton ; but these vitally-born sermons will always 
 incline to be a little Emersonian, and modest, in their display of 
 plan. And they can afford to be, that is, they can afford to lose 
 what force and consolation there may be in a plain skeleton, because 
 they are so charged with the elements of life, and are so life-giving. 
 
 It is time for me now to remark : 
 
 IV. Fourthly, and lastly, on that agony and despair of many 
 inexperienced sermonizers, called amplification; amplification, I 
 say, which in strict definition is not making a few thoughts go a 
 long way, by powerful inflation, but clothing your outlined sermon - 
 in a full-sounded corporeity of actual, ponderable thoughts, all of 
 them relational, of course, to that outline with its first, second, 
 third and fourth, of main thoughts. 
 
 Let me draw an illustration of this matter from the lecture I 
 am now delivering. 
 
 First, I resolved to give a lecture here on sermon making. 
 That was exceedingly notional, and well nigh inevitable, because I 
 was to address for a few weeks here, a congregation of embryo 
 sermonizers. . 
 
 Next, I resolved to have the scheme of my lecture on sermon 
 making stand thus: The topic of the sermon—The accumulation of 
 the material—The organization of it in a suitable scheme—The 
 amplification into the full written form. That scheme grew out of 
 the fact that a sermon has in it those essential particulars—and it. 
 was therefore just about forced upon me. It is good to have the 
 path of duty made plain by a powerful press of circumstances. 
 
 Under the first head—The Topic—I got all the amplification 
 I could delay upon out of the idea that sermonizers had better be 
 quite free and copious in their range of topics. And there I might 
 have stopped, but I paused long enough to put on a rider in the 
 
30 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 cautionary remark, ‘You must be careful to make this your wide 
 sermonizing, your selection of topics from the entire creation, safe, 
 by keeping your ever-sermonizing mind intensely Christian.” Sev- 
 eral other items of amplification occurred to me which I did not 
 use. This, for example—how shall a man determine the order of 
 his topics ; by the order of the Christian year as in the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church ; by the ever-fluctuating state of his congregation ; 
 by a pre-arranged round and round of theologizings, and appli- 
 cations thereof to life; by the to and fro of his own mental 
 idiosyncracies ; or by what ?—a fruitful inquiry, you see, and having: 
 amplification enough in it for an hour. Moreover, I had thought I 
 might mention this curious: little fact:—that a topic selected on 
 Monday, say, snugged away in the mind, and let alone there, 
 absolutely, for three or four days and nights; not being brooded 
 and worked over at all, I raean ; on examination at the end of that 
 time, will be found to have sprouted into a very considerable affair 
 —your mind has seen to that unconsciously—you have had nothing 
 to do with it—and (what is stranger still) experience proves, (my 
 experience does) that if youhad been sound asleep all those four days, — 
 some sprouting would have come to pass. Scores of times after I 
 have gone to bed Friday night I have made a little stir in me, and 
 got my next Sunday’s sermon decided on, and then on waking 
 Saturday morning have noticed a marked advance in me of that 
 topic—it has swollen—it has put out feelers and drawn in correlative 
 thoughts—very likely it is all ready for me to begin writing on. 
 
 That was one of my intended amplifications. And still another 
 amplification that invited me, was a careful statement of the reasons 
 for my assertion, that a wide array of topics is better than a narrow 
 one. 
 
 Now notice; another lecturer, even if he had had the same 
 scheme, would have made a different amplification of that first 
 head, The ‘Topic—where then do amplifications come from, and 
 how can a poor, dry-minded, constipated mortal gettnem? Ianswer: 
 there is only one way, and that is to amplify the man. At any rate 
 that is the first thing. I know, some if amplified to the extreme limits 
 of human amplification, would not be voluminous amplifiers. Their 
 organ of language is small. Or they have an inborn silentness like 
 Gen. Grant, and the North American Indian, and like many a big- 
 headed and much- -thinking man in the back-country. Thomas 
 Carlyle used to preach that amplification is the worst known cure, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 31 
 
 and Mr. Emerson seems to nave been caught in the same sorrowful 
 idea now and then—as for instance, when he wrote :—‘“ come now, 
 let us go alone a whole Pythagorean lustrum, and be dumb.” 
 
 That doctrine may do for some, but not for ordained preachers. 
 What they want is volume and facility. And the way to get it, I 
 say, is to make the preachers themselves voluminous. That first. 
 Any natural silentness in them can be dealt with after we get them 
 enlarged. We don’t want the dam opened till there are waters back 
 of it. That was what angered Carlyle; that there should be so | 
 much openness, and sound, all around, and so little real flow. 
 
 The amplification of men, as preliminary to solidly amplified 
 discourses! A large subject. But there is where discourses come 
 from—from men ! 
 
 For example :—When I said—a preacher’s subjects should be 
 taken from a wide field, I said it out of the observation and study 
 of many years. When I said, a thoroughly Christian mind in a 
 preacher will surely christianize all subjects that come into it, I said 
 it as having noticed that, hundreds of times. When I said, a whole 
 Friday night’s unconscious incubation on an idea, will hatch out a 
 sermon often, I said it because I have hatched them, and know. 
 When I said, under another head, that if a man goes to his study 
 and sets his mind bubbling on a subject, and faithfully records every 
 bubble, those recordings will be mutually related, and will take their 
 place naturally therefore in the sermon which he proceeds then to 
 organize out of them, and not one bubble be lost very likely ; I said it 
 out of my own experiences on the point, repeated hundreds of times. 
 
 An amplifier then—a real one—a solid one—a nutritious one 
 —an amplifier, who, while he has some diction, is not all diction— 
 an amplifier whose movement is a reiterated ‘birth-throe and an 
 eternal refutation of Carlyle’s doctrine of silence,—such an one has 
 lived years and years (this business takes time, and a young man need | 
 not despise himself if he does not feel absolutely inexhaustible right 
 off)—he also has read a good deal, has read digestively, and with a 
 constant appropriation.of facts, principles and vitalities—moreover 
 he has done mountains of solitary thinking—he has become a me= 
 thodical thinker ; that is, when his mind moves down upon a subject 
 it does not go helter-skelter like a flurry of volunteer citizens into 
 an enemy’s country, but with the organized orderliness of «an army, 
 wherein each man is a two-fold force because a unit in an organi- 
 zation. Method is power ;—he has become a methodical thinker, 
 
32 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 also he has learned that most teeming of all secrets, the secret of 
 analysis; and now, whatever subject comes under his inspection, 
 suffers what the nebulae of the firmament suffer when brought under 
 the astronomer’s glass; what is single becomes plural, and the 
 plural more plural, in an endless process of separation. In nothing 
 are sermonizers more differenced than in this; one moves in large 
 and excessive discursiveness, and gets his amplification by sweep- 
 ing into his sermon a great amount of external material, anecdotes, 
 history, personal recollections, the last book, the last murder, and 
 so on, (all good when well used,) which he has come across in his 
 objective travels ;—the other man chooses a single thought, or 
 principle, (the more single the better,), and proceeds to explicate 
 it, fundamentally ; he runs it back to its roots, he knows before he 
 begins that that thing so simple and innocent-looking on the face 
 of it, has any amount of contents; more contents than he will 
 know what to do with when he gets into them. So he gets into 
 them, he defines, he analyzes, he analyzes again, he pursues things 
 into their relations, he finds that the universe is one great ganglion 
 and that any subject is a universal subject ;—the good amplifier has 
 learned to analyze, I repeat ; and finally (for I must hasten) he has 
 been through a multitude of joys and sorrows, he has known love 
 with its many zests and its many inevitable lamentations, he has 
 seen the dying die, he has looked out on the wide woe and mystery 
 of life, he has become full-hearted and full-minded, and now, when 
 he is called to face assemblies of mortal creatures and speak to 
 them, he has somewhat to say, and he feels sometimes as though he 
 could speak forever. He may not be voluble, (God forbid) but he 
 is heavy laden with meanings, and oftimes in his common sayings 
 you will catch the flow of a deep undersong, just as in many a 
 word of Jesus, given us especially by St. John, it has sometimes 
 seemed to me, for the moment, that I could scarcely endure them, 
 they are so fraught with seriousness, and tenderness, and forebod- 
 ing, and moral firmness and majesty, and I know not what besides, 
 as of a man speaking out of an infinite experience, out of an 
 infinite meditativeness, and out of infinite agitations of sensibility. 
 A great man makes a great sermon, and O! what clear effects of 
 greatness are made now and then by quite measurable and even 
 moderate men, who have turned their powers into the service of 
 God with a complete consecration, and have opened themselves to 
 the infloodings of his blessed Spirit. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 33 
 
 My Brethren, I should naturally end here with some attempt 
 to discriminate between a sermon and a lecture, my idea being that 
 a sermon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself from being a lecture, 
 by being made, and delivered in the Holy Ghost. 
 
 I had thought to cover that ground on another occasion, but I 
 shall not, I see now. 
 
ORIGINALITY IN THE 
 PREACHER. 
 
 I am about to speak to you on originality in the preacher and 
 I will try, to begin with, to get down to some clear and vindicable 
 conception of Originality. Accepting a clue from the word itself, I 
 should say that an original sermonizer is one who originates the 
 thoughts that he uses. That seems obvious. But a man who does 
 that is sure to have certain other peculiarities springing out of that ; 
 and, in the popular apprehension of the subject, therefore, an origi- 
 nal man is one who not merely originates the thoughts with which 
 he stocks his sermons, but also has thoughts in practically unlimited 
 quantities—they swarm him ; and, moreover, they are very observa- 
 bly different from those of other men. 
 
 An original preacher then, has those three marks. First, his 
 thoughts are his own ; next, he is fertile in thoughts ; and next, he 
 is different from other men. ‘Those three elements, I say, enter into 
 the general idea of Originality. In strictness, he is original who 
 originates ; but he who originates, is therefore prolific, and unique ; 
 and it is sufficiently exact for our present purpose, if we include all 
 that under the one term original. 
 
 But now, as to that rather great matter of origination, let me 
 ask :—-Where do our thoughts come from? When a preacher origi- 
 nates his own, where do they come from, and when he gets them 
 somewhere else, where is that somewhere else? An important 
 question for men who are public preachers and-who are required to 
 speak ten, twenty, thirty, and more years to the same congregation, 
 except as the perpetual play of death and birth withdraws a familiar 
 
YALE LECTURES. 35 
 
 face now and then, and sifts in an occasional new mind: Where 
 shall thoughts be found, and where is the place of them? Many a 
 young man in the first agonies of production, feels like replying, in 
 those other words of Job: “ Man knoweth not the price thereof, 
 neither is it found in the land of the living. The depth saith, it is 
 not in me, and the sea saith, it is not with me. * * It is hid 
 from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air. 
 * * Where, O where, shall wisdom be found and where is the 
 place of understanding.” And even middle-aged ministers, of a 
 certain second-grade sort, are not without a touch of the same 
 lamentation at times. ‘ Why did you leave Philadelphia,” said I toa 
 partially light-weight doctor of divinity—‘ Because I had nothing 
 more to say,” he replied, frankly, from the bottom of his heart. 
 And after a few years, I noticed in the newspapers, that he had 
 moved on again. He hadn’t yet discovered the hiding place of 
 wisdom. A friend of mine summed up that whole class of preach- 
 ers under the head of “squeezed oranges.” Their first one, two or 
 three years, exhausted their entire sap, and since that, they have 
 been in a condition more easily felt than described. A condition in 
 which, let me add chirkly, no man has any need to be. I consider 
 it no egotism to say that I never saw the day when I was not 
 pretty conscious, that the fountain which gave me my last discourse 
 was more than able to give me another, and then another and 
 another, in everlasting undiminished flow. Of course when you 
 ' have takén out of yourself several thousand sermons and small talks, 
 you know your own mind something better than you did when you 
 had taken out only a dozen ; and are more assured of its bottomless 
 fecundity ; but I courageously maintain that every mind (except a 
 fool) is bottomless, and as non-exhaustible as the waters of the sky ; 
 and if that Philadelphia man touched bottom in his mind, it was a 
 delusion-——it was not bottom—he did not know how to handle his 
 own mind—he had not come into the secret of generative intellec- 
 tual methods—he might as well say he had gone down the whole 
 sub-marine five miles ofthe Atlantic Ocean, and was able to declare 
 its shallowness. 
 
 _ But where do thoughts come from? They come from just two 
 sources, namely: from your own interiors, and from the manffold, 
 endless exteriors, by which all men are surrounded :—these exteri- 
 ors being gotten hold of by redding, and by. observations and by 
 experience. As to thoughts from the interiors, I may say of them, 
 
36 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 that doubtless even they are heavily charged with exterior elements 
 —that is, all of a man’s reading, observation and experience, his 
 whole life-long, has gradually passed into his structure and substance, | 
 to make his originating mind exactly what it is at any given moment 
 of origination, and to make any given product or thought of his 
 mind precisely what it is; but those exterior elements are not in him 
 in any way of recollection ; in that thinking of his from the interior he 
 is not conscious of exteriors ; his whole feeling is like Belshazzar’s ; 
 I did this—this idea is mine—nobody told it to me—I never read it 
 anywhere—or, to draw on Job again, this path no fowl knoweth, 
 and the vulture’s eye hath not seen it; it is my secret, my child, 
 bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh—just as the spider says 
 proudly :—“ that web is this individual spider spun out,” although 
 all the while he knows, if he is an educated spider, that the inward. 
 material of those fine yarns, are the amazing result of the vital pro- 
 cesses of his body, taking the various external spider-foods and work- 
 ing them over by some unsearched chemistry into a brand new 
 form ; a form as unlike the component foods of which it is made, as 
 mud is unlike the heaven-white lily into which it runs up. 
 
 It is the one distinction then, of the class of thoughts which I 
 have called thoughts from the interior, that they seem to themselves, 
 and are, in-born, in-generated, not beholden to any conceivable 
 thing in the universe for their origin, excepting to that live mind there 
 privately thinking. 
 
 Now, I suppose that most persons, at first, would say :—only 
 such a thinker as that is original; and the preacher who gets his 
 sermons from the great second source of possible supply; the source 
 objective, books, nature, life, the million-voiced say-so of the much- 
 speaking human family, he is not original; he is a borrower, and 
 very possibly a plagiarist :—he is not a conscious plagiarist in most 
 cases, but if his discourses are remorselessly looked into, it will be 
 found that they have a strong savor of other people, and do not 
 savor enough of his own self—he certainly is not original ;—the 
 original man pours forth always from his own contents. 
 
 All that is true, but it is as possible for the profusely objec- 
 tive man, the great reader, the great observer, the great man-of- 
 affairs, the great memorizer of facts, events and minima, the excur- 
 sive and wide-plundering man, it is as possible for him to be origi- 
 nal in the profound and self-evolving way already described, as it is 
 for the man who never reads, and never observes at all, but sits in 
 
YALE LECTURES. 37 
 
 his studious solitude, in severe abstraction, and takes good care that 
 what thoughts he has shall be his own and shall smack most relish- 
 ably of his personality. . 
 
 I admit that, if a man leads an intellectual life strongly exter- 
 nal, and is a diligent in-gatherer, there is danger that his original 
 powers will be buried under by his acquisitions, and he therefore 
 not be original; but this bad result is not necessary. If he thinks 
 more than he reads, if he spends more time over his riches of mate- 
 rial when collected than he does in collecting it ; if while he is col- 
 lecting it, he is analyzing it, searching for its underlying principles, 
 generalizing upon it, in short, rationalizing on it in the use of all the 
 higher forces of his mind ; if he reads reflectively, critically, rumin- 
 atively, judicially, and does all his excursive work in a thoroughly 
 attent and vital way, then inevitably what happens to the spider 
 happens to him; the foods of his mind become mind, they increase 
 his mass and his potentiality, they modify the quality of his intellect, 
 they are subtly distributed through his entire mental organism, his 
 entire personality, in fact, just as all our physical food atoms, after 
 proper transmutation, are infallibly distributed for the repair of our 
 bodies and the replenishment of their vigor. And when all this has 
 happened to our much-reading man, and he is called upon to put 
 himself forth in discourse, behold! there is nothing plagiaristic 
 about him ; he falls now under the first class of thinkers, the indis- 
 putably original men, he is not conscious of his materials, neither is 
 any one else aware of them; the fact is, those materials have eter- 
 nally disappeared in him, and all you see is a man; an originating 
 man :—theoretically we know that there are a great many good books 
 in that man and a great grist of other things, a sort of maelstrom he 
 is; but visibly we cannot prove it, we cannot lay our hand on the 
 books and the grist; when he speaks, it sounds just as Adam 
 sounded in Paradise before he had read a thing or fairly seen anything ; 
 his contents are all vital and assimilated, and the only way you 
 know he ever read anything in particular, is the same by which you 
 know a strong and digestive eater, namely, his mind has blood in it,. 
 and endurance and endless performance and when he gets hold of 
 you, you feel that your doom is at the door. 
 
 _I like to describe this sort of God’s creature. There is some- 
 what magnetic in him and the touch of his splendid virility is enough 
 to make one feel himself immortal. 
 
 I suppose you have seen these thick-set, sappy, disgusting green 
 
38 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 worms, that stretch themselves out on the twigs of the trees and 
 lazily eat the green leaves, and eat, and eat, forever; and are so 
 lazy that they will not take the trouble to transform their green food 
 into a decent flesh color, but lay it around on their miserable bodies 
 unchanged (so it looks—I use the language of appearance, of 
 course.) Well, those creatures represent the preachers who are 
 overloaded with undigested externals. The leaves they have eaten 
 show everywhere. You can tell what they ate last. Sometimes 
 they put it forth in plain lumps, the original thing without a pre- 
 tense of reductio ad pabulum, though more often it is disguised un- 
 der some show of transformation. But it is a low and stealing 
 piece of business—the whole thing—and they have no right to 
 preach. 
 
 But whereunto shall I liken the better sort? They are like 
 yonder flowering bush. It has lived on several kinds of rather un- 
 promising food. It has eaten dirt. It has even taken up the insuf- 
 ferable rankness of animal decomposition. And, better and more 
 decent, it has nourished itself by the air and the light, and the rain, 
 and the subtle cool ministries of the night. And lo! the rose. 
 That plant had life, and vital cunning, and knew what it was here 
 for. That plant was original. It needed much material, but it did 
 not propose to be lumbered by it. No, it struck for a complete 
 victory over its material—and got it. For what can be more com- 
 plete than to make over dirt, and the like, into a rose-leaf, that 
 blooming, beautiful, fragrant, and almost spiritualized thing, a thing 
 so exquisite that God might pluck it for himself in heaven. There 
 is originality for you. 
 
 The flower is original ; the green worm is a visible plagiarist. 
 
 If I have now sufficiently defined the original preacher, I am 
 ready to draw out a list of considerations in defence of originality 
 and in praise of it. 
 
 And, First. Referring to the original man, as different from 
 other men—dwelling a moment on that particular element of origi- 
 nality, I submit to you this fact—that every mind born into the 
 world is specifically unlike every other, by the operation of irresis- 
 tible causes ;—as much unlike certainly, as each human face is unlike 
 every other that ever was or ever will be ; which fact does not look 
 at all as though God meant his creatures to be otherwise than dis- 
 similar one from the other. If the new-born mind is in every case 
 unique and unprecedented, why should it not be developed in the 
 
YALE LECTURES. _ 39 
 
 line of that original start. Why rub down its face-marks in a blas- 
 
 phemous attempt to make everybody alike? Why conventionalize 
 
 it by slow degrees! Why work over its aboriginal tone, till you 
 
 could not tell it from all other tones. God does not operate in that 
 
 way in Nature, neither does he thus work anywhere. Every animal 
 
 has his race-lines, every tree has its race-lines, every plant its char- 
 
 acteristic career. Even that sappy green worm—to tell the truth at 
 
 last—is a perfectly individualized creature, and when he is green, it 
 
 is not because he has consented to let the leaves he eats register ex- 
 
 actly their own color on him, but because as he proceeds with his 
 
 digestion and what not, it is a peculiarity of his constitution to pre- 
 
 fer to be green, just as it is constitutional in the lily stalk to prefer 
 to blossom white, and in the rose to prefer that fascinating flush of 
 which I spoke. Likewise, every spring is itself and no other, and 
 every morning is, and every cyclone; and every tide-swell has its 
 
 recognizable idiosyncracies. Likewise, in the unfoldings of history, 
 
 God strikes in to make the great movement racy ; each era has its 
 
 own features, each crisis gets to be a crisis by foregoing preparations 
 
 that are original, and each crisis dissolves away into the common 
 
 flow of events again in a manner quite its own. 
 
 Why then should any one be afraid of originality in men, and in 
 preachers. Why want to have us all twins, and fac-similes! all 
 think alike, express ourselves alike, look alike, sound alike, in a 
 weary, universal humdrum of thought and life. I recollect the perils 
 of originality, and shall throw in a cautionary word or two on that 
 poin by and by. Meanwhile, let us all accept our birthright, and 
 calmly be ourselves. 
 
 Again, only those who are original speak with authority. There 
 is a tell-tale tone in the hearsay man, which he cannot suppress. I 
 suppose it is the ineradicable integrity of the man’s nature, refusing 
 to put off on the public a stolen thing. He wants to do it, and in- 
 tends to do it, and tries to do it, but lying is cross to certain princi- 
 cipal parts of our nature, and no bad thing can be perfectly carried 
 out, thank God. Murder will out. So will borrowed preaching. . 
 
 When I said, those who are original speak with authority, you 
 thought of our Lord, I presume; as you well might, because the 
 entire secret of his weight of speech, was that he spoke what he 
 himself had discovered and nothing else, and had discovered a good 
 deal to speak. There were traditions enough in his land, and in his 
 training ; there were prepossessions, prejudices, bigotries, a powerful 
 
40 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 quantity of book-lumber oppressing the public mind and a thoroughly 
 
 ‘elaborated and imperious conventionalism, after the manner of all 
 very old countries and races; and into this great system of fixed 
 things, and respectable things, and things prescribed, Jesus came 
 with his wise, direct, intuitive eyes, his absolutely unbiased mind, his 
 eyes of infinite, original discovery, and what he saw he said, with the 
 calmness and courage of first-hand knowledge. On the one hand no 
 egotism and on the other hand no flinching ; and those people who 
 massed about him and listened, felt a power which they could not 
 explain, in any full analysis, but which they explained well enough, 
 and better than they knew, when they said :—‘ He speaks as one 
 having authority, and not as the scribes.”” He was an original man ; 
 and his ministers have a right to be, in their measure. 
 
 Every now and then the travelling agent for some book wants 
 me to put my name down in certification to the value of his volume. 
 “But I never read the book,” say I, “and I am so situated at 
 present that I cannot read it.” “But here is a list of eminent 
 clergymen and others who have read it, and are all delighted with it. 
 It is the safest thing in the world therefore for you to give me your 
 name.” ‘To which I reply :—‘ Nothing were safer, as respects the 
 risk that I shall lend my name to a poor and sloshy volume ; but 
 my name there written in your great array of names will be taken 
 by many people to mean that I have myself examined your book 
 and do therefore and thus know it to be a good thing. Not one in 
 a score of the people, taken as they run, would surmise that I am 
 not an original witness in this business. Almost the whole value of 
 my name lies in their lamb-like trust in me at exactly that point.” 
 
 So the man never gets my name. Iam not going to be a 
 public preacher for that book merely because a body of intelligent 
 doctors of divinity, a hundred strong perhaps, together with a hun- 
 dred laymen equally intelligent, have discovered it to be an excel- 
 lent publication, and are preaching for it. 
 
 And I do not see but, in all preaching, the original witness is 
 the only one. My Brethren, it is one of our main distinctions that 
 we are witnesses for Christ. Theoretically, that is according to all 
 Biblical teaching on the matter, we are that; and then, so far as 
 public power is concerned, we do not amount to anything first- 
 class, and irresistible, except as we are witness bearers. In other 
 words, we must deliver our own thoughts—or what is the same 
 thing, we must be original. If we dispense theology, it must be 
 
YALE LECTURES. 41 
 
 strictly the theology which we ourselves have been able to discover ; 
 or if we passs over into the emotional field and discourse on matters 
 of experience, we must get our great emphasis out of our own expe- 
 rience, and in so far as we preach the experiences of other people, 
 unverified as yet in our own hearts, our perceptive hearer will note 
 that there is somewhat hollow in the resound of our emphasis. A 
 photograph of a landscape is one thing, and the photograph of that 
 photograph is another, always and most visibly. It may be a nice 
 picture, this last—in fact it generally looks smoother and handsomer 
 than the other somehow; moreover the natural scene of which it 
 professes to be a representation is plainly there—nevertheless every- 
 body much prefers the first photograph—there is a refreshing real- 
 ism about it—it is a transcript of the originality of Nature herself 
 —it is, as we say, an original picture. 
 
 So the preacher ; in order to be realistic, he must tell what he 
 knows, and not be dressing up the discoveries and experiences of 
 other men. 
 
 But here some one of you in his own mind will interpose the 
 suggestion—‘ We young men, have not had time to discover much, 
 neither have we had any great range of experience ; nevertheless we 
 are on the eve of being preachers, and we are on the eve of being 
 overhauled by an ecclesiastical body, which will want us to have a 
 clear opinion on all theology, and will very likely withhold ordina- 
 tion if we cannot stand up to all the Articles of Faith of the Chris- 
 tian body to which we belong ; And now, Mr. Burton, what shall we 
 do? We can’t be original very much, we can’t be witnesses more 
 than about so far, and yet we seem to be about to be forced to talk 
 very large, and talk from one to two hundred times in a year. 
 
 Well, that does seem to be a crushing state of things, and I shall 
 enjoy remarking upon it. 
 
 I think it is plain that you must retail some hearsay, but in so 
 far as you are incorrigibly honest to the bottom of your heart, you 
 will instinctively put forth your hearsay with some subtle indication, 
 somehow, that it is hearsay. 
 
 A friend of mine was once put in a tight place. He was called 
 upon to act as showman to a stereopticon, for an evening. Half of 
 the views to be exhibited were taken from Europe north of the 
 Alps, and half from Europe south of these mountains. Now 
 it chanced that my friend had never been south of the Alps, and, 
 as I had, he urgently besought me to mount the stage when 
 
42 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 he had done northern Europe and do the rest. But I 
 declined, feeling and saying that he could beat any of us, 
 whether he had visited the scenes ornot. For he had, in large 
 measure, the gift of speech. So I went to the lecture with perfect 
 confidence, but awondering in the secret depths of my mind, after 
 all, whether the lecturer would slow any when he crossed the Alps. 
 At first he did not. He had got up a good momentum, and he 
 went over kiteing and struck Italy with the realistic air of all ob- 
 servers. It seemed to me that he was going to take us through that 
 new country and not let out his ignorance. But he had been in the 
 ministry a good while, and his conscience began to bother him, I 
 suppose, and he pretty soon seemed tired, and at last stopped and 
 confessed. He said he had not been there, but would go on as well 
 as he could. And he went on and was most interesting, too. I 
 would not have had him stop for the world. 
 
 Gentlemen, when that council ask you, as a member of my or- 
 daining council asked me by way of determining my soundness on 
 the subject of the Trinity :—‘ If the Holy Ghost were killed would 
 it kill God ;” do you say :—“I will make shift to answer, but I am 
 young to the councils of God.” Because it will be interesting to 
 have you answer; and a comfort. And after you are settled, and 
 must preach on many things that you have not been able as yet to 
 explore in thoroughly original effort, when you go over the Alps, 
 you may reasonably slow up a little. I should certainly go over. 
 There is a south-lying Europe—a rich} beautiful, historical region ; 
 and the fact that you have not’ been there does not alter that. Mil- 
 lions have been there. So you had better glib along and tell what they 
 say. It would be dreadful to confine your congregation to Northern 
 Europe, merely because that is the only part you have visited. 
 God’s creation is pretty large. And his grace-region is pretty 
 large. And what we cannot personally visit, we had better read 
 about, and then proclaim as hearsay. There are plenty of wit- 
 nesses to certain points of doctrine and experience on which you 
 are not a witness; you are too young and you have not thought 
 enough nor prayed enough—and you thoroughly believe their testimo- 
 ny, and therefore, when you give it out to your people you need not do 
 it in a half and half way, though you can never really thunder and 
 boom, and jump into the emphasis with your whole weight and in 
 perfect gusto, except when you are displaying the north country 
 scenes. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 43 
 
 And your people will let it be so. They are not fools, neither 
 are the ecclesiastical councils fools. All sensible councils prefer 
 that the young mah should not be too knowing. They like to hear’ 
 which way he is headed, and what he best likes, and a few things of 
 that sort—and they like to toll him out into deep-sea soundings to 
 find how well he can tread water, and whether he is honest enough 
 not to pretend that his feet touch bottom—and after that, and pos- 
 sibly a flirt or two of gymnastics among themselves, unnecessary but 
 entertaining, they are ready to go on and do the thing that ought to 
 be done, namely, put the young man into the ministry with con- 
 gratulations, thanksgivings, and their best love. 
 
 It is not easy to draw the line between Authority in religious 
 things, on the one hand, and Individual Liberty on the other—or 
 rather, the line is easy enough, but it is hard to live exactly upon it. 
 The line runs thus : 
 
 In so far as I can search for myself I must do it—in all things. 
 That is Originality. Next I must diligently take counsel of other 
 men, and listen to them with absolute openness of mind. And 
 now, having gathered in all possible data, I must next fall back upon 
 my ownself, in perfect absolutism ; or call it individualism if you 
 like—in perfect individualism I must fall back. Perfect I say, that is, 
 in a spirit as absolute as though no man but me had ever thought a 
 thought ;—and I must decide—decide my doctrine, decide what is 
 real, divine experience. Whoso flinches at that point of absolutism, © 
 waives his indefeasible right, and smirches his own majesty. I tell 
 you there is no manhood that does not begin just there. Surrender 
 there, and you have opened the way to every conceivable self-sur- 
 render and worthlessness, both moral and intellectual. I know 
 the risks of Individualism, and what a force of disintegration it often 
 is ; social life is not possible, the state, church and family are. not 
 possible, history as an organized development cannot be, and 
 civilization itself in its highest forms must die, where the Ego is 
 pushed as some would push it. But I know, also, that where men 
 cease to do their own thinking and make their own decisions in the » 
 manner and under the conditions just explained, there are no longer 
 any men, and the various social organisms are not worth keeping 
 up. Their constituent units have dissolved into imbecility, and so- 
 ciety is like a rotten-timbered ship. 
 
 It is much asserted now-a-days, that the spiritual Ego is not 
 much i a thing anyway. In the first place it is not spiritual, but 
 
44 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 material. In the next place, it is not self-directing and free, but is 
 the slave of irresistible conditions, its environment, and all that. 
 In the third place, of course this Ego is puffed out at death into 
 eternal non-entity. 
 
 And now what are the sure barriers against this flood of mate- 
 rialistic philosophizing? The first barrier is a supernatural religious 
 experience in millions of men, and the glorious self-consciousness 
 that comes of it. A man regenerate, and full of regenerate experi- 
 ences, always believes in his own spiritual existence, his own free- 
 dom of will and his own eternal perpetuality. And he justas much 
 believes—and cannot help it—in a personal God. Those three 
 faiths, hang together, logically and in life, and the more regenera- 
 tions there are on earth, the less materialism there is. 
 
 That is the first barrier, and the greatest. 
 
 But close to that, is that resolute Individualism, of which I was 
 speaking—that manful assertion of the Ego, which is involved in 
 private judgment. If I think for myself, if I produce my own 
 thoughts, if I settle my own principles, if I make my own discov- 
 eries, and if, even when I consult other people, and genially con- 
 sider their dicta, I come back at last to the plain ground of my own 
 kinghood, and make up my affirmative, the whole thing is so in- 
 tensely self-asserting and so amplifies and classifies my self-con- 
 sciousness, that I cannot in the least endure this modern scientific 
 attempt to minimize the inner Me, and woodenize it, and make it 
 a two-penny item in the inevitable grind of mechanical cause and 
 effect. 
 
 Possibly the point I make here will seem to some speculative, 
 rather than practical, but I believe that the true way to resist ab- 
 sorption into the creation, as a part of its dead machinery, is to 
 magnify the personal interior man, practically, first by filling it with 
 the life of God through Jesus Christ, and then by original energiz- 
 ing in the form of truth-searchings, and in the form of independent 
 judgments. 
 
 And if I might turn aside a little here, I could speak of indi- 
 vidualism as indispensable to civil liberty, and as the only foundation 
 of a masculine and powerful literature. But, I was praising origi- 
 nality in the preacher, and to that I return and once more announce 
 to you, that originality in our ministers secures a many-sided con- 
 sideration of all subjects—and nothing else will secure it. It is a 
 peculiarity of our subjects that they are many-sided ; and the heavi- 
 
YALE LECTURES. 49 
 
 est pull that I have, I find, is to get on to all sides, by the help of all 
 sorts of men. Left to myself, and following the impulses of my own 
 constitution, I select certain aspects of the Christian Religion, in 
 front of them sit down, and there enjoy myself forever. But along 
 comes Mr. John Calvin, and invites me to take a turn with him, 
 He has numbers of things he wants to show me. “Your position is 
 good enough so far as it goes,” he says; “ God is love and the will 
 of man is free enough to make him responsible, but God is justice. 
 too, and God foreordinates in the most impressive manner, and I 
 want you to walk all around that, and mortise that into your theolog- 
 ical system, and let your system have the advantage of it; and 
 you too.” 
 
 But, by the time John Calvin is through with me, Horace 
 Bushnell wants him. He has discovered some things, he thinks. 
 And before they have finished with each other, Huxley, Tyndall, and 
 Herbert Spencer, are waiting for them both. Calvin and Bushnell 
 with all their divergency, one from the other, are agreed that Chris- 
 tianity is a supernatural system from first to last, and those three 
 naturalistic gentlemen just named have come to expound the side of 
 Law, to them, and to show that the law-system of God has never 
 been breached in one instance. All religions are a natural devel- 
 opment, they say, Jesus of Nazareth was a product of his race and 
 his circumstances :—a splendid product confessedly, so that unre- 
 flective, unscientific, and wonder-mongering men and generations, 
 naturally enough got him deified, and encompassed his earthly way 
 with marvels, heaven-descended and miraculous. 
 
 Christianity, (these gentlemen go on,) Christianity has been ex- 
 hibited by theologians as a system so. without parallel in other re- 
 ligions, and in Natural Religion, that it seems a kind of strange 
 work of God, an eccentricity, an irruption ; whereas, in truth, Chris- 
 tianity is an orderly factor, and an organic factor, in God’s vast 
 framework of things, and all it needs is time and study, to show its 
 many affiliations with all the great Faiths of the world. That is 
 their talk, and the two theologians listen to it, and get a new sense 
 of the law-side of things, and they begin to wonder—many theolog- 
 ians do at any rate, whether, in preaching the supernatural and the 
 miraculous, we have not been too-prone to show the irruptive and 
 abnormal element in it, rather than its large normalism. A miracle 
 is a startling and unclassifiable thing, certainly, on its hither side ; 
 but if it be looked at on its transcendental side also, may it not be 
 
46 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 found to be part and parcel of a thoroughly-established, universal, 
 undeviating orderliness ; so that while a miracle, when it comes into 
 sight on the earth-side, is very sensational in its rupture of the cus- 
 tomary flow of things, it is even more imposing as a law-abiding unit 
 in that totality of created things of which one hemisphere is the 
 natural, and the other the supernatural. When the supernatural 
 plunges into the natural there is a commotion and the dust flies, and 
 we say God has started up suddenly to do by direct fiat, what would 
 not have been done had he kept his repose, and permitted his crea- 
 ted laws to move on; but he has not started up probably ; the 
 scientists are right; his laws are moving on and it was they that 
 made this plunge, and this dust. 
 
 I have drawn out this illustration rather fully, because it does 
 illustrate my idea that many minds working independently con- 
 tribute to the unfolding of truth in all its phases. My joyful con- 
 viction is that the perilous rationalism in the field of natural science, 
 which is one of the most obvious and most striking features of the 
 intellectual life of the present time, will do forty times more good 
 than hurt in the expansion and enrichment of our conception of 
 Christianity. And it will do it in two ways. It will secure a just at- 
 tention to aspects of truth which have been too much retired ; and 
 it will cause such a hard-headed, and scholarly re-examination of 
 truths which have not been retired, but have been held prominent, 
 and made to be the Malakoff and Redan of the Christian position, 
 that they will be reconfirmed with shoutings. 
 
 Nature is as truly a revelation of God as the Bible is. Nature 
 is an immense theological statement—and every attribute of God is 
 found in that statement, but some attributes more distinctly than 
 others. Those distinct attributes the unbelieving naturalists are 
 bringing out—though they do not intend it, for they take little stock 
 in the idea of a personal God—they are doing good theologiz- 
 ing for all the rest of us :—and if our theology has confined itself 
 too much to a Book (as I suppose it has,) the labors of these bright 
 gentlemen will surely supplement our deficiency. 
 
 And then as to the broader establishment of old truths by the 
 laborious gainsayings of these men, take this example :—they say 
 that Jesus was a purely natural result; given the Jewish race, the 
 Jewish land, the Jewish history, Mary the Virgin, Nazareth, a few 
 simple this-world things like that, and the great Nazarene is fully 
 accounted for. So then we are all invited to study, exhaustively, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 47 
 
 those this-world things ; and the more we do it, the more it stands 
 out as never before that Jesus came from out of the sky in the main, 
 and could not have been born of Palestine only. 
 
 In- like manner, various disparaging assertions touching the 
 origin of the Bible, and touching numbers of sacred things, have led 
 to such a sifting of the same as was never known; and continually 
 the result is, that our Religion, in all its substantials, is gloriously 
 vindicating itself. 
 
 And if we come to the controversies among the men of faith, 
 as to the inspiration of the Bible, and the Passion of the Lord Jesus, 
 and the eternal lot of sinners and all the rest; these controversies 
 have sprung up because our men are intellectually independent and 
 original—when they put their eyes on a thing, it is their own eyes 
 that they put on, and that thing therefore is seen in all sorts of pos- 
 sible ways, and some impossible ones; but no matter—what Ed- 
 wards does not see, Wesley will, and what Wesley does not, Edwards 
 will. Some sensitive man does not cordialize with Calvin’s view of 
 God’s penalties. That is his personal specialty; to be sensitive. 
 Whether it was that his mother was the woman she was, or that he 
 happened to fall under special forces of training, I do not know; 
 but there he is all in a quiver against the Calvinistic theology at that 
 point. But he is a good man, and a man of mind and scholarship ; 
 he begins certain hypothetical reasonings on the old doctrine, to 
 see if he cannot get it into some sort of sufferable shape ; and per- 
 haps not tear the heart out of it, either. Now, what I say is, that 
 that man, moving freely and having no doubt of his right to be in- 
 dependent, will be likely to hammer out some statements that even 
 Calvin will be willing to hear. In his horror of the thought that 
 God should come out against his finally impenitent creatures, in ob- 
 jective strokes eternally laid on, he will carefully unfold a man’s 
 Hell from his own interior, and show him as forever in the grasp of 
 intellectual laws already well known. And what other ameliorations 
 defensible or indefensible he will surmise, we cannot tell; but it is 
 good to have just that man—that kind-hearted (perhaps over-kind 
 hearted and over-shrinking,) well-furnished, determined man, tug- 
 ging with all his might at just that point. Multiply these indefatiga- 
 ble explorers by thousands, and you see what is seen in newly-dis- 
 covered gold lands ; every rod of the theological landscape is nu- 
 merously searched, and every ounce of its dirt, for a thousand miles, 
 is microscopically sifted in some’gold-searcher’s pan. And that is 
 
48 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 what we want. Our theology will be a whole orchestra, when all its 
 tones are discovered, instead of a squeak here and a squeak there 
 of some sectarian view, or some provincialism or some passing 
 aberration of the century. 
 
 I have spoken in praise of originality, in a pretty affirmative 
 way, you have noticed, but I have no objection to slip in a touch of 
 prudence here at the end. 
 
 Egotism and vaporing, and a despising of authorities in the in- 
 tellectual and religious world, is a thing easy to fall into when your 
 soul gets full of the doctrine of originality which I have preached 
 here to-day ; and self-assertion, and an opinionated air, and a brag- 
 ging way of exhibiting one’s originality, is not beautiful either in 
 young men or in old ones—therefore consider a moment. 
 
 If you pursue originality for its own sake, or because it feels good 
 to be original—or if you pursue it for the sake ofa sensation, among 
 the people, and because that feels good ; then you are clean out of 
 the way, and your originality is disgusting. It seems to me I should 
 not pursue originality at all. There are many things that are good 
 to have but you must not pursue them. You must go straight along 
 about your business, and let them come of themselves, if they want 
 to, just as right-minded maidens get their lovers. But what is the 
 business that you are to go straight along about, and in which origi- 
 nality may incidentally come to you? 1 might give several answers 
 to that. If you are in passionate pursuit of the truth, all strutting as 
 of originality will be taken out of you. Or if you have a passion to 
 do good to the congregation to whom you preach, that will do it. 
 Can I think of my sermon in a conceited way when my whole heart 
 is out in the assembly before me? As well could the runner in the 
 games think of his gait, or the swordsman in the duel delight in the 
 glitter of his sword. My Brethren, God puts us, his ministers, in a 
 very testful position. On the one hand, we must make sermons ; 
 we must make good sermons, we must ram into them tons of stock, 
 we must spend days on each one, and work over it in such a con- 
 centrated and devoted way that, when at last it is finished 
 and the agony is over, we cannot help feeling a mother- 
 like self-satisfaction in it; and then when we go into the 
 pulpit, we must deliver it decently, and give enough attention to our 
 ownselves to secure that end; and yet, on the other hand, we just 
 as much must keep clear of self-consciousness, and a loving sense of 
 our own discourse, if we are tc please God and bless the people. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 49 
 
 There we are. And the curse of the preaching of many of us is, 
 that we have not the strength to do those two contrary things, and 
 do not go to God sufficiently to be led out by him into the great 
 motives and enthusiasm in which self is swallowed up ; the enthusi- 
 asm for Truth, and the enthusiasm for Humanity. You see your 
 peril, Brethren, and you see your remedy. Sermon-making is in 
 order to salvation. Sermons are instruments, not ends. ‘A good 
 sermon is a sermon that is good for something,’’ as I once heard an 
 old minister remark. 
 
 And Originality is for use. You want to be original because 
 that is God’s method for the intellect, because thus you are a dis- 
 coverer of truth, because thus your mind is made prolific, because 
 thus you are saved from plagiarism whether formal or virtual, be- 
 cause thus you do your part towards the eventual exhibition of 
 Christian truth in its many-sided entirety ; because thus you are a 
 real witness for God, because thus you continually increase your 
 personal mass and momentum ; and because all these particulars 
 bear on the glory of God, and the welfare of man. 
 
 Some would say, it is well enough for great men to be inde- 
 pendent and original thinkers, and to move before the world in that 
 gait—their size saves them from being ridiculous—a sort of impe- 
 rialism is becoming to them, and people put up with it; but for 
 little men and young men to assume to be original, and courage- 
 ously do their own thinking, is rather intolerable. It can be made 
 intolerable, but it is as possible for a small mind to work by the 
 method of originality as for a large one, else I should not be deliv- 
 ering this lecture ; for more than half of the ministerial minds are 
 smallish. Moreover, a little man has his duty to his own mind, and 
 to his congregation, as much as anybody has. You might say :-— 
 yonder bit of a man has no moral obligation because of his lack of 
 size ; but he has. And in like manner, yonder undergrown intel- 
 lect must take good care to think rightly—not in servile dependence 
 on strong men, but originally—-and if he does, his intellectual forth- 
 puttings, while they will not be stupendous or over-numerous, will 
 be always fresh and have a sound of authority. 
 
 But in making them our own the point of strain, as I said, is, 
 to keep ourselves perfectly modest, and perfectly receptive of the 
 light of other minds. Absolutely firm on the one hand, and abso- 
 lutely genial and inoffensive on the other. Striving to be firm, we 
 may seem conceited, dogmatic, and repellant. Striving to preserve 
 
50 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 our intellectual integrity, and the courage of our opinions, in the 
 stress of the world’s innumerable yea and nay, we may get accused of 
 intellectual pride and forwardness, and of many things; especially 
 if we are young. 
 
 Well, let us watch and pray, and do the best we can. 
 
 I look back with amusement, now, to the intellectual self-con- 
 fidence with which I left this Seminary after Dr. Nathaniel Taylor 
 had spent a couple of years or so getting me on to my own legs; 
 and whereinsoever I stood a little more than perpendicular, I take 
 it back of course, but I bless the memory of that very affirmative, 
 self-centred, and undoubting old man notwithstanding. He knew 
 in whom he had believed, and why he had believed, and he made 
 us all feel that truth is discoverable, and that we could discover it, 
 every man of us, and that we did not need to be badgered out of it 
 by the noise of gainsayers ; and that a man’s a man, in theology as 
 in some other things ; and that it is better to go to the judgment 
 after a life-time of manful strugglings with the truth albeit with some 
 errors, than to go there with whatever amount of truth held in mere 
 languid receptivity. And he was right. 
 
IMAGINATION IN MINISTERS. 
 
 I am here to day to make a plea for Imagination in Ministers 
 considered as Theologians. | 
 
 I do not know whether any previous lecturer has made a whole 
 speech on that faculty or not. Some of the lecturers have had 
 the faculty themselves, in great size, but perhaps they would be 
 afraid to encourage people generally to have it. I heard so con- 
 siderable and judicious a man as the late Rev. Dr. Joel Hawes, 
 Pastor for a life time of the First Church in Hartford, Connecticut, 
 give an account of his high-handed proceedings, in the days of his 
 youth, against imagination in his own mind. He found, he said, 
 that he was pretty strong and exuberant in that trait, and that his 
 sermons were showing it. So by and by, when traveling alone and 
 thoughtful in his carriage all the way from Hartford to New Haven, 
 he improved the occasion for a solemn deliberation on the ques- 
 tion :— how can I do the most good in my life time, preaching 
 imaginatively as now, or otherwise.” I need not say to those who 
 knew him, which way that debate went, nor with what success he 
 enforced on himself his resolution then made, to extirpate that 
 perilous endowment of his. 
 Dr. Hawes stands for a multitude. They are afraid of imagi- 
 nation. And they have good reasons for it. I am afraid of it. I> 
 am afraid of every power of the mind. I am afraid of mind—and 
 body too. Allthings have their risks and perversions. And I had 
 thought that I would say to you here, to-day, just where the danger 
 comes in, as respects imagination in the preacher. I could tell 
 you all about it; but I believe that the dry vision, and the one- 
 eyed vision, the literalism and the non-creative habit-of the un- 
 
52 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 imaginative men has cursed theology and the pulpit even more 
 than the sky-flying and moonshine of the imaginationists. 
 
 But I cease from comparisons, and from all preliminaries, and 
 proceed directly to illustrate the wholesome function of this great 
 power of man in the minister considered as a theologian—or a man 
 theologizing. And under that head I notice: 
 
 First. That, the imaginative man—and he only—is able to 
 handle, and draw out, liblical doctrines historically—to take it, that 
 is, in its entire historical setting. For the word of God on theology 
 is not an absolute utterance straight down from the skies, and direct 
 from his lips, but it comes to us very circuitously through human 
 lips, and many human lips, and through all sorts of human and 
 ‘earthly intermediates; and a full-visioned and creative grasp of 
 those numerous intermediates is an essential part of good theologiz- 
 ing. When God would make himself known in his fullness, he 
 chose to be incarnated in the person of his eternal Son; that pre- 
 existent and infinite personage took upon himself the conditions 
 of time and sense ; he dropped into an order of things historically 
 prepared for him bya long and laborious process, he became a 
 vital factor in that order of things, he accepted ail the relations 
 prepared to his hand, spoke in a certain language for example, was 
 of a certain country, dwelt on a certain spot, in a certain home, was 
 nursed and cultured in a certain religion,—and, in short, made his 
 whole manifestation on earth a relational and conditional one, so 
 that he cannot be fully understood in the least word he spoke, or 
 the least act he performed, except that he is interpreted by those 
 conditions, or relations in which he stood. We must resurrect his 
 era ; not only in its outlines, but in all its essentials. We must res- 
 urrect Judea, as it then was. And when we get hold of Judea to do 
 that, we shall find that Judea intertangled with other nationalities, 
 so that we have undertaken, in fact, a kind of general resurrection. 
 And if Judea intertwined with contemporary peoples, so it did, O! 
 how wonderfully, with the peopled and providential past; so that 
 to possess ourselves of Jesus of Nazareth, as he actually and totally 
 was, a time-man and historical phenomenon, we need the magnifi- 
 cent clear vision and creativeness of the imaginative faculty, as 
 these modern times (to their praise be it said) are finding out. 
 
 Historical imagination! an indispensable first thing in the 
 theologian. 
 
 But some one in his heart may say to me here :—“ Cannot any 
 
YALE LECTURES. 53 
 
 man of good sense and decent memory, without a grain of imagi- 
 nation, by diligent study of any past—as the past, for instance, in 
 which Jesus organically stood—re-construct that past, and have it 
 live before him in its full-toned actuality, so that any one of the 
 many forces and personages of which it is made up shall be judged 
 by him in a valid way. Is it not claiming too much for the imagi- 
 nation to say that it only is able to draw out the theology of the 
 Scripture, and the theology of the Christian ages, in a strictly his- 
 torical spirit and method !” 
 
 In answering this question, I must make a little analysis of that 
 mental power which we call imagination. I will not undertake a 
 complete definition, but I will point out some of the marks by 
 which it may be known. For all the purposes of this present dis- 
 course, imagination may be divided into imagination recollective, 
 and imagination creative. Imagination recollective, places before 
 the mind things absent or past which we have personally seen, or 
 which have been brought to our knowledge by hearsay and study. 
 Imagination creative, takes those re-produced absent or past things, 
 and out of their many elements makes new combinations ; as when 
 a painter puts into his landscape not any one natural scene, but 
 particulars and parts of many scenes with which he is familiar. 
 As regards the historical construction of theology, whereof I have 
 been speaking, imagination recollective figures there; that to 
 begin with ; and if I am asked,—how does imagination recollective 
 differ from memory, and does it differ at all,—I reply, only in this, 
 that it presents to the mind things absent or foregone in a vivid way, 
 and after the manner of literal vision. Things merely recollected 
 seem distant and cold, and to that extent void of result ; things imagi- 
 natively recollected seem near, warm, vital, and inspiring. A 
 recollective theologian, by virtue of an enormous gift of memory, 
 may have an encyclopedic hold on the theologic past, but he holds 
 the past as Encyclopedias are apt to, in a colorless way, and with 
 no special human interest. The imaginative theologian moves 
 among those by-gones, all and utterly alive, and visional,—as much - 
 so as though he had been personally among them, and of them, 
 originally. He cannot see that a man, or a deed, or a nation, or a 
 social process, or a system of thought two thousand years away, is 
 any less actual or thrilling than the same thing in these days. 
 When some one disparaged Plato in the presence of Dr. Amold, 
 Arnold’s lip quivered with grief. A memoriter man ‘could not have 
 
54 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 been moistened in that way, by whatever outrage against all con- 
 ceivable Platos. He would be abundantly acquainted with them, 
 the Platos, of course, but as frigid historical entities, and not in 
 any flesh and blood warmth and nearness. 
 
 A few years ago, accidentally, it was found that underneath old 
 St. Clements in Rome—itself one of the most antique of churches— 
 was another St. Clements, which had been buried and unknown for 
 over a thousand years. When I was there, the portico and nave of 
 that edifice had been dug out, and Father Mullooly, of the Domin- 
 ican Monastery near by, conducted a party of us through it, with 
 explanations. As we passed in he called our attention to the mar- . 
 ble threshold, half-worn out by the passage of countless feet in the 
 long-gone times, and said :—“ there are a good many foot-prints 
 on that stone ;””—and to me, instantly, those living generations were 
 there again, and I felt the mysterious pathos of human life in their 
 persons as deeply and emotionally as I could in any human com- 
 pany of to-day. That sentence of Mullooly’s was coined in the 
 imagination—distinctly. It was not memory. It was not his 
 intellect grasping a fact. It was feeling warmed up to vision. It 
 was imagination, one of whose distinctions is that it is always suffused 
 with sensibility :—it was imagination revivifying triumphantly those 
 dead and shadowy great multitudes by a single unconscious master- 
 stroke—such as are easy to that imperial faculty. 
 
 And Father Mullooly by this little touch, classed himself right 
 in with Shakespeare, in many a passage of his plays. It required 
 precisely the same mental qualities to re-people that old Nave, and 
 tie a thousand human years to that foot-worn marble, that it did to 
 make Hamlet reclothe the bare, dead skull of Yorick which the 
 grave-digger had thrown out, and which Hamlet held in his hands, 
 saying: ‘Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infi- 
 nite jest, of most excellent fancy ; he hath borne me on his back a 
 thousand times. * * Here hung those lips that I have kissed, I 
 know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?P—your gambols? 
 your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the 
 table on a roar.” Is Hamlet remembering there? Anybody could 
 do that. Perhaps Yorick’s dog could. But the dog could not thus 
 re-enflesh that skull; re-create those living lips, and make them 
 merry again ; and give poor Yorick a live and actual visit to the 
 earth once more. _ 
 
 That was imagination ; in one of her minute works to be sure ; 
 
YALE LECTURES. | 55 
 
 only manipulating a skull; but herself entirely, nevertheless—her 
 intuitive and total vision, her deep feeling, her weird mastery of 
 materials. It required only a glimpse of her stately gait to reveal 
 Juno, only his perfect O to reveal Giotto, only the one tone ‘‘ Mary,” 
 to reveal to the Magdalen the risen Jesus ; and in like manner, one 
 slightest word may suddenly disclose a royal imagination in its 
 entire characteristic power. 
 
 But, to get back to theology once more, I want to say—what I 
 have already slipped along into—that when imagination recollective 
 has done her whole work in any given case—as in the reproduction 
 of Jesus of Nazareth, or of the Christian theology—and has put the 
 past before the mind with great clearness, it has in fact passed on 
 into imagination creative. We may have a clear knowledge of the 
 constituent elements of an era; those elements may stand before 
 us in the most vivid and visional reality ; but if we stop there, we 
 are not in full possession of that era. We are right where the 
 painter is when he has assembled the several views, and snatches of 
 color and rude studies, out of which he will make his landscape. 
 I spoke of imagination creative as that by which we combine things 
 recollected in such shapes as they never had before ; and that was 
 a true description. But I must say now, it is likewise a creative 
 "act, to take the contents of an historical era for example, the hun- 
 dred details which you have gathered in their separate literality, 
 and organize them into a conception of that past as it stood when 
 on the stage here, an organized and living unity. Am I making 
 myself as clear at this point as I would like? It were possible to 
 assemble the elemental contents of arose. There they are as plain 
 as day. But you are not within a hundred thousand miles of a rose. 
 Can you organize your elements? Can you get them together and 
 make them grow and flush, and be fragrant, and be, in fact, a rose? 
 No—only a Creator can do that. 
 
 Well, call the era of our Lord a rose. I, a memoriter historian, 
 have heaped together for myself that miscellany of information 
 touching that era, which is the era, in its atomic form. And there 
 Iam. I have imagination enough to look at those accumulated 
 atoms in a pretty living and warm way. They are invisible, but I 
 see them. They are long-past things but I get them near. And I 
 brood them with quite a fructification of interest. But I have not 
 my era yet. This sand-heap of atoms of mine is not that era as it 
 was to the people who took part therein. They did not dwell 
 
56 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 much. on atomics when they were laughing and crying, loving and 
 hating, and tugging in the thousand-fold thrill of their living-time. 
 What I want is, that time with its thrills, flushes and throbs, a cor- 
 porate unit of life; and to get that I must be a Creator. I must 
 have creative imagination. That final act of the mind by which 
 the era—that inert Adam—is made a living soul, is beyond all analy- 
 sis, | presume; as much so as God’s act when he made the first 
 man. And I do not know whether any serviceable rules. can be 
 given for the creation of that creative faculty. Ishould not wonder 
 if a man must be born to it. But if it so happens that he is born 
 to it, then he can cultivate it, or kill it (as Dr. Hawes killed his). 
 My notion is that he had better cultivate it—and I am using this 
 lecture to show the splendid uses of the faculty, in order that I may 
 make you feel that you had all better cultivate whatso of it you 
 may have. It is a high-blood steed with a fearful amount of vigor 
 and possible rampancy, but so much the better if only you once get 
 it harnessed and at work. A horse might be so lumbering and 
 sleepy as not to be worth harnessing. In theology we do not want 
 any such faculties as that. 
 
 But dwell a moment longer on imagination creative. Perhaps 
 there lingers in your mind a doubt whether the living reconstruc- 
 tion of an era after the manner just described is a creative act—is 
 it not rather a purely formulative act. Well, you would not call it 
 a formulative act merely if a painter worked up a dozen different 
 scenes into one original scene. That would certainly be creative. 
 He has made something never before seen, or thought of. 
 But I cannot see that his work is any more truly creative 
 than is the painter’s who throws upon his canvas any one 
 view in nature provided he gives the view in its entire and pro- 
 found significance. As*a matter of fact, the greatest landscapes 
 the genius of man ever produced, are, as a rule, copies of single 
 actual scenes—their greatness consisting in this: that they have 
 made those scenes the medium of all expression, whether moral, 
 spiritual, or esthetic, that can be thrown into them. And when I 
 read the great Poets of Nature [ find the same thing. By their 
 profound and phenomenal sensibility they perceive nature’s utmost 
 possible meaning, and tell it. That is all, generally. Coleridge 
 looks up to Mt. Blanc, with a vision most open-eyed and sympa- 
 thetic, and veraciously relates what he sees. Of course, the poem | 
 is an eminently subjective one, because in it he has imputed to the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 57 
 
 mountain many feelings of his own; but the mountain is capable 
 of having those feelings put into it; in other words, the mountain 
 in its various aspects, movements, and manifestations, is a natural 
 vehicle of expression for those human feelings, and may be said to 
 have been created unto that end; and poetry reaches its highest 
 expression when the spirit of man and the spirit of the universe 
 thus completely flow together. When Coleridge, Wordsworth, or 
 whoever, reaches that synthesis of those two, and that final ecstasy, 
 the creative imagination has done a work than which there is none 
 greater ;—and yet the work is simply interpretative ;—it is not the 
 making of something out of nothing, neither is it the combining of 
 forty familiar somethings into a brand-new result. 
 
 So I like to insist that when the imagination of man is engaged 
 in the work of historical reconstruction, making the dead past live 
 again, and departed personages revisit the earth, and exhumed 
 skulls put on the red and rose of life, she is operating in her su- 
 preme, creative, function, and is wonderful beyond all words. The 
 annalist does not know much about this. The mechanical historian 
 does not. Many a theologian does not. Some teachers of theology 
 do not. Some teachers of church history do not. History is in- 
 tensely vital; and moves on by a vital advance, and addresses itself 
 to the imagination as much as it does to the reason—and in fact the 
 reason is not able ever to be thoroughly reasonable until she has 
 taken into herself the warmth, vivacity, and sudden-flashing intui- 
 tiveness of that other great faculty. It has been thought that in the 
 cold fields of science only reason and the remorseless exactitudes 
 of logic have place ; but, the truth is, poetry is not more indebted 
 to imagination than science is. ‘The brilliant guesses of the sons of 
 science, which, used first as working hypotheses, have at last gone 
 in among the eternal substructures of knowledge, were the unreas- 
 oning outsprings of the imagination, and proved themselves more 
 than guesses because of the large and luminous sanity which is 
 native to that faculty, and because of its constitutional hunger for 
 the real and the true. And as to exactitudes, while the reason has 
 hers, the imagination has hers—the only difference between them 
 being this, that the exactitudes of the reason are formal, while the 
 exactitudes of the imagination reach back to the spirit of things, 
 and are the more profoundly exact on that very account. This 
 point, however, will get some illustration when I come to the third 
 head of this address. 
 
58 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 My second head runs thus: 
 
 The man of imagination, and he alone, inclines to see doctrines 
 in their comparative importance. It is in this as in picture-making. 
 In order to picturesque effects, a painter must have an eye to light 
 and shade, and proportion, and perspective, and the manifold rela- 
 tivities. The cow in his landscape must have her place, and the 
 castle must have its place, and the strong wind in the trees must 
 have its place, and the over-flying scurry of clouds, and the human 
 persons, and the river winding out into the dim and unsearchable 
 distance, must all have their thoroughly discriminated position and 
 value, otherwise we are treated, not to a picture but to an outspread 
 of exaggeration, confusion and nonsense. Some men paint in that 
 way considerably. A Chinese man might, I fancy. His landscape 
 is just a flat surface of unassorted magnitudes. It has no maxima 
 and minima, but an insufferable array and pressure of maxima. So 
 in theology. It is possible to have such a solemn sense of the 
 value of doctrines as to make them all infinite, and defend them all 
 therefore with the same earnestness ; and insist that they shall all go 
 into the creeds, and all be presented in the pulpit, in the very fore- 
 ground of discourse; that there shall not be any background in 
 theology, in fact—for what do we want of a background, when we 
 have nothing to put into it, no doctrines, that is, that deserve to be 
 subordinated by being located in that partial retirement. 
 
 Now, my Brethren, all this flat-surface work comes of unimag- 
 inative minds. I knew an able preacher once who was unto his 
 people, pretty soon, wherever he went, exactly as though he were 
 not able, because his entire presentation of himself and his topic 
 was a piece of flat-surface work. His solemn voice had no light 
 and shade’in it. It was just solemn. Neither had his delivery 
 light and shade. It was one prolonged and unvarying earnestness. 
 His diction had no light and shade in it. It was all first-class. 
 The first sentence was as good as the next one, and the next, and 
 the next, clear through ; the last being an unexceptionable duplicate 
 of all that went before. If that Homer could only have nodded 
 sometimes! But-he didn’t. If he could have slackened his 
 seriousness, or his diction, or his holy voice, or his determination to 
 do good—if some gentle cloud of humor could have precipitated 
 its dewiness upon his discourse at points; if some infirmity of 
 colloquialism could have overtaken him ; if the grand sum-total of 
 his emphasis could have been distributed less evenly ; sometimes in 
 
YALE LECTURES. 59 
 
 cumulations and sometimes in hollows, just as the seas, abhoring 
 flatness and endless levels, climb up in great tides and storm-lifts, 
 and then sink back and consent to be tame a little, while they get 
 breath for another run—why ! he would have been far and away more 
 effective. Imagination is limber, and variable, because it sees alf 
 things relatively, according to the laws of the picturesque ; it delights 
 in cows, castles, clouds, winding rivers and human beings; and in 
 universal geniality it is willing to have them all powerfully painted ; 
 but it knows the difference between a cow and a man, and proposes 
 to have them painted accordingly—and when imagination goes into 
 theology, she knows the difference between those doctrines that are 
 of the essence of Christianity and salvation, and those that are not ; 
 and between the spirit of a doctrine and the form. But this will 
 come out more evidently under the next division of my subject. 
 
 My third head, then, is that imagination is necessary in order to 
 the interpretation of the imaginative parts of the Bible, and a clear 
 hold on the realities that lie back of its oftimes highly poetic vocab- 
 ‘ulary. 
 
 To illustrate. How often in that Book is God spoken of as 
 angry and raging, as revengeful, as impatient, as punctilious and 
 easily affronted, as blood-thirsty, as treasuring up a personal insult for 
 many generations, and as being many things a man certainly never 
 ought to be. And the prose man—the unmitigated prose man— 
 thinks there must be some element of literality in this,—that God 
 has in his mind, something like those several inclemencies. But 
 the poetic theologian knows that these mighty adjectives are but the 
 tumultuation of the imagination, piling up her sensational images— 
 to express something to be sure; something, but, of a truth, not 
 this—that God actually has in his feeling the literal counterparts of 
 those awful human terms. God is infinitely genial. God is uni- 
 formly and eternally genial. God never had a first flutter of impa- 
 tience. God never stands on his dignity and resents insults. God 
 never in one instance laid an affront away in his memory and 
 watched for an opportunity to get in a killing return-stroke. And | 
 how could his creatures survive another minute if he were such a 
 terrific being as that. But, in the way God enforces law throughout 
 his dominions, we have a state of things as though all those adjec- 
 tives about him were true words. When we transgress law we smart 
 for it, and it hurts us and frightens us, as though back of the law 
 
 were some great personal anger. When the misdoings of some 
 7 
 
60 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 ancestor of mine report themselves in my diseased body, it is as 
 though God had remembered those misdoings of his back there, 
 and now had a chance to gratify his revenge. When I resist the 
 Holy Spirit, and therefore quite lose that Spirit, it is as though 
 God would not endure an insult, had lost his patience, had grown 
 sullen towards me, and had left me-——perhaps forever. The hither- 
 side of these realities is such as to justify those lively and fierce 
 adjectives concerning God which I have quoted from the Scriptures ; 
 and those adjectives become infelicitous and intolerable only when 
 innocent literalists get hold of them, and forgetting the essentially 
 figurative character of all language when applied to supersensible 
 objects, proceed to practically demonize the Divine Being by think- 
 ing of him as actually living up to the whole import of those 
 discreditable descriptives. And it seems particularly curious that 
 they should thus literalize those descriptives, because the Bible has 
 thrown in a whole other class of descriptives which talk in a way 
 precisely opposite to those first ones, and seem to be striving with all 
 their might to save God’s honor from the aforesaid imputations of 
 literalism. ‘The reason of man is a poor broken thing but there is 
 enough left of it to see that when the Scriptures set forth God as 
 infinitely amiable, and also set him forth as a being of rage, resent- 
 ment, touchiness, implacability, and the like, both of those pictures 
 cannot be literally true. So the honest, and sturdy old Bible, fairly 
 forces us into figurative renderings, if only we have enough of im- 
 agination, with its elasticity, to be forced. Back of these strong, 
 antithetic terms in regard to God, there is some sort of nature in 
 him which they are both trying to describe, and in which they are 
 both harmonized. Some fumbling, in so great a matter, is pardon- 
 able—inevitable at any rate, considering what lame faculties men 
 have—but it is not pardonable to select those eminently anthropo- 
 morphic images, hate, vengeance and the rest, and declare them literal 
 and no images ; and then fall upon the blander and sweeter words, 
 love, patience, tenderness, mercy, long-sufferance and forgiveness, 
 and condemn them to be images, with no great and comfortable 
 reality behind them. Only just let us have imagination in this bus- 
 iness, and we are all right. We can find our way to a fatherly and 
 dear God, who, like all fathers, does many a thing that hurts, be- 
 cause his heart is so unfathomably tender that he cannot do otherwise. 
 
 Well, the non-imaginative theology, after it has got its Deity of 
 wrath, and other traits germane to wrath, proceeds to find in the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 61 
 
 Bible a correlative doctrine of atonement, and the gist of the me- 
 diation of Jesus is made to be its placation of just that Being. 
 None of us want to deny a propitiary element in the work of 
 Christ ; the manifold language of propitiation found in Holy Writ 
 is good and precious language; it is not language misused, any 
 more than all those wrath-terms are, on which we have dwelt ; it is 
 language designed to point us to some sort of reality in the nature, 
 and in the administration of God. What that reality is, I might 
 undertake to say if there were time for it, but this I am determined 
 to say (and would if it took me a month): namely, that the pas- 
 sion of the Lord was not exacted in any spirit of hate, or blood- 
 thirstiness, or inappeasable hunger for penalty, or irritability as of 
 offended dignity ; and if that passion of the Redeemer had a look 
 as though it were thus demanded, or if any language of the Bible 
 has that look, it is because the passion and the language alike, are 
 images, or terms of imagination; and what the eternal facts are 
 to which they would direct our attention, we must discover by 
 accumulating all heaven-given terms, types, and acted tragedies, 
 and sifting them down to that ultimate and sufficiently awful real 
 thing in God, wherein they all terminate and agree. A piece of 
 work in which imagination has a principal part. 
 
 But, if a Deity of rages and terrors, implies, and leads on to, 
 an inadmissible doctrine of atonement, so also does it lead on to 
 an inadmissible doctrine of decrees—election and reprobation— 
 and an inadmissible doctrine of Hell, and to a whole system of in- 
 admissibles ; which inadmissibles I do not mention as wishing to 
 combat them. I care nothing for that to-day, except as in illustra- 
 tion of what theology may come to when it is wrought out without the 
 limberness, largeness, insight, geniality and intuitive vigor of the 
 imagination. Hell is bad enough in its reality, without its being 
 gloomed additionally by the over-hanging presence and the glee of 
 a Deity such as has been secured by the petrification of the live 
 images in such words as anger, and the rest. What men suffer in 
 hell, here and hereafter, is so hard to bear, and is so full of terror, 
 that, taken in its simple first-aspect, it makes one think of a terribly 
 offended, and terribly strong-willed, law-giver; and this natural 
 first-thought is worked up in the Scriptural imageries of Hell. 
 Then again as to decrees—it is a fact that a certain part of the 
 human race are saved, and a certain part are not. ‘There stands 
 that fact, overshadowing all life; mysterious and sorrowful to the 
 
62 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 last degree. The universe of God, man included, is so constituted, 
 and the government of God is so administered, that that stupen- 
 dous and pitiful result is incessantly coming out,—I was going to 
 say, is incessantly secured, as though there might be some intention 
 in it, and a theology has been found that has the courage to say 
 there is intention in it. Well, the whole thing is so terrific, and 
 works on so as with the sureness of fate and purpose, that the 
 Bible writers, who always freely use the language of appearance, 
 have spoken of God as electing some and cutting off others in an 
 exceedingly willful and irresistible sovereignty; at least, plenty of 
 the expressions used by them are such as have led many to say :— 
 God is that kind of a being, and does such things. And this notion 
 of his fateful sovereignty in the moral field, is able to get a good 
 show of support from his indivertible, awful, straightforwardness in 
 the field of natural law. Imagination says: As Jesus sobbed over 
 doomed Jerusalem, so it must be God tenderly reluctates from all 
 hard dooms in the creation ; and these ten thousand shows of hard- 
 ness in him, and these Scriptural words of hardness, do not mean 
 hardness, except as love itself is compelled to be very firm some- 
 times in order to be really love, and compass its loving ends, and 
 make all worlds glad. 
 
 I do not forget that imagination, in her free way of interpreta- 
 tion may smooth down some fearful facts too much, sometimes ; 
 taking the love-words of the Bible too literally and unqualifiedly, 
 and subjecting the words of wrath, fear and doom to an unjustifiable 
 disembowelment; as though, being images evidently, and disa- 
 greeable ones, too, they had no rights, as message-bearers to men. 
 That has often been done ; I confess it. But what I aim to bring 
 out is, that the whole vocabulary of divine revelation, as regards 
 things spiritual and transcendental, is imaginative, and must be 
 imaginatively received. Without imagination, theology is always 
 wrong—with imagination, theology may be right, (approximately), 
 and often is. When your terms of revelation are images, and when 
 as being images they are gloriously contrary one to the other, on 
 the face of them, (as it is their right to be, it being of the genius 
 and essence of language that they should be, and as they must be 
 if they would communicate the facts of God in their largeness), 
 then it is only the image-making faculty in man that can take those 
 terms, and get back to their ground of unity in the supersensible 
 fact or facts which they are all striving to set forth ; just as in a law- 
 
YALE LECTURES. 63 
 
 case, when a hundred witnesses testify, each speaking from his own 
 standpoint, it needs a mind of some flexibility, and some experience 
 of contraries, to find the undoubted kernel of things under that 
 mass of information and misinformation: 
 
 My Brethren, I have not half unfolded the use of the imagina- 
 tion in Biblical interpretation. 
 
 You are reading your Scriptural Lesson in your Balok 
 matter what it is, but I will suppose it is Jesus at Jacob’s well con- 
 versing with the Samaritan woman. Take that, out of scores. 
 Well, read it with your imagination. You see the scene :—see it, I 
 say, as though you were there. The spot, the surrounding land- 
 scape, the appearance of the well, the face, form and attitude of 
 Jesus, and of the woman, the tone of Jesus when he speaks, calm, 
 kind, communicative and deep ; the voice of the woman replying, 
 her changing face as the Master leads her on, her curiosity, her 
 wonder, her rising earnestness, her longing, her vague grasp of his 
 spiritual profundities—the whole picture, considered as a picture,— 
 you using all you ever learned of the topography of that region, 
 and all you ever learned about Samaritans, and all your study of 
 Jesus, using all to make that picture complete, and vivid to your 
 mind ; read the lesson thus, and it will not be historical but present, 
 not abstract teaching but the teaching of life, not Jesus remembered 
 and read about, but Jesus. O! it is wonderful, how real, and interest- 
 ing, such passages are sometimes. I have often been so filled by 
 them that I’could hardly read at all. My conviction of the divinity 
 of the Scriptures has been gained by these realistic touches, these 
 imaginative reproductions of scenes and conversations in Jesus’ life, 
 more, I think, than in any other way. I shall never be able to de- 
 scribe the impression I have sometimes received of the depth, 
 tenderness, and grandeur of Christ as a spiritual teacher, and a 
 more than man, when I have been simply reading and listening to 
 him in his frequent dialogues with the people he happened to meet: 
 
 I heard a Lecture once from a certain man, on his first visit to 
 Europe, from which he had just returned. He was a professional 
 elocutionist, and he dwelt considerably on the public speakers of 
 England, and imitated them. And among the rest, he recited a 
 vain-glorious temperance speech which he heard at a mass meeting 
 in Exeter Hall, London. And he did it so well, and I listened in 
 so much exercise of imagination, that I saw the whole situation as 
 plainly as though I had been there. What the lecturer omitted, I 
 
64 } YALE LECTURES. 
 
 furnished. I even saw the clothes the temperance orator wore ; 
 noticed how they fitted him, and of what fabric they were made. 
 That, and numbers of other things, I furnished, because my imagi- 
 nation was stirred, and I instinctively sought a full picture. And 
 the result was this ; two or three years after, I told a circle of people 
 that I attended a mass temperance meeting in Exeter Hall; that I 
 there heard a certain man speak, and that he said this and that, 
 which I went on to recite precisely as I had received it from the 
 lecturer. I sincerely told that lie, in complete forgetfulness at the 
 time, that I did not myself hear the speech but had only been told 
 of it. I had been in England, and in Exeter Hall, and that assisted 
 me to imagine the situation, I suppose, but the point I am after is, 
 that the imagination has an almost unlimited capacity to see things 
 —absent things—historic things—faces that disappeared long ago— 
 paintings, buildings, natural views,—vanished sunsets,—death scenes, 
 —Jesus at the well,—Jesus at the grave of Lazarus,—Jesus at his 
 last Passover in Jerusalem that moon-lighted night eighteen cen- 
 turies ago. I do not know that it is best to have your imagination 
 make pictures so good that after a little you cannot remember 
 whether they may not be realities you have once seen rather than 
 the weird work of the mind; but I think I had rather be carried to 
 that extreme occasionally, and tell some lies about Exeter Hall ora- 
 tors than to hear things, and read history, and pass through life with 
 no visional energy, and reproductive enthusiasm, whatever. When 
 I read that Judaism and Christianity,are highly elaborated corre- 
 lates, and am shown point by point the amazing details of that 
 correlation, I want at last to gather up that complex thing, Judaism, 
 as in one vast unit before my mind, and that other complex, Chris- 
 tianity ; and play them off against each other back there in history 
 as in a visible back and forth. When I read that we all rose from 
 the dead in the rising of Jesus, I get my best impression of it, by 
 picturing it—a magnificent scene. When I read of the Judgment, 
 let it be a scene to me. So Heaven,—so Hell,—so the millennium, 
 —so the intercession of Christ at God’s right hand,—I do not want 
 to hear about them, I want to see them. And in many of these 
 things, the Bible assists us to see, and means to make us see. Wit- 
 ness its diversiform imagery in regard to Heaven; a place of 
 pastures, sweet-waters and plenties, a place of choirs and hosannas, 
 a four-walled metropolis of solid great measurements, and of 
 precious decorations and resplendencies, gorgeous as.an oriental 
 
YALE LECTURES. 65 
 
 dream. ‘There are the figures in profusion, and you will do well to 
 use them for the refreshment of your mind, and the vivification 
 of your conception, and not decline them as sensuous, and confused, 
 and too likely to physicalize Heaven. 
 
 Now, so much I have said on the value of the imagination in 
 interpreting the imaginative parts of the Bible, (which include 
 pretty much all parts). 
 
 I shall add, at present, only one thing more. Years ago, when 
 John Bright had just made one of his massive, unflinching, reform- 
 atory speeches before the people of England, a displeased conserva- 
 tive Journal in London complained that he had no “moral imagi- 
 nation”’ as they called it; by which they meant, as was explained, 
 that he had not the imagination necessary to put himself in the 
 place of an opponent, and appreciate his views. A great omission, 
 that, in the make-up of anybody. If some desperate work of 
 reform is to be done,—as when Wm. Lloyd Garrison began against 
 slavery—perhaps the man who is to do the work had better not see 
 the other side too plainly. Horses go best with blinders. What is 
 wanted of them is to go along, and not be getting broad views, and 
 diversified views, to confuse their minds. So, if old school Calvin- 
 ists and new school Calvinists, should sympathetically understand 
 each other’s arguments, it might weaken them both, and perhaps 
 destroy the schools. Still, I should rather not be a reformer at all, 
 or an effective polemic, than to come short of ‘‘ moral imagination.” 
 A theologian who cannot carry himself over into another and con- 
 trary theologian’s ideas, so completely as to be mitigated and 
 temporarily weakened as it were by his plausibilities, has not a 
 complete and well-proportioned mind, is not in the way to make 
 discoveries, and is an unprofitable leader of the public. Of some 
 use he is, I have admitted ; just as sometimes a military leader is of 
 special value because all he knows is, to fight the enemy imme- 
 diately before him, might and main; and, if whipped, to keep on 
 fighting as though nothing had happened ; and therefore never be 
 whipped. However, who would choose to be that kind of useful 
 man, rather than a captain of all-including comprehension. Speak- 
 ing of discoveries, the way to know Calvinism is to go there, and 
 the way to know materialism, or dualism, or atheism, is to go there ; 
 disagreeable spots to visit, some of them, but you must go—and of 
 all the faculties of the. mind, it is literally true, that the only one 
 able to go is imagination. You may have so much imagination, 
 
66 YALE .LECTURES. 
 
 and may stay so long on these sympathetic visits, as to be devital- 
 ized by them, and never have any settled opinions ; (you will meet 
 such people out in the world, and they are the worst kind of afflic- 
 tion to the unimaginative brethren, who always know exactly what 
 they believe, and why nothing else has the least reason to be 
 believed)—so keep watch of yourself, in your imaginative excursions 
 among the Isms, but make the excursions, and get to yourself the 
 big sense and human-heartedness that come of them. 
 
 This gift to “‘ put yourself in his place,” is quite indispensable 
 to the preacher. Hundreds of able men just miss of success all 
 their lives, because they cannot limber themselves to that. The 
 point was hit very well for substance by an eminent man and 
 speaker, whom I heard thirty years ago say :—The young preacher 
 cries—‘‘ Be good—be good,’’—the old preacher says :—‘ My dear 
 friends, if you cannot be good, then be as good as you can.” Life 
 has taught him what human nature is, and what human nature’s 
 difficulties are. He has had some rough times getting his own self 
 to be good, and certain parts of him are not even yet made willing. 
 Also he has moved about among men, and tried to lift on them, 
 and coax them to try to lift on themselves ; and therefore when he 
 stands up in his pulpit, he is like a cannonier, who before he 
 opened his guns had reconnoitered the position he was to bombard, 
 so that he dropped in his shells just right. And then there is such 
 a luxury in preaching, when you preach sympathetically ;—such a 
 luxury for you and such a luxury for the people. They do not like 
 to be fired at by a glib expert who knows guns perfectly but does 
 not know men,—who makes first-rate arguments but does not hit 
 anybody, because nobody stands just where he aims. Every 
 preacher’s eyes are more or less askew, for shooting, until he has 
 been over among the people, and appreciates their situation. 
 
 Hence, misshots. The imaginative and sympathetic preacher 
 
 (sympathetic because imaginative) , has two good and straightforward 
 eyes. 
 
IMAGINATION IN SERMONS. 
 
 In my last Lecture I called you to consider the function of 
 Imagination in theology ; I now ask you to consider Imagination in 
 Sermons. 
 
 It may seem inordinate in me that I give one mental faculty so 
 much space, in a brief series of discourses, especially as that faculty 
 is by no means the supreme one in the minister’s outfit; but I had 
 some things requiring to be said as to pulpit diction, which could 
 come in under the title I have just put forth as well as under any 
 other, and so I have ventured it. 
 
 I think that in organizing the materials of a sermon, and get- 
 ting a skeleton that shall be alive and physiologically articulated at 
 all the joints, one goes through a mental operation precisely like the 
 painter’s when he makes a picture—an original landscape. The 
 painter has in his mind the several features that are to go into that 
 picture ;—in other words, he has on hand the materials for it from 
 out of Nature’s boundless storehouse. It shall be a sunset in the 
 Adirondack wilderness, in the autumn, when -the whole warm 
 air shines, and is in a sweet swoon of peace, and pensiveness ; 
 a region he has often visited just at that season. In his memory 
 and happy mood is everything that goes to make that late-year 
 northland what it characteristically is. He will get his lay of 
 the land from one locality, his forest features perhaps (some 
 of them) from another, his touch of water from another, his 
 mountain distances from still another, and possibly he will shed 
 through all an individual feeling from his own heart, which those 
 places cannot quite furnish ; but which is in no wise incongruous to 
 those places :—some added tenderness in the half-sad autumnal 
 splendor, it may be, drawn from his experiences in this weary world. 
 Now those constituent particulars must come together in his picture 
 
68 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 imaginatively. It is not carpenter-work he is called to. First, he 
 must imaginatively see those sober glories of the Autumn, those 
 waters, those trees and those heights. _Notrememberthem. That 
 is not enough. ‘That is too cold. He must remember them emo- 
 tionally, lovingly, with the vivid reality of a thorough-going interest, 
 and that is Imagination as distinguished from recollection. Or, to 
 use the terminology of my last Lecture, it is Imagination recollec- 
 tive. ; 
 Next, he must combine those clearly-seen, beautiful remem- 
 brances ;—and he must combine them in such a way that, although 
 the counterpart of the picture can be found nowhere in all broad 
 Nature, yet it shall be natural; after the precise manner of Nature ; 
 just what Nature would have done if she had happened to think of 
 it; Nature’s very style. 
 
 He might throw on to his canvass all those artistic recollections 
 of his, and thus get what combination there may be in juxtaposition ; 
 but that is nothing. That does not make a picture. There is no 
 life in it ; no coherency, no proportion, no answering of part to part, 
 no naturalness, that is, nothing that Nature ever did or would ever 
 consent to do. Nature, as we see her, is the silent rhetoric of God, 
 his way of expressing himself, his practical testimony as to what He 
 likes ; and all human art, (real art) is simply a loving conformity 
 to, or reproduction of his style: which style we suppose was not 
 taken up by him arbitrarily, but in deepest reason, or because he 
 could not remain a reasonable being and not take it up, if he took 
 up any style and expression at all. 
 
 Well, how shall our painter get his divine combination. He 
 cannot tinker it up, as I have already said. He needs more than a 
 good mechanical intellect; more than reason even :—he needs 
 Imagination in its creative function ; not its recollective function, 
 its creative—exactly the faculty which God had when he filled the 
 primeval voids with his picturesque creations, great and small and 
 numberless. I have struck now an ultimate fact of the human mind. 
 I asked, how does that man combine? Nobody knows. He does 
 not know, himself.- He has in him, as a man made in the image of 
 God, a power to create pictures that are not a blasphemy against 
 Nature, and therefore are pictures. That is the whole story—the 
 whole explanation, I mean. His mental movement in that creative 
 act is spontaneous, unreflective, instinctive, instant, and emergent, 
 like a birth; a great joy, but a great mystery ; a man-mother he is, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 69 
 
 and who shall tell how growth goes on in the creative womb. It is 
 amazing that a feat so complex as that combination can be per- 
 formed so uncalculatingly, and so at a stroke ; a feat so complex, I 
 say, for, when he throws his parts together, they modify each other, 
 and are therefore no longer the same things that they were when in 
 separation. Certain colors kill each other. Stand up a tall man by 
 a short one, and the tall one talls and the little one shortens. So 
 our painter must discount all those mutual modifications of parts, 
 on the instant when he conceives his picture. It will not do to 
 rush in all the parts and clip and hew and match afterwards. That 
 were botchy. That were to be a mechanic. ‘That were unlike the 
 Infinite Creator. No, he must rhyme part with part, and make the 
 whole thing sing by a stroke of the Imagination exercising herself 
 in her most awe-inspiring function. 
 
 Now a sermon, in its highest idea, is a work of art, if there ever 
 was one. It need not be made for art’s sake, or with a predomi- 
 nant artistic impulse, the moral earnestness of the minister may fill 
 his whole consciousness, so that he has no thought of art and would 
 abhor himself if he had—nevertheless when you come to examine 
 that outcome of his mind and soul, behold it is artistic; it is not 
 merely truthful, it is esthetic, it pleases the taste; unbeknown to 
 himself he has wrought a work satisfactory to all the gods; it has 
 the effect of a picture ; his numerous items of material are in there, 
 in juxtaposition to be sure, but (ten times more than that) in con- 
 gruity, in organic coherency, in a wonderful mutuality, each item 
 fashioning every other item with which it stands related. So in 
 the Apollo Belvidere, limb is joined to limb and function to func- 
 tion in an elastic harmony and mutual support and fine equilib- 
 rium, which fascinates one like a poem. ‘That is the sermon in its 
 perfect form when the Imagination has done its whole work upon it. 
 
 Sermons are oftimes formed in a mutilated way. The forma- 
 tive instinct in the author was not strong enough, and the result is a 
 living thing, with numerous disproportions. Perhaps it is all dis- 
 proportions. The man haphazarded along through it, and you 
 would say, that it has no law and order at all, did you not know that 
 even disorders have their laws. The higher sort of mind moves in 
 philosophical order, and that we all call order, as though there were 
 no other. But if the sermonizer moves in the utmost possible incon- 
 sequence, and gets from point to point by connections the most 
 trivial,—as where the word that happens to be last in each sentence 
 
70 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 is permitted to suggest the next thought,—even there, there is law, a 
 law of association between the thoughts ; so that you have in the 
 production an artistic element—a slight one—and are pleased. It 
 is not utter madness—though even in madness there are obscure 
 links of coherency in the thinking, whereby the mind makes 
 known that it still resists confusion and absolutely will not surrender 
 to chaos and be a personal entity no longer. 
 
 I might give you illustrations of discourses unimaginatively or- 
 ganized—though I need to leave this part of my subject pretty soon. 
 
 Sometime since I prepared a line of discourses on Old Testa- 
 ment personages, in which I proposed to know, myself, all that 
 could be known about those several men and women. So I made 
 my studies rather prolonged and minute and accumulated more 
 material than I could use; which furnished me a good opportunity 
 to see whether or not I had any imagination for the work of pict- 
 uresque organization of material. The prose way of discoursing on 
 those characters, would have been to start in at their birth, or earlier 
 (among their ancestors) and after getting them born, travel right 
 along down their lives chronologically, telling everything, little and 
 great, thing after thing in'stupid faithfulness and garrulity like the 
 chattering nurse in Rome, five minutes on a little quiet thing and 
 five minutes on a great one, mechanically conscientious and equit- 
 able—for is not a thing a thing, forever—that is the prose way, 1] 
 say, of doing such discourses (and all discourses). But the way 
 of Imagination is thus :—She selects from her superabundant mate- 
 rial, as that painter did; and she puts to the front those things—a 
 few—which show, and contain, the life, soul and essential spirit of the 
 person to be portrayed, in his distinctive attributes. There are words, 
 and there are deeds and passages, in every one’s life, whereinto are 
 compressed his entire self; by them you know instantly his whole 
 compass, his essential temper, his determinate rank in the creation ; 
 and after that to search through the vast minutiz of his career is 
 unnecessary :—or, if you do search, there is no need to take it all 
 into your public discourse. Life is not long enough. The intellect 
 and patience of human hearers are limited. You must stop speaking 
 sometime ; and while you are speaking, you must make headway 
 along your road; you must not pick every flower, and point out 
 every view, and sit down on every green spot; you must rapidly 
 gather the general bloom of things; and whereinsoever you intro- 
 duce into your picture of the man in question, the secondary, and 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 71 
 
 little, in his career, you must do it by a touch; put those trifles in 
 the yistas yonder, in the background. ‘That, I Seth: is the way of 
 the imagination. 
 
 And what I noticed in myself was this (to tell the whole story) : 
 when I was not fagged and limp, I had the stamina to see that idol 
 and strive for it, and partially reach it ; but when my brain had gone 
 all and utterly into preliminary work, I inclined to tell all I knew, 
 stringing it along in a dull, petty, chronological manner, which had 
 in it the somnolency and endlessness of the flow of time. 
 
 That is one illustration of unimaginative organization, and I 
 might give many. It is unimaginative to have your sermon taper 
 instead of cumulate, like the breaking away of waters, tremendous at 
 first and feeble at last; or like a thunder-burst, magnificent, and 
 followed by a long patter of ineffectual rain-drops. It is unimagi- 
 native to swell one head of your discourse, to the injury of the 
 others. An eye to proportion—an artistic eye, would avoid that. 
 It is unimaginative to fall in love with the portico of your sermon, 
 and elaborate it till, in the nature of things, the sermon itself 
 cannot amount to much, comparatively. That is setting up a tall 
 man along side of a little, to the injury of both. These unbalanced 
 developments are caused, sometimes by redundant vigor and some- 
 times by lack of vigor. A man full of fire, and full of matter, 
 enjoys an unfenced range, like a swollen spring river, and inclines 
 to take it. A man feeble, on the other hand, when he comes 
 to sermonize, is like a feeble man carrying a burden; he stag- 
 gers about, and the lines of grace and proportion he knows not. 
 But in the case of men weak and of men strong, the more defi- 
 nitely they have the idea of a rightly organized discourse, and the 
 more they discipline themselves on that idea, the more will they 
 come to move artwise ; until after not many years one may find it 
 almost impossible to be otherwise than substantially artistic. The 
 gondoliers in Venice, navigating forever along narrow canals 
 bounded by the stone walls of the buildings, and compelled to shy 
 those walls, will graze them to a hair, hundreds of times a day, and 
 never strike ;.as though the prudence and skill of the boatman 
 had at last passed into his craft, and given it the self-preserving in- 
 stinct of a human soul; and it is one of our satisfactions that by 
 dint of much effort, and much repetition, and that self-restraint 
 which is one of the most difficult of lessons for powerful and ebullient 
 minds, law-keeping and rigid art-work may become second nature. 
 
72 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 I wish to repeat once more, that, although I use the word arta 
 good deal in relation to sermons, I do not mean that sermons are 
 to be made in devotion to art as the supreme enthusiasm of the 
 preacher’s soul—surely he has grander inspirations than that ;—but 
 sermons are to be fashioned into some shape, either good or bad_; 
 and while a badly formed sermon may not wholly fail of good 
 effect, yet the good effect is not the result of the bad form ever— 
 but in spite of bad form rather; and always, other things being 
 equal, the sermon artistically constructed most pleases God, and 
 most powerfully reaches men. ‘That is the reason I am talkative on 
 this subject and urgent. 
 
 But let us pass now to the language of the pulpit, and to Imagi- 
 nation as related to the use of language. 
 
 It has been generally agreed that words, most of them, are 
 physical things, in the sense that they were originally descriptive of 
 physical phenomena. ‘They were descriptive of those phenomena, 
 either as imitating the sound of them—for example, plash and 
 dash mimic the noise of waters, and rush and buzz and whizz the 
 noise of wings ;—or as being mysteriously fitted in some other way 
 to express those phenomena. I cannot enter into the acute con- 
 troversies of scholars at this point ;—as for instance, whether the 
 great body of terms arc strictly imitative in their origin. It is 
 enough for me that the specialists in this department incline to 
 unanimity on the idea that, in one way or another, human language 
 began in physicals, and in all subsequent use has smacked of 
 the same. The first use of language, naturally, was to indicate 
 things visible, tangible, and audible; the things of sense ; but by 
 and by, as man developed into self-consciousness, and reflected on 
 his own states of mind, it became necessary for him to devise terms 
 descriptive of those states ;—and behold! then it was found that 
 the physical terms before mentioned were suitable to that purpose. 
 Somehow, they were. Somehow. And how? Some say, the words 
 to voice the supersensible were arbitrarily chosen, just as mathema- 
 ticians chose the letters of the alphabet to express the quantities 
 which they manipulate, when there is not the least thing in those 
 letters making them more fitted to the use in question, than forty 
 other conceivable signs might be. But whether the truth or not, the 
 most fascinating opinion seems to be that if the words which express 
 physical phenomena are also convenient to describe immaterial phe- © 
 nomena, and have actually been put to that use, it is because there 
 
YALE LECTURES. 73 
 
 is some subtle, ordained similitude between those physicals and those 
 immaterials ; something which makes them the best instruments to 
 that end. Of course by long use words tend to lose their original, 
 sensuous flavors, and the average man is likely to be confident that 
 all words which have been applied to supersensible uses for ages, 
 have. had the face-marks of their original, physical coinage entirely 
 rubbed off, and are now insignificant and arbitrary terms, like thea, b, 
 c, and y, z, of the algebraist. And the average man is right, to this 
 extent :—that the mass of men use language without recognizing or 
 caring to recognize, the primary import, and suggestion, of each 
 term they speak. It is enough, they think, to say, reflect, without 
 recollecting the fact that it means furn back, and distract without 
 recollecting that it means pul/ apart, and prefer, without recollecting 
 that it means-se¢ before. Why should we recollect these things 
 (say they) :—what use is there in it, when the mental states indica- 
 ted by reflect, distract, and prefer, are unmistakably pointed out, 
 and fixed, without recollecting. 
 
 In regard to this view, I put in two observations—and by those 
 observations get to the point in this subject which I am concerned 
 to reach. 
 
 First. That words themselves seem to have an instinct of their 
 origin, in that each word is inclined to refuse forever to be applied 
 to any use in the vocabulary of the supersensible, which is contrary to, 
 and destructive of, its primal and physical import. Reflect, for in- 
 stance, meant turn back ;—well, reflect never can be brought to 
 consent to being applied to a forward-reaching action of the mind ; 
 it knows its own meaning if the average man does not, and it pro- 
 poses to stand by its own first meaning, whether men care anything 
 about it or not. There is that fine and curious persistency in words. 
 They do not ask for any combinations of scholars to preserve them 
 from perversion ; they preserve themselves. They are not afraid to 
 be-used profusely by the unthinking and inexact multitude; they 
 know that they rule their own destiny and can never be confused. 
 That first. ' 
 
 Secondly, it is the privilege of every man—and every preacher 
 —to enter into this secret of primary significances, and, when he 
 uses a word, to use it with a relish of its origin; a thorough-going 
 test in many cases—a zest similar to his who handles antique manu- 
 script, or an old missal, or a piece of armor worn by a world’s hero 
 in some world-convulsing exigency; or any other thing that is 
 
74 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 wonderful and full of pathos by reason of its history. Words are not 
 sounds but things, when you track them back to things. The signa- 
 ture of the Duke of Wellington, was so many letters plus the Duke, 
 and all terms of language are so many words plus things, solid things, 
 concrete indestructible actualities. 
 
 It may be questioned whether, in the swift run of utterance, 
 especially of public utterance, any man is capable of tasting his own 
 words in that way, and enjoying their ground flavors, and hearing 
 their primeval undertone. But all men have some sense of the words 
 they use, else they could not go on; and nobody would want them 
 to goon. They may not sense the physical element therein, but 
 they sense something in them. They do it with infinite rapidity. 
 Even when they utter hundreds of words a minute, they are sprightly 
 enough to catch up some honey from each term. And if they can 
 catch some, they can catch more ;—in fact a practiced and schol- 
 arly man can catch enough to keep him in a sort of intellectual in- 
 toxication. I have listened to men in public discourse who have: 
 sometimes jerked me from my sitting almost by some heavily-charged 
 word, or some sudden compact and fiery sentence. Language 
 spoken is not a flight of dull, wooden balls, but an outgoing of 
 bells, sonorous meanings old and new, tones of time, tones faint and 
 far-away sometimes, but distinct and good like the clear whistle of 
 the boatswain in a hurricane. 
 
 And, as I have implied, when a man uses language in that per- 
 ceptive and pregnant way, all people who listen to him catch the 
 contagion of his gusto. The most ignorant feel that something is 
 going on; that the man is not showering forth X’s, Y’s, and Z’s, 
 which, as simple letters, signify nothing, so that so far as effect 
 is concerned he might as well vociferate inarticulately; but that 
 there is a boom in all he says. 
 
 Why is it that old sermons are such unusable ammunition, the 
 abhorrence of the preacher and the soporific of the hearer. When 
 first preached they were good enough ; first-rate, every one thought, 
 perhaps. What has happened tothem? Nothing. There they are 
 in their aboriginal grandeur. But something has happened to the 
 preacher. When that discourse first came from him, he was in the 
 full sense of its terms :—he finished it Saturday, and by Sunday 
 the birth-warmth was not dead in it—he spoke what he knew, and 
 what he knew as he went along ;—every common word was alive to - 
 him, and he was alive init ; but since then time has slipped in, and 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 75 
 
 many events, and he has lost his connection with his words ; they 
 were his at the time, he gathered them up from the general stock 
 and mass of language and made them his, but now they have gone 
 back into the general and public stock again and are not his, and 
 therefore when he uses them he feels like a hypocrite—he is saying 
 what he does not feel, dispensing words that he has not refilled. 
 They are hollow, and sound hollow, and he wishes he was out of it. 
 The only way to make an old sermon an honest thing and mag- 
 netic again, is to pass it through a re-gestation ; let it enter a second 
 time into its father’s womb and be born. 
 
 And I have had a fancy that sermons delivered memoritor 
 must be ever more in the curse of old ones, more or less. I never 
 memorized a sermon, but I have memorized speeches—long ago— 
 and when I spoke them, I always felt that I was shamming ; and to- 
 day, when I listen to such an orator, I am seized with a painful feel- 
 ing of unreality. I imagine I am, at any rate. I must not be too 
 dogmatic about this, because eminent men, I believe, are advoca- 
 ting the memoritor practice. Possibly, enough practice and some 
 native facility takes a preacher at last beyond the unrealism of this 
 business :—for it is unreal to be talking to your fellow men in the 
 use of only one mental faculty, the memory—or in the use of that 
 mainly. When you stand before a congregation you profess that 
 you are there and that it is you who speak, whereas there is noth- 
 ing there but your memory, I am supposing, (your memory and 
 your body,) which is not you by nine-tenths, or more. 
 
 But, as I said before, I must not make myself offensive to 
 wiser men than myself. When they speak of their freedom, and joy 
 and effectiveness in this kind of preaching, I love them, and 
 believe what they say; but I am not convinced. — 
 
 I spoke of using words in the delight of original relishes ; but 
 I must add, as a part of my subject, that these root-relishes are not 
 the only ones a preacher may have in his sermonizing. 
 
 When a word has started and passed into use, it begins to have 
 a history, and after many years it has gained a great history ;—it 
 has had to do with great men and great events, and it has the same 
 interest that an eminent personage has. Let William Gladstone 
 land on our shores, or Victoria, or Alfred Tennyson, and it would 
 not be the landing of so much flesh and blood, five to six feet high, 
 weighing from one to two hundred pounds ; but it would be the land- 
 ing of the Queen of England, the Poet Laureate of England, and the 
 
 8 
 
76 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Statesmanship of England ;—it would be the arrival of incarnate Eng- 
 land, as you might say. In like manner, words have arrived in our 
 century, all moss-grown, and festooned with associations, picked 
 up in their long journeyings down from times of old; and it is so 
 much added to a man’s pleasure in the use of them and so much 
 added to the force of his exp~ession, if his mind detects, and savors, 
 those precious additions. 
 
 And another thing. Supposing I admit that all this thought of 
 mine in regard to root-relishes and historical relishes (as I have 
 called them) is visionary ; and that, however perceptive and imagi- 
 native a man may be, he: simply cannot get back into those old 
 contents of the words he uses. Grant it to be true that the greater 
 part of human words, in the long attrition of use, have been rubbed 
 down till their coinage is not visible, and they therefore are simply 
 conventional signs, which could be just as well exchanged for nu- 
 merical signs :—the particular mental act now called reflection being 
 called 1, and the act called perception 2, and the act reverence 10; 
 supposing that to be so. It is a highly afflictive supposition, but 
 we will put up with it for a minute ortwo. Has imagination there- 
 fore ceased to. be of great account to the writer and speaker, in his 
 choice of language, and in his joy while he uses it? I tell you nay. 
 For, as these empty conventional signs are employed to designate 
 this and that,—as, reflection, perception, reverence, and the like, 
 among things spiritual and physically imperceptible, and thou- 
 sands of things likewise in the physical domain; it is of great im- 
 portance that those numerous designated things should be lumi- 
 nously and intensely seen, at the instant, by the man speaking and 
 writing ; and it belongs to Imagination to do just that thorough and 
 fervid seeing. If that seeing is not done, or in proportion as it is 
 not done, words have no sense at all. I have already supposed that 
 they have no historical and derivative meanings, and that they are 
 like human beings without an ancestry or a creator; and now their 
 only other possible significance is taken away from them. The 
 preacher writes them down and delivers them to his people, as so many 
 Zeros. He has no interest in them ;—for how can he have an in- 
 terest in terms that came from nowhere, and are practically pointed 
 at nothing. And as he has no interest in them, the interest of his 
 hearers cannot amount to much, and I do not see why preaching 
 should be any longer continued. No, no. If I say a word to mean 
 something, I must distinctly see that intended thing—the more 
 
YALE LECTURES. 77 
 
 distinctly the better—and that seeing, in so far as it is realistic, and 
 emotional and picture-like, is the work of Imagination. 
 
 While I am on this matter of language, with its coinage all 
 effaced by centuries of use, permit me to refer you to old creeds and 
 old liturgies as frequently examples ofthat thing. The creeds and the 
 liturgies, in themselves, are well enough; but reiteration tends to 
 dull a man’s sense of words ;—if he does not watch, and incessantly 
 energize upon them, he loses not only their genetic meaning and 
 vigor, and not only their historical meaning and vigor, as understood 
 by the theologians and their generation who wrote them, but also 
 their present meanings ; and, in this loss of all meanings, the reci- 
 tation of these forms is as useless as an inarticulate monotone. 
 Even that monotone might have some good influence in it, pro- 
 vided it was solemn, and I should advise people to congregate on 
 the Lord’s day and go through that, if nothing better could be had. 
 The sound of the wind in pine forests is moral ;—all grave tones 
 steadily prolonged are moral ; and liturgies will live and creeds will 
 keep on, for the sake of the sound of them if for no other reason ;— 
 but it must hurt their feelings dreadfully to be reduced to that, 
 when they are conscious that they are live things; that they had a 
 parentage and a powerful parentage, and have had a career, too; 
 that they did mean something on the lips of those who made them, 
 and were intended to describe forever certain august realities. 
 
 I should like to spend about twenty-four hours of continuous 
 speech here in your presence, running the terms of the Nicene 
 Creed back to their radicals (so far as possible,) reproducing the 
 history too of that great symbol, and especially its origination, and 
 then when you and I had come into full possession of the dear old 
 thing, standing up all together and reciting it. We should hardly 
 be able to contain ourselves. The familiar drone of utterance 
 would be changed to a play of thunderclaps, comparatively. We 
 should have a Mt. Sinai here, and an awfulness as of God made 
 visible and audible. 
 
 We sometimes deplore the theological discussions that come 
 up, and are afraid that the phraseologies of the fathers will get 
 pounded into dust by the combatants, and we shall never have them 
 any more ; but these contentions are one resounding way of notify- 
 ing men that they must not any longer use their old phrases in an 
 imitative and numb manner; that they must get themselves back 
 into the sense of their creeds, the historical sense, and see whether 
 
78 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 they are willing to subscribe to that sense wholly—if they are, it will 
 be good for them to have been forced to do it afresh ; and really 
 their creeds now will be the very breath of their life ; while if they find 
 themselves not willing to subscribe, they are put into a wholesome 
 live struggle to make something whereto they can subscribe, and can 
 voice in assembled multitudes with a holy awe, and a holy jubilation. 
 
 For one, I have ceased fearing that time-honored forms in the 
 church, creedal and liturgic, will suffer permanent damage, in the 
 vehemency and crush of debate. The Catholic symbols are the 
 common-sense of the Christian ages, crystallized and solidified ; and 
 they will bear a good deal of knocking about. They are the survi- 
 vals of the fittest, and are therefore likely to survive. I do not know 
 what verbal modifications may be forced upon them, nor how far 
 their phrases may be refashioned ; but I certainly do not look to see 
 any breachin their substance. And as to forms less hallowed, what- 
 ever they are, forms provincial, forms denominational, forms philo- 
 sophical, I am glad to see them put through the threshing mills of 
 debate, at intervals, so that the immortal in them may redemon- 
 strate its indestructibility, and the partial and ephemeral in them 
 may be compelled to show its insufficiency. Not all insufficient 
 things are worthless. The butterfly needs a worm-form by which 
 to climb to its winged state; and Truth seems to be willing to put 
 up with imperfect statements, by way of transition to something 
 higher. She is a veritable butterfly, though, in heart and fact, 
 whether detained as yet in her worm:life, or all emerged and fair. 
 
 Another service which Imagination renders us in our sermon- 
 izing, is her prolific contribution of images, and imageries, drawn 
 from life and from Nature. 
 
 It is thought, by some, to be dangerous to accept these contribu- 
 tions and let them into our pulpit language. And it is dangerous, 
 provided we are going to be so delighted with them as to use them 
 for their own sake. If we abjure all esthetical dallyings, all dancing 
 up and down in a twitter over our pretty things that we have thought 
 of, our analogies, and decorations, and fanciful outflowerings ; if we 
 just robustly turn all our devices of words in upon the ends of God, 
 the benefit of men and the setting forth of his glory, then Imagina- 
 tion is not merely innocent, but it is the very life of speech. And 
 see what things she does. 
 
 First, mark in what an omniverous and rich way she works up 
 into utterance, all the familiar things of human life—even its homely 
 
YALE LECTURES. 79 
 
 things ; though, to tell the truth, the moment she touches them they 
 are no longer homely, but are transfigured in the light she sheds. 
 Did you ever watch the workings of prose minds and observe how 
 undaintily they handle the common, and are vulgarized by their con- 
 tact with it. They bring it into the sanctuary sometimes, and it 
 does not fit the holy place and is an offence. They cannot enter 
 the common, without wallowing in it and drowning; whereas the 
 imaginative mind is like the birds that cut the water, and even the 
 puddle, with their swift wing and toss it up into the shine and 
 sparkle of the sun. William Wordsworth undertook a good deal of 
 that kind of work, (the working up of the common into noble ex- 
 pression) and did not always succeed, some thought ; but, in larger 
 part, he did succeed, and beautified life at many points. Robert 
 Burns succeeded. ‘Thomas Carlyle succeeded pretty often. What 
 pile was there in which that man would not grub, when his rage was 
 on him ; but how rarely his grubbing soiled him, and how full his writ- 
 ings are of the affairs that surged around him; full of the great and 
 noble, full of the minute, and the lowly and the mean ; full of human — 
 life as it literally went on in his day and land, whether in palace, or 
 bog hut ; its tragedy, comedy, pathos and glee. 
 
 This charging of rhetoric with the strong stock of daily and 
 humble things, is often seen in uncultivated and even vulgar men, 
 who are under no bondage of conventionalities and speak their minds 
 with absolute veracity, and point-blank. Witness that western bor- 
 der-man, described by Mark Twain, a man earnest and coarse, but 
 affectionate, who sought the services of a minister just on from the 
 East, well-dressed, civil-spoken, and proper, to attend the funeral of 
 a prominent rough whom all the rude men believed in, and loved, 
 and who must be spoken of in funeral speech with force and enthu- 
 siasm. Read what he says and take in the vividness and reality of 
 it. I rode with a New York omnibus driver once upon a day for 
 some miles, on the top of his vehicle, and heard his opinion on 
 many things; and noticed, first, that he had opinions sharply de- 
 fined and reserved ; next, that he had no fear of mortals in showing 
 them ; and finally, that he had a powerful vocabulary, part slang and 
 part English ; but all of it bottomed on concrete, on stage-driving 
 or other plain and ponderable realities. 
 
 Sailors speak in the same way often, and hunters, and the mob, 
 seasoning their talk with terms drawn from their own craft, and 
 putting in sledge-hammer emphases, like the heavy strokes of their 
 
80 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 daily toil. Of course, nothing can redeem such talk as that about 
 Buck Fanshaw’s funeral, and we must all keep wide away from the 
 absolutely gross; but a refined man with poetic capacity—with 
 Imagination, I mean—can touch and turn almost anything into 
 gold—he can make the dirt blossom into a beauty that seems sky- 
 born ;—and he does it in ways that are easy to his faculty; as, for 
 example, where a thing is too gross for direct expression, and yet 
 has value in it, he just alludes to it, in a far-away manner, in the use 
 of some term that is itself high and fine, it being a curious fact that 
 the purest and most cultured minds will receive a quite unmention- 
 able thing, provided it is conveyed by indirection, and with a self- 
 evident non-fellowship with its mere grossness. 
 
 But life is full of things not gross, but only common, and lowly, 
 and those we may easily use—and men most scholarly and fastidi- 
 ous may take these up into their speech profusely, and had better. 
 A man of horses and stables in my congregation, long ago, left 
 the church after one of my sermons, saying :—‘“ Our Minister is 
 pretty strong on the bit.”’ Now there was no harm in that. 
 After an evening of uneasy and uncomfortable debate, wherein 
 a certain Mr. Blank had been combative and unpleasant, a man said 
 to me as we left :—‘‘ He had the hay on his horns to-night, sure 
 enough.” Could anything be better than that, drawn from farm 
 experiences? To say :—‘ Blank was combative,” would have been 
 abstract and decorous; but Imagination brought in a contrary- 
 minded and punching, horned creature, who punches for sheer 
 punching’s sake, and just because she is overflowing with wicked- 
 ness ; as is shown by the fact that she lunges into innocent and un- 
 resisting haystacks. You see the animal with her head bestrown, 
 and her look of general belligerency. It is pictorial. It is like 
 Dr. John Brown’s description of the great dog Rab, whom he has 
 made immortal in that sweetest, and realest, and deepest of sketches, 
 “Rab and his Friends.” “He belonged to a lost tribe” (said 
 the Doctor.) “He was brindled and grey like Rubislaw granite ; 
 his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion’s ; his body thick-set like 
 a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of adog. He must have 
 been ninety pound weight, at the least ; he had a large blunt head ; 
 his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth 
 or two being all he had, gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His 
 
 head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of — 
 
 fields of battle all over it. one eye out, one ear cropped as close as 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 81 
 
 was Archbishop Leighton’s father’s; the remaining eye had the 
 power of two; and above it, and in constant communication with it, 
 was a tattered rag of an ear, which was forever unfurling itself like 
 an old flag; and then that bud of a tail, about one inch long, if it 
 could in any sense be said to be long, being as broad as long ;— 
 the mobility, the instantaneousness, of that bud, were very funny 
 and surprising, and its expressive twinklings, and winkings, the inter- 
 communications between the eye, the ear, and it, were of the oddest 
 and swiftest. ‘Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size ; 
 and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, 
 he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Cesar or the Duke of 
 Wellington, and had the gravity of all great fighters.” Dr. Brown 
 then goes on to compare Rab’s look with the look of the great 
 Baptist preacher, Andrew Fuller, and declares them alike. That 
 is what the Doctor said about Rab; and anybody who cannot see 
 that pictured dog, ought to be bitten by him. 
 
 I am speaking of Imagination dealing with lowly things, and 
 making the lowly interesting and even noble, and I made this quo- 
 tation under that head ; but I cannot help diverting long enough to 
 point out the fine interfusion of that faculty through almost every 
 word of that piece of writing. First of all, and before he began, the 
 Doctor evidently with his mind’s eye saw his dog, in his total pre- 
 sentment and rounded majesty and vigor. There he stood gnarly 
 and real—all dog. There is a sort of genius in that. Then notice 
 his word-work. He compares the dog’s color to that of Rubislaw 
 granite, but in that comparison, after the true manner and instinct 
 of Imagination, he secures more than color ; he gives a foreshadowing 
 of the dog’s massiveness and solidity. Rubislaw granite, said he. 
 Next, he compares his hair to a lion’s hair, and in that he secures hair 
 for Raband a leonine element. A distinct imaginative advance in the 
 description. Another man would have said :—“ his hair was short, 
 hard, and close,” but Brown added :—“ like a lion’s.”” Then :—“ his 
 body, was thick set, like a bull, a sort of compressed Hercules of a 
 dog.” Mark those vigorous concretes, bull, and Hercules—and that 
 splendid adjective, compressed. If he had simply said Hercules, he 
 would have done a strong thing, and touched Rab off with a sort 
 of dignity ; but when he added, compressed Hercules, he got his 
 description down to the dimensions of a dog and at the same time 
 dropped out not a single penny-weight of the Herculean strength, 
 but only condensed it and made it more awful. Then his mouth, 
 
82 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 a midnight abyss and mystery, made more dark by two white teeth 
 -in it. And his head mapped with battle-fields, (his fighting 
 character still amplified upon, you see, that is, kept, in the foreground 
 in the midst of all comparisons, and by them) ;—his ear close cut 
 off (more fight)—like the father of Archbishop Leighton (a humor- 
 ous and affectionate assimilation of dog life, and human life, wherein 
 the man, (the bishop’s father) lost nothing and the dog got a 
 love-lift. Then: “the other eye had the power of two ’”’—how har- 
 monious that is with all we have already been made to know of 
 Rab :—it is an addition to the picture, but it is an addition con- 
 gtuous with granite, lion, little bull, compressed Hercules, and 
 scarred head—a tremendous eye. And his one remaining ear was 
 torn, and tattered, and flag-like, but fearfully vital, and moving yet : 
 (more fight, and more energy and compressed Hercules.) And 
 his little tail was vital and moving, and knowing—it twinkled and 
 winked just as anybody might, and it interchanged cute winks with 
 that wide-awake ear—the realism of the thing is enough to make a 
 dog laugh—the personalization of those small members is so com- 
 plete that you cannot take your eyes from them, you would almost 
 be willing to be a dog yourself, to have so much sense in your 
 humble members. No mere man ever did. And then lest Rab 
 might seem to be nothing but a fighter and so be vulgarized, the imag- 
 inative and deep-hearted Doctor informs us that he was dignified, 
 grave, and simple, and looked like the Rev. Dr. Andrew Fuller. It 
 would have been prosaic to say that Rab had some mental qualities 
 like men. Ofcourse, he had. All dogs have. That is a fact in 
 nature—a bald, common fact. But Imagination loves to get in her 
 bald, common facts, and make people see them, in a way of her 
 own, in a way so that they shall see them and take to them, and be 
 thoroughly pleased, melted and won over. So in this case, having 
 given us a plain painting of Rab’s face—a strong face, but not 
 really pious—she breathes a mild transfiguration over it and leads 
 you to embrace it, in a burst of laughter, by mentioning the dis- 
 tinguished and excellent Dr. Fuller, the great and mighty Baptist 
 Rab. 
 
 In all this, my Friends, you note the distinctive marks of that 
 faculty on which I have now said so much :—its vigorous and visional 
 perception, its creative combinations, its heart and heartiness, so — 
 that it can be warm and fond overa dog and can drag Julius Czesars 
 and eminent men of divinity into dog-likeness, and not belittle the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 83 
 
 men either—true imagination would never do that ; and its capacity 
 to put itself in his place, whether the place be Rab’s, as in this case, 
 or Dr. Chalmers’, or dear little Marjorie Fleming’s, as in other essays 
 of this same John Brown—than whom no better compacted, or moré 
 divinely-tender and true man was ever brought forth of the great 
 Brown stock, I venture to say. 
 
 I have really now no time left in which to speak as I ought of 
 the images, and imageries, and numerous enrichments, which Imagi- 
 nation can bring into the diction of the pulpit, out of endless Nature. 
 We preachers have just as much right to Nature as poets have. To 
 be sure, when we go to her, we go on serious business, and we are 
 after grave material therefore, and poets had better go in about the 
 same way—all the great ones do ;—moreover, Nature is grave, any- 
 way ; her most festive shows do not start a man into any frivolity or 
 thin giggle. Nature is never jocose. She makes us laugh some- 
 times, but it is in some sort as the melodious thunders laugh, not 
 in jollity, but in the soberness of a great joy. 
 
 And what can we get from Nature? Well, read the Poets and 
 see. We can get her repose; and a really restless diction is not pos- 
 sible to him who is in habitual communion with her. He insensibly 
 gathers up into his speech the spirit of her tranquilty. Also, we get 
 rhetorical truthfulness and reality. I have praised Imagination a 
 good deal, but an imagination that does not live in Nature, and in 
 real life, and start all her flights from that solid ground is a phan- 
 tasmal and moony creature, an inadmissible wild one in the pulpit, 
 in poetry, in art, and in all human expression. 
 
 We have seen that it is the instinct of the Imagination to make 
 original combinations, as in landscape painting ; but those original 
 combinations must be strictly conformable to Nature, in all respects. 
 They must be made up of natural material, of actual trees, flowers, 
 seas, green fields, hills, skies, showers, and commotions—and they 
 must organize those actualities as Nature herself is wont to organize 
 them ; otherwise the picture is an insane thing. Well, how shall we 
 get. this truthfulness, but by much companionship with Nature. In 
 ‘other words, we get naturalness from Nature. And an Imagination 
 that conserves its naturalness by an habitual stand in Nature, is sure 
 of itself, and sure to do realistic and acceptable work, when called 
 (as the Imagination often is,) to move out into the supernatural, 
 and picture things over there. A man not thoroughly naturalized 
 in Nature is utterly flighty and ridiculous out there. A writer 
 
84 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 introduces some supernatural character into his drama, I will suppose. 
 Well, that supernatural personage must be made to speak, and be- 
 have himself, something different from a man, for in that way only 
 can it be shown that he is not a man, but a superior being ; never- 
 theless he must be made to act naturally after all—that is, in the 
 general manner of human nature, else all human readers will spew 
 him out. Imagination projecting herself into the unheard-of, and 
 spinning stories of that land, must keep her two feet down solid, 
 all the while, on the heard-of and familiar, and in that way keep up 
 some sort of congruity between those two lands. And all imagina- 
 tive rhetoric—in the pulpit or elsewhere—must perpetually rationalize 
 itself and make itself valid and acceptable to good taste ; to Nature 
 in Nature, and to Nature or the natural, in human life as well. 
 
 I repeat, we can get from Nature truthfulness and reality in 
 our pulpit expression. 
 
 And again, we may diversify and beautify our expression, and 
 make it pithy and rich from the same source. The forms and 
 activities of Nature are a vast language prepared to our hand, and it 
 is as legitimate to express ourselves—all the realities of our souls and 
 all the realities of our total life on earth—through her forms, as it is 
 to studiously keep away from her, and use only conventional terms 
 out of which the Nature element has evaporated at last, so that they 
 are supposed to have a dry and colorless precision. I am not argu- 
 ing on the question of their superior precision, otherwise I might 
 deny it, but what I am particularly after, at this present, is the 
 variety, and beauty, and vividness, and celestial pith of the natur- 
 alistic diction. Dr. Brown called Rab a bull, a lion, a Hercules, a 
 mass of granite of a certain color, a series of old battle-fields, as far 
 as his head was concerned ; a Julius Cesar and a Dr. Fuller—and 
 several more things. He might have said—Rab—and stopped. 
 But that would not have been much to us who never saw Rab. He 
 might have said lion, or bull, and stopped. Or he might have 
 named the Duke of Wellington and Julius Cesar, and stopped, But 
 I would not have had him omit Andrew Fuller for anything. What 
 would Rab have been, without Fuller added. Don’t you see, 
 Dr. Brown knew the value of natural comparisons, and what hun- 
 dreds of them there are, and what endless modifications may be put 
 upon a dog by using them freely? So in that case where Hamlet | 
 addressed the skull of Yorick. First he said he had ridden on Yo- 
 rick’s back a thousand times. (That is a good many more than he 
 
YALE LECTURES. 85 
 
 ever did ride—but Imagination may speak with liberty and she 
 never seems to be lying:) in fact it was truer to say a thousand, 
 than to tell exactly how many times he did ride. Next, Hamlet 
 said :—“ Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.” 
 Next :—“ where be your gibes now? Yourgambols? Your songs? 
 Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar.” 
 Hamlet, in this instance, drew his particulars from human life and 
 not from Nature, but how every added touch increased the visibility 
 of Yorick to our eyes and made him to us an interesting human 
 thing. 
 
 I plead for this versatility and profuseness in ministers. Turn 
 all creation into your diction. Thomas Carlyle ended his life of 
 Oliver Cromwell by calling England an ostrich, with its “ head stuck 
 into the readiest bush of old church-tippets, king-cloaks, or what 
 other sheltering fallacy there may be, and so awaits the issue.” He 
 closes his life of Robert Burns, with this eulogy, and tender simili- 
 tude: “While the Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty 
 rivers through the country of thought, bearing fleets of traffickers 
 and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves, this little Valclusa foun- 
 tain will also arrest our eye ; for this also is of Nature’s own, and 
 most cunning, workmanship, and bursts from the depths of the earth 
 with a full-gushing current into the light of day ; and often will the 
 traveler turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its 
 rocks and pines.” His life of Richter he ends with this natural 
 touch :——“‘In the moral desert of vulgar Literature, with its sandy 
 wastes, and parched, bitter, and too often poisonous shrubs, the 
 writings of this man will rise in their irregular luxuriance like a 
 cluster of date-trees, with its green sward and well of water, to refresh 
 the pilgrim, in the sultry solitude, with nourishment and shade.” 
 He puts in this comparison in the last sentence of his life of 
 Heine—referring to Heine’s victorious struggle against adverse 
 circumstances :—“ It is but the artichoke that will not grow except 
 in gardens. The acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, 
 yet it rises to be an oak}; on the wild soil it nourishes itself, it 
 defies the tempest, and lives for a thousand years.’’ In the last 
 sentence of his life of Schiller, he speaks of him as likely to be “a 
 towering land-mark in the solitude of the past, when distance shall 
 have dwarfed into invisibility many lesser people that once encom- 
 passed him, and hid him from the near beholder.”” Near the close 
 of his life of Walter Scott, he speaks of the pecuniary adversities of 
 
86 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Scott’s latter years and of the manful, strong and fatal drudging which 
 he did to redeem himself, and says of him :—“ The noble war-horse 
 that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to 
 toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels.”’ And in the final sentence 
 of his sketch of Baillie the covenanter, he calls him—‘“a rather 
 opulent, but very confused, quarry, out of which some edifice might 
 in part be built.”” An ostrich with its head hidden in church tippets 
 and soon. A Valclusa fountain. A cluster of date-trees in an oasis. 
 An artichoke as contrasted with an acorn. An ever-visible great 
 landmark in the great past. A proud war-horse condemned to wheels. 
 A rich confused quarry, out of which something might be built. 
 
 I select these at random, of course there are a thousand more— 
 and they illustrate a rhetorical habit—a naturalistic habit—a sensu- 
 ous and metaphorical habit—that is particularly good for preachers. 
 It is legitimate. It is going straight to the original store-house of 
 language. It is resorting to a vocabulary that can never stale. It 
 is speaking to people in a manner they can understand. It makes 
 the things supersensible and metaphysical stand out, and cease to 
 be abstract and remote. _ It weds Religion to Poetry, and Poetry 
 to Religion, where they belong. It is imitation of the Bible—an 
 oriental, image-freighted, and picturesque book—which has done 
 wonders for man as revealing a salvation for him, but has done a 
 good deal also to keep alive in the cold, reflective, precise and 
 abstract Western intellect, the flush and luxuriance and many-sided 
 metaphorizing, of the fresh youth of the human race. 
 
 In this multifarious play of analogies, it is possible to overload | 
 your utterance and give your hearers a feeling that their minister 
 was originally designed for a kaleidoscope, and mostly enjoys being 
 that, rather than the bearer of a plain and unconfused message from 
 God to perishing sinners ; but it is easy to avoid that ;—the Bible 
 avoids it—thousands of luxuriant rhetoricians avoid it—and they 
 avoid it in the same way that you must :—namely, by having a high 
 practical end to the which they are pushing with every ounce of their 
 strength. St. Paul tumbles along like a spring freshet sometimes, 
 and his language cannot be parsed by any known rules ;—but he 
 does not pile up any confusion, because the objective to which he 
 drives pulls him on mightily, and pulls him clear out of all word- 
 mongering and all thought of it. As well could Jesus climbing Cal- 
 vary take pride in his own gait, as this his consecrated Apostle, work 
 up an over-elaborate and showy diction, full of confused glories. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 87 
 
 Alfred Tennyson does not lack in these natural imageries of 
 which I am speaking, but he is as simple and easy to understand as 
 a piece of Ionic Sculpture. I opened his book of lamentation over 
 Arthur Hallam the other day, and thought I would show you how 
 this most opulent of word-masters keeps himself within the lines of 
 absolute simplicity and perspicuity; but I find I have no time 
 for that. See the excellent Imagination of John Henry Newman, 
 but how chastened, orderly, and limpid his utterance is. Jeremy 
 Taylor is not so self-restrained. And I have felt that our Dr. 
 Bushnell would have helped the world to understand him faster if 
 he had not set an image in his almost every word like the face and 
 flash of a diamond. Of course, this is the peril of affluence, even 
 as overflows are the peril of well-watered lands; but dear me! let 
 us have waters anyhow. We will damthem. We will hew channels 
 for them. And we had rather be drowned in them, than to dry up 
 and die in the sand-wastes of a diction absolutely and forever arid. 
 
SHORT SERMONS. 
 
 If I say, as I now do, that I am going to fill this present hour 
 with some remarks on short sermons, I judge that it will seem a 
 rather minute subject to some of you. But I hope to make it sizable 
 gradually, by intertangling it with numbers of things roundabout ; 
 for all things are great if only their relations are opened ;—and 
 then none of the congregations to whom we are sent with our 
 preaching, have any notion that short sermons is a small title, I 
 fancy ;—the most inferior man that listens to us has his mind all made 
 upon the long sermon business,—he may be confused in theology, 
 but on that he is clear. And he is so numerous in these days. that 
 we preachers are forced to give some sort of heed to what he says ; 
 especially as all the superior people are in with him and think just as 
 he does. 
 
 A short sermon is a sermon that'seems short ; it may be fifteen 
 minutes long or it may be an hour. ‘Time has nothing to do with it. 
 If a man is unconscious no speech seems long to him. The hearer 
 fast asleep is willing you should go on till you are tired out. And, 
 what is the same thing, the hearer so absorbed by what you are say- 
 ing as to be unconscious, does not charge the sermon with being 
 prolix. ‘Time is measured, not by clocks, nor even by the rotation 
 of the earth, but by the state of our minds, and the things going on 
 therein. All experience proves that. Absolute mental vacuity has 
 no time-measure, neither has mental concentration much. 
 
 But, I pass from these scattering remarks, to the sad work of 
 drawing out.a list of the things that make sermons seem long :— 
 things in the minister, I mean. To be sure, there are some things 
 
 outside of the minister that will do it. Bishop Potter, of New York, | 
 
 went to dedicate a very fine church ;—and after the service, when 
 the people were gathered about in a bubble of happification over 
 
 
 
VALE LECTURES. 89 
 
 the goodly edifice now completed and sanctified, it was noticed that 
 he was silent. And when some one at last ventured to inquire : ‘‘ Do 
 you not like our Church,” he said :—“O yes, it is a grand estab- 
 lishment,—and has only three faults.” Of course they wanted to 
 know right off, what those were. ‘You can neither see, nor hear, 
 nor breathe in it,” said the Bishop. As good a description of a 
 first-class, modern, gothic meeting-house, as was ever given perhaps 
 —so far as it goes. 
 
 Well, sermons are apt to be long inside of such structures. 
 The preacher’s face is full of holy emotion, but nobody can see it. 
 The preacher’s sermon is full of the best sort of material, and is 
 solidly phrased, and charged with edification ;—-so that one would 
 naturally say: ‘the more of such a sermon the better.” But the 
 people do not say that who sit in those parts where the speaker’s 
 voice rolls around in reverberations and half of his articulations 
 are lost. The preacher is wide awake, demonstrative and impressive, 
 but not to those who are sensitive to bad air, and are semi-comatose 
 on account of it. My church in Hartford is a little inclined to 
 some of these weaknesses, and I have always felt that my people do 
 not know what a preacher I am. When I take my natural swing I 
 preach about forty to forty-five minutes; but a sermon of that 
 number of pages in that edifice takes an hour, because I cannot 
 speak with any rapidity where each word is going to be reduplicated, 
 and rolled around, and take five minutes perhaps in getting down 
 from among the fascinating arches into people’s ears, well lodged and 
 articulate. 
 
 I could tell you a great deal about such things, from experience 
 and from hearsay,—the miserable external things that diminish our 
 pulpit power, and make us tedious ;—however, my purpose does not 
 lie in that direction, but rather in the direction of our faults, whereby 
 our sermonizing has a look of too much length. 
 
 A montonous voice makes length, enormously. There is noth- 
 ing that gives such a sense of eternity as a well continued sober 
 monotone. Always at the sea-shore, I think of that. Always, too, 
 in pine forests. The hum of a distant factory will do it, if only 
 the hum has depth and solemnity. I stood among the graves around 
 Melrose Abbey and heard the Abbey clock strike off the hours ; 
 and ruminated on the old-time, and all-time sound of those pro- 
 longed bell-strokes. They were mellow enough, and not unalluring 
 to the esthetic ear; but I forgot all about esthetics, and all about 
 
90 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 the graves that encircled me, some of them interesting enough ; 
 and all about the dismantled and pensive Abbey, and everything 
 else on earth or in heaven, and just considered that unvarying bell, 
 and the resound of time in it. | 
 
 So a sermon :—it may be esthetic, there may be supreme 
 melodies in it, it may be architectural, Abbey-like or whatever, and 
 festooned with luxuriant church ivies ;—a perfect love of a sermon ; 
 but if, through it all, there drones on a pulpit voice, impressive 
 but eternal,—it must be that all men will say :—“is not that a little 
 long,—would not our minister, good man, be more edifying if he 
 knew when to stop.” Well, he did stop. He was only half an 
 hour, but they had a feeling, all through, that he had had them in 
 hand twice that time. 
 
 Now, Brethren, there are some things continually operating on 
 preachers to make them monotonous in the voice ;—some things 
 particularly hard to resist. Our themes require a solemn voice in 
 the main ;—and we speak on holy days, and in a holy place, and 
 after preparatory holy exercises in our closets,—we are in the pres- 
 ence of God, and we must cause the people to feel that they are ;— 
 and a voice dramatic, a voice colloquial, a voice humorous, a voice very 
 various anyway, seems utterly ruled out in the nature of the case. 
 
 Some twenty years ago, one Communion Sabbath in my church, 
 my wife, not being strong, thought she would not arrive till the 
 close of my discourse. But she arrived some minutes before the 
 close, and there in the porch she listened to my goings on. She 
 could not hear the words, but she heard the voice, and noticed the | 
 voice all the more because that was all she could hear. And I was 
 much surprised, and much grieved, to have her say that I moved 
 that morning in a perfectly measured and wearisome cadence ;— 
 the thing I hated, and always had. It showed me that our kind of 
 work will cadence, and measure off, and make tiresome almost any- 
 body—if he does not look out. 
 
 But how shall he look out. First, let the theological seminaries 
 put their fledgelings into the hands of an elocutionist, a knowing, 
 determined, immitigable man, who will not take no for an answer ; 
 and thus let some incipient good habit be worked up ; a glimmering 
 possibility, (if not probability), that the young men will begin right 
 in their ministry. 
 
 And when they have begun, let them cultivate a theology, and 
 a general way of looking at things, that permits some flexibility and 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 91 
 
 human warmth of voice. Methodists never preach monotonously. 
 They believe in some terrible things, just as we do ;—no man can 
 look out among the facts of the creation and honestly deny forty 
 terrible things ;—but they believe in forty gracious things and 
 lovely, super-eminent over all terribles ; and believe in them in such | 
 heartiness and constancy that it keeps their feeling in a shout ;— 
 their sermons shout ;—they weep, but they shout ;—they preach 
 Perdition with a gospel underflow of hallelujah. I heard them all 
 my youth, and left them in my youth, but I believe they are more 
 right than we are (many of us) in this thing. Christianity is not a 
 Jeremiad—not exactly. It premises Jeremiads, and a sad state of 
 things indescribable, but those Jeremiads it proposes to drown and 
 it is in the world for that one purpose ;—and we, her messengers, 
 ought not to voice her in a manner contrary to her genius. If we 
 let into our voices the monotone of the sea (as I suppose we must 
 a little sometimes), let the “ floods clap their hands” also therein, 
 and let an occasional land-sound slip in, and land-smell, as flowers, 
 mown grass and the breath of the dewy night ; the creation is not 
 all pitched on one key. The God of dooms is the God of beauty 
 and delight, too—if there be Hells, and Hell-glooms, as there every- 
 where are, there be also Paradisaical radiancies and cries of joy ;— 
 and in so far as a preacher is in the love of God, continually show- 
 ered forth on created things, it will modulate his utterance—it will 
 break the flow of his monotony—his voice, always sufficiently 
 serious, will-range the’entire scale of normal voices ; until perchance 
 ‘by much use and the advance of age, his vocal chords are unelastic 
 and unresponsive to the versatility of his mind. Then he must 
 look what he can’t speak—and by that time his face will have be- 
 come facile to such uses and able to serve him a good turn. 
 Another way to make a sermon seem long, is analagous to the 
 first one ;—namely,—make your thought monotonous, and your 
 delivery. In my address on Imagination in Ministers, I mentioned 
 that, for substance, and I will refer to it again only amoment. The 
 thought and the delivery of a sermon may be monotonously excellent, 
 as easily as monotonously worthless. It is monotony in either case, 
 and has in it all the well-known effects of this killing quality. I por- 
 trayed, you may remember, a monotonous man whom I knew— 
 whose sermonizing had no light and shade, no perspective, no power 
 of the picturesque, but worked ona flat and was all foreground. Hu- 
 man nature cannot endure that. I would bring humor into the 
 9 
 
92 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 pulpit in careful measures before I would permit it. I would let in 
 dialogue and great vivacity of gestures. I would diversify my 
 themes extremely. I would make one sermon a story; and one a 
 portraiture, and one a criticism, and one a conversation, and one a 
 dream, and one a poem even, (if I could write poetry). Doubtless 
 we do not want to lower preaching from its divine nobleness ; but 
 pokiness lowers it pretty effectually ;—or if it cannot be said literally 
 to lower it, it does make it of no account, so that the question of 
 high or low ceases to be of much interest. 
 
 Again, a device for making short sermons long is, to have but 
 slow progress through your subject. I look back to my early work, 
 and I find several things, by which, unwittingly, I slowed myself 
 and made those sermons undeliverable in all after years. I had one 
 habit like this :—after putting forth a statement and expressing an 
 idea, I proceeded directly to state that thing, with some slight 
 meaning added, or in some minute new aspect; I was mincing, 
 and microscopic; I did not make a long, free stride and get 
 on—I do not know but my father helped me into that. He 
 was a preacher himself, and he often declared to me that the average 
 hearer is slow, and needs to be nursed along into a thought by a 
 large reiteration of it in changed form ;—not the bag-pipe exactly 
 (I don’t think he meant that), but the bag-pipe with two or three 
 small-voiced attachments. Moreover, I had been under the teach- 
 ing and under the example of Dr. Nathaniel Taylor, and sympa- 
 thetically too, who was a sharp reasoner and metaphysician, and 
 advanced by short steps well taken, after the manner of metaphysi- 
 cians ;—a good thing when you are proving a point and do not 
 intend to have your process of argument broken at any link by the 
 onset of all other metaphysicians combined. But congregations 
 do not like that ;—they like a bold brush—never mind your small 
 touches—strike out your idea in mass, and go along. 
 
 Another slowness discovered by me in those first discourses 
 was a habit of showing forth all the steps by which I arrived at my 
 conclusion ; as though your physician, whom you had called, should 
 spend an hour telling you just how he reached your house, whether 
 on foot, wheels, or the back of a horse, and by what path, or cross- 
 lot cut-off. What you want is he and his medicine. And what the 
 people want in ministers, is their conclusions mostly, and not the 
 laborious rationalizing by which they stepped along to them. There 
 is too much of-that preaching. It is a good mental exercise to 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 93 
 
 those who will bear it, but the nineteenth century is an impatient 
 time, and if you have anything to say, wants you to say it and let 
 explanations go. A third way by which I spun out, was in proving 
 things. Proving them. They did not need to be proved very likely, 
 but I wanted to prove them. ‘“ O, we admit it, we admit it all,” 
 the people were ready to say; ‘‘ but why do you admit it,” thought 
 I. “Iam afraid you do not know the reason of the hope you hold, 
 and I am going to tell you.” And inasmuch as it frequently is the 
 case that accepted beliefs lie in the soul the most non-germinant 
 and useless things conceivable, because they have been accepted 
 traditionally and conventionally, and not as having been searched 
 out ; who shall say that I did not do some good by my arguings on 
 the truisms of Religion. On the other hand, who shall deny that 
 an outright affirmation simply, froma man who knows what he says, 
 is not generally as illuminating and as quickening to blind and dor- 
 mant believers, as the logicking that we practice on them at such 
 length. 
 
 Again, long introductions was a form of tediousness with me. 
 And then many preachers call their hearers to chew the cud of their 
 sermons over again, in extended applications at the end ;—too ex- 
 tended, because too repetitious of what has gone before. A subject 
 well wrought out is already applied, and if the minister squares 
 around to the work of formal applications, he must give a distinct 
 impression in them of substantial addition to what has already been 
 said. The boy who was whipped by his pious mother, and then 
 exhorted, begged that the exhortations might be left off. He felt 
 that the subject had been sufficiently applied in the whipping, and 
 exhortations were tedious and unedifying. 
 
 Another form of tediousness in sermons is lack of substance. 
 An unsubstantial discourse is always long. Some men are unsub- 
 stantial because they have too much facility of thought, and too 
 much facility, especially, of expression. If you have the gift to work 
 up a small-sized thought—an atom of a thing—into a voluminous 
 rhetoric, you are dreadfully tempted to do it. The days are short 
 with ministers,—the working hours in each day,—and their labors 
 are many, and sermons must come along at the rate of several a 
 week, (old or new, or both), and heavy work is not congenial to the 
 unsanctified parts of the ministerial heart, so, if one fair-sized 
 thought can be spread over four Sundays, by force of words, the 
 man feels as the prophet did when he had miraculously expanded 
 
94 YALE ‘LECTURES. 
 
 the widow’s oil. It is a brilliant thing to expand ideas ;—and if you 
 can do it with a suitablé detonation, as when gunpowder suddenly 
 springs into gas and increases its volume from a kernel the size of a 
 pin-head, to fill the whole werld—why ! how can you withstand the 
 temptation. Probably you will not. And so, after a while, your 
 people will be looking around to find what makes your wonderful 
 sermons, half an hour long only, feel as though they had been 
 holding forth a week. 
 
 Extemporaneous preachers are quite exposed to thinness. But 
 that would lead me into a long and delicate discussion, and I dread it. 
 
 The only way to make substantial sermons is to work. Of 
 course you have genius, but you must work. You are to bea settled 
 minister I suppose ;—how settled, time will tell ;—but I can give my 
 word for it now, that if you stay any, anywhere, you must work. 
 And you must work by right methods. Only right methods are 
 fruitful methods. Operate your intellect according to the laws of 
 intellect and it will teem forever. For example, work excursively, 
 and you run thin at last. Work incursively ; that is being inter- 
 preted, penetratively, analytically, in the long-bore fashion, and you 
 will find the artesian reservoirs of the creation, and all congrega- 
 tions will rejoice in you. And I want to add, the penetrative habit 
 is as possible for small brains as for large ones. I do not mean that 
 small brains can do all that large ones can; but they can do all that 
 they can; while if they do not get into the artesian secret they will 
 never do half in their power. 
 
 If you speak with a slow utterance, you will make yourself long ; 
 —long by the church clock, but longer yet in the feeling of your 
 audience. When I was younger than I am now I did not think so 
 much of this, but having been pricked on it myself in these latter 
 years, since I commenced to accommodate my speaking to a high- 
 class gothic interior, I am sensible of the importance of the subject. 
 The force that slows your articulation may be gothic, or it may be 
 approaching age, or it may be an extra solemnity on your part, or an 
 intense appreciation-of what you are saying, so that you want to take 
 time to hold on to each word until each word has passed into your 
 mind its whole benediction. As to that last, I find that I am caught 
 in it most when I am reading tne Scriptures in the public service. 
 I am in some deep chapter of St. John, say; and I know that 
 I am travelling over bottomless beds of ore. I do not know it 
 simply as having been told that there are great beds there, I myself 
 
YALE LECTURES. 95 
 
 see the gleams of them, and I cannot bear to just run along. So I 
 pause, and I pause, and when I do move I scarcely move, and the 
 people out before me in their pews who are less perceptive than I at 
 the moment, see no sense in my delaying and wish I would go on. 
 Well, on the whole, I had better go on. If I alone were involved in 
 the reading, I would take all necessary time, even as’in steam-travel 
 through beautiful countries I would like to slacken the train to ten 
 miles an hour, or less ; but in Bible readings and sermon preachings, 
 as in trains, there are hundreds of others on board—some who care 
 little for beauty, some who cannot possibly sit more than about so 
 long, some who cannot concentrate their minds more than a few 
 minutes. Many classes indeed, together with some children, ‘to 
 whom we ought to accommodate ourselves a little, it may be. 
 
 As to slowness caused. by solemnity, I have noticed that often 
 on ceremonial occasions. I remember administrations of the 
 Lord’s Supper where several clergymen took part ;—special occa- 
 sions they were, so that ordinance was impressive beyond the 
 common ;—and all those officiators took on, and were loaded by, 
 that exceptional impressiveness, and they abated their natural speed 
 accordingly, (real speed being unsolemn, essentially) ; but when they 
 all did that, and every man of them got on slower than I ever saw him 
 before ; and when moreover, every one of them, in my judgment, 
 struck a gait so deliberate that all show of vigor was lost out of it, 
 and the occasion seemed more likely to be languid than affirmative 
 and heart-filling, I sunk away into wearisomeness. And, I fancy, 
 that our congregations (the congregations of some of us) are 
 habitually afflicted in the same way. Sermons are solemn things, 
 and ordinances are solemn, and worship is solemn, and it is asolemn 
 thing to live at all, but we must not be so oppressed by it as to be 
 dumb, and when we do speak we must not drag eee a certain 
 natural and seemly briskness. 
 
 I am reminded here of that to-and-fro of Scripture reading 
 petween the minister and the people which has come into many of 
 our unliturgical congregations. I believe in it, and have in it my 
 own church, where it is carried on heartily and unanimously; but 
 I have noticed that the greater part of the congregations that prac- 
 tice it, are so slow in the delivery of the words that they feeble the 
 whole thing. They cannot keep step together well at such a pace, 
 and they lose the inspiration of concord and a solid march; and 
 the blessed Scriptures themselves seem to tame down from their 
 
96 YALE: LECTURES. 
 
 native force under such a languid handling. Perhaps the liturgical 
 churches incline to the other extreme. I have felt so when I found 
 myself unable to take breath often enough to keep up with them, 
 but then the breathing of a Congregational Minister is peculiar to 
 himself, and ought not perhaps to be enforced on all Christendom. 
 That to which we are habituated is easy for us, and seems rational. 
 And it is curious to notice how little strange and open to criticism, 
 a service different from our own seems, when we have been in it for 
 a while and have caught its rhythm. 
 
 My next specification as to sermons made long by various 
 devices, is, that if your whole thought in preaching is to unfold your 
 subject, without any special aim at any person or thing in the con- 
 gregation before you, a chasm is opened between you and them, 
 and they look at you across that chasm, as a spectacle principally ; 
 an interesting one, perhaps, but not half so interesting as you would 
 be if you eyed them with a determined intention; your eye roam- 
 ing from pew to pew, and from face to face, so that each listener, 
 soon or later, is likely to feel himself addressed and individually 
 pressed upon in a sort of. thou-art-the-man urgency. If you look 
 long and intently into the face of a person asleep, it will wake him, 
 it is said, and many preachers have an eye-power that makes a man 
 feel as though the Judgment Day had come when they light on him ; 
 and I have heard ministers say that they could actually stir up a 
 man asleep, and clean gone away, by focusing their discourse on 
 him ;—not in any personalties, of course, but in a stress of inten- 
 tion. These ministers have no more magnetism and galvanic thrill 
 than you or I, but they avail themselves of the oratorieal privilege 
 of taking aim, by voice and by eye, and silent, imperious volition. 
 When I began to preach I did not know this ;—and for years I did not 
 know it ;—and at times I even prided myself on the fact, (for it 
 was a fact), that I could speak to a small assembly as enthusiasti- 
 cally as I could to a larger one, because I drew my inspiration from 
 my subject and not from men,—and I got myself into a miserable 
 habit of not seeing the faces into which I was speaking; so that a 
 person might sit ten feet in front of me a year without my knowing 
 he was there, or whether he was a man, awomanorachild. Now, 
 that is a great loss ;—a loss to me, and a loss to my hearer ;—he 
 might almost as well have a phonograph speaking to him. When 
 croakers say that preaching is dying out, and that the printing press 
 is going to take its place, we are accustomed to reply; “‘ preaching 
 
YALE LECTURES. 97 
 
 never can die out, because it has in it what the printed page never 
 did, or can have ;—namely, the personal element, man dealing 
 with man, soul on soul, in a divine inter-wrestling, and forty-fold 
 mutuality,” but if the preacher sees nobody, and is after nobody in 
 particular, nor even after the congregation at large, that. boasted 
 personal element is gone and preaching may be ousted from its 
 function at last. 
 
 I have confessed my own sins pretty freely, but of course you 
 will not understand me to say that I take no aim. Ido; but A, 
 B and C would certainly feel, each one, the shock of me more, if 
 he more felt the seizure of my individualizing eye, and the occa- 
 sional jerk of my will grappled on him ;—instead of being compelled 
 to content himself with the general roar of my subject only. It 
 may be a sublime roar, but it tends to make my speech seem 
 longer than it is. 
 
 Close along side of this is the failure we make, when our 
 themes, and our way of handling them, and our diction, are far away 
 from the customary thinking and the daily life of the mass. Put a 
 young man to school from his youth, let college have him four 
 years, and the professional curriculum as many, and then let him go 
 out to address human beings ; and what can be expected of him at 
 first, but more or less separateness from the people ;—who, nine 
 tenths of them, have had no full education, but have had the drill 
 of concrete labor, and the powerful school-mastering of joy and 
 sorrow ;—sorrows deep as the grave, and joys high as heaven. Ex- 
 actly how much good does it do, to take a whole Sunday morning 
 demonstrating to such, the freedom of the will, or the precise sub- 
 jective contents of a man going through this and that important 
 experience P—especially if you use a metaphysical and scholastic 
 terminology, or a theologic terminology brought down from some 
 eminently respectable but remote antiquity. A year ago, I delivered a 
 discourse against the naturalistic school of thinkers, on a certain point ; 
 and I wished to turn on them one of their own guns ;—the doctrine 
 namely, of the relativity of knowledge. So I defined that doctrine 
 —and defined it well; I have looked back since to see ; well, I say ; 
 that is, with absolute clearness and terms that had color in them, 
 they not being blanched in the round and round of long metaphys- 
 ical use. I was much pleased with the definition. After church 
 I met one of the brightest women in my assembly, who had been 
 really edified she said, and intellectually stirred up by what I had 
 
98 YALE: LECTURES. 
 
 preached ; and I ventured to see where that definition had hit her. 
 “T listened to that (said she) with all my might, but when you had 
 finished, I felt the wish that you would begin and go right over it 
 again.” So she was hit, and I had a victory in that she now wanted to 
 know what the relativity of knowledge is, (she never did before) ; 
 but for the present, she was just dazed. I am not quite prepared 
 to say I am sorry I went into that business of defining ; it seems too 
 bad to think of that labor as lost ;—still, it may answer to illustrate, 
 in a general and inexact manner, the way we educated, philosophi- 
 cal and bookish preachers have (and we all tend to be so) 
 of climbing up on to our seven-storied topics, and from that awful 
 height raining down our grandiloquent rhetoric on the parched 
 ground beneath ;—the parched ground looks up in a reverential and 
 stunned way, and sometimes feels as though it were being really wet 
 down, and then again does not know whether it be so or not, like that 
 confused and wondering woman whom I named. 
 A sermon let fall from that height and in that disguise seems long. 
 _And I know no way to avoid such, and get close to men, but 
 by going among men a great deal, and learning to love them man 
 by man, as the redeemed of God committed to your care, and on 
 their way to the eventualities eternal, along a path burdensome and 
 full of ambushes. When a preacher comes to feel that his subjects 
 in the pulpit are the select packages of a divine dispensary, pro- 
 vided for the sick and sorrowful, and the weak, he will be the most 
 practical of mortals, and church-going in his congregation, will 
 seem to mean business every Sunday. I was greatly instructed by 
 a speech I delivered once to a full assembly of sailors in the city of 
 New York. It was the anniversary of their temperance society, and 
 I was the orator of the occasion. I wrote what I had to say, but 
 kept the manuscript in my pocket. And I humbly judged that I 
 had adjusted myself to the occasion,—to a good degree. They 
 listened to me in entire silence and with perfect respect. 1 presume 
 they were impressed. But when I closed, the presiding minister, 
 who knew what he was about, called up a thick-set sailor-man for a 
 ten minutes talk; and then they were impressed beyond bounds, 
 and beyond all the proprieties of silence. I felt my superiority 
 even yet, in respect of brains, and culture, and the power to write 
 a good-looking manuscript ; so that I did not propose to exchange 
 with him and be he, but I would like to know for all time the 
 straight cut to men’s minds, hearts and wills. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 99 
 
 I think we may count on the blessed Spirit of God to assist us 
 in this, provided we open ourselves to him, and never consent to go 
 into our sermoning and our preaching without seeking him. 
 Preathing is not lecturing, but is differenced from that by several 
 marks, and by none more distinctly than by this: that if it is indeed 
 preaching, in preaching’s full idea, it is speaking in the impulse and 
 the light of the Holy Ghost. I do not think that sermons of the 
 Holy Ghost are likely to seem long ; partly because their topics are 
 divinely given to us, partly because our style in them is divinely 
 chastened and brought near to the people whom we are inwardly 
 moved to try to bless ; partly because nothing makes the mind of 
 the preacher fruitful, versatile and unmonotonous, like the Holy 
 Ghost, so that we can stand the strain of years and years, minister- 
 ing to the same congregation without tiring them; and partly 
 because, when that Spirit of God has done all these things for the 
 preacher, he is sure to go into the minds of the people also, to make 
 them interested and receptive. I gave a sermon on Effectual 
 Prayer, which certain clerical men declared to me was the best 
 argument on that subject they ever heard. Well now, there was no 
 argument in it. It was just a statement of my opinions, and it was 
 written on Saturday morning and in the play of my customary 
 intellect merely. But I never in my life was more authentically 
 moved from on high than in that sermon, and my opinions were 
 mine as given-to me, and I spoke by authority; I and my sermon 
 were instruments of the Holy Spirit ; and I knew that we were, at 
 the time, and what those people called a great argument was a 
 - common-place argument made great by Euan atin interfusions in 
 both them and it. 
 
 Every minister has these experiences. And he needs them. 
 Why ! if you are but a lecturer in the pulpit you are in competition 
 with first-class strong men who spend a life-time perfecting them- 
 selves in some speciality, and then consume a month (perhaps 
 months) in preparing a single lecture. And then, there are printed 
 essays, and monographs, and elaborate, powerful volumes which 
 discuss all conceivable subjects ; and the people who listen to you 
 read them ; and your lecturing they insensibly gauge by those high 
 standards with which they are so familiar; and there, O man, you 
 are, condemned to speak at least twice a week, in an intellectual 
 race with these athletes. I tell you, you cannot do it. Your 
 genius may be great, and your industry gigantic, but you cannot do 
 
100 YALE’ LECTURES. 
 
 it. You must come into the secret of small discourses made mighty 
 by the mighty God in them. 
 
 And made reasonably short, too. For, while God the Spirit in 
 a man makes him to be fertile of thoughts, and gloriously commu- 
 nicative, so that you might naturally say :—‘“ He will speak for- 
 hours,”—behold ! he does not. That same Spirit that starts him, 
 stops him ;—precisely as in Nature—in the whole circuit of living 
 things—God observes bounds ;—a tree is only so high ; you can see 
 the top of it—there is vitality enough in it to push up a mile, 
 but it rounds out its idea and stops; and an animal is so long; 
 and a summer is so many months, and no more ;—and it lies in the 
 very idea of a living organism that it is definitely circumscribed, 
 and not boundless. And a sermon God-given and God-wrought 
 is an organism and has sensible limits. In fact, | imagine that a 
 whole course of lectures, which should discuss every feature of good 
 sermons, might be made by simply unfolding that one idea—The 
 Sermon a living Organism. 
 
 I will spend the few moments that now remain in giving three 
 rules for shortening sermons. Virtually, I have been giving rules all 
 along, but I have three more. 
 
 And first. One way to make a short sermon is to stop. ‘That 
 is a second-grade, and mechanical way, though—and I do not think 
 much of it. Live things ought to stop, for the good and respectable 
 reason that they have reached their term; and they ought not to 
 stop before that. If they do, it is a case of stunting. However, if 
 your sermon cannot be stopped in any other way, you must stunt it. 
 Strike it by lightning. Put a worm to the root of it. Any way to 
 get it stopped. If itis asermon that has been carpentered together 
 a mechanical way of stopping is as good as any other. 
 
 But, secondly, a good way to get brevity is to choose just one 
 thought, and resolve that when you have opened that one, in a fair 
 practical statement of it, you will pull up. Do not take one of 
 those vast and infinitely plural thoughts, like the love of God, but 
 a little one—a very little one, because, the minute you begin to look 
 at it, it will swell. Years ago, I read that at the Massachusetts Ag- 
 ricultural College in Amherst, they had put an iron harness on a 
 squash and hitched it to a certain mechanism by which they could 
 tell how much the squash would lift by the expansive force of its 
 growth—and it lifted several thousand pounds. It was bound to 
 grow. So an idea, diligently considered, tends to grow and cannot 
 
YALE LECTURES. 101 
 
 be repressed. You plant it in a pint pot and think that is enough, 
 but it is not. So you must be careful to get a thought little enough, 
 else you will have a sermon too enormous for anything. Or if you 
 take one of the vast thoughts, take only one aspect of it, and work 
 that. Aim at twenty to twenty-five minutes ;—and then, all the first 
 minutes, push on through your material rapidly—use it up fast—so 
 that when you come to the last half of your discourse you may be 
 sure of spinning out to your goal, in somewhere near your predeter- 
 ‘mined time. Most of the half hour sermons I ever wrote were started 
 for about twenty minutes, and grew the other ten minutes by the irre- 
 sistible dilation of life. I fashioned them for the time mentioned, 
 by selecting an apparent mustard-seed of a topic, and then, when 
 it began to get big, throwing out half the things I might say on it. 
 This leads me to my last rule—or word of caution. Do not 
 think you must put in to your sermon everything that belongs to the 
 theme you are on, and all you can think of ;—nor even all the im- 
 portant things. You will speak again on that subject some day. 
 You are a settled minister probably—which, in this nineteenth cen- 
 tury, is a sarcastical term, meaning a few years. But you will stay a few 
 years. And some day you will come up to that theme from a dif- 
 ferent direction, and then you will work in the material that you 
 discarded on that first occasion. I often keep my redundant mem- 
 oranda against such a day as that. Consider too, that your people 
 have no sense of loss when you incorporate in your discourse only a 
 part of the ore you had dug out. You have a large and full-toned 
 conception of what your sermon ought to be, because you have care- 
 fully looked into the topic, and discovered the magnitude and multi- 
 tude of its points ; but the only conception of the topic which your 
 congregation have, is that which you give them in that sermon which 
 seems to you so disemboweled, for brevity’s sake. It is not disem- 
 boweled, to them. No one has any sense of loss when he does not 
 know that he has lost anything. I have missed hundreds of things 
 in life which I might have had, and it was necessary to the ideal 
 fullness of my life that they should come into it; but my life seems 
 now about as full as I can stand, and, not having heard generally 
 what those things are which have escaped me, I do not pine. 
 Neither do your listeners pine, O preacher, for anything you left 
 out—not ordinarily. We torment ourselves too much at this point. 
 Consider also that a genuine sermon, though it be but twenty 
 minutes long, has in it all the essential juices of the subject which it 
 
102 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 expounds. Tap one sugar maple, and you have the entire secret of 
 maple sap. You do not need to drink the whole grove dry, nor 
 even the one tree. 
 
 The truly divine subjects that belong in sermons, do all curi- 
 ously cohere, one with another, and are nourished by the same essen- 
 tial circulation. Let a real preacher preach on election, and his 
 people will have a cup from the Gospel spring. Let him preach on 
 Hell, and they will taste the same waters. And if that is so, much 
 more plainly is it true that any one theme, fragmentarily stated, 
 because there is not time to state it entirely, will have the authentic 
 taste of the whole great theme. I continually increase in my sense 
 of the sufficiency of brief statements in the pulpit, so that they be 
 direct, swift-moving, out of the warm interiors of the subject in 
 hand, and not from its outskirts; and, further, contagious with the 
 personal energy of a man who is in his subject, and has his subject 
 in him, by good study of it, by the Holy Ghost, and by an experi- 
 ence which makes him absolutely know what he is talking about. 
 
 _ Iam speaking, you will understand, of the preaching which we 
 are called to give our people, Sunday by Sunday, and year by year. 
 Sometimes we are called: to open matters to the bottom sands, and 
 from shore to shore, as where St. Paul preached all night, or where 
 Jesus prolonged his last passover utterance till the moon, the dear 
 Paschal moon, was far on in the sky, and the night well spent. 
 When the occasion demands it, or even when our own divine irre- 
 pressibility demands it, we will not fear a long pull; some may not 
 be willing to listen (one man fell asleep when Paul preached that — 
 time), but others some will listen, as being able to see the move- 
 ment of God in us, and the glory of his message through us. 
 
 Gentlemen, to-day for the first time, I have spoken to you less 
 than an hour, and I am-therefore a beautiful illustration of my own 
 subject. 
 
 
 
Deh a A RT SELON aU 
 FAITHFULNESS. 
 
 I wish I might give to the young men present something of my 
 own sense of the importance to them, to the churches of which they 
 may be pastors, to the denomination in which they may stand, and to 
 the general cause of Christ, that they each one attend, faithfully and 
 cordially, the rather numerous convocations, conferences, associa- 
 tions, consociations, ministers’ meetings, councils, and general coun- 
 cils, to which they will find themselves related, as they pass on in 
 their ministry. Time was when I should have been a very unsuita- 
 ble lecturer to you on this subject, because I did not appreciate 
 these extra-parishional obligations and privileges, and sinned against 
 them with a high hand and an outstretched arm—doing it deliber- 
 ately, and because my ideas about such things were wrong. But, 
 now, I do so plainly see that they were wrong, and have been so 
 ashamed of them for a good while, that I consider myself to have 
 great qualifications for speaking to you, and exhorting you, and giv- 
 ing you a right trend, here at the start of your clerical career. 
 
 Now why did I, when I started, eschew these wholesome 
 assemblies? If I say, I did it because I was a fool, that would be 
 the truth, but not the whole truth. I was shy. I dreaded to meet 
 men and exchange opinions with them. Shy,I say. Shy about 
 everything in fact. When Dr. Fitch resigned the pastorate of Yale 
 College, and the next Alumni meeting was considering that notable 
 event, I heard one of the speakers say :—‘ It was once asked how in 
 the world a man so scandalously timid as the doctor, ever raised cour- 
 age to accept such a position as that; and the reply was, because 
 he was too timid to reject it.” Well, I understood that remark. 
 
104 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 And, young gentlemen, perhaps I had better drop in a parenthesis 
 here, and tell you, out of my own experience, that the fear of man 
 can be considerably outgrown by ministers. What you are compelled 
 to do, you can do—and keep doing, and gradually men and assem- 
 blies are not so clothed with terrors as they used to be—that is, 
 provided you have a sufficiently obstinate will, and also a physique 
 that does not miserably give way under you when you lay a strain 
 on it. The legs of a certain marshal of Napoleon the Great, 
 always trembled’ on the edge of battle in the most unedifying manner, 
 we are told; but he never paid any attention to them, he said. 
 “He gave them their own sweet way, and while they trembled he 
 fought.”’ Not all legs of men will stand such treatment as that, but 
 most will, if they are edged along and humored a little. A friend 
 and relative of mine, facing his first considerable assembly, became 
 blind and felt his neck shortening down to his shoulders, and had 
 to be led off and never became an orator; but ministers are not 
 out before assemblies on business of their own, they being divine 
 ambassadors; and that sense of mission would keep the tiniest 
 boat, head on to any gale. Moreover, it is a curious fact that often 
 a soul, constitutionally timorous in the presence of the private man, 
 loses all that when those private persons are massed before him a 
 thousand strong to be addressed. The speaker seems to pass out 
 then into the grandeur of impersonal considerations, and in the 
 enthusiasm of them he is sublimed and fear has no hold on him. 
 
 Thus much on ministerial courage, my young and apprehen- 
 sive brothers. | 
 
 I abjured convocations for fear’s sake, I was saying. Also I 
 abjured clerical bodies, because I did not rightly esteem ministers. 
 I had somehow picked up that precious piece of misunderstanding 
 and practical slander, which has latterly had some special ventila- 
 tion in the public prints; the notion that preachers, as a class, do 
 not frankly speak their minds on the great matters of doctrine and 
 religion, but put themselves before the public as more all-believing 
 persons than they really are; declaring, oftimes, what they are 
 expected to declare, or think they ought to declare, rather than 
 exactly what they are able to see and rest in, and live for, and stake 
 their eternity on. 
 
 Well, beloved, I have come out of that, and I wish you would 
 take my word for it, that ministers are no such second-class and ~ 
 time-serving men of God as such talk implies. My discovery in 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 105 
 
 regard to them is, that while they are earthern vessels, and had bet- 
 ter be—so long as they are ministers—even as the Eternal Son of 
 God, when he would serve men, took on himself their nature, and 
 many of its infirmities—nevertheless those earthen vessels are not 
 so earthern as to be good for nothing; but are of the better sort, 
 decidedly. They are honest. They are frank—just as frank as 
 honesty requires. They are magnanimous. They are brotherly— 
 with each other, and with all men. They are truth-seekers and 
 lovers. They are intelligent and candid. They are clean in their 
 lives. They are gentlemanly. They are conversational and agreea- 
 ble. They show well in emergencies, and are able to be martyrs. 
 They are well-informed. They are fitted for the leaderships of all 
 sorts to which they are called. I will not be choked down. by any 
 modesty in this matter. Neither in this lecture will I be choked, 
 nor in conventions of lawyers, or physicians, or merchants, or 
 women, or anybody else ;—we have no need to fear any of them, 
 and, my brother, if ever you fall to thinking of your own demerits, 
 and your own insignificance, and get so shame-faced that you are 
 tempted to make a slack testimony for your order before a wicked 
 and gainsaying world, do you impute to yourself the merits of the 
 better members of the order, long enough to deliver a rousing tes- 
 timony. For the men in question deserve it,—visibly they do; 
 and then, if they be looked into historically—that is, along all the 
 nobler lines of history, it will be found that society and govern- 
 ment, and all- welfares, have been as much indebted to them as to 
 any one. 
 
 After this preliminary skirmish of mine, you are prepared, I 
 hope, to go on with me, while I draw out in form, some of the rea- 
 sons why you should be very duty-full towards church and clerical 
 assemblies. You will notice that I speak as a Congregational min- 
 ister, considerably, as I reasonably may before a body of men, the 
 most of whom are likely to serve in the Congregational field. The 
 principles, however, which I lay down, apply equally well to all 
 Christian communions. 
 
 First, then, observe; if Congregationalism—as distinguished 
 from Independency—is to exist, it must be by denominational con- 
 vocations ; these are the forms and the means of corporate life and, 
 if they are kept up, somebody must keep them up; and if some- 
 body must, why not you, A, B, and C? It is as much your business 
 as itis mine. On the question whether Congregationalism ought to 
 
106 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 exist, I will not argue. Independency is impracticable, in regard 
 of the great ends of Christian propagandism:; and, in the last analy- 
 sis, it is contrary to the Christian Spirit. When I was remarking on 
 my own aversion to convictions originally, I forgot to say, that I had 
 nursed myself along into the solitariness and repellancy of Indi- 
 vidualism. I thought a man’s religion and his religious opinions 
 were a matter between himself and his God, and did not admit of 
 intermeddlers. I even declined church membership for a time, 
 being afraid that the clear lines of my own personality might get 
 confused, and I suffer some mergence in other people if I joined 
 myself to anything. You will detect the kernel of truth in my posi- 
 tion ; a man must maintain himself an unmistakable integer ; cohe- 
 rence and cohesion, and the agglutinous instinct may be carried 
 clear to the point of self-loss ;—and local churches may agglutinate 
 inordinately, and bring up in an impersonal corporeity, national, 
 provincial or other; and yet Individualism, pure and simple, is 
 indefensible abstractly, and when it is brought to the proof of 
 experiment, it shows itself the quintessence and first principle of 
 disorganization and anarchy. 
 
 We must get together. then, in many kinds of assemblies. 
 There must be councils, conferences, associations, synods, general 
 conventions, and the like. ‘These various congresses have duties to 
 perform, that are indispensable to the general life. Duties to per- 
 form. Young men who surmise that they are right for ministers, 
 must be inspected unto the uttermost. Churches which surmise 
 that they have hit on a right minister for themselves, must be 
 advised ;—sometimes that they have, and sometimes that they have 
 not ; and sometimes that they both have and have not. Disorder- 
 liness must be advised. Heterodoxy must be labored with and 
 voted on. Great questions of morals must have a more than indi- 
 vidual yea or nay pronounced on them. Ecclesiastical precedents 
 must be made. Many things must be thrown into the mill of a 
 national handling, in general assemblies, in order that what is wide- 
 afloat in single minds may get formulated in a formulation of size 
 enough to be visible and ponderous ;—it is astonishing to what a 
 ripeness the general mind may come by the separate and scattered 
 gestations of large numbers of private minds ; and yet have no con- 
 sciousness of it until some general body meets and makes a deliver- 
 ance. It is like an orchard which is red-ripe, all through, but needs 
 a good general wind to shake it down and make all beholders see 
 
YALE LECTURES. 107 
 
 that the day of completeness has come. By these means Individ- 
 ualism is Christianized into Catholicism, self-consciousness into con- 
 sciousness corporate, localism into universalism, bush-fighting into 
 regiments, brigades, and divisions, preaching alone, into a conscious 
 voicing of the whole church of God, creed-saying, a ripple here and 
 a splash there, into the sound of many waters, and the august em- 
 phasis of all generations. 
 
 Go to the councils then, anu the meetings, and the regular con- 
 ventions, and whatever else may be provided for you to take a hand 
 in. Councils get joked in these days as self-conceited and pom- 
 pous. futilities, but these jokers know not what they say. It does 
 expand a man’s self-consciousness to be a councilman, and he may 
 even go so far as pomposity in certain cases ; but as to these bodies 
 being futilities, that is not so. In the Roman communion, certainly, 
 they are not; and even in a communion so intensely individualis- 
 tic as the Congregational, councils are yet capable of making a 
 good deal of trouble, for those that deserve it, and much good for 
 those who deserve that ;—as you will find if you go to all you are 
 ever called to. Go to them, I say, once more. Do your duty ;— 
 your denominational duty, and your inter-denominational duty,— 
 and your international duty, if you should ever get appointed 
 Christ’s delegate to other lands. And your own people must let 
 you spread out onthese. They will be wanting a council themselves 
 some day.. And ifthe principle of shirking gets shed abroad among 
 ministers, how will councils and the rest be made up? 
 
 My second reason for faithfulness to your corporate obligations, 
 is, that if you decline them, and just converge yourself upon your 
 parish work, and there stick year after year, it narrows you, both your 
 views, and your feelings. It may’make you conceited as to “ your 
 parish,” “‘ your congregation,” “ your people,” “ your pulpit,’ “ and 
 your Sunday school,” or it may, on the other hand, weaken your 
 hopefulness and your courage, and slacken the energy of your 
 stroke. I judge that this localization of one’s self, works in the 
 direction of conceit as often as any way, I thought of that while 
 conversing with a Protestant Episcopal clergyman, ali worn out 
 because he did not dare leave his pulpit for a moment (he said) 
 lest some ministerial brother coming in there might, in a single 
 sermon, wipe out his months of careful labor on a class which he was 
 preparing for confirmation. Perhaps your first impulse on hearing 
 
 such talk as that is to admire the man’s devotion. Certainly 
 IO 
 
108 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 that confirmation class was well followed up, and I presume they 
 were nourished on substantial truths ;—but one’s second thought 
 is, that they were followed and nourished by a man so intensely 
 specialized as to have lost his breadth, and his bigness ;—and 
 always in teaching, the teacher is quite as much as his doctrine. 
 He was not so important to that class as he thought. ‘Thousands of 
 clergymen could have handled them as well as he. He was so 
 much of a parish minister that he was nothing else. He had so few 
 outings that he misestimated his ministerial brethren. He did not 
 know the kind of sermons they were preaching. He mismeasured 
 the importance of that class of his. It was very important, but 
 there are such classes without number all over the world ; and there 
 are other congregations, all about, and while the particular must not 
 be undervalued, the general is surely more than the particular ;— 
 and no man can make any just judgment on anything, unless he is 
 conversant with generals. Moreover, while a home-staying, and 
 home-laboring minister, runs a risk of being thus made small and 
 full of a puffy estimate of his own services, his congregation, on 
 their part, may suffer in the same way. If their minister circulated 
 widely, in the various assemblies of his denomination, and of other 
 denominations, he would bring in wafts from those outlying regions ; 
 bits of information, movements of sympathy, intelligent judgments 
 of his own, founded on this wide survey of his ;—and by all this, 
 that particular people, while remaining sensible of themselves, would 
 be made sensible of the rest of the creation ; would like to hear 
 other ministers, and would run the risk of ruining a confirmation 
 class; would consider that a religious service was not spoiled if 
 their minister was absent for once ; and, speaking generally, would 
 get a valid gauge on their-own selves and their own labors, and 
 affairs. But their minister declines to circulate, does not feel the 
 need of a wide contact with Christendom through its many charac- 
 teristic assemblies, thinks it takes too much time to attend to these 
 things, and that his local duties are all he can carry ;—so, while he 
 is circumscribed and belittled, and at the same time is dilated in 
 self-importance, they run into the same infirmities. 
 
 I want to speak a word concerning the enheartenment which 
 one may get by an extended familiarity with Zion at large. One 
 Monday morning in 1872, I boarded a train bound from London to 
 Liverpool to take ship for home, and I found myself facing an old 
 man, who proved to be a clergyman andan American. Were you in 
 
YALE LECTURES. 109 
 
 London, yesterday? said I.. Yes. And where did you attend 
 church? At Mr. Spurgeon’s. Did you hear that sermon of his in 
 the morning, from the text: ‘ He is a root out of a dry ground.” 
 Yes. And what did you think of it? Thereupon he was so filled 
 with emotion that he could not reply. But his wife took it up, and 
 said :—We cried all the way through it. And why did you cry? 
 said I. Then it came out, at last, that he had been a missionary in 
 Turkey all his life, and to come up now, as he had within a few 
 days, out of Turkish surroundings, and all the depressions thereof, 
 where there is not one Christian to a hundred square miles, and get 
 into that immense assembly with its immense unity in the Holy 
 Ghost, and hear them singing in a great swing like the final hallelu- 
 jahs of the redeemed ; and then to hear that truly wonderful dis- 
 course (and I think it was wonderful, and I shall never lose the 
 sound of it), in which, point after point, it was shown wherein 
 Christ was a root out of dry ground, but was also shown how this 
 unpromising One had made his victories, and was on his way to a 
 kingdom that shall fill the whole earth,—why ! it was more than 
 the old man’s heart could endure ;—he overflowed—he took the 
 occasion up imaginatively, after the manner of high feeling always, 
 and made it signify and seem the ultimate unity of man in the 
 blessed Jesus, according to that grand sentence of St. Paul in his 
 Epistle to the Ephesians, the first chapter, and the sixteenth verse : 
 “That in the dispensation of the fulness of times, he might gather 
 together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and 
 which are on earth, even in Him.” In the seership of that sen- 
 tence, the man sat and wept, while the great service went on. And 
 I myself have often felt a similar enlargement and a similar joy. 
 Even under circumstances so disadvantageous as a high service in 
 St. Peter’s at Rome, I have been able to rise into a sort of Millen- 
 ial feeling. The mighty multitude, made up of all lands and all 
 nationalities, and all ranks, under the whole heaven ; the jubilate of 
 choirs reduplicated through the echoing great spaces of the cathe- 
 dral, and even the spectacular elements of the occasion, were woven 
 together into a vision, I found, of Christianity universalized and tri- 
 umphant, fulfilling what I read afterwards on the base-stone of the 
 Egyptian obelisk that had been set up in the great square in front 
 of the church, and surmounted by a cross, namely :—“‘ Behold the 
 cross of the Lord—lo! the Lion of the tribe of Judah has con- 
 quered.” ‘Tugging forever in my own parish, looking out forever 
 
110 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 on my one comparatively little congregation, and seeing only such 
 minute results of labor as are possible to a single man on a single 
 spot, my sense of the majesty of Christianity, and its dominion, 
 prospectively as well as to-day, may slip away from me a little ; but 
 when I walk about Zion and survey her towers and catch the 
 uplift and hosannah of her masses, multitudes, and millions, I am 
 restored to the largeness that belongs to me. I have comprehen- 
 sion and vision. I have insight and foresight and sight all around. 
 
 It is not every day we can get into these ecumenical and vast 
 meetings, and have our idea of what Christendom is, and what 
 Christianity means thus suddenly enlarged, and made transporting ; 
 but yau can accomplish something of the same sort by slow degrees, 
 in frequenting many kinds of lesser meetings: In a gathering of 
 the ministers of a city, on Monday morning, with an inter-mixture 
 of Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and about everything 
 you can think of, each one ready to make an argument for his spe- 
 cial Ism, and all ready, also, to flow into the one grand current of 
 undenominational thought, the occasion works beautifully to pull 
 you out of localism, and out of all your special rages, and make 
 you a sizable and round-a-bout man. I attended a May meeting of 
 the Quakers in New York, years ago, and came away with a 
 renewed sense of several things whereof my own parish might not 
 have reminded me in forty years. I attended every session of a 
 Methodist annual conference that met in my city once, and had 
 restored to me considerably the days of my youth, when I was 
 familiar with the Methodistic stride, and did not know but I was 
 myself foreordained to that movement all the days of my life. It 
 is good to take another man’s gait sometimes. It advises you that 
 several gaits are possible, and several legitimate, and that there are 
 several, of which one is substantially as good as the other. A friend 
 of mine with me in Europe, accompanied me to the service of a 
 certain eccentric communion (as he would call it), and some things 
 done by them seemed very amusing and ridiculous to him. Well, 
 they were not amusing and they were not ridiculous. He was 
 stiff-jointed by a life-long tread-milling in Congregationalism, and 
 was not equal to the versatile movements of that truly beautiful and 
 very plausible ritual. 
 
 It does a man good even to exchange pulpits, once in a while. 
 He sees how Israel looks in all kinds of costumes. He manifolds 
 his conception of church edifices, and choirs and liturgies. He 
 
YALE LECTURES. 111 
 
 learns how possible itis to preach in unprecedented pulpits. He 
 comes home a limberer and a wiser man, and walks into his work 
 again with a certain catholicity. 
 
 Great contact with Christians in your own body, and Chris- 
 tians at large, is a rich re-enforcement of your doctrinal feeling also. 
 The divisions of Christendom are numerous, but the concords of 
 Christendom are more. I do not know that they are more numeri- 
 cally, and I do not care. You cannot measure things by count. 
 Lilliput counts one, Czesar counts one and one only. The true meas- 
 ures are moral, and the unanimity of the Christian world on the 
 great momenta of faith, utterly drowns out all discords, if only you 
 have an ear to hear. Standing on a rocky sea coast, the shatter of 
 the waves might fully fill your ear; but how light is mere shattering 
 compared to that one grave, and immense ocean-tone which eter- 
 nally fills the whole sky. Thus open your ear to the tone of the 
 ages, as with unvarying unanimity they speak forth the great facts 
 and formulations of our faith, and all Jesser sounds are silenced, and 
 you feel yourself re-established in the mighty main things. And 
 the way to get your ear open is to attend assemblies. I have often 
 felt, in the general meetings of the Christian body to which I 
 belong, that I wanted the assembled brethren to stand up every time 
 in some grand creed-saying, in which they could all agree ; some 
 creed, too, in which the general church always has agreed, so that 
 voices absent might be added to voices present, and the innumer- 
 able departed might strike in with the living—what an edification 
 it would be! how we should be doctrinalized afresh! for we are 
 creatures of sense, and what is spoken seems authenticated by being 
 spoken, especially if, in the speaking, all redeemed voices combine. 
 
 Again, be sure to frequent all legitimate meetings, for nu- 
 merous little reasons, such as the following: It is something, to 
 put your eyes on the men of celebrity, and the good men, whom 
 you are likely to meet there. It is a fine thing for young men to 
 have heroes—and for old ones, too—theological heroes—heroes of 
 reform—men of great and admirable learning—men of noble 
 eloquence—men of great endowments of magnetism. The advance 
 of years tends to lessen one’s heroes, I suppose ;—some heroes 
 it quite obliterates, and others it reduces; and some sad and 
 disagreeable old men confess that they have no admirations 
 left—poor old creatures! I say to you, there is no need of 
 these wholesale disenchantments. I am old enough to know, 
 
112 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and I say it. I do not know how many men there are whom 
 I would go thousands of miles to see and hear, and feel the touch of 
 their vigor. I see their limitations, but I see also where they round 
 out towards the infinite. They represent to me the better forms of 
 strength, and the better forms of virtue ;—they represent to me, in 
 short, those great abstract truths, principles, and virtues, which are 
 the enthusiasm of life ; and they represent them in that way which 
 is most impressive to all men; namely, as personalized, and lived 
 out. So, Jesus could say :—‘‘I am the Truth and the Life ;” and 
 His victory lay in His incarnation of these great things. And some 
 other men, in their measure, and with a difference, can say the 
 same thing. And we like to look at those men; it is a miserable 
 day for us when we do not like to. My memory is full of such 
 meetings, and it always gladdens me and strengthens me to recall 
 them. 
 
 Moreover, let me say to you, privately, it may be much practi- 
 cal advantage to you some day to know, and be known, by these 
 men and brethren whom you meet—say, in the assemblies of your 
 own denomination. Young men have their difficulties, in which 
 they need assistance and protection. They have entanglements in 
 their parishes, controversies and contentions against which they 
 cannot make head, self-sufficient and uninspired deacons (though 
 I am obliged to say that deacons are a maligned class—they aver- 
 age excellently well) ; but sometimes a monstrous one will spring up, 
 and then a young minister needs some old, bulky, herculean brother- 
 minister in whom to hide himself. Yes, often, the beginners need 
 help in their parishes. 
 
 Or they come into perturbations and uncertainties of thought. 
 Or they go so far as to adopt opinions which they suppose to be 
 inharmonious with the current doctrine of their sect; and then 
 they grow self-conscious and unhappy. The more peculiar they 
 seem to themselves, the more disinclined are they to move about 
 freely among their brethren, and you never see them in the general 
 assemblies. They are afraid. They feel themselves black sheep, 
 and they have the touchiness of all black sheep. If any one makes 
 a shy at them they do not think it is humor, but a dig at their pecu- 
 liarities. And there is no telling into what retirement and misery 
 and explosiveness they may go at last. Probably it will occur to 
 them that they must leave their denomination, and see if they can- 
 not find better adjustments somewhere else ;—and they even wish 
 
YALE LECTURES. 113 
 
 they were out of the pulpit, for good and all. JI have more than once 
 seen men of this sort. And more often still, I have noticed young 
 men who were putting forth the first symptoms of this unhappy state. 
 Well, the remedy for this—if it has not already passed beyond 
 remedy—one remedy at any rate, and as good as any other, 
 is to mingle much in the assemblies, and rub against other men— 
 and to take counsel of the principal men, perhaps privately, or more 
 likely in public discussions, where they may be heard expressing 
 themselves. As likely as not you will find that you are not the 
 utterly eccentric person you had supposed. Other men have. 
 thoughts as well as you, and they know the wrench of doubt, and - 
 the daze of a man when he does not see how the conclusions 
 whereat he has arrived can be harmonized with the standards. 
 These matured and broad-shouldered men whom I am recom- 
 mending to you in your predicaments, have succeeded in extract- 
 ing from life several precious bits of wisdom. ‘They have learned 
 how to manage a parish, so that now it would be a very monstrous 
 deacon that could unhorse them. They have learned how to 
 cherish numerous views of their own, without inflicting them on 
 their people, or on their denomination ; or striving to make them 
 agree with the standards or the standards with them. Standards, if 
 they are fit to exist, are as celebrated for their omissions as for 
 their affrmations—and the whole, large field of their omissions, is 
 left for the private thinker to expatiate in, and indulge his idiosyn- 
 cracies. Moreover, these mature brethren have discovered that 
 even the great points of Catholic doctrine, the glorious indisputa- 
 bles of the Christian church, may be held by the private thinker in 
 their substance, while he makes pretty free with their form. Now, 
 the substance of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus is, that He 
 interposed between man and God in such a way and in such travail 
 of soul, that all difficulties, whatever they were, by which God was 
 hindered, and could not pardon and save men, were utterly and 
 forever taken away ;—but that magnificent generosity which is 
 enough to melt all human hearts, has been reduced in some creeds 
 to a much more particularized statement (whether true or not), 
 which is not scripturally binding on the faith of anybody, and is to 
 be subscribed to, if subscribed at all, only out of respect to that 
 underlying great truth just mentioned. What the creed is after is 
 just that, and I believe in the creed because it is after that ; and as 
 to its specific forms of conception for that infinite, its patented 
 
114 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 abridgements of it, I will not quarrel with them, any more than I 
 will with its use of this or that single word in its effort to get out 
 what it plainly intends; as, but for nevertheless, or, nevertheless 
 Jor but. There are various ways of getting one’s liberty in this 
 awful world ;—and old men have found that out. There is no need 
 to secrete yourself within the confines of your own parish, and feel 
 sore and scared, and never go anywhere, and by and by get your- 
 self off into some other vocation, because you are such a black 
 sheep. Come upto the meetings. Confer with the chief men who 
 have earned the right to speak by authority. Listen to their essays. 
 Listen to their unconsidered outgushings when they are excited, and 
 under excitement let out the whole truth. Ask them privately for 
 some history of the development of their own opinions. And 
 when they get through, ask them if they think it is right to hold 
 such a budget of views that they never mention, and hear every 
 man of them say yes. Young men—and it is sweet in them—con- 
 ceive that it is not frank and honest not to make an exposition of 
 your entire interior so often as you can get a chance, and especi- 
 ally before councils, who have come together on purpose to ravage 
 said interiors; but, Brethren, all that councils, or anything else, 
 have a right to know about you, are those views in your circle of 
 views that are determinative essentially of your spirit and charac- 
 ter ; and, which introduced into your preaching, will be determina- 
 tive of the spirit and character of the people who listen to you. At 
 any rate, come up to the meetings. ‘That is my refrain. 
 
 It may be, that you have gone into some off-color movement 
 of thought, that is really and substantially unorthodox. Well, 
 come up to the meetings and let us look you over. Perhaps you 
 are worth saving. Perhaps if youcan be protected a few years, 
 and have your freedom, you will be able to come out where 
 we would all like to have you. And there are men among us who 
 can protect you. Our annals are pretty full of instances like that. 
 When a certain friend of mine, then a boy, was installed pastor of a 
 certain church in a city hard by, where he still is after some twenty- 
 four years of continuous service, certain councilmen voted against 
 his orthodoxy ; and the case went into the public journals ; where- 
 upon, an old and eminently orthodox man, pastor for a lifetime 
 of a neighbor-church in that city, came to his deliverance, and put 
 the entire weight of his venerable authority in for a bulwark around - 
 the young man. And his unabated old age stirred itself up intoa 
 
YALE LECTURES. SCT Iba: 
 
 lovely indignation on the subject. Whether my friend’s solid twenty 
 odd years have vindicated the defence then made for him, judge 
 ye. But I want you to see that young men had better know the 
 old ones, and have the old ones knowthem. The above-mentioned 
 grizzled warrior fired up, and opened his guns, because in a pro- 
 tractéd council he had arrived at some knowledge of the young 
 man ;—and perhaps his youth reminded him of his own days of 
 youth, and made him tender and easy to be drawn into an honest 
 quarrel. 
 
 So, go to the councils, to the associations, and the general asso- 
 ciations, and the conferences, and the church congresses, and 
 whatever is up. If you are worth defending, you will be defended. 
 And if you need straightening out before you can be defended very 
 much, why, the meetings of the Brethren are good for that. There 
 is nothing that enables one to see his own views about as they are, 
 more than to toss them out into assemblies, and watch the men 
 there battle-door them about. Opinions are valid or not, accord- 
 ing as they will stand battle-dooring. When I left this Seminary, I 
 understood the introduction of moral evil into this universe, first- 
 rate and perfectly. I had a way of putting the subject which I 
 considered iron-clad, and was willing to put into action in any com- 
 pany. But, pretty soon, I put it in, in a debate with a Methodist 
 layman, a man prone to tender-hearted views, but intelligent 
 
 withal ; and he made a single remark, which I thought and have _ _ 
 
 thought ever since made an utter ruin of my iron-clad. Men can 
 do such things for us. Common men can. There is not an 
 uneducated day-laborer in New England—so that he has native 
 sense—who may not be a good person to try your theology upon 
 and see what he says about it. You do not believe in Materialism. 
 Well, go and talk with the Materialists. You have rigged a pretty 
 boat of your own, full-sailed, full-sparred, shapely, and flag at high 
 mast ; now send her to sea, and let the Materialists blow on her 
 with all their winds ;—not by printed essays, and formal volumes 
 (all that you have looked into, every leaf, before you made your 
 boat), but by arguments, face to face, and by conversations, and 
 the whirl of general debate. In that free way all points are hit, 
 and all the lights and shades of things are brought out as they 
 never are in books. 
 
 Clarify your opinions then in the gatherings of your brethren. 
 Give them a chance to sift them for you. They are experts. 
 
116 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Certain ancient bones, which had been dug up years ago, went wan- 
 dering around the earth to have some man identify them as belonging 
 to this or that animal; and no one knew them; even Hugh Miller 
 could not tell; but at last they found their prophet in Professor 
 Agassiz, who recognized them directly. So much for having Agassiz 
 to carry our bones to ;—and so much for having the sense to carry 
 them. Go to your wise men with your notions, my Brother. Go 
 to the conventions, where you can find them. Go to the councils, 
 where their wisdom is likely to come out. 
 
 And much acquaintance with the brethren, makes them valua- 
 ble to you in many other ways. When you want a new parish they 
 will help you ;—and how can they help you to much purpose, if 
 they have never had an opportunity to sample you? When you 
 want formal advice on some personal matter, or some matter eccle- 
 siastical, they will be glad to obey your call on them, and come to 
 you, and put their sympathetic minds into your case. Yes, this guild 
 of ours is one of the best. Close-knit, manly, tender, and true, are 
 the ties that bind our men together, when we know each other, have 
 exchanged pulpits, have worked along side and man to man, have 
 stirred up conventions together, have gone out in the Autumn, as a 
 general conference, quartering ourselves for days on the unresist- 
 ing inhabitants, have fought each other in councils, and, in the 
 midst of all, have kept up the flow of our love feasts. 
 
 And speaking of love feasts, reminds me that I intended to 
 make a whole separate fifth head, on the kindliness engendered 
 among ministers by the meetings they have ;— which kindliness, 
 while it is enjoyable, very, as a mere feeling, works out also into 
 many utilities. I have said as much, but I have some other thoughts 
 in my mind about it. For, instance, how personal contact leads 
 on to esteem and affection for those who are opposed to you theo- 
 logically, and who have been a little disagreeable to you on that 
 account, as likely as not. Or, something else has made them disa- 
 greeable. You have heard things about them ;—that they are 
 combative—that they cannot preach much—that they gush—that 
 they are inexact thinkers—or fanatical reformers—or voluble—or 
 ambitious. Many things get afloat, first and last, taking all ministers 
 together, and the first movement of the depraved human intellect 
 is to generalize upon the whole man from a single unpleasant bit 
 of information like that. Perhaps that single thing is all you know 
 about him. Some twenty or more years ago, a woman where I went 
 
YALE LECTURES. 117 
 
 to preach refused to go to the church, because I was a Sabbath- 
 breaker, she said. All I did, in those days, was to take a walk 
 Sunday afternoons, which I must take or burst, I usually had so 
 much steam on. Moreover, she ought to have recollected my 
 numerous virtues, and she would have done it if I could have made 
 her acquaintance. I shall never forget the first time I saw William 
 Lloyd Garrison, and heard him speak. He was a much more lamb- 
 like man in his face than I expected to see, and more mild-voiced, 
 and more considerate, in fact, in what he said. I had imputed to 
 his person the deformity (as I thought it) of his political opinions. 
 I fancy that many persons were similarly surprised when they 
 ’ first met in private the late Dr. Leonard Bacon, and felt the suffusion 
 of his geniality and his uncontentious utterance, and his humor 
 and sparkle. All they had known was the pound of his trip-ham- 
 mer movements against slavery, and other nefarious things: They 
 had not been told that his heaven-shaking hammerings, were made 
 to be the sounding and awful things they were, by the great heart 
 that was in him ;—a heart that did not often cry, but saved itself 
 for those strokes of Thor. 
 
 It is best to meet men, and size them on all sides, and take a 
 taste of all their qualities. ‘Then, most likely, you cannot hate them 
 if you want to. The earnest theology of Father Taylor, the cele- 
 brated sailors’ preacher in Boston (it is an old story), had led him 
 to locate Ralph Waldo Emerson in a future Hell; but when he 
 had met him, and felt his pulse, he did not know where to put him ; 
 he said, Emerson’s opinions kept him out of Heaven, and his 
 good character kept him out of Hell, and there did not seem to be 
 any place for him; though it was evident that Taylor was in danger 
 of landing him in Heaven, notwithstanding all his Paganism, 
 Pantheism, and big-headed Jupiter-like dubiousness.. Dr. John 
 Brown of Edinburgh, in his biography of his father, gives some 
 account of a dear old Scotch clergyman, his Uncle Ebenezer, 
 who was shaken from his foundations one day, a little as Father 
 Taylor was. In his not strong old age, he started across the 
 open country, on his pony, in a heavy snow storm, to fulfill an 
 engagement to preach. Nobody could dissuade him, and he went. 
 And he tumbled over at last, pony and all, and was wallowing in 
 his helplessness, when there happened along some rude fellows cart- 
 ing whiskey to the town. And they tugged him up and lifted the 
 pony, and put the old man on, and dusted off the snow, and ran for 
 
118 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 a drink of the whiskey for him, which he swallowed gratefully, and 
 made a downright tender time over him, rough creatures and 
 wicked though they were. ‘ Next presbytery day” (says Dr. Brown) 
 “after the ordinary business was over, Uncle Ebenezer rose up (he 
 seldom spoke) and said :—Moderator, I have something personal 
 to myself to say. I have often said that real kindness belongs only 
 to true Christians, but (and then he told the story of those men) 
 more true kindness I never experienced than from those lads. They 
 may have had the grace of God, I don’t know; but-I never mean 
 again to be so positive in speaking of this matter.’’ Well, that is 
 the effect of knowing people. It is easy to reason on the wavering 
 of Father Taylor and Uncle Ebenezer, and prove that this talk of 
 theirs was mere weakness, and that if meeting men leads to compro- 
 mising one eternal truth in that manner, we were better not to meet 
 them ;—and the less assemblies we have the better—assemblies, that 
 is, where various theologies are mixed together. Let Old School 
 Calvinists meet only Old School men, and New School men their 
 sort, and Armenians their sort, and let ministers who do not know 
 what they do think, have assemblies of their own and enjoy their 
 own confusion. That seems sensible, perhaps, but not very, to my 
 mind. A theology that does not include all the plain facts of the 
 creation, as Uncle Ebenezer’s did not, had better be rolled about 
 on a snowy moor, and receive gifts of comfortable whiskey from 
 the sons of Satan ;—and a theology which does include all facts, 
 had better meet in convention, and council, the theologies that do 
 not, in order that it may learn to hold the truth in love, by being 
 made to love, personally, the false theologians. There is no need 
 to surrender anything. It never makes any impression on me, to 
 meet an Old School Calvinist—that I could ever see—except that, 
 loving him, as I am generally forced to, I take on a habit of stating 
 my own theology with the air ofa man who has heard from the other 
 side, and knows that there are Old School errorists in the world. 
 In the North American Review some time since, Robert Ingersoll 
 made a deliverance on and against Christianity, which called out an 
 article in reply from Judge Black ; and then Ingersoll spoke again, 
 and then there came a word from your own Professor Fisher. And I 
 know of no better example of right and wrong polemics, in respect 
 of touchiness, dogmatism, and personal animosity, than those two 
 pro-Christian articles. Both of those writers show distinctly that 
 they have heard from the other side, to wit—from Mr. Ingersoll ;— 
 
YALE LECTURES. 119 
 
 they both stand front-face to that man, but, O ! the difference in the 
 faces! One was almost enough to make Ingersoll glad he is a 
 Pagan, and the other ought to make him a Christian. Not merely 
 is the intellectual weight of the professor’s statement very great, but 
 there is not a flush of emotion throughout the whole which could 
 not be conscientiously and gladly undersigned by all Christendom ; 
 and Ingersoll himself could not help loving the man who took 
 his life so Christianly. 
 
 Now, my thought is that contrary kinds of men be thrown 
 together as much as may be, in order that under the persuasion of 
 each other’s perceived good qualities, they may not sacrifice their 
 principles, but maintain them with a certain lenitude. There is no 
 more real push in a battering ram than there is in a Spring sun. 
 The ram would pulverize ice effectually, but so would the sun; and 
 there would be so much cushion in the push of the sun, as to make 
 the ice almost happy to die under the pressure. 
 
 And, after ail, Brethren, the whole end of Theology is love. It 
 seems hard to realize that that is so, but so itis. If your theology 
 does not make you loving, it has not Christianized you, and to that 
 extent is not a Christian theology. All ecclesiasticism, and all doc- 
 trinalizing, is in order to character, and the soul of character is love. 
 Preach the truth in love, and for the development of love. Go to 
 the assemblies of your brethren, for love’s sake. In some cases 
 seeing a man may make you dislike him, but I do not think it 
 works so with ministers, as a rule. While I write this sentence, I 
 am trying to think of a minister whom I know well, that I really 
 and rather totally dislike—and I have not recalled one yet. Robert 
 Burns wrote an address to the Devil, which ends up with the follow- 
 ing bewitching touch of benevolence. Burns had spent some nine- 
 teen verses, giving his Majesty a plain statement of his mean opin- 
 ion of him, ending with this irreverent snapper : 
 
 An’ now, auld C/oots I ken ye’re thinkin 
 A certain Bardie’s rantin’, drinkin, 
 Some luckless hour will send him linkin, 
 To your black pit: 
 But, faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin, 
 An‘ cheat you yet. 
 
 But, suddenly now, from that height of impiety the Bardie 
 drops to this flow of the heart: 
 
120 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 But, fare you weel, auld Wickte-ben / 
 O wad ye tak a thought an’ men’! 
 Ye aiblins might—I dinna ken— 
 Still hae a stake— 
 I’m wae to think upo’ yon den, 
 Ev’n for your sake! 
 
 It seems to me that we ministers had better keep going to 
 assemblies until we have just about that feeling towards the most 
 questionable of the brethren. Attack their errors, rebuke their 
 faults, lay on and spare not. Do not fail to see the false opinions 
 of ministers and other Christians, and their erroneous practices, and 
 the flaws and disproportions which make them imperfect in charac- 
 ter; but, and at the same time, be lenient and accept them, in the 
 large receptivity of love, even as God, for Christ’s sake, has excepted 
 both them and you. 
 
PARISH INCONVENIENCES. 
 
 I shall lecture to-day on what I call Parish Inconveniences, 
 using a mild term in order not to frighten you too much at 
 first. And as there are a good many of these inconveniences to be 
 mentioned, I will plunge into their midst as soon as possible, and 
 call your attention, in the first place, to the great subject of small. 
 salaries :—a subject on which my views have greatly changed since 
 I was first compelled to take an interest in it, long years ago. Ido 
 not know but a little income seems little to me even yet (I wish it 
 did not,) but my feeling about such a thing for ministers is cer- 
 tainly different ; and of course I want to impart to you, that dif- 
 ferent, and wiser, and less depressed state of mind. 
 
 When I went out into the Christian Ministry, I was not very 
 hilarious in regard to this whole business of the money. I had fot 
 the least ambition to grow rich ;—I gave that up totally when I con- 
 sented within myself to this special Christian service, and when a 
 bright lady in New Haven said to me, then a theological student 
 there,—‘“‘ I had as lief take a ticket to the poor-house as to marry a 
 minister,” I could not deny that there was a certain show of sound- 
 ness in her. I expected to be poor, and was willing to be. That 
 did not deject me. But I had been led to expect to be worse than 
 merely poor. I thought I might be indecently poor. I thought 
 that a great many churches were willing their ministers should be 
 indecently poor, and miserable. I did not see why I might not 
 strike on just such a people as that. A young man, looking out on 
 life, that practical unknown, is easily impressed and needs chirking, 
 I found. Whereas, just at that time, certain books had come out, 
 in which the shady side of ministerial experience—especially the 
 financial side—was presented with a pre-raphaelite realism and 
 vigor quite appalling. Those books I read, marked, learned, and 
 
122 VALE LECTURES. 
 
 inwardly digested, as the Liturgy says, and believed in. And I sup- 
 pose now that they told the truth, though they by no means rose to 
 the full height of a witnesses oath :—‘‘the truth, the whole truth, 
 and nothing but the truth.” 
 
 In addition to these books, for a comfort, I had some recol- 
 lection of my father’s pastorates when I was a young thing and 
 followed His fortunes while he circulated about the country as an 
 itinerant Methodist. As a boy, I contemplated the ministry in its 
 utilitarian aspects in the main, and when my clothes were not as 
 expensive as I would have liked, and my spending money was 
 limited, and when my father had offers from well-to-do childless 
 women to adopt me for their own, I charged the whole thing on the 
 parishes that we served, and thought they were mean. I now see 
 that we were in less want than I thought, and that the parishes were 
 not mean ; but so far back as that great day when I stepped forth 
 from this Yale School of Divinity, those early prejudices still lin- 
 gered with me and assisted the melancholy books just mentioned 
 to get an exaggerated hold upon me. 
 
 I tell you those things, my friends, because you are where I 
 once was—that is, about to begin life—and may be tried by feelings 
 similar to mine, and I want to give you my later, and more mature 
 and final views on this matter, as fitted perhaps to head off any 
 downheartedness on your part as you survey the years to come. 
 
 Now, I shall admit at the outset, that you must not look to 
 make money in the Christian Ministry ;—for the following plain 
 reasons. First, your income will not be large enough for that, 
 especially as you will, every man of you, see the divine beauty of 
 the early, but never-obsolete scripture :—‘“It is not good for Man to 
 be alone,’””—and proceed to be married so soon as possible. Ihave 
 often thought it would be. good to have a celibate class in the ranks 
 of our Protestant Ministry, with a view to service in feeble parishes 
 —temporary celibates—but it is a plain case that we cannot have 
 them. So ministers cannot make money. Their wives and their 
 other luxuries will keep them right up to the limits of their limited 
 resources. Next, you will not be parsimonious enough to make 
 money on your moderate income—I hope. Next, you will not be 
 sufficiently worldly-wise. You will be piously absorbed in your 
 subjects, and your parochial work, and what knack for business 
 you may have by inheritance from thrifty and managing ancestors, 
 will gradually die out of you, probably—until you have only head 
 
YALE LECTURES. 123 
 
 enough left to draw your salary and pay your debts. Of course, 
 once in a while there comes up a minister who defies all these 
 rules, and stores away some money ;—he is very saving and 
 watchful, and his wife does a world of hard work, and all his 
 weaned children are turned to immediate use, and he does 
 not squander anything on philanthropies—or possibly nothing can 
 kill out of him a natural aptitude for infallible investments, so that 
 his minute savings swell, as by an inherent and irresistible expansibil- 
 ity of their own; but men of this stamp are rather the exception in 
 our profession, and most likely none of you will ever be rich ;—un- 
 less you have been born so. And if you have, I am not sure that it 
 will be any benefit to you. 
 
 But be not alarmed ;—you will not starve. In other pursuits 
 men do, but somehow in ours they do not. The raft is the type of 
 our condition ; it is a very wet thing, butit neversinks. Ships do— 
 the bravest of them. You may serve most poverty-stricken parishes, 
 but you will never starve. I never saw the day when my father’s 
 table was not more than sufficiently supplied. I never sat at a min- 
 ister’s table which did not have on it more than anyone needed. 
 The most meagre one I ever did see—it had such humble signs 
 about it that I felt glad to move on and relieve my kindly host— 
 was the board of a man with flesh on his bones enough to bring his 
 weight to the substantial figure of two-hundred pounds and over ; so 
 that, after all, he could not have been much cramped. 
 
 If you happen to become the Minister of a people who are 
 decidedly indigent, they will at least be sure to keep you as well as 
 they keep themselves, and if they live, you can. Yes, they will try 
 to keep you a little better, out of that respect and love for your holy 
 office, which is as strong in a poor man’s heart as in anybody’s. 
 And, Brethren, it is curious how comfortable one can be on an un- 
 comfortable salary. I was once reduced to living on potatoes, 
 and even they were carefully counted out, our supply was so small. 
 But I suffered no hurt,—neither did any of my party. Some of 
 them grumbled, but it was ridiculous. It does us good to get down 
 to the simplicities of life, and see exactly what human nature needs. . 
 More than potatoes, in the long run, 1 suppose physiology would 
 say, but ministers always do have more than that. My first salary 
 was eight hundred dollars, but I was as well supplied as I am now 
 on six times the amount. Because I had not the wants that I now 
 
 have. And if I had been kept to eight hundred, I never should have 
 II 
 
124 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 had the wants—many of them. It would hurt me now to be 
 squeezed back into eight hundred. . I have sprouted far and wide 
 since then—a sort of banyan tree—and that original pot would not 
 hold me ; but I could have lived without sprouting, if I had had to ; 
 and I presume now that some day I shall be called to lop off, and 
 lop off, to even less than those original dimensions. And if Iam, it 
 _ isin likelihood that I shall feel like a tree that has been trimmed, or 
 like a man who has lost his legs. The trimmed tree looks as it did 
 before it pushed out those branches, but the having pushed them out 
 has gone into its experience permanently, and it will never feel as it 
 did before ;—it feels larger, and richer, and much more of a tree—and 
 it is a well known fact that a limbless man has a sense of limbs as 
 much as he ever had. A human being has a great amount of ca- 
 pacity of self-adjustment to changed circumstances, and that is one 
 of the tokens of his high rank in the creation. If he is planted ina 
 fat soil he blossoms, and if hung in mid-air, he has the persistency 
 of a cactus, and keeps green and blossoms, more or less. 
 
 The point at which an educated clergyman most longs for 
 money is his library. There you may be called to some real self- 
 denial. Possibly you would be a larger man if you could buy more 
 books and possibly a more useful man. That last is more doubtful, 
 though. Books and wide reading, often make men more heady, and 
 unhumble and great-gun-like in the pulpit, than is profitable to the 
 hearer who is more stunned than edified if guns shout too loud. 
 Still, I must not run down books. We do want.them, and many of 
 us want more than we can get. It would disgust me to be confined 
 to the one and only full commentary that adorned my father’s 
 library, to wit, Adam Clarke’s ;—a commentary of so much less worth 
 than many others of to-day that I never think of looking into it. 
 There it stands on my shelf,-six octavos, like Czesar’s dust, to stop 
 a hole to keep the wind away, I might almost say ;—though I would 
 not disparage it. But I need more than such a help certainly ; and 
 we all do. 
 
 Well, My Brethren, however large your library, you will still be 
 called to much intellectual self-denial, if you are to be a thoroughly 
 effective Minister of Jesus Christ. You cannot spread abroad into 
 general culture. Much in Science you must omit. Much in Litera- 
 ture you must omit. Much, too, in Art. Many modern specialties 
 you must be ignorant of, substantially. Scattered along through the 
 pews in your congregation, there will be numbers of men who know 
 
YALE LECTURES. 125 
 
 more than you do along certain lines; lines, too, whither your 
 tastes run as strongly as do theirs. ‘That is true of the broadest, 
 and strongest and most informed, of us, with our great libraries. 
 We must narrow ourselves, in order to force ;—read less than we 
 desire, and think less excursively than we desire. You cannot get 
 rivers to tide on deep, swift and heavy unless you shut them in nar- 
 row runways. 
 
 - But that is the doom of all men. Self-denial and self-speciali- 
 zation, with a view to chosen ends, is the law to which the lawyer 
 and the physician, the merchant, mechanic, financier, teacher, 
 farmer, musician, engineer, and all the rest, must submit. Civiliza- 
 tion gets on by these distributions of labor, and these intense and 
 narrow concentrations. But, Brethren, I beg you to notice how 
 little narrow our specialization is as compared to that of some men ; 
 —a banker’s—a tradesman’s—a sea captain’s—a soldier’s—and 
 many more. First of all, our vocation means brain-work, and not 
 mere fingering in some craft, or brute tugging. And it means brain- 
 work in the exercise of all the nobler parts of the brain, the in- 
 tellectual parts, the affectional parts, the moral parts. I do not 
 think of any pursuit in which a man is more often called to put his 
 entire and royal self into the field. Our themes are of the largest. 
 The interests we handle are of the largest. ‘The motives we wield 
 are large and high. ‘The satisfactions of our office are of the sweet- 
 est and purest. So, we can afford to contract ourselves in our read- 
 ing a little, and subject ourselves to the loss of some esthetic 
 delights and some culture ;—to accept the fact of few costly pictures 
 on our walls—and few of those household decorations and furnish- 
 ments that are so full of art and so exquisite to the cultivated eye. 
 
 But at this point I make another turn on the money question, 
 and inform you that ministers do have secured to them by the work- 
 ings of providence a long list of real prosperities. Often they have. 
 no money to educate their children, but the children get educated. 
 My father could not help me much, but that made no difference, 
 except to give me the discipline and delight of doing for myself. 
 Minister’s daughters are generally considered very marriageable 
 girls—no catch pecuniarily, but the loveliest kind of a catch other- 
 wise ; and after all, wedded life does not live by bread alone. Min- 
 isters have a good many windfalls. What is a windfall? It is God 
 doing the unexpected and surprising. If you pry into a windfall far 
 enough, you can explain and show it to be just what might have 
 
126 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 been looked for; but you had better not pry ;—let it stand as wind- 
 fall, and you have the good sensation of it. I had one such when 
 in Yale Seminary. Right out of a clear sky dropped that lightning. 
 When I was married I had another. It was only two hundred dol- 
 lars a year added to my salary, but it showed that windfalls were 
 possible in my case. I must not run into the particulars of my own 
 life too much, but I wish I might relate to you some things which 
 have been told me, by some of my much-straitened fellow ministers. 
 The Lord takes care of his own. Serve him, and he will do won- 
 ders for you. “The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the 
 whole earth to show himself strong, in behalf of them whose heart is 
 perfect toward him.’”’ (2 Chron. xvi, 9.) 
 Thy power is in the ocean deeps 
 And reaches to the skies; 
 Thine eye of mercy never sleeps, 
 Thy goodness never dies. 
 
 Perhaps you think I am working an optimistic vein. Gentle- 
 men, that is the vein to work when speaking of our calling. If we 
 were freebooters, or corrupters of men, or landlords grinding the 
 poor, there would be no optimism about it; but we are God’s am- 
 bassadors of salvation, and we glory in our calling and we know 
 that all things work together for our good. You may say to me that 
 my lot has been an easy one, and that therefore, it is easy for me to 
 indulge in these high-colored remarks ; but as high-colored remarks 
 as I ever heard have come from ill-conditioned men, to whom I 
 have said in amazement :—How do you live? They have told me 
 sometimes in detail, and have made me both to laugh, and cry 
 and inwardly shout ; laugh and cry at the mingled pathos and humor 
 of their stresses and distresses, and shout at the way they emerged 
 from their emergencies, and at the strong spirit of life and gladness 
 in their souls in despite of everything, and, in fact, because of every- 
 thing and all. I saw a letter from a good and true man, whose 
 parishes had always been noticeably undesirable; and it was 
 written on chance scraps of paper of various shapes, so that 
 it was difficult to track him; but he came out at the end 
 with this remark :—“ Brother, I hope you will not look on these 
 small bits of paper as in any wise disrespectful to you, but rather as 
 one more indication of my spirit of economy, and of the ability I 
 have always had, to live without any visible means of support.”” So 
 you see, he was not crushed. He could laugh at his own exigencies, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 127 
 
 and he could pray, and he could trust God. It is not best that 
 the worldly prizes in our profession should be remarkably glittering. 
 They are glittering enough ; and if they were more so, we should 
 have a glut of self-seeking men whom God could not use as the 
 vehicles of his grace. I hope now, that without sacrificing truth, I 
 have given you a touch of contentment in your minds, in regard to 
 the pecuniary side of your life as ministers. 
 
 ‘You will remember I began to speak of Parish Infelicities ;— 
 I recall you to that idea, and declare unto you in the second place, 
 that you will strike an occasional infelicity in the form of inconve- 
 nient persons ; such as the disagreeable deacon who has been much 
 celebrated in prose and verse ;—and the family that crave an extra- 
 ordinary amount of attention ;—and the precise and obstinate lay 
 theologian out there in the congregation watching you; and the 
 vehement politician who does not wish you to preach politics, as he 
 says,—and the contrary person of whom John B. Gough has said to 
 us, that when the prayer meeting prayed that he might be removed 
 to Heaven, he spoke up from his knees and told them he would not 
 go ;—and the men and women that like office and must have it ;— 
 and the purse-proud pewholder and the penurious pewholder ;—and 
 the immoral man whom you have hit between the eyes by way of 
 discipline, and who on that account feels sore—he and all his rela- 
 tions—and needs floods of Christian love poured out on him, to 
 keep him along—that is, to keep him from making a permanent 
 surrender to sin and Satan in desperation, and to keep him in your 
 congregation, where, of course, he had better stay, and live down 
 his ignominy—O ! there is a good deal of human nature in Chris- 
 tian Congregations ; sanctified in some part, to be sure, but not 
 perfectly sanctified ordinarily. | 
 
 My receipt for treating all these cases, I will postpone for a 
 little, while ” mention as a third possible infelicity which will over- 
 take you, that your correctness as a theologian may be heavily ques- 
 tioned and you be thrown into some parish peril. Sometimes that 
 questioning starts in your parish and gets serious headway, but 
 as often it makes its first headway among people outside, who listen 
 to you only now and then and know you but fractionally ; and they 
 carry the disturbance into your congregation, and set them wonder- 
 ing whether they can trust their own ears for the soundness of 
 their minister. The short-cut rule for suppressing such riots is just 
 to be sound theologically ;—that is all. Think just as they think. 
 
128 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 That will stop them. . But that rule may seem coercive to some of 
 you ; so I will name certain other easements pretty soon. 
 
 Again, an unwelcome theology may not be your only unloveli- 
 ness. Your conscience may seem to force you into public deliver- 
 ances on various practical subjects in which your people have an 
 irritable interest. They are irritable because they are guilty of 
 something, or because the thing you discuss has been carried into 
 politics and struggled on at the polls, or because some single per- 
 son of their number is a conspicuous example of the particular 
 matter which your sermon holds up; or because the whole denomi- 
 nation to which your church belongs is tumultuated on the subject 
 you are moved to unfold ;—it may be temperance that you are on, 
 and there right along your middle aisle, in a powerful row of 
 respectability, may sit, and sit straight up, half a dozen or more 
 men whose ability to purchase a seat at all in that metropolitan 
 position depends on the traffic in intoxicating liquors, in one way 
 or another ; or you may speak on divorce, because that matter is all 
 abroad and it seems therefore a good time so to speak ; but right 
 before you is some one who has been divorced and has been mar- 
 ried again with the apparent general consent of the community ;— 
 or something you say touches the choir, and next Sunday they 
 refuse to sing ;—or you do what a friend of mine once did, you 
 discharge a battery at these nefarious, cheap stories and colored 
 pamphlets that infest the world ; honestly thinking that perhaps, no 
 criminals are more plainly criminal than those wretched books ; but 
 you have not been long in your parish, and have not learned that 
 one of your oldest deacons drives a trade in that Literature ; there- 
 fore he feels hurt, as he ought to, and you do not feel so penitent as 
 he thinks you should, and there you two men are, to fight it out 
 according to the measure of grace given unto each of you. 
 
 Years ago we all had the subject of American Slavery for a 
 standing discomposure and risk; and you young ministers can 
 hardly imagine what a time we full-fledged birds had over that. 
 Some of the ablest and best ministers in the lands were ecclesias- 
 tically silenced because they would not keep silent in respect of 
 that great sin and outrage. Some ministers were voted down, 
 and others were pushed on from parish to parish. I look back 
 to my own ministrations at that time, with amusement, amaze- 
 ment and admiration. I. was willing to be blown into the 
 sky by parish convulsions on that subject, and there are numbers 
 
YALE LECTURES. 129 
 
 of fine people still living who would have been glad to see me 
 go. But asa matter of fact I never went, and here I am, to tell 
 you, Beloved, how it is that men satisfy their consciences as 
 preachers and still stay on the earth not more molested than is 
 good for their patience and welfare. 
 
 Still harping on infelicities, I want to take a moment to refer 
 again to the ticklish matter of church discipline. I consider that 
 one of the very hardest things to get through in peace. A certain 
 lenity, which amounts to laxity in some cases, has come into our 
 
 _ practice in this regard, so that if you wish to ease yourself along 
 
 and wink at many things and keep the people all quiet, you can do 
 it, I suppose. But, now and then you will have the plainest kind of 
 a duty to perform; and then comes the strain on your wisdom 
 and courage. ‘The hard navigation of a case of church discipline, 
 comes of the following particulars, I have found. You yourself are 
 tempted to slip along from a strictly judicial feeling, into the feeling 
 of a prosecutor. This person now up for trial has disgraced the 
 Christian Religion and disgraced your church, and you cannot bear 
 that he should be let off with no mark of displeasure on him what- 
 ever ;—so you shoulder into the case in a manner that is remem- 
 bered against you. Again, it is difficult to bring on witnesses. You 
 cannot compel people to testify, and where they consent to appear, 
 they will go as far as they please and no farther. Again, the jury 
 before whom cases are brought, (I speak of Congregationalism,) are 
 a mass meeting of men of various ages, and perhaps women—the 
 poorest court conceivable in some respects. 
 
 Again, even the officers of your church, the picked men before 
 whom the offender is primarily brought, often know little of ecclesi- 
 astical law and usage, and even on the common-sense of the case, 
 that range that lies outside of law and usage, you will be greatly 
 surprised sometimes to see how they will bewilder themselves by a 
 confused palaver and outgush of heart on the duty of Christian 
 forgiveness. My impression is that most Church Boards will dis- 
 charge almost any sort of criminal, if only he declares himself peni- 
 tent for what he has done; unless in the person of the minister or 
 in some single hard-headed member, there is found a man of robust 
 perception, who pushes the case. 
 
 Again, after the offender is properly disciplined, it requires a 
 great deal more tact, and large wisdom and divine good feeling 
 than many ministers possess, to embrace the culprit-brother and all 
 
1307en ‘| YALE LECTURES. 
 
 his friends, with a heat of affection adequate to their hurt feeling. 
 For they will feel hurt. No matter what the man has done, they are 
 likely to feel injured because the church has taken him up so. In 
 every case that I have had to do with, that has been true. And 
 probably a considerable part of your church will think on the whole 
 that he might have been handled more gently. I wonder whether 
 there ever was an instance, since church members began to fall from 
 grace, where discipline was administered by a unanimous vote. 
 Charles Lamb tells of a “gentle optimist,” who could never be 
 brought to criminate anyone, very much; and his friends secretly 
 agreed to invent a most horrible instance of brutality and state it to 
 him, and see if they could not wake up in him some flicker of ethical 
 vigor ; but when they had finished, the kind cteature only said— 
 “ How eccentric!’’ And that is about as far as many a church 
 trial can be brought along. And that is not extremely strange 
 when you recollect what a lackadaisical view of Christian Charity and 
 Forgiveness has got abroad and what great obstacles ordinarily 
 hinder the putting in of clear and overwhelming evidence before a 
 Church Court. 
 
 This subject of discipline is so many-sided that I ought not to 
 have introduced it all perhaps, unless I could spend an hour on its 
 aspects ; but I have done it, and in the few moments so spent I 
 fancy I have succeeded in convincing you that when you strike a 
 personal church case, you will be likely to feel that you have sailed 
 into a storm zone, where you must close reef and steer like a hero. 
 
 I hope, now, that I have not multiplied and magnified the dif- 
 ficulties of a minister’s lot till you are weary and ready to be 
 alarmed. There is nothing to be alarmed about. All through my 
 young days, I heard the church people sing :—“ Must I be carried to 
 the skies, on flowery beds of ease,”’ and so on—and who does want 
 just that? Who, that is anybody. Remember that these difficulties 
 which I have massed before you, do not all come in one day; they 
 are scattered along the whole length of the years, here a little and 
 there a little, according as you are able to bear them; and perhaps 
 there are some of these trials that some ministers escape altogether. 
 And if you do not escape them, they will not kill you, provided you 
 remember to put into practice a few sentences of sense which I now 
 lay down. I did not invent these wisdoms ; they are just a digest of 
 what ministers generally find out sooner or later. And the sooner 
 the better. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 131 
 
 And, first. You must preach such solid and good sermons all 
 along and live such a solid and good life, that any parish storm 
 that comes up by and by will find it hard to upset you. I have in 
 mind at this moment a most laborious and lovely parish minister 
 with whose affairs I was conversant. He was dislodged from his 
 office in quite a gale, simply (as I judged,) because his sermonizing 
 had always been more emotional than brainy. He was affectionate. 
 He was spiritual. He visited his people with marked zeal and 
 acceptability. He served them in their sorrows as no other man 
 could. And they could not help loving him. And that tie of love 
 was a heavy anchor to windward, when that blow arose. But it 
 could not save him. There was a company of particularly intelli- 
 gent and also admirable people in his assembly, who had pined on 
 the diet he dealt out and had not the heart to hold on to him with 
 both hands, when the wind was taking him away. People are afraid 
 to touch a powerful man, so to speak. They are in a sort of awe 
 before him. It is profane to meddle with him. In that complex 
 thing, a powerful man, it may be questioned which is most powerful, 
 and most contributes to hold him firm in his parish; his powerful 
 preaching, or his good pastoral work whereby people are made to love 
 him ;—in other words, whether it is respect for a minister, or love 
 for him, that principally makes permanence in his position ; but 
 for now, all I care to say is, that anything which binds the man and 
 his flock together is so much preparation against that evil and dis- 
 tressing day, when he and they, in some agitation, begin to pull on 
 the bands which bind them together. People will put up with a 
 great deal from some men. The Pastor has made a mistake; he 
 has mismanaged a case ; he has preached an inadmissible sermon, 
 he has showed favoritism, he has let fall a word of personality, he 
 has lost the customary fine poise of his temper; he has developed a 
 touch of infirmity that no one had ever thought of in connection 
 with him ; but they think as Henry Clay said his constituents ought 
 to think of him ;—that gun of ours has been an excellent one 
 hitherto, and has not been wont to miss fire; so we will pick the 
 flint and try it again. That is the way it works. ‘That is one of the 
 incidental and unsought advantages of doing one’s duty with one’s 
 might, straight along, for duty’s dear sake. There seem to be 
 cyclones in these days, and in some parts, that can almost pull up 
 the foundations of the globe ;—and such a whirl as that may get 
 into your parish and make all moorings snap! In that case you must 
 
132) VALE LECTURES. 
 
 go with the wind, and land where you happen to. In some better 
 parish perhaps. 
 
 My second advice is ;—keep your temper—always. There is 
 no exception to that. You can do it. You are inflammable, but. 
 you can do it. I have done it. I was never angry with a 
 parishioner yet. I have been grieved—a little—and indignant per- 
 haps—but no man of my congregations will say that he ever saw 
 me angry with him. I spend my anger on outsiders. I have 
 expressed my mind. I have resisted my parishioners. I have 
 characterized their doings with a full force of adjectives occasion- 
 ally. I have presided in their public meetings when they were hot 
 and have argued against them from the chair in a square contest of 
 main strength, holding back nothing for fear’s sake; we had all 
 passed beyond fear we were so much engaged ;—but neither in 
 public nor in private, have I lost my good-naturedness. When you 
 lose that you have lost your best strength and your best defence. 
 
 And when I say these things, I do not say them boastfully, but 
 only to show that any minister can maintain, I will not say his 
 equability, but his temper. It is a dreadful state of things if a man 
 must not get excited. I claim the privilege of being roiled as much 
 as I please, provided the roiling stops short of outward rages and of 
 unbrotherly feelings. It is not unbrotherly to be indignant at a 
 man, and call him by the names that he deserves ;—not necessarily. 
 You may do all that and have that man feel, in the very moment of 
 your roaring, that you have no malignity towards him. Keep your 
 temper. When you preach on some explosive public question, keep 
 your temper. When your soft-hearted church lets off some mis- 
 creant, keep your temper. When some one says that your sermon 
 was long, or sophistical, or dull, or that your prayer was tedious, or 
 that you have no oratory, or that you do not know how to read the 
 scriptures in the congregation ; or that you are dreadful at a funeral, 
 or not stylish enough in a marriage service, or not an easy conversa- 
 tionalist when you make calls, or that you are ‘“seven-eighths a 
 magnificent man and the other eighth a hole,” (as I knew a prom- 
 inent church member to say of his minister)—yes, young gentle- 
 men, I draw all these illustrations from life ;—but when these 
 insufferable observations are made, do you quietly pocket the 
 remark, and look as bland as though you had been kissed, and day 
 after day consider whether it be not true, that remark, or partially 
 true ;—there is great profit in criticism, if you only candidly hunt for 
 
YALE LECTURES. 133 
 
 it—but be tranquil tempered, I say. ‘“‘ Never resent an insult,” 
 said a sensible old minister in my vicinity who had spent a long 
 life successfully in one parish ;—he meant, that is the rule for a 
 minister. And he did not mean, be a milksop, either; he was no 
 milksop himself, but a man of views and vigors. A man of views 
 and vigors, but always self-restrained, is always respected ; a man in 
 whose composition no downrightness can be discovered, a man of 
 timidity and pliability, and no possibility of noble indignation, is 
 never ranked so high. 
 
 This keep-your-temper-doctrine which I have been preaching 
 I will add to a little and say ;—treat all men in an amiable 
 manner; the unlovely parishioner so well as the lovely one; 
 the ungentlemanly, the bad, the one who has treated you ill, the 
 one who has got wrathy and left your congregation for no good 
 reason—no matter who he is; bow to him on the street, bow to 
 him on the street when he will not bow to you, say good morning, 
 do his family a kindness, speak well of his excellencies ; show him 
 that you are not spending your short three score and ten years in 
 nursing antipathies and grudges. I have heard of ministers, and 
 known some, who, when they feel themselves wronged by somebody, 
 will show it in their manner habitually. It is poor business. It is 
 imprudent business. It makes you feel unwholesome in your mind, 
 and not quite sound morally. It is so much deducted from your 
 capacity to manage a parish. 
 
 I know right well how this idea of indiscriminate amiability 
 may offend some young men, who are particularly honest and frank. 
 They think that you ought to show that you do not feel alike towards 
 all people ; that it is conventionalism, in one of its meaner forms 
 not to; that a minister who scatters his blandness right and left in 
 the fashion that I recommend has come to be professional and un- 
 manly, a supple manager more than a man. Let us be sincere if 
 we do sour some people, and make some parish losses, say these 
 fine-spirited youth. 
 
 Well, I myself used to feel like that. And I acted on it a little, 
 in some cases. I never much troubled myself about affronts to me 
 (I hardly feel that I ever had any,) but I did enjoy letting some 
 folks know that I had a small opinion of them on account of their 
 general character and ways. But I have changed ;—changed on 
 principle and changed by natural drift. I see now that there is a 
 large Newfoundland-dog way of treating such matters, without any 
 
134 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 loss of self-respect, or lessening of moral perspicacity and moral 
 energy. I should dread to be a parish manager, a distributor of 
 flattery and lies and hypocritical affection, for the sake of parish 
 prosperity ; I should rather swing clear over into gruffness and a 
 disagreeable honesty—but there is a midway course that avoids both 
 of those extremes. 
 
 First of all it is possible to feel kindly towards all men—really 
 feel it, and not imitate it for professional purposes. And how shall 
 we feel it? In several ways. If you have a growing sense of your 
 own imperfections it will much modify your exasperation at the im- 
 perfections of others. Also, if you have a growing habit of recog- 
 nizing the praise-worthy traits that are apt to illuminate and beautify 
 the worst characters, it will tame down your spirit of criticism in a 
 measure. ‘That stingy pewholder of yours, is truthful, clean in his 
 habits, honest in his business, and a loyal husband. That highly 
 combustible politician, the terror of his precinct, is generous money- 
 wise beyond most men. So it goes. People are mixed. There is 
 slag in them ;—wholesale sometimes, but there is gold in them too. 
 
 Moreover, it will assist you to be genial with all classes and 
 kinds, to just move upon them with spiritual intentions. Begin to 
 minister unto them the salvation of the Lord Jesus, and they will 
 become wonderfully interesting to you. You cannot hate a man 
 whom you are striving to bless. Just there you enter into the secret 
 of Christ. He was tender to all, because on a mission to all. 
 
 Still farther, it will assist you to be tranquil and kindly in the 
 presence of imperfect men and women, if you put yourself habit- 
 ually with a heavy stress into the great themes that belong to your 
 vocation. I was never in a fret yet which I could not utterly 
 smooth out by looking steadily and long into the grandeurs of the 
 sky, or out upon the shoreless magnificence of the sea, or into the 
 sublimity of the mountains. And like those infinites are our 
 spiritual themes ;—vast, majestic, serene ;—and communing with 
 them, all small frictions end, all trivial interests are forgotten, all 
 mortal passion dies away. 
 
 When you get close to a man by these several devices, you 
 begin to have a sort of enjoyable interest, even in his faults. You 
 are amused by them, perhaps. ‘They manifest themselves in ways 
 that are humorous to a humorous eye. A high-tempered man is 
 an object of seriousness and pity to be sure, but you are often 
 shaken by uncontrollable laughter over him, too. All large-natured 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 135 
 
 ministers—ministers of the big-dog build—have some side-shaking 
 stories to tell about queer people they have had in their flock, and 
 miserably flawed and blameworthy people ; and about disparaging 
 remarks which free-spoken and ungracious souls have put forth in 
 regard to them, their sermons, and their services, and their well- 
 meant efforts to do exactly the right thing. O! these terrible things 
 are not terrible, unless you let them be terrible. Just take them 
 right and they are of no particular account. Even at the time 
 they are as small as you please to make them; and when they are 
 looked back upon through the mellowness of many years, they are 
 scarcely more objectionable than the irregular forms in a landscape ; 
 they melt into the picture of the dear past harmoniously enough. 
 
 I must do my whole duty, I suppose, and exhort you now, 
 thirdly, to keep your tongue with all diligence. I heard a much- 
 experienced minister say in a charge to a young one whom we 
 were installing ;—my brother, as you go about your parish, keep 
 your ears open and your mouth shut. It is as hard to hold your 
 tongue as it is to hold your temper. You might think that an even 
 tempered and amiable minister would be able to rule his tongue, 
 but it is not always so. High temper runs into speech, of course, 
 but so does geniality. 
 
 Many things grow worse by being talked up. That criticism 
 on your sermon wants nothing better than to have you squirm and 
 mention it to one and another. As the head of your parish, you 
 will naturally be made a confidant by many people, and when you 
 have been a long stretch of years in a place, you will be just rich in 
 information concerning almost every one about you ; and it will be 
 a serious strain on you sometimes, not to use your information and 
 set your knowledge afloat. In some conversations you. will nearly 
 burst with your knowledge. Both parties to a controversy will come 
 to you by night, separately and unbeknown to each other, and load 
 you up with their sorrows ; and you must sit through it all with the 
 silence of a hypocrite ; only taking care not to be so silent as to 
 seem unsympathetic. It is close work and involves a great amount » 
 of ability, though there need be no guile in it. You must be a 
 sphinx, and a vocal Memnon at the same time. It is easy to be 
 vocal; but to be silent and vocal both, to speak words just few 
 enough and just numerous enough, and to have the spoken ones go 
 to the spot exactly, and do no hurt on the passage thereto ; that is 
 the problem. A rifle ball goes to the spot fast enough, but it may 
 
136 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 kill half.a dozen on the road. Let your words be numbered and 
 well chosen. Do not peddle hearsays. Do not have your people 
 feel when you meet them, that you are a man that likes to converse 
 on personalities. Even innocent personalities one may have too 
 much of. Persons are immensely interesting to consider and 
 remark upon, but so are subjects and principles and general 
 movements, if you once get in the way of them. I had rather die 
 than spend my life in a perpetual dribble and run-about of 
 personalisms. It fritters your vigor. It fires your curiosity. It 
 takes you away from the grandeurs and tranquilizations of legiti- 
 mate subjects. It injures your serviceableness. It makes you the 
 depot into which the talking people all about feel called to bring 
 their chatter. It turns a man into everything that a minister ought not 
 to be. Keep still. When trouble is brewing, keep still. Whenslan- 
 der is getting on to its legs, keep still, When your feelings are hurt, 
 keep still, till you recover from your excitement at any rate. Things 
 look differently through an unagitated eye. Ina commotion once, I 
 wrote a letter; and sent it, and wished I had not. In my later 
 years I had another commotion, and wrote a long letter; but life: 
 had rubbed a little sense into me, and I kept that letter in my 
 pocket against the day when I could look it over without agitation, 
 and without tears. I was glad I did. Less and less it seemed 
 necessary to send it. I was not sure it would do any hurt, but in 
 my doubtfulness, I leaned to reticence, and eventually it was 
 destroyed. ‘Time works wonders. Wait till you can speak calmly, 
 and then you will not need to speak, may be. Silence is the most 
 massive thing conceivable, sometimes. It is strength in its very 
 grandeur. It is like a regiment ordered to stand still in the mid- 
 fury of battle. To plunge in were twice as easy. The tongue has 
 unsettled more ministers than small salaries ever did, or lack of 
 ability. 
 
 My last item of advice, I will name but not expand very much. 
 In your preaching you will be independent and courageous, and 
 have your people understand you cannot be suppressed where your 
 conscience is involved ; but through all this affirmative and down- 
 right habit of yours, this frankness of opinion, this freedom to speak 
 of their faults and their duties and their mistakes, they must be 
 made to see that, in your heart, you are an advisor and not a Pope; 
 that after you have spoken forth your word, and put in your influ- 
 ence, they are at liberty to hold their own opinions and go their 
 
YALE LECTURES. 137 
 
 own path ; having perfect assurance that you will not hector them, - 
 not fall out with them because they do so. My observation is, that 
 
 churches and congregations here in New England, will receive almost 
 
 anything from an honest and sensible man, provided they are con- 
 
 tinually sure of that one concession from him. Ministers sometimes 
 
 feel so responsible for their people, that they cannot let them alone 
 
 when they think or do what they cannot approve. “I must give an 
 
 account of them before God,” say these anxious men; and they 
 
 interfere, not in the large way of counsel only, but in pestering ways ; 
 
 in sputterings, in contrivings and stratagems, and pious circumven- 
 
 tions of their people, and affectionate irritabilities—the fidgeting of 
 anervous mother rather than the masculine largeness and repose of 
 a man who means to do his duty, and then fall back on God, and let 
 
 Him defend his own truth. 
 
 It is possible to carry great loads of loving anxiety for your fellow 
 men, and want them to do thus and so, tremendously, and preach 
 about it, and yet not let your desire carry you into pettifogging endeav- 
 ors, and puttering and lying awake nights, and seeming to have a con- 
 trary spirit, and a desire for your own way. A man in the leader- 
 ship and presidency of a parish, is in a position so responsible that 
 the longer he lives the more insufficient he feels ; but after he has 
 done his duty in an earnest and manly way, in any given case, the 
 responsibility passes over upon God, and upon that person, or that 
 people, to whom he has ministered, preached his sermons, re- 
 iterated and urged his doctrine, addressed his private entreaty, 
 and fairly exhibited his pastorly heart. 
 
 I have now finished my rules for getting along with parish in- 
 conveniences. And for your encouragement, I will say ;—I 
 personally know many ministers who are practical exponents of 
 these rules. And for your still farther encouragement, I will add, 
 I can point you to a large number of ministers who fail more or 
 less in some of the things I have mentioned, but who manage 
 parishes with large success nevertheless. They are weak at one or 
 two points ;—being too sensitive for example ;—but they are so 
 strong at all the other points, that when you come to add them up, 
 (and that is just what their parishes gradually do) ; their preaching, 
 their pastoring, their executive ability, their advisory weight and 
 skill, their felicity on special occasions, their shining qualities at a 
 genteel tea-party, their serviceableness in the affairs of the town, and 
 all the rest of their powers, faculties, attributes, and decorative 
 
138 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 uses ;—add them, I say, and get the sum of them—they are truly 
 men who, once settled in, over, and on, a congregation, can stay 
 there as long as a man is apt to care to stay anywhere in this 
 
 migratory generation. 
 
 
 
CEREMONIAL OCCASIONS. 
 
 I shall spend an hour with you this time on the ceremonial 
 occasions in which ministers are so often called to officiate. 
 
 I began life myself as an extreme anti-ceremonialist, and look- 
 ing back for some explanation of that, I find the following things to 
 have been true ;—and I mention them, because some of you may 
 be in the same darkness and misconception in which I was, and as 
 I have come out of it, and know why and how, I have a conceit 
 that, if I am speeded, I may at least start you out of it. Speaking 
 in a Congregational Seminary, I should not feel free to carry you 
 all off into downright Ritualism, if I could; but I do feel free to 
 give you some liturgical and ceremonial exhortations, it having been 
 unanimously agreed even by Congregational churches, that cere- 
 mony and order, in some kind and measure, are both necessary and 
 wholesome. 
 
 I think that my individualistic theorizings went a long way to 
 make me an enemy of ceremonies. If my personal relations to 
 God make the whole of religion for me, and all associational relig- 
 ious life is a profane intermeddling with my sacred privacies, of 
 course public religion and ceremonies are out of the question, for 
 they are associational ; they are a combination of numbers of per- 
 sons to do certain things together, in the same place, and at the 
 same time; their being in them throughout an implication that _ 
 religion is as much a manward thing as a Godward. When we 
 move in ceremonies, (I speak of religious ceremonies) we are after 
 three things; we seek the benefit to ourselves of self-expression ; 
 we seek the benefit to ourselves of the united expression of others, 
 by word or act or both ; in our presence ; and we seek a benefit for 
 others in the same two-fold way, they expressing themselves each 
 
 one and having the good of it, and at the same time having the 
 12 
 
140 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 immense good of seeing and hearing all the rest. In all this action 
 and interaction there is a combined movement on God, to be sure, 
 and a responsive movement on his part ; but what I expressly wish 
 to bring out is the intensely social and corporate character of all 
 ceremonializing. It is as completely opposed to individualism in its 
 absolute form, as anything can be; and in so far as a man is indi- 
 vidual and insular, he must abhor ceremonies ; and even Quakerism, 
 with its silentness, is too ceremonious for him. 
 
 Another dissuasive from ceremonials which had much strength 
 with me, as it has with millions more, was the tendency of such 
 things to Formalism ; that instinctive make-shift of the human soul 
 when it would seem pious without being it. I thought, the more 
 ceremony is amplified, the more inevitably will formalism get in— 
 so that our only safety is to back off from the whole thing into 
 speechlessness, and non-expression, so far as practicable. Particu- 
 larly in the case of ministers, I said that ceremonies full, sonorous, 
 and spectacular, must be disadvantageous. They (the ministers) 
 stand at the head of the multitude, the major-generals of the occa- 
 sion, their voice leading all the voices, their pantomime leading all 
 the pantomimes, and they swollen with the same feeling that a rud- 
 der must have when, by the least motion of its own little self, the 
 great bulk of the great ship is made to sway. And I think even 
 yet that there is a considerable force of self-consciouness and strut 
 in this officialism, if the minister does not look out for himself. I 
 have felt it in the plain and modest liturgies and pomps of my own 
 congregation. 
 
 Another thing that condemned ceremonials for me, was their 
 unwieldiness when we want to move out aggressively upon the mas- 
 ses, the non-church goers, and the mighty multitudes and majori- 
 ties who have never been schooled in ceremonies, do not know 
 their meanings, and look upon them therefore as an elaborated 
 pomposity in the main. 
 
 Also I was averse to ceremonials, because I was, soul, body 
 and spirit, part and parcel of a democratic social order. In a state 
 of society where the theory is, and the feeling is, that one man is as 
 good as another, it is unavoidable that ceremoniousness between 
 man and man will decline ; manners will simplify ; obeisances, saluta- 
 tions and the innumerable forms of elaborate respect, will be 
 abridged ;—officials will be inaugurated in simple ways, and after 
 they are inaugurated will not be hedged about by awful observances ; 
 
YALE LECTURES. 14] 
 
 they can be approached without a half hour spent in formalities, 
 and they can be spoken to in ordinary respectable English and 
 even in slang if the visitor does not know any better, rather than in 
 the inflated adulation of an Oriental court; while the costume 
 you wear on the august occasion, may be according to your own 
 fancy pretty much. 
 
 Well, in this decadence of stateliness and high-wrought gen- 
 tility and formalism, under the influence of the democratic idea, 
 the people fall out of the habit of ceremony and the relish of it, 
 so that even when they pass into the field of religion and approach 
 the Most High God, and make up rounds of worship wherein they 
 shall operate together in congregations and in multitudes, they dis- 
 incline to detail, copiousness, resonance and pomp ; and trust to a 
 few plain things. 
 
 If any of you, my Brethren, are cordially averse to ceremony, 
 I presume you have felt now, as I have passed on in the explana- 
 tions, that I was touching the depths of your case. Very well, how 
 did I get out of these depths. I think that being a minister, and 
 being compelled to speak and act and officiate, and go on parade 
 sometimes, whether I wanted to or no, (as at weddings for example), 
 demoralized me somewhat and made me feel that creatures of sense 
 may reasonably indulge in a spare amount of form. What was said 
 of error, may be said of ceremonies :— 
 
 Seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
 We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 
 
 _ And this movement of mine was assisted by the plain failure 
 before my eyes of individualism, when applied to life. I saw that 
 individualism amounts to the dissolution of society and a practi- 
 cal nullification of the second great commandment :—‘ Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor as thyself.”” It cannot be defended. Moreover, 
 I saw that all Christian bodies had consented to ceremony and were 
 in it ;—some of them all over,—so that the question :—“ Shall we 
 have ceremony?” has been decided by the common sense of man- 
 kind ; the sanctified common sense and the unsanctified ; the only © 
 question remaining to discuss being the quantity and the quality ot 
 the thing. The only Christians that undertake not to consent to 
 ceremony are the Quakers; and with what success I will answer. 
 The two forms in which ceremony embodies itself are, words and 
 gestures or acts, said words and gestures being assisted to be all 
 they can be by our various surroundings. Our Quaker brethren have 
 
142 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 gone in on those two points with all their might and have given us 
 public services without architecture and the colors of art, without 
 ecclesiastical costume, without music, without formal and united 
 acts, and often without one word spoken ; nevertheless I never felt 
 myself under such an incubus of ceremoniousness as in their assem- 
 blies. In the first place, their worship is evidently a prescribed 
 thing ; no such result as that worship of theirs could come of any- 
 thing but a conspiracy ; and the moment a service is prescribed, it 
 begins to take on a formal character. Let one of our Congrega- 
 tional churches, accustomed to worship in the unpompous old- 
 fashioned way, do so simple a thing as to print its order of service 
 and put it in the pews, thus notifying mankind that it has an order, 
 and does not move in pure spontaneity ; and that act is distinctly 
 formalizing in its influence. It originated in an increase of the 
 liturgical spirit in that church and it fosters that spirit. So the 
 Quakers. That service of theirs is carefully and rigidly fore- 
 ordained ; and you feel that it is fore-ordained all through you, 
 when you sit in it; and you are ritualized to that extent. That, in 
 the first place, I say. 
 
 Next, while they repudiate vestments, they are costumed in an 
 almost more than fore-ordinated uniform ;—a religious uniform, 
 because although they wear it on all social occasions yet it is put 
 on from a religious impulse and for religious purposes, as much so 
 as the solemn robes of a nun. 
 
 Next, they are massed in their meeting-house in a certain 
 noticeable order, men together and women together, and dignitaries 
 together always ; as much ordered, thus and so, as the guests at a 
 state dinner with a king. And those artificial rows of human 
 beings work an effect on the mind of a sensitive beholder precisely 
 like the effect of that elaborated action which you see in ritualistic 
 assemblies. 
 
 And next, their silences are immensely vocal, so far as all the 
 ends of impression are concerned ;—and are meant to be. They 
 are a powerful preaching of their particular doctrine of the Inner 
 Light ; that, at least. I do not think of any way in which it could 
 be better preached than by resolutely sitting still and waiting for it. 
 They thus eloquently say :—-God in the mind is indispensable, and 
 all utterance on religion without him is mere human forwardness 
 and very near an awful crime ; moreover, to have God in the mind 
 is feasible and to be looked for. That is very loud doctrine, even 
 
YALE LECTURES. 143 
 
 if they adopt a silent form of saying it. I beg you to believe that 
 I do not say these things as disposed to fault that excellent body of 
 Christians. I am only earnest to show that non-ceremoniousness 
 may put itself forth in a powerfully ceremonious manner, and may 
 even get to itself the whole essence of formalism in a formal, com- 
 bined effort to put formalism down. I believe that is often done ;— 
 and not alone among Quakers. 
 
 ‘Here I am liable to be asked :—Why should we desire to 
 increase Form, if the whole effect of Form can be secured under 
 usages uncomplex and bare, as in the case of Quakers. To that I 
 reply :—There are many truths and many feelings that cannot be 
 expressed by a silent sitting in premeditated rows, and other like 
 simplicities. Neither can we get full expression for our myriad- 
 minded selves, even through words, to whatever extent they are 
 multiplied. A great advance in expression is made when words are 
 joined to music and they together, carry a theme. I am not 
 going to say anything against the possibilities of expression and 
 impression that are in preaching ; but I have been made to know a 
 thousand times in my own experience that music can beat us all, 
 especially in its play on the feelings and in its power to voice the 
 feelings. 
 
 But in addition to words and music, we need ceremonial 
 actions and routines of action, in order to a really complete formu- 
 lation of ourselves and a full stroke on our sensibilities. The Inner 
 Light is profoundly worth preaching, but so are the Incarnation, 
 and the Cross, and the Resurrection, and Regeneration, and a score 
 more ; and they never get preached in their full strength and with 
 its own proportionate emphasis on each one, except through a cere- 
 monial that has variety, and amplitude and the completeness of 
 real art. You do not like to have me speak that word Art in con- 
 nection with worship, but I speak it because I know that expression 
 is an art, and in any case where expression is not thoroughly artistic 
 in the sense of thoroughly conformed to the established laws of art, 
 in its structure and organization, as also even in so secondary and 
 superficial a matter as its ornamentation, if it has any, there is a 
 failure as respects those great substantial uses which expression seeks 
 to secure. 
 
 These are some of the reasons why I have come to see some 
 sense in ceremony. Being a religious official I had to see some 
 sense in it, or leave the ministry. Being brought to see that indi- 
 
144 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 vidualism, as I held it, was practically un-Christian, and that asso- 
 ciated worship is as important as private worship, there was nothing 
 left for me but to fall into the ceremonies by which alone associated 
 worship can formulate itself; especially in any complete and bal- 
 anced formulation. Being brought to see that the minimum of 
 form does not necessarily imply the minimum of Formalism, and 
 that ample Form does not necessarily imply a corresponding ampli- 
 tude of Formalism, but that we may have Formalism in its entire 
 spirit, its entire self-obfuscation, pride, and curse, under a ritual 
 whose one boast and joy is that itis not a ritual at all ; being brought 
 to see these things demonstrated in life, and demonstrated by rea- 
 sonings on the motive of the case, as well as readings in the Bible, 
 I was not disobedient to my light, but succumbed ; and there stay. 
 
 As to the unwieldiness of an expanded ritual for purposes of 
 propagandism among the un-Christianized, all I have to say is that 
 those Christian bodies, if there be any which will not go out to the 
 battles of the Lord except as accoutred just so always, must suffer 
 the disadvantage of their own stiffness. I am not familiar with all 
 communions, but I have an idea that Romanism, with all its devo- 
 tion to externalism and precision, has generalship enough to limber 
 itself to the circumstances of almost any situation, so that while in 
 St. Peter’s she will give you a first-class specimen of ritual, with all 
 possible accessories for the eye and the esthetic sense, she will also 
 on occasion strip herself of these and stand out bare in fighting 
 trim, absolutely unencumbered and athletic. When I was in her 
 queen city, Rome, Sunday after Sunday in the afternoons, I heard 
 her much praised orator, Father Tom Burke, address a large assem- 
 bly in English, on the points of controversy between Romanism 
 and Protestantism ;—and I recollect this admirable fact, that the 
 time spent in ritualizing us was not so long as a good, solid Con- 
 gregational long prayer. At the end of that brief prelude the priest 
 went into the pulpit and argued with us for an hour. That was 
 sense. We were not there and were not invited there to see 
 Romanism in the full glory of her ceremonial, but to be labored 
 upon by the reason, and Father Burke confined himself to the busi- 
 ness of the occasion. Let us have ceremony, but let us be all 
 things to all. 
 
 With respect to the dislike of ceremony among democratic 
 peoples; while the decline of ceremony between man and man 
 may be admissible, on the ground that ranks are abolished and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 145 
 
 every man is as important as his neighbor ; surely it is no inconsist- 
 ency to magnify ceremonial, when we come to Him to whom all 
 earthly personages are less than nothing and vanity. 
 
 You have noticed thus far that while I have shown myself not 
 unfavorable to ceremony, I have not undertaken to make precise 
 statements as to the amount of it that we, non-liturgical people, 
 were well better admit. My opinion is, that there is a preparedness 
 in the Congregational mind (let me speak of that as being ac- 
 quainted with it) for a ceremonial advance in two directions ; 
 namely, in the quality of what ceremony we already have, and in 
 the quantity of it. Better, and more of it, that is the idea. First, 
 better. 
 
 Under that head, I can hardly speak my whole mind without 
 seeming ungracious. I continually admire the liturgical success of 
 my clerical brethren under the difficulties of their situation. The 
 one gigantic difficulty is the habitual extemporization to which they 
 are committed. It is required of them—that is, the ideal of Chris- 
 tian worship requires of them, as do also the congregations as they 
 advance in the graces of civilization—that they make their worship- 
 ful utterances and lead the people in lucid English, in orderly 
 English, in simple English, in solid English, in English sufficiently 
 copious and yet not jejune, in English that knows how to stop int 
 ten minutes at the most and yet that can in that time sweep the 
 circuit of the entire creation ; in unrepetitious English, in English 
 that while it is standard and beyond substantial criticism, is so far 
 suffused with the personality of the author, his thought and his feel- 
 ing, that it is fresh and relishable ; in English that recollects both 
 God and the congregation, but in recollecting the congregation does 
 not succumb and make a speech instead of a prayer; in English that 
 ranges the entire assembly sympathetically and gathers up the 
 thoughts of many hearts and the burdens of many souls and car- 
 ries the whole to the Heavenly Father in a true intercession; in an 
 English, in short, which no mortal ever spoke extemporaneously, 
 except in good moods and in good wafts of the Holy Spirit. And — 
 even then the moods and wafts may be so good as to carry him 
 along into an affluence which seems redundant and protracted to 
 unsympathetic sinners. The demand for the best is growing, I say. 
 The real best—not the artificial best. No slovenliness of utterance. 
 No bad grammar. No untasteful allusions. No words with over- 
 mundane associations clinging to them. No colloquialisms. No 
 
146 ‘YALE LECTURES. 
 
 free-and-easiness in the presence of the Most High. No senti- 
 mentalism of religious affection. No windiness of self-conscious 
 rhetoric. No listening to the modulations of your own voice. No 
 rages, as though you could not hold in your own Godly emotions. 
 No dreariness and soliloquizing instead of praying. No lashing 
 yourself up to a hypocritical animation. No personalities. No 
 photographic description of all the virtues of the deceased in your 
 prayer at funerals, and no extended recognition of all his relatives. 
 
 And while you are careful of your speech, you must be careful 
 how you act. I saw Mr. Spurgeon officiate at the Lord’s Supper, 
 seated throughout and with his two legs lifted into a neighboring 
 chair. I did not ask him whether it was the gout that did that, or 
 his preliminary few words of talk on the fact that Christ’s last Pass- 
 over was a familiar meal whereat the participants half reclined. I 
 do not criticise him ; but you must behave, where you are master of 
 ceremonies. I was at an ornate and numerous wedding in a church 
 where the officiating minister stood cater-cornered to the bride and 
 groom, instead of in absolute face-to-face. He should have been 
 
 more ceremonious. Perhaps he did not like the very considerable 
 
 show before him and took that way to sayso. Perhaps he had 
 been wont to assume irregular attitudes in his pulpit, by way of get- 
 ting himself into liberty. Perhaps he did not care how he stood, 
 and having happened to strike that sidelong position at the begin- 
 ning, kept it; a little thing. But we had better care. 
 
 I was told of a Congregational minister who would place his 
 hat on the communion table always when he passed into the pulpit, 
 and of a remote deacon (a Baptist he happened to be) who was 
 seen to bring the bread of communion to the church in his pocket 
 handkerchief and cut it with his jack-knife ; and I have officiated 
 in a few churches where, when I said 4¢ us pray, to my amaze- 
 ment almost no one bowed, so little sense of ceremony had the 
 Christians there ; all of which cases and forty more I would men- 
 tion as strong illustrations of what unceremoniousness or lack of 
 the ceremonial feeling may lead to. The gravity of these misde- 
 meanors lies right there, in their lack of ceremonial feeling. The 
 minister who liked to have his hat stand on the consecrated table 
 and who was driven out of his parish, at last, in a quarrel that 
 started in that persistent act of his, was not a sacramentalist, you 
 may be sure; he did not believe in Formalism but in a spiritual 
 religion. What is a table ?—so much wood fashioned into a certain 
 
 a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 147 
 
 shape by a carpenter ;—and what are bread and wine and why 
 should there be any particular parade over them? What they sig- 
 nify is important, but they are simply bread and wine, and no act 
 of any official can make them more than that. So ran his mind 
 doubtless, and any act of minor irreverence which he committed, 
 was a growth from his unceremonialism. Not every unceremonial- 
 ist will violate decorum and come short of the full ideal in his 
 ceremonial ministrations, in really gross ways; but in lesser ways 
 they all are apt to fail. Many men have not the ceremonial instinct 
 in them strong enough to really get into the meaning of a service, 
 —and if they are not thus in the service they are sure to blunder 
 in conducting it. Take prayer. Prayer has in it certain essential 
 elements. It is made up of confession, intercession, and kindred 
 ideas, and the minister knowing that, has a perpetual guide in his 
 public outpourings ; and while in any given prayer he may press 
 confession, or thanksgiving, or some other one part, more than he 
 does the other parts ; take him year by year, he is sure not to vio- 
 late the proportions of things and lead his people in the line of a 
 one-sided culture. He knows what prayer is, constituently, and 
 thus his knowledge of the ideal is his constant safeguard. 
 
 Or take a whole service, in its many particulars. Those par- 
 ticulars are to be thrown in together in some sort of order, but why 
 in one order more than another? Why should the sermon come 
 here, and not there? If there are three or four prayers in the ser- 
 vice, how should they differ from each other? Should they differ 
 at all? Should a Christian service move towards a climax, like that 
 supreme and awful moment in the Roman mass when the Host is 
 elevated? Is there any natural crisis in our communion service, or 
 any gradation of interest whatsoever—or shail we strike the major 
 chord of the occasion, and strike it with all our might, when we 
 first open our lips, and spend the rest of the hour in just a tiresome 
 reiteration of that main stroke? , 
 
 So in a wedding. What is a wedding? We stand up and 
 some transaction is to be gone through with. What we are after is 
 plain enough. We intend to make that man before us, and that 
 woman, one for life. But that end is to be made sure by a certain 
 complex formality ; quite complex, if it be looked into enough. 
 What are those complexities—exactly? A prayer is to come in, 
 one or more, probably. Well, how much of possible prayer shall be 
 let into that prayer? Shall you spread abroad upon the general 
 
ee 
 —— 
 
 148 ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 themes of the Christian Salvation? Some officiators seem to feel 
 that all the great topics they may omit, are thereby dishonored. So 
 they aim always to at least allude to those momenta, no matter what 
 the occasion nor how specifically limited. And that is the reason 
 that prayers on express occasions are often so enormously spun out. 
 
 I once saw a minister baptize a child; and what did he do? 
 Do? As near nothing as possible. I suppose he baptized it, 
 because he sprinkled the little head with water and repeated the 
 customary Triune sentence. And he did offer a prayer one minute 
 in length. But he spoke the formula and he spoke the prayer in 
 a tone that had no atmosphere about it, it was as bare of sugges- 
 tiveness and magnetism as the human voice could be when recit- 
 ing a table of statistics. I say,that minister had not studied the 
 significance of infant baptism and gone into the subject so that he 
 could see it from the inside, the vast inside. If he had, he would 
 have swelled a little and vibrated ; and not merely would he have 
 personally dilated, but he would have been inclined to swell his 
 ceremony most likely, by certain quite feasible additions. Suppos- 
 ing he had called on his choir to chant :—“ Suffer little children to 
 come unto me and forbid them not ;”’ or supposing he had himself 
 read that passage. Supposing he had said a few words to the 
 parents. Supposing he had expanded his curt prayer to include 
 the undeniable items and ground facts of child-baptism. Supposing 
 he had Romanized the occasion to the extent of half a dozen inno- 
 cent little particulars which I might name, winding up with a suita- 
 ble shout from the choir—yes a shout: “Glory be to the Father, 
 and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost!” For what in all life more 
 deserves to be shouted over, than such a scene as that, with its 
 unutterable, tender and glorious implications. 
 
 What I am insisting on.all along here is, that ministers need 
 to perceive the real contents of a service or ceremony before they 
 can be trusted to conduct it. Except as they grasp the rationale 
 of it, they are likely to mar it, any minute. They put in imperti- 
 nences, or leave out pertinences, or shackle along under the law of 
 haphazard, or their movement is a hitchetty-hitch when it should 
 be flowing. How much there is in that last! A service often will 
 have pauses in it and misjoints that amount to breaks and jolts 
 and are to you like riding over a rough road ;—the clergyman and 
 his choir do not lap on to each other perfectly ;—he does a thing, 
 and then they do something, and then he does something else, and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 149 
 
 the transitions from thing to thing are jerky ; whereas they ought 
 to be like the silent flow of curves. Or the minister and the peo- 
 ple, take up the Psalter responsively and the two do not seem to be 
 in the same key of feeling; they operate independently of each 
 other; he and they responding should make a melodious oscilla- 
 tion, whereas it is crank-work they are in, more nearly—and he is 
 responsible for it ;—for if he really understood his service and had 
 a good warm ceremonial consciousness and enjoyment of cere- 
 mony, a delight in seeing it move according to its own instinct (for, 
 evermore, ceremony because it is ceremony, likes to move off 
 beautifully and impressively), then these infelicities in his service 
 would not appear, he would get himself and his choir settled to- 
 gether in a close co-ordination, and he would pull his people out of 
 their mechanicalism by the inspiration of his voice and the elan of 
 his leadership. 
 
 Our non-liturgical churches more and more demand these 
 gifts in ministers—I say again. ‘They want their traditional forms 
 made the most of. They want them to be operated in a cultivated 
 manner. It is as easy to save souls in the use of good English, as 
 bungling English ; in the use of good taste as coarse taste, in the 
 enjoyment of an ordered and commanding ritual as in the enjoy- 
 ment of a ritual whose pride it is to be no ritual, but spontaneity 
 and lawlessness. 
 
 If there is among us this desire that our inheritance of Forms 
 be used in the best manner, it is to be looked for also that our peo- 
 ple will tolerate some addition to our old forms. I believe they 
 will. They are doing it in many churches. They are ready to 
 make a great deal more of music than the Fathers did. They see, 
 as they were not used to, that music is a substantial element in 
 worship, and not a mere decoration and a dangerous one. The 
 old plain hymn tune that anybody can sing is good, and countless 
 souls have been helped on by their privilege in that plain work ; but 
 music that nobody can sing save a trained vocalist, may also be 
 good—first-rate—and if the choir and their minister can start a 
 back-and-forth between them, wherein some godly theme shall be 
 tossed to and fro in a manner to make it shine and show all its 
 phases, that also is first-rate and fascinating ;—and if the congrega- 
 tion please to make a unison movement on some creed that they 
 like, or on the Lord’s Prayer, that is good ;—and if they enjoy 
 handling the scriptures responsively, there is no hurt in that ;—and 
 
150 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 if they want to flush the ceremony of the Holy Supper with some 
 new colors and extend its particulars till they fill the whole time of 
 the Sunday morning, as feeling that a rite so central and so stocked 
 with holy and tender meanings, and so full of grace for sinful men, 
 will bear a whole morning put upon it ; very well, let them expand ; 
 there is nothing uncongregational in that. And if. they abjure bar- 
 ren baptisms, both infant and adult ;—and if in this advance of 
 ceremony in ordinary worship their extraordinary occasions begin 
 to advance ; their weddings, their funerals, their dedications, their 
 anniversaries, their days of Easter and Christmas and the like ; it is 
 no wonder and who can prove there is any disadvantage in it? I 
 select these illustrations from what I have seen among our people 
 in these latter years. I was at a communion service recently in 
 one of our own churches, which went on in this manner: ‘There 
 were various exercises of a general nature, which consumed more 
 than half an hour. They were general, as not taking the assembly 
 into the very heart and full stress of the Supper; and yet they 
 artfully and sweetly preluded the Supper. Then the minister 
 descended to the table and read that rich passage in Isaiah :—‘ He 
 was despised and rejected of men,” the choir chanting the alter- 
 nate sentences in a quiet minor movement ;—which minor move- 
 ment rose into something more joyful as the minister led on into 
 sentences of invitation :—‘‘ Come unto me all ye that labor and are 
 heavy laden,” and the like. Then a short address was read from 
 the Communion office of a certain branch of the Christian church, 
 also the history of the institution of the Supper from the same 
 Office. Then an extemporaneous prayer was offered, not two min- 
 utes long ;—-a prayer of consecration strictly. It could be thus 
 brief because it simply asked God to turn those natural elements, 
 there offered to him, to a divine use. Then the bread was broken 
 and distributed in silence ; and after that, while the minister filled 
 the cup, the choir chanted in a subdued and refined passage: “O, 
 the sweet wonders of that.Cross, where my Redeemer loved and 
 died.” The cup was passed, and then the minister moved forth 
 into a large and free range of prayer, through every word of which 
 though, you could hear, now near and now afar off, the tone of 
 Christ’s mediatorial passion. There was a considerable mention of 
 persons and classes, and among the rest an express commendation 
 of the departed, made express by a preliminary noticeable pause, a 
 dropping of the voice, and a use of the beautiful collect for All 
 
YALE LECTURES. 151 
 
 Saints’ Day in the Protestant Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. 
 Then all stood up and chanted together in a full, unanimous out- 
 pouring, the good. words of the Gloria in Excelsis ;—‘“ Glory be to 
 God on high, and on earth, peace, good will towards men.” And 
 the service closed with the benediction. 
 
 Now let alone the exact philosophy of that Order, and even 
 admit if you want to, that it was untruly organized here or there, 
 you can see in it.a tendency towards ritual liturgical touches, coy 
 dallyings with Form, longings to get the Supper out into a generous 
 statement ;—and you can see, I submit, how practicable, harmless 
 and serviceable, well-managed dallyings may be. And this kind 
 of thing is going on all about, and is permitted to go on and will 
 be; and you, young gentlemen, are going out into this world to 
 favor it, or to oppose it. My hope is that you will favor it, and 
 direct it and make it reasonable. 
 
 I have indulged myself in two lectures to you on Imagination 
 in ministers, as theologians and as sermonizers—I hope you will not 
 feel totally worn out with that word, if I gratify myself a little once 
 more, and conclude this hour with the thought that no man can 
 manage ceremony as it deserves to be managed, except as he enters 
 into it imaginatively. 
 
 Take a wedding. The atmosphere of the occasion requires 
 some suffusiveness and glow on the part of the minister ; and mag- 
 nanimity—magnus, animus—a mind sized up to the height of the 
 hour. Well, how shall he be sized up, that poor, limited mortal? 
 In one way only ;—by a solar vision of the tremendous contents 
 of a wedding. The flowers and the music and the gorgeous 
 costumes, and the showy bridal procession, and the manifold 
 pulsation, are a brilliant notice served on him that the occasion 
 has contents ; but it is a notice addressed to his imagination, chiefly. 
 It is an occasion of delight, of anticipation, of memory, too, of 
 uncertainty, of solemn and tender certainty ; the whole preceding 
 life of the parties concerned is in it and their whole coming life 
 and their eternity ; there is in it their youthful view of the act and 
 also the parental view, also the rather numerous views of the emo- 
 tional spectators manifested in nameless out-bubblings, great and 
 small ;—it is a time of delights and it is a time of tears ;—and a 
 clergyman who stands in front of all this, without the faculty to 
 read these glittering signs and signals hung out, without the faculty 
 to enter realistically into the feelings of the parties and all parties, 
 
152 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and create the occasion from the interior, is a sad piece of insuffi- 
 ciency. He may make some observations, he may proceed to invent 
 a prayer produced:from the depths of his own unperceiving mind, a — 
 prayer born of hearsay as to what it probably ought to be at such a 
 time ; or he may assist himself by a printed ceremony which he 
 reads ; but all he does fails to rhyme with the surroundings ;—he is 
 outside of the surroundings, and they are outside of him ;—he is 
 Mr. Gradgrind consciously discharging a function, but this specta- 
 cle has no Gradgrind element in it; his tone as he reads that 
 printed page is literal and colorless, and the liturgic page therefore 
 is outraged—what are those old offices in the books, in reality? 
 printer’s ink and white paper spread out? forms of far-away hear- 
 say? is that the whole account? No. In these carefully preserved 
 and dear forms, we have, first, a pretty entire condensation and 
 practical digest of the main realities of the several occasions which 
 they profess to voice; and besides that, a sound of foregone ages, 
 a mighty murmur of assemblies back and back, tones of the living, 
 tones of the dead, holy offices are they verily, most plural, plenary, 
 mystical and immeasurable, and the voice of the clergyman who 
 officiates in them must in some measure show this plenitude of 
 things, else they are robbed, and a wedding or a funeral, or any- 
 thing else, that tries to get itself spoken forth through them is 
 defeated and comes forth in insufferable abridgements, mutilations, 
 and unvoluminous and unrotund pretenses of utterance. So have I 
 myself heard these forms dishonored by individual clergymen, 
 even in liturgical churches ;—and, parallel to this, I have heard 
 extemporized forms made to labor in the same disability ; the fun- 
 damental infirmity in the whole business being that the clergyman 
 could not be a bit inflamed in his imagination. 
 
 It might seem that an occasion so sombre as a funeral, does not 
 give much range for this bright faculty, these visions, and these crea- 
 tive flights. Imagination is not a bright faculty, any more than 
 memory is, or reason, or conscience. They are all bright or dark, 
 according to the ranges in which they happen to be called to fly. 
 See Dante, see Milton, with a gravity deep as the grave, when treat- 
 ing grave things. See all great poets when they address themselves 
 to that thing of glooms and gleams, human life. The truth is, Imag- 
 ination is essentially serious and, in her utmost blithesomeness, there 
 is never a touch of levity. A funeral has its imaginative tokens, its 
 symbols and vocal signs, its various externals very stimulating to a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 153 
 
 perceiving and responsive person ; and it were long to tell (too long) 
 into what realms of vastness and shadow these externals lead back ; 
 —but quite as much into realms of illumination is he led back who 
 has the faculty to be led, when standing by the dead and among 
 the sorrowful; and an unimaginative mind proclaims itself by an 
 excessive and monotonous lugubriousness in these scenes of lam- 
 entation, as often as in any other way. A funeral occasion has in 
 it certain elements, or contents, mixed contents, as I have said ; 
 and the secret of ceremonial fulness, propriety, flow, and satisfying 
 completeness all around, is just to get at, grasp, and master, those 
 elements. In full possession of those data, in conscious and 
 emotional possession of them, you are released from the bondage of 
 fear, fear of man, fear that you will hurt some bleeding heart, fear 
 that you will make some infelicitous allusion, fear that some word 
 will fall from you that is not in absolute taste, fear that you will 
 express yourself more joyfully than you ought, in view of the fact 
 that several persons just about you are not joyful at all ;—and when 
 you come to read your suitable Scriptures, you interpret them in 
 your reading according to their greatness; by your cadence, your 
 in and out of inflection, the tranquil warmth and fulness of your 
 tone, or perchance by your march of energy—by all those subtle 
 tokens whereby the human mind declares its thoughts and emo- 
 tions, with their innumerable shadings and vicissitudes. 
 
 What I have said of weddings and funerals, applies to all cere- 
 monies. ‘Their true impressiveness is violated if you do not use 
 them in an ideal way. ‘The Protestant Episcopal service begins :— 
 “ Dearly beloved ’””—what! all those undeveloped and miserably 
 flawed and often personally disagreeable saints out there in the 
 assembly, dearly beloved! How can the man say that! Some of 
 them are dearly beloved, easily enough. Anybody can see that. 
 But the rest of them, scattered about! How can he? 
 
 That is good reasoning, is it not? I used to deal with that 
 affectionate expression in that way, and many do. But now I can 
 say ;—dearly beloved, to.all church people and to all mankind, and . 
 it does not wrench my sincere conscience, at all. I like to say it. 
 When I say, dearly beloved, I address the Church ideal—I speak to 
 those imperfect people as potentially and prophetically perfect, and 
 perfectly lovable, by the inworking, sure grace of God. I imagi- 
 natively impute to them the excellence of their coming better day. 
 I see them in Christ Jesus just as their God does. I address Him 
 
154 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 in them. I do it not by a sophistication of my own faculties. 
 Imputation is not sophistication, but a four-square reality, a reality 
 of the imagination, a valid, instinctive, and inevitable movement of 
 feeling. 
 
 And Christian worship is full of these imaginings ;—these 
 glorious and glorifying imaginings. All men are dearly beloved on 
 the same principle. Jesus bore them all in his own body on the 
 tree, and they are redeemed,—and, seeing them as redeemed, I can- 
 not avoid a warmth towards them. It is his warmth reproduced in 
 me and mine is as valid and rational as his. Jesus loves them with 
 a love of pity because they are so imperfect—that is so—but he 
 loves them with a love of admiration also, looking forward to the 
 beauty of holiness to which they may come, by force of redemp- 
 tion and redeeming grace. I might show you this same instinctive 
 play of ideality, here and there, through the whole liturgy. The 
 service corruscates with it. And it is the one thing that sustains 
 ceremonial, and makes it other than a hollow thing. When Richard 
 Cobden died, the Earl of Beaconsfield, in the English House of 
 Commons, delivered a memorial eulogy on him—which I read with 
 admiration. It was only a few minutes long, but it rose to the 
 occasion as no other speech on Cobden then and there did. John 
 Bright tried, but his grief broke him down. Beaconsfield saw Cob- 
 den in his whole magnitude and in his whole remarkable quality, 
 and he saw Cobden’s industrious, manly, and fruitful life ; he saw 
 mourning England ; he saw the great, sad, irreparable vacancy in 
 the world made by that death ; and in masterly vision and compre- 
 hension, of all the several realities of the occasion, he spoke ; and 
 the utterance was adequate and memorable. 
 
 There are many things that we call occasions. The assembly 
 in our National House of Representatives, in memory of President 
 Garfield, when Mr. Blaine spoke so well, was one. When Wash- 
 ington bade Congress farewell and surrendered his sword, there was 
 another. When Luther met the Diet at Worms, when England tried 
 Warren Hastings, when Lincoln spoke on the field of Gettysburg, 
 when Chalmers and his friends left the General Assembly of Scot- 
 land, when Frederick Robertson looked down from the gallery o 
 the theatre at Oxford and saw William Wordsworth come in to 
 receive an honorary degree in a tumult of the multitude that almost 
 shook the Island: these were occasions, and all of us are likely to 
 be overtaken by such, and possibly pushed into the forefront of 
 
YALE LECTURES. 155 
 
 them, as their orator or their master of ceremonies. And what I 
 say is, that some men are good for an occasion, and some are not ; 
 —those that are being made so (other things being equal), by 
 their large-minded, high-minded, fine-minded, hundred-eyed, intui- 
 tive, ideal, imaginative comprehension of the exact facts of the 
 moment. And religious ceremonies are no otherwise than secular 
 ceremonies, in this regard. A minister at the sacred table needs 
 just Beaconsfield’s ability to enter into the situation. Some men 
 will dedicate a church in a manner to change your feeling towards 
 that building forever ;—or they will excommunicate a church mem- 
 ber with a similar impressive ceremoniousness—or they will receive 
 a deputation or address an outgoing regiment in the name of God ; 
 or ordain a deacon ; or consecrate a field of graves, or welcome a 
 world’s Evangelical Alliance, or voice the good-by of a great con- 
 gregation looking for the last time on some trans-Atlantic visitor— 
 as when Bishop Simpson, in the name of American Methodism 
 in New York assembled, poured out a valedictory on Dean Stanley 
 —it does not make much difference what they are called to (these 
 ceremonial men) ; they know how to distil into their speech the 
 entire spirit of the hour, with its multiplied circumstances ;—they 
 may be very simple, they may be robed in no official dress, whether 
 lawn, powdered wig, cocked hat, or priestly stole, they may read 
 out of no book, but out of their mind only; they may eschew 
 sounding titles and all pomps of conventionality. Nevertheless 
 they have great effect on all witnesses, as having visibly gathered up 
 into their minds whatever goes to make the occasion ;—gathered it 
 up for their own enlargement at the moment and their aggrandize- 
 ment of feeling, and for the ennoblement of their diction. 
 
 Great is this gift in the house of God. Happyis the man who 
 always sees and feels the import of a. Christian service. Blessed 
 is he who cannot be staled by routine ;—who feels the pathos of his 
 last baptism as much as he felt the pathos of his first—and more— 
 who never goes to a burial but the whole burden of it and the 
 whole consolation are on him; who officiates at the Lord’s Supper 
 for the ten hundredth time with the tides of Calvary in undiminished 
 flow about him; who lifts all ceremony into the ideal—who takes 
 whatsoever of noble architecture, or noble music, or pictorial 
 beauty, may happen to surround him in his service, and weaves it 
 into the texture of his feeling, as harmonious with his soul’s holiest 
 experiences and indeed serviceable thereto ; while he moves before 
 
 13 
 
156 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 his people, and with his people, in the endless rounds of his office ; 
 simulating in little and so far as he may that other and perfect 
 worship, into which all our ceremonies shall merge at last. 
 
HAE RIGHT CONDUCT :OF 
 PUBLIC WORSHIP. 
 
 My Brethren, I am here to-day to address you on a theme 
 which you have heard discussed before, with more or less fulness, I 
 suppose. Nevertheless, I speak right on, as knowing that the multi- 
 plication of witnesses on any given point of truth may be a service- 
 able thing, especially if the witnesses have had a good deal of 
 experience of that whereof they affirm, and out of their experience 
 have managed to thoroughly make up their minds. 
 
 You will observe as I pass forward, that I understand myself to 
 be addressing a body of young men, the larger number of whom by 
 far are expecting to take service in non-liturgical churches, churches 
 of the sort with which I myself have been connected all my days ; 
 though let me say, I shall distinctly avoid any special comparison 
 between the worship of our churches and that of the more liturgical 
 and ritualistic bodies. I have almost any amount of fellowship with 
 them and could discuss their ways with entire candor and geniality, 
 I fancy; however, I do not feel myself called to that on this 
 occasion. 
 
 When we speak of Public Worship, we mean often the entire 
 service of the Sanctuary; but I shall use the word a little more | 
 strictly to-day, and shall exclude the sermon, as not in exact defini- 
 tion, worship. ‘The sermon is a subject by itself, and a large one 
 too. And first, let me consider the prayers, of which in our usage, 
 there are three ;—the invocation, the central and main prayer (often 
 described with fearful truth, as the long prayer,) and the closing one. 
 And concerning these three, I remark to begin with: That they 
 should be kept distinct—absolutely so, as a rule—in the minister’s 
 
158 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 theory of them and in his practice; and that for several reasons. 
 First, in the structure and philosophy of our service they do cover 
 different fields. They are not intended to lap each other, much less 
 to be mixed together in a total chaos; the long prayer being the 
 invocation over again, for the reason that the invocation swept the 
 entire possible range of prayer; and the closing prayer being a 
 reproduction of both, only with a certain necessary brevity. That 
 is not the theory of our worship, I say; but the invocation is pre- 
 cisely what its name implies, a calling down of God’s blessing on 
 what is to follow, and stands at the beginning, as having an express 
 function right there ; and in strictness (by the way,) should not be 
 preceded by any other act, whether of the minister, the choir, or the 
 congregation. So with the rest of the prayers. They have each a 
 well-defined and characteristic use in the organism of our worship ; 
 and should be kept to that use. Now this rule is violated very often. 
 At a funeral not long ago, in a family of which I am the pastor, a 
 brother clergyman was requested to commence the service with an 
 invocation and reading of the Scriptures ; leaving to me (as was 
 suitable) the Pastoral Prayer, the only remaining act of the occasion. 
 And he started. And his prayer was at least ten minutes long, 
 marching out with a leisurely fulness into all the mentionable circum- 
 stances of the case, including an express notice of each person or 
 class of the near kinsmen of the deceased, together with such general 
 reflections as I myself had hoped to make, but was now in common 
 decency cut off from. As I am gifted with a certain amount of 
 faculty for amplification on a small stock of material, I did not feel 
 myself utterly bankrupted by this raid into my territories ; but I did 
 feel that that blessed brother did not sense the natural proportions 
 and eternal harmonies and boundary-lines of things ; especially as on 
 reaching the grave, and being invited by me to offer a short prayer, 
 he once more mentioned all the relatives, separately, and otherwise 
 conformed himself to the dimensions of the broad landscape and the 
 infinite open air in the midst of which we stood. 
 
 Now such practices as that are exceedingly wearisome and 
 unjustifiable. All persons who have a sharp discernment of what is 
 suitable are offended by them, as well as tired out ; while the undis- 
 cerning feel a staleness creeping over them, though knowing not 
 what it means. Often they attribute it to their depraved lack of 
 interest in religion. But it is not that ! 
 
 And, speaking of weariness, under a repetitious presentation of 
 
YALE LECTURES. 159 
 
 the same thing, I am reminded that some seem to think that a ser- 
 vice lacks full unity and a truly deep impression, unless the key-note 
 of it be thoroughly sounded in the first utterance of the minister, 
 (the invocation) and be kept sounding all through to the final amen. 
 The first hymn must sound it—and all the hymns. The Scriptural 
 lessons must be selected to carry it on. And each succeeding 
 prayer must be full of its flavors. I was present at the administra- 
 tion of the Lord’s Supper one day, and although the first hour was 
 to be spent in prayers, hymns, and sermonizings, prefatory to the 
 Supper, yet the invocation of the minister took us immediately into 
 the heavy stress of the table, in an. extended, wrestling, deep-toned 
 way ; and as completely as though we had already arrived at the 
 table itself; so completely in fact that in the nature of the human 
 mind, we, the congregation, could not make any advance thereafter 
 in our feeling, and hardly in our thought. We had struck twelve 
 (all the sensitive ones of us had) and thenceforth we dwindled, or 
 at best, merely held our own ;—for every act of the entire hour was 
 made by the minister to have that same central emphasis ; an em- 
 phasis which could be endured only about so long, I repeat; the 
 constitution of man being so made that, with a fine instinct of self- 
 preservation, it unloads impression when it has enough of it, and 
 subsides into a wholesome indifferency. Now I maintain, that that 
 brother was wrong in thus starting his journey at his highest speed. 
 I do not like to use the word Art, in connection with the ordering 
 of divine service, as I have said to you several times before, but 
 there are laws of art which must be observed, if the service is not to 
 be made more or less a failure. For example, if that leader of our 
 worship on the day I mention, had made his invocation simply invo- 
 catory of God’s blessing on that assembly in their approaching 
 various acts ; and if the hymn that followed had had no respect to 
 the Holy Supper, but had spread itself in general praise, or had 
 celebrated the Sunday as the day of the resurrection of our Lord; 
 and if the Biblical Lesson that then came on had been selected, not 
 from the intense Scriptures of sacrifice, (the Scriptures that are so 
 full of the mediatorial travail of the Son of God,) but from more 
 general passages, leaving those more particular texts to be used at 
 the moment of approach to the Supper; in short, if our leader had 
 even for the whole hour held us a little off from the precious crisis 
 of the occasion, in various preamblings, all within the lines of 
 Christianity of course—yes, and more than that within the lines of 
 
160 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 interior and central Christianity, so that we might be in a process of 
 real preparation for the feast ; then two fundamental things would 
 have been effectually secured. First, that underflowing unity which 
 is SO precious in any service, and which he was after so earnestly ; 
 and secondly, that unwasted vigor, that full and fresh play of faculty, 
 on the part of the congregation, which makes the Lord’s Supper a 
 heart-filling and strengthening observance. 
 
 Perhaps some of you, My Brethren, will doubt my statement 
 that unity in a service is secured by preamblings that do not come 
 right to the main point. Well, look at the great Historical Liturgies 
 and see how they are constructed. ‘This notion of so many that the 
 sermon is the great feature of the hour, and that all things before and 
 after must chime about that, and from that get their color and tone, 
 is not provided for in the Liturgies; for they move on in their 
 diverse exercises, in a free, multifold and unhindered way, as though 
 real acts of worship, though they be of a general nature, were a good 
 and sufficient preparation of the heart for listening to any sort of 
 sermon that deserves to be preached. Take the Prayer Book of the 
 Protestant Episcopal Church and observe how that undertakes to 
 get its congregations on to the Lord’s Supper. Why, during the 
 first hour, more or less, no one who was not informed beforehand, 
 would surmise that the supper was coming at all ;—-and then, when 
 it does come, the first stroke of the ritual is as far off as the reading 
 of the ten commandments ; then comes a prayer, also far off; then 
 the collect for the day, which may have'a special flavor of Christ’s 
 Sacrifice or may not, just as it happens; then the Epistle and the 
 Gospel for the day, (for the day you notice, and not for the sacra- 
 mental occasion ;) then a Creed is read, a Creed suitable to any 
 service of course; then, after a little, a most general prayer for 
 the Christian church is offered ;—and finally, after all this, notes 
 from the Holy table begin to break in. Now I do not stand 
 here to eulogize these details and pronounce them perfect; but 
 only to put forth the observation, that the great liturgical 
 bodies of Christendom have practically expressed themselves to 
 this effect; that, in order to have all the specific acts of a 
 Christian service proceed upon a fundamental tone, and in that 
 tone have their perfect unity, and therefore their utmost impression, 
 it is not necessary that they should be so exceedingly particularized 
 as my friend who led us in the Communion service that day particu- 
 larized. And I have no doubt that this great consenting judgment is 
 
YALE LECTURES. 161 
 
 right, and that any practice contrary to that. judgment is injurious. 
 
 I may seem to you, to be spending a good deal of time on a 
 minor point, just here ; but if I could run the subject out into all its 
 relations, I might make it appear less minor than you think. If we 
 submit ourselves to the perpetual drill of a routine which is unphil- 
 osophically organized, we may save our souls, to be sure; but we 
 shall be insensibly cheated out of some benefits which we might just 
 as well have. Indeed I think there are forms of piety in the world 
 partially disagreeable and unprofitable, which came to be so as de- 
 veloped under this theory of concentration and particularization, 
 whereon I have been remarking. Give us a broad, diversified 
 rational service ; and not too much music on one string for the sake 
 of impression. My remark sometime ago, that the three prayers in 
 our service should be kept distinct, led me to speak of weariness of 
 mind under them when they are all run together pretty much, and 
 cover the ‘same ground ; and from that I was induced to spend a 
 moment on the weariness and lack of impression of a service, which 
 in its endeavor for unity makes its every act, beginning with the 
 invocation, sound alike. 
 
 And, now, still confining myself to the prayers, I would like to 
 consider the “long prayer,’”’ and throw out some hints in regard to 
 public prayer in general. 
 
 And first, while you keep on calling the long prayer “long” if 
 you want to, do you be very watchful that it never deserves that 
 sonorous adjective. Soon after I commenced ministerial service, I 
 was told of a neighboring brother who prayed fifteen, twenty and 
 twenty-five minutes, almost any Sunday, and had been known to 
 go as high as thirty-five, on a sufficiently august occasion. I, in my 
 inexperience, lifted up my hands in amazement. I could not see 
 what he could have to say to keep him so long, or how he ventured 
 to call the congregation to an effort on their own part so extended. 
 But in less than four years I was wiser; and found that I, myself, 
 was almost equally affiuent, and was being timed by brethren who 
 were not so devout but that they could look at their watches ; and 
 not so awe-struck before the minister but that they could tell him 
 of it. So I commenced to reform, supposing that all I had to do 
 was to say the word to myself and the thing was done, but, behold ! 
 the force of habit, and the force, too, of a deep interest, intellectual 
 and other, in the mighty themes of prayer, and the mighty blessings 
 which prayer goes out to seek ; I did not much reform. Good reso- 
 
162 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 lutions availed little. The moment I closed my eyes and began, 
 time was cheap. However much it might be worth thinking of, as 
 a matter of fact I did not think of it, or at least not enough to 
 frighten myself and stop. ‘Then I undertook praying by the watch, 
 putting it at my side, looking at it as I commenced, and looking at 
 it again as I closed ; but in spite of everything, it registered usually 
 fifteen minutes or more. After a sufficient trial of this, I made up 
 my mind to deliberately omit numbers of things which really belong 
 in any full prayer, for the sake of getting through. I would sacrifice 
 my idea of prayer and work in only a fraction of its rightful con- 
 tents, rather than destroy my prayer altogether as an exercise for 
 the people, by making it burdensome ; just as a man loads so many 
 thousand tuns into his ship instead of twice as many, because he 
 judges it better to get across the ocean with three thousand than to 
 sink with ten. But, strange to say at first, the two or three items 
 of prayer to which I confined myself, under my handling, expanded 
 to ten thousand tuns ;—the secret of that being (I suppose) that in 
 my sense of having shortened down my circle of topics, I felt it safe 
 to amplify each one a little more and in the bliss of that amplifi- 
 cation took no measure of time. 
 
 I must not be too long in giving you the details of this expe- 
 rience, but it ended in my getting a phonographic reporter to plant 
 himself in my gallery, and take down my prayerful utterances verba- 
 tim, in order that I might see objectively what I had been about all 
 those fifteen or twenty minutes. For on running them over in 
 simple recollection, I could not understand by what meanderings 
 or other leisurely works I had succeeded in being gone so long. 
 This reporter brought me to my senses. ‘There was the whole thing 
 in black and white, and I recognized the prints of my own feet, and 
 the earmarks of my own diction, all the way. I was a convicted sinner, 
 and I started out in a still more energetic repentance ; and I want 
 to say for your encouragement, that in due time I brought myself 
 within what I conceive to be proper limits in this very important 
 part of public worship ;—so that, three or four years ago, when a 
 certain gentleman, in my congregation, timed me on Sunday morn- 
 ings for three months or more, it was found that ten minutes was 
 my maximum swing. I confess though, with mortification, that I 
 have not ability enough to condense into ten minutes, or less, all 
 the particulars of a truly encyclopedic prayer—that is all that 
 belongs in a “common” prayer (as our Protestant Episcopal 
 
YALE LECTURES. 163 
 
 friends call it.) Neither do I consent to be confined to such brevity 
 on all occasions ; but I make that general aim ; and I do not do it 
 in mere cowardice before an impatient and unleisurely generation, 
 who insist that everything shall be short, sharp and decisive, (a kind 
 of touch-and-go-movement even in our holiest things, the newspaper 
 article being the divine model for the minister ;) but I am con- 
 strained to strive for a certain brevity, as convinced that the 
 nineteenth century sincerely cannot pray more than ten minutes or 
 so. It can keep its head down and be respectful twice that time ; 
 but its mental exercise for the last half of the same it were unprofit- 
 able to explore. 
 
 Now, My Brethren, I bear down on this thing, and give you 
 my experience and beseech you to be brief, because you are 
 certainly on your way to have your feelings hurt unless you take 
 counsel, and begin your career with a conscience in the matter of 
 brevity. It seemed a sort of sacrilege to me when people began to 
 animadvert on the length of my prayers ; but they kept on all the 
 same, (never harshly though, in a single instance,) and by-and-by I 
 went over to their side, and have had a comfortable amount of 
 peace ever since. 
 
 But I wish you to understand, I do not deliver this exhortation 
 in behalf of brevity, because I am sympathetic with those people 
 who would squeeze the worship of the church to death, in order 
 that the sermon may have room to magnify itself almost without 
 limit. We, on the one hand, and our liturgical brethren on the 
 other, are still in the midst of the old debate, which shall be the hub 
 of the wheel ; the worship or the sermon ; but we are not so far apart 
 on it as we used to be; and the growing opinion among us now is, 
 that while the sermon is not to be belittled, the worship is to be 
 amply provided for, more amply in some respects than in the old 
 times. And following in the line of this opinion, I insist that the 
 sermon shall take heed unto itself, and call a halt (on all ordinary 
 occasions) not very far beyond thirty minutes. Let it aim at thirty, 
 and if, at the end, it finds:itself in a genuine gale, a true wind from 
 Heaven, and cannot stop, why nobody will want it to. Let it sail 
 on. But I notice that these heaven-born winds are generally 
 willing to be reasonable and let a congregation off in about half 
 an hour. 
 
 In my efforts to shorten my sermons in order that worship may 
 have fair scope, I have found it very serviceable to me, to keep 
 
164 i YALE LECTURES. 
 
 betore my mind numbers of considerations like the following. 
 First, that in the course of my ministrations year after year, it 
 is not necessary that I should exhaust the subject I happen to be 
 handling at any one time. If I have thoroughly studied it, I have 
 discovered a good many important points in it; and partly because 
 they are important and partly because I myself have discovered 
 them and do therefore have the feelings of a mother towards 
 them, it is a bitterness to me not to bring them all into my 
 discourse. Moreover, it is an affliction to my taste, as an 
 intellectual man, to make only half a statement of a subject; 
 like a snatch of music from a grand oratorio. But I remember that 
 I am a settled pastor, and (God willing) am to have other chances 
 at that same subject, so that in the course of time I can get my 
 whole oratorio moving, and give my congregation the advantage of 
 it ;—a mutilated advantage you may be inclined to say, because they 
 have not taken it in all at once ; and yet not very mutilated I fancy. 
 For not half of them are disciplined sufficiently to take anything in 
 its entirety at one effort. And in the next place, while I may be 
 painfully conscious of omissions in my treatment of my subject 
 because I have carefully looked it all through, they (as not having 
 done that) do not feel any omissions. It sounds to them like 
 the whole oratorio. In the Easter Service in my church last Sunday 
 morning, my sermon had five heads; but the choir and I had done 
 so many things, and had been so long about it, that I was compelled 
 to omit the first four. Nevertheless that fifth head I found had 
 marched out into the air as though all the preceeding four were 
 sounding therein. Nobody seemed able to imagine that anything 
 had been left out. I presume there were reverberations of those 
 departed and invisible four heads running through that fifth one, 
 because I wrote the fifth as energized and fructified by my pre- 
 ceding converse with the four ;—and that is true of all our sermon- 
 izings. We make a full study of a theme, and then deliver only half 
 our thoughts on it, or less; but in that half, our entire prepara- 
 tion resounds. Three years ago, at the installation of a pastor, I 
 heard one of my brethren deliver an extended charge to the people, 
 and the other evening, at another installation, I heard him deliver 
 it again. But as he was crowded into a late hour by me and others 
 who had preceded him, he was compelled to abbreviate his deliver- 
 ance ; badly, he thought ; and he told me beforehand that he felt 
 unhappy. He shortened it fully one half I should say. But I did, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 165 
 
 not miss anything. And I venture to say, nobody in that house 
 missed anything—excepting always himself. He did not give us 
 the whole loaf; only a slice ; and of course, such a proceeding as 
 that is grievous to the feelings of a generous man. He felt mean, 
 but the fact was, the whole taste of his loaf was in that slice. 
 His entire mind was in it, his spirit, his magnetism, his love of God 
 and man, his whole feeling about the relations of a people to their 
 pastor. So, friends and fellow-brethren, whenever I feel that I have 
 done injustice to a subject and perhaps bereaved my people, by a 
 partial presentation of it, I recover myself by reflecting that I am to 
 have other opportunities to preach on it, most likely; and that 
 meanwhile in what limited bread I have distributed, there is the 
 identical smack of the loaf. : 
 
 And that reminds me to say, that it greatly assists us to brevity 
 in sermonizing, to omit all those preliminary skirmishings about our 
 subject, (like General McClellan’s famous earth-works creeping 
 slowly up the Yorktown peninsula towards Richmond, in the days 
 of our war ;) to omit all these skirmishings, I say, which have not 
 in them the real heart-beat and quintessence of the subject, and are 
 only like the dry burr on a nut; to omit them, and make a straight 
 march for the center, and give the people the very relish of the 
 thing in the first sentence if possible. That saves a great deal of 
 time and does no damage either. 
 
 Another thought wherewith I have comforted myself in my 
 efforts to be brief is, that my people neither require nor need that 
 I should consume much time in giving them the processes of my 
 thought, the steps by which I arrive at results, What they most 
 need are results ; assertions from a man who has looked the case 
 up and knows what he is saying. I am making haste along here, 
 and cannot expound this idea as I would like, and put in suitable 
 qualifications ; but I look back and sce that in the first years of my 
 sermonizing (to say nothing of later days,) I wasted a good deal 
 of my time in the pulpit, and a good deal of the time of the people, 
 in mapping before them minutely the path of my own mind through _ 
 the subjects. I made lengthy arguments in support sometimes 
 of axioms and sometimes of truths, which, although not axioms 
 exactly, yet, for all purposes practical and popular, are better argued 
 by an outright statement glowing with the heat of personal ex- 
 perience. There is that in the constitution of mankind which 
 responds to the main affirmatives of the Christian religion. Say Sin, 
 
166 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and every human soul echoes your word. Say God, say Eternity, 
 say Sorrow, say Jesus, and put it home with the weight of your per- 
 sonal knowledge, and how can wire-drawn reasonings, and philoso- 
 phizings and goings to Richmond by a circuit of half the continent, 
 add anything to it. So much on keeping the sermon within pire 
 dimensions with a view to give worship a large place. 
 
 My second remark on prayers (whether long or short) is, that 
 in them we should conceive God very distinctly, and make our 
 whole movement out towards Him. I sometimes almost think it 
 would be better to have before our eyes a visible representation of 
 God in such form as reverent art has been able to devise ; and on 
 that form, idealized and transfigured perhaps, by our holy imagina- 
 tion, fix our eyes and there hold while we pray; this, rather than 
 to be conscious chiefly of the congregation, and have half our 
 prayer just a speech to them. A parishioner of mine in one of our 
 conference meetings, went into such a deep and absorbed movement 
 of prayer, that (for quite a space) he entirely forgot the rest of us 
 all about him, and continually used language that implied that he 
 was alone, as in the privacy of his room. That seems hardly the 
 thing to do, but I submit, that ignoring the congregation in prayer 
 is better than ignoring God, especially as prayer is ostensibly an 
 address to God, and not an address to man at all. I think that 
 God, from his stand-point in the Heavens, is more pleased with a 
 man-ward lapse of memory than a God-ward ; and is more likely to 
 grant a request that goes straight to'its mark in that concentrated 
 and absorbed way. 
 
 The advantages of a clear vision of God in prayer, and an 
 absolutely resolved holding of the mind to Him, and never dropping 
 to the assembly, are such as these. It lifts you above all human fright 
 —which is apt to be rather severe sometimes in a’ young and inex- 
 perienced man, especially if he be constitutionally timid. It pro- 
 duces in you just that self-abasement which is not only suitable in 
 prayer, but necessary if it is to be true prayer, and to bear in upon 
 God’s mind effectually. It rules down your diction to a godly sim- 
 plicity, saving you from oratory, and rhetorical vaporing, and all those 
 posturings, and tones and tremendous originalizations, which are fitted 
 to catch the ear of men but are most unseemly in anything that pro- 
 fesses to be prayer; and which in addition to that, render it impos- 
 sible for the congregation to follow you in any other way than they 
 follow an oration. ‘They may be greatly entertained and greatly 
 
YALE LECTURES. 167 
 
 stimulated, both intellectually and religiously, by prayers of the sort 
 that I am criticising; but as for praying under such a lead, they 
 cannot. Perhaps numbers of them will think they do, (not having 
 analyzed the matter,) and perhaps whole congregations, under the 
 pernicious education of a favorite minister, may come to feel that 
 prayer is hardly worth listening to, unless it puts itself forth in fresh 
 and ingenious expressions, in touches of fancy, in exuberant illustra- 
 tions, and in re-statements of Christian Doctrine that are brand-new 
 and unprecedented ; but their view is sufficiently shown up by ask- 
 ing the one question: Are such outpourings fitting if conceived as 
 actually addressed to God, and in so far as a praying man senses 
 God, can he—in the nature of things, can he—use such devices of 
 expression? No, he cannot. He will be burdened by the awful 
 presence wherein he stands, and the solemn personal business that 
 sends him into that presence, and his utterance will be simple, and 
 lowly and not too profuse. 
 
 I wish now to speak of a few things that tend to full, various, 
 rich, easy, and right-flavored prayer, on the part of the minister 
 leading his congregation. And first, I should advise much familiarity 
 with the Catholic Liturgies ;—with the liturgies, I mean, of the Church 
 general. I think it isa wholesome thing to read them and study them 
 habitually, especially for a young minister, who, as being young, has 
 not yet formed his habits. He need not go under any bondage to 
 them. Heneed not publicly use theminform. If, at any point, they 
 savor of doctrinal or ecclesiastical theories which he ought not to 
 accept, very well, let him be on his guard against them. But let 
 him read them, again and again; and catch their devout spirit and 
 suffuse his mind with their seemly phraseologies ; and indoctrinate 
 himself in the broad variety of their worshipful acts, and feed his 
 religious imagination on their old-time precious associations, hearing 
 in them, as he may, the voice of long-gone generations, the innu- 
 merable millions of God. They will insensibly chasten his taste, 
 mold his style, bring his extemporaneous doings into orderliness, 
 abate his eccentricities, and make him a man whom it will be a 
 means of grace to be led by in public worship. That will be their 
 tendency at least, if they are used judiciously and with discrim- 
 ination. 
 
 Then again, I think that a minister would do well to consider 
 his public prayers beforehand, if he would have them what they 
 should be. If Iam asked: should he write them? I say no ;— 
 
168 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 much less memorize them. On special occasions let a man do 
 what seems to him best, and let the rest of us not pick at him much. 
 But as a general rule, it seems to me decidedly, that the wisest 
 way for us unliturgical ministers, is to premeditate our prayers, 
 and prearrange them in their outlines and headlands; and leave 
 all the rest to the moment. Prearrangement secures brevity. 
 Prearrangement and premeditation secure thoughtfulness, and save 
 us from the waft of accidental sidewinds as we go on in our prayer, 
 (like unforeseen and unmanageable spurts of emotion, and sudden 
 ideas which, as being sudden, fascinate us, and swing us off into 
 digressions of whose meanderings and outcome nobody can be 
 sure ;) and prearrangement also saves us from omissions that ought 
 not to be made. The only danger in premeditation, that occurs to 
 me now is, that it may destroy our spontaneity, and make us feel as 
 though we were speaking a piece; or searching for our prayer in a 
 corner of our pocket. Of course if our preparation is quite elabo- 
 rate and formal, it tends strongly to that bondage ; a bondage which 
 I should advise you never to submit to. Let your preparation be 
 less formal. Do as I often do (if you cannot do any better) 
 namely, digest the Scriptural lesson which you are going to read, 
 until you are full of its vitality; and make your prayer start from 
 that lesson and there have its roots. Somehow, I find there is a 
 reality in that kind of start; my mind comforts itself in it, and 
 seems to have a real business on hand ; and althcugh it might seem 
 that your prayer, thus born, would have too much local color and 
 not reach the full sweep of prayer; that is, not get in all its ele- 
 ments, and all the proper details—as for example, if you root in 
 some ringing imprecatory Psalm, how shall your prayer get over into 
 Christianity and there expatiate as it ought—nevertheless, as a 
 matter of fact, I never saw a Scripture yet that was not a good 
 enough starting-point. The old Bible is full of one blood. Prick 
 it anywhere and you have struck its inmost reservoirs of vitality. 
 Or, if that figure be not quite accurate, then let me say, that a 
 truly christianized mind turns everything that it touches into honey, 
 and especially cannot fail while ranging the manifold clover-gardens 
 of Holy Wnt. 
 
 Again, much private prayer makes public prayer a veritable 
 divine thing ; and a right thing everyway. I affirm unqualifiedly 
 that a public praying that does not rest back on habitual prayer, is | 
 always a less solid, deep-moving, fresh, diversified, effectual and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 169 
 
 fructifying thing, than it ought to be. O! how important this is, 
 and how I ought to dwell on its deep import ! 
 
 Still again, pastoral visitation makes a good leader of worship. 
 How can a man be self-conscious and formal, in his prayer, and 
 full of flighty excursions of rhetoric, and an ear-catching minister 
 everyway, when he knows by having been into the houses all about, 
 that down in yonder seat before him is a mother in agony over her 
 wayward son; and over there a person feeling his way along 
 anxiously to the light; and yonder a family heart-stricken by 
 bereavement ; and there a man so poor that he cannot sleep nights ; 
 and beyond, another so spiritually insensible and lost that you do 
 not know but he is lost forever ; and all about in front of you, men 
 and women in full bloom for the heavenly life, whose faces are a 
 benediction, and whose thanksgivings you want to voice in your 
 prayer. The innumerable touch of human hearts makes a good 
 prayer, I say. : 
 
 Once more, a profoundly Scripturalized mind makes a good 
 prayer. We cannot use liturgies much; therefore let us use the 
 Bible ; memorize its passages, season ourselves with its doctrines, 
 enrich ourselves with its imageries, read and study its wonderful 
 histories, consort with its illustrious personages, live in its poetry, 
 domesticate ourselves in its old Ritual, analyze its texts and single 
 words, and find how vital they are to the last shred and atom, and 
 how they magnetize and empower the mind ;—then shall our wor- 
 ship move on, as in the most robust and historic of liturgies ;—our 
 thought will be charged with the authentic flavors of God, and our 
 language seem heaven-born sometimes ; for it shall go to the heart 
 as being redolent of the one and only universal Book. 
 
 Finally, and as underlying all the rest; all prayer has the 
 privilege of being in the Holy Ghost; and is prayer in proportion 
 only as it is thus originated and sustained. Many well-intentioned 
 ministers do not seem to fully understand this. Theoretically they 
 admit it, but in their practice they do not quite launch out into its 
 mid-waters. Possibly rationalism has palsied them a little, (some 
 of them) so that they are scarcely more than speculative super- 
 naturalists. Possibly they are shy of letting into their life the full 
 doctrine of the Holy Ghost, because they have seen instances of 
 wildfire. Possibly, in some Communions, they have gone over to 
 externalisms too much, making them the vehicles of God’s grace 
 pre-eminently, and not so much dwelling on his direct and subjective 
 
170 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 approach to the soul. Of course, all these classes of men have 
 their plausibilities to present, and some truths ; and I should like to 
 display their logic for them here to-day, and see what reply I could 
 make. But, in lieu of that, I lift up the experience, the holy 
 inspired experience of innumerable men, who have preached, and 
 prayed, and led their assemblies many and many a time, and thou- 
 sands of them habitually, in a fulness of the spirit of God which 
 has carried them above the fear of man, as the stars range the sky, 
 and has let them into great sweeps of liberty, and great visions of 
 truth, and great confidences of faith, and great victories over the 
 minds committed to their care. So that when a man has once entered 
 into this experience, all rationalistic or other arguments designed to 
 show that ministers had better be calm-minded, and careful, and 
 reliant mainly on a plodding conscientious use of their own faculties, 
 and their much learning, and their oratory, and their culture ; all 
 that line of thought and talk, I say, rolls off froia him like pebbles 
 from iron-clads. While a committee of the English Parliament 
 were demonstrating to the world that steam roads were impossible, 
 Stephenson was getting one ready, and running it. There was the 
 argument on the one hand, and there was the road on the other. 
 The argument was first-class, so good that I presume some of the 
 committee stood by it till they died ; but the people who consented 
 to try the road never cared much for that argument afterward. 
 Experience is better than all the Parliamentary Committees on 
 earth. 
 
 And, My Young Brethren, I advise you to seek an experience 
 of God’s supernatural and direct empowerment for your work, the 
 moment you begin it ;—not a half-and-half experience, but one 
 that shall go to the bottom of the subject and settle it in your mind 
 for all time, and forever. 
 
 I have now spoken to you of the prayers in public worship. 
 The minister’s management of the other parts, as hymns and music, 
 and choirs, and the use of the Scriptures, is a subject for another 
 address. I presume you would all be glad to have me give you a 
 recipe for managing choirs. And, on the other hand, your choirs 
 would like to get from me a recipe for managing you. I do not 
 know but I should be a good enough man for advising you, because in 
 twenty-eight years of service I have never had a single quarrel with 
 achoir. I do not think a minister needs to be a technical musi- 
 cian in order to stand supreme over the worship of song in his 
 
YALE LECTURES. 171 
 
 church. If he is thoroughly grounded in the eternal principles of 
 worship (as very man may be, and should be), and continually shows 
 it by his manner of conducting the worship, on occasions both 
 ordinary and special, and by his wise discussions of the subject 
 from time to time; then his weight with his people will be such 
 that they will follow him and not the choir, in any question, or dif- 
 ference, where fundamental principles and good taste are involved. 
 Of course, if he is by nature an intermeddler and a picayune Pope, 
 with no tact to deal with men, his choir will be likely to make him 
 unhappy now and then ;. as will also his whole congregation for that 
 matter. And probably they ought to. But if he bears rule in 
 God’s house a little as a good mother does in her realm, that is 
 with an affectionate firmness, and also with a timely blindness to 
 numerous small irregularities which are only skin-deep, and are not 
 worth calling a court-martial upon, he will be more likely to move 
 on, and hold his seat in the saddle, forever. 
 
 But I had better pass all this, and conclude with some running 
 observations on the state of things liturgically in our churches, and 
 the possibilities of improvement. Let me speak particularly of the 
 Congregationalists. You will find, when you get among them, that 
 they are resolutely attached to the old-fashioned ways, for sub- 
 stance ; but you will also find, I am sure, that they are more and 
 more ready to receive and incorporate into their worship, this, that, 
 and the other excellence of other Communions. They do not 
 believe in a priesthood, they are not very energetic sacramentarians, 
 they honestly think that prayers read are not the most useful ; they 
 are watchful against any such advance of rites and ceremonies as 
 will make formalists of them, and undermine the old Protestant 
 doctrine of Justification by faith; but there are numerous minor 
 things (new things, for them) towards which they are beginning 
 to be hospitable. The Cross, used as a symbol, does not much 
 alarm them. They are importing into their music some of the 
 old.standard riches and practices of the church at large. They 
 are quite widely diversifying the ancient order of their service ; 
 insomuch that now when I exchange pulpits with a Congrega- 
 tional minister I always have to ask him what his particular 
 practice is. Also, if a minister flushes up a little his ritual of 
 the Lord’s Supper, with a view to have the externals of a thing 
 so significant and so precious correspond more nearly with the 
 thing itself, and more forcibly address the feeling of the congre- | 
 
 14 
 
172 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 gation ; they are likely to put up with it. I think there is a distinct 
 advance among us on the doctrine of a real presence of Christ in 
 the Supper; and that on that account it is feasible to introduce 
 some expansion of ritual at the table, and some new emphasis. 
 Whether these expansions are really profitable, I do not now dis- 
 cuss. I only say they are practicable ; as has been already proved 
 in numerous cases. Perhaps my own church is an extreme illus- 
 tration of limberness in these matters (though I fancy there are 
 many a good deal like it in our cities) ;—but in that church there 
 are I do not know how many things done that did not use to be, 
 and could not be. Not that I have labored with them very much, 
 though I touch the matter now and then, but if an innovation 
 seems to me really good, and not inconsistent with any essential 
 feature of our Congregational system, I slip it in sparingly, on my 
 own authority, and let it speak for itself. I am pretty careful to set 
 on foot only what will speak for itself, in actual use. If you call a 
 mass-meeting of your church to discuss whether the Apostles’ 
 Creed shall be introduced in the congregation ever, or whether a 
 book shall ever be used at the Communion table, or whether there 
 shall be any back and forth of responses between the minister and 
 the choir ; in every case some man will be found to object, and there 
 you ate. But if you have their confidence to this extent that they 
 will endure the first sensation of a new thing, put in on your own 
 wisdom, and if it so happens that you have the wisdom to select 
 the best things, and the easiest, and the most beautiful, and those 
 most commended by long use in other branches of God’s church, 
 and if you have the patience to hold back numbers of things that 
 you think excellent, and not swamp the people by your inventions 
 brought in flood-wise, then in course of time you may establish in 
 your congregation almost anything that you desire ;—that is, unless 
 you are out-and-out an uncongregational man—in which case you 
 ought to leave the denomination. Some of you here present will 
 never have any impulse to introduce deviations from the primitive 
 way of our churches, but others of you will, just as sure as you live ; 
 and our Congregational system is elastic enough to accommodate 
 you, most likely. 
 
 As an illustration, let me give you the order of the Easter ser- 
 vices at my church last Sunday morning :—I do not consider it a 
 triumph of holy art at all, for it is visibly unphilosophical at one or 
 two points, on account of the stress of certain circumstances that 
 
YALE LECTURES. 173 
 
 were upon me. It opened with introductory services by the minis- 
 ter :—‘ How amiable are thy tabernacles,” and the like. Then fol- 
 lowed the invocation. Then the Venite:—“O come let us sing 
 unto the Lord,” the minister reading one verse, and the choir chant- 
 ing the other. Then the first Scripture lesson, an account of the 
 Resurrection of Christ, by St. John, followed by a corresponding 
 anthem of the Resurrection. Then the second lesson (1st Cor., 
 xv), followed by an anthem which amplified upon the theme of that 
 incomparable chapter. Then half a dozen texts were read, in rela- 
 tion to Christian faith, and confessing that faith, whereupon the 
 choir intoned the Apostles’ Creed. Then I spent a few moments in 
 what to me was a most sweet and holy commemoration of those 
 who have departed in the faith of the Resurrection. I took the 
 substance of it from the liturgy of the Catholic Apostolic Church 
 years ago, adapting it to our needs. I have no time to repeat it, 
 but it went on in this way :— | 
 
 First, I read a Scriptural selection which began :— ‘I would 
 not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are 
 asleep.”” Next, I made a general mention of the saintly dead, to 
 which the choir responded in a solemn Amen. 
 
 Next, I mentioned them in several classes, with a like choral 
 response to each. Those classes were the Old Testament saints, 
 and the immediate fore-runners of the Lord; the mother of the 
 Lord, the Apostles, the Evangelists and Pastors, the martyrs and 
 confessors, that succeeded j—and, finally, those of our own church 
 who had left us during the year, their names being solemnly re- 
 peated, and the choir following with these words :—‘‘ May they 
 rest in thy peace, and awake to a joyful resurrection.” Then came 
 a congregational hymn :—“ Let saints below in concert sing, with 
 those to glory gone.”’ 
 
 After that the service swung back into its general path again 
 and there were prayer, responsive reading of the Psalter by the 
 minister and the congregation, a Gloria Patri; a collection, with 
 offertory sentences, (which sentences are sometimes delivered by 
 the minister alone, and sometimes by the minister and choir in 
 alternation), a hymn, a sermon only fifteen minutes long, because 
 what went before had been uncommonly protracted, a hymn again, 
 sung by the congregation, and then the benediction. 
 
 Now every year, on special days, like Easter, and Christmas, 
 and Thanksgiving, I have sent to me from Congregational pastors, 
 
174 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and Presbyterians, and Baptists, printed special programmes, anala- 
 gous to that which I have just recited in your hearing ;—which shows 
 to me that there is at least a scattered liturgical movement among 
 us (as you may call it). I have no idea that we are on the way to 
 the introduction of a liturgy proper ; [there are profound reasons why 
 that will never come to pass ;] but I am sure that within certain nor- 
 mal limits our ancient service is to be diversified and enriched, the 
 present individual instances of that being multiplied far and wide. 
 
 Years and years ago I heard a Congregational pastor telling of 
 a sermon which he had recently heard in New York, from a well- 
 know Protestant Episcopalian, on the reasons for the exact order of 
 the successive acts in the worship of that church. And this Congre- 
 gationalist remarked with much contempt on the insignificancy of 
 such a pulpit theme as that. He ridiculed such topics as “ debilita- 
 ting topics.” That is what he called them. And I recollect that I 
 at the time had a certain amount of sympathy with him in his view. 
 
 By which circumstance I am reminded that some in this 
 assembly may think that the present lecturer has spent a good deal 
 of time to-day, and on points, some of which at least, are so sub- 
 ordinate and minute, as to be open to that ridicule involved in that 
 word, debilitating. Nevertheless, I stand fast in my conviction 
 that so small a matter as the law of before and after in the ongo of 
 public worship, the reason that one act comes here, another there 
 and another there and not otherwise, is abundantly worth discours- 
 ing upon, even as God discoursed to Moses on the precise details of 
 the Jewish tabernacle and its worship ; and that our congregations 
 cannot have the advantage of a full-toned cultus if the study of 
 that subject is belittled. The masses of the people cannot be 
 expected to be students of the subject. They sail round and 
 round in the routine which is provided for them; thanking God 
 and making no complaint so long as their prepossessions are not 
 jostled, [and who can describe the endless riches of holy nurture 
 which they receive] but we, the ministers, ought to be students of 
 the subject, in order that our churches may be rationally defended 
 against the enormous and increasing pressure of the great ritualis- 
 tic bodies of Christendom (their doctrinal pressure and their liturgi- 
 cal pressure), and at the same time may have the intelligence and 
 the catholicity to receive from those bodies whatever contributions 
 of thought or worship may profitably be incorporated into our 
 system. 
 
LIBERTY OF THOUGHT WITHIN 
 CONGREGATIONALISM. 
 
 When I stood about where you do, my Brethren, I had an anx- 
 iety like this : 
 
 I began to study theology under the doctrinal prepossessions 
 of my religious training, as we all do, and it seemed to me that 
 candor required I should now disengage myself from those prepos- 
 sessions, and address myself to all inquiries in that beautiful blank- 
 ness and innocency of intellect in which our great original father, 
 Adam, was, when he landed in this strange world. I had hitherto 
 believed in a God, and did yet, but a knowing class of men had 
 always contended that there is no such Being, so I must wrench 
 myself if possible into a totally judicial position and throw upon my 
 instructors the task of showing me, in my assumed ignorance, that 
 there is a God. And the whole system of Christian truth must 
 similarly validate itself before my unbiased mind. So, I came to 
 this Seminary rather than to any other, in part, because I had an 
 idea that Dr. Nathaniel Taylor here, took contracts of that sort 
 and enjoyed them. 
 
 I cannot conscientiously recommend to otties men this at- 
 tempted philosophical impartiality of mine. It had its uses, but it 
 had its mischief. We have no right to disavow our pious training . 
 and our personal experience of God, even to the extent of tem- 
 porary non-committalism ; neither do I believe it can be defended 
 on philosophical grounds. 
 
 _ However, I was in constant fear that I should somehow lose 
 this philosophical balance of mine. Some teacher might get in on 
 me with his seductions. Or some tenderness towards my father 
 
176 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and mother, now away from me, might undermine my thinking. 
 Of course, as I went on, I accepted a goodly list of things as pro- 
 ven; so that I was willing to undertake a Christian pastorate, and 
 did ; but I knew several things even then whereon I doubted, or in 
 which I did not believe in just that complete and enthusiastic way 
 that I desired. So, now, my fear was that the position of a preacher 
 and pastor, with its obligations to a pretty full orthodoxy, and its 
 fine advantages of all sorts, which I certainly should not want to 
 forfeit by any too great freedom and independence of inquiry, would 
 incessantly and insidiously operate on me as a bribe to conformity, 
 and make me non-judicial, thus vitiating all my thinking and disin- 
 ‘tegrating the foundations of my manhood. In fact, I sincerely 
 thought myself in some peril at that point. And so my first years 
 of service were years of self-watchfulness, and perhaps of inordi- 
 nate self-assertion, as against this supposed liability to encroachment. 
 
 Now I am going to speak to-day to that state of mind, think- 
 ing it not unlikely to be here before me full-blown or in the bud. I 
 shall say certain things which it would have done me good to hear 
 in that early time from a man who had been in the world and 
 among the churches long enough to discover how matters go on 
 out there. I have been exposed to that tremendous danger for thirty 
 years and I still live and I have never felt freer in my life, intellect- 
 ually, than I do now. ‘That is the simple truth, my young friends ; 
 and I will explain it to you. 
 
 First, I found that our Congregational churches concede to 
 their ministers—well, sometimes even an indefensible amount of 
 liberty, as it would seem to me. I have preached everything that 
 I wanted to; everything that seemed to me true and entitled to a 
 place in the pulpit. No committee ever visited me to tame me 
 down to their own views of things; or beg that I would reef in, 
 in my speculations on the wide ocean of the doubtful or the un- 
 knowable. I sailed to all points of the compass, and landed on all 
 distant shores, wherever the excursive impulse took me and I seri- 
 ously thought it my duty; only one man ever made a formal call 
 upon me in the interest of more prudence. He was a good man, 
 and particularly ignorant, and naturally circumscribed, and repre- 
 senting nobody on earth but himself. He treated me well, and I 
 treated him well and extracted profit from his talk and loved him 
 till God took him. 
 
 No doubt you must get into your teaching the substance ot 
 
YALE LECTURES. 177 
 
 the Christian religion. You must show that you are not exploring 
 to the ends of the earth under a sheer vagabond impulse, but in 
 the interest of truth. You must concede to the people the same 
 liberty that they concede to you, and not conceive of your pastor- 
 ship as a lordship and practical right of tyranny. You must make 
 it plain that you are after their welfare, whatever you say or do. 
 Take heed unto these few, obvious things, and then no man in the 
 world, who holds himself under any responsibility at all to other 
 people, is freer than you are as a Congregational minister. That is 
 my experience. 
 
 Again, I have attended ecclesiastical councils these many years, 
 as faithfully as any other man, and of the scores, young and old, 
 whom I have seen appear before these bodies for ordination and 
 for installation, I never knew but one to be rejected, and he lost his 
 case because he had not character enough to carry him through. 
 As a theologian he was a fair success and would have been set in 
 office by a unanimous vote. Occasionally I have seen individual 
 votes recorded in the negative, and in one instance the majority for 
 the candidate was but one, while after the council was dissolved a 
 stricter count seemed to show that the body did really divide 
 exactly in the middle. But no matter, he went in. Also on the 
 far horizon I have heard reverberations of negative majorities, as in 
 this city within a year; and in other States over the hills and far 
 away, but near enough to be suggestive ; still these adverse majori- 
 ties are as exceptional as cyclones and earthquakes, and, unlike 
 cyclones, they are often mitigated by facts like these :—the majority 
 in the negative is small ;—or it is numerical and not moral; or the 
 majority leaves on record so many cordialities towards the defeated 
 man that he is almost more in honor than he would have been 
 under the glorification of a major vote ; or the church which had 
 sought him is so confident of its own right judgment on his merits, 
 and is in such a state of Christian exasperation withal, that it pro- 
 ceeds, right or wrong, to secure his services as though nothing had 
 happened. It took us till midnight to reject that one minister 
 whom I saw rejected, and he was backed by such a high-wrought 
 multitude of free-born Congregationalists that all of us, members 
 of the council, whose home was in other cities, took the earliest 
 train next morning out of those parts—and then that multitude had 
 an installation of their own ;—their deacons and other chief men 
 took it in hand, and performed the necessary offices and duties at 
 
178 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 the service ; and so the choice of that people was triumphantly ful- 
 filled. Anda thoroughly foolish piece of business it was, as they 
 themselves discovered at last. Congregationalism seems to have 
 these little contrivances in the interest of liberty, or is made to 
 have. In one case within my knowledge, a council pronounced 
 against the installation of a man, on the ground of theological con- 
 fusedness, and did it by a strong vote ; but the people immediately 
 called another council, the old one and much more, and by that 
 council the man was successfully brought to the haven where he 
 would be. And the association of ministers to which I belong, 
 licensed a young man (I think, unanimously) who had just been 
 refused by another association for theological reasons. A discus- 
 sion arose outside, on the comity of that proceeding, as there rea- 
 sonably might, even as that second council which over-rode its pre- 
 decessor was discussed, as it also reasonably might be, but no one 
 was killed in either case, and the succeeding ministry of both of 
 those men indicated that somehow, and sooner or later, they should 
 have been put into service. In another case it might not happen 
 so, but in this case it did. It is an entertaining sight, sometimes, 
 to see the way men among us get their liberty. Congregationalism 
 has some fine old expedients for heading off interlopers ; but it is 
 not often that a good and substantially sound man of our order is 
 really abused. 
 
 If he is young, earnest, and interesting at all, most likely some 
 old minister of renown and weight will have his bowels of compas- 
 sion moved in his behalf, and will defend him, before the council 
 and before the public. A candidate whom I wanted to vote against, 
 and thought I might, had a hearty champion in Dr. Joel Hawes, a 
 man of divinity, as careful and sound and respected as you could 
 find. On another occasion, where I was present, an equally respec- 
 table minister burst forth in indignation at what he considered the 
 pettifogging and hectoring attempts of certain councilmen to reduce 
 a young candidate to his ultimate atoms, and, perhaps, in the last 
 analysis show him to be unsound. 
 
 Gentlemen as you go out to your ministry and move along 
 the years, if you are at all what you ought to be, you will find the 
 country full of these natural defenders of you against any real 
 wrong ;—sometimes they are men who have had to fight a fight 
 themselves ; sometimes men who, although pretty full of theology 
 are even more full of affection ; sometimes rational liberalists, and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 179 
 
 again latitudinarians ; sometimes lowly, hard-working pastors whom 
 the practical toils of life have taught that a large part of current 
 theology is speculative, and not binding ; and again it will be some 
 scholar who has not spent his life in parish service, but whose stu- 
 dious investigations have taught him the same thing ;—and then, 
 back of all individual defenders, stand ever the great generous 
 masses of the Church, with their rough and ready judgments, their 
 quick recognition of character, and stamina, and high motives, and 
 their fine inflammability on occasion. 
 
 I have no disposition to disparage the Congregational polity as 
 a working system, but it has several excellent escapes for men who 
 ought to escape. Some of these escapes were not intentionally 
 provided by the generations who elaborated the system, but like 
 seams in ships they open of themselves when the system falls into 
 a rough sea of circumstances ;—open providentially, as some would 
 say. Of course, reason declares that a ship like that must sink, 
 but it is one of the features of this craft that it sails on, with an 
 occasional open seam and parting of its timbers, about as well as 
 any other—in practical safety, at all events. When a sociologist 
 notices the thousands of incoherent and hap-hazard phenomena 
 that emerge in human society, he might say that such a chaos and 
 wide welter could work out no benefit whatever on the whole, and 
 had better not be started at all ;—as, for example, how can there 
 ever be any equilibrium of the sexes—numerical equilibrium—when 
 each. birth, ini the sex of it, is such a pure fortuity ;—-nevertheless, 
 behold ! somehow this infinite jumble of all kinds works along into 
 eventualities most orderly and benignant—the sexes are counted 
 off as though some mathematician had that interest in hand; and 
 all other things are counted, measured, weighed, assorted, and 
 manipulated with most excellent precision, as by a very discreet and 
 million-handed somebody, ever at work just back of this visible, 
 vast whirl, criss-cross, and heigh-ho of luck and disorder. Like- 
 wise, Congregationalism seems to some critics and anxious specta- 
 tors, to have infirmities enough in its constitution to make it a fail- 
 ure the moment it is set running ; but just out of sight, somewhere, 
 is a something or other that saves her. And I should like to give 
 one lecture here on the prudential and conservative elements in 
 Congregationalism. Again, within a few years it has come to be a 
 fact that a majority of all our churches are served by men who 
 were never put in their places by a council ;—another convenient 
 
180 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 circumstance for those jealous for their own liberty of thought. 
 Those of us who have been accustomed to the old way of councils 
 of installation, dislike this new device, and think we can show why 
 we dislike it ;—but here it is, beloved, and if any of you are con- 
 cerned lest you be cramped in your freedom when you harness 
 into our dear old system, there is a ray of light for you. No, you 
 will not be cramped, any more than is good for you, and if you turn 
 out a Methodist minister, you will not be. Please tell me how often 
 there comes a trial for ministerial free-thinking in the Methodist, 
 or the Baptist, or the Protestant Episcopal persuasions? And it is 
 not because those bodies are getting loose, either, but rather that 
 their ministers are practically sound. If you are a Presbyterian, 
 the grip on you may be a little more strangling and dangerous, but 
 if you find yourself coming to your last breath in that body, here 
 outside are these other communions, with wide-open breathing for 
 all the Presbyterians on earth, if only they will appreciate their 
 opportunities and come over. 
 
 I have treated this subject of freedom in the Congregational 
 Communion in a care-free spirit and without melancholy, as you 
 have noticed, because I am convinced of two cheerful things ; first, 
 that the schemes of prudence and reaction, which have been organ- 
 ized of late against whatever excessive freedom there may be 
 among us, will not be permitted to endanger our liberties. This 
 reaction may go to excess, it may billow and career, and toss up its 
 foam ; it may raise a feeling within itself, that it is about to deluge 
 the planet ; but there is in Congregationalism a rock-bound coast of 
 Individualism, and local Church-Independency, on which these 
 towering reactions are sure to dash and shatter when they get far 
 enough. 
 
 Secondly, I am convinced that this shatter of the various con- 
 trivances of prudence and conservatism, will not end in license 
 under the name of liberty. There will be scattered cases of top- 
 heaviness, and vaporing and heresy, among our ministers—and 
 among all ministers ;—but the bulk and body of us will retain our 
 substantial sanity and our wholesome effect on the children of 
 men. Taking us all together, we are a hard ship to wreck, as I said 
 before. 
 
 So much have I put forth as fitted to soothe a young minister 
 alarmed as to his liberty and as to the possible loss of his judicial 
 temper ;——as I used to be. The churches will not oppress him. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 18] 
 
 Another thing I discovered, which tended to bring ease to my 
 mind in regard to my doubts and my possible inability to be en- 
 tirely conformed to what might be required of me, and in regard to 
 my general peace in life, was that a thoroughly profound and satis- 
 factory religious experience may be had by a man who is a good 
 deal inexact in his philosophical religious thinking. For instance, 
 it used to be thought that the sacrifice of Christ was a ransom paid 
 to the Devil, who had us all. That was doctrine good enough in 
 evangelical circles once, and the piety of pious men nourished itself 
 on that view. It has been taught, in the same circles, that Christ 
 in His passion endured exactly what we sinners would have been 
 compelled to endure had He not interfered. It has been taught, 
 too, by evangelical teachers, that while He did not endure the same 
 that we must have done, He did endure the equivalent thereof. And 
 soon. I need not mention all the fine thinking that has centered 
 on that adorable mystery, the mediation of the Son of God. But 
 under all these evangelical theories, human souls have had great 
 gladness, great tenderness, great liberty and vigor and growth in all 
 directions ;—and they have had this because those different hypoth- 
 eses have all abundantly magnified the Redeemer and his work ; 
 and in magnifying Him, have magnified by inevitable implication 
 all the essentials of the Christian theology. As respects the mere 
 matter of gratitude to Jesus Christ, with all of piety and salvation 
 that that involves, either one of several evangelical modes of con- 
 ceiving his sacrifice is as good as any other of the several. So 
 then, we have great freedom in our philosophy of the Atonement. 
 We are not compelled to settle it. We would like it settled, but we 
 can live, and live to all eternity blessed for evermore, if it is not 
 settled. 
 
 And the same is true of some other doctrines. There is a 
 great struggle to get an infallible Bible. And there is a special 
 anxiety at present concerning the final state of obstinate sinners. 
 If it is not one thing we are wresthng on, it is another, and this 
 never-ceasing human endeavor is full of uses ; but the substance ot 
 what the Infallibilist is after, is a Book that gives us—really gives 
 us—God’s way of salvation for men ;—and that we have, whether 
 Infallibilism and the Infallibilists are true or not. There are sev- 
 eral views of that Book besides his, several more or less important 
 variations from his view, that are conservative of all necessary doc- 
 trine and conservative of all the main interests of the Kingdom of 
 
 * 
 
182 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 God. And as regards the eternal doom of sinners, what we want 
 is a view that does not diminish penalty beyond its maximum im- 
 pression on men, and that is secured alike by several minor varia- 
 tions of doctrine. 
 
 I have struck a precarious line of thought here and ought to 
 pursue it something farther, if I am to do it justice and make all 
 snug and safe ;—but it must answer to say, as I have, that you pro- 
 vide for your release from a great deal of bondage when you dis- 
 cover the distinction between the substance of a doctrine, the thing 
 therein that makes it valuable, and the philosophical formulation in 
 which it happens to put itself forth for to-day. In the proposition 
 God ts light, it so happens that the three words are English. They 
 might have been Spanish, or German, or Arabic, and they were 
 Greek ; but who cares for the particular language in which they 
 stand, if only in every language we get the fact back there in the 
 nature of God, that He is Light, and in him is no darkness at all. 
 So, the substance of the Atonement is that Jesus Christ somehow 
 removed all difficulties whatever they were, on all sides, to our eter- 
 nal and complete salvation ; and these refinings as to a ransom paid 
 to Satan and so on, are but the ruan-made Greek, Spanish, and 
 English, in which that glorious Fact, or Substance, is costumed. 
 This Substance is binding on us and to fly from it is heresy and 
 spiritual death, very likely; but the terminology is not binding. 
 Voice the Atonement, O man, in the philosophical tongue that suits 
 you, and let no one abridge your liberty there. 
 
 A third discovery. I found that whereinsoever I was uncer- 
 tain, doctrinally uncertain that is, as to the philosophy of doc- 
 trine, I might keep still about it ; still before my people, still before 
 my brother ministers; except here and there a chosen soul, still 
 everywhere and all the time. A young man is not apt to know 
 that silence is very often his privilege. He cannot see why such a 
 proceeding is not deception and duplicity. He wants his flag 
 afloat in the upper air and not hidden in the darkness of his 
 pocket. But may not men and ministers have some privacies? 
 This spirit of outrightness is beautiful and let us keep full of it so 
 long as we live; especially let preachers be brave and transparent, 
 and let their congregations have the unconfusedness and comfort of 
 feeling that they are so; but we must have our outrightness confine 
 itself to matters on which we have something to affirm. Now if a 
 man has gone so far as to educate himself in theology, and put him- 
 
YALE LECTURES: 183 
 
 self in some pulpit to preach; presumably he has a list of things 
 whereon he has got his foot firm down, so that he wants to preach 
 them. It may be a small list, but it is sufficient to make him an 
 affirmative man, and sound affirmative when he speaks, provided he, 
 in his preaching, just keep within that list of beliefs. I agree with 
 the frequent remark, that a preacher must not be a negative, nor 
 even an agnostic ;—his general tone must be declarative and un- 
 qualified, rather than hesitating, or even deliberative ;—but a young 
 man has not ripened to unqualifiedness on all points that ever occu- 
 pied the human mind. He has not had time to think himself out 
 into the largeness of the universe ; neither has he yet found his way 
 into all godly experiences. Still, it is time for him to begin to 
 preach. He cannot wait till he reaches full stature and is sixty or 
 seventy years old. Moreover, the churches do not want him to wait. 
 They like him while yet downy and callow and chirping. 
 
 But even now he has learned a few things. . He has learned 
 the doctrine of depravity and the helplessness of man; ‘his own 
 heart has taught him that. And he has learned that there is a 
 Redeemer. Out of his studies and out of his experience he has 
 settled that. He has learned that there is a Hell and a Heaven; 
 he has been in them both. He has no doubt that God is, and 
 holds men responsible. He believes the Bible a divine Book. He 
 has found it so. He has looked out on the world and noticed that 
 the Chnistian religion has force among men. He sees that the men 
 of God must be organized in the Holy Ghost for God’s work. He 
 has had his communions with God. There are a score of points 
 on which he is solid, and in some of them he is enthusiastic. Well, 
 let him preach them. If he knew ten times as much as he does 
 and had ten scores of points, instead of one, the one score that he 
 now has would be the ones he ought to preach nearly all the time. 
 The most mature affirmative theologian gets his affirmativeness from 
 these very truths that this young man has already grasped ;—be- 
 cause they are the chief truths, they are the Christianity of Chris- 
 tianity ; they are the working forces of the Gospel. If only a man 
 is full of the idea that Christianity is a supernatural religion—that 
 alone, it carries enough in it to make him a powerful preacher ;— 
 a man of faiths, and not an Agnostic, mooning forever in the vast- 
 ness of his own dubiousness ;—a man in contact with whom other 
 men are stimulated and helped in all the confusion and weariness 
 of life, yea, helped on their way into the final glory of God. Why 
 
184 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 consume Sunday time in opening your unsettled questions, when 
 you have pulpit topics already more than you can ever get through ; 
 ——and those the essential topics, too? Why is it a part of manli- 
 ness to proclaim your unconcluded thinkings on matters which it 
 would not be supremely important to proclaim if they were con- 
 cluded? Keep still, I say again. Have sense. An English gen- 
 tleman traveling in this country for the first time, accompanying 
 Dean Stanley, had spent his first Sunday in Boston, and had lis- 
 tened to one of our eminent preachers there, a man of several very 
 mentionable gifts ; but what most impressed the Englishman, as he 
 said, was that man’s good sense. “ After all,’”’ said he to me, “ after 
 all, the greatest quality in a minister is good sense.” Possibly that 
 has been said before by somebody, somewhere ; it rather sounds so, 
 and yet it seems fresh, somehow. Have sense. I wish it did not 
 take half a lifetime to get it. 
 
 A fourth important discovery that I made, and made a matter 
 of ease to my mind, was with regard to creeds. I feared I might 
 not be able to accept them sufficiently, and might be uncomforta- 
 bly pressed towards acceptances from which I reluctated, as I have 
 already said. My church might press me. ‘My denomination 
 might press me. The importance of preserving my influence for 
 good might lead me to Creed subscriptions that I was not up to 
 with all my faculties. But when I came to see what sort of a thing 
 a Creed is, in some respects, then I could sign an ample variety of 
 them. A Creed is a storm-born: child generally, and there are 
 storm marks on it. If it had been born in pleasant weather ;—in. 
 the deliberativeness, meditativeness, and tranquil undebative tem- 
 per of peaceful sunshine, it would have been a spherical affair ; 
 whereas, it is hemispherical, one-sided, a partial utterance. Whena 
 man says to me, good morning, and I reply, good morning, sir, that 
 expression of mine is not the whole of truth, by any means. It 
 was a reply, and was narrowly limited by that fact. So a Creed, the 
 Nicene for example, a most noble and much-used symbol; but 
 mark the thunder-stroke movement of its Trinitarian clauses :—“ I 
 believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, 
 begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of 
 Light, very God of very God, Begotten not made, Being of one 
 substance with the Father.’’ I do not know that any human com- 
 position does me more good to articulate; but no breath of man 
 ever shaped itself into just such a shape as that, except as divinely 
 
YALE LECTURES. 185 
 
 stirred up by some denial, as the Nicene fathers in fact. were. 
 After this burst of polemical energy, the Creed swings into the 
 broad Catholic movement of the Apostles’ Creed, in the main, the 
 only Creed I recall at this moment which does not lie open to my 
 remark as to their polemical origin, and their resultant partialism. 
 That has the true earmarks of Catholicity, and is therefore good to 
 use under all circumstances and in all ages. 
 
 I have lying open before me, as I write, the Creed of the Theo- 
 logical Institute of Connecticut; which I mention with entire 
 respect and simply for illustration’s sake. It is a Creed which I 
 could myself sign, as all members of the Connecticut Pastoral 
 Union have, though I never did sign it. But if I did, I should do 
 it in distinct remembrance that the document was originally a pro- 
 test against certain phases of doctrine which it was supposed might 
 get headway in the Congregational body in this State; and that, 
 starting in such a motherhood, it must be a decent child and show 
 its mothering, as it honestly does ; so that it has nothing near the 
 breadth of the two Creeds to which I have already referred. Of 
 course every subscriber to that Creed, when he gets his name writ- 
 ten, in the secret places of his own mind adds numbers of things ; 
 antithetic truths, qualifiers and wholesome expositions of the docu- 
 ment, thus making another Creed, as long as the one he has signed, 
 until he gets himself into the wholeness of Christian doctrine after 
 all, into the sea, instead of being detained in a puddle. And that 
 is my point; that Creeds must be signed in that way—not with 
 mental reservations, I do not mean that, but with mental additions, 
 ordinarily, that all Christian people could assent to. I will illustrate. 
 The article in this Creed, that describes God’s election, runs on in 
 this familiar and innocent manner :—‘ God, from eternity, elected 
 some of our fallen race to everlasting life, through sanctification of 
 the Spirit, and belief of the truth, not for any foreseen faith or obe- 
 dience in the subjects of election, but according to his own good 
 pleasure.” According to his own good pleasure! Now when I say 
 amen to that, I interpolate. a cogitation of my own, to the effect that 
 God is a supremely good, reasonable Being, full of love, and finds 
 his pleasure in going by the constraint of sweet and loving reasons 
 always. And that is exactly why his “ pleasure’ in election—as the 
 Creed calls it—is a good pleasure. Behold! what a flood of the 
 milk of Heaven’s kindness is carried into the interiors and very 
 entrails of an Article on Election, by a little legitimate and friendly 
 
186 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 amplification of the saying, “His pleasure.” The object of the 
 makers of the Creed was to get men suitably humbled under the 
 sovereignty of God in Election; but I have made an exegesis that 
 also melts men; for a “ pleasure”’ so infinitely “good ” is enough 
 to melt anything. 
 
 Appending to the Creed a little meditation of my sort, a medi- 
 tation which I should expect the authors of the Creed would them- 
 selves approve, I manage to globe my conception of God in salva- 
 tion, and save the formula of the Pastoral Union from doing me any 
 hurt. If it had gone on and declared that many are elected to be 
 lost, as numerous Creeds have declared, I should be willing to sign 
 that, because it is so ;—in an awful rational sense, it is so—but I 
 should have my private appendix to that ; namely, all lost men elect 
 themselves to be lost. One is as true as the other, and no theodicy 
 is entire without both ; so that self-election should stand in the fore- 
 front of every Creed, as conspicuous, as loud-spoken, and fondly- 
 spoken, as God’s election. 
 
 You see my thought about Creeds now, and how I seem to 
 myself to have a good deal of liberty in them—honorable liberty, I 
 claim. If my Church has one that she would like subscribed by 
 me, lam ready. If the Congregational National Council pleases 
 to promulge some restatement of doctrine, by and by, I agree 
 beforehand to give myname to it. They could invent something 
 that I would not sign, but they will not. No Council, Synod, or 
 General Convention, in these days, ‘that is, of the Evangelical type, 
 would issue a Creed which a man might not sign, in the main at 
 least ;—sign and accept in the real meaning of its words and even 
 in the intended meaning generally. By the way, what is the differ- 
 ence between real meaning and intended meaning? Is there any? 
 If you subscribe to a Form, are you not honestly bound to sub- 
 scribe according to the intention of the authors of it? Is not that 
 its real meaning? I volunteer a small cogitation on that—since it 
 seems to lie in my path through this subject—thus :— 
 
 The authors of a doctrinal statement may have launched out 
 in that statement into something considerably bigger and grander 
 than they meant, or supposed at the time they had got. Blessed 
 be God, men are liable to these unconscious expansions, when their 
 souls are in great travail with a Creed. You see something analogous 
 to that in the experiences of the Biblical prophets sometimes. 
 They forged expressions intentionally local and narrow, but behold 
 
YALE LECTURES. 187 
 
 those expressions are susceptible of universal uses, and the Spirit 
 of God that presided over those prophesyings designed just that 
 largeness. Or, take a modern illustration. Some strict, and pretty 
 denominational Calvinistic theologian goes upon his knees for 
 prayer. He isa godly man and God moves in him as he prays. 
 Perish the thought that he there, face to face with God, would say 
 one word adverse to his own theology which he has solemnly elabo- 
 rated and spent a lifetime on—but he almost does. Yes, he prays 
 in such a way that an Arminian could join him. He is asking God 
 to save a certain man, and in his earnestness, while the doctrine of 
 decrees is not denied, and need not be, it is retired for the time 
 being and other doctrines, just as true, are brought to the front ; 
 and the effect is as though his theology were getting modified, 
 dropping its denominational marks, and taking on Catholicity. 
 
 Anybody may be overtaken by these enlargements. Secular 
 men are. They coin sentences that reverberate forever. They 
 make speeches that go in among the classics of the race. They 
 intend nothing. They had nota thought of ambition. They had 
 not the least premeditation, very likely. But all the more because 
 thus unconscious and void of purpose, they were open to the spirit 
 of the age, or the spirit of history, or the spirit of a great national 
 movement, or the spirit of God—call it by whatever name you 
 please, I fancy that on inspection it will be found to settle down to 
 that last, the spirit of God in a man. Witness Lincoln’s speech at 
 Gettysburg. Witness many a hymn, and many a national hymn. 
 Witness some music, in which the soul of mankind will speak itself 
 forth forever. 
 
 Also witness some Creeds, I say. The writers intended Fatal- 
 ism of the most insufferable species, let us suppose ; but they shot 
 clear over into Christianity, and Christianity ever after could use 
 their Creed as a vehicle of her large meanings. After they had 
 finished their production, they looked it over and pronounced it 
 good—there was their Fatalism all out in elaborate black and white, 
 all they could ask, so they think, but are deceived generally. In 
 Creed-making, when the authors have made sure of the specialty 
 most on their hearts, they start out into a pleasant excursion in 
 some other parts of Christianity ; paying their respects to this and 
 that doctrine not necessary to be very powerfully stated just then 
 they fancy—moving therefore unpolemically—and it is in those ex- 
 cursions, if nowhere else, that they are likely to trip and fall out of 
 
 15 
 
188 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 their specialty in a measure ; and all succeeding generations have 
 the advantage of their misfortune, and sign their Creeds. The 
 great God who notes the sparrow’s fall is unlikely to take no inter- 
 est in a body of men in travail with a Christian Creed ; and while 
 for wise purposes, He sometimes stands aloof and leaves them to 
 bring forth a phenomenally mean result, at other times He passes 
 into their spirits by His Spirit, and gives them a victory they never 
 prayed for; a Creed for the ages, a Creed to be chanted through all 
 the tribes of Israel; and when we chant it. we do not chant their 
 intentions alone, but their magnificent inadvertency, their unknow- 
 ing seership, their service in the will of God made articulate through 
 them. What would not the Fathers say, if they could get up from’ 
 their graves and see how their partial works have swept the world 
 sometimes, the local and denominational widening into the univer- 
 sal, the individual made great and representative of the whole 
 Church on Earth. 
 
 I think, then, that Creeds sometimes have a double sense ; 
 man’s sense (the sense of their author) and God’s sense ; and you 
 may sign which you please. If an ancient symbol proves large 
 enough to hold all discoveries made since it was issued, very well, 
 put the discoveries in mentally, and sign the whole thing. I repeat, 
 a free use of Creeds is one of the ways by which we secure our 
 liberty as thinking men. 
 
 I come now to the last head in this discourse, and inform you 
 that any anxious doctrinal questioning you may now have, will be 
 likely to be eased by the simple lapse of time, provided you go 
 forward in your plain duty, preaching what you know, bringing the 
 Gospel to bear on men as well as you can, and looking constantly 
 to God. 
 
 How often does the following come to pass in the interior his- 
 tory of ministers? During their years in the school of theology, 
 and for some time thereafter, they lay themselves out full-strength on 
 certain questions that seem to them to lie at the very threshold of 
 theology ; requiring therefore to be settled before the business of 
 preaching can be taken up in earnest. I hung for a long time to 
 the inquiry touching the existence of a God, such as I had tradi- 
 tionally received. I proposed to have that problem thought out, 
 before I took one step in active life ; and then I proposed to make 
 daylight shine through the incoming of moral evil into the universe 
 of God. It could not be much satisfaction to discover a God to 
 
YALE LECTURES. 189 
 
 be preached, unless I could discover that he is a good one, and 
 worthy to be preached—and looking out on a creation in such ter- 
 rible confusion, and distress as this one of ours, how could I find 
 my way to the solid conviction, God is infinitely good? And soon. 
 Questions and questions—and prime questions many of them, to a 
 man about to spend his life in telling men about God and his ways. 
 But, for various reasons, a man may find (as I did) that some of 
 his questions cannot be solved by him at present ; whereat he falls 
 back tired out and lets them go. He has done his best, and they 
 must go. In the case of some of them he accepts that slender 
 preponderance of probabilities which he is able to raise in regard 
 to them, and goes on with his work. In the case of others, he 
 makes a complete adjournment to some far-away and more lumin- 
 ous future ; and proceeds to preach just so much as he has discoy- 
 ered. His new work, with its splendid motives, and its successes 
 very likely, wakes enthusiasm in him, and his old energy for un- 
 wieldy questions therefore slackens. Ina hand-to-hand fight with 
 evil he forgets to discuss how evil broke in on us originally. In his 
 joyful proclamation of the Christian salvation, he forgets some of 
 the intricate questions as to Biblical inspiration. There in the 
 Book, beyond mistake, is the salvation, and that is enough to fill a 
 man and keep him speaking with all his might. But by and by 
 out of the pigeon-holes of his mind tumble by accident this and 
 that old question of his ; and to his amazement, when he tests him- 
 self on them he finds that they are settled, and he could not tor- 
 ment himself with them now if he tried. Some of them are set- 
 tled as being solved. When his present mind looks them in the 
 face, they seem to have no special perplexity. He has not studied 
 them since those old days of mental tribulation ; nevertheless they 
 are clear—pretty clear. He has had personal experience of God, 
 and that former debate—is there a personal and good God—is to 
 him as though a man should fumble an axiom, and pretend to feel 
 dreadfully because he could not understand it.. Experience goes 
 where logic cannot. Perhaps I cannot demonstrate that my will is 
 free, but I feel it free in me; so no matter about your demon- 
 strations. And particularly in the things of religion, demonstra- 
 tions become superfluous as experience enlarges. Experience 
 makes you intuitive. Experience makes you a large and know- 
 ing theologian. Experience enables you to sit back, high and 
 lifted up and omniscient, in a sort of Olympian superiority, and 
 
190 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 look down on the thinkers in the plain below, who in much dust 
 and confused endeavor are wrestling with each other on the 
 problem of a personal Deity, and the reality of an external world, 
 and the facts of consciousness, and the probability of any kind of 
 life beyond these present horizons, and the possibility of being 
 saved from what we at present are, by the power of Jesus Christ. 
 There they are, and up there he is—raised thereto by the actual 
 doings of God in his soul. 
 
 But experience does not solve all things, and so our minister 
 finds that some of those old trying subjects of his are settled, not 
 as being explained, but as seeming now not especially necessary of 
 explanation. If I have no interest in getting a thing explained, it 
 is as if explained, for all practical purposes. These indifferent sub- 
 jects I dare not mention in full, lest I appear to belittle some that 
 others think of solemn consequence. The philosophy of the 
 Atonement is an interesting matter, but one can live and save his 
 soul if he postpone it to some convenient eternity. Large areas of 
 philosophical divinity need not be traveled now, and need not be 
 preached. And as to what we do preach, there is this to say, that 
 preaching a doctrine with a view to save souls by it, and not with 
 a view to get a subject systematically unfolded, is just the Baconian 
 way of discovering exactly what that doctrine is and whether it is a 
 doctrine. A doctrine that cannot be used, is a false one. A true 
 doctrine which, in use, seems not to serve God’s ends, and bless 
 men, is misconceived at some point by the preacher. If all minis- 
 ters were retired scholars, intent on theology and nothing more, I 
 do not know in what misconceptions theology would not at last 
 bring up. The salvation of theology is trying to preach it. Will 
 it work? Putit tomen. Does it convince them? Does it bring 
 them to God? When I read some of the essays and books issued 
 by professors of theology, I say—blessed be studiousness and the 
 cloister. When I go among the churches and see the preachers, I 
 say—blessed be service in the field. Well, every man ought to 
 have something of both. Persons made as I was could never 
 get to a large and comfortable settlement in the truth, I fear, by 
 the labors of seminary life. Inquiry is in danger of being fruitless, 
 unless brought continually to the test of life and manful striving. 
 
 Young Gentlemen, all through this hour I have carried an 
 implication that some of you may be as I once was, and I have 
 done what I could to show you the ways of liberty out in the world ; 
 
YALE LECTURES. 19] 
 
 and possibly in my earnestness for so long, on that one point, I 
 have seemed to provide more liberty than any one needs, or should 
 take. I have no idea that many of you will find yourselves pushing 
 and discomforted to get your liberty when you fairly come to the 
 sacred and sweet ministries of your office. You will have passed 
 through your curriculum, and in it will have become affirmative, 
 and Creed-bound to a certain extent, and in an intelligent and 
 wholesome way. You will have had some spiritual experiences 
 which have confirmed your faith and enlarged your religious intelli- 
 gence as much as the teaching of your teachers. And, back of all, 
 as being earlier than all, stand (I hope) the faiths of your child- 
 hood, your home nurture, the old nest-warmth, the magnetism of 
 your mother, to mortgage you to God forever and make all serious 
 Creed-wandering impossible. How we tug on those first moorings 
 (the home-moorings) sometimes, but how they hold; and after we 
 have sufficiently roamed the realms of inquiry and had our strain 
 and peril there, how peacefully we return to our first rest, and wor- 
 ship the God of our fathers. These conservative influences will 
 work to make you not afraid of Creeds ; and that, joined with the 
 fact that the theory of Creed subscription in these days is quite 
 elastic in almost all Christian bodies, will give you a good sense of 
 freedom. ‘I commend you to God, and to the word of His grace, 
 which is able to build you up, and give you an inheritance among 
 all them that are sanctified.”’ 
 
THE VAGUE ELEMENTS: IN 
 LANGUAGE. 
 
 Gentlemen, you are to be preachers some day not far off. 
 Some cf you have begun already in a scattering and tentative way, 
 and it is impossible you should too thoroughly understand the instru- 
 ment, Language, whereby you are to get your impression on men. 
 So that I fancy I may do you a service if, to-day, I discourse before 
 you on the Vague Elements in Language, and the value thereof. 
 
 I suppose you are already advised that it is your privilege to 
 be clear, and convey ideas, definite ideas, when you speak, but I 
 say unto you, it is your privilege also to be dim and misty, and 
 convey no sharp-cut ideas at all, but only impressions ; which 
 impressions in your hearers will be deep or not just according as 
 you are dim and not clear ; the current doctrine, the doctrine I mean 
 of the average man, that the sole function of language is to carry 
 ideas into people’s minds, being a dreadful untruth, an untruth 
 which has miserably circumscribed many a preacher and many a 
 theologian, and has caused many an extremely lucid creed to be 
 worshiped three times more than it deserved. 
 
 I have nothing to say against clearness, as you will notice 
 while I go on. Contrariwise, I should have been willing to speak 
 to you to-day on:—The lucid elements in language and the value 
 thereof ;—as willing as to undertake the cause of mistiness, were it 
 not that the true, great function of Mist is not appreciated by the 
 most and does not get its real place in courses of lectures here 
 and elsewhere. 
 
 This is a great and special era for insisting on perspicacity, and 
 the disciples and enthusiasts of the perspicacious, in the scientific 
 field, many of them at least, have got on now to the following pitch 
 
YALE LECTURES. 193 
 
 of impudence ; namely, they are claiming that whatsoever is not 
 absolutely visible, hearable, touchable, tastable, smellable, or what 
 is the same thing, material, physical, and therefore demonstrable, 
 is, on that account, not at all to be relied upon; and so in one 
 grand affirmation, the entire kingdom of supersensible entities, 
 including God himself, that crown and sum-total of imperceptible 
 realities, is obliterated by these gentlemen. Now as against the 
 modern agnostic position, and against the more outright doctrine of 
 absolute denial, I on this occasion lift.up my doctrine of Mist, 
 the legitimacy of vagueness, the sterling use of vagueness, the 
 indispensability of vagueness indeed, in order to the highest impres- 
 sion on the human mind. It is nothing against a thing that it can- 
 not be explicitly formulated. It may be as real a reality notwith- 
 standing that. And that it resists formulation is, as likely as not, 
 one of the tokens of its immensity. 
 
 But let us now carefully edge along into our subject and see 
 what we find. A picture, gentlemen, is a statement, in a _termi- 
 nology addressed to the eye and not to the ear. And whereinsoever 
 it has force and arrests the beholder, it gets its hold first of all, of 
 course, by its distinctness. ‘That stands central. A painted tree 
 must be a tree to the eye, beyond a peradventure ; a man a man, 
 a leaf a leaf, an animal an animal, and nothing else. If the artist 
 starts to say tree, and leaves you debating whether it be not a human 
 shadow that you are observing on the canvas there, that artist there- 
 by advertises his own confusedness, and is in a vagueness that no 
 lecturer can defend. For I should have said, there are two kinds of 
 mist ; the mist of a weak and essentially misty mind ; and the mist 
 of minds large, rational, lucid, who are as capable of clear statement 
 as of fogging, and who never let in a shred of fog save as attendant 
 upon, and an envelope of, a sunlit statement. 
 
 So then the picture of which I am speaking ; the good picture, 
 the powerful picture, has something to say, and says it in a tone 
 that is crystalline and ringing. That to begin with, doubtless. So 
 much as that I concede ‘to the cause of perspicacity. But now 
 behold how the real and effective artist gets himself on beyond the 
 finiteness of perspicacity, into the larger ranges of impression. For 
 there is no use in talking to the contrary, whatever can be stated is 
 too small to carry us completely away. However limited we may 
 be ourselves, thank God, we have a life-long, constitutional hunger 
 for the unstatable. Give us some token of that, O artist. Hang 
 
194 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 out a flag over where the unstatable lies hidden. Draw for our eye 
 a hand that points out into the vast which you cannot explore. 
 Show us a wind blowing that way. Anything, anything, to tell us 
 that beyond all that can possibly be formulated in the terms of your 
 Art, there sweeps an Unknown; and that you are not yourself in 
 the conceit that the statable is anything more than a dot to the out- 
 spread unstatable. Some signal to notify us of that we must have, 
 if we are to bow ourselves clear to the ground before you. 
 
 A few days ago, with this thought foaming in my mind, I 
 stepped into my parlor to see how my paintings there hung, showed 
 in this great matter. The first one I chanced upon was a copy of 
 Rosa Bonheur’s “‘ Changing Pastures ;’’—a work full of space, light, 
 clearness, and beauty ;—no metaphysical theologian ever made an 
 argument more translucent and incontestable than that woman’s 
 showing of her wide stretch of waters, her crowded. boat-load of 
 sheep in the foreground, her sweep of mountains in the distance, 
 her human figures, the old shepherd and his oarsmen in the boat, 
 and all the rest. Her realism and the bare, large vigor which she 
 manifests in that out-standing and massive reality, are most admir- 
 rable ;—and manly. I mean disrespect to nobody when I call 
 such work as that manly. But Rosa Bonheur does not stop there. 
 No. Here and there is a rent in her realism, through which we 
 walk out of the real, and out of the narrowness of visibility, into 
 the ideal with its immeasurable scope, its absolute openness and 
 feeling of openness ;—the region wherein the soul of man is most 
 at home and most elate, always. For example; the painter might 
 have bounded her picture by a wall solid and high as heaven, and 
 she might have arched over the entire scene by a great dome of 
 stone, and shut us down under that to contemplate forever her well- 
 painted, literal sheep—so’ literal that you can hear them bleat all 
 packed together there; to these literalities of several sorts, I say, 
 she might have confined us, with not a ghost of an outing any- 
 where ; but—dear Soul! she wouldn’t do it, in truth she could not ; 
 she could not herself endure to be imprisoned in that way. So, in 
 place of a dead surface of wall, or any hindering thing, she set a 
 brave, great sky ; a veritable God’s sky ; not a leaden, eye-confining 
 thing, almost as bad as a wall, but a sky full of Beyonds and outly- 
 ing infinitudes, a sky that beckons the impressible beholder into 
 these roomy outings; so that while her picture is an earth-scene 
 and tells an earthly story, and not the highest kind of one either, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 195 
 
 but a lowly, rather, enlivened and glorified by no definite touch of 
 sentiment or pathos ; nevertheless it widens away into the heavenly 
 spaces, as all of earth ought to. } 
 
 So much for the sky. Then under the sky and on the earth 
 such touches as these occur—all of them outings for the contem- 
 plative beholder, you notice. Of course, if the beholder wants to 
 stop at sheep, and in sheep have his whole satisfaction, I do not 
 know that he can find a lot more to his mind than these of Rosa 
 Bonheur’s. If he knows a sheep when he sees it, and if sheep 
 know him as a friend of sheep, as all dogs knew John Brown, and 
 all breathing creatures loved Donatello, then he may sit down in 
 this boat on the waters, this sheep-boat, and stay and have his per- 
 fect bliss. He will escape all perils of the imagination, and be on 
 first-rate terms with those scientists who cleave unto the finite and 
 pooh-pooh all else. 
 
 But most picture: lovers like to spread a little and wander, and 
 get far-off, and be let forth into the unhorizoned ranges. They 
 fancy that life’s literalities do themselves get a lift somehow and a 
 transfiguration, if only in looking at them and dealing with them 
 we have in us at least an obscure sense of something other than 
 they ; other, vaster, and more dim. ‘Therefore this painter of ours 
 comforts us by opening valleys back into her mountains ; great val- 
 leys; valleys not painted but suggested by the top-lines of the 
 mountains ; and as they are only suggested and not closely defined, 
 you are at liberty and are invited to send forth your musing mind 
 into them and expatiate to your heart’s content; a performance 
 this, on the part of the painter, much more stimulating and satis- 
 factory to you than though she had gone up the valley with you and 
 told you all and everything, as she did in the case of her sheep. 
 
 Moreover, by way of otherwise indicating her valleys, and not 
 actually plodding along up them and showing you every step of the 
 road, she starts her waters flowing back, and up, and when she 
 gets those waters well started she stops them, but she stops 
 them in such a way that when you notice exactly where they stop, 
 it is plain as day that they do not stop there, but range on, you 
 cannot tell how far; just as a winding road when it goes out of 
 sight gives you the clearest kind of a notification that it is still 
 moving on. Now what a cunning and masterful way of painting a 
 valley it is, not to paint it, but hint it, somehow. How much more 
 sizable and bewitching is a hinted valley than a painted one! 
 
196 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 It is like a veiled lady; her indistinct face gives you a chance to 
 glorify her; but if she lifts her veil, the facts are all out. The 
 unveiled facts may be ravishing, but they cannot be so ravishing as 
 your idealistic creation of that face when so far concealed that 
 there is a chance to work your imagination upon it. 
 
 But pass from Rosa Bonheur’s mountains and valleys and sug- 
 gestive sky, to her treatment of the waters over which she floats her 
 sheep. It was in her fond heart to make those waters lustrous 
 under the slant lights of her sky; but lustres are likely to detain 
 the eye on the surface and hold it away from the much more seri- 
 ous and impressive thought and feeling of awful depths and glooms 
 underneath. It were too bad to give usa stretch of sea with no 
 fathomless mystery below, merely that certain soft hues might waver 
 before us and shine and please. Therefore along the waves now 
 and then she makes a submarine hint, and in the far foreground 
 where the shadows of three human forms are cast upon the water 
 from the boat, she, the painter, instead of reflecting them to us 
 from the surface merely, as she might have done, carries them down 
 and down ; as much as to say :—“ See now, this water is no shallow 
 thing, but a shadowy abyss, it runs down, dimness below dimness, it 
 widens away in tracts and tracts of gloom, it sequesters hordes of 
 creatures, it treasures old wrecks, and the dead and the lost things of 
 long ago, heaps on heaps ;’’—“ yes, it is a sea,” she says; “I can- 
 not paint it for you, what terms are large enough for stating such a 
 thing as that, but just you follow those three shadows into the 
 depths and see what sort of a feeling they raise in you ;—it is not 
 necessary you should have any clear ideas as you follow those 
 shadows, it is better you should not; what you want is a great 
 impression of submarine realities, and that is best secured by escap- 
 ing the realism of detail and all distinctness, and all sense of 
 boundaries.” 
 
 I have spent an unconscionable time on this picture, you may 
 think, but you are mistaken. In this one and particular study thus 
 long-protracted I am getting some principles established which 
 open a path for us into the innermost of my subject. I had 
 thought to mention the vague elements in other pictures on my 
 walls ; but I must not delay. There hangs there a copy of Church’s 
 “Sunrise in the Tropics,” which begins with an exhibition of tropi- 
 cal foliage as veracious and full of fact as the multiplication table. 
 But then, immediately back of that in the picture, everything goes 
 
 a i 
 
YALE LECTURES. 197 
 
 into haze, a lovely illumined haze, deeper and deeper as you follow 
 on into the remote. The forms of things struggle through it with 
 great difficulty, and by and by they disappear altogether and your 
 eye buries itself at last in complete confusion, a golden confusion ; 
 but that confusion is by no means like a stone wall to end at. You 
 cannot see through, I grant you, any more than you could through a 
 stone wall—that is true—but unlike the wall, it does not stay your 
 mind ; nay, it projects your mind into regions outlying, and you feel 
 very much as though you were actually seeing breadths, and 
 breadths and breadths of equatorial luxuriance and splendor. 
 
 These illustrations of the indeterminate, and the function of 
 it, taken from the painter’s art, are fascinating and endless, but I 
 want to take you now over into the field of music; peradventure, 
 that will help me on my way a little and still more confirm my doc- 
 trine of the vague. 
 
 I do not refer now to music wedded to words, and made to 
 carry a theme contained in those words. I am playing off and 
 away from words and language as yet, with a view to come down on 
 that when I am ready for it, with a good momentum gathered up in 
 these perambuiations through the other arts or modes of expres- 
 sion, wherein I am now indulging. For, language, painting, music, 
 sculpture, architecture, pantomime, all conceivable instruments of 
 expression, have certain common features and in so far as they have, 
 a study of one is a virtual study of the others. 
 
 The majority of those who have a heart for music and réceive 
 imperative and dear impressidns from it, are not themselves musi- 
 cians. They understand neither the terms nor the grammar of the 
 art. The whole thing is a foreign language to them, and therefore 
 they cannot speak it; and if those who do speak it have any dis- 
 tinct ideas whatever in that speaking of theirs, this horde of igno- 
 rant but fond listeners know not what those ideas are. I appeal to 
 the experience of many here present, if that is not so. Iam one 
 of the ignoramuses in question. And yet, there is no sort or form 
 of utterance, or noise-making, which works on me even approxi- 
 mately as music does. I listen to it always when I can. I follow 
 it about. I surrender my emotions to it. I was never yet ina 
 state of rage which could not be utterly put down and made 
 ashamed by music ; never in a grief which could not be profoundly 
 ameliorated, for the moment at all events; never in a levity that 
 could not be chastened, nor in a perplexity or general state of dis- 
 
198 YALE: LECTURES. 
 
 trust that could not be led on and out into serenity ; and never yet 
 was I in any seven-by-nine confinement in the finite, and there 
 chafed, but music could infallibly toll me off towards and into the 
 amplitude of the Infinite, where I could really get my breath and 
 could mysteriously take on an imputation of its magnitude, and 
 have some sense of possessing magnitude myself. But not one 
 idea gets into me through that whole performance. Not one. If I 
 listen to a preacher, I must attend to his meanings. Meanings are 
 his one and only contrivanoe for getting at me and doing anything 
 with me. Up there in a great sweat he stands conveying ideas, and 
 down there in the pew I sit in a responsive sweat, trying to get 
 ideas, so as not to lose the whole occasion. A twofold wretched 
 tug, just because we are shut up to having ideas. I was told of a 
 boy who, after a great deal of labor to make a composition, began 
 one with this truly affecting remark :—‘“It is rather difficult and 
 pretty impossible, to convey unto others those ideas of which you 
 are not yourself possessed of.’’ Now if that boy had been a musi- 
 cian, there would not have been a bit of need that he should con- 
 vey ideas to anybody. His composition would have been as good 
 without them. Whether musicians must themselves have ideas 
 when they speak forth in that almost celestial language of theirs, is 
 anicer question. Exactly what idea, now, lies back of each term 
 of that cabalistic eloquence, do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si, do? Please 
 tell me that. And when those eight emptinesses get themselves 
 together in all sorts of twist, double-twist, intertwist, and labyrin- 
 thine elaboration, and thereby make people cry, and sometimes 
 laugh, and sometimes rend heaven with their indignation, what real 
 thought or thing is there to which that miraculous complexity cor- 
 responds. When I throw out among you a sentence of this lecture 
 of mine I am able to point you to some concrete thing which my 
 words—most of them, not all—stand for. If I say, ‘‘Gentlemen,” 
 you know what that means. It is not like do or re or mi, mere 
 articulate noise. If I say, ‘Gentlemen, you know nothing about 
 music,” the words :—Gentlemen, you, know, nothing, and music, all 
 instantly suggest some reality that you can put you finger on, or 
 your thought at all events. The term zo/hing in that sentence 
 comes nearest to a failure in that respect. It would take a long 
 hunt to find the tangible counterpart of nothing, I fancy; and I 
 may say, as I pass, that that is one of the numerous words at 
 which those vaguenesses get in wherewith, I contend, language is 
 
YALE LECTURES. 199 
 
 saturated. But I am speaking of music, and I am charging vagueness 
 on it—for is not a language vague which accomplishes its victories 
 of influence without carrying ideas, and without being able to point 
 to any perceivable thing in heaven or earth, that its do-re-mi’s, or its 
 overwhelming combinations of do-re-mi’s, signify. The necessities 
 of my subject to-day do not compel me to prove that musicians 
 when they compose or musically perform, whether by their own 
 tuneful throats or by instruments, are totally empty of ideas. All I 
 am forced to say is, that all much-impressed but unmusical listeners 
 to their goings-on are not so impressed by ideas conveyed. As a 
 work of supererogation, however, I do hint, that musical composers 
 and musical performers when they address us, are not in just that 
 distinct labor to embody ideas, ideas clearly formulated in their 
 own consciousness and anxious to be delivered, that writers and 
 speakers are in who use ordinary language. Of course I do not 
 say this as intending to disparage music in comparison with the 
 other arts of expression. On the contrary I put it foremost ;— 
 beyond Painting, beyond Literature, beyond Oratory, beyond every- 
 thing. I like what Matthew Arnold says in one of his poems :— 
 
 Miserere Domine! 
 The words are uttered and they flee. 
 Deep is their penitential moan, 
 Mighty their pathos, but ’tis gone. 
 They have declared the spirit’s sore, 
 > Sore load, and words can do no more. 
 Beethoven takes them then—those two 
 Poor, bounded, words; and makes them new; 
 Infinite makes them, makes them young, 
 Transplants them to another tongue, 
 Where they can now, without constraint 
 Pour all the soul of their complaint, 
 And roll adown a channel large 
 The wealth divine they have in charge. 
 Page after page of music turn, 
 And still they live, and still they burn, 
 Eternal, passion-fraught, and free 
 Miserere, Domine ! 
 
 
 
 Thus much in glorification of music. It is wonderful, unique, 
 Heaven’s solitary child and darling. But in the midst of all this 
 that I say about it, I ask you not to forget what I am chiefly after, 
 namely, this ;—that Music holds this lovely and radiant queenship of 
 hers, by reason in part of the fact, that she courageously dispenses 
 
200 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 with the service of ideas and cleanly-minted conceptions; as 
 often as any way not using words at all, as in instrumentation for 
 instance ; and where she does use them, as in her do, re, mi, taking 
 care to select arbitrary and utterly meaningless terms, that cannot 
 be tracked back to any physical root like most terms; terms that 
 cannot be traced to any particular association that explains their ori- 
 gin, (as where a certain special new color recently came to be called 
 magenta, because a certain great battle had just happened to be 
 fought at an old-world place whose name was Magenta) : selecting 
 terms, I say, that owe their origin to the stark, inexplicable, lawless 
 volition of man, terms therefore as bare of associations or foregoing 
 history, as a new-born babe ;—that is the vocabulary of Music, in 
 so far as she has any. Nevertheless, let me say it once more, she, 
 most nearly of all voices, voices the infinite, she most successfully 
 raises in us those feelings whose chiefest peculiarity is that they feel 
 in us exactly as though they had no limits, and would be blas- 
 phemed if ever limits should undertake to circumscribe them. I 
 tell you, Men and Brethren, we are all pretty small, but the small- 
 est of us every now and then has emotions which, as we turn and 
 look in on them, seems to be measureless—exactly that ; I have felt 
 that a thousand times—measureless—or if on the remote outskirts 
 of these emotions in us we observe some dim similitude of metes 
 and bounds, they are so dim that they do not distress and suffocate 
 us ;—they are like Rosa Bonheur’s sky, which is the end of her 
 picture to be sure, the point at which her brush stopped ; but the 
 
 point also and moreover and a good deal moreover, at which we 
 
 are passed triumphantly on and out into whatever illimitable voyag- 
 ing we have the sensibility and imagination for. 
 
 I was getting off the substance of this statement not long ago, 
 to a very practical and concrete woman, a woman of every-day, 
 remorseless sense ; and she told me she wished I would stop talking 
 in that way to her. She listened attentively, and was vexed, because 
 she discovered nothing in her own experience that corresponded to 
 those big moods and mental states that I pretended to be describing. 
 Gentlemen, if any of you are vexed, I cannot help it. Perhaps 
 some day, when you are old enough and impressible enough and 
 reflective enough on your own inward state, this thing will begin to 
 glimmer into you. Blessed be God for music, or for whatever thing 
 has the knack to abolish horizons and let us out into the Infinite ; 
 which, after all, is our native air. 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 201 
 
 Speaking of sounds, and of their power according as they are 
 indefinite, consider a great, booming bell-stroke, or the go-off of a 
 great cannon. When they first hit the ear, those sounds, they are 
 even painfully definite and mind-piercing; as excruciating as a 
 creed that assumes to get God defined completely and made porta- 
 ble in the finite; but after a little that clear first crash has the 
 decency to fine away and fine away and widen off into space, and 
 grow vast, and by and by misty and wavering, till at last it hovers 
 and pulses on the very verge of silence ; there it stands trembling 
 as though loath to jump off and be eternally still ;—finally it jumps 
 and is gone forever, and then it comes back and is not gone—then 
 it dies again-—then returns a very tenuous and phantasmal ghost of 
 asound. It reminds one of Tom Hood’s lines :— | 
 
 We watched her breathing thro’ the night, 
 Her breathing soft and low, 
 
 As in her breast the wave of life 
 Kept heaving to and fro. 
 
 Our very hopes belied our fears, 
 Our fears our hopes belied— 
 
 We thought her dying when she slept, 
 And sleeping when she died. 
 
 So that vanishing sound thinned out through the whole 
 immeasurable air, and when it expired no mortal could tell ;—but 
 I ask you ; when is that bell-stroke, or that explosive cannon, most 
 powerful ; when in the first crash it is separated from the encom- 
 passing silence of the creation bya line of distinction like an abyss, 
 or when its confines have come to be dubious, when it has reached 
 the border-lands of Silence and is melting into silence, like snow 
 into the river? Its vagueness is its glory. Its vagueness makes it 
 seem large. Its vagueness holds us in a hush of emotion. Its 
 vagueness energizes upon us and in us and produces emotions that 
 are the duplicate of its own dreamy magnitude. And it is just so 
 with many other inarticulate sounds. 
 
 But let me now carry my doctrine of the vague over into Lit- 
 erature, and observe how the case stands there. Take that poem 
 of two verses, written by Alfred Tennyson, and called by him, 
 “The Poet’s Song.” I think you will say, Gentlemen, that it 
 requires good courage in me and all sorts of faith in my dearly- 
 beloved vagueness, to go to that man for specimens of it. For who 
 
202 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 that ever wrote is more crystalline than he, who more nearly ap- 
 proaches the beautiful finiteness of Greek sculpture, who has cut 
 more cameos, and who more delights in cameos, with their explicit 
 particularity and their ever-legible lines of limitation? Yes, that is 
 so; but Tennyson is a great man ;—he is no cameo himself and he 
 cannot confine himself to cameo work. As a matter of pastime he 
 may toss off a jewel like that, and there stop; but when he brings 
 all his powers into the field , after he has done his fine cutting and 
 given you a scene, a thing, a man, a thought, so that it stands out 
 like a dog’s head on a door-knocker for distinctness ; he proceeds 
 to call you off into regions circumjacent and large and misty, as 
 likely as not, like the sea-begirt and fog-bestrown island on which 
 he lives ;—-tones far-away you will hear—tones indeterminate—bells 
 that are of earth perhaps and perhaps of heaven, wind-sounds “from 
 unsunned spaces blown,” yes, revelries of the imagination, ordered 
 and melodious revelries, he will give you, and in your joy you will 
 forget cameos and crystals and all clear-cut forms whatsoever. 
 
 I do not think that the poem—‘ The Poet’s Song ’’—is so good 
 an illustration of all this as I might find, but it does furnish a good 
 etching, an absolute picture ; and at the same time there is a noble 
 off-look or two in it, which gives a sense of room and range ;— 
 exactly as Rosa Bonheur, after she had painted her sheep with Ten- 
 nysonian fidelity—there they are, sheep all over, precisely as God 
 made them—indulges us in brave sky-lines and great suggestive 
 chasms and valleys in her mountains, and great watery depths, and 
 so on ;—so that we are in the expansibility of the Creation a little, . 
 and not in the belittlement of a cameo. 
 
 Tennyson undertakes to tell us in the two verses mentioned, 
 that a poet went forth from the city into the country, seated him- 
 self, and poured forth a poetic melody. And the melody was so 
 fascinating and amazing, that a wild swan, a lark, a swallow, a snake, 
 a hawk and a nightingale, all paused and listened, and declared 
 they never conceived the like. As I read now, just watch these 
 creatures. You can see them as visibly as though I had them here 
 with me to pantomime the thing over again for your edification. 
 
 The rain had fallen, the Poet arose, 
 
 He passed by the town and out of the street, 
 A light wind blew from the gates of the sun, 
 And waves of shadow went over the wheat, 
 And he sat him down in a lonely place, 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 203 
 
 And chanted a melody loud and sweet, 
 That made the wild-swan pause in her cloud, 
 And the lark drop down at his feet. 
 
 The swallow stopt as he hunted the bee, 
 
 The snake slipt under a spray, 
 
 The wild hawk stood with the down on his beak 
 And stared, with his foot on the prey, 
 
 (It must have been marvelous singing that arrested him in his 
 greediness there.) 
 And the nightingale thought, “I have sung many songs, 
 But never a one so gay, 
 
 For he sings of what the world will be 
 When the years have died away.” 
 
 Now I do not know but that utterance is perfect, artistically 
 and everywise. But that in it which engages my attention at the 
 present, is first the author’s absolute conception of his scene ; no 
 cameo I say was ever better cut; there is a statement for you as 
 firm-lined and obvious as though made under oath, by the most 
 incorrigible of realists ;—all the rights of perspicuity are religiously 
 secured,—no holy creed were ever better in that regard; but see 
 now secondly, how Tennyson slips in a magnitude or two, and gives 
 us an offing here and there, an outrun into the majesty of the dim, 
 a touch of atmosphere which like all atmospheres ever seen of man, 
 comes just short of complete translucency ; and we all know that 
 the one feature by which atmospheres get those lovely shows and 
 carnivals of color wherewith they so intoxicate us, is this short- 
 coming of theirs in the matter of clearness. 
 
 When our poet has taken us into the country and spoken of 
 the wind blowing from the gates of the sun, and of the cloud- 
 shadows traveling across the wheat, he has therein and thereby 
 given us a feeling of height and space out there. We are not 
 invited to any small scene, like an etching hung ina gallery, but the 
 whole creation is called in to make an occasion worth while. And 
 that is a good start. Plainly it is no mere cameoist that has us in 
 charge. Next he proceeds to inform us that this same whole crea- 
 tion is made to be attent and is, in fact, just ravished by that out- 
 poured melody from that man there seated. The prose way of 
 stating that, would have been to state it straightforwardly, just as I 
 now have. But to hint it, by picturing three or four animal crea- 
 
 tures as arrested and attent, is three times as effective as any 
 16 
 
204 YALE, LECTURES. 
 
 statement. To our quick feeling, those intensely concrete and lively 
 specimens of the creation are more than the creation, on the prin- 
 ciple sometimes mentioned, a part is more than the whole ; as that 
 veiled lady, you remember, was more revealed when partly veiled 
 than when her entire unobscured face rose on us. 
 
 By that cunning device, then, of the selected animals, Tenny- 
 son takes us on an unexpected walk through the creation, a walk 
 not precisely marked out either, but vague, vast and alluring. I do 
 not say that we are wide-awake to all this, and consciously say to 
 ourselves :—It is through the creation we are now going ;—no, the 
 author does not wish us to be in such a state of clear intelligence 
 as that. All he wants is to start a creation-feeling in us, while we 
 concentrate on his four, interesting live creatures. 
 
 Two releases, then, we have had already from the finite and 
 narrow ;—both times into the outlying creation. But now comes a 
 third release, not exactly into the creation this time, but into the 
 future; and not into any finite and comprehensible future, the 
 future, that is, of dates and days and periods, and generations, and 
 slow great cycles ; the future that can be held in clear idea—no, 
 not into any such terminable and little thing does he project us, 
 but hear him :— | 
 
 The nightingale thought, I have sung many songs, 
 But never a one so gay, 
 
 For he sings of what the world will be 
 When the years have died away. 
 
 When the years have died away! Are we detained on larks, 
 hawks, swans, snakes, and nightingales now? Westarted with them ; 
 for we must start on some solid and real thing always; and men of 
 mind always give us some clear thing like that to begin with ;—or 
 as I said before, in every picture there needs to be, for a central 
 fact to tie up to, a statement, a cubical nugget of reality ;—but this 
 nugget having been secured in this poem and we having gone all 
 abroad from that, in a flourish or two, as I have explained ; we are 
 caught up at last and shot forth and forward, farther than cannon- 
 balls ever went, farther than space ever stretched, beyond the roll of 
 time, into a nebulous Somewhere, so nebulous as to be next thing to 
 Nowhere, and in that half—somewhere half—nowhere, our minds roll . 
 about in just that big confusedness which the poet wants us to be 
 in. He might have said or had his nightingale say :—ten thousand 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 205 
 
 years away, or a hundred thousand, or a million. Perhaps Jonathan 
 Edwards, in his more acute and analytical moments, would have 
 liked that better. There is a relishable, factual quality in that, that 
 I can see myself. But I do not want to look at it long. I would 
 rather be ballooned in the Infinite, to the sound of :— 
 
 When the years have died away! 
 
 There is also a touch of the supernatural in this poem, which I 
 have not mentioned. How easy it is to construct a first-rate argu- 
 ment wherein it shall be proved that the supernatural and the infi- 
 nite cannot be set forth in natural and finite terms at all. “Natural 
 terms! Physical terms! Limited terms! They embody the 
 unlimited ! Why is not that a contradiction in so many words? 
 By whatever laborious devices you carry this earth-bound, small ter- 
 minology of yours over towards the supra-mundane and its immen- 
 sities, and howevermuch you sublimate these terms of yours, as is 
 often done in poetry, will they not distinctly savor all the same of 
 their earth-born pedigree? Can they go beyond themselves? Must 
 not all sky-piercing human structures stand on the earth and there 
 keep standing however high they go, and rock when the earth 
 rocks? What are God, angels, heaven, hell, and all the rest over 
 yonder, as we conceive and describe them; and what can they be, 
 but materialistic and anthropomorphic projections, long-stretching 
 shadows of things here, that we have come to know about? An 
 angel, conceived by a man, is a magnified man. And even God, 
 in all our descriptions of him, is simply or mostly a powerfully 
 idealized man, we might say. We call him a person and thus make 
 him head up in a bounded consciousness, like us ;—an awful and 
 large consciousness, to be sure, but the moment he is alleged to 
 have consciousness at all, he is represented as fenced in from the 
 great All of being, a section of the All, nucleated and organized ;— 
 in fact, made little in order that he may be made conceivable to 
 little folks like us. A friend of mine asked Matthew Arnold when 
 he was among us recently, how he came to invent that much-bela- 
 bored definition of God, which he has put into his books. He 
 calls him you recollect, “that power other than ourselves that makes 
 for righteousness.’”’ And he replied “that he did not invent it in 
 the interest of agnosticism or unfaith, but in the interest of a larger 
 faith.” He. had grown sick of the current belittlement of the 
 Almighty in the customary religious talk about him as a person, and 
 
206 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 soon. He thought that the pious masses are under the delusion 
 that when they have said person, and a number of other strictly 
 human and cameo words, they have actually got God. Therefore 
 he proposed to throw them out to sea and get some size into 
 them, bereaving them utterly of their old, circumscribed lingo, and 
 calling them to take note of, and be awestruck under, this rather 
 finely conceived and first-rate vagueness ; “‘ That power other than 
 ourselves that makes for righteousness.” What a sudden lift out of 
 the smallness of personalism, that expression “he not-ourselves is! 
 Whether it is in every respect a safe and wholesome thing to be 
 lifted into the eminently thin ether of Mr. Arnold’s definition, I 
 will not now say; but as to the whole notion that supersensible 
 things and persons cannot be set forth to any good purpose by a 
 naturalistic and human language; I say they can. What terms, 
 pray, doves Mr. Arnold himself employ when he sets out to take 
 away the people’s God, and give them another and larger one? 
 Was the sentence ‘The power not ourselves,’ made out in this 
 unknown that we all want to get into and talk about? I venture 
 to guess that it was devised in the library of Matthew Arnold, 
 and that every word of it is nothing but English—not divine, not 
 even angelic, but earthly to the last degree. I presume you could 
 trace those words into the earthly past a thousand years, and very 
 likely find where they first came up out of the soil of earth and 
 time. 
 
 But I was remarking on Mr. Tennyson’s poem, “‘The Poet’s 
 Song ”’—and saying there is an element of the supernatural in it ;. 
 and in it you will see one of the ways by which the supernatural 
 may be and often is set forth in the machinery of the natural. 
 Those birds, snakes, and what-not, that were so captivated by that 
 chanted melody—that human song so immensely transcending all 
 songs of larks and nightingales—did not behave after the natural 
 and well-known fashion of such creatures. Whether they have such 
 intelligent and listening birds out in the invisible I do not know. 
 Perhaps they do. Perhaps these that Mr. Tennyson saw were astrays 
 from that land other than our own. At any rate, they are no birds 
 of ours. And, don’t you see, we are just enough confused as to 
 whose they are—whose and whence—to feel ourselves carried out 
 and away and far away from the strictly terrestrial. It is precisely 
 another other-than-ourselves contrivance. We go astride of such 
 magnificent negatives and mind-puzzlers, and ride the realms of air 
 
 —- — 
 
VALE LECTURES. 207 
 
 —not into the invisible literally, perhaps, but into very imposing 
 mist, wherein the effect on us is considerably as though we had 
 become conversant now with trans-mundane territories. 
 
 If I might take time for it, I could show you this same thing, 
 this arriving at the supersensible by earthly means, in a much more 
 striking development in Coleridge’s Christabel—where quite a 
 number of weird and unclassifiable occurrences come in to lift our 
 feet away from the ground and make us know that, wherever we 
 are, we are not in this world merely. For instance, there is a mas- 
 tiff that every night of his life, when the castle bell strikes twelve, 
 puts forth just sixteen howls, twelve for the hours and four for the 
 quarters. Where did such a dog as that come from, every rational 
 human being proceeds to ask. And how is it that that barking of 
 his is done always at the very hour, the awful hour, when his mis- 
 tress of the castle died years and years ago? Now Coleridge has 
 half a dozen or more inventions like this in that poem. And what 
 is the result? He does not take you to any particular shore, land, 
 coast, or remote station of the universe by these inventions, and 
 definitely land you; but he takes you away from this time-land ; 
 yes, that is the trick of it; he carries you off and leaves you no- 
 where, and the nearest you can come to any description of your 
 feelings, is to say—“ Well, here I am, but where am I!” and that 
 is a pretty good description of the unearthly, the beyond, the 
 invisible, in finite terms. 
 
 But not merely in night-howling mastiffs and in birds bewitched 
 by poets’ melodies, may the “country other than our own,” and 
 the unperceivable people and personages off here “ other than our- 
 selves,” “‘ that make for righteousness ” some of them, and some of 
 them not, be expressed, but in single words also something of the 
 same sort can be done. If I say of God, he is infinite, that is, 
 not-finite, I think I have made on your mind a decided impression 
 concerning him as he really is, I have taken an earth-born, finite 
 word, and negatived it, and doing that, have pitched you out of 
 the finite totally. To be sure I have given you no more spot to 
 land on than had Noah’s weary dove, but that is precisely what I 
 aimed at. If Noah’s dove had found a place for his anxious feet, 
 he would not have thought it much of.a flood that he was sailing 
 over ; and if my 7m-/inite, should set you down on any determinate 
 thing or spot, you would certainly underestimate the divine ; just 
 as when the Creeds say “ persons,’ and ‘ three persons in one 
 
208 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 nature,’ they (according to Mr. Arnold) almost minimize the 
 Being they are describing. The truth is,.as soon as we have said 
 persons, we must pour in the glorious confusion of our negatives, 
 like non-finite, and start the people out of their comfortable earth- 
 built snuggeries, (like persons and so on) and set them careering— 
 not to say careening—across the uncharted expanse of the Bound- 
 less. We want to leave them about where that old definition of 
 infinite space leaves the mind; namely, “Infinite space is that 
 whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.” 
 That is just about what it is. Gentlemen, I am not the man to 
 deny the legitimacy of Creed terms ; person, three persons, and all 
 the rest. Ido insist, though, that while you are regaling yourself 
 with your small bottles of water, you shall not be permitted to think 
 that in those neat and delightful half-pints you have the ocean. 
 And in order to prevent your thinking it, I say, let the ocean in on 
 you, and paddle confusedly about in it and get to know its great- 
 ness. Often one and the same word, or expression, may be made 
 to have in it a clear, finite affirmative, and withal a flicker of the 
 infinite ; as where the Nicene Creed declares the eternal generation 
 of the Son of God. Generation is a terrestrial term, and a term of 
 beginning applied in the non-terrestrial field, where terrestial flavors 
 are impertinent ; but when you add the word “ eternal,” and deny 
 a beginning to the Son of God you have somewhat purged your 
 terminology of its earthly taint and made it serviceable in that 
 region of the immaterial. 
 
 You have often noticed the clear western sky illuminated by | 
 
 the sun descending, or quite gone down, and have felt that that sky 
 led you off and back and through and on, as to the very throne of 
 God. But I submit you do not get so far back in a clear sky as 
 you do ina sunset sky that is heavily clouded, but is revealed, a 
 touch here and a touch there, through rents in those. cloud-forms. 
 How deep and holy and sometimes awful in their splendor are those 
 narrow in-looks. Gentlemen, our language of the supernatural, 
 unseen and illimitable are cloud-terms; in which there are hints 
 of those Beyonds-; mere hints, rents, partings of the finite, in-looks 
 therefore, on-looks, through-looks, all the more intense and over- 
 powering because thus framed in ;—as in picture-galleries you see 
 better by looking through tubes. 
 
 I make a turn now in my general subject and come up to- 
 
 vagueness in language from another direction. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 209 
 
 When I was discoursing on music a little back, I made the 
 point that the effect of music is preeminently emotional, rather 
 than intellectual; an impression on feeling, without any ideas car- 
 ried over into the mind. I now have to say that while language is 
 certainly a vehicle of ideas, and carries swarms of them into hosts 
 of minds, clear ones, splendidly clear and satisfying sometimes ; it 
 also in innumerable instances consents to be like music exactly ; and, 
 while it talks on, and sounds intelligent enough, as a matter of fact 
 secures in the listener emotionalism only, and no sense of ideas 
 whatever. And that service of language is as great as any other, 
 and ought not to be spoken against as though it were something 
 unsolid and beneath human beings; especially educated human 
 beings, like theologues in their third year, or learned professors in 
 their many years. My mind is that great men who are void of just 
 this mooniness do miss one of their chief bignesses, and had better 
 begin right off to size out into the obscure, and take impres- 
 sions that they cannot give much account of at the time,— 
 impressions, I mean, that they do not at the moment trace to ideas 
 received. 
 
 Now language often prevails by the musical quality in it con- 
 siderably. My yacht on the waves rocks me in the loveliest curves 
 of motion conceivable. And rhythm in language rocks me. And 
 rhyme rocks me. And the kiss and kiss of Hebrew parallelism rocks 
 me. And the structural balance in the movement of many a prose 
 writer rocks me, I find. I am not intellectual under it —at least, it 
 is not that feature of the effect which I am considering now—I.am 
 not intellectual, I am a babe and rocked. Robert Browning begins 
 one of his poems thus :— 
 
 Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles, 
 Miles and miles, 
 
 and we are all delighted. But why? Because of the clear scene 
 in it, of course, the lovely distance, the expansiveness of the whole 
 thing and the beauty spread over all. But there is more than that 
 in it. There is a flow of melody. Hear those ravishing liquids 
 and vowel-sounds murmur along together,—the evening smiles, 
 miles and miles. And while I am on this passage let me name to 
 you another subtle power in it. By the monotony of that melody, 
 our feeling, unbeknown to ourselves, is chastened and made seri- 
 ous, and thus brought into accord with the pensiveness of the 
 
210 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 evening. We are put into an evening mood, so as to look at the 
 quiet-colored horizon off there, and at 
 
 The solitary pastures where the sheep 
 Half-asleep 
 Tinkle homeward thro’ the twilight, stray or stop 
 As they crop— 
 
 to look at the whole, I say, with adjusted and suitable eyes. Now 
 Browning did not think out all this contrivance of expression for 
 getting the upper hand of us. No, it was not stratagem in him, 
 but spontaneity,—cultured spontaneity. He felt thus and so him- 
 self, and he simply poured this his feeling forth; and we are 
 caught. It is not a matter of ideas on either side,—his or ours. 
 You add up all the volumes that Shakespeare ever wrote, and it 
 would not begin to equal the volumes that Shakesperian commenta- 
 tors have written to explain his cute ways of fascinating us ; whereas 
 most often he wasn’t cute and intentional at all. Is a bird cute and 
 intentional when he sings? Is a flower full of plans on us when it 
 blooms? Is God premeditative and strategic when he loves? 
 
 Now Brethren, keep hold of my exact point. I am running 
 down ideas, conscious, clear ideas as necessary factors and sole fac- 
 tors in self-expression, and in receiving impression from language. 
 Dr. Elisha Kane relates that during one of his long winters in the 
 vicinity of the north pole, a certain sailor on his ship was observed 
 to be weeping over Tennyson’s :— 
 
 Break, break, break 
 ‘At the foot of thy crags, oh Sea, 
 But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
 Will never come back to me. 
 
 I never asked the sailor, but I will engage that if he had spent 
 his whole winter trying to find out wherefore he cried, he could not 
 tell. He could tell some things ; as that the “‘ Never come back to 
 me,” started his heart homeward, and also set him wondering 
 whether he should ever see home again, and get away from that mis- 
 erable old inscrutability, the north pole. But it would not have oc- 
 curred to him that Tennyson’s music was stealing into him, and the 
 gray tone of the music, the monotony, the sombre refrain ; also the 
 bright images in the background of the poem, on which these gravi- 
 ties were projected and made more grave :—also never could he 
 have devised the connection of thought between these two lines :— 
 
 a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 211 
 
 Break, break, break 
 On thy cold gray stones, oh Sea. 
 
 (Just hear the lament in those vowels—“ thy-cold, gray, stones, 
 oh Sea’’) and these other two lines of the same verse :— 
 
 And I would that my tongue could utter 
 The thoughts that arise in me. 
 
 What is the connection, anyhow? Most people cannot tell. No 
 matter what the connection is. Stop trying to get ideas. You can 
 cry without ther, just as well. The first real, old, luxuriant English 
 ivy that I ever saw, an ivy that covered every inch. of a church 
 tower several feet deep, was at Muckross Abbey, in Ireland ; and I 
 cried. What did I do that for? Was not that being more mooney 
 than was really necessary? Did I cry under a sudden uncommon 
 access of ideas? I never was emptier of ideas in my life. Men 
 and Brethren, do you not know that three quarters of the chords 
 that vibrate in us are below our consciousness ; that more than half 
 of our experiences come from strokes made on those sub-conscious 
 chords ; that preaching, or old ivies never reach their utmost power 
 till they reach them and play on them; that those chords are 
 reached without ideas even better than with them; that a Creed 
 partially fails, if, while it states thoughts as clear-cut as a minted 
 dollar, it does not at the same time start the mysterious depths in 
 us, the sleeping sub-bass strings, the strings of mystery, the strings 
 that talk large and talk vague, like that bell-tone that I described as 
 widening abroad through the infinite air, so spiritual and unmeas- 
 urable at last? 
 
 I can tell now about that ivy business, in part at any rate, 
 because I have analyzed it. I have been down into myself with a 
 search-warant, and after I had read Browning’s ‘‘ Love Among The 
 Ruins,” I did the same thing; and I have no objection to self- 
 search, in itself considered ; but I resist the doctrine that emotions 
 not thought-born are illegitimate ; bastards and not sons ; that there- 
 fore language must bend its whole strength to begin clear; when 
 the most superfine and celestial instrument of expression that we 
 know of, (music) has its main strength in not being’ clear ; I resist 
 the doctrine for many reasons. ‘The first reason is, that I know 
 better—know it by having thought it out, and know it by a hundred 
 experiences of my own. ‘The second reason is, that everbody else 
 knows better, if he is old enough to examine his own contents and 
 
212 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 will calmly do it with this matter in his mind. The third reason is, 
 that religion cannot live without my doctrine of vagueness. It may 
 have a name to live, in the form of cold-blooded, finite and small 
 propositions ; but religion in its fulness and full power is a thing 
 saturated with awe; and how can awe keep itself alive while look- 
 ing up simply into the small face of a definitely-stated immaterial, 
 invisible, immeasurable and divine. My fourth reason is, that if 
 preaching is content to be propositional, lucid, exact and religious 
 in the canned form only ; an eternal display of cameos ; it can have 
 no such efficacy among men as it ought to. When you come to 
 that particular kind of work and declare it the only kind that has any 
 right to be done, you have practically and in principle gone over to 
 materialistic scepticism ; which has settled down on the theory that 
 only the thing which can be brought into measurable dimensions, 
 and really grasped, is a thing at all, and entitled to our respect. 
 
 Now Brethren, in the progress of my thought to-day I hope 
 I have not accidentally disrespected clarity in expression, and 
 those extreme labors of clarification which are so congenial to 
 many minds both eminent and common, in the pulpit and out of it. 
 I listen to them sometimes when they are simplifying things and 
 putting them up in minute packages,—‘“ breaking the bread up small 
 and putting it on a low shelf,” so that the most undeveloped of us 
 can get the good of it—lI listen to them, and watch them, and 
 notice how manfully they contend with the universal haze of things, 
 with a thorough-going gusto; and when with much tugging they 
 push back the line of haze one space farther, and widen the hori- . 
 zon of the definite, I am as pleased as anybody ; but I cannot help 
 reminding them every now and then, that what I have often noticed 
 in the brightest days of the year in London, may be noticed also 
 in those areas of thought which they have most triumphantly clari- 
 fied and flooded with daylight, to wit ;—the very daylight never 
 fails to have a sweet blue haze in it. Look up into the dome of St. 
 Paul’s, and there it is, and no mistake. Out of doors I said, What 
 a perfect and shining day this is, in this celebrated old fog-land ! 
 But all the while the haze was there ; and likewise in subjects, when 
 you have reached the acme of translucency, you need to wash your 
 sunshine once more; and then and moreover, we all know, and 
 these gentlemen themselves admit, that a few miles back in the 
 subjects which they have so cleared, there begins a gloaming which 
 deepens back into midnight. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 213 
 
 It is interesting to remember that every word they use is 
 stocked with several meanings and is likely to bea bit muddled on 
 that account. First of all, it has more or less of its primary and 
 physical meaning, the taste of the earth from which it sprung; and 
 some man who listens to them will detect that aboriginal flavor. 
 Next, the word has lingering in it its historical meaning, the savors 
 it has picked up in its passage down ages and ages of use; and 
 some listener will be ferretting out that. Next, if it so happens 
 that the word is an inspired one, because the man who utters it is a 
 temple of the Holy Ghost, it will have in it a God’s meaning, 
 which meaning perhaps the speaker himself has no thought of, and 
 which most of his hearers also may not perceive, while some truly 
 sensitive and clairvoyant perceiver in the assembly will get hold of 
 it. Next, (and finally—for I cannot mention all the contents and 
 cargoes in each word of man)—next, I say, that word thrown out 
 among the people, is like the shadows in a lake caused by the 
 trees, heights and buildings on its banks. Those trees, heights and 
 buildings are fixed and stationary things, in the main, and are there- 
 fore able to cast stationary and restful shadows, if only they can 
 have a restful surface on which to cast; but the lake is mobile and 
 unstable—it lies still and glassy when it wants to; and then those 
 shadows look like their originals on the bank ;—then again it rip- 
 ples, it rolls; then clouds float over and kill those bank-shadows 
 altogether ; and so it shifts on. 
 
 “The shadows on Loch Katrine’s breast 
 Are neither restless nor at rest.” 
 
 Thus words ; they go out upon a thousand different minds and 
 take their luck. Say Imagination to one man and he scowls; say 
 it to another and he smiles all over. It is sometimes said that a 
 man sees in Europe only what he takes to Europe. Well, a man 
 sees in a word only what he takes to it. One day in my congrega- 
 tion, Dr. Horace Bushnell took his hat and left, in a spurt of honest 
 wrath, because I asked the people to sing the tune America. They | 
 stayed and rolled out America with a great noise, but he would not 
 hear it, because it was God Save the Queen, one of the national airs 
 of England, stolen and rechristened America. So it is with all things. 
 They have the bad luck to fall on different minds, making peace 
 sometimes, and sometimes a pother. JI amused myself this morn- 
 ing thinking about you students, and what variegated impressions the 
 
214 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 sight of you in a body here in this chapel makes on this miscella- 
 neous fringe of people, right, left, and all around. I know what I 
 think of you, but Bob Ingersoll looks on you with mingled pity 
 and contempt. And alongside of him sits a minister who has 
 averaged you and concluded that you do not seem as intellectual 
 as the students of his day. So that he is afraid the ministry is flat- 
 tening out. Another minister knows better, he thinks. He says 
 you look first-rate. One brother out there has himself had a hard 
 and depressing time in the ministry, and your hopefulness, as you 
 look forward to your work, makes him almost sick. One old min- 
 ister, who has had just strength enough left to get to this Chapel 
 and sample a few of my lectures, is mightily pleased because the 
 gaps made by the fading away of the old men are so sure to be filled. 
 Another man weeps because you remind him of his son who died 
 while in his divinity studies. And then the ladies over here have 
 their views. Some of them just mother you. Some have “ thoughts 
 too deep for tears ’’—on William Wordsworth’s principle, perhaps— 
 
 To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 
 
 That is the manifold picture you make, Gentlemen. It is not your 
 fault. You are solid and immutable enough, as an object. These 
 brick buildings are hardly more so. But these minds that gauge 
 you, they are regular Loch Katrines :— 
 
 In bright uncertainty they lie, 
 Like future joys to Fancy’s eye, 
 
 and you have to suffer. People find in you, and in words, just 
 
 what they take to them and to you. And that is an element of 
 incertitude in language. 
 
 Then too, the clear speakers, who make a god of clearness and 
 think there is no other, for I am addressing myself to their case at 
 present, cannot themselves define one in a hundred of the words 
 they use. They cannot define them extempore and at the moment 
 when they use them, nor later (ordinarily) when they have had 
 time to think on them with all their might, can they define them. 
 When I came to make a Lecture or two for you on Imagination, I 
 thought, in decency, I ought to tell to a dot what Imagination is, 
 and I found I did not know. Then I consulted two or three meta- 
 physicians, and I found they did not know. Then I came back to 
 my own wisdom, took a deep dive into my own consciousness and 
 
 hee Dine = 
 
YALE LECTURES. 215 
 
 strove to evolve a definition from what I myself might inwardly have 
 of Imagination. I evolved three corners of the thing—enough for 
 my purpose as a lecturer—and the other corner is under water yet. 
 Generally from two to three corners are under. I had all my life 
 been wont to speak of Imagination ; and all my life the listeners to 
 me had conceived that they knew what I meant; but not a man of 
 us could draw a clear line around that thing, and make it stand out 
 in absolute separateness from every other human faculty. 
 
 Such is language, Young Gentlemen,—the instrument we are all 
 using so fully, and looking intelligent while we use ; the instrument 
 you will do your preaching with and draw up Creeds with, and wreak 
 yourselves upon with great enthusiasm sometimes. Well, wreak on. 
 I have no objection. I myself have been wreaking on it for the last 
 hour or more. But let us not pretend that these dice we play with 
 are perfect. If only they were, some questions would have been set- 
 tled thousands of years ago. But how can they be settled when the 
 coin of interchange is of indeterminate value? How much are those 
 dimes and half dollars and dollars, that are flying about in such helter- 
 skelter fashion? Nobody quite knows. Often, when a speaker passes 
 a dollar, as he supposes, the man in the pew sees but ten cents in it. 
 And occasionally the speaker’s ten cents is worth a hundred dollars. 
 The fact is, language as used is a semi-chaotic flux of incertitudes, 
 wherein we are exercised most wholesomely for something better yet 
 to come ; beatific visions, and other visions. Of course here and there 
 in the welter there emerges a limited spot of solid land ; the ascer- 
 tainable and ascertained ; and on those spots we sit down and have a 
 dear good time. Not because such unsizable and stingy spots are so 
 much in themselves, but being all we have they are valuable ; and be- 
 sides, they show that spots emerged are possible in our case. If they 
 are, we may hope for more of them gradually. At any rate, they are 
 gcod spots to jump from and take with us when we are called to go 
 out of this seeing in a glass darkly and knowing but in part. 
 
 Our little systems have their day; 
 
 They have their day and cease to be; 
 They are but broken lights of Thee, 
 And Thou, O Lord, art more than they. 
 
 We have but faith; we cannot know; 
 For knowledge is of things we see; 
 And yet we trust it comes from Thee, 
 A beam in darkness; let it grow. 
 
216 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 I do not quote these lines as accurately consecutive to what I 
 have just been saying, in the form of them, but because in their 
 spirit they are consecutive enough, and because in ihem I find that 
 mingled confidence and half-pensive sense of limits which I find to 
 be habitual within myself—that mental state which led me this week 
 to write out this my last lecture to you for this year. I bid you 
 farewell. 
 
 i i I 
 
THE SERVICE OF ART IN 
 | RELIGION. 
 
 (1.) 
 
 That body of Christians with whom it has been my lot to be 
 connected, is infested by what I consider a prejudice against the 
 use of the beautiful in the service of religion ; which prejudice de- 
 clares itself in divers ways, such as: 
 
 First, an altogether too powerful array of unarchitectural and 
 unadorned church edifices :—edifices that may shelter the people 
 from storms, but do not in the least minister to culture, besides 
 being deficient in several other respects. 
 
 Secondly, in a strong dread of—not to say contempt for— 
 everything decorative, or symbolic, in connection with religion and 
 religious worship ; the entire elaborated symbolism, painting, and 
 sculpture of the Church of God at large, being lumped together as 
 suspicious and swept away at a stroke :—the Cross, as recalling the 
 passion of the Lord and the deepest idea of the Christian life, being 
 repudiated almost as energetically by some, as the more far-fetched 
 and artificial symbols whereon men have doted. There must be 
 no sculpture in the house of God. And there must be no painting 
 —none, at least, that has any meaning init. There may be frescoes, 
 perhaps, and in scattered instances profusions of color have been let 
 in; but the rule has been that the instant those colors proposed in 
 any wise to express some divine thing, some scene in the life of the 
 Lord, some great historical figure like an Apostle or a Martyr, some 
 thought dear to the heart of universal man ; that over-vaulting am- 
 bition has been stamped upon, and stamped to death. So, not long 
 
218 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 ago, in a certain city when I stepped in to look at the rejuvenated 
 interior of a sacred building belonging to an historic and opulent 
 church, lo! I found myself in a gorgeous bar-room, or saloon, so 
 far as the coloring was concerned; and not even the well-chosen 
 texts of Scripture strung along below the cornice in suitable, strong 
 colors, could in anywise begin to redeem the thing and make a 
 church of it. 
 
 Thirdly, our antipathy to the beautiful, shows itself in a four- 
 square resistance of all hands to that most serviceable of the arts, 
 Christian music, in its higher forms—in those forms, that is, which 
 represent as no other contrivance of expression can, the inward life 
 of man, in its multiformity, multiplexity and immeasurable yearning. 
 
 Fourthly, we are shy of all liturgical advance among us, sus- 
 pecting that if public worship starts out deliberately and consciously 
 to be decorous and perhaps beautiful, some enervation will manage 
 to creep into our piety, some luxuriousness, some esthetic volup- 
 tuousness, at any rate some stiffness of formalism and resulting 
 awful chill of death. | 
 
 These are some of the tokens of our denominational suspicious- 
 ness towards the beautiful. Perhaps there are others; but these 
 are enough to indicate our trend. If I have seemed to speak 
 pointedly of this matter, and with a flavor of disrespect, it is not 
 because I want to be impudent or unfair or unloyal to my denomi- 
 nation. No; what Iam most after, is to make the thing I mean 
 stand out and be distinctly visible. That I am not unfair, or un- 
 appreciative of these views whereof I have spoken, will appear, it 
 may be, as I proceed now to name some of the sources of our Con- 
 gregational aversion to esthetics—an aversion, I may add, wherein 
 we have the sympathy of some other pious bodies of people. 
 
 I. To begin with, we are the descendants, both lineal and 
 spiritual, (numbers of us lineal and all of us spiritual) of a certain 
 historical, much-buffeted, resolute and solid people, who by the 
 grace of God discovered that the religion of their day and land had 
 gone into affiliation and whoredom ( an affiliation that amounted to 
 a whoredom) with Art—fine art—the arts of expression and impres- 
 sion—so that in that three-fold, good classification of all thinkable 
 realities which Plato made out for us ; namely, the True, the Beauti- 
 ful and the Good—the Beautiful had gone into the saddle, and was 
 riding the other tvwo—a most preposterous and profane thing, our 
 Fathers said. So they shouldered in to right that. And after the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 219 
 
 frequent manner of reformers, they righted it more than was neces- 
 sary. Not merely did they unhorse the Beautiful and seat Religion 
 in her vacant place, but they proceeded to have Religion ride over 
 the prostrate Beautiful till her breath was clean gone out; her 
 sculptures and paintings and millinery and pageants and even her 
 innocent decorums, they annihilated ; and her great and venerable 
 cathedrals—the four walls that had harbored all the .aforesaid frip- 
 pery—came in for a share of their mighty disrespect. The reality 
 in that movement was its sound intention to exalt religion, by sepa- 
 rating it from its too great reliance on the esthetical, and establishing 
 it on its own colossal and very sufficient foundations. 
 
 The noise of that contest has died away, and all is still as we 
 look back there, but the heat of it keeps up, and it makes us who 
 are successors of those men—I will not say hot, but obstinate. And 
 yet, you see, there was an idea there. Even if our Fathers could 
 have been persuaded to confess that Art has a legitimate function 
 on earth, and even in religion a good function, they would have 
 gone straight on to add :—Nevertheless, as things now are, the 
 Church must be pulled away from all that, and totally weaned. 
 Only thus can her salvation be secured, in the present emergency. 
 Moderate drinking may be defensible, but she, the Church, has got 
 where she cannot drink moderately. Her lust of beauty is too 
 strong. If she takes one drop she is drunken. Let her be put on 
 to bread and water, and there kept—perhaps forever, for her soul’s 
 health. 
 
 II. Moreover, the Fathers did not make this trenchant gen- 
 eralization against Art on an inspection of English Christianity 
 alone, but on a survey of the ages. ‘They looked abroad and afar 
 and they noticed that the submergence of religion in the esthetic 
 element had occurred a good many times and in many nations, and 
 they surmised that there was a law of deterioration therein :—a rule 
 that a religion must grow effeminate and carnal if she does not 
 eschew Art pretty thoroughly. Witness Romanism, and the great 
 Church of the East. Witness Greece, where fine Art reached such 
 a splendor as the world never saw before. Did her Art save her? 
 Did it not rather ungird her, slacken her sinews, enfeeble her hold 
 on higher ideas than that of beauty, and enfeeble their hold on her, 
 so that she must rot away in her entire substance and cease forever 
 from among men. Go into the museum at Naples and look at the 
 art-works of exhumed Pompeii. Mark their excellence. Notice 
 
 17 
 
220 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 what a sense of the Beautiful that Pompeiian people must have had. 
 But observe at the same time their unspeakable demoralization— 
 their obscenity even in their art; their fitness to be suddenly buried 
 by the wrath of God, using his volcanoes to dothe work. That was 
 the way the Fathers were prone to reason. And we cannot deny 
 that great devotion to beauty and Art, and great moral enfeeblement 
 and corruption, have existed together often, whether one was the 
 cause of the other or not. There was Lord Byron, there was Rob- 
 ert Burns, there was Tom Moore, there was the poet Shelley, and 
 numbers more, three times worse than they, in whom the feeling for 
 beauty, the sensitiveness to beauty, and the power of beautiful ex- 
 pression, the art instinct, was exceeding strong. Burns, Byron and 
 Moore even wrote religious hymns, and did it well—much better 
 than the average saint ever did ; but all these refined gifts of theirs 
 did not make high-toned men of them. Beauty and the love of 
 beauty did not establish the kingdom of God in their hearts. 
 
 I do not know but [ am getting out the Puritan’s argument for 
 him in a way so strong and fascinating that I can never overthrow it. 
 But I want to be fair, you see. I had rather make it overstrong and 
 take the consequences, than to be mean enough to make it too weak. 
 
 III. Again: Puritanism claims sometimes, when it argues this 
 subject, that the passing of our ideas, thoughts, feelings, forth into 
 material embodiment in architecture, painting and all the rest, does 
 by the necessity of the case make a materializing influence on the 
 mind—an influence adverse to spirituality. That is the supreme 
 
 peril of artists, it is thought. They deal with form. That is, their _ 
 
 business is to formulate. If they could only be content to leave all 
 human ideas and feelings unformulated, not made visible, not 
 physicalized, in color and in lines and in all the cunning contrivances 
 of their craft, all would: be well; but the plastic instinct in them is 
 uncommonly strong and gives them no peace until they have re- 
 duced the ideal to a finite and sensuous statement of some sort ; and 
 they must take the curse of this their own restless inability to just 
 abide in the ideal, the unstated, the unphysicalized. If only while 
 they were stating they did not supremely concentrate their attention 
 on form, they might still be saved ; but it lies in the nature of their 
 business that they should thus concentrate ; they would not be artists 
 unless they did. So on they go, poor things, preparing the means 
 of a quite possible ruin for themselves, and an equal danger for all 
 people who are very much given to beholding their beautiful works. 
 
 a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 221 
 
 The physicalization of the mind, incident,to all artistic expres- 
 sion :-—-that is the argument. 
 
 And similar to that is the notion that many great Christian 
 ideas, when circumscribed by the terms, color and what not, which 
 the artist uses, are so much circumscribed as to be belittled and 
 almost or quite profaned. Let them remain forever unexpressed. 
 In the Vatican Palace at Rome, I recollect seeing somewhere a 
 representation of God the Father, by Michael Angelo, if I remember 
 aright. God the Father, was set forth by this most insufficient and 
 awfully minimizing device; namely, the head and shoulders of a 
 respectable looking old man. There are many things which one 
 might say about such a performance as that ;—and some things 
 might be said in regard to the frequent efforts of ancient art to 
 portray our blessed Lord ; but all I need to say just now is what all 
 of us do probably feel, that while numberless religious truths, events 
 and persons, cannot be put into form adequately, some cannot at 
 all, and had therefore. better be carefully let alone, even by such a 
 magnificent genius as Michael Angelo, and much more by that 
 swarm of lesser men who have ventured upon divine themes. 
 
 Well, people of the Puritan way of thinking, enlarge that obser- 
 vation to cover all efforts of art in the religious field. Religion suf- 
 fers, they say, by being subjected to expression in the close-cramped 
 terminology of the painter’s and sculptor’s art. I suppose they 
 would concede a little more to music. So I should hope, at all 
 events, — 
 
 IV. Once more, we Congregationalists revert admiringly and 
 lovingly to a certain solid, world-impressing cultus generations back 
 in our denominational history ; an immensely seminal affair as re- 
 gards the civilization that has unfolded on this continent, to our 
 great glory before all nations ; a cultus full of God, and every con- 
 ceivable moral tonic. But that very cultus, we. remember, was 
 associated with great bareness of Art, as was natural in view of our 
 very Protestant origin in England (as already explained), and so now 
 we find ourselves tender in our hearts towards bareness of Art, and 
 not unwilling to have it perpetuated among us, as it visibly is; 
 we impute to that bareness the renown of that great cultus back 
 there, with which it was connected ; we are under the beguilement 
 of association. A white meeting-house is a staring discord of color 
 in any green landscape, and nothing better than a monotony in 
 any landscape of snow; but those redoubtable progenitors of ours 
 
222 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 worshiped in such, and we want to. If they had been puling creat- 
 ures, and nothing to be proud of, we might have given in on the 
 white meeting-house question and let the laws of color have their 
 way and our church edifices melt harmoniously into the color-tones 
 of Nature ; but they were not puling, but great, and they shall not 
 be dishonored by having anything abolished that belongs to the 
 thought of them and their life, whether building, psalm tune, ritual, 
 ecclesiasticism, or anything else. A quite noble feeling in itself 
 considered, no doubt. ‘The only question is whether that ancient 
 cultus cannot be preserved in the core and power of it, without an 
 everlasting sanctification of its incidentals in this manner. 
 
 V. Another thing. Our Fathers were burdened by great prac- 
 tical tasks in this new country, which consumed their entire vigor, 
 so that it was not possible for them to indulge themselves in even 
 innocent flirtations with Art—and we their descendants are in 
 something of the same difficulty. 
 
 VI. Moreover, in those scattered instances where we have 
 emancipated ourselves from that primeval art a little, we sometimes 
 have committed the fundamental mistake of discarding utility for 
 the sake of beauty, building fine churches under a supreme medie- 
 val impulse, which were indeed very fine to look upon, but very 
 faulty in regard to air and light and hearing: all essentials to healthy 
 worship. Also in music, when we have pulled away from the tune 
 ‘“‘Mear,’’ and from “China,” and from other like solemnizing strains 
 wherein the ancients worshiped, we have occasionally been taken 
 with headiness and vaporing, (not to say capering) and have let 
 music run away with us; and in the matter of decorations (as in 
 that saloon church that I inspected) we have sometimes done things 
 that make the simplicity of the Fathers seem good and sweet. All 
 mistakes of that sort get quoted profusely, of course, as so many 
 arguments against mingling esthetics with religion. I have no time 
 to make a list of these mistakes. Neither have I time to draw out 
 all the other strong points made by the Puritan reasoner on the 
 subject of Art and Religion. I will only add on this general branch 
 of my theme: 
 
 VII. That we, the Congregationalists, have no such special 
 connections with a transatlantic Christian body, as the Protestant 
 Episcopalians and the Romanists have; so that while they are 
 greatly influenced, on the side of sacred art, by the art culture of 
 those foreign bodies, we have the advantage of almost no foreign 
 
YALE LECTURES. 223 
 
 influence whatever. Their church art is almost dominated by the 
 old-world civilization. Whereinsoever, under the limitations of 
 American life, they can expatiate in Art, they are apt to expatiate 
 along historic and accredited lines. Among us, on the other hand, 
 each parish committee expatiates along its own lines. Not only are 
 the committee mostly unconscious of the art-wisdom that for ages 
 has been accumulating in foreign lands, but they are largely una- 
 ware of what wisdom has happened to accumulate here in their own 
 denomination ; because the denomination is, perhaps, the least 
 organized, and the least compacted into a corporate consciousness, 
 of any on the continent. In matters doctrinal we manage to diffuse 
 through the whole body the sense of the whole ; but in matters of 
 religious art we diffuse much less, so that misbuilt church edifices 
 and misconceived rituals, and misbegotten church music, and in- 
 expressive and indefensible ornamentations, and astiff-necked local- 
 ism, are more common among us than is agreeable. 
 
 My Brethren, I make a complete turn now, against’ this whole 
 prejudice in regard to Art. Thatside has had the floor long enough. 
 I perceive its plausibilities. I acknowledge the realities that are 
 sprinkled along through its argument. I agree that as between 
 Religion and Art, art must give way to religion in every contest. It 
 must, and it ought to. Moreover it does. Sooner or later it does. 
 And it always will. For religion is superior to art. We can live 
 without art. We cannot live without religion. 
 
 But I contend that God meant art to be the handmaid of religion, 
 and if, in any instance, they are found to be adverse one to the 
 other, it is the work of perverse men and Satan; even as good 
 marriages are soinetimes muddled by intermeddlers, and men and 
 women who are made to pull together do not. 
 
 On the general question cf beauty and its function, and whether 
 it has a function, I submit the following observations. I hope they 
 will go to your hearts. Even if they do not convince you, may 
 they go to your hearts and trouble you and start inquiry. 
 
 First, what does it mean that a perception of the Beautiful, 
 and a sensitiveness to-the Beautiful, is a universal feature of the 
 human race? Given any development whatever, that feature 
 emerges. The lowest savage has his esthetics, such as they are. 
 An animal has not. The beaver and the bird and the squirrel and 
 the bee do some praisworthy building. The carpentry of the beaver 
 will bear examination, as well as the architecture of Giotto. The 
 
294 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 nest of the bird and the honey-cell of the bee and the structure of 
 the coral are in curves, and have that appeal to our sense of beauty. 
 But it was not the beauty of the curves that those creatures intended ; 
 their utility, rather, if they intended anything (which they did not.) 
 The bird’s curved nest. fits his body snug and good; and makes 
 him feel well in his long broodings there in the woods. And the 
 cell of the bee is good structure. Andsoon. As to intention, all 
 that was in the God who made the creature and fitted him to do 
 wise things without being wise. But even God seems not to have 
 intended beauty in this matter so much as use; unless you go clear 
 back and say—he made the bird in curves instead of rectangularly, 
 because curved birds are most beautiful; and then having curved 
 creatures on hand, inspired those creatures to fashion their homes 
 to correspond. . But what I wish to get to is, that man alone among 
 creatures has esthetic perception and sensibility. He knows a 
 zig-zag when he sees it, and he does not like its look. He knows 
 that certain colors do not blend and that others do. And the un- 
 blended jar him. The blended affect him like music. He knows 
 the difference between a space enclosed by an arch and a space 
 enclosed by right lines, and evermore gravitates to the arch. It is 
 of no account for the present, why he does it; I simply say he does 
 it. And what does it mean that he is forever doing those things? 
 Why did God make him in just that fashion? In order that he 
 should eschew the Beautiful and turn it to no account in his own 
 development, and make no use of it in the way of joy? Did God 
 give hunger in order that we should never eat, and ears in order 
 that we never hear, and feet for the solemn purpose that we always 
 sit still? No, all constitutional faculties, love of beauty among the 
 rest, are for something ; that is, to be exercised. 
 
 Secondly, why has the Creator created such a delightful world 
 and universe as this all about us? It looks as though he himself 
 were a beauty-lover. Of course he is. Shall he make a beauty- 
 lover—man—and not be in that respect like his man? Is that 
 credible? If God does not like rainbows and the gracious sweep 
 of horizons, and the sparkle of dewdrops, and the tinges, tints and 
 celestial purities of skies, why does he flood such fairnesses forth? 
 Also, why has he established that unchangeable mathematical basis 
 on which musical harmonies repose, if he had not real interest in 
 harmony. Then, too, why does he make this overwhelming appeal 
 of created beauty to us, if he did not desire us to respond to it? Is 
 
 ee 
 
YALE LECTURES. 225 
 
 God aman that he should be a tempter, and lead his feeble offspring 
 into that which must injure them ? 
 
 Thirdly, why did he do a similar venturesome thing and impel 
 his chosen writers of the Bible to walk abroad upon the creation in 
 such unrestrainable delight in its beauties? The more he inspired 
 them the more they put forth just that trait. When he left them 
 alone to write honest history, in the exercise of their own honest 
 faculties, there was nothing particularly esthetic, imaginative, poetic, 
 ideal, tuneful, lyrical in their movement ; but the moment he filled 
 them with his Spirit, for some transcendent spiritual purpose, they 
 were lifted out of all that. Their language became cadenced, it 
 was singing, they rhymed. Next, they filled their tuneful outflow 
 with personalizations of the forms and forces of Nature, and with 
 those personalizations they affectionately communed, as with very 
 persons. 
 
 Next, they filled all creation with God, and made it alive ; the 
 thunders were his voice, the clouds and the thick darkness were his 
 pavilion, the stars were his flocks which he led out shepherd-like 
 —in short, their utterances were supremely beautiful. Poor old | 
 Jacob when he was dying, had no natural strength to make a poem, 
 even if he ever had; but he did make one, and the way he luxu- 
 riated in the images of Nature was wonderful :—what he undertook 
 to describe was far away and transcendental, not physical; but un- 
 consciously his vocabulary was concrete, naturalistic and imagina- 
 tive to a high degree. Judah, thou art a lion’s whelp, said the 
 prophetic old man ; Issachar, thou art a strong ass, crouching down 
 between two burdens—Dan, thou art a serpent in the way, an adder 
 in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels, so that his rider shall fall 
 backward—Naphtali, thou art’a hind let loose—Benjamin, thou art 
 a ravening wolf—Joseph, thou art a fruitful bough, even a fruitful 
 bough by a well, whose branches run over a wall. But it was that 
 _ predestinated and preeminent Son, Judah, upon whom he most laid 
 out the strength of his seership, and most affluently covered with 
 his imagery. Perhaps we cannot minutely interpret all his words, 
 but listen to the sound of them ; Judah is a lion’s whelp ; from the 
 prey, my son, thou art gone up. He stooped down, he couched as 
 a lion and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre 
 shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet until 
 Shiloh come, and unto him shall the gathering of the people be. 
 Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s colt unto the choice vine, 
 
226 7 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 he washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes : 
 his eyes shall be red with wine, and his teéth white with milk. What 
 a luxuriant effusion! How instinctively when God’s Spirit was flood- 
 ing him he ran forth into God’s world, its exuberance, its freshness, 
 its exhaustless multiformity, its pure beauty, for his materials of 
 expression. 
 
 And coming down to the New Testament it must suffice to say 
 that our Lord himself evidently had a deep satisfaction in the fasci- 
 nations of Nature, and did not hold himself back therefrom. I 
 plainly hear the beating of his heart towards all beauty, in such a 
 passage as: ‘‘Consider the lilies how they grow; they toil not, 
 neither do they spin; and yet, I say unto you, that even Solomon 
 in all his glory, was not arrayed like one of these.””’ No man could 
 make that comparison between Solomon and the lilies, and so praise 
 their array, whose eye and feeling were not at the moment saturated 
 with their beauty. I have heard that sentence—‘ Consider the lilies,’ 
 sung so often and with such impressive sweetness, that I cannot dis- 
 sociate it from the music ; and am liable therefore to find in it heart- 
 warmths and many things that are of the music rather than of it—- 
 the influences of such associations being very insinuating and subtle ; 
 —but I chose rather to think that music has done in this case what 
 it is able to do, and was designed to do, in all cases where it carries, 
 explains upon and unfolds divine themes ; namely, it has but taken 
 me into the otherwise undiscoverable profundities of the words of 
 Jesus ; it has given me to hear the flow of their inner melody, it 
 has told me how he felt when he spoke as he did. 
 
 My exegetical commentator on the passage, informs me that 
 the language indicates that Jesus, when he said lilies, did not mean 
 lilies in mass, or the genus lily, but that he fixed his attention on the 
 individual lily. Well, I knew he did without being told. My music 
 which I have heard seemed to tell me as much as that. A general- 
 ized love is a good thing, but a love that individualizes is much more 
 fervid and touching. When the word, Consider the lilies, springs 
 from a specific observation of lilies at the moment and a brooding 
 on them one. by one, it needs music for the rendering of its whole 
 precious sense, 
 
 But I return to my question, if beauty has no great and useful 
 function, why did God, when he inspired men to write, set them 
 revelling in it as he did? 
 
 Fourthly, still speaking of things that I find in the Bible, please 
 
YALE LECTURES. 227 
 
 tell me why God commanded that the place where he was to be wor- 
 shiped by his people Israel should be such a very fine place? 
 There was goodly architecture, as good and costly as could be at 
 the time. There was great carefulness of ornament—carefulness 
 and cost. The whole matter was specifically laid down and en- 
 joined ; a hanging, a touch of color, a socket, a nothing-at-all (as 
 we should say), as precisely and imperatively laid down as the 
 Mercy Seat and the Cherubim in the Holy of Holies. And then, 
 inside of all this glory, a ritual was forever to move on full of cir- 
 cumstance and decorum, more circumstance and carefulness, three 
 times, than was necessary to any ends of use. Itisthought by many 
 in these days that beauty is too much of a beguilement to be let 
 into God’s house and service. It tends to materialize the mind. It 
 leads off into sensuousness. It fixes our attention on things that 
 can never save the soul. God’s service has come to be a spectacle 
 —a physical spectacle—in the Roman Church. And how can that 
 be avoided, if you multiply physicals, and set people rejoicing in 
 their eyes and their ears. Well, what people were ever more facile 
 in getting themselves out of spirituality into sense, and even into the 
 bottomless ditch of carnalism, than the Jews; unto whom God 
 appointed architecture, ceremony, beauty, pomp, spectaculars and 
 so on? Why was he not more cautious? If esthetics are a 
 spurious element in religion, essentially and eternally; or if while 
 not necessarily spurious, the bearing of them is bad practically and 
 on the whole, human nature being so perverse that it can turn a 
 good thing into a curse, any time,—how could God institute that for 
 his Jews, that external religious system to which I have adverted? I 
 am glad that he has given us such a full account of it as he has, so 
 that we may know for certain and forever, how far art, beauty, orna- 
 mentation, cost, sumptuousness, gorgeousness, sublimity and the 
 rest, may reasonably go, in helping religion. Of course all the arts 
 when they start out to benefit religion, in any given time, place 
 nation or Christian body, must be wise as serpents in adjusting 
 themselves to said time, place and people. We Congregationalists 
 do not want any Holy of Holies, nor any High Priest, nor sprink-. 
 lings, nor incensings, nor arks ; but we may well have as much as 
 these in other forms suited to our rather austere and perhaps grim 
 peculiarities. Speaking of grimness, I can recollect the time when 
 to me, the young son of a Methodist minister, the Congregationalists 
 were the grimmest thing I had yet ever heard of. We did not call 
 
228 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 them Congregationalists, my Father and I, no, we called them Cal- 
 vinists ; a word of terror much more than the other—as indeed it is 
 to this day. Well, when Beauty undertakes to prepare something 
 fitted to Calvinists, she must look out for herself and not be too 
 orate. The glory of Solomon and his temple are too much of an 
 array for them. Calvin himself would endure a more elaborated 
 externalism than these his children. The building where he preached 
 so long in Geneva, was and is quite a building. And the liturgy 
 that he used was quite a formal instrument of worship. Either one 
 of them would almost shock a Calvinistic congregation back in one 
 of our steadfast hill towns, with their weekly Lord’s day extempori- 
 zations and their right-angled edifice with its undimmed white light, 
 its white paint, its green blinds and its dear Puritan memories. 
 
 I know the stock argument against all this that I have been 
 saying, in regard to the decorous and decorative aspects of the 
 Israelitish system :—it is said that a new era came in when Jesus 
 came, he being opposed to those foregoing indulgences in the 
 sensuous, and desirous that the interior and the spiritual should now 
 come to the front and have its day. No doubt there is a grain of 
 truth in that view. And that grain of truth is exactly this, that 
 while under the old order, all such things as institutions, ceremonies, 
 seemlinesses and beautifications, were secured by objective com- 
 mand ; under the blessed order of this Messianic period, objective 
 command has gone into comparative disuse, and in lieu thereof we 
 have what the elder world never had, the indwelling Holy Ghost, 
 the first gift of the ascended Lord, to set all things in order in the 
 Church ; all things I say ; doctrines, polities, rituals, clerical orders, 
 religious art, everything you can think of—which subjective method 
 is inferior to the old one, as letting in a more or less occasional 
 fallibility, the old one being precisionism made perfect. For ex- 
 ample, there was absolutely no chance for the builders of the taber- 
 nacle or the architects of the temple, to mistake God’s desire 
 touching the structure thereof at any least point, or as to any least 
 touch of adornment ; nevertheless, the new method, the method of 
 the Holy Ghost, operating in souls and in the Church to get things 
 done, is, beyond all expression, an advance on the old one as 
 respects the supreme things to be secured—as much in advance, 
 for aught I know, as the anti-typal Lamb of Calvary was an advance 
 on all preceding sacrifices. My Brethren, there was never a great 
 teacher or founder on earth who was less an institutionalist, in the 
 
 ST 
 
YALE LECTURES. 229 
 
 sense of personally instituting things, reforms, systems and all sorts 
 of exterior elaborations, than Jesus ; but there was never on earth 
 an institutionalist so prolific as he, in the sense that from him and 
 his resurrection life, carried into individual souls through the Holy 
 Ghost, institutions were to come—institutions, rituals, arts, litera- 
 tures, laws, philosophies—a prodigal outflowering, wide as the 
 world and as perennial as the tree of life by the “pure river of water 
 of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of 
 the Lamb.” Ah yes! he is the tree of life. All earth-born growths 
 roust wither. Only the fruitages of the Holy Ghost abide. Even 
 the arts, that have no supernatural root, are perishable,-or wherein- 
 soever they survive they serve a distinctly second-rate use. And if 
 you ask me what I have to say in respect to the perpetuity and the 
 eternal monarchy of Greek art, this is my answer ; that in so far 4s 
 Greek art, at any period, or in any instance, was the product of relig- 
 ion, it had in it that condition of longevity on which I insist ; and 
 in so far as it was not, but was moved by a finite impulse, and con- 
 fined itself to a finite range, while it is the best thing of the kind the 
 world ever saw, I suppose, yet the kind is secondary, and it were 
 possible to show that, adding together all the elements of transcend- 
 ent art, such as technical ability, formulative power, noble aims, 
 profound feeling and wealth of ideas, Christian Art is immensely 
 the queen over classical ; and whatever may be the value of classical 
 models (and certainly it is very great), if Christian Art does not take 
 . the lead by far, as a factor in modern civilization, the reason will 
 be, that too many Puritan folk contrive to get themselves born— 
 persons, that is, that do not see all sides of the salvation which is 
 provided for modern life. 
 
 I was speaking of the era of the Holy Ghost; of its fallibility 
 as compared with the old era and of its superiority, nevertheless. 
 It would take me too far out of my way to expand that matter, and 
 forestall all possible misapprehension of what I have said. I donot 
 deny that the great Teacher laid down some objective standards. 
 Certainly he did. Still, it is true, as a general remark, that the work 
 of formulation, doctrinal, institutional, ritual, ecclesiastical, esthetic 
 and all the rest, was left to men in whom the Holy Ghost should be, 
 when the Holy Ghost had finally come in that phenomenal coming, 
 which made all prior comings so inconclusive and incomplete that 
 Jesus could freely speak of them as no comings at all. 
 
 I come now to my fifth head of argument against what, for the 
 
230 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 sake of convenience, I have called the Puritan urgency for the di- 
 vorce of beauty and religion. I hope I shall not use that word 
 Puritan so often as to create an impression that I have an uncon- 
 genial and unbrotherly feeling towards the people referred to—for 
 I have not. For rhetorical purposes, I want to use them. And 
 they are sucha stalwart folk that they can bear a good deal of using 
 —and even unjust use. They are inured to it, for generations. 
 
 But fifthly, I say :—that idea mentioned some time since, that 
 over and over again, in the history of the world, the highest develop- 
 ment of the Beautiful has coexisted with a low state of religion, and 
 that therefore, the Beautiful, speaking by and large, is not only not 
 nourishing to religion, but probably withering, I would like to make 
 head against still further, by several running remarks, thus: if secular 
 education tends to keep men out of the criminal class, as the statis- 
 tics of that class do prove that it does, and as we should natur- 
 ally expect it would ; is it not likely that the influence of beauty, con- 
 sidered merely as a secular force now, would also have a good moral 
 bearing? And again, how often do we see persons of the highest es- 
 thetic development, who at the same time are sound, strong, inflexi- 
 ble and sweet religiously ! - I have in mind now a man whose piety is 
 a most admirable compound of staunchness and tenderness, a man 
 who would rise to martyrdom on a fair call with absolute spon- 
 taneity,—all the moral grit of his New England progenitors is in him 
 undiminished—so much so as to be a matter of remark—and yet it 
 is almost an amusement to notice how intoxicated that heart is in 
 the presence of the goodly scenes of Nature, how sometimes his 
 soul within him willalmost liquefy before a choice painting, and how 
 a use of language, in a public speaker, for instance, that is terse, pat, 
 vital, full of noble intention, and in supreme art, will give him so 
 much pleasure that he can hardly utter his feeling. These instances 
 are common enough on earth, my Brethren. And in every great 
 public emergency that comes up, like war after a long period of 
 peace, culture and easy living, during which a great many men and 
 women have given a good deal of attention and interest to the em- 
 bellishments of life, or life in its esthetic aspects, and have come to 
 be considered dilettante, unrobust, lisping, people of the rosebud and 
 perfumery order—so considered by the uncultivated multitude—be- 
 hold, these supposed man-milliners and fashion-plates, these enervate 
 creatures, these New York Seventh Regiment ornamental men, go 
 down to the field of death as gallantly and cheerily, and with as iron 
 
YALE LECTURES. 231 
 
 a manhood as though they had never once seen a picture ora party, 
 or a fashionable coat with a rosebud in the buttonhole thereof—side 
 by side they go with the men of the shop, factory and farm, these 
 sons of culture, these emasculates, facing all things of peril and en- 
 durance. How very often that is so. Often enough, at any rate, to 
 show that the influence of high civilization is not necessarily de- 
 grading and enfeebling. 
 
 Consider, once more, that aside from material beauty, we have 
 no images wherewith to represent the beauty immaterial, the beauty 
 of a thought, the beauty of an intellectual structure (as an essay ora 
 discourse or a poem), the beauty of innumerable beautiful feelings and 
 the beauty of holiness. It cannot be that material beauty is debauch- 
 ing, or that it is so far dangerous that we had better keep away from 
 it, when all these beautiful, holy and precious interior things— (the 
 things of the soul for whose preservation beauty external must be 
 shunned, it is thought)—cannot be at all formulated and put into cir- 
 culation, except in the use of the material, the physical, the sensuous. 
 The deep subject of language I cannot enter ; especially as I did try 
 to enter it when I spoke to you last year and had some points to carry ; 
 but how far does one need to enter it to discover the divine use of 
 beauty as a vocabulary for the soul? When I look at the eternal 
 whiteness of a far-away Alpine summit, I call it holy and awful in its 
 holiness ; but that only means that yonder immaculate mountain-head 
 is an image ; a suitable and therefore ordained image of a certain su- 
 preme moral quality in God, angels and men. Some Sybarite, be- 
 holding that Alp, may not be moralized by it ; it is even conceivable 
 that he may simply turn it in among his luxuries and there stop ; just 
 as many a Church goer makes the means of God’s grace to be a savor 
 of death to his miserable soul ; but that is not the fault of the Alp. 
 The Alp is all right. That snow is holy. So holy that many of us 
 are nearly heart-broken while we stand down in the valley and look 
 up at it. Down in the valley! Sure enough, there we are. In the 
 valley of unholiness ; cleansed by the washing of regeneration, per- 
 chance, but not stainless—and yet not hopeless quite, because from 
 skyey heights out infinitely beyond the utmost Alp, there comes to. 
 us a word of hope, saying, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they 
 shall be as white as snow, though they be red like crimson, they shall 
 be as wool.” Isaiah understood imagery, and he knew that white 
 is one of God’s chosen soul-terms—a touch of the sensible whereon 
 there plays forever a touch, a glory of the supersensible. 
 
232 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 And so I might move through the entire creation and find 
 everywhere the moral and spiritual. The creation and we stand 
 over against each other in an appointed, detailed, wonderful corre- 
 spondence. It was my privilege last year, in my lecture on the 
 Vague Elements in Language, to show how even the infinite may be 
 effectively set forth in finite contrivances of expression. And I 
 doubt whether any impression of the infinite ever received by man 
 is wholly void of a moral element. ‘The infinite, at any rate, is 
 serious, grave by its very size ; and when you get as far as serious- 
 ness, you cannot be far from the border-lines of the moral. Now 
 the sweep of curved lines is one of the ways of indicating the infinite 
 —not the sweep of circles, because they are too full of the intima- 
 tion that they get around and come full circle by and by ; the moment 
 a curve completes its curve and joins, it becomes a finite image ; but 
 these curves that curve slowly and take forever to get around, are, 
 to our feeling, as though they never did get around. For a thing 
 that moves on and moves on and never stops moving, that shadows 
 forth the infinite for us; and all my experience is that when I get 
 upon such a journey as that, I feel pretty solemn, and as though I 
 wanted no reprehensible thought or emotion to come into me. 
 
 A similar moral or semi-moral effect can be wrought upon us 
 by the skilful use of colors; and it is the very divinity of pictorial 
 art that it can do such things. Many landscape painters understand 
 all about this. And a painter does not amount to much unless he 
 does. He who paints a bare boulder even in simple definiteness— 
 that is, in an exact, cold reproduction of its finiteness, has abused 
 the boulder. What did that boulder ever do that entitles it to such 
 treatment! Nobody ought to be painted in his utmost literalness. 
 That is knowing him after the flesh, as St. Paul expressed it. A 
 human face should be painted suggestively. A face at any given in- 
 stant, at the instant, say, when the artist is looking at it in order to 
 paint it, has a certain kind and amount of expression, but that man 
 there sitting to be looked at and painted, has in him quantities of 
 kinds and amounts of things, not present in that one moment, or 
 one hour, of that face. ‘Therefore it is an exceedingly fragmentary 
 and insulting performance to paint him as he then is, and have that 
 pass down to all generations, as the man. It is not the man. It 
 requires a very roundabout exploration to know aman. Moreover, 
 when you do know him, in his actualities, you have no right to paint 
 him so. If we all had in us nothing but our actualities, we should 
 
 ‘ 
 
 aS LS 
 
YALE LECTURES. 233 
 
 be small affairs ; and hardly worth painting. Our potentialities are 
 the greatest thing about us. That is so even with heathen men. 
 But since Jesus has come and: redeemed men, their potentialities 
 have been greatly enlarged and manifolded; and they must be 
 painted accordingly. Paint a man at his best ; not only as what he 
 has made himself to be so far, but paint him according to what he is 
 germinally, and what he may be when those precious germinals have 
 received the whole stimulation of the grace of God. In other words, 
 idealize him. Or, in still other words, make a little show of the in- 
 finite in him, here and there. Those who love the man will applaud 
 your fine veracity in the matter, your ideal veracity, if nobody else 
 does. 
 
 So the boulder, so anything. Treat all suggestively. Spread a 
 little warmth over your rock. Mellowit. Puta heart into it. For 
 it is a curious and beautiful fact, that every visible thing has a heart, 
 when closely studied ; like Alfred Tennyson’s tree that the maiden 
 kissed and kissed and then kissed again, because she found a dear 
 name cut on it; until the tree could stand it no longer but spoke up 
 and said : 
 
 Her kisses were so close and kind, 
 That, trust me on my word, 
 
 Hard wood I am, and wrinkled rind, 
 But yet my sap was stirred; 
 
 And even into my inmost ring 
 A pleasure I discerned, 
 
 Like those blind motions of the spring, 
 That show the year is turned. 
 
 Tennyson can hardly be charged with exaggeration here. Every 
 thing has a heart. And there is nothing more admirable and whole- 
 some in fine art, from the beginning, than modern landscape work, 
 for the one reason that it has passed clear beyond the bewitching 
 finitude of Greek achievement, into the deeper and more solemn 
 witchery of a statement from the interior ; which statement of Nature 
 from the interior is large, vague, vast and practically infinite, because 
 it is from the interior ; or, in other words, because it takes Nature 
 in its expression as having meanings, meanings intellectual, mean 
 ings moral, meanings spiritual, meanings affectional. 
 
 I was saying that as lines have power to suggest the infinite, so 
 have colors. And how do they do it? In various ways. Please 
 remember, I am trying to illustrate the thought that material beauty 
 
234 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 cannot be, to be shunned, as some claim, because beauty supersen- 
 sible, the different forms of soul-beauty, are not to be set forth other- 
 wise than in terms of material beauty, or the beauty of the world ; 
 and I have drifted into a cognate thought, by way of illustration, the 
 thought that material things can represent to us and make us feel 
 the infinite. Lines can do this and so can colors. Whena painter 
 starts you down a vista that has no end, he has started in you the 
 vagueness of the infinite. When a painter has hinted, but not painted, 
 the depths of the ocean, he has done the same thing. When a 
 painter, along his far away sky-line, has drawn a color-tone which 
 says that beyond the horizon there, out of sight, sweeps a boundless 
 stretch of sea, he has given into your soul the whole immeasurable 
 suggestiveness of sea. Not even when you stand on the sea-shore, 
 and look off, are you so immersed in the infinite, as when you mark 
 that painter’s line of color. On the shore, outlooking, your eye 
 reaches an horizon. To be sure, you do not stop there, still that 
 horizon jars you and mars the full impression of infinity upon you 
 from the endless waters. But in the picture, you see neither sea 
 nor horizon, but the sea is suggested without a thought of horizon. 
 Everything is left without boundaries. You have a statement whose 
 main value is in what it does not state. These are some of the ways 
 of impression open to the color-master. 
 
 I have heard the superiority of classical art attributed to the 
 finiteness of classical subjects. It is possible, it was said, to formu- 
 late perfectly, as the Greeks did, ideas as limited as the Greek ideas 
 were. But since Christianity has come with its glorious enlarge- 
 ments, its many ideas that shade off into mystery and have their 
 principal effect as being mysterious, the old-time, absolute Greek 
 formulation—that has been the fascination of the world ever since— 
 must be given up, of course, and art, as art, must take an eternal 
 inferiority, it is thought. Why undertake to harness art to religion, 
 when the chief contents of religion are essentially unstatable by art. 
 
 That difficulty and some others, I may get at in another lecture. 
 Meanwhile, have I not at least nibbled around the edges of it, in 
 what I have said? . Modern art can state the large Christian ideas. 
 It had better let alone trying to state the Almighty in a Vatican 
 fresco of an old man. And a few more impossibles it had better let 
 alone. But nine-tenths of all that Christianity has brought in, can 
 be stated in a way to make about all the impression a human soul can 
 bear. And even the Almighty can be set forth, if we cease from the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 235 
 
 folly of bodily parts and just describe on the canvas the great works 
 that so reveal him. I never look at the ocean or ata terrible storm, 
 or at the sky of night, or at the mighty mountains of a land like 
 Switzerland, without an impression of God that is practically 
 infinite. And in so far as such things can be painted, God is made 
 known art-wise. The modern machinery for embodying the infinite 
 is good. 
 
 I have spoken of lines and colors, but I have said nothing of 
 music. And music is the one art that is most serviceable for the 
 setting forth of those Christian ideas and experiences whose dimen- 
 sions, and whose celestial qualities, are supposed by some to be 
 unstatable essentially and forever. I say they are not. I imagine 
 that music was born for that purpose, principally. What did the 
 Greeks know about music, comparatively? Nothing. No, music 
 
 was waiting for the Messiah and his kingdom. Waiting for the Holy 
 Ghost to get into souls, and start there all sorts of mysterious com- 
 motions ; penitences, exultations, aspirations, expectations, sweet 
 loves, a whole world of life that the ancients did not know. Music 
 waited for that; and when that came she came, last-born of God, 
 with her hymns, anthems, oratorios and marvels many; marvels of 
 composition not only, but marvellous new instruments, and instru- 
 mental combinations ; instruments that almost articulate and often 
 seem to know and be glad for the divine service they are in. God 
 hasten the day when every Christian man shall know music. 
 
 18 
 
THE SERVICE OF ART IN 
 RELIGION. 
 
 (II.) 
 
 It is sometimes mentioned as a reason why art should never be 
 invoked in aid of religion, that the very act of putting ideas or in- 
 ward experiences of any sort into form, as in art, is deteriorating in 
 its tendency to the man so doing and to all people who consent to 
 commune with and enjoy his work. Ideas or feelings, if let alone 
 and left to be in the mind simply ideas and feelings, are less danger- 
 ous morally than they are if externalized, and especially if external- 
 ized in terms of beauty. Perhaps if they were externalized in 
 thorough-going ugliness, they would be less to be feared, but the 
 moment they are charming or even pleasant, the trouble begins, and 
 all concerned are demoralized unless they set a guard against the 
 beguiler. Well, those of us who are conversant with Holy Writ, do 
 not need to be told that the physical is quite an inlet of evil for men ; 
 and even those of us who are simply observant of what goes on in our 
 own selves, have come to know the same thing ; Holy Writ in this 
 case, as in many others, being simply an authoritative statement of 
 what is true and easily discoverable, Bible or no Bible. But if the 
 Bible is explicit on the dangers of the physical, the external, the 
 sensuous, it is equally explicit on the more subtle and vastly more 
 unrelishable point that evil has its seat and all its potency in the soul 
 of man, and not in externals ; so that ideas unformulated, unexternal- 
 ized, unembodied, are not always such tremendously innocent things 
 after all. Leave them alone in the mind and never speak them forth 
 
YALE LECTURES. 237 
 
 in any form, and they would fester there and work corruption as ener- 
 getically as you please. However, I am not disposed to insist upon 
 that, to-day. It isso, but let it go. I grant that formulation has its 
 perils. Formulation is the occasion—the occasion if it is not the 
 cause—of religious degeneration in countless cases. It is claimed 
 that it tends to degeneration in all cases. Well, admit eventhat. I 
 do not feel myself compelled, in order to reach the ends I seek here, 
 to resist the very radical statement, that always when tangible em- 
 bodiment of soul-facts is attempted, whether in art or in anything 
 else, a distinct moral risk is incurred ; and that therefore all the arts 
 of expression are to be diligently watched. 
 
 But now just notice a few plain things. First, that our Maker 
 in giving us bodies, has indicated his wish that we should externalize 
 and take the risk of it. He externalized us; then why should we 
 not proceed to perpetually externalize ourselves in all kinds of utter- 
 ance, pictures, sculptures, music, rhetoric, architecture, gesture, 
 oratory: and in that ofttimes most affirmative and impressive of all 
 utterances or self-embodiments, silence ; that fine-art which occasion- 
 ally a silent man like Grant has perfected. A soul taken singly and 
 alone is nota man. A man is an incorporated soul. There is a 
 good deal of talk abroad about “saving souls.” Christ Jesus did 
 not come into the world to save souls, butmen. And the gist of the 
 scriptural doctrine of the resurrection is, that each man of us is 
 saved in his totality—not a ghost but a man (which a ghost never 
 was). Well then, if a man is not a man except as he is corpore- 
 alized, neither is a thought a thought, nor a feeling a feeling, unless 
 it is corporealized or embodied or formulated. I will show that 
 more minutely a little farther on. For the present I assert it and 
 say moreover, that whether that assertion be true or not, it is true 
 that God’s creating us soul and body, points to, suggests and legiti- 
 mates the bodying forth of our inner and spiritual selves in suitable 
 forms ; such as our wit can devise and such as seem to effectually 
 do the business for us. 
 
 Further I wish to ask, how are we ever to have the least human 
 intercourse, if we donot get out into these embodiments whereof. I 
 speak ; into language, into painting, into music, into abiding struc- 
 tures and so on? I sometimes notice that the horses in the field 
 put their noses together and have a protracted season of silent fellow- 
 ship. We have not yet come to that fine clairvoyance. Or rather, 
 I should say that we are capable of silent fellowship, but have 
 
238 ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 numerous things to say for which mere silence is not enough. When 
 a man’s wife is silent to him sometimes, it is a saying to him as much 
 as he can stand at the time ; but in the long run of life our minds 
 and our hearts get full of things that cannot begin to be expressed 
 in the simple alphabet of silence. The horse is not so. His 
 consciousness is pretty simple on the whole, I judge, and a simple 
 language therefore answers in his case. Our consciousness has a 
 hundred-fold more contents and more complexity and we must have 
 a hundred devices of expression, some of them very complex. 
 There is no intercourse, I say, if externalization ceases. 
 
 But remember that only a part of our intercourse is with our 
 contemporaries. I do not know but I have to do with the departed 
 more than I have with the living. I read their books. I contem- 
 plate their arts. I listen to their music. I sit still and absorbent 
 under the venerable influence of their cathedrals and their memorial 
 structures. I go to their graves and read the inscriptions over 
 them. I go up and down the earth on pilgrimages to those cities 
 where the precious: vestiges of them are particularly accumulated. 
 But suppose these men and all the men of the past had been preju- 
 diced against externalization, had not believed in memorials and 
 vestiges and precious accumulations, but had consulted the horse— 
 as Solomon said, Go to the ant—and had refused everything save 
 the mutual touch of noses, so to speak. That would have answered 
 a certain purpose for them, but not much of a purpose for us who 
 want to recall them and realize them and get some profit from their 
 experience. If each generation refuses to express itself, then every 
 generation must make the experience of life entirely uninstructed 
 by all past experiments. What an unaccumulative and unprogressive 
 race the human race would then be, like to the very animals of the 
 field. 
 
 I was saying a little while ago, that as 2 man is not a man unless 
 embodied, so a thought is not a thought unless embodied. And 
 now look at that. 
 
 On the sharp question whether the mind of. man can think 
 otherwise than in forms of the outward—sense-forms—I am not 
 anxious to speak; but on the question whether the mind does 
 habitually and chronically draw on the external for its moulds of 
 thought, anybody may speak who ever took the trouble to examine 
 his own practice in the matter. We think in words, generally we 
 do. Everybody does. It is instinctive with us. We were made to. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 239 
 
 If all men breathe, they were made to breathe. And if they all think 
 embodied thoughts God meant they should. But if my unexpressed 
 thoughts are thus formulated in fact within me, and proceed in 
 terms of structural coherency and logic, and in terms of beauty 
 often ; behold I am already in the perilous trap of a practical 
 externalization—interior and mental externalization. Perhaps I am 
 not much degenerated by it; nevertheless there is a sense-process 
 going on in me. I am in commerce with externals in the privacy 
 of my mind. The matrix of my thought savors of the physical. I 
 may comfort myself with the notion that I am particularly unphysical, 
 because I have not put my thought into any form that can be touched 
 with the hands; but I am deluded. Jesus went to the root of this 
 matter when he taught that a man need not advance so far as an 
 overt act in order to be corrupted, but that the instant a reprehen- 
 sible thought emerges into his consciousness, the whole strength of 
 corruption is in him. 
 
 I say again: the instant I think a thought, the jeopardy of 
 physicalization has begun, because that thought, following the cus- 
 tomary process of human thought, clothes itself in a body borrowed 
 from the outward. Metaphysicians sometimes fancy when they use 
 language forthe sharp purposes of their particular business, that 
 they have triumphantly purged their terms of the colors and flavors 
 of the outward world. They have eliminated the physical, or at any 
 rate, whatever physical there may be left in their words they do not 
 use in their processes of thought. But language is loth to be expur- 
 gated in that way. It was sense-born. It was physical in its origin. 
 And it knows it and is not ashamed. So it holds on to its physical 
 parentage. It holds on; there is an indestructible physical image 
 in each word of it. The metaphysician may try not to have any- 
 thing to do with that image, but the image is the vital essence of 
 the word and when he is dead and gone and another generation 
 come to read what he has left, often they hunt out his suppressed 
 images, in order to get down into his real meaning ; the fact being, 
 after all, that those images, those physical elements, did always 
 secretly determine even that metaphysician’s use of language. There 
 is a curious pertinacity here: a persistence as of a thing alive and 
 wilful. 
 
 I said at the beginning that I was willing for the sake of argu- 
 ment to admit that there is in all cases a tendency towards an evil 
 influence on men in all the arts of expression. 
 
240° YALE LECTURES. 
 
 The moment a mind moves forth into embodiment, artistic or 
 otherwise, it perils itself and everybody else. Let that be conceded, 
 whether we need to concede it or not. And now it becomes very 
 important to know what are our securities against that miserable 
 tendency and especially in fine art ; whatis our security? Are there 
 any securities that are so secure as to make it worth while trying to 
 wed art to religion ever? I propose to answer that question. 
 
 And first we must not undertake to get security by minimizing 
 form, as the Congregationalists incline to do sometimes and other 
 bodies much more. Form we must have on all accounts, and if we 
 are to secure the ends of self-expression fully and the ends of impres- 
 sion fully, we must have of form not a little. The fact is, in several 
 denominations those ends are not secured with any fulness. One 
 might make a good lecture on the exact points of short-coming 
 among the Quakers, for example, in that regard. There can be no 
 complete and symmetrical doctrinal development, except by a com- 
 plete and symmetrical development of form. Neither can there be 
 any well-balanced and full-toned development of the religious life. 
 Indeed there would not be such things as denominations, with their 
 contrary polities and their contrary theologies, were it not for the 
 inadequate and fragmentary rituals and form-systems of the Christian 
 bodies. ‘There would only be the Church Catholic, as there ought 
 to be. I do not say that all men would think alike as to doctrine 
 and polity, if they were all put into the discipline of the same forms ; 
 absolute uniformity of opinion could never be ; but they would think 
 alike so far, and particularly would be developed along the same lines 
 and into the same types of religious experience so nearly, that they 
 would have no heart for denominational subdivisions. I say sub- 
 divisions to indicate my sense of the disgraceful multiplicity of the 
 separated folds. I have heard many fine arguments to show the 
 great value of denominations ; but in my judgment, all real values 
 could be better secured in a Catholic, or universal Church. I did 
 not know that once, but I have known it for some years now. We 
 must not undertake to defend ourselves from the possible debase- 
 ment incident to Form by any extreme abridgement of Form. 
 
 Secondly, confining myself now to the arts that carry in them 
 influences of beauty, I remark : beauty is safe enough always, and no 
 one is morally relaxed by it when neither the artist nor the observer 
 makes it an end in itself, but on the contrary, seeks ends intel- 
 lectual, ethical and religious, and holds beauty strictly subordinate 
 
YALE LECTURES. 241 
 
 and contributory thereto. I have struck now a fundamental 
 chord in this whole matter. In any just and wholesome arrange- 
 ment of the arts of expression, beauty is a subordinate element. 
 And how do we know that? . By what considerations do we show 
 that beauty belongs down there under those other things; and 
 begins to be a dissolvent of character, directly it is let out from 
 under the same? Comparing the moral and religious influence of 
 simple intellectualism with the moral and religious influence of 
 beauty, it seems to me there is not much choice between them. A 
 man under the supremacy of intellectualism is as much a sinner and 
 as much in hell as a man under the supreme rule of beauty. It does 
 not seem so at first ; and if Jesus Christ had not come among us and 
 given us the benefit of his awful stroke of moral analysis, we should 
 never have got into this matter to any practical purpose. But he 
 has come, and now intellectualism as the reigning purpose and joy 
 of life has little to say for itself. It carries a man down always. It 
 does not make him lackadaisical necessarily. On the contrary he 
 may be exceedingly athletic and formidable. When John Milton 
 portrayed Satan, he did not consider it necessary to make him a 
 milksop nor to effeminate him at any point. He, Satan, was a very, 
 gifted person, and what he could not do no finite creature could. 
 But intellectuality, a life moulded, modulated and marshalled under 
 intellectual influences pure and simple, is perdition in every essential 
 element of perdition. How then does it deserve to be put above 
 the Beautiful as a supreme formative force? | 
 
 I reply, the Beautiful, if let alone, does work emasculation in 
 the matter of simple-strength. It gradually kills the more strenuous 
 elements in character. Itundermines heroism. A solid nationality. 
 like the Puritan commonwealth cannot be built on it. Moreover I 
 think it may be true that the Beautiful, as being more distinctly 
 sensuous than the intellectual has amore direct affinity with practical 
 sensualism than intellectualism has. I suspect that an examination 
 of the facts of history, a reference to peoples and periods that have 
 surrendered to the Beautiful, might show that to be so. So that the 
 Beautiful does stand second to the intellectual as a good force in 
 life. And it stands second to the ethical, of course. To settle that 
 we have only to refer to the experiments made by individuals and 
 by communities, with the ethical as a dominant factor of develop- 
 ment. Let a man put his conscience and his religious nature of 
 which his conscience is a part, in the ascendant, and what does he 
 
242 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 come to? Asa matter of fact, what does he come to? What kind 
 of a man does he make? And how does he feel within his own self? 
 Is he a happy man? Do his faculties in him act as though they 
 felt that a spurious king was set over them when conscience was 
 enthroned? Do they not rather show an utter contentment and 
 pull along in their own particular function, each one blithely, sing- 
 ing even as the worlds sing, because they are marshalled so orderly? 
 Also in every case what is the national result of an enthroned con- 
 science? History has but one voice in this matter. On the other 
 hand, what is the uniform consequence when such a faculty or impulse 
 as vanity or combativeness or love of dominion or bodily lust reigns 
 in a manoramonga people? The innumerable intermeddlings with 
 the monarchy of the conscience and religion, by the several other 
 powers of man, overwhelmingly settle the question of the de jure 
 power. So then the Beautiful must abdicate. 
 
 Or try the question in this way: Conceive the Beautiful as 
 eliminated from the physical creation; would there be anything 
 worth while left? Yes, we should still have structure and mass and 
 utility. Quite an array of things solid and sizable; that is, if we 
 include in the Beautiful only the esthetic conception. When we 
 speak of structure, and of utility as resulting from structure, we have 
 passed into the realm of intellectual beauty, to be sure, but we have 
 not passed into esthetics strictly. A perfectly neutral universe, as 
 regards esthetics, would be quite a universe, I say. So might an 
 unesthetic man be quite a man, as is numerously proven every day. 
 And a Deity too might be very adorable who did not love beauty 
 and cared not to create a beautiful universe. But take from the 
 Deity and from the man and from the universe every shred and 
 semblance of the moral, or the intellectual, or the true, and what is 
 there left? It would take a whole week’s thinking to determine 
 whether we had anything left. Certain it is that what was left would 
 not be worth retaining—even as a man when dead is no longer 
 worth keeping. 
 
 I propose to give now some concrete illustrations of an undue 
 surrender to beauty. And as I havea company of embryo preachers 
 before me, I will begin with the sermon. A man starts out to make 
 a beautiful sermon. That is what he is after. I am ashamed to 
 have anything to do with such a person, even for the purpose of 
 illustration ; but as such persons occasionally appear, and particu- 
 larly as any preacher (especially a young one) is liable to be caught 
 
YALE LECTURES. 243 
 
 in a temporary passion for the beautiful some day, and to get up 
 discourses accordingly, I think I had better take hold of the case. 
 Well, the beautiful sermon is started, and I will tell you what the 
 man will do. He has already surrendered all intention of utility or 
 usefulness. The homiletical impulse has vacated and the esthetical 
 impulse has come in. A man who has come along so far as that 
 may be looked to to do anything. First he proceeds to forget 
 that the first beauty of a discourse—the first chronologically and the 
 first logically—the beauty in fact without which no other real beauty 
 is possible—lies in organization, and is not sensuous but intellectual. 
 When God would make a beautiful man, he provides a frame for him, 
 not any frame, but a frame that will hang together and be specific, 
 a man’s frame, not a brute’s, and a frame not only that will hang 
 together, but will hang together creditably, proportionally ; no one 
 member too long for the rest, or too short for the rest, or too heavy 
 or too light; a skeleton which when clothed on with flesh will be 
 seen to be beautiful and will pay for all the fleshly decoration. To 
 decorate a malformation would be incongruous. Every malformed 
 man, if he could have been permitted to put in a single word before- 
 hand, would have said, ‘“‘ Please omit decoration and give me a 
 form.” I should like to be decorated and formed both, but if that 
 is too much to ask, as between the two give me form. And that 
 sermonizer ought to feel in the same way, but he does not. He 
 wants decoration ; decoration irrespective of the frame ; decoration 
 whether there be any frame or not. 
 
 As I.am upon the subject of beautiful organization, [ might as 
 well say here, parenthetically, that I know of no one rule for secur- 
 ing it so important as this. Take the good of your congregation for 
 your aim ; not merely their general good, but their specific good 
 through this subject you have chosen; get your intention high up 
 in that way; clarify it; simplify it; state to yourself exactly what 
 you are after ; and then shape your materials, organize them hero- 
 ically on that objective. And it will require some heroism. Your 
 fondness for this and that in your accumulated material, will make 
 you want to put itin. It is something you have labored on and 
 dug out perhaps ; or it is a scrap of learning; or there is a glitter 
 of the ideal in it that pleases you; or it is a touch of pathos which 
 might melt somebody. There are numerous temptations and you 
 will need to be a hero and ask only, does that item bear naturally 
 and directly on my objective? Moving among the heaps of good 
 
244 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 stuff that you have got together, in that constant, courageous self- 
 denial, you are apt to develope a plan of your subject that is simple, 
 coherent, orderly, compact, with an all-engulfing trend, like the pull 
 of a raceway; a veritable organism, a thing of beauty indeed— 
 intellectual beauty. You did not aim at beauty. You aimed at use 
 and God rewarded you for it by carrying you unconsciously into 
 beauty, as he always does. 
 
 But our man whom we left a moment ago, does not propose to 
 waste himself on such plain work as that. He does not choose to 
 get beauty unconsciously, or to put up with a kind of beauty so little 
 obvious to the multitude as beauty structural. If he can only get 
 flesh, real pink flesh, something pretty and posy-like, he will run the 
 risk of the frame. Well, it is an instructive fact that even posies 
 have to have something to grow in or on. In order to satisfactory 
 ornament, there must be something to ornament. Ornament con- 
 sidered as an independent beauty-spot, is one of the most ineffective 
 and ridiculous of things. Omament—ornament legitimate and 
 telling—is simply and always the natural and spontaneous efflores- 
 cence of structure. How that one definition damns scores of ambi- 
 tious art-works, sermons, buildings, paintings, musical products ! 
 It is a truism in architecture that all adornments must be congruous 
 to the buildings that they undertake to adorn; a rule which I 
 expressed in the essence of it, when I said adornment is structure 
 efflorescent. That is, there must be so perfect harmony between a 
 building and its decorations, that it is as though, and makes one. 
 feel as though, the building had blossomed. The congruity in 
 question lies in several particulars. ‘The ornaments must be suitable 
 to the intention of the building. A gothic cathedral must not be 
 called upon to blossom into ungothic or unreligious or pagan embel- 
 lishments. Also the ornaments must be suitable to the structure of 
 the building ; and to its position and surroundings; and to some 
 other things perhaps. But I must not get too far away from sermons. 
 However I am not far away when I am naming the laws of congruity 
 in art. For example, a sermon may be gothic or Moorish or Greek, 
 or of the New England meeting-house type. Christianity is pretty 
 diversified in its aspects and contents and admits a good variety of 
 sermons, but Moorish embellishments on a gothic sermon, or Jeremy- 
 Taylorisms festooning Jonathan Edwards, were grotesque. Anda 
 Moorish sermon at a funeral were scarcely the thing. | 
 
 When it is once settled that a discourse is to be a sermon, a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 245 
 
 multitude of beautiful things are ruled out. That one decision 
 excludes them. Were it a political speech or a Fourth of July Ora- 
 tion, or an address of courtesy or a military proclamation or a nuptial 
 discourse it would be different ; certain flowers might then be let in, 
 which now must be foregone, and even an occasional spangle might 
 not be offensive. But the precise point I wish to press just now is, 
 that when the sermonizer has made the structure of his discourse 
 ‘beautiful he has virtually provided for every other beauty of pulpit 
 utterance that is suitable and is possible tohim. ‘The mind that has 
 the grace and the vigor and the moral purpose to organize such a 
 structure as I have described, will find always as it moves along in 
 the process of amplification upon that structure, that those .very 
 mental qualities which originated the structure, do also joyfully 
 originate all along the decorations thereof; congruous decorations, 
 of course, because structure and decoration are the issue of the self- 
 same mind ; the fine purpose in the man, that presided over his 
 ’ work of organization ; the purpose to do a definite good to a certain 
 congregation, by the use of a certain subject, on a certain occasion. 
 That purpose also presides over his entire movement through the 
 subject when he comes to write it out, and infallibly selects suitable 
 details of beauty, if indeed it be proper to say that he selects at all. 
 He does not. No, out of such a mind as that, agitated by the work 
 it is in, beauties spring of themselves. The man does not call them ; 
 he simply ferments in the stress of ncble endeavor, and they come. 
 As he is but partially sanctified at best, and but imperfectly disci- 
 plined and cultured in his intellect, the probability is that some 
 things will spring out of him that are more sumptuous than suitable ; 
 heavy dabs of color that need to be reduced, heavy tones that do 
 not harmonize with the general flow of his music; ramping, sudden 
 growths that spoil the proportions of his landscape ; spurts of energy 
 that spurted before he knew it ; but such a man as he, will certainly 
 see these things and go back upon them with a swift vengeance. 
 He knows that a mere detail has no business to be springing into 
 the foreground and attracting all observers, even if it be a bewitching 
 detail in itself considered—it cannot be considered in itself; it is” 
 but one thing in a great whole, and when one thing in a great whole 
 sets up to be considered by itself, it has outraged the whole; in 
 proper subordination and congruity to the whole it can make its own 
 valuable addition to the solid effect of the whole. Perhaps:no one 
 can detect that contribution, but it is there ; even as in a perfectly 
 
246 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 blended chorus the most peeping voice tells to a mathematical cer- 
 tainty, though no mortal could find thesame. But an insubordinate 
 detail is a practical nuisance. It nullifiesa sermon. ‘That is, its 
 whole effect is towards nullification. And when a sufficient number 
 of insubordinate details assemble themselves in a sermon, with a 
 conceit of their own fascination, a sermon is unshapely and spoiled. 
 
 And the man who starts to make a sermon that shall be beauti- 
 ful, lands just there ; in no sermon at all, but in a miniature of what 
 the universe would be, provided structure and structural melody were 
 ignored all through it and the Creator had directed his undivided 
 attention to sensuous beauty-effects. By the way, I suppose that 
 word beauty, if we are going to be strict and further our own con- 
 venience in the discussion of beauty, should be confined to sensuou 
 impressions and not be permitted to include any supersensible reality 
 whatever. However I have shackled along so far without confining 
 it,and possibly I can go on so to the end. By my reference to the 
 sermon I have now illustrated our great means of security against 
 beauty. It must be subjected to that intellectual thing, truth, and 
 to that good thing, religion. Artists must go for intellectual and 
 ethical ends supremely and for esthetic ends secondarily. And 
 Churches and Christian denominations must seek art for moral ends 
 and not just for the luxury and the ravishment of beauty. 
 
 Take it in architecture. First, certain utilities must be thor- 
 oughly made sure in a Church edifice. The building must accom- 
 modate the assembly. It must not be built in a way to tumble 
 down, either the day of dedication or any other day to come. The 
 materials must be as indestructible as is convenient and they must © 
 be put together to stay. The space enclosed by the walls must be 
 convenient for the particular uses of the people who built them. The 
 possibility of seeing and hearing must be attended to. Then again, 
 in a building to be used for God’s service, as that building is, every 
 visible thing must be real. ‘There should not be pretended cornices 
 and pillars and architectural effects accomplished by hypocritical 
 frescoes ; which frescoes are supposed to be most satisfactory 
 according as they most nearly succeed in deceiving somebody. But 
 after all these points of construction, utility and moral honesty are 
 covered, the question of beauty comes in well. 
 
 May beauty come in? May art have a chance? The masons 
 and the carpenters and all the utilitarians have had their chance or 
 are to have, and now is there anything more? May we put any cost 
 
YALE LECTURES. 247 
 
 on that building, over and above any conceivable utility, and make 
 that cost simply an offering to Him? Will He feel like rejecting 
 our precious ointment, if instead of selling it to convert heathen, we 
 wastefully pour it out in that pious way? Moreover inasmuch as 
 this building is for the one end of personal salvation, can we further 
 that end by some efforts now that are artistic? Is aman saved as 
 much as he might be when he is simply converted, or even sancti- 
 fied? Is it any good to have his converted and sanctified soul 
 refined? A refined saint seems to be more current in the world 
 than an unrefined one. If you are about to come to close quarters 
 with him, marry him for instance, you like him refined. If you are 
 going to transact business with him, or do anything with him that 
 brings you near enough to catch his insensible emanations, his mag- 
 netism as it is sometimes called, the more refined he is the better. 
 You have no prejudice against his holiness or his good principles, 
 but if in addition to that he is civilized, you have no objection. 
 There is no such civilizer as regeneration by the spirit of God, taken 
 in its effect, both direct and remote. That is so. Still, a person 
 civilized to the extent of being regenerated, may for the time being 
 be austere, uninformed, in part unmodulated and unrelishable. 
 Therefore is there any way by which the Church building where he 
 fondly worships can be turned in upon him for purposes of culture, 
 and at the same time not retard his piety ? 
 
 First of all, knowing as we do the rather stiffening effect of 
 right lines, supposing we try curves on him a little, in the construc- 
 tion of the building. You get that man travelling along a curve and 
 he has got to be graceful. Curves have insensible emanations as 
 well as men, and the insensible emanations of a curve are very con- 
 genial and very improving, as compared to the insensible emana- 
 tions of a zig-zag. Also if this curve that has taken hold of this 
 man, winds off into mystery, as curves often will, that will do no 
 hurt. That being led off into mystery may be an advantage to his 
 present square-cut and realistic make-up, it may be, even modify his 
 theology. It need not injure or alter the substance of his theology, 
 but around that substance it may throw an atmosphere which, while 
 it might not make much of a show on Fairbanks’ standard scales, 
 could easily be as valuable to this man as though it did. And then 
 there is what John Milton has called a dim religious light, meaning 
 to intimate, as I understand, that the light in question is religious 
 because dim ; though of course, as was also intimated by this same 
 
248 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Milton, the light gets a part of its religiousness from the fact that it 
 is strained through 
 Storied windows richly dight— 
 
 through windows, that is, that have some sort of religious story to 
 tell, and tell it ornately, in colors. Supposing we experiment on 
 our man with that. Probably he is a strenuous and. busy person all 
 days, save Sunday, and cannot in the week be caught in that leisure- 
 liness of mind which is quite necessary to a full and deep impres- 
 sion upon his sensibilities by any good and Christian story. But 
 here now in his pew he sits, with his work laid aside, with his best 
 clothes and their silent culture on him, voluntarily offering himself 
 to be impressed. ‘To be sure, he mostly faces towards his minister, 
 determined to receive impressions from that particular quarter ; but 
 when a man is intent in one direction, looking out his front door, all 
 his side and back doors are so much the more exposed ; just as 
 people are run over by watching approaching trains more often than 
 in any other way; the train they are not watching then gets its 
 chance at them. Multitudes of people you cannot run over except 
 as you get them looking out for a particular train. For example, 
 there is many a hater of art and beauty in Churches, who has it for 
 his established principle to watch the minister and repudiate the 
 gothic or other fine architecture all about him as he sits, and the 
 storied windows and the heavenly preaching of the choir; but I say 
 unto you, verily, his side and back doors are exposed, and to such 
 an extent that after a few years he is not the man he used to be, as 
 some accidental test applied to him shows. 
 
 It is proposed to abolish the choir and to have congregational 
 singing ; and to his own surprise and alarm he discovers that he 
 does not wish that to be done. Or his artistic edifice wherein he 
 has sat so long burns up, and the disheartened and economical 
 congregation are inclined to put up now that infinitely reiterated, 
 unsculptured and unbedight edifice wherewith we are all familiar, 
 when lo! he finds himself going over to the mystical Babylon again 
 and advocating her fornications. He is thc victim of insensible 
 emanations. He knew that his preacher emanated. He always 
 knew that. That is the preacher’s avowed business. But he had 
 not known that all these other influences were emanating ; that the 
 Gospel, when preached in a white-light interior, is not the same 
 that it is when preached in a dim religious light, that dim religious 
 light being also supported and carried home by the numerous other 
 
YALE LECTURES. 249 
 
 esthetic blandishments which are apt to characterize a Church 
 interior that has ventured along so faras to invoke the aid of stained 
 glass and blazoned holy stories. ‘The Gospel remains the same in 
 whatever light, as regards its substantial grandeur, tenderness and 
 efficacy ; but remember always that the Gospel may be received by 
 a person in two modes: first, by eruption, secondly, by saturation. 
 And when you come to that second mode, these esthetics that I am 
 describing get their chance. 
 
 Even preachers may be divided into two great classes, the 
 irruptive and the saturative, the last getting their saturative quality 
 largely by their culture, their tone, their art-quality, their likeness to 
 
 - storied windows and religious architecture and the sanctified com- 
 positions of the great tone-masters of the world. Some four years 
 ago, when I delivered a lecture here on our Congregational worship 
 and proposed some enlargement of ritual among us, the late Dr. 
 Bacon, who was present, said that I had been spoiled by my Upjohn 
 Church. Which was only what I am now saying, that the saturative 
 form of impression is one of the forms, and a strong one too. I 
 wish my Upjohn Church had got at me fifty years ago and that my 
 constitutional irruptiveness had had fifty years of chastisement. As 
 it is, I must irrupt, more or less, so long as I live. However I have 
 come at least to recognize the other more silent and gentle process, 
 the process saturative, and to be willing to speak a word to you in 
 its behalf, as I am doing this day. I do not know that I should feel 
 that I had risen to the full size of such an occasion as this if I should 
 spend my whole hour expounding so small a detail in the general 
 subject of beauty and its influence, as a dim religious light ; still I 
 have noticed that an entire large topic is often contained in some 
 single one of its elements, even as a tree is completely discovered 
 in its smallest leaf. Just let a man discuss the storied window ques- 
 tion clear to the bottom, and he has broken the back of the whole 
 difficulty in the matter of esthetics and religion. It is frequently 
 taken for granted that these elements of impression for which I plead 
 —the art elements—are not so much elements of impression or use, 
 as elements of fancy, entertainment and enjoyment, and are not 
 worth considering strenuously, on that account. But it is not so. 
 Take that inconsiderable circumstance, the storied or colored win- 
 dow, as an illustration. The light thus secured has the following 
 not at all trivial recommendations. 
 
 It sequesters an assembly seven times more than does an untoned 
 
250 VALE LECTURES. 
 
 light, that is, it makes them feel that they have left the street, shop 
 and home, the flow of daily and common life, and are now shut in 
 with God and things divine. Next, itimmerses them, unperceivedly 
 perhaps, but none the less on that account, in the mysterious ; that 
 feature of religion which saturates the sensibilities as profitably as 
 any other feature, it may be. At any rate no one has taken the full 
 stress of his religion till he has felt the touch of its mystery. Blessed 
 be anything that helps bring that about. Next,so much of dimness 
 as any reasonable interior is likely to have is promotive of mental 
 tranquility ; that one thing most necessary to get, before a man’s 
 religious privileges begin to soak in very much. That is physiology 
 in part. The eye here must have repose, the rest of shadow, before 
 the mind can have repose and the mental receptivity thereof. Ido 
 not understand however, that this mental advantage of shadow rests 
 wholly on physiology ; I fancy it is an ultimate fact of the human 
 mind that dimness inclines one to meditativeness, brooding, senti- 
 ment and movements of the soul far-out and away. Behold the 
 genial influences of the night. The numerous staring visibilities of 
 the day are then withdrawn. They no longer occupy the mind. 
 And with that the numerous noises of the day are hushed. And 
 thus released, the intellect no longer operates as simple intellect, 
 but the sensibilities are called in. A man’s deeper self and his 
 honester self and his tenderer self and all his better and choicer self 
 comes forward and begins to play. Therefore the night is a rare 
 time for lovers, as has been immemorially understood. And just as 
 rare a time is it for piety to expatiate upon its holy and nourishing 
 themes and search out its waters of comfort. It is a time for remi- 
 niscence too ; a time, in fact, for everything sedate and mellow and 
 saturative. So then, a sacred interior that borrows a little of this 
 same night-witchery, has done a good thing. It has prepared an 
 atmosphere, a mental atmosphere, wherein the Gospel can do its 
 very best. For the Gospel has not done its best when it has simply 
 laid down its propositions. ‘Those invulnerable propositions do not 
 more need to be uttered forth in and through a vibratory medium, 
 the air, than they need to go forth through what I will call an 
 esthetic medium, made up of the impalpable influences of softened 
 light, strong and refined architecture, truly religious, chaste and 
 rational decoration and an order and movement of service harmo- 
 nious with them all. 
 
 It may occur to some of you that Christianity is an essentially 
 
YALE LECTURES. 251 
 
 cheerful religion, and is imposed upon therefore when domiciled in 
 any the least sombreness, such as dim lights and gothic effects. I 
 think we shall come to the truth in this matter, if we take one look, 
 fair and square, at Him who is Christianity impersonated. God 
 forbid that we should call him uncheerful. But God forbid also that 
 we should call him cheerful in the same sense that birds and squir- 
 rels are, or even the ancient Greeks, who have so filled the world 
 with their incomparable happy art. Jesus was aman of sorrows and 
 acquainted with grief; not alone as bowed down under a heavy 
 Mediatorship which reached its climax on Calvary, and then melted 
 away into the flow of a great triumph; but as essentially, constitu- 
 tionally and forever a chastened person. Go back to that date in the 
 dateless eternity when the triune God alone was, and why was God 
 not even then what for lack of a better word I will call. chastened ? 
 What should we think of a Being who, standing at that point, con- 
 templating the fact that his own good and blessed nature made it 
 incumbent on him to originate by and by such a universe of contin- 
 genicies and shadows as this universe of ours, could be otherwise 
 than toned by it? Go forward also to that forthcoming and eventual 
 date when that apostolic word, “ Where sin abounded grace did 
 much more abound,” shall have been completely fulfilled, and the 
 whole groaning and travailing creation shall have been brought out 
 ofits pain into the glorious liberty of the children of God ; the best 
 time, on the whole, the creation ever saw: and even then there 
 will be something not unlike a minor chord in the universal re- 
 joicing. Even as Hillhouse meant to hint, I suppose, in that hymn 
 of his where he addressed the angels who never fell, and said to 
 them : 
 
 Earth has a joy unknown to heaven— 
 The new-born peace of sin forgiven. 
 Ye, on your harps, must lean to hear 
 A secret chord that mine will bear. — 
 
 That reminiscent element in earth’s final joy, the remembrance 
 of sin, will eternally differentiate it from all other joys, and it is 
 impossible not to believe: that the enthroned Jesus, gone victoriously 
 to the right hand of God, in his undiminished and unchangeable 
 humanity, will evermore be something other than he would have 
 been, other in his feelings, other in the entire play of his soul, by 
 reason of what he has passed through; and also by reason of the 
 
 19 
 
252° YALE LECTURES. 
 
 tremendous fact that in spite of all he has passed through, hell is 
 not yet obliterated from the map of the universe, and if our ortho- 
 doxy be true, never will be. 
 
 My Brethren, gothic architecture, with its seriousness and 
 grandeur, its sombreness, as some would say, is an inevitable influ- 
 ence from Jesus of Nazareth. The Greek templeisnot. The Greek 
 temple is not formulated on a serious back-ground. Greek archi- 
 tecture is not the product of spiritual struggle. Once in a while a 
 Church building committee, caught by its historic renown and 
 deluded by the idea that grave architecture may come to be weari- 
 some if profusely repeated, proceed to set up a Greek form to wor- 
 ship in; just as painters and sculptors sometimes think they have 
 chosen their best possible subject when they have selected some 
 figure or scene from classical mythology and have laid themselves 
 out on that—on some pagan Deity, some Bacchus, some Faun, 
 some Mercury or some Venus. ‘The truth is, we have Bacchuses 
 and Venuses enough of our own, if it is important that art should 
 keep on in that way. But really and soberly, when you come to 
 religion and religious subjects, I humbly venture the remark that 
 Christianity need not knock under to heathenism. We will take 
 what is good, refined and great in the classical civilizations, and 
 make what use of them we can; and we will even borrow ideas from 
 their sacred buildings ; but Christianity has developed an architec- 
 ture of her own; an architecture severely chaste, moral and sublime 
 in its fundamental tone, but quite capable of being warmed and 
 illumined with sober touches of cheerfulness, by various devices not 
 necessary now to specify ; touches superimposed on that solid founda- 
 tion-tone. I do not know anything much simpler than the great 
 cathedral at Cologne, so far as its interior structure is concerned. 
 I shall never quite recover from those unsculptured stone pillars that 
 there bound the nave and stretch away into the upper spaces. The 
 whole moral strength of simple lines is there developed. But there 
 is a great glory of windows in that edifice, that for one thing ; and 
 when in 1872 I attended an early morning service there, and the sun 
 in the east inundated all, and especially the sufficiently adorned and 
 beautified choir-space, where the service headed up; I felt that I 
 never saw such a combination and sweet mutual interfusion of sub- 
 limity and beauty; the sublimity made mellow and melodious by 
 the beauty, and the beauty made strong, unenervating and moral by 
 the sublimity. I am not here to be fanatical and say that any the © 
 
YALE LECTURES. 253 
 
 least departure from the gothic type in Church edifices is unpardon- 
 able ; but as I am taking time to show how the Beautiful may be let 
 into religion, without letting in softness and debility and ultimate 
 demoralization, to wit, by subordinating it to the supremacy of the 
 true and the ethical, I do like to insist on gravity as an underlying 
 quality of the architecture of the Church—gravity, that great tone 
 ‘which so comes into the gothic, for one. Let gravity be made sure, 
 and certain sane and robust things implied therein; and the florid, 
 the sensuous, the artistic will not be likely to run away with us. 
 
 It is like what I said about the sermon ; make sure of structure ; 
 get into you the true structural spirit, and the decorations will come 
 along inoffensively and in right measure. 
 
ORDER IN SERMON TOPICS. 
 
 Gentlemen, we learn by the mistakes we make; that for one 
 way ; but when a man has spent a half century or so making mis- 
 takes and getting wise in that expensive manner, he turns to those 
 who are young, with a feeling that they ought to learn by his 
 mistakes and not be at the miserable expense and waste of time 
 of working out a great list of mistakes of their own. Hence this 
 constant procession of lecturers through this desk, men covered all 
 over with the scars of their mistakes and desiring to tell you where 
 each scar came from, and how they might have avoided it as well as 
 not had they only known what they now know. Each lecturer 
 is seized with a deep fear, now and then, that you will all go straight 
 along to make mistakes for yourselves and that nothing short of 
 actual decapitation will stop you; and yet none the less does 
 the lecturer’s heart within him yearn to lecture, I notice, just as 
 though there were some good in it. Well, perhaps there is. If the 
 universal desire of man for immortality rather indicates an actual 
 immortal life, may it not be that this universal instinct to lecture, on 
 the part of gentlemen rich in mistakes, is a hint that men as young 
 as you are benefited by being lectured—one in a dozen of you, at 
 least. 
 
 These thoughts, pro and con, came to me as I started out 
 to prepare for your benefit the warning in black and white which 
 lies here before me now. A particular, clear warning which no 
 man happened to deliver to me when I stood where you stand. 
 
 My Brethren, on a given Lord’s Day, a minister preaches on 
 a certain topic, and on the next Lord’s Day on a certain other 
 topic, and the next day on another; and so on so long as he lives. 
 But what determines the succession of those topics? Do they 
 
YALE LECTURES. 255 
 
 cohere by any coherency however attenuated, or do they stand 
 each one in absolute cut-off from everything before and after, like a 
 solitary island in mid-ocean? Probably there is some sort of 
 coherency in the business: so much at least as prevails in a string 
 of beads which, although they are not in a very vital connection 
 and cannot be said to hang together, are at least hung together ; as: 
 the cord on which they are strung very well knows; but is the 
 preacher’s coherency intentional, methodized, bottomed on princi- 
 ple, and therefore persistent and uniform? Probably not. “Mine 
 never was. And so far as I could tell, most of the preachers whom 
 I knew were just like me. They had come out of the theological 
 seminary with no thoughts at all on the subject, and they skittered 
 along accordingly. ‘That was a whole generation ago, when things 
 were darker than they are now, and young men had more facilities 
 for not knowing everything than they have at this present time. 
 
 I shall distribute the material of what I have to say to you now 
 in regard to the succession of the- preacher’s topics, most con- 
 veniently for myself and most conveniently for you who must listen 
 to me, if I remark; that all conceivable laws for methodizing this 
 succession classify under two heads, first, laws subjective, secondly, 
 laws objective. That considerably threadbare terminology, subject- 
 ive and objective, is so convenient that one dislikes not to use it 
 occasionally. If it were not convenient it would not be threadbare. 
 Roads that most accommodate the public want are those that have 
 the grass all worn off, of course ; and their bareness is their glory. 
 
 Let-us in beginning consider the subjective laws of before and 
 after in pulpit topics. They are such as the following: First, you 
 may get your themes and the succession of them from the abso- 
 lutely unregulated impulse of your own individuality. Years ago I 
 was about to marry a certain eminent gentleman whom you all 
 know ; and the appointed hour had come and he and I were in 
 a room by ourselves composing our minds for the event, presum- 
 ably ; and presumably rehearsing our parts for the impending cere- 
 mony. Not at all, Gentlemen, not at all. He was discoursing 
 to me with all his might on a certain very remote intellectual 
 subject, as though marrying and giving in marriage were already 
 over with and ended for this world, and we were all like the angels. 
 “‘ My friend,” said I, interrupting him at last, ““do you not wish to 
 know what particular ceremony I am about to use?” “No, Mr. 
 Burton, I am not one of these stereotyped men, you know. Follow 
 
256 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 your own genius, and it will be perfectly satisfactory to me.” Well, 
 sermonizing may go in that way. ‘The preacher opens to his 
 congregation the special matter that he does open at any given 
 time, because he, the preacher, is exactly the man that he is. 
 If he had happened to be a different man, he would have opened a 
 different subject. That is the whole explanation of what his people 
 get that day. A most precarious state of things, one might say. 
 Being fed by ravens were not more so. 
 
 Secondly, a preacher may follow the impellings of the Holy 
 Ghost in his own soul, and may have it for his rule that his theme 
 shall be given him, every time, supernaturally. He refuses themes 
 gotten by study, or human conversation or any sort of public or 
 private hearing or seeing. He has no objection to study or to 
 the voluminous say-so of authors, conversationalists or lecturers ; 
 but when he comes to that one and critical act of selecting next 
 Sunday’s discourse, he proposes to just empty himself of all mortal 
 accumulations, and take in only sky-born things. A beautiful atti- 
 tude that. And a fruitful one, too. For the Holy Spirit has no 
 aversion to souls thus heroically made empty. On the contrary, he 
 delights to enter such; and when he is once in, he is delighted 
 to find there, after all, great’ treasures of honest accumulation ; and 
 out of those treasures to pick topics for the man’s use and mark 
 them sometimes so that he can know them. Almost all preachers 
 —all real preachers—can tell of experiences they have had in that 
 line. Not more was the stock and stuff of prophecy given to 
 the Hebrew prophets, than the substance of sermons is given 
 of the blessed spirit to men now, over and over. These then are 
 the two, great subjective laws of choice, as regards our subjects. 
 They are chosen in a supreme individualistic impulse, or they 
 are chosen as chosen for us by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 And now a word as to the objective laws of choice. 
 
 First, the minister may move about much among his people 
 and quietly hunt his themes in their hearts and lives. Being their 
 minister rather than another people’s, he naturally wants to preach 
 to their necessities ; their necessities are his subjects and his great 
 business is contact with them, with a view to know them and make 
 his discoursings touch their case, Now that is pastorly and sweetly 
 Christian in the intent of it: moreover it is oratorical, for the 
 power of oratory lies one-half in adjustment at the moment to the 
 assembly in hand. The abortiveness of misadjusted oratory and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 257 
 
 the death-sweat to the speaker himself, if he is sensitive enough to 
 have a death-sweat ever, is often a recollection for a life-time. 
 This pastorly preacher whom I am now describing, not only hunts 
 hearts and lives from house to house and along all the ways of life, 
 with a view to suitable discourses, but he watches from afar and in a 
 general way; peradventure, the public mind of his parish may 
 be moved by a common wave of feeling, by some occurrence 
 of common interest, as a conspicuous and impressive death, or 
 a startling accident or a great crime or a special jubilation ora 
 presidential. election or an earthquake or an outrageous heresy 
 or a crusade of the women of the community. Many things 
 happen; and the pulpit can rehearse them, or if it does not 
 exactly rehearse them, it can shape itself to them in the abstract 
 discussions of truth that are full of application to the present situ- 
 ation. Of course, there is no coherency in such subjects as they 
 comeion one after another; but then there is rio coherency in the 
 successive interesting events wherewith they deal. 
 
 To be sure, the sensationalist has his special glee in pulpit 
 topics based on present passing phenomena in this way; but a 
 decenter minister than the sensationalist may also get his topics 
 thus, considerably. On the whole, it does seem rational that a 
 public speaker should indicate somehow that he knows what partic- 
 ular world he is in and what the present, passing circumstances are 
 wherein he stands and speaks. “I speak to posterity,” said a cer- 
 tain disgusted member of Congress, when his fellow members 
 did not incline to listen to him ; and we are all familiar with Charles 
 Lamb’s account of Coleridge’s getting him by the button in the 
 Strand, in London, to talk to him at length on a favorite philo- 
 sophical subject. . Lamb says that he took out his knife and cut off 
 that button that the absorbed philosopher held by, and went his 
 way for the day; and at night found Coleridge on the same spot, 
 going on as briskly as ever. Well Brethren, it is not best for 
 preachers to be too much absorbed in present and transient circum- 
 stances, but we had better, on the other hand, not preach to 
 posterity alone, nor to the empty air. I can recollect the day when 
 I prided myself that my pulpit interest, for me, was drawn from 
 my subjects, so that in that respect I did not care whether I had 
 many to listen to me or not, or whether my congregation had all 
 cut off their buttons and left. That was going too far—as | think 
 now. 
 
258 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 But secondly now still dwelling on topics selected on object- 
 ive principles ; a minister may take this for his rule; he will spend 
 half his year, the winter, for example, in sermons directed to revi- 
 valistic ends, and the other half of the year in sermons that shall 
 have a wider range and bear on culture and edification, That is a 
 simple path and numbers there be that enter thereat. 
 
 Thirdly, we can formulate a complete system of doctrinal 
 topics, and take our people through a wholesome round of theology, 
 year by year; that for Sunday mornings. Then in the second 
 services we can move more miscellaneously; making free with 
 all subjects the more freely, because we have piously observed our 
 appointed routine of the morning and given the hearers a sure loaf 
 to masticate: the centre and substance of a full divine meal. That 
 plan has one virtue for certain, namely, itis a plan. It makes a 
 preacher consecutive because doctrines are consecutive; and it 
 tends to make consecutive Christians in the pews. The people are 
 insensibly methodized under that treatment, and they grow to be 
 knowing and systematic in religious truth. 
 
 Again, preachers may follow the recorded career of the Lord 
 in their sermonizing ; or lastly, they may do what comes to much 
 the same thing and take the order of the Christian Year, as laid 
 down in the liturgies of the Church at large. I run over these last 
 specifications rapidly because I shall get back to them again, and to 
 all my specifications, when I turn back in my subject and consider 
 the desirability of these subjective and objective methods. And first, 
 the methods subjective. Let me give them a rapid run through the 
 mill once more and point out some of the chaff and grit in them. 
 Take the doctrine: “Just follow your own genius,” as the great 
 doctrine for preachers. No doubt a preacher of that kind will 
 be likely to be full of flavors, to be marrowy and real; and con- 
 sidered simply as a galvanic battery, he may be first-class. But 
 -a personality formulated on the principle of individualism, as his 
 has been, is likely also to be circumscribed, lop-sided and more or 
 less eccentric. A man who has so much respect for his own interi- 
 ors as to make them the law of his pulpit subjects—the law of their 
 selection and succession—has reached that advanced stage of 
 self-respect by an individualistic course of education as distin- 
 guished from a catholic education. That is, in his choice of books, 
 lines of study, methods, teachers and everything else which has 
 gone in to make him what he is, he has supremely followed his own 
 
YALE LECTURES. 259 
 
 genius. In preserving his own precious individuality and standing 
 guard against influences that might obliterate or enfeeble it, he has 
 kept out influences that would have universalized him and made 
 him an organ with several hundred pipes, instead of a solitary and 
 eccentric bagpipe. Now a bagpipe in the pulpit tends to make bag- 
 pipes all around. I do not know anybody who more needs to . 
 be an organ than a preacher of the Gospel. The Gospel is as 
 capable of innumerable tones and tunes as the vast atmosphere is, 
 if only it can have a many-piped man to tone and tune through: a 
 man who is an organ and nota pipe. I do not now dwell on the 
 disadvantage that the preacher himself suffers when he is a pipe. 
 No, what I object to is the multiplication of pipes and pipers 
 among his hearers by his being what he is. They take the fashion 
 of his doctrinalism and his spiritualism and his entire limited cul- 
 ture. As though a deformed man should inflict his type on the 
 whole community. This highly original preacher whom I am 
 deprecating, not only selects his topics and their order by the law 
 of his own originality, but he selects his Scriptural lessons for 
 his pulpit and his hymns by the same law; and the prayers in 
 which he leads his congregation are simply self-evolutions once 
 more ; they are his experience and his circumscribed religious 
 thinking spoken forth, and the bowed congregation must conform 
 themselves to that unique pattern, or else not pray at all. Usually 
 they do not pray at all, but watch that interesting evolution. The 
 danger is that they will come to like watching it and to supposing that 
 to be prayer, and to feeling that prayers which are catholic rather 
 than individual are tame and formal and maybe not acceptable 
 to God. 
 
 I wish I had time to illustrate at large the evil of following 
 your own genius too much. I am afraid you will laugh at me when 
 I tell you that at Easter 1884, in early April, 1 began to write and 
 preach on the Resurrection of our Lord; and on that theme 
 and its branches and corollaries staid, steadfast and rooted till the 
 last Sunday in July—four months— averaging more than one sermon 
 a week on it and writing on nothing else. I presume you will 
 charge the bagpipe infirmity on me. I could explain and defend 
 myself partially, at least, but I will-not. Rather I prefer to hasten 
 on and say, that I can refer you to scores of important Creeds, 
 Church Creeds, Creeds of theological seminaries and denomina- 
 tional Creeds, in which the Lord’s resurrection is not mentioned 
 
260 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 at all, and nobody would know from them that he did rise, save by 
 inference or implication. And that although. the doctrine of the 
 life of the risen Lord, communicated to dead human souls by the 
 Holy Ghost, to make them alive, is the doctrine pre-eminently 
 that differences Christianity from all other religions. Now is not 
 that playing something less than full organ? Those Creeds are 
 very resounding on the passion of the Lord and on some other 
 themes, but they pitifully die away on that one event which is the 
 forth-flowering of all preceding events. We needa speaking pulpit 
 which is not limited by the private genius of the man in it, a pulpit 
 that discusses topics that any given private genius might forget, or 
 touch too lightly, if he were not made aware of them and attent 
 by the voice of the Holy Catholic Church; the godly wisdom 
 of the whole Kingdom of God; the teaching ages; the Holy 
 Ghost in the ages. The preacher who goes by his own genius, 
 does not much hear this great teaching. He has picked up some 
 things—some great things probably—and on them he puts his 
 whole weight. ‘They suit his mind. He can preach on them 
 con amore. On other topics he would be listless. So he abides in 
 these his specialties. I must work the truths that I can work, says 
 he, and what other truths there may be must be worked by men 
 who are born to it, as I certainly am not. And his people, instead 
 of sitting at a full table, sit stintedly at his; and bear the stamp of 
 his specialization. So much for that. 
 
 And now, how about getting ovr sermons by the direct gift 
 of the Holy Ghost? Will that do? Shall I open this particular 
 thought or text to-day, because the Holy Ghost operating in the 
 secrecy of my mind, has authentically designated that subject for 
 this day; and shall I insist- on that as the rule of my selection 
 always? No. And why?. For various reasons. To begin with, 
 God has confessedly provided various externals for the guidance of 
 men; the Bible, for instance ; and human advice, and his provi- 
 dence working on the large theatre of history; and ordinances 
 which are practical digests of information; and the teaching 
 Church. I do not. need to name all of them, but if there is only 
 one—just one—the Bible, say—that one is conclusive to the point 
 that God did not intend men should walk by the inner light simply. 
 And I do not know but the same thing is indicated quite as clearly 
 by the fact that men are made of soul and body, and not of 
 soul alone. Why am I clothed upon with this external outfit with 
 
YALE LECTURES. 261 
 
 its several outlooking organs, by which I am related to the vast and 
 multifold external and am perpetually externalized—why all this, 
 except as my Creator wanted me to lead a double life, and be 
 doubly directed in all that I do: first, by the blessed Spirit, no 
 doubt ; but again, by authorities exterior to myself! Moreover, 
 why is it that, while the operations of the Holy Spirit in souls are 
 certainly favorable to sanity, sweetness and discretion, the forth- 
 puttings of the persons thus operated upon are frequently neither 
 sane, sweet nor discreet—why is this unless God means to notify us 
 that a man must not go by interiors alone? The Apostles and the 
 first disciples were full of the Holy Ghost and of power, even 
 the power of the Holy Ghost, as they needed to be considering 
 the tasks they had on hand ; but this fullness of the Spirit did not 
 save them from error always, and was not meant to. They had 
 differences among themselves in respect of the things of the King- 
 dom, wherein both parties could not be right, although they were 
 re-born of the Holy Ghost. Mary, the blessed Virgin, was much 
 inspired when she improvised the Magnificat; so was Zacharias 
 when he chanted his Benedictus; but both of those God-given 
 hymns are strictly nationalistic rather than universalistic and 
 Christian, and it took quite a long time to get even the Apostles out 
 of a nationalistic conception of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. It 
 is difficult to speak of all this without seeming to disrespect the 
 Spirit of illumination, the light of God in the mind; but we must 
 speak of-it, otherwise men all about will be undertaking to go 
 by the Spirit of God and nothing else. Evidently the Spirit does 
 not wish any such thing. He enters them and then yields to their 
 ignorance and persistency and lets them blunder. A ship all sail 
 capsizes. Sails and good gales are good, but. ballast is good too. 
 And when God’s gales are on us, the gales of his Spirit in the mind, 
 we must steady ourselves by the ballast of authority and by the 
 wisdom of that same Holy Ghost embodied in the Book, in 
 Christian history, and in Christian institutions, notably the Church. 
 The secret of equilibrium lies in a due balance of the outward and 
 the inward. 
 
 You see now, my young Brethren, why I cannot advise you to 
 get your sermons from Sunday to Sunday by any merely subjective 
 law of choice. Well then, how shall you get them? They must 
 come somehow, for the Sundays come and the congregations come 
 together. If the ministers were all. Joshuas, every now and then 
 
262° YALE LECTURES. 
 
 - some sore-pressed soul of them would be halting the sun, stopping 
 the Sundays and taking a rest in his subjects ; but the Joshuas are 
 all dead and gone; and no preacher ever escaped the next Sunday. 
 Brethren, I do not think we need to escape it. Subjects are as 
 numerous as Sundays are. And while I would not lay down a too 
 strict and iron rule for getting subjects, and locating them, one 
 on this Sunday, and the other on that; I have slowly settled to the 
 idea that, for an outline of our march through the year, nothing 
 is better on the whole, perhaps, than the life of the Lord chrono- 
 logically followed ; as it is followed, indeed, in the Christian Year 
 laid down by those Christian bodies which give attention to such 
 things. At any rate that may do for one outline. The life of the 
 blessed Lord, I say, beginning with the Advent and ending with the 
 Ascension ; and yet not ending there, for his invisible career is 
 a part of his human career as truly as his birth was. The Man 
 Christ Jesus, that veritable man, in his humanity intact and undi- 
 minished, has gone up to the right hand of God, has sent forth 
 thence the Holy Spirit, and now waits till his enemies be made his 
 footstool by that Mighty Spirit! In even just mentioning this out- 
 line for sermonizing, I feel my heart caught in the warmth of it and 
 made glad. 
 
 The first advantage secured by such a course of preaching 
 is, that it sweeps the entire circle of Christian truth, and does 
 not leave the minister and his people exposed to the perils of a 
 partial and unbalanced cultivation. A man who had never exam- 
 ined the subject might say, and would be likely to say, that a 
 following of the life of Jesus in our sermonizing must result in less 
 breadth and less variety than some other plans: the plan of a 
 doctrinal curriculum, for instance. Are there not large parts of 
 Holy Writ that do not get treated by us in our pulpits provided we 
 simply run the round of the Christian Year ; such as the civil legisla- 
 tion of Moses, and many a report of battles, and numerous touches 
 of personal portraiture, and a great many religious hymns in the 
 Psalms and elsewhere which have not the remotest reference to 
 Christ ; and any amount of national history too in the Old Testa- 
 ment? I reply, of course, the Bible in its entirety, and not in 
 selected parts is our text book. We must be careful on that point. 
 The whole educated world has come out of the notion that all parts 
 of the Book are equally profitable to be preached upon, so that 
 a minister must take for his topic Paul sending for his cloak to 
 
YALE LECTURES. 263 
 
 Troas, as often as he takes the sending of the Holy Ghost, and so 
 often as he preaches on the cloak must be just as enthusiastic as 
 though the Holy Ghost were his theme. Nevertheless, the whole 
 Bible, cloak and all, is to be turned in and utilized when we speak ; 
 and if it cannot be utilized on the Christian Year plan, then that 
 plan is conclusively exploded. But consider now the following. 
 
 | A loving student of Christ and his career will find himself 
 carried, by that study, into an amazingly large fraction of this 
 volume :—carried by a movement direct and inevitable. ‘The most 
 unpromising portion in which to find him is the Old Testament, 
 but the moment we accept the Old Testament record as organically 
 one with the new, and admit that the day of the Messiah was 
 preluded and introduced by a gigantic preamble, a long-continued 
 toil of miscellaneous forces which were systematized and made co- 
 efficient by the blessed purpose of God running through the whole 
 thing, and converging the whole to the Advent ; and admit further 
 that the Old Testament is our authentic history of all that ; we have 
 implicitly declared the presence of Jesus in innumerable places in 
 the old record. He was the outcome of the ages and to interpret 
 him we must search those ages. And while we shall find him very 
 obviously manifested in numerous events, personages, institutions, 
 prophecies, and allusions back there, we shall as truly find him in 
 still more places: Psalms, histories, sentences, incidental utterances, 
 and what not, wherein no mortal at the time suspected any other 
 meaning than that meaning constrained by their time and locality. 
 If God chooses to elaborate a terminology full of present signifi- 
 cances and then thousands of years thereafter, in thé providential 
 unfolding of events, makes that old terminology carry vastly 
 expanded significations, which significations it is now plain enough 
 that terminology was designed to carry, if God pleases to take that 
 way of gradualism, and would not have his Old Testament speak 
 forth all its contents till the fullness of time ; who are we that we 
 should undertake to criticize him; and why may we not better 
 thank him that we are privileged to explore a Book so germinant 
 and phenomenal? 
 
 And so the New Testament. If Christ and his life is our 
 appointed circle of topics, to be sure we must resort primarily 
 to the histories of him given by the four Evangelists ; but hardly 
 more to them than to the Epistles, those inspired expositions of the 
 very things we are after concerning the Lord. If I am speaking on 
 
264 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 the birth of Christ or his circumcision,.or his baptism or his temp- 
 tation or his transfiguration, or his death or his resurrection or his 
 ascension, or on any scene in his life or any slightest word that ever 
 fell from his lips, my experience is that the whole volume begins to 
 swarm about me; not every passage of the whole, perhaps, but 
 there is such a swarming that I feel as though every and each were 
 swarming, precisely as the Samaritan woman said, “Come, see a 
 man that told me all that ever I did,” because Jesus had told her so 
 much in the few words he did say, that she was sure of his ability to 
 tell more, and felt that already her entire secret consciousness had 
 been opened out. If you press me hard, and ask me at what point 
 in the Christian Year I am accustomed to bring in Paul’s cloak, 
 I answer, I bring it in when I bring in the man that wore the cloak. 
 And if you ask me where I bring him in, I answer, I can bring him 
 in wherever his life connects with Christ’s life, or even with the 
 Kingdom of Christ. It is not straining matters much if when 
 speaking of Christ, I speak of one of his Apostles, especially such 
 a sizable and interesting Apostle as St. Paul. Moreover, how that 
 little accident of sending for the cloak helps light up the whole 
 early situation, the exact situation wherein both Christ and all his 
 friends found themselves. The truth is, we depend on trivial inci- 
 dents for a large part of our information whereon to build an histori- 
 cal and realistic conception of the day of Jesus and his co-laborers. 
 
 I should say here, that if there are some parts of the Scriptures 
 that cannot be directly connected with a life-long round and round 
 of Christ-sermons, as perhaps there are, those parts can certainly 
 be drawn upon and made of use in the way of illustration and 
 enrichment for the Christ-sermons—and I suppose it was one of the 
 special designs of God in getting the Book written, to have it used 
 in that way. A preacher with eyes on all sides of his mind, may 
 and will use material collected from the whole breadth of created 
 things and human life ; but his pre-eminent storehouse is the Bible. 
 The Bible has more contents than any other book. And it has 
 more of God in it. And it was more intended for moral and relig- 
 ious use therefore-and for homiletical material. 
 
 I said to you at the beginning that in laying down the circuit 
 of the Christian Year as one of the most serviceable of circuits for 
 the preacher to follow, I did not mean to be more than cast-iron on 
 the subject, and I therefore desire here to slip in the suggestion, 
 that if only we traverse that circuit in one thorough-going discourse 
 
YALE LECTURES. 265 
 
 each Sunday, we have fulfilled all righteousness perhaps, and made 
 sure of a roundabout education and indoctrination for our people ; 
 and on the numerous other occasions when we are called to speak, 
 may spread abroad upon such topics as do not come into a follow- 
 ing of the life of Jesus—if any such there be. I doubt whether 
 there are. I wish this body of students would appoint a committee 
 to hunt for some and let me have the list they make out and see 
 what I think of it. If I cannot find a scene in the life of Jesus, or 
 some sentence that he spoke, or something else directly connected 
 with him, that will make a natural text whereon to unfold every 
 object on that list of yours, young Gentlemen, then I will give up 
 the case. But supposing I cannot. Suppose there are numbers 
 and numbers of good, preachable subjects that do not easily get 
 into the cycle of the Christian Year. I should say march through 
 the Christian Year, that for one thing; make sure of that—and 
 then right along parallel to that substantial movement, just march a 
 more miscellaneous and unforeordained movement, skirmish-work, 
 Zouave-fighting, hitting things as they fly: such as the last earth- 
 quake, Paul’s cloak, politics, dress, the theater, the social evil, 
 Ecclesiasticism, the advantages of celibacy on the part of the more 
 poverty-stricken and roaming of the clergy, anything you please ;. 
 only, my Brethren, you will always notice that the Christian Year 
 kind of preachers never want to discourse on equivocal or unper- 
 missible themes. Their constant companionship with the Lord in 
 the round of his life disciplines their taste and sharpens their 
 hunger for themes full of Gospel fatness and gusto, themes that are 
 not scrappy and remote and queer. 
 
 At the same time they will not be narrowed and made monoto- 
 nous by this companionship with the Master, in their prescribed 
 round of discoursings. When Dr. Horace Bushnell had served his 
 people twenty-five years, he preached a sermon to them, afterwards 
 printed, in which he said that some of them had complained that 
 he preached Christ too much and did not range through as large a 
 diversity as a preacher reasonably might. He defended himself a 
 little, but I presume they were right. At least they had an idea 
 which they were feeling after. Never did there live a more versa- 
 tile man than he, in the constitution of his mind ; he was -wonder- 
 ful in that regard ; but for various reasons, the heavy attacks made 
 upon his orthodoxy among the rest, he had labored supremely upon 
 certain aspects of truth and had partially retired other aspects. 
 
 
 
266 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Some subjects he not merely did not discuss, but took no 
 interest in; important subjects, too. Various things that quite 
 fascinated a ritualist, he simply despised as topics for a strong man 
 to consider. The continuing and undiminished manhood of the 
 ascended Lord, he esteemed a small matter, apparently. The vari- 
 ous questions that center in the atonement enthused him mightily 
 and pervaded his sermonizing to any extent for'a long time ; but it 
 would have been better had he widened his sweep by something 
 like this on which I am this day insisting: a selection of his 
 themes of discourse, not by the accident that his theological stand- 
 ing at certain points had been impugned, nor by the accident that 
 he had become a Congregational minister ; nor by that primary and 
 fundamental accident, his being born with an Olympian head and 
 with steam on from the first, so that he could create full-veined 
 subjects for himself, as the profuse prairie creates flowers—in no 
 such ways as these could a man like him, or any other man, in 
 truth, be widened to his utmost and made all-including in respect of 
 topics: but rather by some external, authorized curriculum, put 
 upon him as a bondage at first, if need be. It does not hurt these 
 giants to harness them and make their huge strength move along 
 roads that former generations have laid out; it is interesting to see 
 them canter across the open fields and disport themselves in simple 
 exuberance ; and it makes the rest of us proud that one of us is 
 thus exuberant and gigantic—but when you come to solid use—or 
 to the greatest solid use—why let us have them harnessed ;_har- 
 nessed into some objective round ; the Christian Year, for example, 
 or even into some of the other objective systems which I have 
 named ; the yearly course of doctrinal sermonizing for one. 
 
 I do not mention Bushnell as a pre-eminent sinner in the 
 respect named, neither have I the heart to emphasize against him 
 anyway. He is only one of hundreds of us. I myself am one of 
 this wicked class naturally. Some subjects I like and some I dis- 
 like ; and if I do not keep watch, I preach all the time on the 
 former. And I select Scriptures to read to my people that I like, 
 and do not at first see, perhaps, what some parts of the Bible were 
 written for at all. Of course, my pious intention is to preach on 
 everything that deserves it ; and to do it proportionately ; dwelling 
 on the uplifted Cross more than I do on the Roman soldiers at the 
 foot of it; but I am like the converted Indian who was put to trial 
 before a police court for whipping: his wife. “I forgot,” said the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 267 
 
 poor fellow ; and when 1 as a preacher come to look back over any 
 year of my preaching, or over a stretch of years, I notice that I 
 “forgot” all along and followed my nature too much, rather than 
 my solemn good principles in the matter. 
 
 Many of us are carried away by the special rages of the period 
 in which we live, or of the nation to which we belong, or of our 
 denomination or of the local community where our home is: and 
 we preach more than we ought on those rages: on the rights of 
 man more than on his obligations, (how natural that is in an Ameri- 
 can !), on individualism more than on solidarity, (how natural that 
 for a Congregationalist !), on Church organization, apostolical suc- 
 cession and the force of sacraments, more than on doctrine and 
 life (how natural that for a ritualist!), on the love of God more 
 than on his holy rigor (how natural that in this day!), on sins 
 against the social state, like theft, lying and adultery, more than on 
 the sins that are purely spiritual and an injury against God. 
 
 Now as a corrective of all over-specialization, all disproportion, 
 all narrowness, all provincialism, denominationalism or localism, 
 all private personal impulses, in preaching ; I present the Christian 
 Year and praise it; and if I cannot have that, then I want some 
 similar thing ; some contrivance which represents, not the extem- 
 poraneous wisdom of some single John Smith, however intelligent 
 or inspired, but the aggregate wisdom of all the Smiths ever born, 
 if we can get at it; a wisdom that is the aggregate of something ; 
 of a synod or a general Conference or a Caucus of Presiding 
 Elders—anything to get ahead of Smith. Not that I would be so 
 uncongregational as to want a bondage provided for Smith, but I 
 would like something set up for him to look at and turn over in his 
 mind, and perchance freely choose ; something portentous enough 
 to make it a conceivable thing that he should choose it and go by it, 
 by and by and when he has looked long enough ; if not implicitly 
 then approximately or by fits and starts; so that his listening con- 
 gregation shall notice every now and then that he is in the throes of 
 something foreign to himself—that is, something that he did not 
 altogether originate himself. 
 
 Again, if you as a preacher distribute your emphasis upon a 
 large and various list of subjects, as you will if you follow the plan 
 I have been speaking of, you will save yourself and your people 
 from all unwholesome religious excitements. Yes, and from all 
 
 revivals, some man speaks up and says. Yes sir, that is so; from 
 20 
 
268 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 revivals that depend on an exclusive, prolonged, persistent presen- 
 tation of two or three doctrines. And in my judgment that is not 
 one of the least of the uses of the Christian Year. It does not 
 forestall all fluctuations of feeling. It does not prevent seasons of 
 special feeling, real swells, in fact, as at Advent or Easter-tide 
 or Passion Week or Lent. I do not understand that God wants 
 the fixity of the solid plain in the ongo of the inward life of men, 
 but rather the beautiful mobility of the sea. But the mobile sea 
 needs steadying, somehow, does it not? Mere mobility, mobility 
 unharnessed, mobility uncontrolled by any objectives whatever, that 
 certainly is not best. Standing as I do among a kind of creatures, 
 namely, human creatures, who are three times too dead in spiritual 
 matters, I have never felt called upon to make all the ado I could 
 against what has come to be known as revivalism ; but if anybody 
 asks me my cool opinion on the subject—my opinion on the whole 
 —if he will bear with me, I am willing to say that all the revivalism 
 that is really wholesome in the long pull, and will add up large in 
 the day of Judgment, can be secured and naturally is secured in 
 that annual circuit of preaching which I am trying to glorify this 
 day ; and that one of the reasons why I glorify that scheme is, that 
 it is sure death to certain styles of revivalism—to those styles, I 
 mean, which are begotten of whole winters of direct bombardment 
 on the consciences of men, in the use of a certain few missiles 
 of terror and the like. Perish the thought that these missiles are in 
 any wise unscriptural, but perish the thought also that these volum- 
 inous Scriptures of ours and the truths they contain, enjoy being 
 retired for months at a time, while a limited selection therefrom is 
 made and trundled to the front and opened in a special cannonade. 
 
 Years ago, I was calling on the late Rev. Dr. Jonathan Brace 
 and he, happening to be in a reminiscent mood, said to me: 
 “Thirty-seven years ago this very week, Dr. Hawes took me in his 
 carriage, drove me over from Hartford to Litchfield and preached 
 my ordination and installation sermon. It was in the time of 
 the theological controversy over Dr. Bushnell. On the way I said 
 to Dr. Hawes: ‘Do you know, Doctor, what Dr. Bushnell says 
 about your preaching?’ “Why no.” ‘He says that you have but 
 three topics, Death, Judgment and Eternity.’ Hawes dropped his 
 lines and said solemnly, ‘Could a man have three more important 
 topics, Brother Brace?’ ”’ Those of you who knew those two emi- 
 nent men, and how powerfully they were differentiated from each 
 
YALE LECTURES. 269 
 
 other, will see the points of relish in that anecdote; but I intro- 
 duce it here for the purpose of saying: Three topics are not 
 enough. They may be enough for one day, but they are not enough 
 for three hundred and sixty-five. They are enough to make an ex- 
 citement with, as one hurricane is enough to tumble up all the 
 waters of the globe ; but the waters of the globe do not need to be 
 tumbled up in that way. There are a good many forces where- 
 with to operate upon the waters; forces uneccentric and serene, 
 forces that leave the oceans so that we can navigate them and not 
 be drowned, all of us:—the sweet moral suasion of the moon, 
 and the complex swing of the moving earth. There is no danger 
 of stagnation if the whole roistering brood of hurricanes stay 
 away forever. Let them stay away, I say. Just carefully follow the 
 Lord and have your meditations rise and fall with the fluctuations 
 of his life and teachings, and you will have all the vicissitudes that 
 are good for you. When I come along into the Spring and keep 
 step with the events of Passion Week, I find myself submerged in 
 as much emotionalism as I can comfortably carry. The whole air 
 about me seems to be in a swoon sometimes under the stress and 
 suffusion of the great themes of the season. And I am left in that 
 suffusion just so long as is healthful for me, and then Easter pulls 
 me out of it into another suffusion; and yet the beauty of it is’ 
 that that other is not another, as being contradictory to the first, 
 but another as purple is something other than red, being red plus 
 blue. The red is allsaved and the blue is super-added. Blessed is 
 that scheme of holy culture in which each stage melts into the next, 
 like a tributary into its river, swallowed up but not lost. 
 
 Thus much on the tranquillity breathed into u. hy the Christian 
 Year. Our whole emphasis is not heaped up on three heads; 
 whether Death, Judgment and Eternity, or some other equally 
 solemn three. All the mental over-heat ever heard of was caused 
 by inordinate concentration dn one or a few thoughts; and the 
 only remedy for over-heat is counter-irritants or heat started up at 
 other points. Warm a man up on a whole cycle of themes and he 
 will never run wild on one. Wheel him through the Christian 
 Year and he will be sane and peaceful, though not torpid, the whole 
 year through. And what better can you have than that: peaceful 
 but not torpid ! 
 
 The only other advantage of that scheme of pulpit topics of 
 which I have been speaking, that I will ask you to consider to-day, 
 
270 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 is that it will make your preaching concrete and factual, rather than 
 abstract, philosophical and remote from the thinking of the average 
 listener. I think pretty well of a doctrinal syllabus along which to 
 conduct our people year by year, if we cannot have anything better ; 
 as the preachers of the Reformed Dutch Church are ecclesiastically 
 required to get through the Heidelberg Catechism once in so long. 
 But there is something better. It is one of the perils of that plan, 
 the plan doctrinal, that it tends to take the minister off into intel- 
 lectualizing in philosophical theology ; dropping the personal ele- 
 ment, the Lord Jesus, considerably, and losing thus an immense 
 advantage. My Brethren, most of us who are brainy and investiga- 
 tory, incline to cease from tangibilities and expatiate in the intan- 
 gible. We like to manipulate propositions better than we like to 
 manipulate things. We are afraid of color and the flash of imagery 
 and the beguilements of physical analogy in our diction. If we 
 could only get a terminology as colorless as that of the algebraist, 
 and swing along in his absolute exactitudes, when we speak, we 
 should be happy. But nobody else would be happy, save some 
 tenth man out in the pew, the algebraist himself perhaps, sitting 
 there to see how near we come to a scientific demonstration in 
 what we say. Is there much passion or much that smacks of the 
 ground in mathematic symbols? No, you will say, neither do those 
 cold terms suggest any living person. They not merely suggest no 
 person, but they do not seem to have been devised or invented by 
 any person, human or other. All such flavors as that are purged 
 out somehow. But preachers want to suggest a person, such should 
 be their wish. They want a vocabulary that is full of the taste 
 of the ground, of affairs, of things, of visibilities, of life. We had 
 better have a fairly spectacular vocabulary, than to pale away into 
 x, y, z, and trade in them. Neither do we want the square-cut 
 exactitudes for which those terms stand. Our subjects all widen 
 away into the indefinite and their border-lines are wavering lines— 
 wavering and misty. We are to deal in concretes, to be sure, 
 things that a man can get his grip upon; but large concretes, 
 so large as to be nebulous on their remote circumference. 
 
 Well, how likely is all this to be accomplished on the syllabus 
 principle? An annual course of doctrinalizing? After I had grad- 
 uated from college, and had gone so far into theology as to intend to 
 study it in a few months and was therefore a rather advanced and 
 capable person as compared to the average of any miscellaneous 
 
YALE LECTURES. 271 
 
 congregation, and supposed that I knew a good sermon when I 
 saw it, I chanced to hear a discourse on Election, by one of the 
 ponderous and admirable Princeton Alexanders. It was in a 
 Presbyterian Church in Newark, New Jersey, that I heard it, before 
 the customary congregation of that Church, and on an unspecial 
 Sunday. And it made a dint on me that is a dint on me yet. Not 
 on account of the truth conveyed by it, but rather because of the 
 supreme ability of Dr. Alexander, then manifested, to shy the audi- 
 ence he was addressing and have the subject all to himself. He 
 was clear, O! yes, he was clear. And he was acute. And there 
 was not an ounce of padding in the whole long discourse. And 
 there was not one person of all his hearers who could have begun to 
 make such a solid, killing essay as that. But the language was 
 sternly intellectual and scientific and purged of all warmth; an 
 elaboration from out of the cloister and not from out of any place 
 that the mass of his amazed hearers had ever been in. And 
 the thought was closely consecutive. If you stopped to wink you 
 lost something. Everybody seemed to know as much as that. So 
 nobody did wink; though as I looked about on the faces to see 
 how they were all getting on, I noticed that they seemed to be 
 about where I was; in a dulled-down and humiliated way, as 
 though they wanted to wink a good deal. 
 
 Now no sermon like that was ever preached by a Christian 
 Year man to an ordinary and unselected assembly. His manner of 
 getting his topics has externalized him and dragged him away, dic- 
 tion and all, from scholastic methods of dealing with his congrega- 
 tion. He may be dull enough by force of having been born dull, 
 and limited and sealed up, but so far as his training in topics is 
 concerned, it has tended all to carry him near to the apprehension 
 of the people. Iam not getting this point out as I meant to, but 
 it has some value if only it could be got at. I have great respect 
 for intellectually able preachers, powerful theologians, redoubtable 
 essayists, stalwart Alexanders and all the rest. It would be a 
 pitiable thing if the Christian Church did not produce such; they 
 have their place and function. But preaching is not essaying nor 
 theologizing nor philosophizing, but a dealing with men, women and 
 children, in mass and unassorted, for their salvation, Wherefore, 
 our instrument must be their vernacular for substance, the English 
 language in its most living and picturesque forms; the English 
 language perpetually freshened by the speaker, in that he uses it 
 
RED 4 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 with a thorough-going sense himself of the precise, live contents of 
 its swarming forms, a sense of their radical contents as reaching 
 back to a physical base, a sense of their acquired contents, acquired 
 by ages of use, and a sense of what I will call their homely contents, 
 derived from human life in its homely average. 
 
 And our materials of discourse must be not merely real 
 entities ; simple, abstract, thoughts are that: but entities vigor- 
 ously externalized and made to seem like facts: after the manner 
 of the Bible, which continually clothes the unseen in the drapery of 
 the visible. Hell, for example, is a well-known, deep valley and 
 revolting catch-all, where the fire never goes out. And if Jesus had 
 some spiritual truth to convey, he wrapped it up in a familiar inci- 
 dent or bit of common experience ; or he pointed with his finger to 
 something then and there present. No Alexandrine monograph on 
 election from him ever. Many of his hearers thought he was 
 ridiculously simple, I dare say, or at least did not fathom the 
 profundity of his simpiicities—and many of us, when we were 
 younger, have failed in the same way. But now it is coming to us 
 that there is no teacher like him for massiveness and reach; and 
 that no man, however philosophical, theological, solid and able, 
 need feel himself circumscribed or let down from his intellectual 
 and scholarly dignity, if he formulates the riches of his mind 
 in terms that are concrete and unrarefied earth-growths and growths 
 from daily life. 
 
 Now, my dear young Brethren, I have made a long labor, and 
 whether it is a mouse that you have from it all, judge ye. I am 
 certain though that it is something more than a mouse, provided it 
 serves to wake you to the serviceableness of some sort of plan in 
 your preaching ; that, as distinguished from planless on-goings. I 
 have no undue attachment to the scheme I have been eulogizing ; I 
 hope I have not. I like it pretty well, but you can do a good deal 
 with other schemes. My particular enthusiasm is, I say, that you 
 get some objective order by which to mareh, and be not left a prey 
 to your own spontaneity, or left to skew this way and that by the 
 touch and touch of accident: like a boat adrift on a river, which 
 bumps now one bank and then the other, and gets its devious 
 course in that unbeautiful way. The people in that boat keep 
 moving and see a good deal of landscape first and last; but it 
 must be a deal confusing-to take their landscape thus, at all sorts of 
 obliques ; sometimes head on to it and sometimes backing up. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 273 
 
 When they come to make a map of it, by and by, it will puzzle 
 them, I fancy. Of course, when you set yourself to study plans, 
 you will see that there is a choice between them and some of them 
 you will reject. And when you have selected the best one, as 
 nearly as you can get at it, and are fuirly in the midst thereof, per- 
 haps you will find it useful to season it with touches of admixture 
 from other plans. When you are in the movement of the Christian 
 Year, should you settle on that, you must not fail to let into yourself 
 the Inner Light, the Holy Ghost: partly because, on almost any 
 Sunday of the Christian Year, any one of several subjects may 
 be germane to that day, and the blessed Spirit may assist you to 
 just the one of the several; and secondly, if the particular subject 
 for the day is given you by your chosen curriculum, the Holy 
 Spirit is infinitely able to warm up your subject for you, as you 
 revolve it in your mind ; making it most dear to you and most dear 
 and irresistible among the people. 
 
 The two heaviest objections to all this that I have been saying 
 before you to-day, are that an elaborated order, covering the whole 
 year, is fatal to that revivalism which many believe in and love ; and 
 that an external order, let down heavy on the preacher, is likely to 
 impair his elasticity and make his sermonizing drudge-work too 
 much: a speaking on this or that because the time has come for 
 the same and not because his mind has happened to kindle to it. 
 
 As regards revivalism ; let us be left to just those natural and 
 sweet and fruitful vicissitudes which come of a reverent and tender 
 pause, now on the Advent and now on the next eventuality and the 
 next and the next, in the great history of the Redeemer of the world. 
 As regards the damage to one’s spontaneity by the superimposition 
 of an order, I observe, first :— 
 
 It is found in experience that no such damage is incurred. In 
 that thoroughly detailed system for getting through the year which 
 is presented to us in the liturgies, for example, of the liturgical 
 denominations when any Christian season arrives—as Advent, say— 
 there is provided, among other things, a pertinent selection of 
 Scriptural Lessons to be read and thought about: and what sort of 
 a mind must a preacher have if, with the solar thought of the Incar- 
 nation before him and with the Advent Scriptures, than which 
 
 ‘nothing was ever more lyrical and contagious, pouring themselves 
 into him, he cannot raise a free flow and settle to his theme with 
 delight? A man who, thus stimulated, feels himself bondaged, is 
 
274 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 not fit to be a preacher of the Gospel at all. You need not tie 
 yourself to the particular round of Scripture Lessons provided 
 in the liturgies, but you had better tie yourself to some provided 
 round and not make your own selections always in the interest 
 of spontaneity. An individual selection, extemporized from Sunday 
 to Sunday, is always a partial one. Only a selection deliberately 
 marked out by the Church, or by the general sense of some repre- 
 sentative body, is likely to compass all Holy Writ evenly and so 
 furnish an even culture to all concerned. As a matter of fact, 
 I repeat, a curriculum does not destroy spontaneity. On the other 
 hand, it immensely increases it. Each Sunday, in the annual speci- 
 fied circle of Sundays, presents numerous points of stimulation to 
 the mind and calls the mind out and makes it sing in its theme. I 
 have heard very able ministers of my own denomination say that 
 the most wearisome and distasteful of all their mental work was the 
 work of choosing topics whereon to preach. They were at liberty, 
 ordinarily, to preach on any one of ten thousand ; and that was the 
 trouble. It would be a mercy to them, in the dubiousness of this 
 unbounded range of theirs, to nail them right down, even to Paul’s 
 cloak. That would be a challenge. And instead of consuming 
 their vigor in a vagabond movement through all topics to get the 
 right one, they would instantly set themselves to direct, resolute 
 digging on the cloak; and something would have to come. Con- 
 centration is wholesome. Each summer, when my vacation draws 
 nigh, I am distracted, I notice, by the great numbers of summer 
 resorts to which I may go; but on that particular summer when I 
 am compelled to use my vacation for the production of one to 
 a dozen lectures wherewith to torment you the following winter, I 
 am much less distracted. I select, of necessity, some place in the 
 country on the railway, not far from my study in Hartford, not far 
 from that familiar desk and chair wherein my poor old mind feels 
 most at home. 
 
 Me this unchartered freedom tires 
 
 said William Wordsworth. There is no liberty worth anything 
 which is not a liberty under law. ‘Thy statutes have been my 
 songs,” said the Psalmist. Which goes to show that objective law 
 may be transformed into spontaneity. Statutes into songs! The 
 prescriptions of the Christian Year into a furtherance to the preach- 
 er’s mind. Statutes into songs. I do not know that the Psalmist 
 
YALE LECTURES. 275 
 
 could have bettered that if he had spent years upon it. I do not 
 believe he knew how good it was. In that sentence of his he inad- 
 vertently plumped out the innermost feature of the Christian life ; 
 namely, the law of God as a restraint or bondage, utterly dissolved 
 away in the free flow of a delighted obedience. — 
 
ASSIMILATION OF SERMON 
 MATERIAL. 
 
 Gentlemen, most of you feel your own limitations, I dare say. 
 If you do not, I feel them for you. So do your professors. But I 
 am willing to believe that you feel them yourselves ; your limitations 
 of character and your limitations of intellect. In other words the 
 grace of God has not finished with you yet. Neither have your 
 teachers and the various other forces of tuition. And in your present 
 circumscribed and half-and-half stage of development, you have times 
 of looking forward to the forth-coming days of your service as Chris- 
 tian ministers, and saying, ‘“ who is sufficient for these things, who 
 has character enough, who has brain enough, and who, in fact, has 
 a sufficient body for a really victorious handling of all the great works 
 and tasks that seem to belong to our calling.” 
 
 On the great question of sufficient bodies I will not dwell. My 
 private opinion is that bodies are useful and had better be kept up. 
 Indeed in the last analysis, success in ministerial service is a question 
 of bodies. With no body at all, that is, if a man is a ghost pure 
 and simple, no church wants him. For various reasons they do not. 
 But supposing he has a body; but a very attenuated, undigesting, 
 shattered and inefficient body; a body that has no voice, no push, 
 no courage, no ability to sleep nights and all that : why, that man’s 
 church calls will be few and ought to be. So then, dear Brethren, 
 I should lecture on your bodies, and warn you and exhort you and 
 tell you my experience and point to illustrious examples. But I 
 pass it all, as I shall also the exceeding great question of sufficient 
 character for good service in the ministry. I think character is 
 more possible to be had than intellect. There is less of it in the 
 world, but that is not because it cannot be had. Every man can 
 
YALE LECTURES. 277 
 
 be good ; ever so good ; good enough, as-you may say; so good in 
 fact, that his parishioners will hardly care to have him improved ; 
 but not every man can be very bright and very massive, weighty 
 and awe-inspiring, in his mind. | 
 
 And another thing, your goodness, when you get to be minis- 
 ters, can be used every day among your people and not grow stale ; 
 that is, if you are honest, truthful and pious to-day, and then to- 
 morrow are honest, truthful and pious over again, and so on, putting 
 forth the self-same qualities, honesty, truthfulness and piety the, 
 whole year through, nobody wants you to change, because you have 
 been at that so long and have grown so reiterate in it. No, you 
 are just as relishable the thousandth time that you are honest, truth- 
 ful and pious, or the ten-thousandth, as you were the first time. 
 Whereas, on the contrary, if you promulge the same idea every day 
 in the year, or the sarne set of ideas, you grow tame, and the parish 
 gets tired, and you must say something different; and right there 
 comes the pull on your mind, and you need a good deal of mind, 
 the more the better ; an unlimited mind almost you begin to feel. 
 
 So, although character is indispensable, yet, since by the good 
 grace of God it is so feasible, and when you get it, is not staled by 
 every day wear, so that it is not necessary to start out into something 
 brand-new in order to keep your people interested, I will pass on 
 to consider the much more distressing question of your intellect :— 
 that instrument whereby you satisfy the terrific clamor of your con- 
 gregation for ideas; new ideas; ideas that you never put forth 
 before, exactly or ideas, at any rate, so costumed, decorated and 
 disguised, that your hearer will have a feeling that he has fallen on 
 something original ; the same old Gospel perhaps, but the old Gospel 
 so freshly expressed as not to be a whit threadbare. 
 
 I would not ridicule this craving for freshness, neither would I 
 intimate that the craving cannot be gratified. I think it can. Any 
 old truth, re-lived on the spot by the man who speaks it, seems 
 original always and goes out with authority. Or put it in this way ; 
 whoso utters that which is given him to utter by the Holy Ghost 
 operating in him then and there as he speaks, makes an effect on 
 his listening congregation precisely as real news would, notwith- 
 standing the news he tells is simply the exceedingly old and very oft- 
 told tidings of salvation by Jesus Christ. There is something very 
 dear and encouraging to ministers in that curious fact. 
 
 I will pass, I said, to the question of your intellect and how you 
 
278 , YALE LECTURES. 
 
 shall handle it to make the most of it, in both size and productivity, 
 so that your congregation shall never be worn out under your 
 preaching. 
 
 Two years ago, when I was speaking in this place, I said in a 
 certain lecture: where do our thoughts come from? when a preacher 
 originates his own thoughts, where do they come from; and when 
 he gets them somewhere else, where may that elsewhere be?) And 
 I went on to try to answer these questions, saying for substance, 
 that our thoughts come from our interiors and from the manifold 
 endless exteriors whereby we are surrounded ; not as though the 
 thoughts of interior origin are not made up largely of external 
 material, for they certainly are ; but in those thoughts that are dis- 
 tinctively mind-born and interior mind-born and interior as con- 
 trasted with thoughts sense-born and exterior, the exterior material 
 has been so digested and assimilated and made the man’s own, that 
 he is not in the least conscious of exteriors, but seems to himself to 
 be originating absolutely. So then, although at first it seems super- 
 ficial and inexact to speak of two sources of thought, namely: the 
 mind itself and the world of outside material, nevertheless, so far as 
 our own consciousness reports on the matter, that distinction is exact. 
 We do consciously, that is, taking consciousness as our text, origi- 
 nate many ideas, whereas many other ideas that we have and put 
 forth we consciously do not originate, we being at the time aware 
 that they come from beyond our own minds; they are external 
 things ; we are in debt for them to books, men, nature and God. 
 If I had not already spoken here at good length on ideas subject- 
 ively originated—in the sense now explained—I should want to do 
 it to-day. But I must not repeat, (you may repeat honesty, truth- 
 fulness and piety, but not ideas,) and I have more than enough to 
 do in discoursing on Materials external, and the way we must use 
 them, love them and beware of them. 
 
 Well then, I am going to speak from this time forth until the 
 hour ends, on Mental Assimilation, bearing down all the while on 
 externals, even as in that former lecture I bore down on internals. 
 
 You have noticed, I take it, that some preachers are very sub- 
 jective in their discourses, dealing a great deal with Mental processes, 
 discussing what that Mental movement and state called faith, pre- 
 cisely and consciously is and what repentance is and how it feels and 
 how it gets started in a man, and wherein it is distinguishable from 
 numerous other things that look and feel in us a good deal like it, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 279 
 
 and what “ full assurance of faith’ is, and what remorse is and how 
 conscience in us can be known from other attributes, and how con- 
 science works under either one of a hundred different sets of circum- 
 stances ; and in the complicated mental process of turning to God, 
 what and how many separate elements can be traced by a long- 
 headed, acuminated analysis of the matter. Subjective preaching, 
 I say—mental philosophizing in the pulpit—sharp, detailed, hound- 
 like, endless, able, amazing, philosophizing—you have seen some of 
 it and heard of a great deal more, for it is a kind of utterance that 
 was more prevalent in the old times than now but it still. lives ; in 
 some strength, here and there, and although it is highly respectable 
 in its intellectual aspects and although a certain strong cultus may 
 be built on it, yet on the whole there is a better way for preachers 
 than the subjective way. A better way. 
 
 The subjective method breeds an ela mrectne and anx- 
 ious piety. A man led by his minister to concentrate on his own 
 interiors, must be anxious. What is there there that has any 
 particular cheer in it! At first sight one’s own self is depressing 
 enough to him, but when that first sight is carried on into a minute, 
 indefinite, mental and spiritual self-analysis, the thing gets worse 
 and worse and no good and sweet peace is possible under such 
 a regimen as that. 
 
 Moreover, a preacher very prone to subjectivity, and therefore 
 not cordially prone to externals and intellectual incomes from that 
 quarter, gradually formulates for himself a narrow individuality—of 
 course he does—the only way to expand and multifold one’s self, is 
 to get out of one’s self and take note of other individualities, and 
 hear what they have to say ; giving our own say-so the advantage of 
 rectification by theirs ; but this preacher of whom I am speaking, is 
 averse to all that ; introspection is his forte and delight, and so far 
 as expansion is possible by introspection, he expands, but by that 
 alone, for these subjective persons are not unlikely to be earnest 
 and persevering, and what individuality they have is as strenuous 
 and resolute as you please. But I say again and must insist on it, 
 they are narrow—they are strong theologians as likely as not—they 
 know precisely what they believe and why they believe it, and why 
 you and I ought to believe it, and why we are distinctly less than 
 first-class persons, if we do not so believe ; and they are formidable 
 champions to deal with in a theological wrestling match ; however 
 they are narrow and a considerable part of their strength comes from 
 
280 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 their narrowness, from the concentration of narrowness, from the 
 ignorance of narrowness, just as when you look ata picture through 
 two tubes, so that you can see nothing in the wide creation but the 
 picture, it immensely brightens your sense of the picture. 
 
 And being circumscribed themselves, their preaching tends to 
 circumscribe those who listen to them ; and circumscribed individ- 
 ualities thus get multiplied and theology becomes stationary in those 
 congregations, as theology ought, no doubt, in its gist, substance and 
 core, but as theology ought not as respects the way men grasp, 
 handle, express and apply that substance and core. ‘Think of 
 evolving your theology from your own consciousness and from the 
 materials of your own experience, and making it thus of just your 
 own size and no more; when thousands of first-class men in all 
 ages have been laboring in that field and have reported their labors, 
 and when theology, as it now stands, is the result of a long historic 
 process organically unfolded under the ever-present and orderly- 
 moving influence of the Holy Ghost, more or less! Think of the 
 implied egotism and practical impudence of such a proceeding! It 
 is only implied ordinarily, [am happy to say. The men are not 
 conscious of what they are doing. But if they just would consent 
 to make one trip beyond their private and interior selves, to see the 
 size of the creation, and count up the host of other thinkers abroad 
 upon the face of the Earth and back in Christian history, they 
 would be conscious of their egotism, and of their disrespect to a 
 great company of exceedingly bright and honest souls, 
 
 There are other evils of this thmg which I have found it con- 
 venient to call subjectivity, but I must hasten along with you. 
 
 I have prepared the way now to deal directly with the external 
 materials of thought—the thousand elements that our minds are 
 privileged to take in, grind down, vitally transmute, assimilate and 
 make sermons of. : 
 
 First of all, how are we to get hold of all that external stock 
 and stuff? Not by being intellectual hermits, building our cabins 
 in the little sequestered nook of our own consciousness and having 
 a quiet, happy, self-conceited time all to ourselves. That will not 
 do, as we have just seen. No, we must go forth among men and 
 multiply to the uttermost our points of contact with human life and 
 thought. 
 
 Specifically, we must take advantage of wide conversation on 
 every subject of human interest, not omitting all possible converse - 
 
YALE LECTURES. 281 
 
 with common people, for there is scarcely a man anywhere in these 
 parts, however illiterate and unthoughtful, who is totally devoid of 
 “‘views,”’ (as they are called) and stubborn views at that; views 
 that he will fight and die for, if you would have him ; views that he 
 has assimilated somehow and made to be the pith, push and throb 
 of his personality ; and then underneath his views, lies that great 
 human nature that all men have; a very respectable and even 
 august and pathetic thing ; get yourself into conversable terms with 
 that, O preacher ; listen to what he has to say ; try your theology on 
 it, and see that nature squirm as likely as not and express itself and 
 fly at you ; and thus illuminate both the excellencies and the defects 
 of your theology, more than a course of lectures could, perchance. 
 And while you converse with all sorts of persons, do it genially, 
 receptively ; not as perpetually shocked by many things that you 
 hear ; nonsensical things, infidel things, malignant things, shocking 
 things—supposing they are shocking, you are around after ideas, not 
 to be horrified and paralyzed ; this is God’s world after all and truth 
 is God’s truth, and He has everything firmly in hand, and you are 
 permitted to share His tranquillity in the midst of errors and terrors 
 and about all that is believed, said and done, here and everywhere. 
 Move about. Get around. Travel your parish.. Do not be one of 
 those much-cursed and much-despised “literary fellows,’’ whereof 
 we have heard in these times from the many lips of the Philistines ; 
 recluse thinkers, unpractical men, do not be of that sort. Meet 
 everybody whom you can; and when you meet him assimilate him 
 and make sermons of him—as I heard Mr. Beecher say at a dinner 
 of mutton, “the next time that sheep bleats, it will be in a pulpit.” 
 
 Again, I insist that you attend the regular and irregular and 
 never-ending meetings of the Clergy and of the Churches; the 
 Associations, Conferences, Synods, Conventions, Congresses, Clubs 
 and all the gregarious manifestations of religious, ecclesiastical and 
 theological men and women. I say attend all, that is, attend habit- 
 ually and numerously. Attend the stated and organic convocations 
 of the Christian body to which you belong, always—make that your 
 rule—and then, as to the assemblies of Sister bodies, attend often 
 enough at least to show that you are a light-seeking and promis- 
 cuous person. The American Tract Society has always circulated 
 tracts against what it calls ‘‘ promiscuous dancing,” but never a tract 
 against promiscuous Christian fellowship and comparison of views. 
 Your brethren of other communions can teach you many things. 
 
282 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 So can the elect and expert, assembled brethren of your own Com- 
 munion; the ministers gathered in council to anatomize some 
 young pulpit candidate ; the Church Congress, where the wolf is 
 very particular not to lie down with the kid, but to stand up and 
 debate with the same and keep on loving him all the while—the 
 district meeting for spiritual commingling and for the discussion of 
 practical methods—my experience of the modifying power of all 
 these things on one’s thinking, to say nothing of their several other 
 forms of power and of the love-feast aspect of them, leads me to 
 speak very favorably of them to you who are on your way to the 
 time when you will be preachers, and when, therefore, all grists 
 that can be induced to come to your mill will be valuable to you. 
 I even like to see Christian ministers dropping in to “ Ninteenth 
 Century Clubs,” as Dr. McCosh and others did the other day in 
 New York. There the steadfast old gentleman sat to hear what 
 Infidelity had to say for itself, and decide within his own mind anew, 
 whether or not to give Christianity up. Being a Scotchman and a 
 doughty one, he did not give it up, and went away from the discus- 
 sion still a Christian ; but not the same Christian that he was when 
 he went in. . He had more light; more light on the impregnable 
 solidity of the Christian system ; more notion how to put truth to 
 the minds of men in these days; more sense of the way Calvinism 
 is unrelishable to the natural man; more per-fervid determination 
 to cry aloud and spare not on the eternal truths. 
 
 Again, you will find much in books to put into your hopper as 
 sermon-makers. ‘The first of books is the Bible. More grists are 
 for you there than in any other one place—or any ten places. Ido 
 not say that because it is the proper thing and necessary to make 
 this lecture of mine acceptable at this particular point, but because 
 I have myself discovered it tobe so. I shall be referring to the 
 Bible again in a few moments and therefore shall not say about it 
 now so much as I might. But note this one thing: that if you 
 have a habit of going to this Book to see what it teaches, rather than 
 to see how copiously it supports and can be made to support your 
 own theological and other prepossessions, preconceptions, prejudg- 
 ments, then continually you will find yourself inclined to read 
 numerous human books that try to expound the Bible and that take 
 up single Bible themes and expand them into whole volumes ;— 
 and even those Books that do not seem to you scripturally founded, 
 you will look into. In short, you will be a multifarious reader and 
 
YALE LECTURES. 283 
 
 your sermon-stuff will come from God’s enemies, not as frequently 
 as from God’s friends may be, but almost so. 
 
 I do not suppose it is our bounden duty always, when we 
 approach the Bible, to unload all our life-long precious preposses- 
 sions and read as though no point of truth had ever been settled 
 and as though it were impossible to conceive what the Book, which 
 we are now reading, is likely to say to us on this or that or the other 
 point. We go to the Bible for a good many purposes and at any 
 given time we approach it in a state of feeling accordant with the 
 specific purpose that we then happen to have in mind; but I claim 
 that one state of mind in which we ought to approach the Bible, is 
 absolute teachableness and hunger for light. Absolute teachableness 
 implies that we have discharged from our mind all bias, all prejudg- 
 ment, all previous knowledge, as the basis of opinion. You are not 
 in a state of perfect docility if you are full of opinions already, no 
 matter how rational and biblical those opinions may be. Well, per- 
 fect docility in the presence of this teaching Bible makes you want 
 to know exactly what the Bible teaches, if you go to it with a con- 
 firmed conscious prepossession that it teaches this and that, you are 
 not in a state of inquiry as to what it teaches ; butif you are docile, 
 you are in such a state, and if so, then it is inevitable that you take 
 counsel of your fellow men, the theologians and others, who have 
 studied the Bible and have written out in books what they have 
 found there. That is my idea. And I should advise a wide reading 
 habit. Read the writers with whom you agree, if you want to, but 
 just as much, perhaps, read those who you think have gone off from 
 exact foundations, if only they are honest and really have ideas. 
 They are as able as anybody to stock your mind and make you a 
 productive sermonizer. ; 
 
 The external materials of thought are inexhaustible and preach- 
 ers are entitled to them all. History furnishes material ; philosophy 
 furnishes some ; science some ; poetry some ; all the multiplying olo- 
 gies some ; civil affairs contribute ; everything contributes ; even the 
 humble minutiz of daily life are very filling to the right kind of a 
 mind and may be worked over into sermon form—the thinker is a 
 universal devourer, or may be, not for purposes of gluttony, but for 
 purposes of self-nutrition, and ultimately for the nutrition of others. 
 
 But let me come a little nearer now to this subject of nutrition 
 —mental nutrition—the thing that the fecundity of preachers 
 
 depends on so much. 
 21 
 
284 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 These externals whereon I have been remarking, these mate- 
 rials for the omnivorous mind you may possess yourself of in two 
 ways—two and no more, so far as I now see—you may have them 
 memoritively, or you may have them assimilatively ; in addition to 
 that, you may have them in both ways at once. Quite as often as 
 any way, however, the strongly memoriter men are not very assimi- 
 lative, and on the other hand you may see prodigious assimilators, 
 men chock-full of the all-about plunderings they have made, who, 
 nevertheless, cannot remember much of anything, especially in 
 detail. If they had no way of accumulation but the memoriter way, 
 their emptiness would be pitiful and practically embarrassing both 
 to them and to us. 
 
 But they have another way. A man has not lost his food 
 because it has disappeared from his stomach; neither has he lost 
 the mental food which he has gathered in, because it has disappeared 
 from his memory. The food disappeared from the stomach because 
 it would go more fully and really into the man’s possession, being 
 vitally distributed to the different parts of his system, and in the 
 distribution being made over from merely material and dead atoms, 
 into vital atoms ; atoms not unworthy of a resurrection to eternal 
 vitality, when the Lord shall come. The difference between memo- 
 rized mental material and assimilated mental material, begins now 
 to come out. 
 
 The disadvantages of the memorized sort are more than you 
 would think at first. | 
 
 Memoriter possessions you may,lose. Most of them you must 
 lose. And you may lose all of them some day. To recover them | 
 again, possibly, in the resurrection state, but for the present we are 
 incessantly dropping our memorized accumulations. The Rev. Sam 
 Jones in one of his peculiar sermons recently, spoke of a feeble 
 little Mississippi steamboat so weak in her steam appliances that 
 whenever she whistled it stopped her engine; and similarly, the 
 limited memory’ of man is not strong enough to take in a new 
 thought without letting out some old one, once laboriously taken in. 
 A most miserable and ridiculous faculty in that one aspect of it. 
 How fast does a man get rich and powerful in his mind by that pro- 
 cess of taking and dropping, like the mill-mind hopper? How 
 much does he grow? How long would it take to make an able- 
 bodied thinker of him, a man of real weight and respectability; a 
 powerful preacher, for example, provided this curious faculty of his, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 285 
 
 his memory, threw overboard every day exactly so much of her 
 cargo as would balance what she that day took in. Providentially 
 the memory does not do that exactly, but on the contrary, retains 
 more or less of the old when new materials are shipped—after all 
 though, this being unable to whistle without stopping your engine, 
 this constant losing from recollection more or less, while you are at 
 work to acquire, makes one ask as I did, how long it would take to 
 make a person full-grown and sufficient, if his mental possessions 
 were all of that fugitive memoriter sort. And how many men, and 
 even ministers we have seen who are scarcely larger at fifty, in the 
 great particulars of intellectual manhood, than they were when they 
 left the theological seminary ; because. they have, for the most part, 
 led a memoriter life. They have read enough and been told enough 
 to amount to something, but as the hopper grows no richer for the 
 grist that is in it, and therefore after ten thousand bushels have been 
 thrown in has not advanced in the least beyond its original hopper 
 state, and would not have advanced if the whole ten thousand bush- 
 els had stayed in it forever; so the memorizing men, however 
 repeatedly they have taken in the grists of the mind, and even if 
 they are endowed with those phenomenal memories that hold on to’ 
 grists like a resurrection memory, do not grow very perceptively 
 greater, do not weigh in a conflict, do not preach ponderously, do 
 not get home on anybody with any special efficacy—with any efficacy, 
 I mean, corresponding to their years and their privileges and their 
 unlimited consumption of excellent outward material. Sir William 
 Hamilton in his lectures on Metaphysics, while discussing the mem- 
 ory and telling what it has been able sometimes to do, mentions 
 a young Italian who could have thirty-six thousand words read to 
 him hap-hazard out of a dictionary, just once, and then could start 
 off and repeat the thirty-six thousand in the precise order in which 
 he heard them, and could turn the list end for end and repeat it 
 backward ; and could recite the list skipping every other word and 
 could do all these things after a year or two had passed away; and 
 I do not now remember what else he could do—and do not want to 
 remember—the thing is frightful enough already. But did you ever 
 hear of that man among the really great men of history? Did those 
 thirty-six thousand words prove to be of the nature of an increase to 
 that miserable young fellow in any respect? Sir Isaac Newton and 
 Lord Bacon, Shakespeare and Milton, Homer and Plato, Daniel 
 Webster, William Gladstone and President Porter, could not all put 
 
286 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 together recollect a thousand words; so the Italian was at least 
 thirty-six times the man that they would be if all rolled into one 
 corporeal unit, or would have been they twenty-five times over, 
 provided that the gigantic accumulator in his constitution had been 
 able to assimilate the materials of all sorts which it was able to take 
 in. But, so far as heard from, it was more retentive than assimila- 
 tive ; and the Italian stands forever a solemn sermon to the world 
 on the comparative uselessness of unassimilated possessions. There 
 he is, a plethoric nobody and a warning. 
 
 That distinguished Englishman, William Carpenter, I recollect, 
 in his work on Mental physiology, also gives some striking illustra- 
 tions of the insufficiency of mere memorizing to increase a man’s 
 size, weight or quality ; or more particularly, he enforces by numbers 
 of anecdotes the idea that strictly memoriter acquisitions, or things 
 gained by “cramming,” as a collegian would say, do not stay by one 
 very long. In they come and out they go and the man is a simple 
 sluiceway, except that of course some small amount of material 
 sticks to the sides of the sluice and stays—to no good purpose 
 however, as it is not taken into the man’s circulation, but only sticks. 
 
 Now, Brethren, I have brought you to a day of judgment and 
 I want you to decide whether you will be memorizers or assimi- 
 lators. If you are good memorizers, your people, as you preach and 
 talk to them, will get a good deal from you no doubt. Perhaps you 
 can stand up before them and run off thirty-six thousand words as 
 straight as a string. But I want to mention to you some of the 
 drawbacks in that kind of preaching, I have more than hinted 
 some of them already, but the subject is not used up. 
 
 First, if you get your homiletical materials by cramming, using 
 a great deal of memory and not much of anything else, your personal 
 increase will be likely to be small—I have said that once and nowI 
 Say it again, your personal increase will be small. Itis a pity to 
 spend several days making a sermon, and then to take aim and fire 
 it, while you remain as empty as a fired gun, when you might fire 
 your whole charge and yet retain the whole charge for your private 
 use ever after; retain it as completely as though you had not fired 
 atall. If only your ammunition were assimilated ammunition, firing 
 would not decrease it, any more than pumping exhausts a living 
 spring. Pump away, the spring knows where to get more. Preach 
 away too, you are just asrich. Is not that worth knowing, for a 
 man who may want to preach forty years in the same pulpit. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 287 
 
 Secondly, preaching in the use of memoriter materials does not 
 bring much gusto to the preacher himself. What is the gusto of a 
 sluiceway as compared, for instance, to the gusto of a growing plant? 
 Or make this comparison. A plant stands in the ground and 
 takes up the mold and rejects the dead grit, and takes the rain and 
 the dew and the air and the sun, and secretly makes them all over 
 into just what it wants—namely, into life and living forms, with a 
 murmur of inward joy the while, that anybody can hear and share 
 who has the ears for it ; and then right along side of the plant, stands 
 a stake driven down for some purpose; and what does the stake 
 do? Does it sing at its work? No, it is doing no work. It has 
 nothing to sing about. It just stands there a mere stick ; good to 
 hitch too perhaps—a sound and safe stick, and therefore respectable 
 —but a stick. Live things are liable to eccentricities in their grow- 
 ing and forth-pushing ; sticks are not ; but which of the two is the 
 happier, in all likelihood, the live things or the sticks? So the 
 preachers. He who speaks from out of the vital stores of his mind 
 and nature, has his own private glow and gladness always; enough 
 to pay him well for his work, salary or no salary. 
 
 Thirdly, since memoriter material lumbering a minister’s mind 
 and preached at stated times does not make much heat and vital 
 joy in him, it does not over-much do it for his hearers. What is 
 preached out of the memory, is apt to be received only into the 
 memory. How can an unvital man vitalize other men? The idea 
 is absurd. He may instruct them. He may drill them. He may 
 exercise their patience. But as respects vitalization he is a failure. 
 And after all, my brethren, vitalization is the greatest work of 
 preachers. I had rather be alive with little information, than dead 
 with tons of it. JI had rather hear a preacher of limited contents, 
 so that his contents have been turned into life and personal force, 
 than to hear a man whose contents run up to thirty-six thousand, 
 but are in him simply as stored in a warehouse. It is sometimes 
 debated whether preaching will not die out before long, because 
 books and periodicals are so multiplied. When you can get as good 
 a sermon as was ever written, in printed form, for five cents, why go 
 to the church, spend a hundred dollars a year for a seat and consume 
 an hour each Sunday, to hear the local minister, a limited man and 
 not a natural orator, preach a much poorer sermon? How are you 
 going to answer that? By saying that the risen Jesus formally 
 appointed preaching. But he appointed it for some substantial 
 
288 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 reason ; and what is that reason? There are numbers of answers 
 to that ; but the one that I want to bring out at present, is this : that 
 while the contents of a book, or that five cent sermon, coolly read 
 in the quiet of one’s home, may be powerful and useful, the self-same 
 contents, or even much lesser contents, may be still more stimula- 
 tive and useful, if taken into a vital mind and there transmuted in 
 the mysterious processes of life into personal substance and fervor, 
 and then preached. I think we preachers will have to surrender to 
 books and periodicals, if we intend to go by memory and mechan- 
 ical public rehearsals of what we have read. Of course the Holy 
 Spirit could use any sort of a preacher to secure effects ; but accord- 
 ing to all observation thus far, he will not. The Holy Spirit is a 
 reasonable Spirit. It respects certain well-known laws; and if it 
 uses a certain man or preacher, it is able to explain why it uses him. 
 
 Well, dear brethren and gentlemen, I must have some words 
 with you now on a matter that, I presume, you have been wondering 
 I did not come to before ; on the question, namely ; how this famous 
 business of assimilation is to be accomplished. Is there any recipe 
 for it that a reasonable man and even a young man can compre- 
 hend and put to practicaluse. Are not assimilators born, not made ; 
 or if they are not made, can a person make himself to be an assimi- 
 lator, otherwise than by many years of effort, experimentation, fum- 
 bling and mistakes? If it takes nearly the whole life-time of a 
 minister to fashion himself into this so desirable thing, had he not 
 better give up before he begins and lay out what strength is natural 
 to him in some other direction. , 
 
 I propose to answer that. It does not take long for our bodies 
 to begin to assimilate. It is a success from the start. And things 
 vegetable make a success of it. A live slip set into the ground is 
 as cunning in the matter as is an old wise tree. Assimilation is 
 deeply mysterious, but it is feasible ; and a man does not need to 
 be old, nor to be a philosopher to do it. So much encouragement 
 as that we have, on the very face of the subject. Mr. Drummond 
 has written an ingenious book on ‘ Natural Laws in the Spiritual 
 World,” and I fancy that if our bodies can assimilate and do it 
 instinctively and commence so soon as they are born, then our minds 
 —and all minds—can do it; and can begin pretty early, and that 
 they will do a large part of their assimilation nSunchia yes if we give 
 them a good chance. 
 
 I do not claim that a man can sit himself down and say to his 
 
YALE LECTURES. 289 
 
 mind—“ go to now, do you just assimilate”.—and then have that 
 mind march right off and do his bidding. No, he must get at it in 
 ways different from that. 
 
 I will not spend any time on it, but Iam compelled to say that 
 highly assimilative minds, as a general rule, are not found in unas- 
 similative bodies. It is a mortifying fact, but a literal, that your 
 physical nutritive processes are the foundation of your mental nutri- 
 tive. An imperfectly nourished brain does not receive impressions 
 absorptively. A brain not supported by a rousing stomach, doth. 
 not drink up all kinds of mental aliment, like a sponge. Make a 
 note of that and act accordingly. Even the memory fails if physi- 
 cal nutrition fails. I have had some experience of that myself, at 
 times. 
 
 But let us lift out of physicals and note the following things. I 
 hardly know where to strike in, but perhaps a thing as fundamental 
 as any to be said, is, that time is an indispensable element in assim- 
 ilation. Time! The one vice of “cramming,”—the reason that 
 cramming never made a scholar—is that the deposits made in the 
 mind are made to be used right off, used and discharged. A vice 
 of some preachers is, that they cram for the Sunday immediately 
 before them, amassing great store of material, but not giving their 
 minds the time necessary to grind, vitalize and appropriate it. The 
 question of time in physical assimilation was looked into long ago. 
 A good many years back, a certain Alexis St. Martin, (if that was 
 his name,) had the covering of his stomach shot away and there was 
 a life-long healed opening there, so that the doctors for the first time 
 in the history of the world could leisurely enter a live man with their 
 interesting experiments. And they wentin. They dropped in all 
 kinds of food at the end of strings and then through the opening 
 they watched how matters went on ; how long it took to get diges- 
 tion along to this, that and the other stage ; how much longer it 
 took some foods to get on than it did others and how some sub- 
 stances never got on. It was a wonderfully edifying opportunity. 
 But whatever they dropped in, took time, they found, and could not 
 be much hurried. They could cram the man and then beg him to 
 get the cram worked over by the next Sunday, but the man could 
 not. Nature was too strong for him. Nature knew that she was 
 entitled to just so much time, carefully measured out, and she took 
 it, Sunday or no Sunday, and would make no haste. 
 
 Well, minds know the same thing. If you read largely for an 
 
290 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 immediate purpose—your next sermon for example—your intellect, 
 (or to speak more profoundly, your nature,) has no opportunity to 
 do that brooding which it dearly enjoys, that it surely will do when 
 permitted ; and that it must do if it is going to make itself fat out 
 of that reading. And just here I mention it as a curious fact, that 
 this brooding business done by your mind, when it gets a chance, 
 is not a volitional effort, as a rule; you do not do the brooding, 
 your mind does it; you go off about your business, perhaps, you 
 give scarcely a thought to that inwardly deposited material, you are 
 too much occupied ; but all the while your mind is manipulating 
 that mass, that intellectual stock, brooding it, fructifying it, coaxing 
 it to be vital, sucking it up into its own circulation by a thousand 
 capillaries, raising it from the memorized matter to matter assimi- 
 lated and organized ; a very amazing operation ; amazing and inscru- 
 table. I like to dwell on it ; itis so subtle, so effectual and so useful. 
 I recollect telling you here once, in some connection which I have 
 now forgotten, that many times when I have been shut up to just 
 Saturday morning for the writing of my Sunday’s sermon I have 
 made special effort to select my topic for that sermon, Friday eve- 
 ning—sometimes on my bed in the few moments before I went to 
 sleep—because I knew by long experience that if the topic was 
 only lodged in me, my mind during all my hours of unconscious- 
 ness, would be turning it over and in the morning when I woke I 
 should certainly find my sermon well on its way. How often that 
 has happened to me. 
 
 But, to come back to my thought. Assimilation requires time. — 
 Therefore, you must read a great deal and take in materials also 
 from other sources than books, (and the sources are numerous) ; 
 you must gather in much, not in view of a near day when you will 
 use those accumulations, but in view of the welfare of your mind 
 for all time; and you should even ingather often for no purpose 
 whatever, but only for enjoyment at the moment. You may read 
 much poetry in that way ; and there are kinds of poetry that do not 
 give you anything, unless they are read in that way. Those kinds 
 were produced in the meditative and leisurely mental moods of the 
 author ; and they speak only to corresponding moods in the reader. 
 
 Or take that bewitching American man, John Burroughs ; when 
 he goes abroad upon the face of Nature, his travel does not sim- 
 mer down to the strenuous and fierce questions, which is the 
 shortest road between two given points; and which is the swiftest 
 
YALE LECTURES. 291 
 
 conveyance from place to place, or how soon can I pick up the stuff 
 for an essay. Notso. He idles along, with hardly any conscious 
 intention ; knowing that any spot in the whole open world where 
 he may happen to find himself at any given moment, is inexhaus- 
 tively rich in almost every element that can nourish and fascinate 
 the mind of man. Therefore his contact with Nature is eminently 
 rewarding. She saturates him. He gives her time to saturate him. 
 He sits down in her bounties and beauties chin-deep and soaks. 
 He lets time-measures go. He knows nothing but Now. _ Practi- 
 cally he is in Eternity. At any rate, he has passed beyond dates 
 and periods, and engagements and beginnings and endings and 
 responsibilities and the importance of making haste to get his mind 
 where it can repeat thirty-six thousand words ; and there is nothing 
 left of the universe but first, Burroughs ; second, Now and third, the 
 flower at his feet, the insect humming in his ear, the soft wind on 
 his cheek, the grass, the talk of some near bird; the dear natural 
 things. 
 
 Now it is wholesome to read such books as his. They are the 
 outcome of a peculiarly assimilative mind. Theyare leisurely and 
 they require leisureliness. No matter about next Sunday. No 
 matter whether his book will work into sermons or not. It infallibly 
 will, but if you read it as intending that it shall, you have fallen 
 totally out of relations to that book and Burroughs can do little for 
 you. What you want is to cease from intentions, especially from 
 immediate intentions, and thus secure leisureliness and absorption. 
 
 It is implied in this absorptive or assimilative reading, that your 
 mind at the time is in a state of more or less energy. Absolute 
 torpidity and snoring over a book ; suspends all capillary action of 
 the mind, or at least retards it, and it is as though you were not 
 reading. However, it is not necessary in the particular kind of 
 reading that I am now trying to describe, that you be in any formal 
 effort over it. No; please loaf through the book. The mind that 
 wrote it loafed; now do you loaf. Only please keep awake while 
 you loaf. 
 
 But there is a little different kind of reading, of which I wish to 
 speak. It is assimilative reading, too; and assimilative partly 
 because it lets in the element of time. In the reading last men- 
 tioned, you are receptive, in the main, but in this kind you are more 
 affirmative. You actively inquire. You take time to doit. You 
 say, is this author’s position sound? Is he exactly fair towards 
 
292 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 opponents? Is he exact in-his facts? How do his notions har- 
 monize with the great immutable points of religion? There are fifty 
 questions you can ask—and if you ask them it will slow your move- 
 ment and make you ruminative; and possibly some single state- 
 ment of your author will lead you into a whole day’s rumination. 
 You are not consciously amassing stock for sermons. You are not 
 cramming to meet some engagement. You are simply not letting 
 that man sluiceway through you his ideas and propositions, and 
 leave nothing behind for your enrichment. However, you are not 
 specifically resolved to assimilate. The word assimilation does not 
 enter your head. All the assimilation you accomplish is incidental 
 and unwitting. All that you know yourself to -be doing is, drifting 
 along those pages considerately ; sifting, questioning, judging. But 
 sifting, questioning and judging, carry assimilation in them. They 
 give the lengthened and drawn out time requisite for assimilation. 
 The mind can not assimilate by a simple touch-and-go contact with 
 anything. Newspaper reading is the greatest touch-and-go move- 
 ment in these days. And it breeds a touch-and-go habit, which is 
 apt to be carried into all other reading. It may almost be doubted 
 whether the exceedingly increased reading-habit of the public, in 
 these latter times, has made the intellectual fatness and personal 
 weight of each reader more than the fatness and weight of his less 
 bookish grandfather. It seems like another aggravated case of 
 sluiceway. I often think of it when I read the statistics of books 
 drawn from circulating libraries and find that seventy-five per cent 
 and over of the drawings are novels; and also, when I recollect 
 various young persons of my acquaintance who, each Saturday, take ~ 
 from the public library, one, two and three books, to read over Sun- 
 day. Ifaperson does that last, you may know two things ; first that 
 his books are slosh; and secondly, that if they are accidentally not 
 slosh on any given Sunday, he will make slosh of them, so far as his 
 own mental increase is concerned, by the unruminative way in 
 which he reads them, coursing through on a run, so as to be sure to 
 be ready for two or three more books by the next Sunday surely. 
 
 I say then, in order to assimilation by reading in order that 
 you may be more plump, full of color and puissant when you end a 
 book than when you began it, you must either read it in the 
 leisureliness and tranquillity of simple enjoyment—as I explained a 
 little back—or in the determined, robust use of your several faculties — 
 of analysis, comparison, reflection and judgment; all this being 
 
YALE LECTURES. 293 
 
 carefully unpractical to this extent and in this sense; that you are 
 not consciously getting ready for anything—as next Sunday’s sermon, 
 for example—but are doing the work for its own dear sake. The 
 moment you let next Sunday into the business, that particular, low- 
 class performance known as “cramming” is apt to begin; that 
 operation which is infested by these two vices ; that it is too pre- 
 dominantly memoriter, and that the necessary time-element is 
 eliminated. 
 
 - You will understand, brethren, that I dwell on books simply as 
 one of the external sources of intellectual supply. There are num- 
 bers of others, but the principles that should govern us in availing 
 ourselves of them, are the same as those just mentioned, with regard 
 to remunerative contact with books. We must give our minds time. 
 We must discharge ourselves from immediate intentions a good 
 deal. We must resolutely inquire, sift, judge and slowly chew our 
 cuds. To be sure, our people are waiting for our last cud, so that 
 we are tempted to feel that we cannot chew it, but must lump it 
 right out on to them and then run for another ; still a preacher’s 
 salvation as a man good for fifty years in the same pulpit, depends 
 on his putting himself under a rather iron rule, that his very last 
 cuds positively shall not be used, but only those that having been a 
 good while in his system, are no longer cuds at all, but fat, muscle, 
 bone, marrow, pluck and fire. That is what cuds are for. A sermon 
 of cuds is profoundly inadmissable. A sermon of materials that used 
 to be cuds, is all right. More than once in the course of my life, I 
 have had young ministers, yet in the first years of their service, ask 
 me whether they should sermonize from the level of their general 
 information and power, or should get largely above themselves each 
 Sunday, by force of a specific exaggerated preparation for that Sun- 
 day ; and always, by God’s help, I have had strength to say, just 
 what I have said to you, to wit:—no cramming—as a rule, no 
 cramming—you can prepare enough without slipping into that vice 
 which we so call. 
 
 There are several qualifying remarks which I would like to 
 introduce here, but I must take a final movement now to observe 
 that some materials are more assimilable than others. The plant 
 rejects grit and takes up mold. Animal digestion also is very par- 
 ticular about what it undertakes to dissolve and put to vital use. 
 And the mind is full of a similar fastidiousness, or spirit of discrimi- 
 nation. ‘The thirty-six thousand words of that young man, or a table 
 
294 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 of logarithms, or the thin and pompous little homily of the Rev. Mr. 
 Chadband, when he gets on to his saintly and feeble legs, are not so 
 nourishing as a great poem, or a passage out of human life, or a judi- 
 cious selection from Holy Writ. And when I commenced this lec- 
 ture I meant to point out what it is precisely that makes one food 
 assimilable by the mind and another not—but no matter; we all 
 know an assimilable food when we begin to chew on it—if it is 
 gravel we find it out and if it is real meat we find that out. I would 
 not slander even gravel. It may be good for exercise and for 
 mental discipline in mathematics. Moreover, men of phenomenal 
 digestion can eat it. Hens eat gravel; and must have it I am told, 
 if they are to keep up their usefulness. Speaking of those thirty-six 
 thousand words, I suppose Professor Whitney would not ask anything 
 better that to be turned loose among them to spend his eternity. 
 But most of us are like the Italian, to whom they were gravel. Of 
 course, to some minds, pretty much everything is gravel; but the 
 general run of us have our good foods, which we know as the ox 
 knows his master’s crib. Good foods—good foods! Very good ! 
 
 But perhaps the word most worth saying here and at last, is, 
 that the best food in the world for assimilative purposes is the Bible, 
 Put that in your pocket to make an essay on—the Bible as a food 
 —not-a guide, not a treasury of important information, not an arsenal 
 for fighting men to draw on; but a food to make men thick-set, 
 strong, healthy, sizable and handsome. Some eminent ministers 
 have been described as, “ Men of one book.” Well, supposing their 
 one book had been the New York Sunday Tribune, or Tupper’s 
 poems, (good as they be), or Edwards on the Will, (powerful as it _ 
 is), or the Algebra of Professor Loomis; or any one of the now 
 numerous solid books put forth by the fertile Faculty of this great 
 University. Would those eminent ministers who spent their lives 
 in the Bible and felt their enthusiasm grow to the very last and 
 came to be admired for their stature, sap, leafage and heaven-like 
 bountifulness, have achieved all that on any conceivable book save 
 The Book—do you think—even although multitudes of men’s books 
 are books Bible-born? Now why is this? In that essay that you 
 write, just dig that out. 
 
 It is thought by some that if they can explode Christianity, 
 they will have exploded the Book that enshrines it and reduced it 
 to the level of other interesting old volumes. On that I should say, 
 they surely will have exploded the main strength of the Book ; but 
 
YALE LECTURES. 295 
 
 I fancy it would survive and forever transcend all other productions 
 on account of the immense human elements that are packed into 
 it, to say naught of anything else. The elements of human life as 
 it is—the universal human elements—the elements fitted to carry it 
 home to the business and bosoms of the eatire human family, not- 
 withstanding that family are dispersed abroad in dissimilar tribes, 
 nations, races and individuals. I wrote a sermon the other day on 
 Rebecca and Isaac, confining myself to the simple old story of how 
 Isaac got Rebecca—and I could hardly live through it, the whole 
 thing was so fresh, dewy, self-evident and sufficing ; so heart-to-heart 
 with all hearts that know what a heart is. And all through the Bible 
 you find quantities and quantities of the same sort of thing—that 
 something or other which makes the Book the spokesman of the 
 human family ; the interpreter of the soul of man, man’s congenial 
 other self, the Book that finds him, warms him, strengthens him, 
 goes into his circulation and makes his blood red, virile and copious. 
 I feel often that I would go on taking texts from the Bible, carrying 
 the Bible around in my pocket, putting it in my trunk when I travel, 
 handing it to the bride for a present, reciting it to the sick, reading 
 it at the burial and getting its sentences immortal sculptured over 
 the dead, even if Infidelity succeeded in large measure in reducing 
 its supernatural contents. Anyway and always, it is the best thing 
 we have ; the best Book to feed on—the only Book that a man can 
 exclusively live on and yet be broad, deep, high, manifold and very 
 great. 
 
VERACITY IN MINISTERS. 
 
 The subject that I desire to unfold before you to-day is the 
 rather important one of Veracity in Ministers. 
 
 I wondered at first whether I would not say inveracity, but 
 after a minute, I saw—or thought I saw—that you might see or 
 might think you saw a sly flicker of suggestion in that to the effect 
 that ministers are inveracious sometimes; and I did not wish to 
 begin with even hinting such a thing. Doubtless they are so, some 
 of them ; doubtless all of them have their temptations to be inve- 
 racious ; and doubtless the best man may lose his footing for an 
 instant, and speak or act in a manner that does not bear looking at 
 afterwards: we are all human, I suppose; but the clerical class, 
 taken as a body, are among the most honest of men, they being 
 almost simple sometimes, so that lay-folk take advantage of them. 
 Not only do they keep out of jail pretty unanimously, not only do 
 they get themselves up to the conventional standard of veracity, the 
 standard that will answer for lawyers and merchants and society 
 people, but they valiantly wax honest a shade beyond that, and 
 speak and act considerably as though they felt they might die be- 
 fore night. That is the kind of persons, on the whole, that they are. 
 
 They have some special advantages for being honest. 
 
 The vocation which they have selected takes them necessarily 
 out of the companionship of the dishonest classes and sets them in 
 a good moral atmosphere, where they certainly ought to behave. 
 To be sure they mingle with the dishonest, but it is as having a 
 moral mission to them and not as comrades and affiliated souls. 
 Pitch never sticks to any one who goes nigh it in that way. Again, 
 ministers as having an assured social position, do not need to prac- 
 tice the numerous small insincerities and time-servings which many 
 
YALE LECTURES. 297 
 
 do practice in order to secure a desirable standing. That is a 
 blessed let-off. 
 
 Also, they are quite looked up to as authorities ; and where a 
 man’s dictum has that advantage, he may put it out frankly and not 
 turn and squirm, and dispense an hypocritical palaver in order to 
 make himself acceptable. 
 
 Also they are not men hired by the day, and liable, therefore, to 
 be dismissed if they happen to speak forth some unpleasant truth. 
 
 Also, by moving around among men and women a good deal, 
 and lending a hand in innumerable social assemblies, they come to 
 a social poise and tact which saves them from being surprised into 
 swarms of little lies, that are popped out by way of recovery from 
 emergencies. If a lady of great blandishments and great nerve 
 forces them into a sudden corner, instead of lying to get out of it 
 as millions of bashful and unpracticed souls would and could hardly 
 help doing, they, these ministers, are apt to have the self-command 
 to parry and eel their way out ; and if things grow really desperate, 
 they have the vigor and the character to just settle into a silence 
 which, while it is very good-natured and gentlemanly, is also very 
 baffling to the enemy. ‘This is a small matter to discourse upon, 
 but I have myself been saved from so many falsehoods in precisely 
 that way, that I quite dote on it, and like to mention it as one 
 of the felicities of the clerical situation. 
 
 And there are others, I suppose. But ministers have their 
 disadvantages, too. There are a good many reasons why they 
 should not be perfectly truthful—a good many forms in which they 
 can lie if they want to. And some of the forms are so subtle as to 
 be hardly perceptible, while some are so plausible and wholesome- 
 looking, that the most pious preacher might be taken in by them. 
 
 In the first place a man’s energetic desire to do good and 
 save souls may induce him to resort to the following devices : 
 
 He may use exaggerated language. No matter about the lan- 
 guage, he says, if I can only get God’s very truth into these sleepy 
 souls. JI must exaggerate, otherwise I shall not get any hold at all. 
 
 Or he may cater to his hearers’ prejudices by lines of argument, 
 illustrations, quotations, and numerous contrivances of speech, that 
 he does not himself quite believe in and enjoy ;—for if this hearer 
 is stirred up and made to bristle, if he is not stroked the way of his 
 fur, all communication with him is cut off. What is the use of 
 preaching then? You can not save his soul! Did not Jesus him- 
 
298 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 self, and his Apostles, put in reasonings on their assemblies that 
 were not absolute, but were the nonsense of the people themselves, 
 taken for granted for the moment and fora purpose. It was an 
 oratorical adjustment to the case in hand. If the Jews believed 
 that insanity and so forth were the result of demonization, why 
 might not the great Teacher speak of it in that way ;—not as 
 affirming demoniacal possessions, but as manipulating a people who 
 did affirm such things. You see how cleverly a preacher may salve 
 his conscience with the doctrine that the end justifies the means ; 
 especially when the means are nothing worse than an argument not 
 so faultlessly excellent and irresistible as the hearer thinks it to be. 
 
 Again, there is nothing more melting to a congregation, and 
 more likely to get their souls clear open, to what their minister may 
 say for their good, than to notice that he has a thorough-going 
 interest in them—not in them as a multitude or mass, but in them 
 as individuals ; so that he cannot refrain from shaking hands with 
 them often, looking into their eyes, asking about each member 
 of their families, weeping with them when they are in trouble, and 
 putting forth all sorts of emotional concentration upon them one by 
 one, week in and week out. This is natural and beautiful and there is 
 nothing to be said against it. But do you not see what a temptation 
 the minister is under to furnish precisely the thing his people want, and 
 in quantities to suit the purchaser! Perhaps this man was not born 
 very emotional. Perhaps he was born well enough, but has been 
 cooled off since he was born by a long-continued devotion to 
 study, to things intellectual rather than affectional, so that now he is 
 more brainy than hearty. A good many things are supposable, but 
 no matter about supposables ;—here is this daily call for pastoral 
 effusiveness. And for effusiveness in the pulpit, too. He must 
 preach tenderly, yearningly and all that. He must have a tone in 
 his voice that can reach clear to the place of tears on occasion. I 
 say must; not as meaning that he absolutely must, but that he had 
 better. And there he is. He can heroically refuse to go any 
 further than he can in this business, and thus save his own soul; or 
 he can overdraw his reservoirs to save their souls. And all that I 
 have to say about it is, that he is invited to be inveracious by an 
 invitation about as seductive as a manever gets. If he succumbs, he 
 becomes “professional’’ as it is called :—professional !—a terrible 
 word that ought to make a minister squirm as if the shirt of Nessus — 
 were on him. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 299 
 
 Again, a preacher is continually invited to be more orthodox 
 than he may happen at heart to be. All the world over, conformity 
 is a fine advantage to any man. Where there is a state Church, as in 
 England, and Russia and in Italy in the old times, conformity is the 
 one balm of life. If you take into account both the other world and 
 this, conformity to God is the best thing; but if you leave out the 
 world to come, and consider the one matter of comfortable circum- 
 stances in this present Kingdom on Earth, there is nothing equal to 
 conformity to the reigning religion. Conform or die, was the racy 
 alternative they used to put to people. Afterwards, that was miti- 
 gated, and took this shape ; conform or die socially and politically, 
 and in respect of facilities for getting your daily bread. At pres- 
 ent the pressure of the most advanced parts of Christendom upon 
 the more laggard parts and even upon such as China, Madagascar 
 and the “ unspeakable Turk,” is so severe, that what is called “relig- 
 ious liberty,” is enjoyed almost everywhere. Still, some remainders 
 or semblances of rigor, left over from the grim long-ago, are to be 
 discovered anywhere you please to look. This country is as toler- 
 ant of dissent as any, I presume ; but even here I should rather be 
 a Congregational minister than some others I might name. In 
 Philadelphia there are well on towards a hundred Presbyterian 
 Churches I am told—almost more than is really necessary, a Con- 
 gregationalist might be mean enough to say—but what I will say is, 
 that in that city it were perceptibly better to be a Presbyterian 
 minister than a Unitarian. You would get more invitations out— 
 more appointments on important public committees, (those small 
 exaltations that keep a man advised of his own importance) ; more 
 furtherance all around in any enterprise you might start. The kind 
 of invitation out that Roger Williams had when he tried to stay in 
 Massachusetts, that Unitarian man would miss in these improved 
 and clement times ; but almost as totally might he miss the whole 
 miscellany of agreeable invitations—just as one of those hundred 
 Presbyterian ministers would miss a good deal probably, if he should 
 undertake to set up in Salt Lake City. More than a generation 
 ago, Dr. Horace Buslinell—if I may mention him once more, as 
 having known him and his case so well—was a more than suspected 
 man, as regards his conformity to Congregational or even evangeli- 
 cal standards ; and that dispute cost Bushnell a world of trouble. 
 It did not unhorse him, because he was an athletic rider and had a 
 
 good horse under him, in his faithful North Church of Hartford— 
 22 
 
300 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 then, too, he had an unweariable pugnacity of his own that kept 
 him from being too humble under attack, to say nothing of the good 
 conscience and the love of truth that were in him, but the ado over 
 him was a noisy and distressing one—bad enough at all events to 
 show how important a reasonable amount of reputation for ortho- 
 doxy is. If the pressure on a man towards orthodoxy took the 
 form only of a single, belligerent, heavy attack, one square fight 
 might and main and then over with, it were not so bad ; but fre- 
 quently it is not an open war at all, but simply an impalpable some- 
 thing or other in the air, a something that keeps on year after year, and 
 in the which the poor man breathes. It does not exactly kill him— 
 he almost wishes it would, but it does not ;—it merely takes the 
 caloric out of him, slowly and effectually, and makes life something 
 less than life ; just as when you go into those great art galleries in 
 Rome, in the winter, where no fire has been since the morning of 
 the creation ; at first you are entirely comfortable, but by and by 
 you begin to notice that a process of devitalization has set in. It 
 does not amount to anything on your entrance, and you have no 
 idea of leaving the gallery on account of it. You are not really 
 uncomfortable, you say, but you wish there was a fire. Ah! well, 
 you are a slightly-scuttled ship, and you will disappear. So is it I 
 fear as regards that imperceptible mist of distrust which envelopes 
 a minister who is a little strange doctrinally. This air is good 
 enough, he says at first, courageously—pretty fair—I can stand it if 
 they can. But in the course of years he discovers that they can 
 furnish more cold mist than he can breathe with any comfort. So 
 you see the strain on him to conform may be just awful at last, and — 
 as likely as not he starts out to overhaul his opinions, peradventure 
 he can reformulate them in a manner to have them sound like the 
 good old traditional truth divine. 
 
 And while he is in this business of revision, he is curiously - 
 helped to make it thorough by numbers of weighty arguments, 
 among which this stands out as large as any ; that if the people to 
 whom he preaches are the least bit shaken in their opinion touching 
 his soundness, his ability to benefit them by anything he says, how- 
 ever true, is impaired, if not ended. That Greek there in their 
 pulpit they fear, even when he brings presents. Therefore he must 
 just stop being a Greek, as fast as he can. 
 
 Again, piety is of much value to a minister. A little piety 
 even, goes a great way—and a great deal goes still further. There- 
 
YALE LECTURES. 301 
 
 fore he must furnish it. And the temptation is to furnish more than 
 he has, And that is inveracity in one of its inoffensive forms. I 
 call it inoffensive with reference simply to the fact that the man’s 
 motive for being more pious than he is, is the glory of God through 
 the salvation of the souls committed to his care. He cannot bear 
 to have his people no more pious than he may happen to be. 
 What a low piece of business it were for a minister to make him- 
 self the standard for his people. In his sermons he always says: 
 “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” There 
 is no implication in such utterance that the man who speaks 
 it forth is perfect. That were an absurd idea. No; he is simply 
 holding up that measure of character which is authoritatively given 
 him to hold up. Well, if he preaches beyond himself in that man- 
 ner, why may he not act beyond himself, and take on just that holy 
 tone that he knows to be so impressive upon the children of men. 
 
 My Brethren, I am showing you, or giving you a picture of 
 the Devil weaving his nets, because I remember what Solomon said 
 —‘Surely, in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird.” 
 My dear young birds, there is one of Satan’s nets for you in plain 
 sight. He will want to persuade you to be pious beyond the facts. 
 He will never spur you to be pious in more than seeming, that were 
 to build up the Kingdom that he hates—but he will edge you along 
 to be hypocrites if he can, 
 
 And here is another net. Often you as a minister may feel 
 that certain views held from of old in the religious community, ought 
 to be modified. They are too stringent. Those views have respect 
 perhaps to the manner of keeping Sunday, or to the precise kind or 
 amount of infallibility there is in the Bible, or to the question of 
 the punishments of God; but you sincerely fear that if the com- 
 munity begin to relax from the old-fashioned rigor, they will relax 
 for good and all before long; and you cannot have that. So you 
 wink at their present ignorance and let them stay ignorant. You do 
 not dare do otherwise. You do not exactly advocate these ideas of 
 theirs, but you somehow manage to let the people go on supposing 
 that you think as they do on these matters. You say—‘“The truth. 
 is not to be told at all times,” and other old saws of prudence and 
 sanctified common-sense you hunt up, and calm your mind with 
 them. 
 
 Or it may be that the public mind is not so affirmative as it 
 ought to be on some point. Men have come to have sleazy 
 
302 ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 notions about penalty and hell, about the propitiatory element in 
 the work of Christ, about the moral and doctrinal authority of the 
 Church, about the over-observance of holy days, about owning 
 slaves, and speculating, and divorcing, and leaving their prayer- 
 meeting to go to the ballot, and raffling to support the Gospel. It 
 is interesting to look back and also look around and see how good 
 people have grown bewildered occasionally and doubtful, on pretty 
 plain things, and have given Satan the benefit of the doubt. Well, 
 the minister thinks that men and women in these confusions, 
 cannot be jerked out of them by a sudden application of stark 
 force. No, you must toll them out. You must lay down a long 
 line of corn—corn that they like—even as partridges in the woods 
 are beguiled into snares ;—all they see is kernels of grain, strung 
 out and they follow on. In other words, you must rather pare 
 down, or razee the truth, and deal it out simply as they are able to 
 bear it. There is quite a good deal of this done in Christian pulpits. 
 And it is so easy to slip into it. 
 
 I have now mentioned some of the advantages and some of 
 the disadvantages of the minister in the matter of veracity. And I 
 hope I have taken you along far enough to make the situation seem 
 an anxious one. It is an anxious one. The ordinary and average 
 honesty is not enough for a minister. Of course he is not going 
 to tell lies, nor steal, nor forge, nor murder. Crimes like those 
 end him—and he knows they do—and therefore he is not going to 
 commit them, even if he wants to (which he ordinarily does not). 
 But simple seemliness and straight walking is only the shell of 
 honesty, and this man of God is not a man of God, unless he can 
 show truth in his inward parts. So then let me undertake a little 
 close remark. 
 
 I define veracity to be a supreme intention to see and describe 
 things as they are. A supreme intention to see and describe things 
 as they are! Many see pretty well, who are slippery when they 
 come to tell about it, whether by word or act. On the other hand, 
 many tell well—that is, what they see they report straightforwardly— 
 but then their seeing is poor. That though may be an intellectual 
 fault. The poor seer may get to heaven; the poor teller never 
 will. And it is these poor tellers that I am after mainly to-day. 
 Stupid ministers are one thing ; dishonest are another. The stupid 
 ones we can get along with (we have to, at any rate) but the 
 dishonest are different. Permit me to give you a rapid list of 
 
YALE LECTURES. 303 
 
 hindrances to exact seeing, and describing. In all seeing there 
 are two factors :—the seer and the thing seen. But let us look at 
 the seer and the hindrances to exactness that lie in him. 
 
 First—He may be a constitutionally gushing seer. Did you 
 never know such? They suffuse the whole creation with their own 
 rosiness, and report the creation accordingly. 
 
 On the other hand a man may be a cold seer, by nature, and 
 the creation that he reports is by no means the same creation that 
 the gusher has just reported. But the thing that interests me, as 
 set to unfold my subject, is that neither of them reports the actual 
 creation. There is a chronic inexactness in the statements of such 
 people, which you must always figure on and remorselessly elimi- 
 nate, before you can really know anything from what they say. 
 
 Again, the present transient mood of a seer is likely to qualify 
 his perception and make it inaccurate, and that inaccuracy must be 
 discounted in the report he brings of the object he has observed. 
 One morning in December, 1869, I mounted a hack with the driver 
 thereof and drove from Naples to Pompeii—my first visit to that 
 fascinating place—and my last. But the day was cold. It had 
 snowed. ‘The streets of the disentombed city were white a little. 
 The dust flew too, on the road out, March fashion. I was physic- 
 ally miserable. Therefore Pompeii is substantially a blank in 
 my memory. It is pitiable that a supreme thing can be made 
 to be nothing by some grumpiness in this vile tabernacle that 
 we have on us for a time; for an uncomfortable man is always 
 a misreporter. But if only we are comfortable what may we not 
 see? We can even see things that are not. What the Baths of 
 Caracalla in Rome amount to in fact, I do not know; but one 
 sunny and warm day in late March, I, with a friend, climbed to the 
 top of that great structure, and there, reclined and buried in the 
 green growths on the roof, I dreamed and absorbed and blossomed 
 for hours, thinking such reminiscent thoughts and luxuriating in 
 such imaginings as a man of some sensibility might, with the his- 
 toric city not far away, and with his own mortal body in a state of 
 perfect warmth and perfect repose and contentment—in a state of 
 prolonged purring, to express it so. So now that building and that 
 day are not blanks in my mind. I could make a sumptuous report 
 of them. 
 
 Not always though do our moods come from our bodies. A 
 man’s view of a good cause may be qualified and made a practical 
 
304 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 lie, by some irritation he has had sometime in connection with that 
 cause, or with some one engaged in its advocacy. 
 
 A man’s view of the fitness of a certain person for a certain 
 office, may be quite wrong (though honestly wrong) because that 
 candidate has happened to cross him in some respect. 
 
 Our moods are numerous and spring from diverse sources, but 
 a mood is as much a mischief-maker, in the matter of true seeing, 
 as color-blindness is, or purblindness. 
 
 Again, the philosophers tell us, when they discuss the relativity 
 of knowledge, that all things show themselves to the human eye, 
 not in their total reality, but in so much of their reality as the 
 human eye is constitutionally able to get hold of. And when they 
 say this, sometimes they say it with a general look on their faces 
 and a suggestiveness in the tones of their voice, which is equivalent 
 to an additional piece of information to the effect that what we see 
 when we look at an object, is to the realities stowed away and hid- 
 den in that object—hidden forever very likely, from us—as one 
 leaf is to all the leaves of the leafy world. There we are again ! 
 Accepting the doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, what a baby 
 report any report we make is! ‘The fault is not in the object but 
 in the observer. The object stands there in its absolute bareness, 
 offering itself to be looked at through and through, but it sarcastic- 
 ally suggests that it cannot furnish eyes and object both. 
 
 But even where we are able to get into the interiors of the 
 object considerably, and see it in several aspects rather than in one, 
 we, for the time being, are not at the right point of observation for 
 all that many-faced seeing as likely as not, and cannot be ; and on 
 that account, any report we make must be inadequate, and in that 
 sense inaccurate. This remark applies especially to our contem- 
 plation of religious truth. In the New Testament there are many 
 references to the resurrection of man, and the subsequent resurrec- 
 tion state. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, makes quite 
 an effort to flood that subject with light by his reasonings and 
 analogies. Also by his touches of exultation as he moves along, he 
 reveals the dimensions of the resurrection fact quite as much as he 
 does by anything he directiy says about it. He, as an inspired 
 man, sees something that we do not, and by the glow on his face 
 and his joyful gesticulations, we are made to know how this thing 
 is no small affair. So then, we have a doctrine to the resurrection. 
 We talk about it, we preach it, we put it into our creeds. Buta 
 
YALE LECTURES. 305 
 
 very powerful sort of relativity of human knowledge comes in here. 
 It is not permanently in, but it is in for the present. So long as we 
 stay on the earth, the earth is our view-point in respect of the resur- 
 rection. But the view of the resurrection from here, compares 
 with the view of it which we shall have after the resurrection is 
 past, or after we have gone around to the other side, as our view of 
 a cloud when under it compares with our view when some balloon 
 has taken us up and around, on to the sky-side of that cloud. A 
 man looking up at a cloud takes his oath that it is dark and dismal ; 
 a man looking down on a cloud swears that it is one of the 
 brightest and most beautiful things he ever saw. 
 
 So much for the power of standpoint, as determinative of per- 
 ception, and of the reports founded upon perception. 
 
 And this thing that I have called standpoint so often as any 
 way runs into and becomes identical with that thing that I have 
 called mood ; a person’s mood at the moment of observation. 
 
 I recollect that when our war of the rebellion was on, twenty or 
 more years ago, the strong cursing in the book of the Psalms 
 seemed to all loyal people to be dealt out about right,—none too 
 hot. In peace, such talk sounds severe. Our first feeling is, that 
 David and the others permitted their emotions to speak up more 
 than was necessary. But when our Southern brethren began to 
 shoot us, and we were as indignant as ever was David, we saw the 
 Psalms more as they are. Our changed mood was an advantage to 
 us as interpreters. 
 
 So when the Spirit of God steals into the heart of one of our 
 circle of unchristian children, and converts him, leaving the rest, 
 the doctrine of election seems a more real thing than it did when 
 we heard it abstractly discussed and proven by our minister. 
 Speaking of election, we should say about it now what we should 
 not have said, save for that thunder out of a clear sky, that con- 
 version in our family. 
 
 In like manner the right of a minister to take part in politics 
 —a right which we never denied, I will suppose—seemed not at all 
 what it used to, the moment he in the fervor of an election, when . 
 we were more moved in our minds than we ever were before, actu- 
 ally took part—an influential part—and worst of all, took part on 
 the side opposite to us. In our abstract and judicial mood of 
 mind, taking part was one thing, in our political mood of mind it 
 suddenly became another. 
 
306 . YALE LECTURES. 
 
 Now Brethren, I have made a display of these incertitudes in 
 seeing things and reporting on them, in order that you may discover 
 what a fiery trial of our honesty we are all in, in this present world. 
 The unprincipled man lets these numberless forces shoulder him 
 about as they please, and he sees things pretty much as he happens 
 to, and when he comes to describe them he is equally loose. And 
 the principled man, ofttimes, is not principled enough to resist this 
 confused stress of forces; especially as half of them are particu- 
 larly obscure. These thousand-and-one subjective moods that 
 determine our perception of this and that, are very often uncon- 
 scious moods, like a vessel headed straight towards port, with all 
 sails set, and a comfortable assurance in her own mind that she 
 is making the port; when, in fact, a secret ocean current is carrying 
 her leagues and leagues away. 
 
 Now, a minister, of all men, is under moral engagement and 
 obligation to see well and tell a straight story. 
 
 First, to see well—To see well! I rather think that, ordina- 
 rily, when we speak of veracity, we do not get back so far as that. 
 Veracity is reporting a thing as we see it, and that fulfills all right- 
 eousness, most persons would say. But it does not. We are 
 as much bound to see things as they are, as we are to report them 
 as we see them. That is the starting point of veracity ; to see them 
 as they are. Right there, at the root, that moral quality, honesty, 
 begins to come in. I have expounded the difficulty there—the 
 complicated and awful difficulty—but no matter, God entangles us 
 in difficulties on purpose to find whether we have the integrity to 
 get through them. The integrity; not the perspicacity except 
 as integrity makes perspicacity. No doubt our difficulties develop 
 our intellects, and that is one of God’s ends in letting difficulties 
 try to snarl us. He wants us to be bright. But still more and 
 mainly, he wants us to.be honest. So he tempts us. He shows up 
 before us all sorts of objects, in bewildering phases. They are 
 bewildering in themselves, those objects are ; and they are bewilder- 
 ing because our moods and our constitutional idiosyncrasies do, 
 unbeknown to ourselves, drift us this way and that, and make us 
 like astronomers studying the sky through their telescope from the 
 rolling deck of a ship. I think it was Samuel Johnson—the great 
 Samuel—who said that if a child of his, looking through the window, 
 remarked that there were four objects out there, when in fact there 
 were but three, he would whip the child ; so important to any good 
 
YALE LECTURES. 307 
 
 development did he judge accurate observation to be. To say four 
 even, when there are three, is a demoralization as distinct as to 
 forge a complete lie, and say there are none. But perhaps the 
 observer was simply mistaken, you reply. He had no right to be 
 mistaken. He was careless as to whether he was mistaken or no; 
 and with only that carelessness to stand on, he proceeded to make 
 an affirmation outright and definite. There is a play of moral 
 quality through the whole business. 
 
 Here is a minister. He is preaching a good many things. 
 Most of them he has examined to the full extent of his faculty 
 and his opportunity. But some of them he has not, (I will sup- 
 pose) ; still, they are conventionally considered parts or items in a 
 roundabout and full-toned orthodoxy. Therefore he preaches 
 them. Like the child looking out of the window, he says four, at a 
 venture. Four is what he is expected to say, and he says it. I 
 will not condemn that minister as a lost soul because he has so 
 done ; but he has tampered with himself in a manner all the more 
 perilous, in that it requires a little push of analysis and acumen to 
 get at and spot its essential turpitude. Or if that is too strong, 
 then say (more mildly) that his underpinning of character would 
 be less worm-eaten if he stopped doing such things. Perhaps that 
 is no milder. Perhaps a worm in an underpinning is as dangerous 
 as a worm in a living root. Most of the demoralizations of men, if 
 searched out, would be found to have their beginning in some sub- 
 conscious, imperceptible minute defect like that. 
 
 I have’ now spent all the time I can conveniently spare on that 
 primary and foundation matter, seeing well, seeing exactly, seeing a 
 thing as it is ;—for I have yet to deal with veracity in the use of 
 language. Veracity in the use of language! That to which the 
 term veracity is generally supposed to apply, particularly and prin- 
 cipally. A man who makes a good honest start at that radical 
 point, seeing ; is just the man who wants the language he uses in 
 giving an account of his seeing to correspond to the facts ; close- 
 fit—not a grain overdone, not a grain underdone. There is no 
 intellectual joy like the joy of that close-fit, but the moral joy of it 
 to a moral man is still greater. That absolute rhetorical veracity — 
 exhilarates like a play of electric currents through one’s bulk and 
 being. Often, when after labor or by a stroke of spontaneity I 
 have wedded word to fact, in a match of one to the other as com- 
 plete, self-evident and triumphant as though one had been eternally 
 
308 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 predestinated for the other, every faculty in me has shouted for the 
 moment ;—it is so satisfactory to have exactly the right thing done, 
 and to have the rightness stand out incontestible. I think that the 
 way in which the human mind coins words for its thoughts and per- 
 ceptions, in a steady, copious run of coinage, without the least 
 premeditation or conscious anxiety (more often than any way, and 
 always if inspired and vital) is one of the most marvellous of things ; 
 and indeed no mean image, but a finite duplicate rather of the 
 creative fertility of Almighty God. As his great energies teem and 
 teem and never tire, so do we his creatures teem ; word after word, 
 pat and full, exact and well-rounded, the words fitting the thoughts 
 to the last touch of fitness and the thoughts filling the words to the 
 last touch of fullness. 
 
 Veracity in the use of language, shows itself in such particulars 
 as the following : 
 
 First,—In a burning desire to get at the exact meaning of a 
 word before we consent to use it. It is easy enough to heedlessly 
 pour out words, flood-like and incontinent ; but this is an irresponsible 
 and immoral procedure. Words were not made to toss about care- 
 lesswise any more than dynamite is. When an honest man speaks, 
 he pledges his honor to the validity of the meanings which he puts 
 into his expressions; and he feels that he does, as truly as he 
 pledges himself when he signs a note. I want to tell you of a little 
 fraud that I committed—only some two years ago too, when I was 
 old enough to know better and should have supposed myself man 
 enough not to have done such a deed. God found me out in it 
 though, and I do not intend to do so any more. JI was delivering a 
 course of Old Testament historical lectures Sunday evenings, and 
 was on the career of David. And having come along so far as the 
 death of Saul and Jonathan, I wanted to turn to a particular good » 
 use among the people, David’s beautiful song of lamentations over 
 those two, beginning :—“‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy 
 high places’””—but my good use could be best secured by accepting 
 the old-fashioned interpretation of that composition at a certain 
 point, although I knew that said interpretation had been attacked 
 by scholars and considerably demolished ; nevertheless I put on an 
 honest face and turned in on my confiding hearers that old-fash- 
 ioned view ; muddling my conscience with the convenient off-hand 
 thought that the authorities were not agreed on the point in 
 question. But providentially, off in one of the pews there sat a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 309 
 
 hard-headed strong man from another parish, who of late had been 
 minutely digging out that whole history, and he mentioned to one of 
 my parishioners this performance of mine. That parishioner knew 
 he was mistaken of course, and told him so. His trust in my ability 
 and scholarship and other things, was sufficient to enable him to 
 take a stout stand against him, and in favor of me. However, he 
 wrote me a note about it, and then I wrote him a note, telling him 
 that the man was right, that he had the weight of authority on his 
 side. You see I had fallen, but I got up quick; so soon as I was 
 caught, at any rate. Well, in relating this incident, I have opened 
 quite a swarm of questions. For instance, the recent revisers of the 
 Bible have witched with numbers of our old passages that we have had 
 the joy of quoting all our lives. Some passages they have caused 
 to disappear entirely. Others they have left in, but not till after 
 such an overhauling of their primeval supposed sense, that one feels 
 like a criminal if he stands to that primeval sense, uses it in preach- 
 ing, and says nothing. Is it as honest as a minister of the gospel 
 should be, to be reading from his pulpit an old version whose little 
 infirmities here and there have been so exposed ? 
 
 And this brings up the whole subject of Biblical quotation. 
 How far may we use texts and passages rhetorically, rather than 
 exactly. Does the Bible like to be dragged in to assist oratory 
 in that way; even though it be sacred oratory? Is it “sacred” 
 oratory, with these devices scattered along through it? And when 
 you come to preach from a text, may that text be made to doa 
 duty it never thought of till you got hold of it and had a present 
 and particular good you wanted to accomplish by its teaching. Of 
 course anybody can see that we must not stand up and squarely say 
 “‘ Dearly Beloved, this text teaches so and so,” when it does not. 
 We may say, “It suggests to me the following twelve heads,” and 
 then we may go on to make our whole discourse on those twelve 
 heads. There is no lying in that; but how must that text feel all 
 this while? Doubtless it is flattered that an educated and cultivated 
 and religious man is so crammed with suggestions by its humble 
 self; at the same time must not that text be mournfully remarking | 
 in its own mind now and then; “But I have a meaning of my own 
 (so I always supposed), a God’s meaning; and on the whole I 
 should be pleased if you would make a thirteenth head on that, 
 and let me serve to that extent, as my original self; and not asa 
 mere suggestor.” 
 
310 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 These points of equity are confusing to an undisciplined con- 
 science, but to a man who is honest in every atom of him, the 
 appeal of that Bible text is full of pathos. 
 
 Now you see in a moment that in order to the truthful use 
 of language, we are carried directly to philological and exegetical 
 study. All people would agree that preachers need to be up in 
 those tudies as a matter of information ; but I say unto you to-day 
 it is a matter of integrity also. What is slander? Well, one form 
 of it is reporting that a man said something that he did not say. 
 And why is not the Bible slandered when some inaccurate and 
 unexegetical fumbler spends hours every week in public discours- 
 ings on what the Bible says. Unquestionably the Bible does say 
 many things that he declares it does. The general tone of its 
 teachings on the principal topics of doctrine and life, he gets at. 
 But the Bible is like a person. It has in it, so to speak, virgin-like 
 and elusive qualities and shades of quality which must be perceived 
 in order to a complete and completely relishable acquaintance with 
 the Book. A merely English scholar may get a good deal from the 
 Bible ; but a Greek and Hebrew scholar can get more. Words 
 fairly quiver with delight when you hunt them out clear to their 
 radicals. When I take my food in a rather wholesale and bolting 
 fashion—so much food in so many minutes—I taste it, certainly, and 
 wish I had more ; but my tongue does not at all reach those ultimate 
 flavors of my bread and my meat, wherein and whereby, princi- 
 pally, meat is meat and not bread, and bread is bread and not 
 meat—those ultimate flavors that the bread and the meat do most 
 pride themselves on. It is impossible to get the whole marrow of 
 Greek or Hebrew or Latin thought in an English rendering of it. 
 Hebrew thought in an English dress, is Anglicized-Hebrew thought 
 always—more or less. .Thought, that essence of the mind, instinct- 
 ively takes on a body of language that is surcharged with its own 
 idiosyncrasies, and any other embodiment would be a misfit to a 
 degree and so far not an embodiment. We should not say that 
 any living thing was embodied, when some sort of externality was 
 mechanically put upon it. No, embodiment proper is the unem- 
 bodied vitally and therefore characteristically expressed. 
 
 So then our very veracity forces us to philology, to exegesis, to 
 profound interpretation. If we intentionally misrepresent meanings, 
 we are liars, plainasday. But if we misrepresent meanings through 
 carelessness, or through laziness, it shows that we have in us the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 311 
 
 making of aliar. We are willing to make statement after statement 
 that we have never taken the trouble to verify. We are leaving a 
 large part of the significance of our Bible—many a savory term, 
 phrase, turn and idiom, unused and undetected. It is not right, 
 T say. 
 
 - Secondly.—Veracity in the use of language shows itself in the 
 avoidance of overstatement—not to say understatement. Over- 
 statement comes: From a real desire to lie: From an innocent 
 over-rosiness of mental constitution from the womb. From an 
 innocent over-endowment of sensibility. From ignorance, often. 
 From a religious desire to make a strong impression and do good. 
 Finally, and omitting, doubtless, some causes ; from an over-done 
 concentration on the particular object which we are trying for the 
 moment to report. Please grant me a little pause on that last— 
 thus : 
 
 Each object of thought is variously related to other objects of 
 thought, and that one object cannot be seen accurately and accu- 
 rately reported except as its numerous relations are perceived and 
 weighed, and duly let in with their influence. For example: 
 
 Now it is a habit of multitudes of minds—preachers and all 
 sorts—to contemplate things unrelationally. It is the curse of 
 theology—one curse—that so many fail to contemplate its several 
 momenta systematically. It is the curse of preaching—one curse— 
 that the men, so many of them, sharpen their attention right down 
 to the one .truth or topic they happen to be on for the moment. 
 It is the justice of God that they have up I will say, and if you had 
 never heard of God before you would conclude that justice is all 
 there is of him. 
 
 I know it is one of the inherent and necessary infirmities of 
 any statement of a truth, that you isolate it more or less from other 
 truths. Formulation is simply a setting of boundaries around 
 the thing you formulate; and those boundaries would not be 
 such if they did not fence off that thing to a degree from all those 
 things to the which it is in fact related. If you say—‘God is 
 Justice !’’—you have selected a single attribute of God from out of 
 his many attributes, brought it into the foreground, magnified it, 
 lifted it for the moment out of its real place in the organism of his 
 attributes and committed an exaggeration, a temporary exaggeration. 
 Formulation is exaggeration, always. If you preach on an attribute 
 of God you cannot, at the same time, and in that single half-hour, 
 
312 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 preach on his every other attribute, and thus avoid disproportion. 
 No, you must bear down on the thing in hand, and accept what 
 disproportion may occur. And then at some other time you must 
 have God’s Love for your topic, and bear down on that. And so 
 on. But in all this your specific bearing down, you may tone your 
 statements and reduce exaggeration to a minimum by being your- 
 self a relational thinker—a man accustomed to recollect that God is 
 manifold, made up of several great powers in magnificent equilib- 
 rium and co-ordination. ‘The equilibrium and co-ordination of the 
 forces of the created universe is but his harmony of living, pro- 
 jected and made visibie. A being like Him when he came to cre- 
 ate, could not do otherwise than have his universe like unto himself. 
 I repeat, the way to reduce exaggeration to a minimum is to make 
 yourself a relational thinker. One of the chief objects of education 
 is to get young men into this relational habit. A man is not educa- 
 ted till he be brought to that. One of the tokens whereby you can 
 tell a great man from a man little and scrappy, is that the latter 
 takes truth in scraps, or single phases; and when he speaks gets 
 right down on his scrap and cackles with all his might, while the 
 great man handles truth integrally. He, as much as the lesser 
 thinker, is compelled by the necessity of the case to expound truth 
 one phase at a time and in that way exaggerate. Nevertheless you 
 will hear in all he says on that phase a sound as from other phases. 
 Particularly in the moderation of his statements will you hear that 
 sound. His language is not pushed into the extreme possible 
 intensity of language. While he shows that he has interest in his 
 theme, he shows that he has heard of other themes. Focus the entire 
 vital heat of your body on some single square inch of your body, 
 and you have an interesting inflammation, an inflammation which 
 attracts much more attention than forty whole bodies, with their heat 
 uniformly distributed. And in like manner a preacher who accumu- 
 lates his entire energy and fire on the one truth that he is discussing, 
 and thinks of nothing else, may set the people agape more than the 
 full-globed, all-comprehending man, whose heat on this and that 
 does not proceed to the inflammatory point, because he has a fervid 
 sense of numerous other truths and themes. 
 
 You have a good illustration of this that I am now trying to set 
 forth in the mental temperance of a statesman or public man, who 
 is historically informed and cultured ; his temperance in the midst 
 of the flow and passion of present events, as contrasted to the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 313 
 
 vehemency, overaction and overstatement of the public man who, 
 as knowing nothing of history, has nothing with which to compare 
 the present. You will hear this last, saying :—“The treason of: 
 Jefferson Davis was the greatest crime since the crucifixion of the 
 Son of God’’—“ Ulysses S. Grant is the greatest general since Julius 
 Ceesar’’—and like ear-catching utterances. ‘‘This presidential 
 election is the most important one since the foundation of the gov- 
 ernment ; if we lose it, the cause of free government is set back a 
 hundred years ;” and so on. Nowif this man only knew anything 
 that has occurred between the date of the crucifixion and the last 
 election, he would be more entitled to make these stunning general- 
 izations ; but he does not know. Perhaps some of these broad and 
 impressive things that he says are true, but he does not know that 
 they are. He is too ignorant historically for that. 
 
 Neither does that denominationalist who magnifies a pulpit 
 orator of his own persuasion as the chief pulpit power of the 
 Nineteenth Century, know much probably of the pulpit giants 
 outside of his own circle and his own land. 
 
 The truth is, all persons and things and truths are truly rated 
 only by those who are in possession of the large measures of history. 
 Exaggeration is the child of ignorance. Exaggeration comes of an 
 isolated and unrelational contemplation of the objects of thought. 
 
 But Gentlemen, there is a form of recoil from exaggeration, on 
 which I ask you, so long as you live, to lay your rather undivided 
 contempt. The moderation, the non-gushing habit of a wide- 
 minded thinker, scholar and man of information, is a truly respect- 
 able and imposing thing, as I have already implied. His considerate 
 diction and his tranquil argument go home with their whole force. 
 You know the man, and deduct not one ounce from his statement. 
 Even when his diction is really tame, as sometimes happens, by 
 reason of his mortal fear of excess, you feel that an occasional ice- 
 berg in the midst of the general inflammatory condition of human 
 thought, is a force in favor of sanity and repose ; and you do not 
 mind running your own craft with her coppers all hot in under the 
 shadow and wholesome chill of that solid mountain of ice. Also 
 when your cool man, by reason of his many-sided knowledge, is 
 made to be inordinately prudential and wavering, so that he drops 
 out of the practical. push of life, you recollect again his value in 
 reducing the fierce temperature of the creation, and are thankful. 
 Moreover if his prudentialism, and his unaffirmative or mildly affirm- 
 
314 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 ative tone extends even to moral questions, so that his yea and nay 
 are not wholly yea or nay, but a little of both; as was supposed to 
 be the case with our great Daniel Webster, in some respects, thirty 
 or more years ago; still, in the midst of the frantic positiveness of 
 multitudes who are positive in inverse ratio to their information 
 and their sense of the totality of things, it refreshes you to see an 
 extreme man who is extreme in the direction of tranquillity and 
 considerateness. 
 
 But I cannot say so much in praise of that affected moderation 
 which we sometimes see—that refusal to be absolutely concluded 
 and enthusiastic in respect of anything, which some persons put on. 
 They put it on and there is where the contemptibleness of the 
 thing comes in. They have no all-sided information and all-sided 
 habit of thought, which moderates them ; but they moderate them- 
 selves intentionally and deliberately, because to be moderate is so like 
 those unexcited and well-poised men and women who are informed 
 and thoughtful. When I first visited the old world and saw certain 
 first things over there, I was much moved ; but I had with me as a 
 temporary companion, a young Englishman, to me a stranger, up 
 from London on his country vacation, who sat in the same beautiful 
 ruined Abbey that was near drowning me in a certain sort of 
 emotion, and serenely nibbled his lunch. He was not hungry (we 
 had just had our breakfast) but neither was he hungry for the 
 Abbey ; and as between the two, it was much more genteel to eat 
 and not let the Abbey run away with him, than to imitate me and 
 let it out that he never before saw,an Abbey in the beauty of hun- 
 dreds of years of decline, and so advertise his own greenness. The 
 gentility of indifferentism !—that is what I want you to despise. 
 If you are so completely informed about Abbeys that you cannot 
 learn anything more in that line, and if you have been daily rubbing 
 against Abbeys from-the moment you were born, and -on that 
 account are more bewitched with your lunch than with the moss- 
 mantled pile; why go on and eat ;—that is honest, and to that 
 extent it is respectable. But if you are as unpracticed in Abbeys as 
 is the over-flowing Yankee man at your side, and devote yourself to 
 your lunch simply to lie, and notify him that you are not so much 
 of a fool as he (which is just what millions do) then there is noth- 
 ing respectable about it. To be green is no discredit necessarily 
 (though it is a misfortune) but to be untruthful is a great discredit. 
 Sometimes even young men and young women assume this gen- 
 
YALE LECTURES. 315 
 
 teel indifference to all things, whereof I speak. When a mature 
 person puts on indifference, we may be deceived by him at first. 
 Possibly the man is as informed and experienced and as staled by 
 experience as he appears to be; but as to these young people we 
 know better right off. They have not been in the world so long, 
 and traveled about so much and so deeply entered into all sorts of 
 things, that a fine landscape cannot flush them, and a fine oration, 
 or concert, or picture is a weariness to their souls ; and a fascinating 
 human character has no fascination, they have encountered such a 
 glut of them. No; they, keeping cool as they do, are little hum- 
 bugs—and plain humbugs. 
 
 Is it exaggeration to oversee and overstate :—to wreck one’s 
 native tongue in trying to express one’s strong impressions ; as. some 
 young gentlewomen are malignantly accused of doing—but is it not 
 also exaggeration to purposely and guilefully cultivate languor, exnuz, 
 and an air as though you had seen everything there is to see, and 
 sampled it, and engulfed yourself in satiety by much sampling? 
 Is it not exaggeration to profess and pretend to the moderation of 
 the many-sided observer and thinker? Is it veracity in the use of 
 language, to call a whirlwind “elegant” and an avalanche “a nice 
 thing’? and a magnificent sunset ‘“‘a rather pretty scene” and a 
 Gen Gordon shut up in Egypt, and oblivious of everything save 
 God and duty, “too lovely for anything!” Are not these diminu- 
 tives—these hypocritical diminutives, lies. If they had in them 
 only the infirmity of inexactness they would be inveracious and a 
 sort of slander—for no one is entitled to apply to things that are in 
 reality so overwhelming, such incommensurate, petty and miserable 
 adjectives. But when these adjectives are selected for a hypocritical 
 purpose, they contain a second immorality. 
 
 O! how good it is to get out of all this feebleness and imposi- 
 tion, and out of real indifferentism with its tamed-down language 
 and its unflushed face, into the outrightness, rest and self-commitment 
 of Shakespeare, and Hebrew prophets, and imprecating Psalmists 
 who knew the difference between Babylon and Jerusalem and did 
 not doubt that God also knew the difference !—to get away from _ 
 that everlasting balancing of probabilities in the moral field, which 
 emasculates a man’s affirmatives and his negatives too—to be out of 
 it into the clear sight and the perpendicular faith even of such 
 whole-hearted haters, and un-Addisonian rhetoricians, as Thomas 
 Carlyle, and Dr. South, and John Milton, in some of his prose 
 
 a3 
 
316 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 utterances ; and many another utterly resolved and vehement soul. 
 Of course no extreme can be defended, but as between the lacka- 
 daisical on the one side and the over-rugged on the other; as 
 between Hercules and Nancy; as between strength, vision and 
 fresh sensibility exaggerated, and the exaggeration of diminutives, 
 indifferentism, pretense, and weakliness, can any reasonable mortal 
 hesitate ? . 
 
 Now in some pulpits it is Nancy that you hear, and not Hercu- 
 les. It is not Miss Nancy, but alas! it is Mr. Nancy. First, he 
 thinks it would be unphilosophical to warm up and say something. 
 The true way is to put in the pros and cons, and when you get them 
 all in to just stand in them chin-deep, and look helpless. This 
 preacher has reduced dubiousness to a fine art. Doubtless he has 
 escaped out of exaggeration, but he has not landed anywhere. 
 Neither has he landed his people anywhere. In the next place he 
 abates his diction to correspond to the neutralism of his thought. 
 It is proper and pale, and inoffensive and unpotential, and void of 
 positive verity. An adjective with a real swelter in it would con- 
 vulse him. Doubtless there are many sweltering realities in the 
 Book and Providence of God, and in human life, which ought not 
 to be formulated at all unless in terms correspondingly sultry ; but 
 this man is in the moral bewilderment of the idea that a thing 
 understated is not wronged and therefore, to be on the safe side he 
 tones down his utterance beyond the facts. 
 
 To be on the safe side! Well, Gentlemen, as my final contri- 
 bution to your enlightenment to-day, I will draw out here a recipe 
 
 for keeping on the safe side. Are you afraid you shall seem more: 
 
 interested in the things you describe than the real worth of those 
 things will justify? Are you afraid you shall seem more orthodox 
 than you are, more pious than you are, more fascinated with each 
 parishioner than any mortal of any discrimination can be with some 
 of them, more emphatic all around than the facts will warrant? 
 Well, listen. As regards the truths we are called to preach, 
 and the human and divine interests we are set to conserve and ad- 
 vance ; thank God over-emphasis is not possible. Not to emphasize 
 them and make everything ring when we discuss them, is to imitate 
 that man referred to who spoke of a hurricane as “a nice thing,” 
 and of God’s vice-regent in the Egyptian desert with the hosts 
 of Hell surging at his gates day and night, as “just lovely.” Let 
 no preacher practically disparage the things whereof he speaks, by 
 
 a 
 
YALE LECTURES. 317 
 
 speaking of them faintly and in a small way. They are not small, 
 and he need not be when he handles them. 
 
 There is no difficulty there. The lawyers and the doctors do 
 not have just the advantage that we do at that point. The realities 
 to which they give themselves are pretty great, and they may put in 
 their energies accordingly ; but ours are much greater. We have 
 undertaken to co-work with the Son of God in the spiritual salvation 
 of the world, to fill up (O! searching thought!) “to fill up that 
 which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of the 
 Church which is his body ;” not by physical endurances necessarily 
 or mainly, but by entering into the fellowship of his spiritual 
 anxieties and sufferings, which spiritual sufferings of his are the 
 pivotal point of his mediatorship, the point of ultimate pressure 
 when he bore the sin of the whole world. If a lawyer gets a case 
 involving a few millions, he considers that he has a great case, and 
 he moves into it with all his powers, and his entire argument palpi- 
 tates with the heart-beat of those millions, while neither judge nor 
 jury look upon it as anything unseemly or disproportionate if his 
 language seems to say continually :—“ This is a matter of millions.” 
 Well, let us preachers talk as though we had millions in the case. 
 
 But as to that recipe. Here it is. 
 
 If a man is substantially orthodox, and substantially religious, 
 and substantially resolved to save his every parishioner, then he 
 himself is saved forever and utterly from all kinds of excessive 
 action and speech. 
 
 I read in an English newspaper of a gentleman in London, a 
 Swiss gentleman of much character and ability, but of a curious 
 negligence in keeping himself personally clean. He began to be ailing 
 in a way that he did not understand and he sought the counsel of an 
 eminent physician, who knew his peculiarities. And this physician 
 wrote out an uncommonly particularized and professional prescrip- 
 tion for him ;—which he carefully read and then said: ‘Why, 
 Doctor, I do not see that this is anything more or less than taking 
 a bath.” ‘Well, it is open to that objection,” replied the Doctor. 
 “Tt is open to that objection.” 
 
 And my recipe is similar to that. I introduced it with some 
 pomposity, as though I were opening a brand new box of wisdom, 
 but in reality it is as old-fashioned and tame as taking a bath. I 
 simply say :—My Dear Young Brethren, do you just be good men, 
 and then you may speak and act, orthodoxly, piously, and with 
 
318 - ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 pastoral affection. There will be no exaggeration and hypocrisy of 
 exaggeration init. But out of you (as the Holy Scriptures intimate), 
 shall flow veracities like rivers of living water. 
 
 Now notice, I do not insist that you shall be good, by a good- 
 ness such as only one minister in ten thousand reaches, before you 
 shall let yourself be a preacher or a pastor at all. Of course that 
 one man in ten thousand is the very man you must try to be—it 
 were shameful to aim at anything less—but the presumption is that 
 you will not be he. You will be more than you would be if you 
 did not strive to be he, but the chances that you will reach to his 
 stature are nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to one. A 
 discouraging way to state it, but we want to get at the facts. 
 
 Well, as extreme saintliness is possible to you, but extremely 
 improbable (according to those figures), I advise you to make sure 
 of a decent average of goodness among that multitudinous nine 
 thousand and over; and on that as a working basis rest your min- 
 istry down, and go on. As your years multiply and your spiritual 
 strivings multiply, and you approximate that eminent and solitary 
 divine just mentioned, you can lift your ministry, your preaching 
 and your pastoring to square with the new facts. If your preach- 
 ing and pastor-work advances faster than you advance toward 
 yonder eminent saint, that is inveracity—the thing I am lecturing 
 against—but if you advance your talk, and your deeds, and your 
 asking your people about their families, only and precisely as you 
 yourself do interiorly get on, that is exactness before God and man 
 and before your own conscience. Do that, and you can roll your- 
 self as a sweet morsel under your own tongue, all the while. And 
 you can do that. Theoretically, you can be the one minister in ten 
 thousand, but with ten thousand figures, save one, against you, your 
 theoretical possibility is mainly a beautiful object of contemplation. 
 But to be a good man simply, is practicable. You can have a sharp 
 and effective conscience. You can have religious feelings. You can 
 have communion with God. You can have the graces of the Holy 
 Spirit. I will not stop to name those graces, but you can have 
 them. And you can have in you a daily steadfast push to do 
 your duty. And if you get all those plain and feasible things, 
 you are a man worth having in any parish—city or country. 
 
 And then as to that ofttimes pretty difficult matter, the having 
 an enormous interest in every pew-holder, both temporal and spirit- 
 ual, I observe : 
 
YALE LECTURES. 319 
 
 First—That there are undeniable differences in pew-holders, 
 which differences not to see were unintellectual and inveracious. 
 Some of these persons it were the work of a lifetime to warm up to, 
 particularly if you keep in mind their characteristic imperfections. 
 By dropping those and making believe that they have no imperfec- 
 tions you may embrace them with a degree of heartiness :—but it 
 is better to take men just as they are, and accurately size the 
 dimensions of the problem and the job you have to handle. Let 
 us know the worst. 
 
 It would seem then—taking the matter as far as we have now 
 got along in it—it would seem that a minister, an honest and dis- 
 cerning minister, simply cannot treat his whole parish alike. He 
 may treat them alike in all ways of practical kindness, but when 
 you come to the endearments of personal intercourse, the melting 
 right down on one’s neck, so to say; why he cannot. He must 
 select. Even Jesus knew the difference between Herod and Pilate 
 and Mary of Bethany—knew it and marked it. 
 
 But let us rise a little now, and light up this terrible matter, 
 by a second remark, which does light it up, and let the minister out 
 into a plain and good path. 
 
 Our specific and characteristic relation as ministers to our 
 congregation is religious and not social. ‘To be sure sociality comes 
 in, incidentally, and may be very sweet, just as when we go a-fish- 
 ing, it is necessary, and may be refreshing, to get down to and 
 perhaps into the same water with the fish. The fish are pleased 
 and we are pleased very likely. But that is not what we are there 
 for. No; we are there to catch them. If their being pleased to 
 have us in the water with them, makes it easier for us to catch them 
 (as it probably does), it is all right; but pleasure—either in them 
 or in us—is not our end. 
 
 Well, the moment a minister disengages his end or aim from 
 sociality, and everything else, and bears right down to the personal 
 salvation of these men and women, the solemn question whether he 
 can bring himself to really enjoy falling on their necks, and on the 
 neck of Herod just the same as on the neck of John or Mary— 
 that question subsides. He does not care whether he can or not. 
 He loves them all, as the purchase of the Lord Jesus; and the 
 more it seems unlikely he can ever love this one and that one of 
 them on natural principles, they are so faulty and disagreeable, the 
 more intensely is he drawn to them in spiritual affection. Just 
 
320 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 think of Mr. Moody standing before a great assembly of roughs in 
 low London or low New York! A steaming witch’s cauldron 
 were not more repulsive to every moral sense and every physical 
 sense. But this very repulsiveness is what attracts Moody to them 
 infinitely. Ido not doubt that the man, any time, ona square au- 
 thentic challenge, would die for the most far-gone scoundrel among 
 them ; and do it joyfully. Let a minister once get that affection 
 into him, the religious affection, the true affection of his holy 
 office, and it transfigures all his Herod pew-holders before his eyes. 
 —yYes, the beauty of him who died for these Herods is imputed to 
 them, and he sees them in the glory of that ideal character to which 
 by the redeeming grace of God they may come. 
 
 
 
HIGH-HEARTEDNESS IN THE 
 MINISTRY. 
 
 My brethren, it is one of the best blessings to be permitted to 
 be a Christian minister. Permitted by your personal make-up ; per- 
 mitted by your circumstances ; permitted by the favorable voice of 
 the Church ; and permitted by the sufficiently clear call of your God, 
 delivered to you by the Holy Ghost operating in your consciousness. 
 With what a solid and good feeling, now, I give to you that testi- 
 mony, founded on what little I myself have experienced and upon 
 a considerable observation of the ministerial class. In fact, I do 
 not see how a man could consent to stand here and speak in these 
 courses of lectures at all, if he did not have that feeling about our 
 vocation. I think your honest faces down there, looking at him, 
 would make him blush at his own hypocrisy should he try it. 
 
 However, there is slag in almost everything. This is a world of 
 slag. Slag came in, when Adam went out of paradise and it is 
 here yet. And so there naturally come into our work some things, 
 and some things are often allowed to come in when there is no need 
 of it, which tend to kill enthusiasm in the minister ; so that you can 
 actually see scattered instances of them, who started out with fresh- 
 ness, determination and expectancy, but have gradually sunk into 
 routine, dignity, decorum and unhopefulness. They are not de- 
 moralized, in the sense of being immoral, these that I have in mind. 
 They have not lapsed from the truth. Their trumpet, what trumpet. 
 they have, gives no uncertain sound. They move through the 
 circle of their duties with the punctuality of a chronometer. Their 
 long professional service has stamped their personal appearance 
 and demeanor, so that they are eminently respectable men to 
 meet and look at. And they will keep on in their appointed round 
 
322 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 till their years end, and will have some conventional scripture to 
 speak for them, on their tombstone. But they are not enthusiastic. 
 I do not mean gushing, but enthusiastic. Some of God’s ministers 
 are as chirping at sixty or seventy years of age, as they were when 
 they began. They have found nothing in the courses of their work 
 to make them humdrum. But these others have. And now, what 
 is it that they have found? Just what the chipper ones have found, 
 in many respects. 
 
 For instance, when they began to be preachers, they supposed 
 that if they made good arguments, before a reasonable congregation, 
 and quoted good scriptures and closed their discourse always with 
 a suitable, well-meant, unimpeachable application of their subject, 
 then all those reasonable human beings would be convinced and act 
 accordingly ; but behold, as often as anyway, when they preached 
 there was no particular sign that anybody was convinced. They, 
 the people, listened to their sensible and warm-hearted young man, 
 and were glad they had secured such a promising minister, at a price 
 that they were able to pay, but as for proceeding to be converted, 
 or to be perfectly sanctified, they did not. Well, if this discomfit- 
 ure had been for one Sunday only, the man could have lived through 
 it; but lo, it kept on. By and by, it began to occur to him that the 
 law of Christian preaching might be, that it does not convert every 
 soul instantly. Then he remembered that, in the School of Divinity, 
 he had been taught how the heart of man is depraved and unwilling 
 and hard to melt down, and soon. He recollected too, what he had 
 heard many times, but never thought of, that the most successful 
 ministers who ever lived, had more defeats than successes in this 
 very matter of souls saved. Whitefield, Moody, Wesley leave a 
 hundred times more people unconverted than they convert, in the 
 places and mass-meetings where they speak. And as though to 
 indicate to them that they must all expect just that, it is related of 
 Jesus himself that whenever he spoke to men, the listening multi- 
 tude divided, some saying yes and some saying no; and divided in 
 no middle line ; moreover, the result being, even as Jesus expressed 
 it: “ Many are called, but few chosen.” 
 
 It seems strange that a person can live twenty to thirty years in 
 the world, go through College, spend three years in a theological 
 Seminary, hear a good many valuable lectures from a series of plain- 
 spoken and warning men ; and yet commence to be a preacher with 
 no practical sense of this thing that I am now telling ; so that he is 
 
YALE LECTURES. 323 
 
 disappointed and chilled when his charges from the pulpit all the 
 year long are so numerously resisted and not made the most of, by 
 both saint and sinner ; but so it is—being told a thing is so curiously 
 different from personally encountering it. 
 
 To tell the truth, my young brethren, I myself struck a streak 
 of disappointment right at this point. I did not find what I expected. 
 I did not know that I expected it—we never know half that is in us 
 —and one of the great uses of practical life is to bring us to a con- 
 sciousness of our own contents, in the way of knowledge and the 
 rest. I did not give up, but I could see how a man might at any 
 rate, how he might slacken by and by, and deliver his strokes for 
 conscience sake mostly ; or because it is the proper thing to do, 
 according to all accounts. I think my teacher in theology helped 
 me to a good deal of confidence in the power of mere argument. 
 Of course he did not fail to inform me, that argument unassisted by 
 God’s direct unction must be a failure, but he madé such an admir- 
 able argument always himself, when he tried and withal had such 
 a fine soldierliness in it, that made as I happen to be I could 
 remember not much save that. I believed his doctrine of unction ; 
 but as often comes to pass with beliefs, I folded it decently and 
 respectfully away ; swore by it when called upon and proceeded to 
 get along without it in a measure. Therefore, my fervor in preach- 
 ing was in risk of ebbing, when I saw that all the world was not 
 directly moved thereby. 
 
 Again, some are cooled a little by the unexpected parishes in 
 which they find themselves somehow—soon or late—small parishes 
 —parishes not on the line of any railway or turnpike—parishes of 
 limited salaries, limited church attendance, limited increase of chil- 
 dren, limited vivacity and perhaps limited intelligence. They never 
 supposed their merits ranked as low as that. They were bright 
 enough in the Seminary, wrote good compositions, attended to their 
 studies, were reasonably well spoken of, had a good voice, were easy 
 and successful in their gestures, took their license in their pocket 
 all their last year and went about preaching with what seemed 
 acceptance at the time; and now, at the end of twenty years, they 
 are lodged and seemingly stuck where there is neither railway, turn- 
 pike, nor increase. Such a discrepancy between a man and his cir- 
 cumstances no one can appreciate who has not been in it. And 
 then the way it confuses a man’s mind! How did I get here, he 
 says. What secret faculty, attribute or endowment in me, or set of 
 
324 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 endowments was it, that caused me to be shoved along down and 
 down, by not easy stages, to this place and doom. 
 
 Dear Soul! that has happened to him, very possibly, which 
 happens to men in every calling. He is a solidly meritorious 
 person, just as he thinks he is. His head is excellent and his char- 
 acter is excellent. But time and sufficient experiment have brought 
 to light a constitutional disqualification in him for that particular 
 service on the face of the earth, the service ministerial. Very likely 
 it is a minute point ; but as the smallest kind of a sufficiently sharp 
 tack in the bottom of a man’s shoe controls the whole situation and 
 makes it necessary for him to get another shoe, so that little disquali- 
 fication is the explanation of the mystery of that minister’s career. 
 When I heard Cardinal Manning and listened to the victorious and 
 far-reaching sniff that he gave whenever he made a thoroughly good 
 point, I thought that for a settled preacher in a first-class position, 
 he would hardly answer. A sniff is nothing. It does not disprove 
 a person’s character. It does not show that he is not learned. able 
 and godly enough to be a Cardinal ; but it might prevent his being 
 a Cardinal, if the duties of that great office required him to stay on 
 one spot forever, among the same set of people and in such close 
 quarters that they could hear and could not fail to hear, every sniff 
 he put forth—thousands in a year, perhaps. 
 
 It would be ungracious in me to give a list of the many kinds 
 of sniff that hinder men. It is some defect in the man’s oratory, 
 perhaps ; it is something or other that you can hardly put your 
 finger on in his manners ; it is his inborn proneness to doubt a thing 
 which he has struggled against but has not yet extirpated; and his 
 preaching, in various ways, is made unacceptable by that feature of 
 his mind; or unconsciously he is dogmatic and conscientiously 
 aggressive and can hardly sit five minutes in a parlor without coming 
 at you with his battering ram ; his well-meant and Christian batter- 
 ing ram, to be sure, and designed for your salvation ; nevertheless, 
 you do not want any salvation that is brought in that way—depraved 
 human nature being ridiculously particular about the way in which 
 good is done to it. Or this good man is naturally very reserved and 
 the modern parish insists on a good deal of effusiveness ; or while 
 he is congenial to old people, he is not winning with the young—or 
 to boil it all down into one sentence and state vaguely what I do not 
 relish analyzing—he is not popular. It was supposed when he was . 
 young that he was going to be popular; and he supposed he was ; 
 
YALE LECTURES. 325 
 
 but no one then suspected the sharp tack that would begin to stick 
 up in him, as parish after parish tried him on and wore him a little. 
 So he is not as enthusiastic as he used to be. 
 
 Again, and on the other hand, some ministers are so popular 
 that, being much praised and stall-fed by their admiring parishion- 
 ers, they grow fat, contented and dull and greatly need to be pricked 
 by the sharp pricks of adversity. To be sure, when they get soggy 
 enough, they are no longer popular; but what made them soggy 
 was too much prosperity and pampering. Pampering tends to kill 
 a man’s noble enthusiasm. 
 
 Again, his early enthusiasm may grow tame by reason of his 
 habitual contact as a preacher—his professional contact—with the 
 truths of God and the things of God. All the time he moves among 
 them ; all the time it is his business to handle them; all the time 
 this necessary familiarity may reduce that lively sensibility in regard 
 to them which he once knew. 
 
 And again, a minister may unwittingly numb himself and settle 
 into the deadness of rut-work and go by routine rather than by spon- 
 taniety, by starting on his career with a not absolutely supreme 
 intention to do good and let all considerations, personal to himself, 
 go. ‘There is an opportunity for great self-deception just there, my 
 brethren. I am not willing to believe that any man of you is con- 
 scious at present of anything but a determination to do God’s work 
 and not cherish yourself—not care more for salary than you do for 
 souls—not delight in a brilliant parish call more than in a large 
 opportunity to bless mankind. Theological students have a good 
 deal of human nature in-them, but they are all honest to that extent. 
 However, they are not all as sanctified as they may think they are. 
 A quotable per centage of the students here and everywhere, will 
 incline to use the parishes that call them and their opportunities as 
 ministers, for their own advantage more than they ought. They are 
 capable of that kind of alloy in their motives. They do not now dis- 
 tinctly anticipate such works, but it will come. Well, they must 
 fight against it. I presume all of them will. And one of the 
 reasons why they had better is, that a service of God carried on - 
 with that admixture of the personal element works tremendously 
 to extinguish the characteristic enthusiams of the ministerial office ; 
 and I can point you to men now living whose life is unhappy, who 
 have a great deal to say against parishes and their meanness and 
 their poor appreciation of what is done for them, and who discharge 
 
326 , YALE LECTURES. 
 
 their official duties in a perfunctory torpidity and with just the joy 
 of a man on a tread-mill, because they have slipped along into self- 
 serving ; although it may be that even yet they are not quite aware 
 of the slipping. 
 
 I have now given you some specimens of the things that tame 
 down the ministerial man from the beautiful ardor and expectation of 
 his first sermon-work and pastor-work, into the round-and-round and 
 around again, of a merely perfunctory fidelity. I have omitted, 
 though, one of the frequent forces of dullness, namely :—the neces- 
 sarily routine character of some of our work—and I have made the 
 omission, because I want to discuss the formidable subject of rou- 
 tine in another lecture. 
 
 I have also omitted the depression which a good and faithful 
 minister may feel when he notices the numerous Christian congre- 
 gations that are captivated by shallow men in the ministry and men 
 of no taste and mock orators and unserious men and men every 
 way unseasoned, untempered, unregulated and uncalled of the Holy 
 Ghost too, one would say. When a true minister is sick of such 
 sights, he is led to inquire within himself, why should I offer my 
 services to this unperceiving generation. Would that God would 
 let me out into some pursuit and calling where a sterling man goes 
 for what he is worth. So frequent has it come to be that people 
 are bewitched by inferior ministerial gifts, that great popularity in a 
 preacher almost creates a presumption against him, in serious and 
 well-balanced souls, who know nothing of the man as yet, save the 
 one thing that he is very popular. Mr. Ruskin hits the matter off, 
 I remember, in one of his customary thrusts, by saying :—“a popular 
 preacher is admired by the majority of his congregation for the 
 worst parts of his sermon.”’ But let it go. I am glad to be through 
 with this business of telling what depresses ministers and deadens 
 them. For now IJ am ready to spread myself out on the things that 
 nourish enthusiasm in a man and keep him alive, merry-hearted and 
 aflame, notwithstanding all possible disadvantages and discour- 
 agements. 
 
 And first, the feasibility of a life-long chirkness and upbubbling 
 of the soul, is settled by the many plain instances of the same. We 
 look for some bubble in boys and beginners. It is natural to them. 
 The force of life in them is not yet abated by the pull and the drain 
 of multiplied years, and they have not come into the full stress and 
 wear of affairs. But have we not all seen old boys in the ministry, 
 
YALE LECTURES. 327 
 
 gray and worn men with a boy’s heart under their old jackets, a 
 boy’s zeal, a boy’s dauntless expectation ; men that like to preach 
 as well as they ever did, like to strive for souls, like to defend the 
 truth, like to believe in the kingdom of God and its ultimate domin- 
 ion? Why yes; and things like that are not uncommon in other 
 professions and pursuits. There are aged lawyers whose passion 
 for legal investigation and work is a supreme delight to them and 
 much more than in the days of their youth. And scientists and 
 musicians and teachers and business men, have a similar experi- 
 ence; and even sheer money-getting, that pitiful blind lust for 
 accumulation, often grows to an inextinguishable rage, as the years 
 go on; so that the man goes out of the world at four or five score 
 —no matter how old—with a money-eagerness still on the increase. 
 If a secular pursuit, that in the nature of things cannot engage and 
 inspire one-half of a man’s soul, may make him so indefatigable and 
 so elate, so long as he lives ; and if a pursuit that is not only secular 
 but directly cross and crash to everything fine, noble and spiritually 
 pure in our nature, can keep a man alive, agog, industrious and 
 devoted, so long as breath remains in his body; would it not be 
 strange and infamous too, if ministers failed to reach a similar undy- 
 ing zeal; stimulated as they are by the highest conceivable motives 
 and fascinations. 
 
 The lawyer, the scientist, the statesman, the philosopher, is led 
 on, I will suppose, by his love of truth ; but consider the superiority 
 of the truths that lead us on, as suited to inflame feeling and 
 endeavor ; the truths of God and the truths of man as the child of 
 God, foredoomed to immortality and chosen in Jesus Christ tc 
 eternal life. Our truths stir us up and keep us going, by their very 
 dimensions. It is no mere sharpness that we are called to in our 
 studies, not microscopy, pettifogging, atomizing, however important 
 they may be ; but it is to affairs of size, of out-stretching self-expan- 
 sions, which ask for the grandest we can do. 
 
 And another thing ; some might think that this very size that 
 I speak of, in the truths we pursue, must prevent our getting far 
 into them and therefore-must tend to daunt endeavor and depress - 
 the mind’s natural ardor ; but we, who are in the business, know it 
 ~isnotso. A great truth is much more stimulating than little truths. 
 Moreover, we do get in to them by our labors. We find out one thing 
 after another in the field of religion and the field of theology ; partly 
 because things actually new are brought to light now and then and 
 
328 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 partly because the very old truths which we have always known and 
 the Church has always known, are freshened to our apprehension in 
 such wise as to seem new. How common it is for Bible readers 
 and students, to have texts that they learned in childhood, have run 
 against and considered a hundred times since and have often 
 expounded to others, suddenly star forth before them like meteors, 
 and fill them with divine delight. Along the horizon of every 
 inquiring and devout mind, there is always a flicker and a glow, as 
 of truths yet hidden behind the hills ; and the expectancy thus kept 
 alive and the deep questioning, are among the most sterling joys of 
 our life. How reprehensible and dreadful is that minister who, in 
 the midst of such possibilities and called daily to handle and apply 
 the truth of truths, can humdrum and gradually die down into just 
 a respectable automaton ! 
 
 Passing now to a point under the head of supports for a minis- 
 ter’s enthusiasm, I mention something very fundamental indeed ; 
 something which alone is more than sufficient for any amount of 
 perseverance, high-heartedness and increase of joy. I refer to that 
 sense of mission which we may all have and one as much as another. 
 In so far as your call to the ministry and your mission to men from 
 God, is by you simply inferred from your mental endowments, your 
 proficiency in scriptural and other learning, your ability to address 
 assemblies, your circumstances in life and the verdict of an ecclesi- 
 astical council, assembled to pass upon your case and send you out 
 humanly authenticated, multitudes of men may have a better call 
 
 than you. Their gifts, acquisitions and external furtherances, may _ 
 
 be more than yours ; and the council that inspected them may have 
 worked itself up to a more rousing majority than your council could 
 see its way to; and even if your council was unanimous about you, 
 possibly it was one of those luke-warm, guess-work and charitable 
 unanimities, that are fair to look upon outwardly, but within. are 
 only so-so. 
 
 But there is one form of callin the which you need not be 
 beaten by mortal man, be he never so brilliant and the darling of his 
 council ; your access to God and God’s access to you, the mutual 
 approach of you and God, is just as open, direct and assured as can 
 be another’s ; and that which is the ultimate factor in all real calls 
 —the soul’s message and commission from God direct, private and 
 
 inaccessible to all inspection by bystanders, doubters, critics, well- 
 
 wishers and inquiring councils—that may be yours perfectly. Many 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 329 
 
 a man has it and so may you. And while I would not advise a 
 young man to refuse the ministry because this his inward summons 
 from God had not yet come to be quite irresistible ; the fact being 
 that many an excellent and successful minister has gone to his work 
 without that clear inward foreordination that he desired at the time ; 
 yet I would say to you, that when a man has reached the thick and 
 thunder of life’s battle, or say, when the great waters that are fain to 
 drown him, strangle his zeal, kill his vigor, put out all his fires and 
 water-log him generally, are rolling in, there is no dam against them 
 more heaven-high and solid that he can raise, than his constant 
 remembrance how when he first went out on this business of trying 
 to save souls, he did not send himself, and was not sent by man in 
 the main, and was not pushed in by a lot of conspiring circum- 
 stances, but was sweetly constrained by the spirit of all grace. And 
 so constrained it would have been the woe of his life if he had 
 not gone in; so constrained too, that he could have withstood, (so 
 he felt at the time), the lack of all customary external furtherances ; 
 and perhaps even the adverse finding of a fallible human council. 
 How such a memory as that lights up a poor, tried minister’s soul 
 and keeps him warm and elate forever. There is nothing perfunctory 
 about him and cannot be. 
 
 But as I intimated, many (and perhaps a majority,) are in the 
 ministerial office with no such supreme off-send to fall back on 
 when life grows heavy, when the parish is small and away from the 
 turnpike, when they find they are not orators and when perhaps 
 even their personal godliness seems mysteriously to have less weight 
 with the populace that they would have supposed it must. They 
 may be truly called ; that is, they are in the vocation where they 
 ought to be; and yet they did not secure, when they started, quite 
 that call in the soul to which I have referred ; and now what shall 
 they do? ; 
 
 I should reason on their case in this way. It is not wonderful 
 that they missed that special, luminous, self-evidencing, never-to-be- 
 forgotten call, at the beginning of their official career. “They were 
 young—young in every respect. They did not realize the worth | 
 of such a call and therefore did not seek for it so earnestly as they 
 might. They had not learned the secret of full converse with God. 
 In their exuberant young energy they did not conceive the miser- 
 able uselessness of all human energies, however exuberant, aside 
 from the spirit of God. Most men have to do their natural best 
 
330 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and be baffled a thousand times, before they can learn that one 
 thing. It is not wonderful then, I say, that these ministers have not 
 a first-class “call”? to remember and ground on and get daily 
 strength from. 
 
 But now they have had experience. The futility of man’s forth- 
 puttings to do God’s works, they have learned from many a defeat. 
 Contrariwise, the triumph of the feeblest forth-puttings, if only God 
 assists, they have also learned ; by an occasional experience of their 
 own and by a good deal of watching of ungifted but consecrated 
 brethren, they have learned the way of prayer. The path between 
 them and their God is trodden bare with their footsteps. So now 
 they are in a way to get a call for themselves. They need not strike 
 out for a great general call to cover their entire remaining life, such 
 a call as a young man before he begins may naturally seek. No, let 
 them push for a smaller thing than that, a thing, at any rate, more 
 detailed and close at hand. For instance: let them refuse to preach 
 on any given occasion till God distinctly gives them the sermon for 
 that occasion—the topic—the text—the handling of the topic. 
 Let them insist on that specific call. It is a pretty cheap minister 
 that never had a sermon given him. And if he can have one, he 
 can have a thousand and every one. The God that gave the one 
 can give the rest. The man that got the one, can get the rest. The 
 secret that brought the one, will bring them numberless and sure ; 
 and the secret that brought the sermon, will bring anything. For 
 instance, the minister can have his public prayer given him, or the 
 private word of counsel he is going to speak, or the settlement of 
 the numerous practical questions that come up in the course of his ~ 
 ministry, as easily as he can have his sermon given. And_all these 
 givings from God are specific calls of God. Hence, when a man 
 moves out to a particular thing on a call, he moves strong ; and he 
 is happy and he tends to believe in the ministerial office ; and he 
 thinks a parish off from the turnpike is worth saving and might fitly 
 occupy the gifts of an archangel. When some deacon of his, with 
 a strong and penetrating mind and frank and conscientious habit of 
 speech and a due sense of his official importance, tells him that he 
 did not enjoy his sermon, did not approve of it and did not think 
 he was impressive in its delivery ; although the minister is mortified 
 at first and confused in his mind, nevertheless, presently it comes to 
 him that he got that sermon from God, on his knees—on his knees 
 more than once—on his knees every day while he was writing it he 
 
YALE LECTURES. 331 
 
 was speaking with God and God was speaking with him ; and while 
 he was sitting at his table making his pen go, hunting for scriptural 
 references, looking at his commentaries, doing his work, his soul 
 felt itself to be feasting—it was feasting—God feasted him ; and in 
 that way constantly God undersigned his name to that sermon—and 
 aman with all this recollection and assurance in him, can stand ten 
 deacons—ten perspicacious deacons. And the beauty of it is, he 
 can stand them, not as withstanding them, not combatively, not 
 resentfully, but receptively, genially and in that prudent spirit of 
 silence, which is so wholesome always in a parish. Why should this 
 minister make contention, or feel hurt, over a matter on which God 
 has definitely spoken to him. The minister may be mistaken about 
 God’s part in that sermon—to mistake is human—but probably he 
 is not mistaken. He is no more likely to be mistaken than he is in 
 any other quite plain thing. However, all I want to inculcate along 
 here, is the general idea of the practicability and the usefulness of 
 calls as numerous as the numerous details of a minister’s daily life 
 and labors ; and emphatically do I wish to lift up and magnify these 
 specific habitual calls, as a first-rate antidote for the dejections, or 
 forces of dejection, inherent in our office; and the much more 
 multiplied dejections that are not inherent in the office, but are let 
 in and lugged in by ministers themselves; and are thrust in by 
 perverse or misjudging men and women on the outside. 
 
 It is often that ministers find their circumstances rather deso- 
 late—their deacons too perspicacious—their congregations too full 
 of old roots of bitterness ; their own oratory too feeble and their 
 salaries as feeble as their oratory. But none of these things move 
 them, ot diminish their industry, fire and hope, provided all along 
 through the stretches of desolation, God drops in His clear, sweet 
 calls and calls, like bells out of the sky, and fills the souls of his 
 servants with the great music of them. | 
 
 But now, thirdly ; close along side of what I have been saying, 
 comes this thought ; a man in close practical converse with God, in 
 the manner just explained, is instinctively hopeful, warm and 
 undaunted and unable to be sunk in his spirit by any criss-cross of — 
 circumstances. It is not a matter of reasoning, thus—“ This ser- 
 mon of mine was unquestionably given to me by my God, because 
 I besought him ; therefore I stand to it, deacon or no deacon and 
 rejoice therein”—no, the matter of which I now speak is much 
 less argumentative than that and much more mystical. It is this the 
 
 24. 
 
332 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 man, by virtue of his habitual, close terms with God in the work of 
 getting his numberless calls, is unwittingly lifted up into a real 
 partnership in God’s own repose and sanguine expectation ; and 
 so, when the deacon speaks to him, or when the general work of 
 God moves on tediously in his parish, under his administration, or 
 the individual soul that he has labored with for weeks cannot be 
 won ; or his people get tired of his preaching and want him to move 
 ‘on, or what is worse, because vaster, when the cause of salvation is 
 stayed, or even retrograde throughout a whole nation and perchance 
 throughout the world ; he has no feeling that these things are of any 
 permanent moment; he knows all the same that the kingdom of 
 God stands sure; that the lion of the tribe of Judah is to conquer ; 
 that his own dead parish is not forsaken ; that yonder long-sought 
 person in his parish is not doomed ; that other days of grace are to 
 come. And somehow—he cannot explain how—as respects those 
 not few personal instances to which salvation will certainly never 
 reach, he is not cast down in just the way he should have supposed 
 he would be; he is sorry but he is not desperate ; it is something 
 as though the persons were to be saved after all ; and in like manner, 
 his own unexpectedly small and inefficacious ministry does not 
 make him melancholy, not that exactly ; for perhaps it will add up 
 at the last better than he fears; the reports are not all in yet and 
 they will not be till the day of judgment; in any case, he simply 
 cannot find it in his heart to take on about it, as though there 
 were no God and no God’s providence. He does not reason it out, 
 I say once more, but no matter, the peace flows into him and the 
 
 joy and the enthusiasm ; he can find few rational considerations to ~ 
 
 support it, perchance, at present, but it does not need such support ; 
 it comes of itself—or to fall back to my original explanation, a man 
 in daily converse with God, a man full of God’s calls and God’s 
 personal dealings, by the nature of the case doth participate in 
 God’s own inscrutable serenity as he looks from his throne down 
 on these same unnumbered, wide-spread deplorables of many kinds. 
 
 Now, brethren, I must give you another strong old recipe for 
 Jassitude, perfunctoriness and the numbness of routine in clerical 
 people. This recipe now coming, does not operate on the outside 
 of the difficulty. It does not comfort the numb minister by telling 
 him how he can get his salary raised, or how he can make some 
 
 eligible parish call him away from the uninteresting old spot where. 
 
 he now is, or anything of that kind; but like all good recipes, it 
 
 — i a 
 
 
 
YALE LECTURES. 333 
 
 moves straight in on his joints, marrow and reins and totally revo- 
 lutionizes his inward parts. Let me open the matter in this way. 
 St. Paul speaks of our fellowship of Christ’s sufferings, and now what 
 were those sufferings. They were these. 
 
 First, his self-denial when he left his primal state and incor- 
 porated himself in our lowly fiesh and became subject to earthly 
 conditions. 
 
 Next, he took the burden of our dreadful case on to his sympa- 
 thetic feeling, thus bearing our sins as no man or angel could begin 
 to, because neither man or angel is deep enough in his sensibilities, 
 and because he is not comprehensive enough, either intellectually or 
 morally, to gather in the details of our lot and doom, in their entire 
 number and their entire size. 
 
 Next, in that which has come to be known, preeminently, as 
 the passion of Jesus, there was an unsearchable transaction between 
 
 him and his (and our) God, wherein he was dealt with and consented 
 to be dealt with and rejoiced to be dealt with, in a manner full of 
 agony for him, but full of deliverance for us—a transaction which has 
 been always both the fascination and the despair of theology :—a 
 transaction too around which the innumerable company of non- 
 expert thinkers and Christians have flocked, as though they all knew, 
 by their regenerated intuitions, that in the bosom of that mystery 
 somewhere, the crucial somewhat of their salvation was wrought. 
 But no matter about explanatiéns and waiving everything save one 
 thing, I say, Jesus did suffer for us, substitutionally and mediatorially. 
 
 And now, as to our fellowship with him, in the three august 
 particulars of his suffering, just named ; his suffering by incarnation, 
 his suffering by sympathy and his suffering in the mystery of the 
 cross. I need not argue that as regards incarnation and the suf- 
 fering thereof he must stand forever alone, no mortal being able to 
 share it; and as regards his crucifixion and the substitutional and 
 propitiatory suffering, in that he must, in the nature of the case, 
 stand forever alone ; so that the only remaining particular or point 
 at which such as we can follow him is his sympathetic deep concern 
 for men. And even there, we can only follow him afar off; but we . 
 can follow him—yes, what he felt we can feel in kind, and it is one 
 of the earmarks of our regeneration if we do. 
 
 And this concern for men, this Christ-like concern, does not 
 concentrate wholly or mainly on man as an embodied this-world, 
 temporal creature ; a being that needs to be fed, clothed, housed, 
 
334 ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 educated and decorously buried ; that sort of sympathy is humanita- 
 rianism and while Jesus was a humanitarian, that was not at all the 
 unique feature in his character, function and career. Jesus addressed 
 himself to man as a spiritual personage and spiritually fallen; and 
 whereinsoever he was sympathetically crushed by our lot, that was 
 the great point of the crush ; and it belongs to us to enter his fel- 
 lowship precisely there ; and a minister is no minister, but only a 
 lecturer and secularist, until he has entered there. And it lies in 
 the line of my subject to-day to add, that the minister who enters 
 there and there sympathetically expatiates, or as some would express 
 it, the minister who loves souls, aches for them, works for them, 
 storms heaven for them and has them for the spinal cord of his 
 whole official activity, is habitually full of joy, push and spiritual 
 seership, and can no more be dampened and made a professional 
 routinist and stick, than can God’s angels. 
 
 The only objection I have to that traditional phraseology, “love 
 for souls,” as a description of our fellowship with Christ in his suf- 
 fering sympathy with men, is that it is not broad enough. “Love 
 for souls” and “love for men,” are by no means equivalent and 
 interchangeable phrases. A man is more than asoul. A man isa 
 soul and a body, with all that implies. And Jesus did not come to 
 save souls any more truly than he came to save bodies, with all their 
 belongings, conditions and inferences. The gist of the doctrine of 
 the resurrection on one principal side of it, is that Jesus assumed the 
 human body, in its limitation, disability and wreck ; took it down 
 into the tomb, where by right it belonged, under the old sentence, 
 
 —‘ The wages of sin is death,” and rose with it, transubstantiated — 
 
 into a body, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal ; and 
 that when he thus rose, or more accurately, when, after forty days 
 of lingering here, he ascended to the right hand of God, he shed 
 forth the Holy Ghost as he had promised he would, to start the prac- 
 tical recovery of our souls and our bodies ; our souls right away and 
 our bodies when the good time comes ; that recovery of our bodies 
 being sure to be a repetition, limb for limb and line for line, of the 
 recovery of his own body, when he emerged from the grave, tran- 
 substantiated, spiritual, invulnerable, incorruptible and immortal. 
 It is not good theology then, to say “love for souls,”—that is if you 
 would be precise. It is not always necessary to be precise ; but if 
 we evangelical men complain of humanitarians that they omit the 
 souls of men from their anxieties and endeavors, we, on our part, 
 
 — ee 
 
YALE LECTURES. 335 
 
 must take care not to fall into a similar pit and omit the bodies of 
 men from our concern, our theology and our benevolent forth-put- 
 tings. ‘There is at present a confused push of undiscriminating 
 persons in the Christian Church against the resurrection of the body. 
 They think it is more spiritual and refined to ignore bodies and not 
 let the Christian salvation save them ; but the “vile body,” that St. 
 Paul tells about, is no viler than the vile soul that lives in it—not a 
 whit—and if you are to be so over refined and fastidious, you must 
 ignore souls too. The fact is, the blessed Jesus addressed himself 
 to souls and bodies both. He took us in our total, double-phased 
 vileness ; and he raises us in mass, as sunken ships are raised. In 
 his person to-day, at the right hand of God, we have a glorified 
 man, soul and body both, the perfect type in that respect and the 
 forerunner of the resurrection hosts that will pour into that same 
 holy presence at the last ; all with their bodies on albeit in such a 
 bodily transmutation, transfiguration and effulgence, as will make us 
 all turn in memory to this description of Jesus on the mount of his 
 transfiguration. ‘‘The fashion of his countenance was altered, his 
 face did shine as the sun and his raiment became shining, exceeding 
 white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them.” Is there 
 lack of refinement here ? 
 
 The evangelical love for men then is what we ministers need 
 in order to life-long, spontaneous workfulness and high spirit. I 
 call it ‘‘ evangelical” love in order to indicate two things ; that it is 
 another better and bigger thing than were humanitarian love; and 
 that it is a God-born love, and is not natural. The Holy Ghost puts 
 it into our hearts. And the one disability of some ministers is, that 
 such distinctly supernatural love has never been put into them, and 
 is not the spring whence their countless ministrations among men 
 flow forth. They are proper persons. They behave. They dress 
 rigidly in black suits. They call on their parishidners. They visit 
 the sick. They are kind to the poor. They are very decorative on 
 a ceremonial occasion. They uphold philanthropies, reforms, sound 
 politics and those well-ordered conventionalities whereon the peace 
 of the world reposes. There is a rustle of respectability in all their _ 
 garments. And they accomplish much good, too. If we had never 
 heard of a higher good than they ever accomplished, we should have 
 said, they are doing well and none can do better. But there is 
 a higher good. While you are thinking of such a minister as that 
 and his fine image is before you, just say over in your mind, “ the 
 
336 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 fellowship of Christ’s sufferings—the fellowship of Christ’s suffer- 
 ings,’ Say it over again and again till you and the other in 
 question are enveloped in the atmosphere of it and he begins to 
 be judged by its judgment and his round of service gets measured 
 thereby ; and see if he does not begin to shrink before you and 
 sound hollow comparatively and hardly seem a Christian minister 
 after all. 
 
 I speak sharply because the subject is a radical one. The one 
 trouble of all disheartened ministers is that they have fallen out, or 
 were never in, the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings. It is enough to 
 discourage any one, (the poor disheartened man says), not to have 
 more converts, more hearers, more salary, more books, more rail- 
 road facilities, more proximity to the metropolis, than have I. Well 
 sir, if you had in you the evangelical love for men and the soul- 
 travail of the Lord Jesus, you would have all things, just as St. Paul 
 said concerning himself, “as having nothing, and yet possessing all 
 things.” 
 
 But brethren, loving men in the evangelical way, as distin- 
 guished from the humanitarian, is not the easiest thing in the world, 
 but rather, is always a hard and unnatural thing ; and therefore this 
 serious question comes up: How shall we ministers get the love in 
 question? Many of us are constitutionally sluggish in our emotions 
 and unaffectionate. We may be pretty brainy and may therefore 
 have a never-dying interest in subjects and in the unfolding of sub- 
 jects in the pulpit ; an interest that, taken in connection with our 
 superior allotment of brains, makes able essayists of us and men a 
 
 good deal admired ; but as regards love to men, we are not gifted. . 
 
 You may be a humanitarian by birth, thousands are; but no one 
 was ever born an evangelical man-lover. Moreover, the men them- 
 selves that we are to make a business of loving are extremely 
 ineligible cases, as likely'as not. Anybody can be a pretty fair lover 
 if he may select his persons; but the dreadful thing about this 
 whole matter of evangelical loving is, that the more unlovely the 
 man or the woman, the more ardent and attached are we required 
 to be. There we are; and what are we going to do about it? 
 
 In replying to that, I go to the very foundation of the difficulty 
 at the start—I have done it already, in a passing way, but I wish to 
 do it formally and saliently now—and to say, that spiritual fervor 
 
 towards men, which is our most resplendent endowment as minis- | 
 
 ters of the Gospel, has its beginning and its eternal fountain in a 
 
 
 
 a ee 
 
YALE LECTURES. 337 
 
 personal experience of Christ for our own selves, by the Holy Ghost ; 
 a personal experience begun, kept up and daily renewed on and on. 
 If a man cannot say, I am crucified with Christ—I am dead to sin 
 and the world, and day by day I die to it, am dead and am buried, 
 something after the strong manner of St. Paul, then he has no 
 yearning over anybody, no motion within him to save his fellow men, 
 no evangelical love. He may have natural love in quantities, any 
 quantity ; enough to make of him an excellent humanitarian ; but 
 this other great kind of love, this greatest of all kinds, he knows 
 nothing about. 
 
 But I will suppose the minister has had his personal experience 
 of Christ—his regeneration, in fact, by the Holy Ghost—that to 
 begin with ; and that his experience of salvation is daily renewed 
 within him, so that therefore, love to men is at last natural to him. 
 Then next all along by study and meditation on the subject, he may 
 enlarge his conception of man, of his rank among created things, of 
 his very great dimensions, of his indefinite capacity for personal 
 expansion, his ability to suffer and to enjoy, his eternal inability to 
 go out of existence, the enormous ransom that has been paid down 
 for him, his salvability to the uttermost, under the terms of that 
 ransom, his present uncleanness and his possible holiness; his 
 present spiritual debility and inaptitude and his possible vigor ; his 
 present weariness and disrelish and: frequent despair in all moral 
 action and his possible spontaneity therein ; his present dreadful 
 selfishness towards his fellows and his possible concord and affection 
 towards thém ; his present profound affiliation with the kingdom of 
 evil and his possible affiliation with the kingdom of God—and when 
 the minister in these ways of meditation has reached an ample idea 
 of man, an irresistible loving concern for him springs up in his soul ; 
 and in all he does as preacher or pastor, he is made ardent, ener- 
 getic and positively supernatural—while in this exalted passion, it is 
 all but impossible for him to think of such a matter as his own salary 
 and the size of his congregation, and the location of his parish, and 
 the small power of his own oratory and the swarm of little dejections 
 that fill the air like summer gnats and try to make an unhappy, - 
 complaining, tormented creature of him. They simply cannot do it, 
 
 It is related of many Christian martyrs, how they literally did 
 not feel the fires that burned them up. I suppose there is good 
 physiology for that and good psychology. And our martyrdoms in 
 third-rate parishes, our personal exposure to able-bodied deacons 
 
338 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 and others, our conscious lack of natural gifts, our lack, perhaps, of 
 educational gifts, our unoratorical way of speaking, (the best we can 
 do, but nothing to boast of), our curious capacity, it may be, to 
 throw a coldness over the meeting when we go about in society, 
 (one would need to write a volume to rehearse all the inadequa- 
 cies of our tribe ; their real inadequacies, their imputed and alleged 
 inadequacies and that still larger class of inadequacies which are 
 neither real nor imputed, but are imagined by ourselves on the Mon- 
 days of each week ;) concerning the whole multitude of these, as 
 the martyrs mentioned were sublimed by the cause they died for, in 
 such wise that they did not know their hurts ; so our devotion to the 
 ends of the ministry, our love for those for whom Jesus died, will 
 at least minimize the disadvantages whereunto we may be appointed, 
 and lead us to thank God every day that he was willing to put us 
 into the service of his Son. 
 
 Now, my dear young men, I want to stop here, on this whole- 
 some high upland which we have reached after some climbing ; 
 but for the sake of a complete statement, I will take you down to a 
 low place and say unto you, that a minister truly devoted to the 
 high ends of his calling, as just now explained, will be likely to have 
 all the temporal furtherances he really needs, all the admiration he 
 can stand, and calls from parishes loud enough, as likely as not, to 
 imperil his soul. Amen. 
 
LEGITIMATE ELEMENTS OF 
 VARIETY IN CHURCH SERVICE. 
 
 I pass to-day to a consideration of the legitimate elements of 
 variety in the public services of the Church. 
 
 And when I say, legitimate elements, I intend in some wise a 
 slant at the elements. illegitimate that have been known to slip in, 
 on a Call from itching ears and itching eyes and that general itch of 
 the mind, which a certain very reputable writer hit off and made 
 immortal, when he said, ‘All the -Athenians and strangers which 
 were there, spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or 
 to hear some new thing.” Modern life is much more diversi- 
 fied and complex than life in the old time was.. There are more 
 books to read, more theatres, operas, concerts, circuses, menag- 
 eries and side-shows to attend ; more expansiveness, multiformity, 
 glitter, gorgeousness and dizziness of social life; swarms of re-— 
 formatory movements, from the salvation of drunkards and street 
 Arabs, to the betterment of the dress of women ; more clubs, guilds, 
 and conspiracies ; more new-born ologies to investigate and be able 
 to pass an examination upon—all these spicy inventions have to be 
 supported and continually replenished with fresh victims And at 
 the top of everything, stands that admirable modern monster, the 
 daily newspaper, to see that nobody goes to sleep in this miscella- 
 neous business of living and taking in all these varieties and inter- 
 esting phenomena, which are massed in the ample spaces of the first- 
 class journal; massed, described, spun out, ornamented and some- 
 times illustrated with wood-cuts, so that even children cry for them ; 
 and by the time Sunday comes and these rather jaded and sometimes, 
 blase multitudes of people who have been thus profusely entertained 
 during the week, are assembled in the Sanctuary to have their souls © 
 
340 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 saved ; I tell you, they know a dull service from one stirring ; they 
 want you to put on all your steam and blow your whistle in every 
 conceivable pitch. What they most delight in, is to have you tell 
 them in their Saturday’s newspaper exactly what your entertainment 
 is to be; the subject of the sermon, the musical programme, the 
 particular singers on duty for that day, who the preacher is and all 
 about it. A manful resistance to this pressure is kept up by 
 numerous old fogies—a considerably despised and useful class ; and 
 by force of them, aided to some extent by the better parts of the 
 Athenians themselves, who like a wide-awake life for six days, but 
 do not object to a comparatively peaceful harbor on the seventh ; 
 by the combination of all possible forces I say, the house of God is 
 preserved in a good degree of sanctity in many places ; the ancient 
 approved services go on for substance; and only such departures 
 from old-fashioned ways are permitted, as God will wink at, pre- 
 sumably, in view of the hardness of our hearts and the weakness of 
 our frame and the beggarly elements whereof we are composed in 
 both soul and body. But it is not as it was, when the New England 
 ministers could preach an hour and then preach another hour; 
 and could even pray an hour and on particular occasions make 4 
 service six hours long, with never a particle of sensational material 
 in it all, nor one word put in for mere entertainment’s sake, from 
 beginning to end, nor a single thing done to ease the strain of strict 
 attention, or to comfort the stationary and fixed mortal bodies of 
 those fine old Puritans. Those daysare gone. Somehow they have 
 
 left us. And now men lecture on the legitimate elements of variety _ 
 
 in tne public services of the Church, as though the Athenian great- 
 grandsons of those same iron-built fathers must be humored in their 
 desire for varied—not to say variegated—exercises in the Sanctuary. 
 
 My brethren, I am not going to surrender anything important 
 to this outcry for ease and entertainment in the house and worship 
 of God, but I will indicate certain points where it is not impossible 
 to introduce that diversity which even the most sanctified souls do 
 really enjoy ; and more than that, turn it to good spiritual account. 
 Let it be granted that in certain great staples, public worship is to be 
 the same, unchangeable forever ; as, that it is to be made up of prayer, 
 praise musically expressed, Scriptural readings, preaching and the 
 several ordinances which the Scriptures make binding on us; and 
 
 that these solid terms and details of any and every service are to be © 
 
 strung along in an outline order, which must be approximately the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 34] 
 
 same for all time ; let so much as that be conceded (as it will be by 
 people who think the subject out) ; and then the several easements 
 that may be let in for soul and body, are something like the fol- 
 lowing. 
 
 First, as our bodies naturally abhor a fixed posture if it is too 
 long continued, and as a body full of abhorrence can greatly discom- 
 pose the man in it and spoil his worship, it is best that our services 
 should call for quite a little change of posture as they move on. If 
 a service is properly organized, it will require diversified bodily 
 movements. ‘There is a congregation of sensible people, for whom 
 I have sometimes officiated, that unanimously keep to their seats 
 and rise not at all, until the singing of the last hymn; and they do 
 not rise then on any feeling that God’s praise should not be sung 
 down-sitting, rather than in a posture of special reverence ; for if 
 any such feeling was in them they would rise at the several times 
 when his praise is sung in the earlier parts of the hour—no, they 
 rise, partly because it seems about time so to do, and partly because 
 once up, they are already to march out and lose no time, so soon 
 as the benediction. which immediately follows the hymn, is spoken. 
 Now that people are continually violating one of the solemn proprie- 
 ties of God’s house—inconsiderately of course, for they are a rever- 
 ent people. They bow their headsin prayer. That address to God 
 they take some sense of. Why then, do they not sense it when they 
 move out towards God in song and make some bodily testimony 
 corresponding, and thereby take some of the physical tediousness 
 out of their service ? 
 
 I have been in assemblies, a very few, where, when I said, 
 “Let us pray,” scarcely any one went down at all. There they sat, 
 as stiff-set as though head-bowing might lead on to some formalism. 
 They were good enough people, most of them, but they had not 
 given attention to the very axioms of right action before God. 
 Posture is nothing and piety is everything, I presume they would 
 say, if being challenged on the subject, they had the pluck to say 
 anything. 
 
 When the officiating clergyman in the Protestant Episcopal 
 Service, begins, “ Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us,” 
 and so forth, the dearly beloved brethren in question get upon their 
 feet to hear what he may have to say; and they do it because it is 
 more decent to stand when you are addressed by a person in a 
 formal way ; and they ought therefore to stand through the sermon, 
 
342 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 if it were practicable. I have never carefully examined the printed 
 services of the great liturgical bodies, to see whether every bodily 
 
 change therein required is founded on the nature of the particular — 
 
 act performed at each change, but I presume it is. Those liturgical 
 Christians, taken all together, have made some study of such things 
 and their worshipful practices are apt, to that extent, to be rationally 
 grounded. ‘The minister kneels in the prayers for the same reason 
 that the congregation do ; because he then comes into the presence 
 of God and speaks to him; but in the Absolution he stands and 
 they remain kneeling, because he is then God’s spokesman to them 
 and God’s gift-bringer, while they are recipients from God, through 
 him. 
 
 This matter is full of detail, but the main thing I am after in 
 referring to it at all, is to bring out before you one particular where- 
 in the public service may have some elasticity and not amount to a 
 bodily imprisonment, especially to young children. When you sing, 
 stand up, or do something to show that you know you have come 
 to another turn in the ongo of the worship. When the prayer has 
 been reached, bow down, or else stand up, as our fathers did—either 
 way is Scriptural, at least do something. When you receive the 
 benediction, bow your head, unless you are so stiff a congregationalist 
 and so afraid of admitting the priesthood of the ministry, that you 
 cannot conscientiously take an attitude which says that something 
 did really come from God to you through that speaking man’s— 
 “The Lord bless you”—floating down from the pulpit. When the 
 choir are singing their piece, you must settle for yourself what you 
 had better do then. Theoretically they are praising God, very 
 
 likely speaking for you in the matter, because you have never © 
 
 learned the fine, etherial language they are using, in order to speak 
 
 for yourself; and therefore, it would seem you ought to stand up, ~ 
 
 just as you bow in prayer with the minister when he theoretically 
 voices your prayer for you. And by these several corporeal flexi- 
 bilities, you shall not merely adjust yourself to the varying realities 
 and the obvious decorums of the occasion, but do something to 
 save yourself from a feeling of monotonousness in the church 
 worship. | 
 
 Again, the minister can introduce certain reliefs, by cultivating 
 a reasonable variety in the tones of his voice and a reasonable ver- 
 safility in his gestures, too, I may add. Perhaps you will feel that I 
 am detaining you on minimum particulars now, and I do not myself 
 
YALE LECTURES. 343 
 
 suppose that tones and gestures in a preacher are so momentous 
 as piety. A man cannot get into heaven by the lift of his own ora- 
 tory, so fast as he can by the lift of his own piety. Still when he 
 comes to the tug of lifting others into that bright haven, the awful 
 fact is, that voice and a few apparently small things of that sort, are 
 among the maxima of personal influence. It is one of the unescap- 
 able disadvantages of preachers as compared with all other orators, 
 that their subjects of discourse, being uniformly grave ones, and not 
 unfrequently even terrible subjects, tend towards and almost compel 
 solemn vocal tones, and also easily carry a man into cadenced tones, 
 otherwise called ‘“sing-song.’’ That mellifluous embroidering of 
 grave tones which our church organists practice, we preachers can- 
 not emulate, for we use an organ of only one pipe—though a pipe 
 of much range—and then, if the truth must be told, ministers are 
 more serious men than organists, on the average, and before God do 
 not dare put even their one pipe through all its possible variations, 
 when they preach. However, we must shun monotony. Other 
 things being equal, that will at least double the length of our pas- 
 torate. I have been in this evil world longer than you have, young 
 men, and that is one of the things I have discovered. 
 
 As to monotonous gestures, those appear only on those men 
 who have given careful attention and a good deal of practice to 
 delivery. Probably they have been in the hands of some teacher of 
 oratory, have learned rules of gesture and have studiously made 
 gestures in private. I heard a minister of some name and some pith, 
 repeat, memoriter, a thoroughly elaborated, doctrinal sermon, an 
 hour long ; and knowing his memoriter habit, I expected to notice 
 that he said the same words that he did before ; but I declare unto 
 you, he made the same gestures all through—for, all the principal 
 gestures, the absolutely killing ones, I could definitely recollect. 
 They were good and they came in all along at exactly the same 
 points as on the first occasion. You might say, if they were at the 
 right points on the first occasion, why should they be changed to the 
 wrong points on the second for the sake of variety ; and perhaps I 
 could not answer you, but I could suggest and I would suggest, that 
 a certain effect of monotony cannot be escaped if preachers are 
 going to cut-and-dry things in that manner. Cutting-and-drying, 
 when carried beyond a certain line, becomes what is known a 
 mannerism ; and did you ever know anybody who liked mannerism 
 when he really took a full sense of the thing? Vary your voices 
 
344 ; YALE LECTURES. 
 
 then, gentlemen, so much as circumstances will permit, and when 
 you come to giving us gestures, let us have a diversiform assort- 
 ment. Let up on your solemnity a bit, for the time being, if you 
 cannot make your voice flexile otherwise; and give us a change 
 from gestures, even in the form of non-gesturing for a space, so 
 that we may the more relish your prepared, proper and infallible 
 gestures, when you get back to them. 
 
 Thirdly, do not make your services monotonous in and by 
 your strong push for unity in the service. I spoke to some of you 
 here two years ago, of a Communion service I had attended just 
 before, wherein the able and well-known man who conducted it, 
 came near being the death of us, because in his Invocation at the 
 start, he took us straight to the Holy table and to the centermost 
 and most heart-moving realities of it; and then in his choice of the 
 hymn immediately following, did the same thing ; and then read an 
 intense Scripture in the same line and then prayed at length, on the 
 same subject, mostly ; and preached on it three quarters of an hour 
 and then called us to sing one of the fervid, good hymns on the 
 Passion of the Lord; and finally invited the meagre remainders of 
 our feeling to warm up to what was really the focus of the occasion ; 
 though as you see, that focus had been by him carried back out of 
 its place to the opening act of the service—the Invocation—and 
 from that had been kept moving along down through all the details 
 of the worship, a perpetually present and traveling thing. The man 
 or woman in the pew, who had moved through the foregoing parts 
 of the exercises that day with only a languid enlistment of his or her 
 feeling—or possibly with no enlistment at all—could accept that 
 invitation to warm up when the table was at last reached ; but I, 
 who had been fool enough to start off with the minister in his Invo- 
 cation and warm up there and be as over-quick as he was; and 
 thereafter had kept warmed up every time he asked me to; I, be it 
 said had come to the end of my responsiveness ; and what he did 
 at the blessed table was of comparatively no account to me. I 
 was as empty as a last year’s nest. I had been privileged to be 
 present and assist at a magnificent instance of unity, but it was 
 one of those cases referred to by the late Duke of Wellington, 
 where a victory is worse than a defeat. 
 
 Brethren, unity is not incompatible with variety. I have care- 
 fully counted the separate and different particulars of that Sunday. 
 morning’s transaction ; and I find there were eleven of them, if not 
 
YALE LECTURES. 345 
 
 twelve—enough, in conscience, to have secured the most ample 
 diversity. And the way to secure it, was to make the seven partic- 
 ulars that antedated the administration of the Supper, just range the 
 utmost permissible limits of the inner circles of the Christian religion. 
 There was no need to go out of sight of Calvary and the Cross, 
 No; it was necessary on that occasion to keep near to it in hymn, 
 prayer, Bible lesson and sermon ; but if the minister had made his 
 Invocation (that which Invocations always should be), an asking of 
 God’s blessing on that Service then begun, (that and nothing more) 
 and the hymn following, a magnification of the Lord’s day ; and the 
 Scriptural lesson a history of the origin of the Jewish passover (that 
 for example), and the succeeding long prayer, as rangey a thing as 
 prayer ever has the conscience to be; and the sermon a root dis- 
 cussion of self-sacrifice, from the text—‘ Verily, verily, I say unto 
 you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
 alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit,”—if these had been 
 the preliminaries, would they not have been in perfect unity with 
 the ceremony to follow; and yet would any decent man have had 
 the least sense of being tired on account of monotony? 
 
 So at a funeral, if that happens which I have sometimes known 
 to happen, that three prayers are offered by two or three ministers, 
 at the house and at the grave-side, and that in those successive 
 prayers, all those especially bereaved are photographed in outline 
 and commended to God three times over; to be sure unity is 
 secured, but it is the wearisome unity of a monotone, whereas, in 
 all Christian services, the only right unity is that which you see in a 
 good picture, where there are never-so-many elements, or forms of 
 material present ; human figures, hills and valleys, trees, breadths of 
 haze, lights, sky-lines and what not ; but all are victoriously reduced 
 to the oneness of an absolute composition, by that unifying genius 
 which no man can analyze and tell how it does what it does, but in 
 which man is the image of the God who made him, as wonderfully 
 as at any other point of his mental organism, save only his moral 
 attributes and the workings thereof. The organization of a service, 
 then, so that while it may be very plural in its details and full of 
 variety, it shall be a solid unity, is a work of art, a real composition, 
 and it needs some thought and care. Still further, the result to be 
 secured is such a choice one and in such a choice field, that it is 
 worth some attention. It requires some attention, and some atten- 
 tion not only to compose and unify the legitimate elements of variety 
 
346 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 in God’s worship, but to eliminate all spurious elements, sensation- 
 alism, vain-glorious music, eloquent prayers, rituals that are the 
 product of one local minister’s brain, unsaturated by the liturgical 
 wisdom of the ages; in short, all the spawn of the spurious. 
 
 Fourthly, a word as to variety insermons. How shall sermon- 
 izers be various and so not tire their audiences? Shall they go 
 outside of Christianity and outside of the Bible for fresh and taking 
 topics ; topics that men are immersed in at the moment and are 
 therefore likely to give their attention to if their minister takes them 
 up—such as the election, the murder, the strike of laborers, the great 
 defalcation, the last scientific or other book? No—Christianity is 
 fertile enough in topics, if you only find them. If you want to 
 allude to the murder and the defalcation and the book, as illustrating 
 or as clinching some Christian thing about which you are talking, 
 very well; but de not make the body of your discourse of secular 
 material and stuff. 
 
 But just as energetically as I say, do not go outside of Chris- 
 tianity—in a large interpretation of that word Christianity—do I 
 add: be careful, while you are observing those true and obvious 
 limits, be careful not to make your Christian sermon itself dull, by 
 too exclusive preaching on a small assortment of truths. You have 
 heard it said of some men, that they have only about one sermon. 
 They preach from a good many texts and on a good many subjects, 
 but they always preach the same sermon. All roads lead to Rome ; 
 and these preachers in all their themes bring up at their dear Rome 
 presently. At a certain Yale commencement, as much as thirty 
 years ago, the annual concio ad clerum was preached by the Rev. 
 George Perkins, and his subject had been given him a year before- 
 hand by the General Association of Connecticut, and it was Chris- 
 tian Sanctification, Perkins was a strong man and an excellent and 
 successful parish minister, and a redoubtable, much-speaking anti- 
 slavery man. We all knew what he would most want to discuss in 
 that concio of his, but, said we, “he is tied up for once; Christian 
 Sanctification is his subject, unanimously voted to him and there he 
 is.’ Perkins was as able to discuss Sanctification as the next man, 
 he was considerably sanctified himself; but when we flocked into 
 yonder Church on The Green, to hear him, he gave us for his first 
 sentence, these words :—‘‘ The greatest hindrance to sanctification 
 in this country, is Slavery ;” and from that he went on to give us 
 
 of his plain-spoken, rousing and good anti-slavery speeches. I 
 
YALE LECTURES. 347 
 
 am not here to say whether he did right or wrong, but I want to 
 caution you against habitually having one discourse, whatever your 
 subject may be, or at most but half a dozen discourses ; better have 
 more. We all know that Christianity has her major truths and her 
 minor truths ; and that majors may go into sermons oftener than 
 minors ; and that some majors are so immensely major (the majors 
 of the majors), that tones from them—tones direct or tones far-away 
 and faint—may reasonably be heard in a good part of our public 
 utterances ; but to say, as some men have been known to, that we 
 will never preach a sermon from which a man listening might not 
 learn the way of salvation and be saved then and there, if he never 
 heard a sermon before, is to limit one’s self and cut off one’s variety . 
 and provide for our being tiresome over much. 
 
 Also, why should every sermon that we preach be constructed 
 in one and the same way, as so many heads and two applications, 
 one to saints and one to sinners ; why not make lots of sermons with 
 no heads and no applications, like a poem? The highest kind of 
 poem never has heads, much less thrusts them forth and calls the 
 world to make a note of them. It has a skeleton and points of 
 juncture and articulation in the skeleton, but all that is concealed, not 
 in any guile, or even with intention, any more than a born infant is 
 deliberately planned and plotted to conceal that frame work which he 
 undoubtedly has. A born sermon never advertises its joints, first, 
 second, third and fourth and so on; though a very important class 
 of sermons reasonably may and often do and even perhaps must ; 
 I refer to such as are formulated by the formulative intellect, being 
 manufactured rather than born and designed to instruct rather 
 than magnetize. 
 
 Again, why should a preacher be habitually didactic, or habit- 
 ually expository, or habitually hortatory, or habitually argumentative, 
 or habitually pathetic and think he has failed if somewhere in his 
 discourse he has not visibly wept, or let a tremulo into his voice. 
 There is enough to weep about, more than enough, and a preacher 
 had better let himself do it sometime before he dies, and perhaps 
 
 several times, but why found his reputation on that and be monoto- 
 nous about it. There is nothing more tedious than tears, if they 
 are let on too frequently. ‘This is a poor community to cry in,” 
 said one of my deacons one day, when we were querying whether 
 to call in a certain emotional evangelist. “This is a very poor 
 community to cry in.” 
 
 25 
 
348 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 And it is a poor community to do any one thing in monoto- 
 nously. All sorts of sermons are open to us to preach. And let us 
 preach them. Sometimes we may take the modern newspaper 
 article for our model and be short, direct and business-like, letting 
 exordiums and perorations, heads and applications, appeal and 
 hortations and all that kind of valuable machinery go. Sometimes, 
 however, we may put all the machinery in ; and speak an hour per- 
 haps in order to get it in. Sometimes we may wrestle on a subject 
 till we exhaust it, but more often we had better take a lesser task 
 and treat just an interesting corner only of the subject, getting 
 through in twenty minutes, if we have good luck. Why be monot- 
 onous, I say again. Why have certain doctrines that you dearly 
 love and build up your experience on ; and then feel like a fish out - 
 of water, if you are not speaking on those. You are a Calvinist, I 
 will suppose. As likely as not you are an Arminian, (Arminians are 
 pretty thick, the Methodists being responsible for making a swarm 
 of them) ; but I will suppose that you are a Calvinist. So you will 
 preach Calvinism. All right, do it; but the items of agreement 
 between you and Arminius are more than your items of disagree- 
 ment; therefore, why not multifold your preaching and ease your 
 hearers, by going over among those items frequently? Not merely 
 would you thus give comfort as not seeming to them monotonous, 
 and amaze your congregation by your versatility as a man of mind, 
 but when you got back from your excursion among those, neutral 
 items and began to enforce your Calvinism once again on the peo- 
 ple, you would find that you were impressing them decidedly more 
 than would have been possible, had you stood by your Calvinistic 
 specialties straight along and fed them out to your sheep, unmiti- 
 gated and undiversified by perhaps less condensed food. We have 
 learned in physiology, that our nutriment should not be in the 
 quintessence form always, but should be ameliorated by admixtures 
 of lesser value and even by a certain ratio of what might be called 
 trash material, that is, that cannot be assimilated but must go for 
 waste ; and yet meanwhile may serve some mechanical, or other use 
 in the processes of our systems. 
 
 Before I leave this subject of diverse sermonizing, among the 
 rules for securing it, such as various reading and all kinds of contact 
 with human life as it is and with Nature and with Art, I would like 
 to mention prominently and in fact put before everything else, the 
 rule that you must have contact at all points, contact at all points 
 
YALE LECTURES. 349 
 
 rather than a few, with that world of multifarious material massed in 
 the Bible. At first, it would seem as though all ministers inevitably 
 would have this contact with the entire contents of the Book; but 
 it is not so. The undeniable presence in the world of monotonous 
 preaching proves that. Men could not be monotonous if they had 
 possessed themselves of the universality of this volume, that is if 
 they had drawn their topics from all parts of it, enforcing upon 
 themselves some sort of system in the matter, instead of going into 
 the book hap-hazard when they wanted a sermon, after the fashion 
 of the grab-bag. Grab-bag selection exposes us to the peril of 
 preaching our whole life through, without using at all some of the 
 material that the Bible has waiting for us. That is why I took it 
 upon me last year when I was here, to speak some kind words about 
 that round-and-round of contemplations, prayers, services and ser- 
 mons established and made sure by the Christian Year, that device 
 of the liturgical communions of the world. I said then, and I say 
 now, that I do not hold that up as a divinely ordained curriculum 
 at all; I do not even say it is the best one; but I insist that some 
 cycle or system is necessary, if ministers are going to be made 
 certain to preach on all proper and good pulpit themes, and preach 
 on them with a duly distributed emphasis on each theme. Leta 
 preacher provide his own curriculum, if he does not entirely relish 
 one drawn out by the church at large. Iam sure however, if some- 
 how he could be induced to let the godly wisdom of somebody 
 besides himself be called in, it would plainly appear in the result, 
 that the godly wisdom of ages on ages, and millions on millions of 
 men—hosts of whom were exceedingly well-furnished men—adds 
 up larger, as a rule, than one man’s single, solitary and lonesome 
 wisdom. But no matter about that, if only he will start out to have 
 his weekly choice of pulpit subjects regulated in the main by a 
 deliberately chosen and previously-established order, even if it 
 must be that nobody but himself deliberately choose and establish 
 it, let him move by a doctrinal order if that suits; engaging with 
 himself to make the circuit of all Christian doctrine in the course 
 of twelve months or two years say, using his Sunday mornings for it, 
 and leaving his second sermon, each Sunday, to be given up to 
 more miscellaneous and disorderly discoursings. Let him take his 
 liberty, I repeat, as to the particular order he will obey ; taking care 
 simply that his pet order be formulated on a Biblical basis and 
 therefore includes all preachable things; each preachable thing 
 
350 : YALE LECTURES. 
 
 being magnified by him, or only moderately magnified, according 
 as it is moderately magnified or not in Holy Writ itself. 
 
 You understand, brethren, I am harping as I do on a system- 
 atized flow of subjects, with only one thought in my mind, although 
 movement by system has numbers of advantages—only one thought, 
 namely: that if you go by some preconsidered and thoughtfully 
 ptepared cycle, in your preaching, you are likely to be a man of 
 variety and so far fascinating and not dull. Your cycle, of course, 
 whatever form it takes, must rest on the Bible as a whole and not 
 on the Bible in spots; therefore your multiformity as a preacher 
 will correspond to the almost illimitable multiformity of the Bible 
 itself. So much as to sermons. 
 
 Fifthly, let us look at prayers. And there I touch more diff- 
 cult ground. You cannot limber your voice much in prayers and 
 secure variety in that way, and you certainly cannot make many 
 gestures ; and it is preordained in the nature of things, that prayer 
 shall have certain fixed features, such as confession, supplication, 
 intercession and thanksgiving; and besides, if you undertake to 
 make yourself too interesting in prayer, by an ever-changing way 
 of treating confession, supplication, intercession and thanksgiving, 
 you are kept on such a keen intellectual and rhetorical jump that 
 neither you nor your congregation can really pray. As intellectu- 
 alists and rhetoricians you may have a very fine time indeed and be 
 something worth going to, but as petitioners before God, you are a 
 failure and a public nuisance. So then, as regards prayer many are 
 led to say: Let the prayers of thé Church be written out and 
 prescribed ; let us have just that uniformity and run the risk of the 
 tedium of repetitioners—so much risk as there actually is; which 
 is not much. But others, while they admit the comparatively nar- 
 row range for versatility in prayer to which we are confined, proceed 
 to add: But within that range, we can legitimately do some things 
 to escape the drone of sameness ; for instance, we need not make 
 a distinct effort to get into the same phraseologies every Sunday ; 
 we may avail ourselves of so much diversity of diction as is natural 
 to us; and again, we may be pastorly in our hearts, so that when we 
 are presenting to God the case of our people, we slip easily and 
 sweetly in to a good deal of minuteness and have the advantage of 
 the endless variety of minuteness ; moreover, if the minister is as 
 religious as he ought to be and when he prays, moves in on God 
 by the Holy Ghost and not by his own impulse, he will always 
 
YALE LECTURES. 351 
 
 seem fresh, diversified and satisfactory, whether he touches custom- 
 ary points or uncustomary, and whether his vocabulary is new every 
 Sunday or no; and one of the great advantages of extemporized 
 prayer (they add), comes in there ; prayer in its ideal, as carrying 
 us into the presence of the Most High God and enforcing upon us 
 therefore, particularly, a high-type utterance, is such a total impos- 
 sibility for mortal man, that perforce he is thrown upon the aid of 
 the Holy Ghost, and once brought to that, it is not possible, as was 
 said, that he should be monotonous and uninteresting. There may 
 be a good. share of sameness in him from Sunday to Sunday, his 
 bump of language may be small and his natural bump for ideas 
 may be small, but an inspired man’s small bump is better than the 
 powerful bump of a man uninspired just as Mr. Moody’s ignorance, 
 which he once said he had consecrated to God, is more of a force 
 for all the practical purposes of the Kingdom of God, than tons of 
 unconsecrated learning. 
 
 Thus runs the talk, pro and con. And in the midst of it we 
 must accept the denominational position and pulpit and liturgical 
 usage wherein God seems to place us, and do the best we can. My 
 own experience of public prayer is hardly worth referring to, except 
 perhaps as a warning; but with my tendency to amplification, not 
 to say inflation, and considering, on the other hand, the insatiable 
 desire for brevity which distinguishes the modern congregation, I 
 have concluded at last to be satisfied if I can get into each prayer 
 some of the essential objective and other elements of prayer. In 
 respect of the proper spirit in prayer, we assuredly should not be 
 satisfied unless that is in always and every time; but as respects 
 everything else, we should not be too hard upon ourselves. I know 
 it is a fallacy to say that the Publican’s prayer—‘ Lord be merciful 
 to me a sinner ;” and the prayer of the crucified malefactor, “Lord 
 remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom ;” and the prayer 
 of Peter sinking in the waters of Galilee, ‘“‘Lord save me’’—I know 
 it is a fallacy to mention these and like instances, as legitimating 
 the omission from public prayer of the larger part of the elements 
 of prayer full and complete ; but it is a comfort to think of these 
 instances, nevertheless. The thief on the cross had not time to go 
 through the entire service of the Book of Common Prayer and 
 close with a recessional hymn ; neither had Peter. They were both 
 in an emergency. But not much more of an emergency than a 
 modern, extempore minister is in, leading the prayers of a congre- 
 
352 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 gation with the remorseless church clock ticking in front of him and 
 the modern man in the pew, with watch in hand timing his progress. 
 The moral pressure on him to get through is strong, knowing as he 
 does that if moral pressure fails on him and he keeps on being 
 lengthy from year to year, by and by physical pressure will take 
 the field and carry him off out of that parish. I feel then, for 
 myself, that all I can engage to do, as regards completeness of 
 prayer made interesting and profitable by due versatility, is to do 
 the best I can. And angels could do no more. I will aim at a 
 prayerful spirit. I will aim to be tolerably brief. And as to things 
 further, I will take my chance; using what intellect, taste, power 
 of expression, pastorly thoughtfulness, Biblical scope and so on, 
 I happen to have at the moment and throwing myself on the chari- 
 table consideration of the assembly, be it more or be it less. It is 
 one of the stock remarks of the liturgists though, that all such 
 well-meaning clergymen, however inspired, do at last have ruts 
 in which they move, though not conscious of it always. All I 
 can say is, I hope this is a slander. Some of the extemporizing 
 ministers reply that they know it is. And there I leave the case. 
 Sixthly, how shall we escape sameness in the administration of 
 ordinances and in the management of ceremonial occasions that are 
 not ordinances? I think I notice a growing disposition all around 
 not to escape sameness in these matters, but to let it in and love it 
 and deal it out to the people and make them likewise love it. 
 Most of the young and old couples now-a-days, in the regions where 
 I live at any rate, when they come to the solemnities of wedlock, 
 desire to be married in the use of some determinate office or ritual 
 that a good many other, couples have used safely and successfully. 
 . Whether it is that they distrust the faculties of the clergy, or that 
 formalism is on the increase, or that a wedding has come to be 
 thought more of an occasion than it used to be, or that in the 
 alarming increase of divorce there is a corresponding instinctive 
 desire to forestall divorce by the introduction of more nuptial pomp, 
 impression and nail-fast ceremony, I know not; but the drift is all 
 one way. And I liketo humor it. [like it for the parties concerned 
 and I like it for myself. It comforts my ceremonial consciousness, 
 (whatever that may mean), to do just as those couples say. So 
 far as variety is concerned, every wedding is such a fresh thing, 
 in its own self and essentially, that no repetitiousness of ritual can 
 tame it down, I find. A Sunday’s service may be humdrum by the 
 
YALE LECTURES. 353 
 
 operation of various causes; but a wedding never. Every bride is 
 a new instance of beauty and sweet expectancy ; every bridegroom 
 is more captivating than he ever was before. Every wedding march 
 that the sympathetic organ careers through seems as good as new; 
 and then there are the flowers and the people and the girl’s father 
 and mother, with their hearts full of crying and laughing both ; 
 while all other hearts all around-about are sympathetically in much 
 the same predicament ; and now if, when the rejoicing organ stops 
 and the people hush down, the minister lifts up his voice and speaks 
 forth an order of words wherein you can hear a sound of all genera- 
 tions and can feel the touch of innumerable like gracious occasions, 
 do you suppose that it necessarily quenches that wedding? I never 
 found it so. It lies inthe very nature of ceremony to be repetitious ; 
 to follow well-known, oft-repeated lines of action and utterance. It 
 is not possible to get any ceremoniousness at all in, on the principle 
 of helter-skelter. Some extreme persons, in order to forestall 
 formalism and vain-gloriousness, would just deify helter-skelter and 
 have that for the one embellishment of what are called occasions ; 
 for instance, making all weddings different from all others; and 
 administering even the Sacraments of the Church in at least so 
 much free-and-easiness that the congregation cannot tell quite what 
 is coming. 
 
 Well, speaking of ordinances, it is inevitable that there should 
 be a large constant or unchangeable element in them all. That, at 
 any rate. - To begin low down and take a perfectly safe position, I 
 should say that in every infant baptism there must be an infant. 
 There is no chance for variety and originality and helter-skelter 
 there. And there must be some responsible person, or persons, to 
 present the infant. And there must be water, more or less. And 
 a certain uniform, unchangeable act must be performed ; in which 
 act certain ideas are involved always—which essential ideas it is 
 customary to express. Baptism is not an ever-fluctuating mere. 
 show, but back of all the conventional or ritual drapery of it, there 
 lies an unchangeable core of reality ; a great core it is too, else bap- 
 tism could not keep up century after century. 
 
 And similarly, in the Lord’s Supper there are essential things 
 which can never be changed, because they are essential. Helter- 
 skelter must keep away. 
 
 But these essentials of an ordinance being secured, God leaves 
 us to our freedom, only stipulating that in all our ceremonial 
 
354 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 amplifications we keep in the line of the core-realities of the ordi- 
 nance and simply give those core-realities a more voluminous 
 expression, just as he insists that a seed, if it would not remain a 
 seed (as most likely it would not), shall unfold itself in infallible 
 conformity to the vital idea or type that is in it. 
 
 And now since I have spoken deprecatingly of picking out pul- 
 pit subjects from the Bible without any method, like children blindly 
 fingering in a grab-bag, I desire to be consistent and advise you; 
 First and most certainly, not to extemporize on the spot your ritual 
 additions to the core of God’s ordinances, so that nobody can begin 
 to tell what is impending ; and secondly, if you do not think it best 
 to subject yourself verbatim to any ritual thus far devised by men 
 or churches not to manufacture your ritual in any grand desire for 
 originality or popular variety, but far otherwise with a reverent and 
 cultured desire to assimilate your ceremonial to those great outline 
 features of ceremonial, which characterize alike every liturgy ever 
 published by any branch of the church universal. 
 
 You observe, my brethren, that I am falling back again on my 
 feeling that any ceremonial occasion, because it is just that, a ceremo- 
 nial occasion and not something else, is entitled to a good measure of 
 stability of procedure and must have it if it is not to sink from a cere- 
 mony, or even a church ordinance, into I do not know what,—into a 
 thing of poor effect on all beholders and participants, at all events. 
 
 Finally, the only remaining forms of possible and decent variety 
 in church sevices, that I need to mention, are, a wide selection of 
 Scriptural lessons ; a similar wide selection of hymns to be sung ; and 
 a reasonable use of what may be called special services; praise 
 meetings—anniversaries—services of benevolence or reform—com- 
 memorative meetings and others. 
 
 Some ministers are extremely conservative in regard to these 
 last. You cannot get into their church buildings with your mass 
 meetings in furtherance of this and that. They uphold the regular, 
 orderly worship of the church, they say. Our Protestant Episcopal 
 brethren are rather careful on that point. Others are ready to let 
 in almost anything that promises any good to man—to his body or 
 his soul—or to any of his interests. Secular lectures may come in ; 
 and political assemblies may come in, if only they have some show 
 of moral intentions ; and town fairs, educational conventions, con- 
 ventions to get women their rights—yes, the innumerable ferment 
 of this practical, man-loving ninteenth century may come in. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 355 
 
 I think that when these things come along naturally—the best 
 of them—they may be accepted as a good thing enough in the 
 sanctuary, especially if the place where we live has no public-hall ; 
 but I would not artificially get up occasions for the one purpose of 
 variety, that people may get their religion in unusual and perhaps 
 partially disguised forms. I do not argue the matter, but leave it 
 there. 
 
 _ The selection of Scriptures and hymns is more important to be 
 attended to; but I have already laid down the principles that should 
 govern that. Half the time, when I exchange pulpits with a brother 
 minister, I find when I get home that he has given out to my people 
 some hymn that I never did. I look that hymn over and get some 
 one to play or sing to me the tune to which it is set in our church 
 book and I find probably that it is as good as many hymns which I 
 have given out. Thereupon I reflect afresh on my own limitations 
 and wonder why I am not more all-ranging than Iam. I tell you, 
 brethren, we all need watching lest we grow narrow and set and 
 therefore stupid, in our preferences and tastes. A private-man may 
 grow stupid if he wants to, but a minister must not, because if he 
 does, this stupidity of his is the measure and limit of the opportu- 
 nities of a whole congregation. ‘They have to sing his narrowly- 
 selected few hymns. And they have to hear, mark, learn and 
 inwardly digest his ever-recurring little round of Scriptural read- 
 ings ; the copious, round-about, all-sided, mighty Word and Book 
 of God, being scrimped to the dimensions of his individuality and 
 not suffered to speak with more than half its voices. I consider an 
 established lectionary as an almost necessary thing in all churches. 
 Let alone in this presence—this strong congregational presence— 
 the question who shall establish the lectionary ; there ought to be 
 one. The Congregational Conference in this State of Connecticut 
 ought to issue one for our state ministers to look at.. They need 
 not worship it—that would be uncongregational—but they could 
 look at it and offer themselves to be enticed by it; and the beauty 
 of it is, they could use it and their peoples know it not. Perhaps 
 the greatest difficulty in the way of such a movement is, that.so- 
 many of our ministers are under the impression that the sermon 
 they have in the pulpit with them, must determine the lesson that 
 shall be read that day. Unity of impression requires that, they 
 fancy ; whereas it would be an aid to impression if they did not 
 make the lessons, the hymns and all the prayers, revolve around 
 
356 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 that one manuscript, even as it would have been an aid to every 
 interest involved if that minister who made everything revolve 
 around the communion service, as I explained to you, had diversified 
 the occasion more. 
 
 But why do not we all use the well-considered and wide-sweep- 
 ing lectionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church? Because that 
 scheme of Lessons is grounded on the Christian Year—an invention 
 which we all respect as a well-intentioned effort to provide an ample 
 and thoroughly Christian cultus, but which for historical and other 
 reasons many of us have not adopted and perhaps never shall. So 
 then, we had better begin to make a lesson-order of our own and 
 see how we come out. If we come out as well as the Episcopalians 
 have and furnish for ourselves a round of readings, wherein all parts 
 of the Bible are honored, we need not be ashamed; whatever prin- 
 ciple of selection we adopt. But I want something. I want it for 
 myself. I want to see my Brethren in it. I want to have you 
 young ministers put through that orderly march and to see you 
 absorb the insensible culture of it and become Catholic in your 
 taste and Biblical, rather than denominational in your theology, fat 
 with the fatness of many foods rather than lean and grim through 
 feeding on this or that special food. 
 
 For the man who has established his lectionary, by the logic of 
 the case has therein established the course of his sermonizing also ; 
 or what is the same thing, the course of his thinking; the shape 
 therefore of his entire religious development. | 
 
 I leave these freely-spoken thoughts with you, dear brethren, to © 
 
 sift, expurgate, chew upon and charge against me, if need be. 
 
 —— , " — P = 
 ge ee ee ee ee ee a 
 
 
 
ROUTINE: ITS PERILS AND ITS 
 VALUES. 
 
 At first I looked for a better word than routine to describe 
 what I am after; for so many people and ministers have come 
 under the supreme influence of the Perils of Routine, that the term 
 itself has a meanish kind of savor, and it makes one draw a tired, 
 long breath, just to hear the sound of it. But I found it was the 
 best I could do, all things considered, and so I move out and forth 
 under the burden of it. However, in its use I shall refer simply to 
 a fixed round-and-round. It does not hurt the planets to go round 
 and round, neither does it hurt the Maker of the planets to have 
 them do it ; and it seems to be proven, therefore, at the very begin- 
 ning, that routine is not necessarily bad. It is bad or not, just 
 according to the creature that is in the round-and-round. The 
 right kind of a man or minister finds it beautiful, is as happy in it 
 as the stars in their courses, and as much helped along. 
 
 I wish, friends, you would consider this gigantic, multiplex, 
 eternal, circularity over our heads here in the sky, and all about, 
 and let it prepossess you a little in favor of Routine. It is a curious 
 and fascinating circumstance that God has builded his universe to 
 go in ever-repeated circles so much. On the face of it, it looks as 
 though the curve had something in it essentially delightful to his 
 mind ; and that the countless whirl of things along their curved. 
 paths in such a wide immensity and in such perilous-looking, hair- 
 breadth ins-and-outs among themselves, were a most satisfactory 
 spectacie to his eyes, he being able, such is his boundless faculty, to 
 contemplate it in its magnificent entirety at a glance, rather than 
 pick it up in laborious piecemeal as our wretched little faculties do. 
 
358 | YALE LECTURES. 
 
 I know it would fairly intoxicate a man to look down on some good- 
 sized handiwork of his own like that and watch the interplay of the 
 thing, the junctures made by the many movements, and get the 
 perfect harmony and co-ordination all through: all set in cycles 
 also, and the eternal grace of cycles. I never heard that there was 
 any mechanical difficulty in setting up a universe on the rectangular 
 principle mainly, with its endless jerks on the feeling of all behold- 
 ers. Neither can I imagine that there would have been any mechani- 
 cal difficulty or any inability whatever, as respects the measure of 
 God’s power, in fashioning and running a creation wherein the fact 
 of a thing’s having occurred once—as the rising of the sun, or the 
 flood of the tide—would be sure proof that that same thing would 
 never occur again to all eternity. The inconvenience of such a 
 creation as that in the matter of laying our practical plans, and the 
 sense of insecurity and apprehension which it would shed abroad 
 in men’s minds, would be something, evidently } for example if I 
 agreed to lecture here at three o’clock, and on arriving here found 
 that the sun had not yet risen, and so far as heard from might not 
 rise for a week, or perhaps a year, or possibly never, having gone 
 off to the outposts of God’s realm as though on some mysterious 
 lark—the inconvenience and anxiety, I say, of such an infinite 
 organization of desultoriness as that would have been painful ; but 
 such an organization would have been practicable, I take it, to a 
 being of infinite power. It would have only been universalizing 
 what is supposed to occur in the case of a miracle; that unforsee- 
 able irruption among the fine old and much beloved uniformities of 
 Nature. But our God is no such a person as that. It is constitu- 
 tional with him to be a routinist considerably, and he has so made 
 us that it is both a pleasure and a necessity to be routinists too. 
 
 And this natural predisposition to circularity in the Maker of 
 all things, after it had embodied itself in great Nature and in the 
 structure of man, was sure to manifest itself in other fields of God’s 
 activity. ‘Therefore, in the only recorded instance where he has 
 definitely and minutely expressed his mind in regard to human 
 public worship of him ; he has assimilated the worship to the cycles 
 of the firmament—that first, as was naturally to be expected—then 
 next as could not so easily have been anticipated, he started rota- 
 tions of sevens ; seven days, seven years, seven times seven years ; 
 a whole miscellany of sevens round-and-round, thus giving an arti- 
 ficial sanctity to the number seven forever. The number three also 
 
YALE LECTURES. 359 
 
 got in. And in every substantial respect, that old Jewish cultus 
 was methodical and repetitious to the last degree. When the priest 
 in the temple had done a thing, or a definite set and circuit of 
 things, he had to go over it all again, verbatim, and the priests 
 themselves had their turns and relays of service in a fixed math- 
 ematical order of hours and days. ‘These orders, cycles, mystical 
 sevens and all the rest; these holy and sweet routines, could be 
 converted into the numbness and tiresomeness of routine in an evil 
 sense ; and the Prophet Isaiah in his first chapter has opened him- 
 self out on that with a wholesome rage; nevertheless, the God of 
 the orderly firmament took the responsibility of being orderly also 
 (orderly and repetitious) in the worship which he appointed, and if 
 men turn his good thing into an offence, on them be the curse. 
 
 I want to speak for a moment rather analytically on the special 
 risks of any round-and-round. 
 
 We are so made—and I am glad we are—that habitual action 
 —action in a much repeated circuit of action—tends to become 
 automatic ; and the bad feature of automatic action (on its religious 
 side) is that it tends to be unreflective, inattentive, mechanical, 
 formalistic, and does not sense what it is about. For example—an 
 automatic man—a man who has prayed to God innumerable times 
 and got dreadfully used to it so that he has only to start his prayer 
 and the prayer runs on, hums and drones of itself—that man does 
 not feel whose presence he is in, and whom he is speaking to, An 
 automatic, minister converses with people about their souls, and 
 pretty much forgets all the while, the serious and tender realities 
 he ishandling. An automatic ritualist travels through the sufficiently 
 excellent book of worship in his hand on any given Sunday, with 
 so little conscious impression on his dulled feeling as he passes 
 along that he comes to the end with only a hazy self-satisfaction as 
 having wound his way through an appointed opus operatum spell, 
 a deft sort of contrivance for blessing souls without their knowing 
 it; that as distinguished from a recollected, volitional, attent and 
 consciously receptive march from step to step of the service. And 
 the greatest suggestion that we non-liturgical people make against 
 printed rituals, is that they produce human automata too much ; the 
 very persons that Isaiah in his first chapter made his terrible stroke 
 at. That is what we say, but of course the automata referred to 
 are wide-awake enough yet to strike back. 
 
 An automatic theologian is a man who has a definite, limited 
 
360 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 set of first-class doctrines, perhaps the sacred seven, perhaps the 
 
 partially sacred three or five, on which he has run his mind around ~ | 
 
 at the same gait three hundred thousand times; until now if he 
 be started—whether by himself, by the nudge of an antagonist, or 
 by a sudden wind, he goes the same track without the ghost of a 
 volition in his own mind to help him along, but simply as an expert 
 plays a piano; with no voluntary touch of this, that and the other 
 key, as is proven by the fact that at the same time he is playing, 
 this expert can carry on a conversation, or read a book, or absorb 
 himself in a game of chess. It is easy to see where his mind is. 
 It is on those other things. Therefore it is not on his playing. 
 That playing is done by his unconscious self; that artificial and 
 second self which has been created by diligent routine. Well, this 
 theologian referred to, this finely developed machine, as he does 
 not run by conscious intelligence, so he is not accessible to the 
 attacks of intelligence from the outside. You cannot upset his 
 theology. Neither can you modify it. Neither can you cause it to 
 expand from its own core, and be itself, yet bigger. That would 
 be contrary to the genius of iteration and automatism. Automatism 
 in man is parallel to instinct in animals. The animals are born 
 with their instincts, while men get up their automatism by force of 
 routine. But, once gotten up, it is instinct over again pretty much. 
 The little duck just out of his shell runs to the water infallibly. If 
 he were omniscient, he could not do it more surely. But that 
 duck is’ not omniscient. He is not even reasonable. Therefore 
 
 you cannot reason with him. He would remain a duck, even if | 
 
 Jonathan Edwards took himin hand. Well, he ought to. But that 
 is not the reason that he does. No, he has no reason. I do 
 not complain of him. I only protest against his being called 
 intelligent. 4 
 
 Now, wherein does the theological automaton differ from the 
 duck? In some particulars no doubt. First of all, he was not 
 born so. God forbid. He originally selected his theology in the 
 exercise of more or less mind. Perhaps he reasoned on it a good 
 deal. Perhaps he took it by inheritance. Perhaps he was not 
 capable of real reasoning, but was capable of fumbling or trying to 
 reason and his theology is a resultant of his fumblings, taken in the 
 aggregate. But, whether in one way or another, he did secure his 
 
 theology, and then he began to convert himself into our automaton. — 
 
 He ran his theological scheme through his mind over and over year 
 
 
 

 
 YALE LECTURES. 361 
 
 after year, with such sameness of argument, meditation and what 
 not, and with such inattention to all distracting side-lights and new 
 lights, that at last his whole nature (thus mysteriously are we made) 
 began to keep step to the tune of it, and now that nature of his is 
 like that cork leg, so famous in song ; it runs itself. Say, Predesti- 
 nation, and off it goes. Say, Free-Will; Say, Irresistible Grace ; 
 say a dozen different things that I might mention, and it acts like a 
 hist-a-boy to that automaton. It winds him up and he buzzes till he 
 runs down. Or considering him as a duck, he blindly starts for the 
 water. What was not instinct in him at first, but a show of reason, 
 is pure instinct now. I do not say he should not take to water, or 
 to speak literally, that he ought not to hold to his theology; but I 
 say he should not hold it automatically. He did not start it so. 
 He started his theology like a flexible human being. He thought— 
 more or less, as I have said before—he paused, he inquired, he 
 asked his neighbors perhaps, he prayed about the matter, and a 
 thing that started in that way, why should it not be kept up in that 
 way? If the way was good enough to begin with, it is good enough 
 to keep on with. He is older now than he was at first, and he has 
 more neighbors to ask, and more light has had time to break forth 
 out of God’s holy word ; the Book has even been revised since he 
 began to be an automaton ; and he is losing all this, and how can 
 theology ever make any advance either in him or in the world, if 
 things are to be carried on in his fashion? 
 
 Moreover, if he ever undertakes to preach, the people will not 
 be stimulated by him. They know a machine when they hear the 
 creak of it. They know that the speaking automaton up there 
 does not himself intensely taste the ideas that he is promulging. 
 They know, too, that those words of his are not the live product of 
 his mind on the spot, as fresh to him and as delightfully flavored to 
 his perceiving taste, as though no one had ever thought of them 
 before ; much less used them. For an automatic thinker is likely 
 to be an automatic rhetorician. He uses the words that conven- 
 tionalism dictates ; he has heard them all his life, and spoken them 
 all his life, and worn all their original bloom off and totally lost their — 
 sap and the thrill of their root-meanings, and he handles them and 
 tosses them off as so many dead things; they are dead to himself ; 
 and dead to his hearers because dead to him. I cannot explain it, 
 but so it is, a man who does not reach the tongue of his mind down 
 the whole length of the deep significance, physical, historical and 
 
362 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 associational, of every term ‘he uses in his public utterance, as the 
 humming bird probes the heart of the flower with a quiver of de- 
 light, cannot pass those words of his over into listening minds in a 
 way to start them into any particular quiver. 
 
 In expounding to you, as I now have, the insensibility and 
 unconsciousness of mental movements automatically carried on, to 
 which automatism routine undoubtedly tends, I have said the prin- 
 cipal thing that can be said against routine. Still, I would like to 
 add a word more in the same line. If a minister confines himself 
 to the duties of his profession entirely, to sermonizing and _ pastor- 
 izing in their never-ceasing circuit, under the impression perhaps 
 that it is his duty to do so, or possibly because by long separation 
 from other things he has lost all relish for other things; it will 
 surely hum-drum him by and by, lessen his vigor, lessen his zest, 
 lessen the e/an of his attacks; and lessen public interest in him. 
 The subjects we treat are large and many sided, the human interests 
 we manipulate are the supreme interests of life, and have in them 
 great pathos and great fascination ; nevertheless we must range be- 
 yond our parish and our preaching a good deal, if we are not going 
 to lose our spring. We must read something beside theology. 
 Poetry will be good for us. Fiction will be good for us in well- 
 chosen doses. We should hear music. We should look into books 
 of science. We should luxuriate in pictures. We should visit Wall 
 street. We should go down to the sea in ships. We should have 
 a very diversified circle of acquaintances ; and be sure not to have 
 them all alike. Some of them may be saints, but they need not all 
 be. Some of them may be sombre, but some of them should be 
 humorous, and occasionally one may even be of the twittering sort. 
 Birds twitter, and bird-like natures always may. As I came along to 
 this point in my lecture, I paused and began to run over in my 
 mind the names, faces, manners, dress, character and history of 
 those whom I know, crony with, and depend on; and I declare to 
 you it was almost as good asa three day’s outing to drop on to 
 each one in that way, and fondly analyze them all. Human beings 
 are exceedingly interesting. And they are put up in such different 
 shapes! Under the general sameness, of course, that belongs to 
 human nature, you find on a genial inspection and shape of each 
 such an infinite miscellany of attributes, traits, idiosyncrasies, in- 
 firmities and pleasant forms of perverseness, as are partly comi- 
 cal, partly touching, partly amazing, partly admirable and partly 
 
 ee 
 
YALE LECTURES. 363 
 
 frightful besides. At any rate it is good to goamong them. There 
 are two kinds of recreation. One is to go to sleep, or what is the 
 same thing, fold your hands, half-close your eyes, sit around and be 
 stupid and let your nature carry on her insensible and unsearchable 
 recuperations in you. The other way of recreation is to keep 
 awake and keep pretty bright and simply move your mind around 
 on things that you are not used to, things outside of your profession ; 
 public entertainments, excursions, “hunting, fishing and war,” as 
 we used to read in the old geographies. And especially upon the 
 face of Nature do you move around—move slowly ; loaf; Nature 
 takes loafers into her arms and loves them, prefers them and tells 
 them things and soaks her own peace into them and smooths out 
 their seemingly hopeless kinks and hushes their nerves and elimi- 
 nates from their make-up their artificialities and twists of dishonesty 
 that they get in society and sends them back home feeling like a 
 wood-nymph. That is my experience. ) 
 
 Recreation by diversifying your mental action! ‘That is the 
 idea. One night last week when I was writing this lecture, it sud- 
 denly staled on me. But I went off that evening to the regular 
 meeting of the Liturgical Club, to which I belong ; a club made up 
 of three kinds of clerical men; Episcopalians, Catholic Apostolic 
 ministers and a more feeble number of Congregationalists ; and I 
 watched the play of their strongly contrary individualities for some 
 two hours, and played my own individuality too a little, and went 
 home as-good as new—and the next morning this tedious lecture 
 fairly blossomed again. 
 
 That is the way it works. Do not wear yourself out in routines 
 of labor. 
 
 And I may add—do not become so entirely a routinist in your 
 work, especially in your intellectual work, that if it so happens 
 some time that you are called on to do work outside of your dear 
 routine, it will nearly incapacitate you. Some ministers cannot 
 much more than half think, except as they are in their own library 
 and at their own desk. And some ministers can not preach with 
 any freedom and power in a strange pulpit or on an open platform 
 or at a street corner. It has been true of some lawyers that they 
 could not make an argument, if they could not have something to 
 twirl in their fingers while speaking. A great many public speakers, 
 (preachers generally they are,) have a regular motion of their body 
 
 which has come to be necessary to the facile action of their intellects 
 26 
 
364 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 —they rest on one foot and then on the other—or they turn their 
 heads so and then so and then so again, or they oscillate in a balance, 
 now on their heels and now on their toes, or they keep their hands 
 traveling monotonously, or they make some particular and perhaps 
 eccentric gesture with one hand, while if that hand were tied behind 
 their back it would end all further possibility of intelligent utterance. 
 It is not well to be a slave to routine. 
 
 I call your attention now to the second general head of my 
 discourse, namely: The value of routine. I put value last and 
 give it the advantage of a last mention, because I want to make 
 my greatest impression with that, for, be the perils of routine what 
 they may, I think you had better have them for the sake of the 
 values mentioned. Well then listen while I recount those values. 
 
 First, in the matter of your church services—and perhaps in 
 some of your other official services—it is a comfort to your people 
 to have you a calculable man, not like that suppositious sun which I 
 mentioned as not having risen yet when I reached here at three 
 o’clock to lecture ; nor even like a comet, which is sure to come 
 sometime but nobody so far knows when ; but rather like our actual 
 old trustworthy sun, the orb that is always on time, not behind-hand 
 and not before-hand and always just about so hot in summer and 
 less hot in winter, always keeping his appointments with the other 
 orbs, so that they all love him and can pre-arrange their daily and 
 yearly affairs on the solid ground of his foreknown fidelities. That 
 is the kind of minister to be, if you are to have the hearts of your 
 people. They want to know whether you are going to call on them 
 in the church to keep Easter in the Spring somewhere, or at Christ- 
 mas time—whether at an infant baptism you will have an infant 
 present or not—whether the ritual for morning and evening service 
 which you have been moving in for some time, is likely to be turned 
 end for end some Sunday, or totally supplanted by some new order, 
 and whether in these total supplantings, as they promiscuously come 
 along, a philosopher could discover any regulative principles of 
 before and after in the flow of the details. 
 
 It is a great advantage to your people to have you methodize 
 your activities and functions to a certain extent. That first. 
 
 Secondly, it is a great advantage to yourself. Not to mention 
 the satisfaction of noticing that your people are contentedly resting 
 down on your orderly faithfulness, you can do more work and do 
 it easier on system, than you can on spurt, lawlessness and disorder. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 365 
 
 That is often said ; and it is true. And I am going to tell why. 
 There are several wherefores. © 
 
 If you have a method and stand to it every time you make the 
 circuit of that method, your mind and body both do more and more 
 catch the run of it, get used to it, fashion themselves to it and have 
 it for their second nature, their instinct, yes, their automatism. I 
 have reviled automatism in certain connections, but now I am going 
 to praise it. There certainly are many kinds of work where the 
 automatic principle is good enough. There are even many kinds 
 that cannot be at all performed except as that principle is brought 
 in. Let me illustrate that. The shortest cut between any point in 
 the high air and a given point on the ground, is a curve, not a 
 straight line but a curve ; and the hawk, when he dives for his prey, 
 always travels that curve. He does it by instinct. If he had to do 
 it as taught by some professor of mathematics, he would fail. And 
 if his mind were as large as Plato’s, instead of being nothing but a 
 hawk’s mind, it would not alter anything ; he simply could not keep 
 that ideal line. Mere reason is not equal to finding its way practi- 
 cally along that curve. The passage must be made automatically. 
 It must be in the hawk structurally and congenitally so to do. 
 
 Similarly, if Dr. Carver, when hundreds of glass balls are thrown 
 into the air, is going to catch every oneof them on the wing with his 
 rifle and break them, or if the pianist is to rush through his complex, 
 amazing fingerings with his eyes shut and his thoughts at the ends 
 of the earth and with no more consciousness of directing that finger- 
 work than though he were dead ; or if Mr. Blondin is to walk on a 
 rope in the air across Niagara and wheel a wheel-barrow along the 
 rope and for aught I know wheel himself in his wheel-barrow, and 
 all in a poise as assured and safe as your poise when you tread a 
 side-walk ; then in lack of any instinct for such astonishing doings, 
 the men must drill themselves till they get up an instinct; they 
 must routine and routine and routine, I do not know how many 
 hundreds of times; routine their muscles and their whole bodily 
 apparatus ; routine their perceptive faculties ; routine their concen- 
 tration ; routine their entire selves in fact, until the greater part by 
 far of their performance has passed beyond the lines of voluntary 
 action clear out into absolute mechanicalism and they are scarcely 
 more than hawks diving instinctively down the air short-cut. 
 
 There are many amazing achievements, like rope-walking, or 
 the feats of gymnasts in the arena, or the miracles performed by the 
 
366 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 sleight-of-hand man, which at first thought we should call physical 
 wonders merely, and therefore illustrations simply of the great spon- 
 taneity of action to which the body may be brought by long practice ; 
 but really there is as much mind as body in these doings, and the 
 possibility of mental spontaneity at last is also illustrated by them. 
 When somebody walks the rope, he does not do it in the use of the 
 same kind of mental faculties that Milton used when he wrote Para- 
 dise Lost, or the lawyer uses in a great argument, or the preacher 
 in his great discourse, or the high-class mathematician in some 
 abstract discovery that he makes; but that man up there on the 
 rope uses mind after all and what mind he does use, he uses con- 
 summately. It is faculty in absolute drill and scarcely less infallible 
 than the hawk’s instinct rushing along his curve. Moreover it is the 
 same grade of faculty that the carpenter uses when, with his trained 
 eye, he makes instant judgment on such matters as size, form and 
 distance ; or that the marksmen uses for similar purposes, or that 
 even the painter uses when he arranges spaces, vistas, dimensions, 
 heights and the like on his canvas. Moreover, there is a fine exhi- 
 bition of disciplined will in the rope-walking, that steady will ; con- 
 trolling muscle and nerve and the natural terrors of the mind, was 
 not born such a will as that ; it was born like all other wills, pliable, 
 timid and fluctuating ; but having been put upon its mettle daily for 
 years and years, all those congenital infirmities have been worked 
 out of it and there now it is, ruling the difficulties of the occasion 
 and facing awful perils without the least conscious effort. 
 
 So then, it is not a bodily autordatism alone that we are called 
 to study and admire in these cases of skill and nerve, but a mental 
 automatism quite as much; in other words, a manikin on the rope 
 in the gymnastic arena, or in the sleight of hand, could not begin to 
 do what the man does; and therefore while in these cases we are 
 made to know the wonderful perfectibility of the human body by 
 dint of routine practice, we are quite as certainly made to know the 
 perfectibility of our intellectual parts by the same means and (by 
 analogy) of our moral parts. If the several perceptive faculties 
 which these physical experts bring into the field when they perform, 
 can be made such exceedingly capable faculties, especially if they can 
 be brought to operate in such entire unconsciousness of effort at the 
 moment—yes more than that, if they can be brought to act absolutely 
 well, even if the man turns his attention completely away to other 
 matters, then we are prepared to believe that men can be worked 
 
YALE LECTURES. 367 
 
 along, or routined along—for it is routine that does it—until they 
 shall operate in a similar, non-voluntary, unlaborious, automatic man- 
 ner, throughout the entire range of their higher attributes ; that is, 
 let a man concentrate himself on the discipline of any one of his 
 native powers and subject that selected power of his nature to the 
 tremendous influence of a duly-protracted round-and-round and 
 there is almost nothing that is not possible to be done. Done, for 
 instance, for the imagination or for the memory or for the faculty of 
 abstraction or forthe conscience. And not only is it possible to push 
 any single, selected faculty—as imagination, memory, abstraction or 
 conscience—on thus into perfection; but (what is much more 
 marvelous), it is possible to harness up a team of faculties and 
 diligently routine them together, even as raw soldiers are routined 
 together in military drill, until said faculties are able to move in 
 absolute co-ordination, in absolute spontaneity together, starting off 
 all of them at the least crack of the whip on an automatic dead-run ; 
 an unreflective dead-run, an unconscious dead-run, a machine-like 
 run, an undirected run, a run of their own motion, a run by blind 
 habit, a triumphant run too, such as could never have been approxi- 
 mated, save by the calling in of the automatic principle. 
 
 Every thinking man can illustrate this from his own history— 
 and IJ can—thus: When I have gathered together a miscellaneous 
 heap of memoranda for a sermon, the next step I need to take is 
 to organize that miscellany under some terms of order. It will not 
 do to tumble it out on my congregation in its present confusion and 
 lack of unity, any more than it will do for a painter to empty the 
 unassorted contents of his mind on to his canvas. Well, there are 
 several possible principles of order whereby I may reduce that heap 
 of valuable stuff to shape and make it comprehensible ; some of 
 which principles are superficial and scarcely more dignified than a 
 trick, while others are philosophical, deep and true. Among these 
 perplexing possibles I must choose. I dare not undertake to say 
 exactly how many of the faculties of my head are involved in this 
 business that I am now describing. A good many; I am sure of 
 that. By my perceptives I look at my written memoranda. By my 
 memory I recall just what those very abridged and imperfect memo- 
 randa stand for. By something-or-other in me I decide the com- 
 parative value of those recorded items and the precise place or rank 
 to which they therefore shall be assigned in my discourse. Undoubt- 
 edly that something or other in me is my religious nature, for one 
 
368 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 thing. For instance, an item that on inspection seems a little 
 irreverent, my reverence rejects. An item not wholly harmonious 
 with the revealed truth of God, my reverence and my sanctified 
 affection and my truthfulness, reject. Perhaps some one of these 
 memoranda is full of fine analysis or full of ideality and I shall take 
 hold and deal with it in the use of certain corresponding powers of 
 my nature. It begins to look as though all there is of me were 
 embarked in this enterprise. JI am not marching into it by any 
 single faculty or any six faculties, but I am using my entire team. 
 It is a very complex case of cooperation. But I do it easily enough. 
 As likely as not I will have that chaos subdued in a few minutes. I 
 do not go around among my numerous faculties and exhort each 
 one to do his very best now and keep the touch of the elbow with 
 his brother faculties and not get into the see-saw of an ugly mule 
 team. When I began to make sermons, I did a good deal of this 
 exhorting and consumed much time on it. My team had never 
 been hitched up before—not much at any rate—certainly they had 
 not been hitched to anything so big as a sermon. So I had to 
 exhort them and coax and flog. But I accepted myself as I was 
 born and proceeded to practice coordination. I exhorted the 
 faculties. And Iwhippedthem. Idid it every week. Some weeks 
 I thought I had gained on it. Then again, I thought I had not. 
 However, on the whole I did gain. And now when I get my chaos 
 assembled—my unformulated materials of discourse—all I have to 
 do is just what a famous public singer told a friend of mine she 
 does when she is on the stage and wants her throat to trill. She 
 practiced daily four years, she said, and had not even then succeeded 
 in reaching the trill she was after. The physical organs, the organs 
 of articulation and her mind, in the several faculties involved, were 
 not yet quite co-efficient and simultaneous in their action. They 
 could not catch the knack of hitching up together and trilling. But 
 at last, suddenly, the lady could not tell how, the long-sought hitch- 
 up was-made and off went the trill like a bird. And ever since 
 that moment she has had no difficulty. The inharmonious powers 
 once harnessed up, never unharnessed. And now whenever she 
 wants to perform that feat, she simply gives the word to the facul- 
 ties concerned and they take care of it all. She feels and knows 
 that they do it and not she. The performance is taken right out of 
 her hands. What was volitional for a long time and accompanied 
 with a great deal of pushing, is now involuntary; as involuntary 
 
YALE LECTURES. 369 
 
 as the tick, tick, of a wound-up clock. So the minister with the 
 stuff of a sermon on hand, which he is going to organize. For 
 years it went hard with him to do that—rather hard—but now the 
 hard is easy. He can start his trill with the snap of his finger. 
 While he is simply looking at that mass of material, its atoms begin 
 to move. And they do not move promiscuously either. Evidently 
 they have been seized with a common idea. It is like the drum- 
 call in an encampment of soldiers. The soldiers pour out innumer- 
 able and fly everywhither, but behold, they fly into companies and 
 regiments. ‘Those incoherent, insensate atoms (the minister’s ser- 
 mon stuff) do the same thing. They are not insensate. They have 
 caught the hint of their master. It isa case of trill. They organ- 
 ize themselves. The minister does not do it. At most, he simply 
 watches the thing go on and enjoys ‘it. It is just like music, the 
 way those atoms and crude masses make haste to get themselves 
 into orderliness and there stand in beautiful array. 
 
 I have made too many words on this illustration, but it will 
 stand for a large class of mental processes ; processes self-moved, 
 processes wherein numbers of our mental powers (to say nothing of 
 our corporeal powers), conspire and pull together and do it spon- 
 taneously ; processes that are never possible to be arrived at except 
 in one way, namely ; by long routine. 
 
 I beg you to take good notice of that last ; that certain mental 
 works never can be done at all, if routine is not called in and 
 pushed and pushed till what was difficult has become second nature. 
 All expert doings depend on just that and that is one of the greatest 
 values of routine. I spoke of a long-practiced minister’s looking 
 his sermon stuff into shape in a few moments, but that is not the 
 only line of work wherein his life-long routining tells. It tells in his 
 amplification of that same discourse. It tells in the fairly bewitched 
 way in which the entire mixed contents of the creation, like live 
 things flock to the out-looks of his mind as he writes, begging to be 
 let in for the illumination and enrichment of that discourse. He 
 does not have to send out a search warrant for these things. Once 
 he did and his search-warrants could not bring in more than a 
 fraction of them either. But the warrants have been flying about 
 and all abroad for twenty or thirty years now, and the creation has 
 taken the hint at last, so that not a single search-warrant is any 
 longer necessary. No; but as the heaped-up, unarranged mass of 
 sermon-stock that I mentioned as waiting to be organized, suddenly 
 
370 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 developed a stir in all its atoms, when the master’s order-loving eye 
 lighted thereon, so the innumerable things of the creation, so soon 
 as they got wind of it that the minister had gone to his desk for 
 amplification, took up an automatic movement towards that desk 
 and poured in a very embarrassment of riches. 
 
 Or, take the minister as publicly extemporizing, whether in 
 prayer or discourse. Once he always rose to utter himself with 
 trepidation. He was not sure of his words and he was not sure of 
 his ideas. But now he could go on forever. Sometimes he does. 
 As likely as not he is eloquent. He does not try to be. He passed 
 clear beyond trying years ago and now it isa case of trilling, Or it 
 is like those amazing, musically-organized Italians who improvise. 
 Those men versify and rhyme and sing and touch the whole thing off 
 harmoniously on their guitars, with the facility of rippling brooks, 
 because they have for a long time turned their whole peculiar nature 
 —body, soul and spirit—into a routine of improvisation. 
 
 Of the same sort precisely, is that unconscious personal poise, 
 and unconscious ease of conversation, repartee, fence and sparkle, 
 which many a woman of the world displays. Such a man as Daniel 
 Webster or John Foster and a thousand more exceedingly able men, 
 look upon her as an almost supernatural being ; she is so frightfully 
 superior to them in all this beautiful airiness ; whereas the truth is, 
 her life has been spent in that thing until she ripples, glitters, tosses 
 you on the sharp end of her bodkin and makes you to feel like a 
 fool, automatically. She can sparkle as easily as you can prose on 
 the weather. , 
 
 In all the fine handicrafts, this same principle comes in abun- 
 dantly of course. Proficiency in every department of human devel- 
 opment depends on skill artificially worked up—worked up by 
 routine, 
 
 And all these brilliant inventions in the practical field and these 
 brilliant discoveries in the field of science, those of them which are 
 reached by sudden intuitive outsprings of the mind rather than by 
 methodical processes of reasoning—and there be many such—are 
 apt to be the work of well-routined minds; solidly methodized 
 minds ; minds that have come to supreme facility by much precision 
 and practice, so that, although seeming sudden, they are not mere 
 guess-work and upstart movement but rather the blossoming of 
 a plant which had in it the manifold potentialities of a blossom 
 after all. 
 
YALE LECTURES. 371 
 
 I say then, one of the uses of routine is facility. Work by 
 method makes facile work at last, because we, in mind and body 
 both, are capable of automatic action. 
 
 And speaking still further on the idea that he who works by 
 method and consents to routine, works easier and can do more 
 work, I mention this. 
 
 That routine gradually stamps out reluctance in us, so that we 
 lie down under it as we do under any other inevitable and waste no 
 time or friction in halting and rebelling. When the chaotic masses 
 of the primal creation were first lumped into shapely globes and then 
 set in the bondage of definite orbits and precise time-keeping, day 
 and night forever, I can imagine that they did not enjoy it and 
 would have sulked and possibly did sulk in the privacy of their own 
 minds—but what was the use—the course of created things was 
 established and started and there they were in the whirl of it. So 
 sulking died out, just as a minister’s groanings over his first sermons 
 died out, as the routine that he had chosen for life went on and as 
 his groanings over his first pastor-work died out. Routine kills 
 groanings and the good breath thus saved is turned into work. I 
 have certain days in the week when I make parish calls, I will sup- 
 pose ; a certain day or days when I attend to odds and ends ; cer- 
 tain mornings when I write, certain hours when I receive the human 
 family, certain hours when I pray, certain times when I fast, certain 
 times when IJ take exercise, certain times when I cast overboard all 
 work, empty myself of intentions and float round ina vacuum. I 
 framed out my time in this manner years and years ago, I will still 
 suppose, and now the question of times and seasons never comes up. 
 Tt is fast-time say. Well, if I had not my routine established, I 
 should beg off sometimes. There is nothing in fasting that is con- 
 genial to the bodily appetites. What they like is eating. And 
 where a person is born very fleshly they like eating first rate. So I 
 incline to beg-off. And I not merely beg but I reason. An ingen- 
 ious man can see a good many alluring arguments for not fasting. 
 So I might spend a week debating the question, procrastinating, 
 shivering on the brink, wondering whether I had better ever begin. 
 So in the matter of calls, I had rather read my book. And in the 
 matter of my prayer, my newspaper has just come in, or my sensi- 
 bilities are dull, or I am somehow in a mysterious inertia. Now the 
 non-routine man fritters away half his time, petting his own reluc- 
 tancies, his indisposition to take up tasks and disagreeable duties ; 
 
372 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 whereas, if his allotment of time from his God were clearly pro- 
 grammed and foreordained, when this or that duty arrived he would 
 move to it with something very like spontaneity. Take it as respects 
 the choice of topics for sermons. Many ministers spend almost as 
 much time hunting topics, or selecting topics from those which they 
 have hunted down, as they do in unfolding the same ; and withal, 
 this hunting business is much more vexatious and killing than un- 
 folding is. Supposing now this topic-hunter had a prearranged 
 general order of topics. Supposing he was a Christian-year man. 
 Supposing he was a doctrinal preacher and worked up a course of 
 doctrinal sermons once in so long. Supposing he even took for his 
 rule the tossing up of a penny and letting heads or tails decide. 
 Suppose almost anything in the direction of method and routine. 
 Do you not see that that ends hunting, in the main? When a thing 
 is nailed right on to a man by a prescribed order, he has nothing to 
 do but take it and make the best of it and spend not a minute in 
 further search, or in grumbling. You might imagine that a forced 
 topic would breed grumbling, but it does not. Routine men find ~ 
 that it does not. At Christmas, Epiphany, Good-Friday, Easter, 
 Ascension and Whit Sunday—those Christian-tides, for example— 
 you are looked to, I will suppose, for a particular sort of sermon 
 every year so long as you live. But this, like any other circuit that 
 any reasonable man or Christian body is likely to adopt, is full of the 
 best kind of suggestiveness to the mind ; so that when any given date 
 or period arrives, the mere coming of it with its cargo of meanings 
 starts the man into fertility straightforth. Moreover it lies in the 
 nature of the mind, that so soon as it plainly discerns the inevitable 
 —especially if it is a genial inevitable—it acts like those spontane- 
 ous atoms in the minister’s pile of sermon-material, when the minis- 
 ter’s awful eye rested upon them. They started with alacrity and 
 any mind in its predetermined and unescapable circuit of thought 
 always developes alacrity so that, verily that is fulfilled which 
 William Wordsworth said in his now famous address to Duty : 
 
 Stern Lawgiver! Yet thou dost wear 
 The Godhead’s most benignant grace; 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 As is the smile upon thy face: 
 
 Then Wordsworth takes wing in a flight like the following, still 
 apostrophizing Duty :— 
 
YALE LECTURES. 373 
 
 Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, 
 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads; 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; 
 
 And the most ancient heavens, through Thee are fresh and strong. 
 
 No doubt, each man of us ought to go to his duty in each case 
 of duty by the pull in part at least of great motives consciously in 
 him at the moment, and if we live long enough, and the grace of 
 God to us-ward fails not, we shall eventually find ourselves in that - 
 state ; a state so blessed that it is hard to wait for its coming ; but at 
 present, as a matter of fact, we all have our lethargies, when the pull 
 in us and on us of motives is feeble ; and in these low times, rather 
 than that we totally come short and leave our duty undone, it is 
 well if we are started forth by the simple nudge and joggle of 
 routine ; fasting, for instance, because the time for fasting has come, 
 calling on the parishioners because it is the day for it, praying be- 
 cause it is the hour for prayer, and not because we so want to do. 
 A debate might be raised on the exact moral worth of such perform- 
 ances as those, either to the performer or to those performed upon, 
 but all debate is cut short the moment it is mentioned that God 
 himself has appointed days, dates, hours and numerous circularities 
 of human action, knowing, all the while, that not one man in all 
 generations forever would come up to those appointments, each 
 and all, and every time, unlanguidly. He knew we could not do it. 
 Nevertheless he made the appointments. Therefore his mind must 
 be that we take these our necessary, occasional torpidities with us, 
 and go in to the duties. And if that is his mind, then ye may 
 reasonably look for a blessing, in such unaffirmative, matter-of- 
 course routine fidelities. And I think it may be noticed, in human 
 life, that the steadfast time-keepers, the men that never ask permis- 
 sion of their moods to keep their engagements with God, and their 
 engagements with men for God’s sake, are blessed. They make 
 better characters than the disciples of do-as-you-feel. They are 
 honester. They cannot be tampered with. Put them in an awful 
 gap, turn away your head five minutes, and then look back ; they 
 are there still. Turn your head, if you want to, six months. Still 
 they are there. Cicero’s “abut, excessit, evastt, erupit,’ and the 
 rest, does not apply to them. They have not erufit. They have 
 not even adu¢. And they never will. What can you expect of a 
 man that goes by his moods, never does any thing that he does not 
 want to, or, at the best, procrastinates, hoping that sometime he will 
 
374 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 want to. I say unto you, such an one has provided fundamentally 
 for his own ruin, and for his own uselessness, considerably, among the 
 children of men. The truth is, my Brother, by diligence you can 
 kill your own moodiness and make yourself a steady-going-person. 
 You can kill your moral moods, and you can kill your intellectual 
 moods. I marvel when I notice how much more uniform the action 
 of my own mind is than it once was. I can get something out of 
 it any day. I do not say what, but something. Long ago, when I 
 used to go to my study to think and write, I could not tell whether 
 my mind would give down that day or not. NowI know. I know 
 it will. So far as quantity of production is concerned, a stupid 
 day is about as good as a bright one with me. And when a stupid 
 writing-day happens along, I keep firmly to the routine of produc- 
 tion and put up with some falling off in the quality, for fear that if 
 I ease off on the routine, my once moody mind will fall from the 
 grace of uniform productivity back into its original state of incon- 
 stancy, costiveness and inability, and have whole days of no yield 
 whatever. Keep your sap running, lest it forget how. 
 
 As I come now to the close of this lecture, I begin to think of 
 my own reputation for consistency, for did I not name it as one of 
 the evils of automatism on its religious side, that it tends towards, 
 even if it does not involve an inattentive, mechanical and therefore 
 formalistic style of observance and duty-doing ; nevertheless, have I 
 not gone boldly forward to magnify routine fidelities? I have not 
 the least doubt that I could worm my way out of that incongruity if, 
 after having spoken to you so long, I might take time to do the nec- 
 essary amount of squirming. I can recollect the time when if I 
 seemed to contradict myself, I was frightened ; but I have got over 
 that. Now I go straight on and say what seems to be true as 
 regards my subject, and take it for granted that all those sayings 
 will fight it out among themselves and get a real concord and 
 peace. 
 
 The problem to-day is to accept routine and even automatisms 
 with their unquestionable advantages, and yet not take on any of 
 their disadvantages. A very critical piece of navigation. But, 
 Beloved, that is about where we mortals are in most things. It is 
 like paddling a birch canoe. You must sit in the middle, sit per- 
 pendicular, not turn your head much either way, and part your hair 
 in the middle (as some one has said), else you upset. Well, there 
 is where we get discipline. In this life of ours, with its many forms 
 
YALE LECTURES. 375 
 
 and instances of difficult navigation, we are to consider, to balance 
 things, to watch ourselves, to secure preponderations often by the 
 weight of a single hair, to run the gauntlet of many dangers and 
 not be caught by any of them. ‘That is what we are in the world 
 for and out of it comes character. 
 
 A large amount of our activity, and a considerable part of our 
 responsible action needs to be relegated to our automatic powers. 
 After that is done there is no danger that there will not be hundreds 
 of things left to be attended to volitionally and in full consciousness 
 of what we are about. Take our constant walking as an illustration. 
 We simply cannot give to it our voluntary attention. There is too 
 much else to busy ourselves about. It must go on mechanically. 
 Take the operations of an accountant. He adds up his long 
 columns of figures and runs through his long processes with spon- 
 taneous inattention ; and his business would kill him if it was not so. 
 Take these mechanics who stand at a bench and do some one 
 small thing over and over forever. We call them “skilled work- 
 men,” and pay them high wages, but this skill of theirs that we are 
 willing to pay so much for, is simply the more or less automatic 
 facility into which they have perseveringly routined themselves. 
 But their craft still requires from them a great deal of determined 
 conscious attention, and by as much as their faculties operate auto- 
 matically, by so much are their minds released and at liberty to give 
 themselves to this conscious and considerate attention, and thus 
 reach on towards perfection in their craft. 
 
 So’ in the domain of morals and religion. In so far as our 
 numerous fidelities to man and God have come one after the other 
 by long practice to be what you may call automatised, we are set 
 free for the labors of intentional and effort-full action. By the grace 
 of God our expectation is that some day our total action will be to 
 a good degree automatised. At all events it will be spontaneous. 
 It will come from us with ease and satisfaction. We believe this, 
 because it has been promised. We believe it too because already, 
 at particular times, under special inspirations of the Holy Ghost, the 
 whole team of our lumbering and reluctant powers and energies 
 have swung into a blithesome flight, a beautiful fury, a complete 
 liberation, a something unvolitional and lyrical to the last degree. 
 That is the ideal condition of man; and this automatism that I 
 have said so much about, with its perils and its many values, is the 
 - foreshadow and similitude of that. And it is a precious thing that 
 
376 YALE LECTURES. 
 
 even in the natural action of our natural powers, and so low down 
 as these half-wrecked, corruptible bodies of ours, this automatic 
 similitude and prophecy doth develop itself in never-so-many forms. 
 
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