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 The educational ideal in tJ 
 
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THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 
 IN THE MINISTRY 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
THE EDUCATIONAL IDEAL 
 IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES 
 
 AT YALE UNIVERSITY 
 
 IN THE YEAR 1908 
 
 BY 
 WILLIAM HERBERT PERRY FAUNCE 
 
 PRESIDENT OF BROWN UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1908 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Copyright, 1908, 
 By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1908. 
 
 J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
 Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The following addresses were delivered as the 
 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale University in 
 March, 1908, and a few weeks later were repeated 
 in a somewhat different form as the Earle Lectures 
 at the Pacific Theological Seminary of Berkeley, 
 California. They contain no information on any 
 subject; but are designed to give — what is perhaps 
 the only gift one man can really make to another — 
 a point of view. 
 
 Many ministers to-day have a dim and baffled 
 feeling that their work is somehow not fully cor- 
 related with the Hfe of the modern world. They 
 stand like David when he had rejected Saul's armor 
 and had not yet found his own — bravely facing 
 the gigantic form, but uncertain as to the method 
 of attack. They are striving to define their own 
 calling afresh and adjust it to novel and rapidly 
 changing conditions. Must the prophet decrease, 
 because the teacher has increased? The questions 
 forced upon us by the obvious reinterpretation of 
 the minister's function are of interest not to cler- 
 gymen only, but to every believer in Christianity 
 and to every student of social and moral progress. 
 The writer, having spent fifteen years in the active 
 
VI FOREWORD 
 
 ministry, and ten years in the still more active task 
 of educational administration, has attempted to 
 show that the relation of the two spheres of preacher 
 and teacher is closer and more vital than has yet 
 been recognized; and that the educational con- 
 ception of the ministry — though other ideals may 
 be important and valuable — will be especially 
 fruitful in our time. 
 
 He begs leave to express his indebtedness for 
 candid counsel and illuminating suggestion to his 
 friends. Rev. Robert A. Ashworth and Professor 
 Gerald Birney Smith, and to his colleague, Pro- 
 fessor Walter G. Everett. 
 
 Providence, September i, 1908. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Place of the Minister in Modern Life . i 
 
 CHAPTER n 
 The Attitude of Religious Leaders toward New 
 
 Truth 39 
 
 CHAPTER HI 
 Modern Uses of Ancient Scripture ... 75 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Demand for Ethical Leadership . . . "S 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Service of Psychology *53 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 The Direction of Religious Education • . I93 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 The Relation of the Church and the College 223 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 The Education of the Minister by his Task . 257 
 
THE PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN 
 LIFE 
 
 " The teachers shall shine as the brightness of the firma- 
 ment, and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars 
 forever and ever." — Dan. xii. 3. 
 
 " A good preacher should have these properties and virtues: 
 first, to teach systematically. . . ." — Luther, Table-Talk. 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 
 
 All professions and occupations are in our time 
 being subjected anew to the ancient question, 
 "Cut bono?'' No calling is so venerable, so in- 
 trenched in honor and office, that it can escape the 
 demand, — sometimes brusque and irreverent, but 
 at the heart of it thoroughly justifiable — What is 
 the use? On the threshold of our study, therefore, 
 we may well ask : What is the use of being a minister, 
 and what is the function of the ministry in modern 
 society ? 
 
 The vast changes through which the world has 
 passed in the last fifty years — changes industrial, 
 economic, political, religious, changes in our ideals 
 of freedom, of success, of culture, of morality — 
 have created many new professions, and have 
 seriously affected the standing of the three time- 
 honored professions, medicine, the ministry, and 
 the law. 
 
 The practice of medicine is a calling vastly more 
 important and influential than it was two generations 
 ago. The equipment of the physician is far sounder 
 
 3 
 
4 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and more scientific, his spirit is more heroic and at 
 the same time more catholic, than formerly, and his 
 decisions are vital to our individual happiness and 
 our municipal and national health. As regards the 
 legal profession, we must confess that it has not 
 gained in recent years in popular regard or in de- 
 termining influence. While our lawyers are better 
 trained than formerly, they have often become 
 attaches of industrial corporations, and in so doing 
 have, without any deliberate desertion of ideals, 
 been forced to exchange a national horizon and the 
 promotion of justice for the endeavor to make law 
 minister to the advancement of corporate industry. 
 Such an aim compels extreme specialization in 
 study, and, if unchecked by the larger view, may 
 bring it about that the lawyer becomes the greatest 
 obstacle to the enforcement of law. It is time for 
 all broad-minded and true-hearted men in the legal 
 profession to protest against the permanent surrender 
 of its deeper and nobler ideals. 
 
 The greatest change wrought among modern 
 callings has been in the relative scope and influence 
 of the ministry. There are those who tell us that 
 this is now a discredited profession, and many facts 
 seem at first to support that view. Few young 
 men of strong personality and power of leadership 
 are now choosing the ministry as the vehicle of self- 
 expression or the means of moral uplift. Our 
 college graduates of greatest intellectual vitality are 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 5 
 
 usually drafted into business pursuits or into scien- 
 tific research, and those who do choose the ministry 
 are often the young men of rather passive suscepti- 
 bilities and gelatinous fibre. Many ministers are 
 not eager to have their own sons enter a calling 
 beset with novel difficulties. The clergyman as 
 depicted in the popular novel or on the modern 
 stage is frequently not a virile or attractive person. 
 Short pastorates betoken a restlessness on the part 
 of pew and pulpit. There is a widespread disinclina- 
 tion to attend church, and a doubt, half serious, half 
 jocose, as to whether listening to a public exhortation 
 twice on Sunday is the best way for a thoughtful 
 man to spend his day of rest. The pointlessness 
 of much church-going impresses even those who 
 believe in its possible value. These and kindred 
 facts do not constitute a trumpet summons to our 
 ablest college graduates; they rather give color to 
 the nebulous notion that somehow the laboratory, 
 or the library, or the magazine, or the social settle- 
 ment, is henceforth to do the work of the Christian 
 pulpit. 
 
 Yet while the air is full of these doubts and 
 scruples, we are confronted with the fact that outside 
 the pulpit preaching is to-day more widespread, 
 more vigorous, more effective, and more in demand 
 than at any time during the last hundred years. 
 We live in an age not only of reaction from the crass 
 materialism of which Professor Haeckel is a belated 
 
6 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 exponent, but an age of unprecedented ethical in- 
 terest, of altruistic enthusiasm, of a moral passion 
 that overflows all ecclesiastical channels and con- 
 ventional modes of expression and spreads like a 
 great river nearing the sea. Preaching is at last 
 getting outside the churches, as it always has done 
 in ages of great moral advance. The preacher is 
 not always or usually an ordained official — he 
 is a college professor, a political leader, a judge 
 of the Supreme Court, a diplomat, or the governor 
 of a state. When the President of Yale University 
 publishes a volume of baccalaureates, do we find 
 them less vital and persuasive because the symbol 
 of his office is a mace rather than a mitre? When 
 Princeton's presidency passed from the theologian 
 to the economist, did Princeton weaken in any 
 degree its appeal to the conscience and aspiration of 
 young manhood ? The addresses of the chief magis- 
 trate of our republic are usually sermons.^ In their 
 deliberate iteration of obvious principles, in their 
 direct summons to moral action, in their fearless 
 rebuke of evil as the speaker sees it, in their ex- 
 altation of primitive and homely virtues, they recall 
 the best preaching of colonial days. Whoever has 
 heard a lecture by the political leader who has in 
 recent years more than once been an unsuccessful 
 candidate for the presidency, has heard an address 
 
 * The references to men in public life were made in the year 
 1908. 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 7 
 
 precisely such as may be heard in a thousand 
 churches — only reenforced by unusual gifts native 
 and acquired. When the present Governor of New 
 York State speaks from the pine boards of a county 
 fair, or the rear platform of a train, he is simply 
 enunciating the primal verities which his father 
 uttered for forty years from the pulpit of a single 
 denomination. When our Secretary of State speaks 
 in South American capitals, his fundamental appeal 
 is not to love of gain or glory, but to the sentiments of 
 justice, brotherhood and spiritual unity which it is 
 the direct aim of Christianity to create and main- 
 tain. But this modern preaching has shaken off the 
 shackles of the homiletic "firstly" and "secondly"; 
 it has escaped from surplice and pulpit and dim reli- 
 gious light ; it has ceased to care for metaphysical for- 
 mula, and girding itself with the weapons of the time, 
 it sallies forth in broad daylight into market-place 
 and mill and legislature and court, to do battle for 
 the moral ideals of the race. And the multitudes 
 throng and crowd to hear it. Preaching out of 
 date? There is more eagerness to hear a worthy 
 appeal to the sense of duty to-day than ever before 
 since Miles Standish stepped on Plymouth Rock. 
 
 In the realm of literature the same phenomenon 
 is seen. Robert Louis Stevenson, like every other 
 Scotsman, could not refrain from preaching. His 
 "Lay Morals" have penetrated minds that were 
 impervious to any treatise, his "Vailima Prayers" 
 
8 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 have been repeated by thousands who shun all lit- 
 urgies, and through life he called ethics his "veiled 
 mistress." While nine-tenths of our modern fiction 
 is anaemic and flaccid, the other one-tenth is the 
 vehicle of our most intense reforming passion. 
 Thackeray and Dickens have scourged our pleasant 
 vices, and no preacher of the present day could 
 lay bare our social sins more pitilessly than is 
 done in ''The House of Mirth" and ''The Fruit 
 of the Tree." The socialistic periodicals of our 
 time flame with that spirit of self-sacrifice and 
 devotion to advancing ideals which ought to mark 
 our religious press. The labor leaders, speaking 
 in dingy halls or on the public square, often show 
 as much love for humanity and devotion to its up- 
 lifting as can be easily discerned in our "master- 
 pieces of pulpit eloquence." Indeed, our pulpits 
 are sometimes put to blush by the fervor and con- 
 viction of men who breathe an ampler ether and 
 speak in more convincing tones. Just when the 
 pulpit had become cautious in affirming the belief 
 in immortality, then came John Fiske to exalt in 
 the name of cosmic philosophy such beUef as "an 
 act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work." 
 Just as we were thinking that religion must be 
 more modest in the presence of science, comes even 
 Professor Huxley to declare that "science teaches 
 in the clearest and strongest manner the Christian 
 doctrine of entire surrender to the will of God." 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 9 
 
 When our faint hearts are wondering if it is any 
 longer safe to say "I know," Sir Oliver Lodge 
 comes forward to affirm a spiritual life with un- 
 changing standards and undying hopes. 
 
 We often hear it suggested that religion is losing 
 its grasp on life because we no longer keep the 
 annual days of fasting and painful introspection; 
 yet, as an EngUsh visitor has recently pointed out, 
 the month of June with its college commencements 
 is a time when the whole country looks inward and 
 upward. From hundreds of commencement plat- 
 forms the foremost men of the country are in that 
 month taking an account of our moral stock, ap- 
 praising our national success, rebuking our foibles 
 and purifying our ideals. The chief value of many 
 colleges is not in the students they educate, but in 
 the reaction of the college on the community about 
 it, demanding of the community continuous sacrifice 
 for unseen ends, uplifting new standards, creating 
 new horizons, and filUng whole sections of the 
 country with noble discontent. If thus the college 
 in any measure does the work of the church, therein 
 the church rejoices. Preaching to-day is in con- 
 stant and urgent demand, and our country is alive 
 with novel forms of moral appeal. 
 
 Should the modern preacher then leave the pulpit 
 in order to deliver his message? Should he seek 
 public office or enter diplomatic service in order 
 to gain the ear and sway the mind of the nation? 
 
10 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 What is his proper place and function in society? 
 At once we are met by four conceptions of the min- 
 istry, four stages in the evolution of the Protestant 
 idea of the preacher's task. We may call them 
 the liturgical, the magisterial, the oratorical, and 
 the educational conceptions of the ministry. These 
 conceptions have not always appeared in the same 
 order of succession. They may, and often do, co- 
 exist in the same community. There is some truth 
 in each one. Yet on the whole they constitute a 
 genuine development which is worth our study. 
 
 I. The liturgical conception of the minister's 
 task was supreme in the mediaeval church. Doubt- 
 less it entered the primitive Christian community 
 as an inheritance from the Old Testament, where 
 the rehgious ceremony often appears as the great 
 essential in the preservation of religious life. Clem- 
 ent in his epistle draws out the analogy between 
 the Christian pastor and the Jewish priest, and 
 develops the liturgical conception of his work. 
 Cyprian advances on this analogy and gives us the 
 full-fledged idea of the Christian priesthood as 
 distinct and separate from the laity. Most vividly 
 was this idea embodied in the ecclesiastical archi- 
 tecture of the Middle Ages. If architecture in 
 general may be called "frozen music," then church 
 architecture is certainly congealed theology. Some- 
 how the beliefs men hold find unmistakable utter- 
 ance in the structures they build. Nearly every 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE II 
 
 church of mediagval Europe by its cruciform ground- 
 plan proclaimed its faith in the Eternal Sacrifice, 
 and by its separation of nave and choir uttered its 
 belief in the separation of priest and people. Be- 
 tween the choir and the nave stood the great screen, 
 often curiously wrought and richly adorned, but 
 strong and immovable, a prohibition and a barrier. 
 Before the screen were the people, to listen, to 
 receive, and to obey. Behind it were the divinely 
 chosen office-bearers, to interpret authoritatively 
 the divine will, and by performance of appointed 
 rites to wash away sin and to render the wor- 
 shippers acceptable to God. The working of the 
 daily miracle of the mass was deemed vastly more 
 important than any oral teaching could be. Or- 
 dination was the chief sacrament, since without 
 due succession in the apostolic line the church 
 itself must cease to be. To transmit the authority 
 unimpaired and to continue the sacred rites un- 
 broken was the great essential of the priestly office. 
 Even the most sympathetic interpreter must 
 see the perils which lurk in such a conception of 
 the minister's task. In its grosser forms, such an 
 ideal of the minister makes him the mere agent of 
 the hierarchy, subordinating truth to safety and 
 profiting by popular ignorance. Even in its most 
 refined forms the liturgical idea is constantly liable 
 to be confused with the magical. Whenever the 
 office is separated from the character of the man who 
 
12 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 fills it, whenever some venerable formula is used 
 as an incantation, whenever some sacred rite is 
 supposed to confer grace apart from the moral 
 attitude of those who receive it — then we have 
 simply pagan magic masking itself under Christian 
 symbol. The only way by which the noblest lit- 
 urgies and ceremonies can be kept Christian is by 
 the constant affirmation that they are but symbols 
 in and through which the loftiest truth is made 
 vivid and intelligible to mind and heart. The 
 priestly — in the sense of representative — func- 
 tion is indeed perpetual. To approach the High- 
 est in behalf of the lowest and feeblest is a high 
 privilege. But how easily this idea glides into the 
 trust in some opus operatum, how deftly it sub- 
 stitutes an exterior for an interior, and confuses 
 priesthood with priestcraft, all Christian history is 
 witness. Our only preservation from these perils 
 is in the constant reiterated teaching that no office 
 can lift a man above the level of his own character, 
 and no ceremony can be more than "an outward 
 and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." 
 2. The Puritan movement revolted sharply from 
 the liturgical idea. Under the influence of the great 
 reaction, the cathedral was forsaken and replaced 
 by the wooden chapel or meeting-house, the Gre- 
 gorian chant was exchanged for the metrical atroci- 
 ties of Tate and Brady, and ''the anthem high 
 and service clear" made room for the reasoned and 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 1 3 
 
 elaborate sermon, often seeming to assume that to 
 confute and to convert are synonymous terms. But 
 if the Reformers and the Puritans lost ministerial 
 power in one direction, they gained it in another. 
 Deprived of the power of the keys, they grasped the 
 power of the desk and of the sword. They assumed 
 control of the education of youth and of the faith 
 of adults. No prelate ever wielded more auto- 
 cratic powers than Calvin at Geneva, and his claim 
 for the "divine ministry" now seems to us amazing. 
 The theocracy of Massachusetts continued the 
 same tradition, and in the days of Cotton Mather 
 Christian ministers were clothed with power to give 
 authoritative interpretations of truth which were 
 enforced by the penal code. 
 
 In one respect the Puritan ministry of the Ameri- 
 can colonies was right, — it recovered and nobly 
 maintained the idea of the ministry as involv- 
 ing fundamentally the teaching function. Those 
 wearisome discourses with their innumerable sub- 
 divisions were at least addressed to intelligence, 
 not to mere sentiment or passion. The doctrinal 
 sermons, long since relegated to dust and oblivion, 
 had at least this dignity, — they conceived the con- 
 gregation as a thoughtful assembly, demanding 
 and deserving serious instruction, and the preacher 
 addressed himself year after year to the task of 
 indoctrinating a whole community in truth. Dog- 
 matic as the method was, formal and remote from 
 
14 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 life as the discourses now seem, we must at least 
 acknowledge that such sermons were a species of 
 deliberate and continuous public education, furnish- 
 ing an intellectual basis for the great religious 
 awakenings and the patriotic uprisings of a later 
 time. 
 
 But it is needless to dwell on a conception which 
 our age has left far behind. The magisterial idea 
 is an alien in the modern world. The minister 
 who should now assume the attitude of ecclesiasti- 
 cal infallibility, and rely upon the machinery of the 
 law in order to compel assent, would show himself 
 a belated straggler. If he takes the sword, he shall 
 perish with the sword. Even the Roman Catholic 
 church in America wants no real alliance with the 
 state. The ministry has gained immensely by ap- 
 pearing in our time as it really is, — a fundamentally 
 religious calUng, asking the state only to stand out 
 of its sunlight and give it a fair opportunity to serve 
 and save humanity. 
 
 3. But many of us were brought up under the 
 idea that the minister is primarily an orator. This 
 dominated the great French preachers Bossuet 
 and Massillon, it shaped the style of Barrow and 
 Tillotson, of Liddon and Spurgeon, and the early 
 pioneer conditions in America furnished just the 
 plastic and responsive environment in which re- 
 ligious oratory could flourish. The profound reli- 
 gious faith in which the colonies were established, 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 1 5 
 
 the absence of the forms which belong to an older 
 civilization, the atmosphere of freedom, the demand 
 for personal initiative, the longing for effective 
 leadership, the simplicity and unconventionality 
 of much American life — all this offered unpar- 
 alleled opportunity for fervid, moving, masterful 
 preaching, and no country in the world has devel- 
 oped a larger number of so-called " pulpit orators" 
 than the land of Finney and Beecher and Bellows 
 and Storrs. The service such men rendered was 
 beyond price. They gathered up in themselves the 
 finest impulses of their time. They could assume 
 a common fund of religious knowledge in the con- 
 gregation, a previous instruction in the Bible and 
 in Christian doctrine, and upon the training already 
 received in the home the appeal of the pulpit was 
 based. These great preachers became the mouth- 
 pieces of democracy. They interpreted the republic 
 to itself. They translated "the sinless years that 
 breathed beneath the Syrian blue" into the free, 
 progressive, tumultuous life of America. They often 
 appeared as logic on fire. They swept the whole 
 gamut of human penitence and aspiration. They 
 were often the most wide-visioned and comprehen- 
 sive personalities in the community, and stripped 
 of all priestly or magisterial claims, they received 
 the homage due to sincere and virile personaUty 
 gladly flung into the service of truth. 
 
 Under the influence of this conception of the min- 
 
1 6 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 istiy, our ecclesiastical architecture has changed. 
 Churches have become primarily places for listen- 
 ing to the spoken word. The sanctuary has given 
 way in some places to the "auditorium." The 
 music has become simple and popular, the hymns 
 less expressive of divine majesty and more sensitive 
 to human need. The atmosphere of reverence 
 and worship has been insensibly merged in the 
 atmosphere of kindly human sympathy, and the 
 entire congregation has offered itself to the gifted 
 preacher that he may play upon it as he will. So 
 long as Christian society needs a spokesman, so 
 long as there are wrongs demanding protest and 
 rights to be defended, so long as humanity must 
 be summoned and inspired, the task of the Christian 
 orator will remain. 
 
 Yet there are obvious limitations and defects 
 in the oratorical conception of the minister. In 
 the first place, it rules out of the ministry nine-tenths 
 of our young men, since the vast majority are quite 
 incapable of oratory. It finds no place for the 
 cool and careful scholar, for the quiet effective 
 administrator, for the thinker poor in speech but 
 rich in germinating ideas, for the organizer of social 
 forces, for the teacher who fails in formal address 
 but shines in the give-and-take of personal inter- 
 course. A conception of the ministry which makes 
 the great majority of men ineligible is surely in- 
 adequate and misleading. Only here and there do 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE \*J 
 
 we find a Boanerges, an Apollos, a Chrysostom. 
 But a calling which is to reach all sorts and conditions 
 of men must have room in it for more than one kind 
 of capacity. 
 
 Moreover, the preacher's output must be a con- 
 tinuous weekly production. Can any living man 
 produce forty or fifty orations each year ? Not even 
 Daniel Webster could have evolved a reply to Hayne 
 once a week. The essential condition of the great 
 oration is a great occasion, an unusual contingency, 
 the stir and zest of some rare and momentous event. 
 He who is to address the same assembly twice a week 
 for ten years must adopt a different aim, or he will 
 in the very nature of things disappoint himself and 
 all who hear him. 
 
 Against this conception is arrayed also the in- 
 stinctive feeling of our generation, which has be- 
 come suspicious of mere oratory. The master of 
 assemblies has his place in this age as in every 
 other, but our generation could not listen to-day 
 with patience to Edward Everett or Charles Sumner. 
 An age in which "economy of attention" is proposed 
 as the basis of good writing has no time or incli- 
 nation for the sonorous periods, the word-painting, 
 the perorations of other days. A good style-, written 
 or spoken, is like a pane of clear glass through 
 which we can see all objects in true proportion and 
 perspective. A bad or "eloquent" style is Hke a 
 stained-glass window — men look at it but cannot 
 
1 8 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 see through it. The directness, sincerity and sim- 
 plicity of public speech in our time makes the 
 "pulpit orator" as much out of place as the sound- 
 ing-board and the hour-glass. The elaborate works 
 on homiletics which once were on every minister's 
 shelves now seem curiously cumbersome and anti- 
 quated. They conceived the sermon as a work 
 of art or architecture, something to be built up 
 piece by piece, consisting always of the same sort 
 of introduction, proposition, development, etc. — 
 something ingenious, artificial, and too often life- 
 less. Preachers of that school thought far more of 
 the development of a subject than the attainment 
 of an object, and when we hear one of them to-day, 
 he seems ghostly and unreal. The pulpit is not 
 a place for display of rhetorical or logical skill, 
 not an easel for a work of art, not a '^ throne of 
 eloquence." It is an opportunity to grapple with 
 human lives; it offers ''thirty minutes to wake 
 the dead in." And an attempt at Ciceronian elo- 
 quence must be in such circumstances an indication 
 of Ciceronian character. 
 
 4. The church of to-day must consider afresh the 
 earliest of all the conceptions of Christian preach- 
 ing — that indicated in the far-reaching commis- 
 sion : " Go ye and make learners of all the nations." 
 The "teachers" are frequently mentioned in the 
 New Testament, although their work was often 
 combined with other functions. Possibly the epistle 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 1 9 
 
 to the Hebrews is an example of their expository 
 and reconciling work, dealing with mental bewil- 
 derment and struggle, and constructing a bridge 
 from the old to the new. The great addresses in 
 the book of the Acts, uttered by Stephen before 
 his martyrdom, by Paul in the presence of Agrippa 
 and Felix, and on Mars' Hill, are at the farthest 
 possible remove from mere exhortation. They are 
 historical expositions and illuminations, taking the 
 hearers at their own level of knowledge and con- 
 viction, and lifting them step by step into the vision 
 and conviction of the speaker. They are as far re- 
 moved from Demosthenes as the Temple of Herod 
 was from the Parthenon. But under the influence of 
 Greek rhetoric there entered the church the idea 
 of the sermon as a work of art, and, in the phrase 
 of Dr. Hatch, " there has been a sophistical element 
 about it ever since." The sermon has in many 
 regions become an address on classical models, an 
 end in itself rather than a tool for shaping human 
 life. Now the church must return to its original 
 idea of an ecclesia docens, and so train its ministers 
 that the world again may say: "We know that thou 
 art a teacher come from God." 
 
 In recovering this original conception of the 
 ministry the church is allying with itself the most 
 powerful forces of our time. Recent advances in 
 civilization have consisted chiefly of improvements 
 in education. We have been placing all institutions 
 
20 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 on an educational basis. We have perceived that 
 a campaign of education is the only campaign that 
 cannot fail. The great tide of interest in education 
 which has swept over the modern world is due to 
 our modern idea of life as a growth rather than the 
 product of fiat, and as capable of indefinite modi- 
 fication and transformation under pressure. This 
 view has transformed our public institutions. A 
 museum is no longer a place for the exhibition of 
 natural curiosities, but a place for the instruction 
 of the people by concrete objects. A library is no 
 more a storehouse of books, but a place of study, 
 research and training. Our Department of Agri- 
 culture is no longer an office for gathering and 
 publishing statistics; it is a missionary board, a 
 teaching body, whose lecturers travel through the 
 land educating farmers to broader and truer views 
 of their task. Our Young People's Societies are 
 all undertaking the systematic training of their 
 members in Biblical study, in church history, in 
 methods of social service. Our temperance and 
 missionary organizations all have an educational 
 department which is frequently the core of the 
 entire endeavor. Our Young Men's Christian 
 Association, which began as an evangelistic move- 
 ment, and which still includes that idea, has become 
 in the public mind chiefly identified with educa- 
 tional activity for the development of body, mind 
 and heart. Our great industrial enterprises are 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 21 
 
 often forced to undertake education, and one of 
 them has nearly four hundred college men in its 
 own training school, that from them it may select 
 the most promising for important industrial posi- 
 tions. Eagerness for knowledge with a view to 
 its immediate application to life is the consuming 
 desire of our time. Teaching is in some ways the 
 characteristic activity of our age. For this the larg- 
 est buildings are erected, the greatest endowments 
 given, the largest taxes freely levied. The nations 
 have come to perceive that all industrial, military 
 and intellectual achievement is based directly on 
 the persistent education of the people. 
 
 Now the church in its fundamental idea has an- 
 ticipated precisely this attitude. In the days when 
 in Europe the church was officially in control of 
 all human affairs, it planted Christian schools in 
 every land. In America it founded nearly all our 
 earliest colleges. The mottoes of those colleges — • 
 Christo et Ecclesice, Lux ac Veritas, In Deo Spera- 
 mus — show clearly the spirit in which they were 
 established. But the chief educational work of the 
 church can never be done by reaching a few through 
 formal schools and curricula, but must be done in 
 and through its regular services and functions. 
 If the aim of education is "preparation for complete 
 living," and the aim of the church is "that the man 
 of God may be thoroughly furnished unto all good 
 works," then the church is fundamentally an educa- 
 
22 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 tional institution, and the minister is in essence a 
 teacher of his generation. 
 
 In this conception are included several other 
 ideals that are often made prominent. It is often 
 said that the great work of the church is inspira- 
 tional, that what men need most is encouragement, 
 uplift and inspiration in their struggle for righteous- 
 ness. But how is the church to convey inspiration? 
 By physical fervor ? By emotional ecstasy ? Surely 
 not; but by "manifestation of the truth." There 
 is no other such energizing influence in the world 
 as the simple apprehension of the truth. The church 
 inspires by presentation of ideas and ideals. The 
 eternal Hfe which it offers is simply knowledge of 
 the true God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. 
 By the slow and irresistible processes of education 
 the church is to introduce these ideas into the hearts 
 and lives of men. 
 
 It is sometimes said that the church is mainly 
 a means of rescue, a life-saving station on a dan- 
 gerous coast, whose only mission is to deliver ship- 
 wrecked sailors from impending death. Surely 
 every church, like every school, must be able to 
 perform the work of rescue," must be ready at all 
 hazards to plunge into the surges of poverty and 
 vice and crime and bring out of despair the lost 
 soul. But to make this violent and catastrophic 
 experience the norm and model of all Christian 
 endeavor is to do violence to the essence of the 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 2$ 
 
 Christian faith. To a church that is merely a rescue 
 station, all St. Paul's epistles must be unintelligible, 
 since they are marked by the almost entire absence 
 of any counsel to rescue individuals. The writer 
 seems absorbed in the great task of instructing the 
 church in truth and duty. He conceives the church 
 not so much as a life-boat to rescue the few, as a 
 lighthouse to guide the many, — "Ye shine as lights 
 in the world." The mission of our Lord was evi- 
 dently not to win the largest possible number of 
 individual disciples, — after his death the number 
 assembled in Jerusalem was only "about a hundred 
 and twenty," — not to heal the greatest possible 
 number of the sick, — his recorded miracles are 
 less than forty, — but to implant in the world a new 
 ideal of true life and make that ideal germinant 
 and irresistible. Those who hated him hated his 
 ideal and spurned it; those who followed him were 
 in love with his ideal, and loved him with passionate 
 and deathless devotion because he incarnated that 
 ideal, and was what he taught men to be. The 
 powers of the priest to intercede, of the magistrate to 
 enforce, and of the speaker to convince and inspire 
 were all included in the power of the teacher who 
 came to bear witness to the truth. 
 
 But what is the minister to teach ? Does not this 
 conception of the teaching function as supreme 
 lead us back to the old didactic and scholastic 
 methods from which we have happily escaped? 
 
24 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Does it not mean the substitution of the essay for 
 the sermon, the exaltation of the doctrinal above 
 the practical, and the enthronement of dogma over 
 life? It is to avoid this very misconstruction that 
 we prefer to speak of the ''educational ideal," rather 
 than the ''teaching function," of the ministry. If 
 the pulpit is to become merely an echo of the pro- 
 fessor's chair, if the gospel is to become mere diluted 
 sociology or literary criticism, if the minister is to 
 be a mere pedagogue, then indeed the ministry is 
 robbed of its power and the church will become an 
 appendage of the college. To return to the doctri- 
 nal sermons of early New England, to make religion 
 a mere course of lessons in theology, and offer dog- 
 matism in place of devotion is not the path of progress 
 to-day. While the knowledge of facts is impor- 
 tant in religious education, the supremely important 
 elements are ideals, standards and values. The 
 great task of the minister is to give the people an 
 abiding sense of moral and spiritual values, to make 
 them realize what is worth while. It is to give them 
 some dominating conception of life and its meaning. 
 It is to furnish some general standards that may 
 reconcile and unify the scattered and conflicting 
 insights of our complex and hurried civilization. 
 It is to lift men to some mount of vision from which 
 they may "see life steadily and see it whole." It 
 is to give men some general conceptions on which 
 they may string the beads of particular and isolated 
 experiences. 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 2$ 
 
 For example, how shall men conceive God? 
 Shall they think of Him as the Jehovah of the Old 
 Testament who cried, "I, the Lord thy God, am 
 a jealous God," or with the apostle John as ''light 
 in whom is no darkness at all"? Shall they think 
 of him with Omar Khayam as "Master of the Show," 
 or with Spinoza as substance, or with Mohammed 
 as irrevocable decree, or with John Fiske in his 
 boyhood, as a venerable man writing in a celestial 
 ledger, or with Tennyson as "closer than breathing, 
 nearer than hands and feet"? How shall they 
 think of society, — as a collection of individuals 
 whose highest law is laissez-faire, or as an organism 
 whose supreme law is : " Now are we many members, 
 yet one body " ? How shall they think of Christianity 
 — as "a form of rent paid to God," as insurance 
 against the perils of another world, as a series of 
 logically defensible propositions, or as simply an 
 attitude toward God and man? How shall they 
 think of the moral law — as an arbitrary enact- 
 ment enforced by Sinaitic thunders, or as a revela- 
 tion of what God is and man may become? How 
 shall they think of life — as probation, or education, 
 or both? Shall men conceive of the salvation 
 offered in the gospel mainly under forensic or un- 
 der personal analogies ? What shall be our attitude 
 toward modern culture, toward science, literature 
 and art? Shall we fear these things as hostile to 
 the highest life, or ignore them as irrelevant to the 
 
26 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Kingdom of God, or find larger place for them in our 
 time than did the writers of the New Testament 
 in their time? What shall be our attitude toward 
 the spirit of inquiry and research now dominant in 
 education? Is this the latest manifestation of the 
 mocking "spirit that denies," or is the utterance 
 of the Zeitgeist a true accent of the Holy Ghost? 
 Shall we shun modern scholarship as "knowledge 
 that puffeth up," or cultivate the attitude of Moses 
 when in the presence of disconcerting novelty he 
 cried: "I will now turn aside and see"? What 
 about the great ethnic faiths with which trade and 
 diplomacy and immigration are bringing us into 
 constantly closer contact? Are they the offspring 
 of deceit, or are they sincere gropings after Him 
 who is not far from every one of us? What con- 
 stitutes personal success in life — is it self-culture, 
 or is it social service ? Who is greatest in the king- 
 doms of earth, — the warrior, the captain of industry, 
 the missionary, the monk, or the poet ? What is the 
 Christian view of competition in trade, the Christian 
 view of the duties of citizenship? What is the 
 Christian attitude toward philanthropy, toward 
 commerce, toward warfare, toward the exploitation 
 of half-civilized or savage races? To sum up these 
 questions in one : What sort of ideal has the greatest 
 moral value, and what kind of life is most worth 
 while ? 
 The answer to such far-reaching questions is not 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 2/ 
 
 to be given by dogmatic deliverance from a pulpit 
 "just three feet above contradiction." It is to be 
 found by carrying the people patiently through the 
 process of discipleship, by leading them in their 
 gropings for the foundation principles of the moral 
 life, by showing them the outworking of true and 
 false ideals in the history of Israel, in the story of 
 the Christian church, and in the rise and fall of 
 cities and empires. The creation and maintenance 
 of Christian ideals is the preacher's function. To 
 show what those ideals are, to defend them against 
 attack and substitution, to apply them to the rapidly 
 changing life of our generation, to ingrain them in 
 the fibre of the individual and the nation — this is 
 the inexhaustible and fascinating task of the modern 
 minister. It can be achieved not through liturgy 
 alone, or by mere authority, or by sermonic brill- 
 iance, but by the slow, silent, irrevocable processes 
 of Christian education. 
 
 Soon after Mr. James Bryce came to this country 
 as ambassador from Great Britain, he said in a 
 public address: ''Who are your poets? That is 
 the question for you. Who are writing your songs 
 or stirring your hearts — or isn't your heart being 
 stirred? . . . Each generation and each land 
 should have its own poets . . . men of lofty thought 
 who shall dream and sing for it, who shall gather 
 up its tendencies, and formulate its ideals and voice 
 its spirit, proclaiming its duties and awakening its 
 
28 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 enthusiasm through the high authority of the poet 
 and the art of his verse." With few changes these 
 words would accurately describe the minister's 
 mission. To "dream" and "stir" and "formulate" 
 and "voice" and "proclaim" and "awaken" — 
 these are the unchanging marks of true ministration. 
 And this work is to be accompHshed not merely 
 by lyrical overflow in hours of strong emotion, 
 but by continuous and progressive effort. The 
 great poets have been among the chief teachers 
 of the race. They have sung because they have 
 seen, and have been driven to re-interpret. To 
 summon men by great conceptions of their origin 
 and destiny and duty and power, to view all daily 
 drudgery in the "light that never was on sea or 
 land," to reveal all human action sub specie aeter- 
 nitatis — this is the immortal and essential work 
 of the ministry. 
 
 And such work is peculiarly needed in our age 
 because of the difficulty our generation has in seeing 
 the whole of anything. The men of our time are 
 absorbed in details. The specialist flourishes — 
 by which we mean the man who neglects the for- 
 est for the sake of the trees. Feeling their incom- 
 petence for the great syntheses which have been 
 rashly made in the past, the men of our day shrink 
 from generalization or from any large view of life 
 and duty. As if afraid of the question "Why?" 
 they bury themselves deep in answering the ques- 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 29 
 
 tion "How?" We are in our Wander jahren, rest- 
 lessly journeying with little assurance of arrival. 
 Surrendering all theories of art, men now minutely 
 analyze certain artists and their work. Ignoring 
 science in general, they devote themselves to the 
 study of the spots on a beetle's back or the prop- 
 erties of nucleated air at a fixed temperature. 
 Giving up all attempt at a philosophy of music, 
 men spend a lifetime in mastering a single in- 
 strument. Despairing of finding any message in 
 English literature, men count the color epithets in 
 the ''Idylls of the King," or assiduously labor to 
 expound the subtlest allusion in "The Ring and 
 the Book." 
 
 So far as this shrinking from the whole of things 
 springs from modesty and scientific caution, it is 
 admirable. So far as it springs from mental las- 
 situde and enfeeblement, so far as it indicates dis- 
 sipated energies and distracted minds and satis- 
 faction with the partial and the transient, it must 
 be met by the great calm affirmations of seer and 
 prophet and teacher, and by the visions and im- 
 peratives of religious faith. An age of specialism 
 can be coordinated and unified only by the per- 
 ception of a kingdom of ends, which is the Kingdom 
 of God. It is the prerogative of the minister to 
 bring back into a generation distraught by its own 
 knowledge, and bewildered by its own disintegra- 
 tions, the sense of the unity of true life, the sense 
 
30 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 of the beauty of the ordered world, of the imperative- 
 ness of duty, of the glory of sacrifice, and of the near- 
 ness of God/ The fixed ideas of a people are of 
 far more importance than any particular activities 
 or achievements. The total amount of goods manu- 
 factured in the United States in a given year is 
 a matter of economic importance. But infinitely 
 more important is the attitude of the national spirit 
 toward such ''goods." Must we admit that ''things 
 are in the saddle and ride mankind," or are all 
 goods to us merely the instruments of noble living? 
 The man who shapes the nation's attitude toward 
 its goods is rendering far greater public service than 
 any manufacturer possibly could do. To mould 
 the national conception of the purpose of life, to 
 uplift the ideal of social and civic action, to give 
 to struggling man a conception of goodness which 
 is at the same time practicable and inexhaustible, 
 — this is to meet a need that was never more acute 
 than in a generation which often seems to be "bound 
 nowhere under full sail." 
 
 An unusually penetrating observer of our in- 
 stitutions and tendencies ^ has recently written : 
 
 ^ " The mere decomposition of the world has not satisfied the 
 deep demand for an inner understanding of the world; the dis- 
 covery of causal laws has not stilled the thirst for emotional values. 
 . . . We begin to remember again, what naturalism too easily 
 forgets, that the interests of life have not to do with causes and 
 effects, but with purposes and means." 
 
 — Professor Hugo Munsterberg, Psychology and Life, p. 182. 
 
 2 Mr. H. G. Wells, in The Future in America, p. 154. 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 3 1 
 
 *'The American has yet to achieve ... the con- 
 ception of a whole to which all individual acts and 
 happenings are subordinate and contributory. . . . 
 The American problem is preeminently one that 
 must be met by broad ways of thinking, by creative, 
 synthetic and merging ideas. ... It is one chiefly 
 moral and intellectual; it is to resolve a confusion 
 of purposes, traditions, habits, into a common or- 
 dered intention." This is the same problem that 
 Plato faced in his ''Republic," and proposed to solve 
 by enthroning Justice in the soul of the citizen and 
 in the government of the state. It is the problem 
 which Augustine sought to solve in his vision of 
 the City of God; the problem which Dante saw so 
 clearly in the disrupted Florence of his time. The 
 solution is to be found, as all the deepest thinkers 
 of the world have told us, only in religion. Only 
 religious faith can break down the middle walls 
 of partition, partizan, sectarian, national, racial, 
 and fuse the jarring elements of human life into 
 a harmonious unity. Only the conviction that 
 " God's in his heaven" can persuade men that in some 
 deep sense "all's right with the world." 
 
 In the same line is the increasing demand for 
 standards of value in modern life. The standards 
 of the colonial period in America, often limited and 
 inadequate, have largely passed away. In literature, 
 art, ethics, law, philanthropy and commerce, we 
 cannot be content with the decisions of the age 
 
32 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 of Washington and Jefferson. But have we discov- 
 ered standards of our own? "While electricity and 
 steam have bound the nations of the earth together," 
 says Nicholas Murray Butler, "questions of knowl- 
 edge and of belief have split up every nation into 
 sects. In all this tumult it is difficult to catch the 
 sound of the dominant note. . . . Standards of 
 worth are strangely confused and at times even their 
 existence is denied." ^ 
 
 Now Christianity comes to this varied, confused, 
 and flowing world with certain definite standards of 
 moral judgment. It does not proclaim the moral 
 equality of men or of deeds. It declines to blink 
 or blur fundamental divergencies of character and 
 conduct. It does not say that all men in the King- 
 dom of Heaven are to be equally great, but it lays 
 down a new standard of greatness. It appeals 
 from all the provincial extempore judgments of 
 to-day to the eternal verdict of the unseen Judge. 
 It stands undazzled by power or wealth or earthly 
 glory, undismayed by charges of pietism or "other- 
 worldliness," to affirm that what Christ lived for 
 in the small Syrian province is the supreme goal 
 of all human life ; that what he loved all men should 
 love unswervingly, and what he hated all men should 
 hate forever. It affirms that just as a small break 
 in the clouds at a single point shows us the blue 
 that overarches the world, so through the narrow 
 
 ^ The Meaning of Education^ p. 40. 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 33 
 
 aperture of the Galilean life we may get a glimpse 
 of the spiritual firmament that overspreads all 
 human action with its store of infinite energy and 
 its expanse of infinite calm. It affirms with Matthew 
 Arnold that we might "as well imagine a man with 
 a sense for sculpture not cultivating it by the help 
 of the remains of the Greek art, or a man with a 
 sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of 
 Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense 
 for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the 
 Bible." 
 
 The Christian minister comes to the world, not 
 with a set of ready-made rules, but with certain 
 standards of value which had their origin in the 
 consciousness of Christ. That sinless conscious- 
 ness is the fountain-head of our faith and our morals. 
 We can no more get beyond Jesus than we can sail 
 past the North Star. Whole chapters of Aristode 
 are out of date. Some sections of "Paradise Lost" 
 now seem unworthy of the writer and unmeaning 
 to the reader. But just as the sense of beauty 
 culminated in Greece some twenty-three centuries 
 ago, so that all our artists bend in admiration over 
 a poor fragment of the Elgin marbles, so the reve- 
 lation of ethical standards culminated in Palestine. 
 The Parthenon, battered and crumbling, shows us 
 a building beyond which architecture may not go. 
 We may build something different — something 
 more nearly perfect no man hopes to build. So 
 
 D 
 
34 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 character reached its supreme embodiment and 
 standard in Jesus of Nazareth. We desire no new 
 edition of the Sermon on the Mount, and no modifi- 
 cation of the Golden Rule. We can easily surpass 
 Jesus in the length of his life, or the quantity of 
 his labor, or in the amount of his human knowledge. 
 In quality and revealing power he is unsurpassable 
 and final. Different men there may be and should 
 be; but in the realm of character and religion a 
 greater master and leader the world will never see. 
 If with Emerson we still say : 
 
 "Earth proudly wears the Parthenon, 
 As the best gem upon her zone ; " 
 
 we must also say with Robert Browning: 
 
 "That one face, far from vanish, rather grows, 
 Becomes my universe that feels and knows." 
 
 We indeed must traverse many realms in art and 
 science and industry and politics where Jesus could 
 not enter. We must solve many problems of 
 economics and militarism and diplomacy that he 
 never faced. We must battle with diseases and 
 vices and ingenuities of evil such as the first century 
 could not know. But the roots of character, per- 
 sonal and national, remain unchanged. The answer 
 to the novel and often appalling problems that con- 
 front us demands ever new knowledge, but not a 
 new attitude toward good and evil. The question : 
 *'Who is my neighbor?" must be answered in the 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 35 
 
 twentieth century by a new definition of neighbor, 
 but not by a new kind of love for him. The '' woe 
 unto you, hypocrites," loses none of its pertinency 
 and smiting power when the "chief seats in the syn- 
 agogue" are exchanged for a rented pew in a Gothic 
 church, and the "devouring of widows' houses" is 
 accomplished by the manipulation of stocks. The 
 parable of the Good Samaritan we might indeed 
 re-edit, substituting modern materia medica in place 
 of oil and wine, the ambulance in place of the humble 
 beast, the hospital in place of the inn, and princely 
 endowments instead of two pence. But the mental 
 and moral attitude of the Samaritan toward the 
 victim of individual greed and social laxity remains 
 as clearly imperative as when Jesus said, " Go thou 
 and do likewise." 
 
 A recent writer curiously maintains that the ethics 
 of Jesus is insufficient because he omits to say 
 anything about "municipal sanitation"! We may 
 well be thankful that in our Lord's teaching is 
 nothing about the external and mechanical, noth- 
 ing about water supply and drainage and charity 
 organization, that he touches with sovereign power 
 the springs of life, not its transient appliances and 
 methods. He opens the fountain and leaves others 
 to build aqueducts and convey the stream. Even 
 in the realms of science and art, on which Christ 
 never touched, and which have become almost 
 central in modern life, the fundamental virtues are 
 
36 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the same, the meaning of success and failure, of 
 selfishness and service, are the same as in all other 
 departments of human life. The seven lamps of 
 architecture are lighted from the same source as 
 the seven-branched candlestick of the Apocalypse. 
 The cry, ''Art for art's sake," is misleading, be- 
 cause it is an attempt to set up a provincial standard 
 of judgment in the studio or the art gallery, and 
 exempt one form of human activity from the uni- 
 versality of the Christian ideal. The answering 
 cry, "Art for life's sake," affirms that the most 
 scintillating genius is still a divine gift, held in trust 
 for all humanity, and hence under the sway of 
 the eternal law. Truth, purity, righteousness, joy, 
 rise above both Hebraism and Hellenism, they 
 know no latitude or longitude. He who has of all 
 our race most completely embodied these permanent 
 and essential qualities is therefore an abiding figure 
 in the life of the world, and to translate his attitude 
 and transfuse his quality into the language and 
 character of each succeeding generation becomes 
 a supremely important task. 
 
 This sense of the value of Christ and his standards 
 is not to be confounded with any particular meta- 
 physical construction of his existence or origin. 
 Such a construction follows, not precedes, the sense 
 of value, and is the effect, not the cause, of our alle- 
 giance. We may aflfirm — I believe we must affirm 
 — that the uniqueness of Christ's character and 
 
PLACE OF THE MINISTER IN MODERN LIFE 3/ 
 
 influence involves a uniqueness of personality. We 
 may say, if we will, that the definition of Christ which 
 is found in the great historic creeds is simply the 
 homage we pay to his character rendered into terms 
 of our philosophy. But this philosophic explana- 
 tion of Christ is not the primary function of the 
 minister. His function is to apprehend and in- 
 terpret the great ideals and standards which are the 
 gift of Christ to the world. Possessing those stand- 
 ards and with power to unfold and apply them, 
 he is a man essential to all institutions and move- 
 ments and causes in the modern world. The seer 
 is more needful in life than even the doer. Where 
 there is no vision, the people perish. The world can 
 do without the warrior, the manufacturer, the builder 
 of warehouses and railroads, much sooner than 
 without the man who conserves and expounds its 
 ideals. It can exist without much goods laid up 
 for many years, but not without the supreme good 
 which it is the minister's function to make real and 
 vivid. If he comes to his fellow-men with the as- 
 surance of the prophet and the patience of the edu- 
 cator, he may easily be the most useful man of his 
 generation. He shapes all human life after the 
 pattern in the mount. He has not the satisfaction 
 of the architect who sees his ideals fixed in granite 
 or marble. He cannot share the pleasure of the 
 engineer who sees his innermost thought rendered 
 in the tunnel or viaduct of steel. But he sees his 
 
38 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 message written on the souls of men and trans- 
 lated into careers of unselfish and loyal service. 
 He sees through slow-moving years his pupils 
 growing in power to interpret in their own lives 
 the mind of Christ and so to share in the life of God. 
 While others reap more external and visible rewards, 
 he partakes of the divine joy of moral creation, and 
 shares in the great primeval purpose, "Let us make 
 man!" 
 
II 
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS 
 TOWARD NEW TRUTH 
 
 "Quisquis bonus verusque Christianus est, Domini sui esse 
 intelligat, ubicumque invenerit veritatem." — Augustine. 
 
 "I was brought up to distrust and dislike liberty; I learned 
 to believe in it. That is the key to all my changes." 
 
 — Gladstone. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE ATTITUDE OF RELIGIOUS LEADERS TOWARD 
 NEW TRUTH 
 
 A YOUNG minister now in his first pastorate re- 
 cently wrote me: "I am preaching a series of ser- 
 mons on the narratives in the book of Genesis. 
 But I am appalled at the problems presented by an 
 ungraded congregation. How is it possible to adapt 
 my exposition to the young man just home from 
 college, and also to his father who has not opened 
 a book for twenty years? How can I reach the 
 restless mind of the keen young critic in the front 
 pew, and the devout and mystic temper of the aged 
 saint behind him? Is not the problem insoluble?" 
 
 At another place I hope to show that some grad- 
 ing of the modern congregation is possible. Mean- 
 while let us note that the finest appeals in the realm 
 of religion, literature, or art have never been ad- 
 dressed to a class, but to humanity as a whole. 
 The great leaders of the world have boldly struck 
 the note of universality. They have never been 
 content to be private chaplains to a coterie, or limit 
 their ministry to a group of selected spirits. They 
 have declined to deliver a provincial message ap- 
 plicable only to men of a certain grade or type, and 
 
 41 
 
42 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 have spoken confidently to the passions and hungers 
 that are in the heart of all men everywhere. Shake- 
 speare's greatness is that he holds captive philosopher 
 and merchant and schoolboy. Millet's "Angelus'^ 
 speaks not only to connoisseurs, but to the farmer's 
 boy and the labor union. Walter Scott did not 
 write for Scotland only, but for Europe and America. 
 The great preacher is not the one who can preach 
 on some special occasion to a company selected 
 from a single grade of culture, but one who strikes 
 notes so fundamental as to wake vibrations in every 
 human soul. What minister does not long at times 
 for a congregation so homogeneous in experience 
 and training that he can address them as a group 
 standing on the same round of Hfe's ladder? Yet 
 whoever has attempted to address a graded assembly, 
 as, for example, an assembly of college students, 
 finds another set of difficulties confronting him. 
 Such a congregation is immensely inspiring, but is 
 subject to swift reactions and changes of mood. 
 It swings at once and altogether to the preacher's 
 side, or it turns from him with ruthless indifference. 
 It is like a vessel with a shifting cargo, and liable 
 to lurch at unexpected moments with results both 
 tragic and comic. It lacks the solid and staying 
 qualities of a diversified congregation in which all 
 the interests of human life are represented. But 
 a preacher addressing a varied and heterogeneous 
 assembly, discerning beneath their superficial dif- 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 43 
 
 ferences their fundamental need, becomes himself 
 a profound reconciling force in the community. 
 In an age of specialism, when men's daily tasks 
 lie far asunder, and mutual misconstruction is easy, 
 the preacher stands for a need common to all human 
 beings and a satisfaction that all may enjoy. By 
 steadily addressing men, not as journalists or 
 carpenters or teachers or clerks, but as human^ 
 the minister becomes a mediating and unifying 
 power in the community, all the greater because 
 often unrecognized. 
 
 There is probably no greater joy that a leader 
 of men can know than thus to rise above all the 
 idiosyncrasies and particularisms of an assembly, 
 and grapple with the essential and permanent in 
 human nature. Many a preacher who is ill at ease 
 in personal intercourse, embarrassed in giving advice 
 to a young man or woman, and an utter failure 
 in a drawing-room, rises to face a heterogeneous 
 congregation ''attired with sudden brightness, like 
 a man inspired." The petty peculiarities of his 
 neighbors he has forgotten; the provincialisms 
 that bored or annoyed him in his best friends have 
 dropped out of sight; and he steps into the pulpit 
 as the commander of a naval squadron hoists the 
 signal summoning a whole fleet into action, rejoic- 
 ing that all trivial differences have vanished in the 
 presence of the essential and compelling need. 
 Under such circumstances the preacher enters into 
 
44 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 a memorable experience, which is psychologically 
 the best possible commentary on the pentecostal 
 narrative. He is lifted out of his hampering limi- 
 tations; he no longer watches his own shadow; 
 he has forgotten how or when the message was 
 prepared. All that is local and temporary is swal- 
 lowed up in the consciousness that at that moment 
 and in that place the divine fulness and the human 
 emptiness are coming together, and this through 
 the preacher's message. Again, the ancient miracle 
 is repeated, and out of the motley multitude each 
 man hears the message in his own tongue wherein 
 he was born. No political orator addressing men 
 of one party, no university professor addressing 
 a select group, can experience the inexpressible 
 joy which comes to the preacher who sees before 
 him only humanity stripped of all its accidents, 
 and pours into it a gospel stripped of all save the 
 divine and eternal message. If ever on earth it 
 is given to man to attain a sense of union with the 
 infinite, it is given to the preacher under such 
 conditions. 
 
 But no less important is the minister's mediation 
 between successive generations, his work in turning 
 ''the hearts of the fathers to the children." The 
 vast inrush of new knowledge in the last fifty or 
 seventy-five years has brought with it peculiar 
 opportunities and peculiar perils. Probably more 
 new facts regarding the physical world have been 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 45 
 
 discovered during the last seventy-five years than 
 during the previous seventy-five hundred years. 
 Alfred Russell Wallace computes that thirteen 
 great inventions or discoveries were made during 
 the nineteenth century, and only seven in all the 
 centuries before. Thirteen inventions — such as 
 the steamboat, the electric light, the telephone 
 — in the last century, and only seven — such as 
 the mariner's compass, the printing-press, and the 
 barometer — in all the previous story of humanity ! 
 Cicero used essentially the same sort of lamp as 
 Edmund Burke, and Burke the same as Lincoln. 
 But since Lincoln's day the illumination of the civil- 
 ized world has been transformed. The ship in which 
 Paul sailed from Caesarea to Rome was built on 
 the same plan and propelled in the same way as 
 that which brought Lafayette to America or carried 
 Franklin to France. But since Franklin's day 
 ocean travel has been as truly transfigured as if 
 the Atlantic had evaporated to one-tenth its former 
 size. Even a century ago the transmission of 
 news was so slow that Andrew Jackson cap- 
 tured New Orleans after peace had been de- 
 clared between the United States and Great Britain, 
 not having heard that the war was over. To-day 
 a speech delivered in the English House of Com- 
 mons may be reported and printed in America some 
 hours, by the clock, before its actual delivery. 
 This enormous advance in knowledge, theoretical 
 
46 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and applied, has worked vast changes in man's 
 attitude toward the universe and toward his fellow- 
 men. The mere fact that men know more things 
 than once they did is not significant. The fact 
 that the flooding tide of knowledge has swept mil- 
 lions of men from their old moorings is of immense 
 significance for the preacher. Each new fact must 
 be correlated with and built into the mass of previous 
 fact in human possession. Our generation has been 
 like a child that, having patiently put together 
 the many blocks of a ''dissected map," then dis- 
 covers on the floor another piece which should have 
 gone in somewhere, and for which he must make 
 room by beginning all over again. Only, in the 
 vast cooperative Lebensanschauung that humanity 
 is ever constructing, we have recently discovered 
 millions of new pieces; and the result is a degree 
 of bewilderment and dismay such as the world has 
 not seen since Copernicus took the earth out of the 
 centre of the sky and transferred it to a remote and 
 obscure position. We have undergone, and must 
 undergo for years to come, a general disturbance 
 of social and ethical values. What if some of the 
 new facts that must be incorporated in our map of 
 life make certain old facts seem irrelevant or even 
 untrue? What if the new facts in anthropology 
 pour a wholly new light on the moral code? Was 
 monogamy the primitive form of marriage, as once 
 we thought? Is the keeping of a Sabbath essential 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 47 
 
 to the progress of humanity, or have some non- 
 Semitic races prospered without it? If the Baby- 
 lonian account of creation is largely similar to that 
 of Genesis, what becomes of the uniqueness of the 
 Bible? "What becomes of?"— yes, that is the 
 characteristic question of our time. 
 
 Another consequence of this new knowledge is a 
 new and unprecedented separation between parents 
 and children. Never were two generations parted 
 by so great an interval. Even in Germany, where 
 a kind of military subjection of children to parents 
 has long prevailed, we hear of a general youthful 
 revolt against the family authority. In this country 
 the serious phenomenon is not so much a revolt 
 against authority, as a separation of interests, 
 a complete divergence of world-view, between the 
 mature men and women on the one side and the 
 young people on the other. Most of the moral 
 breakdowns in college life to-day are due in part 
 to a fatal lack of understanding between the father 
 and the son. Frequently a man of the highest 
 character in the community dreads to be left alone 
 for an evening with his own boy. He has failed to 
 be the companion of his son, and so has failed 
 to be educated through his parenthood. He has 
 dropped out of step with the swiftly marching 
 generation. He cannot comprehend the point of 
 view of the young people. They speak a different 
 vocabulary from that in which he was trained. 
 
48 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 They indulge freely in certain recreations from 
 which he was debarred or for which he has no taste; 
 and on the other hand certain business practices, 
 on which his success was built, the young people 
 begin to suspect and condemn. The mature man, 
 if he strays by accident into their company, feels 
 himself an embarrassed ahen. Their view of out- 
 door sports, their indoor occupations, their idea 
 of what is worth while, their estimate of art and 
 poetry and success and happiness, has been subtly 
 affected, as vegetation on the shore is affected by 
 the noiseless approach of the Gulf Stream. We 
 sometimes speak of this change as if it were an 
 isolated problem of family life, to be solved by 
 fresh assumption of parental control. It is really 
 part of the change of universal climate to which 
 John Fiske alludes when he speaks of the men of 
 our generation as "separated from the men whose 
 education ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider 
 gulf than ever before divided one progressive genera- 
 tion from their predecessors." ^ 
 
 Now what has historical Christianity usually 
 done in such eras of transition? It is compelled 
 either to set itself against all that is new, as of the 
 evil one, or it is compelled to translate its essential 
 message into the thought-forms of the age. It 
 must either resort to the repressive measures of the 
 Index and the Inquisition, or it must adopt the 
 method of the writers of the New Testament. 
 
 ^ Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. I, p. 230. 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 49 
 
 For the New Testament is essentially a literature 
 of mediation. It is an attempt to make a startling 
 and abhorrent truth credible and even welcome to 
 those whose whole training was a barrier to its 
 acceptance. Every New Testament writer is con- 
 scious that he has to proclaim a truth repugnant 
 to the powers that be, and make it seem in harmony 
 with old institutions and ideals. To show the Jews 
 that the Christ they slew was really the culmination 
 of their heart's desire; to show the Greeks that 
 a Jewish peasant was the truth which all their 
 philosophers had vainly sought — this was the task 
 of the apostles. And the New Testament achieved 
 this, both by its passionate and contagious con- 
 viction — "We have seen the Lord . . . our 
 hands have handled the word of life ... we 
 were with him in the holy mount" — and by its 
 patient translation of the new teaching into famiHar 
 forms of thought. For to translate a message is 
 not merely to find in one language the words equiv- 
 alent to those in another; it is to find equivalent 
 idioms, symbols, values, so that each man shall 
 hear the truth in familiar forms of his own home 
 and daily life. Christianity in the vernacular is 
 Christianity triumphant. If our religion has only 
 one set of symbols, it must be a local cult, rather 
 than a universal redemption. The New Testament 
 seized the dominant conceptions of its age and 
 poured the new truth into them. Did the Jews 
 
50 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 conceive the supreme representative of their nation 
 to be the High Priest ? Very well ; Jesus of Naza- 
 reth is the true High Priest of humanity, making 
 atonement not by the blood of beast and bird, but 
 (here the old bottles do not suffice for the new wine) 
 by the offering of himself. Did the Jews expect a 
 speedy consummation of the age in dramatic apoca- 
 lypse? — then it is Christ that by his dread voice 
 shall cause the dead to awake. Did the Jews have 
 in their sacred books a mysterious Melchizedek who 
 came and went as if let down from heaven and 
 then withdrawn ? — then Christ is another Mel- 
 chizedek without father or mother. Did they have 
 a curious tradition that after Moses smote the rock 
 in the wilderness that rock followed the marching 
 caravan to quench their daily thirst? With swift 
 translation Paul writes, ''That spiritual rock which 
 followed them was Christ." Did the entire Hebrew 
 worship find its centre in symbolic sacrifices by 
 which offended deity was propitiated ? — then in 
 every address to the Jews the apostle Paul will 
 set forth Christ under the symbols of altar and 
 mysterious scapegoat and placating ritual. 
 
 But when writing to congregations in great cities 
 of the Roman empire, surrounded by the daily 
 spectacle of court procedure under Roman law, 
 he often introduces the juridic analogy as most 
 helpful. He then turns easily to forensic forms of 
 thought. Humanity is at the bar of God, Christ 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 5 1 
 
 is the advocate, by whose victorious pleading and 
 efficient representation men may be acquitted, jus- 
 tified, and their iniquities remembered no more. 
 The end of the age from this point of view becomes 
 a grand assize, before whose mere picture on 
 the walls of the Sistine Chapel Europe has quailed 
 and trembled for three hundred years. 
 
 But when Paul appears on Mars' Hill this entire 
 vocabulary has vanished. He has no word regard- 
 ing any high priest or any allusion to forensic 
 justification. It is now not the Mosaic ritual but 
 the Greek poet Aratus that furnishes his sym- 
 bolism, — "for we are also his offspring." The 
 God of his Fathers, whom Paul worshipped, is iden- 
 tified with the nameless deity to whom the Athenians 
 had erected an altar in the public square. 
 
 And after the apostolic age was over, the process 
 of translation into terms of the Greek philosophy 
 went steadily on. It was impossible for Alexandria 
 and Antioch and Rome to conceive the new doctrine 
 as if those cities were merely suburbs of Jerusalem, 
 or as if every Roman citizen had been brought up 
 on the Old Testament. Patiently Christian scholars 
 labored at the task of finding in the current thought 
 of their own age some worthy symbols of the Judean 
 faith. God became to them the Absolute and 
 Infinite, whose attributes could be reasoned out 
 and catalogued. Christ became — as indeed he 
 is in the New Testament — the logos, at once the 
 
52 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 divine reason and the divine utterance, through 
 whom the Absolute is revealed in time and space. 
 It may be doubted whether any attempt to solve 
 modern difficulties through a restatement of the 
 logos doctrine can avail. That concept was used 
 by John and by the Greek fathers simply because 
 it was part of the education of the men they were 
 trying to convince.^ But when we, many centuries 
 later, have to explain with much difficulty what the 
 logos was before we can say that Christ is the logos, 
 we are impeding faith by the very explanation we 
 offer. 
 
 In the great historic creeds we come against such 
 terms as "substance," "person," "essence," "pro- 
 cession," — concepts which are as far away from the 
 atmosphere of the four gospels as the Roman curia 
 is from Nazareth. No one of the apostles could have 
 understood such language. Imagine Simon Peter, 
 
 ^ "It is the fashion in our day to represent older dogma as a 
 corruption of the primitive simplicity of Christian faith by the 
 admixture of a foreign substance, namely, Greek philosophy. 
 The truth is just the reverse. The novel element in the compound 
 was not philosophy, but the gospel. The doctrine of the logos 
 and all that it implies was the common assumption of the culture 
 of the time. That which was new was the identification of the 
 logos with Jesus and the reinterpretation of God which this re- 
 quired. The steps which led to the formulation of the doctrine 
 of the Trinity are the steps by which the Christian spirit made 
 for itself a home in the existing intellectual environment." — 
 Christian Theology in Outline, by William Adams Brown, p. 143. 
 " The Christian spirit making for itself a home " is a summary of 
 all Christian theologies, councils, and creeds. 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 53 
 
 whose compelling creed was, "Thou art the Christ, 
 the son of the hving God," — imagine him ponder- 
 ing the statement in the symbol of Chalcedon which 
 affirms Christ to be "acknowledged in two natures, 
 inconfusedly, unchangeably, invisibly, inseparably, 
 the distinction of natures being by no means taken 
 away by the union, but rather the property of each 
 nature being preserved, and concurring in one 
 Person and one Subsistence" ! It is easy for us 
 to smile at such definitions, just as future genera- 
 tions may make sport of our acrid debate over 
 free silver or interstate commerce. But behind the 
 old theological, and behind the modern discussion 
 are tremendous moral issues. Gibbon's mirth 
 at the slight difference between homooiisios and 
 homoiousios is not justified. The real question 
 was whether in Christ we have a veritable revelation 
 or merely an unusually noble aspiration, whether 
 Christ is one more good adviser, or is Lord and 
 Master of the spiritual life of all men. Had you 
 and I been at Chalcedon, as children of that age 
 we should have voted for homoousios and gone 
 singing to the stake rather than give up that central 
 syllable. 
 
 But the point we now make is that, true or false, 
 the historic creeds are translations of Christ and 
 his message into forms of thought unintelligible to 
 Moses, Isaiah, and Micah, and in large measure for- 
 eign to the Pauline episdes. The creeds may be, 
 
54 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 if you please, the logical outcome of the epistles, 
 the inevitable result of the human intellect focussed 
 on the gospel material. But they would have been 
 largely unmeaning to any of the original twelve 
 apostles. Indeed, some passages in those creeds 
 would have been unmeaning to Christ himself. 
 Yet whether the creeds be true or false, they are 
 inevitable, and the continuous translation of the 
 Christian message is still going on. We have yet 
 to do for the Orient what Greek Philosophy did for 
 Europe. The followers of Buddha and Confucius 
 can never enter the inner secret of Judaism. By 
 what right do we demand it ? The Puritan meeting- 
 house in the Indian jungle is not more anomalous 
 than the Athanasian creed in Calcutta. Dr. Charles 
 Cuthbert Hall, after a year in India, pungently 
 wrote: "He who, confident in Western tradition, 
 ignores the differentia of Eastern thinking, and 
 preaches Christian truth to the subtle students of 
 Allahabad precisely in the terms to be employed 
 at Oxford or Harvard, while he may interest a few 
 who have become Europeanized in their thinking, 
 runs the risk of remaining unintelligible to the 
 many whose intellectual presuppositions have almost 
 nothing in common with his own," ^ 
 
 Leaving for others questions as to the charac- 
 teristics of the Oriental mind, we may well ask: 
 
 * Christian Belief interpreted by Christian Experience, Preface, 
 p. xvi. 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 55 
 
 What are the special thought-forms of the Western 
 world in our age? What is the new world- view 
 in which we are to "find a home" for Christian 
 faith? 
 
 The dominant conception of our age is the idea 
 of the world, not as finished product, but as un- 
 folding process. How easy it is to state that con- 
 ception, and how immeasurably difficult to grasp 
 a fraction of its far-reaching sequence ! The car- 
 penter theory of creation has gone forever. Instead 
 of a world neatly finished off in six solar days, we 
 have a world still in the throes of creation, — moun- 
 tains rising, seas shifting, earthquakes rumbling, stars 
 falling, new species arising, and man just beginning 
 to "have dominion over the earth and subdue it." 
 Instead of a history which is as a small stage, whereon 
 a few notable figures — kings and queens and 
 apostles and prophets — have their exits and en- 
 trances, we now dimly perceive a vast drama, its 
 origin in the primeval fire-mist and its goal some 
 "far-off divine event to which the whole creation 
 moves." The physical world is no longer an inert ; 
 and passive mass, to be fashioned by mind — it I 
 is shot through with mind in every particle. It is i 
 kinetic, palpitating with energy in every atom. The 
 atom itself seems as if it were a mere vortex of force, 
 and the old elements we thought stable and eternal 
 are steadily being decomposed into more fugitive 
 and ethereal substance, as we pursue them beyond 
 
56 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the borders of the visible world. And all these 
 mysterious powers and forces are ceaselessly in 
 play, evolving new forms before our eyes. New 
 coast lines are forming, new eruptions burying cities, 
 new species of plants being discovered or created, 
 new languages arising, new civilizations coming 
 to birth. Astronomers no longer care to speak of 
 the "fixed stars," for they know that the ancient 
 celestial fixity is relative and apparent only. 
 Governments are seen to be an evolution, nations 
 to have their youth and their maturity and their 
 decay, and the whole world appears in ceaseless 
 movement. Indeed, the commune vinculum of edu- 
 cated men to-day consists not in the fact that 
 they have been over the same course of study, but 
 that they have learned to look on the whole world 
 of nature, art, science, philanthropy, education, 
 religion, as an endless unfolding process. That 
 the physical world is not a mass of dead material 
 but is throbbing with force, that the human 
 world of institutions and laws and governments 
 is steadily evolving into new and more intricate 
 patterns, that all we see and touch is growing and 
 climbing, and that "in to-day already walks to- 
 morrow" — this is the conception which makes a 
 man intellectually at home in the modern world. 
 
 Some consequences of this world-view are obvious. 
 The man who holds it no longer thinks of truth as 
 a fixed deposit, but as an ever advancing construe- 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 57 
 
 tion of reality. He looks upon the creeds not as 
 credenda but as credita. They mark how far the tide 
 has risen, but they do not make the tide rise. He 
 thinks of society, not as did Plato in his "Republic,'* 
 as a fixed entity to which the individual must be 
 adjusted, but as an organic growth. He thinks of 
 teaching not as the handing over of a body of as- 
 certained knowledge from teacher to pupil, but 
 as a process in which teacher and pupil climb new 
 heights together. He thinks of theology not as 
 static and stereotyped, but as a progressive appre- 
 hension of the divine presence in the world. Even 
 God he thinks of as having a real experience. The 
 most precious truths of Christianity seem to him not 
 as jewels to be kept in a casket, but as seeds to be 
 bravely planted. 
 
 Now the perils of this point of view are obvious 
 and constant. A man may come to think of the 
 world as ceaseless and meaningless flux. If the 
 fixed stars have gone, he may imagine that the an- 
 cient duties and virtues have gone with them. He 
 may think that the new and popular thing is the 
 true thing. The historian is always near kin to the 
 latitudinarian. 
 
 But perilous or not, the evolutionary world- view 
 is the characteristic note of our age. It is the tem- 
 per of the generation of which we are a part and 
 in which we must speak our message. To use the 
 vocabulary of the pre-Darwinian era — whether 
 
58 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Darwinism be true or false does not concern us here 
 — is to use a dialect not found in any popular lit- 
 erature to-day, and hence fairly unintelligible to the 
 people. Whenever we hear a preacher speaking 
 in the old thought-forms — either because he has 
 become aged or because he was born so — we are 
 somehow conscious of a chasm between speaker and 
 hearer. It is not that we disbelieve what he says; 
 but that his whole way of approaching truth, of 
 testing truth, of valuing truth, is so different from 
 ours that we simply cannot follow him. He defends 
 the truths that we have believed all our lives, in 
 such a way as to shake our faith in them. He places 
 the duties we have been performing for years on 
 a basis which for us does not exist. The things 
 which separate men are not the things which they 
 afhrm or deny, but the things which they take for 
 granted. 
 
 It is of course easy to show that much of our 
 modern world-view is to be found in the New Testa- 
 ment. Christ's fundamental metaphor is that of the 
 seed. If in some places he speaks of an imminent 
 end of the age, he also says: ''After a long time the 
 Lord of those servants cometh," and he expected 
 the leaven to remain in the meal ''till the whole was 
 leavened.' In the magnificent outlook to which 
 Paul rises in some of his epistles he sees the ages 
 as moving toward one great far-distant goal. He 
 conceives the world, not as a cosmos, or arrange- 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 59 
 
 ment of things in space, but as an cboUj an age or 
 era, a definite period in the unfolding of a dramatic 
 history. His idea of faith and goodness is not static 
 but dynamic. As Professor Ramsay says: "The 
 good never seems to occur to his mind as a mere 
 quahty, but as a law of progress. . . . The world 
 to him is always fluid and changing, never stationary. 
 But the change is toward an end, not mere flux 
 without law."^ Indeed, the writings of Paul are 
 far more in sympathy with the ideas of progress 
 which dominate our time than with the mathemati- 
 cal and mechanical conceptions which held sway in 
 the eighteenth century. But whether we find in our 
 New Testament the conception of universal growth 
 or not, we do find it in our own generation. Such 
 is the language which our people speak. Such is 
 the vocabulary into which we must carry the Chris- 
 tian message. 
 
 But another dominant conception, already hinted 
 at, is even more obvious — that of universal and 
 invariable law. The changes which are in progress 
 around us and within us are not mere fortuitous 
 happenings, not mere "variations of cosmical 
 weather," but are under inevitable and universal 
 law. And this law, of which our generation is ever 
 talking and thinking, is not a statute, but a uniform 
 sequence. It is not a command directing that 
 
 ^ Professor W. M. Ramsay, Contemporary Review, October, 
 1907. 
 
60 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 certain phenomena shall occur, but is a uniform 
 order in which events do occur. All events physical 
 and psychical, all tides in the sea and in the soul, all 
 movements whether of the comets or of the nations, 
 are proceeding according to a definite sequence. 
 Thoughtful men of our generation do not affirm 
 any mechanical causation in the psychical realm. 
 But they do affirm that lawlessness is inconceivable 
 anywhere — most of all inconceivable in the pro- 
 cesses of a truly rational mind. Chance there is 
 none, the very idea is self -contradictory. Progress 
 under law is universal. 
 
 This conception is the background of modern life. 
 It is the subconscious note sounding in school and 
 college, in laboratory and lecture room. It is the 
 basis of all work done by Lord Kelvin and Helm- 
 holtz; it is the presupposition which underHes 
 modern charity ; it is the obvious creed of both cap- 
 ital and labor. Beginning in the realm of physical 
 science, it has been transferred to the realm of eco- 
 nomics, education, sociology, until the idea of life 
 under law permeates and colors all our thinking. 
 
 The reverence men once felt for canon law or 
 papal bull or imperial decree they now feel for the 
 laws of nature. They keep on their hats at the pass- 
 ing of an ecclesiastical pageant, but they bow in 
 admiration before Virchow and Pasteur. The mar- 
 vellous tales once told of the saints find curious 
 analogy in the doings of Edison and Marconi, and 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 6 1 
 
 the superstition of the ages of faith is matched by the 
 creduHty of the age of popular science. The very 
 men who find it difficult to accept Biblical miracles 
 are credulous in the extreme when the newspapers 
 proclaim that the origin of life has been discovered, 
 or that we may soon be in communication with 
 the inhabitants of Mars. Recently, a well-known 
 American scientist gravely announced, in order to 
 test the public mind, that he had succeeded in photo- 
 graphing the visual image which he found on the 
 retina of a domestic animal. And the public ac- 
 cepted the preposterous marvel, merely because it 
 was put forth in the name of science. 
 
 But in spite of all exaggerations and defects, the 
 *' reign of law" has brought powerful reenforcement 
 to religion. It has made polytheism impossible. 
 It has banished faun and dryad, nymph and satyr, 
 forever. Great Pan is dead. It has driven from 
 the world all possibility of chance or caprice. It 
 has taught us that whatsoever a man soweth, that 
 shall he also reap. It has solemnized life, and by 
 its stringent affirmations regarding heredity and 
 reversion to type has reaffirmed some of the older 
 doctrines from which the church was retreating. 
 Science has given us such sanction for the moral 
 law as our fathers never dreamed of. It has shown 
 us that if we disobey, the penalty is not to come in 
 Sinaitic thunder, but in the poisoning of our own 
 blood, and the corruption of our own nature. It 
 
62 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 has given us deeper conceptions of crime and punish- 
 ment, and the meaning of hell and heaven. It has 
 shown us that, in Emerson's phrase, ''crime and 
 punishment grow out of one stem," and that the 
 Christian heaven is not some arbitrary appendage 
 to earthly goodness, but the inevitable outcome of 
 a goodness that is steadily climbing and growing. 
 It has furnished a new basis for belief in prayer. 
 The laws of nature are to the Christian simply the 
 habits of God, and a God of fixed habits is the only 
 one to whom we could reasonably pray. If the 
 Infinite be in any sense arbitrary or capricious, 
 prayer is doomed to disappointment. But if the 
 law of cause and effect is universal and invariable, 
 then we become sure that prayer "does work," 
 achieves objective result, and that the mighty change 
 it produces in us is necessarily the cause of some 
 change in the whole world of matter and of spirit. 
 The prayers that we find in Homer and Virgil are 
 often terrified pleadings with fickle deities to break 
 through their usual indifference and perform some 
 act of favoritism. That sort of prayer has become 
 impossible among rational men. We now pray, not 
 that God will change his law, — which is his habit, — 
 but that we may so perceive the law and surrender 
 to it as to enter into perfect harmony with God, and 
 thus receive his indwelling and transforming power. 
 Out of the general conception of the world as a 
 growth under law has come the scientific temper 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 63 
 
 and method. The mental texture of such men as 
 Darwin and Huxley was wholly different from that 
 of such men as Newman and Gladstone. Mr. 
 Gladstone, with all his superb and masterful powers, 
 had no conception of what his contemporary Her- 
 bert Spencer was doing. Mr. Gladstone's last book 
 is called "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." 
 The very title shows a conception of the Bible at the 
 farthest remove from present Biblical scholarship, 
 to which the Bible is a growth, and not a rock. The 
 scientific temper creates a distinct type of mentality. 
 If we bring a new truth to a man of artistic tem- 
 perament, he asks: "Is it fitting and harmonious?" 
 If we bring the same truth to a man of linguistic 
 and literary training, he is likely to ask: "Is it in 
 accord with the great authorities?" But if we bring 
 it to a man of scientific temper, he asks: "What 
 is the evidence?" And in collecting the evidence 
 he proceeds inductively, abstaining from all con- 
 clusions, if he is consistent, until the facts are in 
 hand and have been duly studied. Observation of 
 the facts, classification of the facts, inference, verifi- 
 cation, conclusion — that is the path over which the 
 inductive temper of our own age habitually travels 
 in reaching truth. 
 
 It would be easy to show that this way of approach- 
 ing truth finds much sympathy in the Christian 
 documents. "Come, see a man that told me all 
 things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?" — 
 
64 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 there is the very method of experiment to which our 
 age has given allegiance. "Believe not every spirit, 
 but try the spirits whether they are of God" — there 
 is precisely the process of every chemical laboratory 
 applied to spiritual phenomena. But the Bible is 
 not intended as a scientific treatise. Its profound 
 moral and religious truth must be translated into the 
 thought-forms of our generation. There is danger, 
 of course, that in exalting law we shall ignore per- 
 sonality. We may, and often do, forget that 
 there is more than one kind of evidence, and that the 
 logical and intellectual alone, separated from the 
 rest of human nature, will never lead a man to the 
 deepest truth. There is danger lest in admitting 
 and expounding the universal law we shall seem 
 to imprison God in his own creation, and reduce 
 ourselves to mere puppets moved by a string. But 
 in spite of all dangers we must patiently, resolutely 
 present the ancient message in forms of present-day 
 speech. Mohammedans are forbidden to translate 
 the Koran lest they misrepresent it. Christians are 
 bound to translate the Bible into every language, 
 disposition, mode of apprehension — its universality 
 is proof of its divineness. 
 
 The Christian denominations of America are 
 failing to realize the strategic importance of college 
 towns and cities. Many a church is sending mis- 
 sionaries to the western frontier or to the Philip- 
 pines, while it is doing nothing whatever for the 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 6$ 
 
 thousands of students who frequently congregate in 
 a single institution. Every pulpit in a college town 
 should be filled by a man who can speak in the 
 vocabulary of his own generation. It is not needful 
 that he be a great orator or scholar; it is needful that 
 he shall not widen the chasm which so often exists 
 between the pulpit and the class-room. 
 
 If the preacher habitually thinks of God as the 
 " magnified hero" of Genesis, while the hearer thinks 
 of him as indwelling presence; if the preacher 
 thinks of creation as a finished fact, and the hearer 
 thinks of it as present process; if to the one man 
 the Bible is a rock, and to the other a growth; if 
 one man thinks of all truth as a deduction from first 
 principles, and the other thinks of truth as induction 
 from observed facts; if to one man duty is a dis- 
 agreeable task imposed by authority, and to the 
 other is a mode of self-realization and the only path 
 to joy; if to one man the world is Satan's seat, and 
 to the other the presence chamber of God ; if one man 
 thinks of prayer as a way of getting desirable pres- 
 ents, and the other thinks of it as the communion 
 of spirits; if one man looks upon Christ's sacrifice 
 as the great exception to all law, and the other thinks 
 of it as the supreme exemplification of law, — then 
 the preacher may be wrong, or the hearer may be 
 wrong; but certainly, as they speak different lan- 
 guages, neither can be of much help to the other. 
 And this is the situation in scores of college com- 
 
 F 
 
66 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 munities in America. The ministers are depressed 
 by what they understand as antipathy to rehgion on 
 the part of college students. The students are be- 
 wildered by one world-view in the church and an- 
 other in the college. 
 
 It is, however, in facing the naturally diversified 
 and ungraded congregation that the chief problems 
 arise. On the one side of the minister is the world's 
 scholarship, whose method he must understand, 
 whose growing results he must keep close at hand. 
 On the other side is the human group committed 
 to his charge, souls struggling, sinning, aspiring, 
 crying for a clew to life's maze and a lift in its bur- 
 den-bearing. Between these two stands the minister, 
 not as middleman, — a timorous and commercial 
 designation ! — but as constituting in himself the 
 higher synthesis of knowledge and sympathy, of 
 scholarship and character. He sees that the world 
 of scholarship is sometimes given to extremes, that 
 it may become arrogant or reckless. ■ He sees that 
 the human group before him are sometimes blind 
 and deaf to the truths they most need. In the min- 
 ister knowledge becomes humanized, and humanity 
 is led deeper into knowledge. The care for truth 
 and the cure of souls meet in the heart of the min- 
 ister. 
 
 It is greatly to be desired that we should have in 
 this country such a union of scholarship and fervor 
 as is frequently seen in England. We can easily 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 6/ 
 
 recall the names of a dozen men in recent English 
 and Scottish life, like those of Canon Farrar and 
 Henry Drummond and George Adam Smith, who 
 have united large and scholarly investigation with 
 profound spiritual fervor. But in America too often 
 knowledge and zeal have stood asunder. We have 
 had in college and seminary learned linguistic teach- 
 ers who seldom are heard outside the class room, 
 who never grapple with the woe and sin of our great 
 cities, who never face their fellows in their primi- 
 tive human hungers and passions. Such men can 
 teach paradigms, but they cannot expound a gospel. 
 On the other hand, we frequently see Christian 
 workers who have not spent two consecutive hours 
 in study for many years, and who by their pious 
 Philistinism are steadily widening the breach be- 
 tween intelligence and devotion. They defend the 
 faith by railing at science, they militantly affirm 
 their belief in the Bible ''from cover to cover," 
 and after attacking evolution and the higher criti- 
 cism, sit down in complacent perspiration with con- 
 sciousness of duty done. But is either of these ex- 
 tremes necessary ? What is knowledge worth, save 
 as it comes from life and leads to life? What is 
 life, if it be not ever advancing entrance into truth? 
 Nobly has Phillips Brooks charged us to "value no 
 feeling which is not the child of truth and the parent 
 of duty." When feeling, strong and fervid and 
 irresistible, thus stands midway between perception 
 
68 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and action, between truth and life, our problem is 
 largely solved. 
 
 But the question is sure to arise: How far should 
 the minister soften the impact of new truth upon 
 his congregation? How far should he proclaim 
 immediately, and to all, the innermost conceptions 
 which he himself has attained by long years of toil 
 and tumult? Shall he, out of regard for truth, pro- 
 claim at once his entire conviction? Or shall he, 
 out of regard for the weak and the timid and the 
 ignorant, give to the congregation something less 
 than that which feeds his own soul ? In the attempt 
 to act as mediator may he not sacrifice his self- 
 respect? In the attempt to blazon forth his entire 
 creed may he not wreck his church ? 
 
 On this subject there are two classic utterances 
 of the last generation. The first is by Thomas H. 
 Huxley, in a letter written to Charles Kingsley just 
 after Professor Huxley had been sorely shaken by 
 the sudden death of his only son. In all English 
 literature there is no other letter so flaming and throb- 
 bing with the love of truth. ''The great blow which 
 fell upon me seemed to stir my convictions to their 
 foundation, and had I lived a couple of centuries 
 earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me 
 and them — and asking what profit it was to have 
 stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the 
 mass of mankind? To which my only reply was 
 and is : O devil ! truth is better than much profit. 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 69 
 
 I have searched over the grounds of my beHef, and 
 if wife and child and name and fame were all to be 
 lost to me, one after the other, as the penalty, still 
 I will not lie." ^ In such an utterance there is the 
 very spirit of the apostles and martyrs — without, 
 alas! their vision. Let every young minister, after 
 weighing all the emoluments and honors which can 
 be had at the price of dissimulation, cry out for him- 
 self, ''Still I will not He!" 
 
 But have we thus fully answered our question? 
 Is the matter quite so simple and obvious? Listen 
 to the other utterance, from one who also suffered 
 much because of his dissent from popular opinion — 
 Matthew Arnold. "There is no surer proof of a 
 narrow and ill-instructed mind than to think and 
 suppose that what a man takes to be the truth on 
 religious matters is always to be proclaimed. Our 
 truth on these matters, and likewise the error of 
 others, is something so relative that the good or harm 
 likely to be done by speaking is always to be taken 
 into account. . . . The man who believes that his 
 truth on religious matters is so absolutely the truth, 
 that, say it when and where and to whom he will, 
 he cannot but do good with it, is in our day almost 
 always a man whose truth is half blunder, and 
 wholly useless." ^ 
 
 The solution of the problem thus presented de- 
 
 ^ Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 233. 
 2 Preface to Literature and Dogma. 
 
70 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 mands first of all genuine sincerity and courage; 
 but these alone are not enough. It demands also 
 common sense and pedagogical insight. The min- 
 ister who adopts the educational standpoint is al- 
 ready on his way to the solution. No human teacher 
 ever dreamed of giving an entire course of study in 
 a single lesson. No teacher can unfold his inner- 
 most thought on any subject to his class the first 
 time he meets it. To attempt that would be to in- 
 duce either sheer bewilderment or open hostility, 
 and in either case to close the minds of the class to 
 further instruction. There is much significance in the 
 evident gradations in the teaching of our Lord : " From 
 that time Jesus began to show unto his disciples how he 
 must go up to Jerusalem. ..." "He charged them 
 that they should tell no man until he was risen jrom 
 the dead. ..." "I have many things yet to say, 
 but ye cannot bear them now." The great teacher, 
 who faced scorn and crucifixion without shrinking, 
 drew back into reticence when face to face with 
 incapacity for apprehension. He could meet the 
 Roman legions undaunted, but he preferred to be 
 silent on the deeper things of the kingdom, rather 
 than to bewilder and mislead his followers and cause 
 one of the Uttle ones to stumble. The educator 
 needs both courage to face opposition and patience 
 to lead step by step the dull and the weak. In 
 the latter respect he is like the shepherd, who ''shall 
 gently lead those that are with young." The souls 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 7 1 
 
 in whom new ideals are trembling to the birth de- 
 mand tenderness and consideration from the true 
 shepherd of the sheep. But they need at other 
 times resolute direction — the club as well as the 
 staff. 
 
 If the minister stands before any congregation 
 and in order to keep his place and save his reputa- 
 tion consents to the permanent concealment of the 
 deepest truth he knows — he is a craven and a 
 hireling, and the spirit of Huxley shall rise up in the 
 judgment and condemn him. If on the other hand 
 he stands before his congregation to pour out upon 
 unprepared minds the most difficult truths in his 
 treasure, forcing his people in three months over the 
 road for which he himself required thirty years, 
 then he is neither teacher nor shepherd, and his 
 claim of honesty will not save him from being pro- 
 nounced by clear-sighted men unworthy of his place. 
 The minister who has just entered on a pastorate 
 should sit down and deliberately lay out a course 
 of training for his congregation covering a series of 
 years. He sees prejudice to be combated — but not 
 at the first service; abuses to be sturdily rebuked 
 — but not until he has won the confidence of the 
 people. He sees corruption in public life that must 
 be attacked, social theories that must be replaced, 
 false ideals that must be exchanged for true ones, 
 antiquated conceptions of the Scriptures that must 
 be outgrown. But if he proposes to revolutionize 
 
72 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 politics, social theory, and Biblical study in his first 
 six months as minister, he should seek employment 
 only under an itinerant system. ''I have fed you 
 with milk and not with meat, because ye were not 
 able to bear it," is the utterance of the same apostle 
 who said: ''I have not shunned to declare unto you 
 the whole counsel of God." All truth is for all men ! 
 — that is the fundamental conviction in any strong 
 and fruitful ministry. "Line upon line, precept 
 upon precept" — that is the only method of instruc- 
 tion by which broad, clear-visioned men are made. 
 We may sum up our whole discussion of the 
 minister's mediating work by saying that he is to 
 keep alive man's faith in an ever present God. He 
 is the coupler between the generations, uniting past 
 and present in a common vision of the indwelling 
 Spirit. Goodness does not consist in reading how 
 other men were good, and religion is not describing 
 the altars which other generations have built. Rud- 
 yard Kipling has a story entitled: "The Man who 
 Was." There are sincerely devout men who seem 
 to believe in a God who was. He was with Moses, 
 they say, opening up streams in the flinty rock; but 
 now men must dig wells or build aqueducts if they 
 want water. He was with Israel, granting the people 
 bread from heaven; but now if a man wants bread, 
 let him work for it. He was with David and 
 anointed him to the kingship; but now he anoints 
 nobody, and those who want high office must secure 
 
THE ATTITUDE TOWARD NEW TRUTH 73 
 
 the votes. About the year loo a.d. all inspiration 
 ceased, and about 200 a.d. all miracles ceased, and 
 now in a world bereft of divine voices we stumble 
 and grope till the end. O young prophets of the 
 truth, such an idea is the master falsehood of hu- 
 manity ! It is the one fundamental untruth which 
 will put unreality into every sermon and impiety into 
 every prayer. Our God was, and is, and is to come. 
 In your familiar garden you may hear his voice in the 
 cool of the day. Moriah is to him not more sacred 
 than Monadnock, nor did Aaron's rod bear diviner 
 blossoms than our golden-rod. Why seek we the 
 living God only among the dead symbols? The 
 Bible is not the story of a vanished splendor, the 
 melancholy memorial of departed powers. It is 
 the revelation of powers that now play about us, 
 victories that may now be won, and a life which in 
 every nation and every age may be lived by faith in 
 the ''Strong Son of God, Immortal Love.'' 
 
Ill 
 
 MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 
 
 " The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the 
 greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. 
 Every attempt to belittle it ... is a crime against humanity. 
 And if there are to be miracles, this book ... is itself the 
 greatest miracle. For here we have a system of religious 
 doctrines and beliefs that has been built up without the help 
 of the Greek philosophy, by unlearned persons, and that has, 
 more than any other, exercised an influence for good upon the 
 hearts and lives of men." — Immanuel Kant. 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 
 
 The American visitor to Westminster Abbey, the 
 great "temple of silence and reconciliation," usually 
 makes his way first to the Poets' Corner, where he 
 can see side by side the monuments to the chief 
 singers of the English-speaking world during the 
 last five centuries. It is but a small corner in the 
 vast Gothic temple, yet there are crowded into it 
 Chaucer and Longfellow and most of the great poets 
 who lived between them. As the broken light falls 
 through the great stained windows upon the marble 
 effigies and tablets, it shows on one side of the narrow 
 space the writer of the ''Canterbury Tales," and on 
 the other the writer of the "Tales of a Wayside Inn," 
 and spreads before us the whole message of five 
 centuries of English poetry, in a space perhaps fifty 
 feet square. 
 
 Our Bible is another abbey, older, richer, sublimer 
 than any Gothic minster, giving us in the narrow 
 compass of sixty-six small pamphlets the entire 
 message of Israel to the world. Beginning with the 
 earliest literary compositions of the Hebrew race, 
 such as the song of Deborah, "Arise, O Lord, and 
 
 77 
 
yS EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 let thine enemies be scattered!" it reaches to the 
 last cry of the last surviving apostle, "Little chil- 
 dren, love one another!" In this small library are 
 gathered nearly all forms of speech and of literature, 
 — orations, sermons, poems, codes of law, history, 
 fiction, legend, fervid exhortation, biting irony, 
 tender entreaty — all the multitude of voices through 
 which Israel has spoken to the world. Here are 
 pilgrim songs sung for centuries by innumerable 
 caravans as they came in sight of the gleaming 
 towers of Jerusalem. Here are acrostics curiously 
 wrought; here are battle hymns full of "the thunder 
 of the captains and the shouting," and beside them 
 vesper meditations ; dehcate idylls of rural life, such 
 as that of Ruth and Naomi ; games and riddles, such 
 as were proposed by Samson; eager and affectionate 
 correspondence; and the undying words of Christ 
 himself. 
 
 This unique library is the greatest single educating 
 power in the modern world. It is addressed to in- 
 telligence, and demands some measure of education 
 on the part of all who would receive it. Ecclesiasti- 
 cal architecture or pageantry makes a direct appeal 
 to the senses. Embroidered vestments impress the 
 dullest peasant with the dim sense of something rare 
 and precious. The full-voiced choir, the swinging 
 censers and the tinkling bell impart a sense of awe 
 and reverence to the man who is half asleep, and 
 indeed sometimes exert a hypnotic influence which 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 79 
 
 merges all clear thought in a glow of mystic feeling. 
 But the Bible addresses and creates alert intelli- 
 gence. It cries with PhiHp: ''Understandest thou 
 what thou readest ? " and with Paul : '' Give attention 
 to reading, to study, to teaching." 
 
 Many millions of men have learned to read for no 
 other purpose than to read the Bible. When a single 
 society prints the Bible in three hundred and fifty lan- 
 guages, many of which were reduced to a written form 
 simply in order that they might receive the Bible, 
 we may gain some inkling of the enormous intellect- 
 ual force generated by a religion which reaches the 
 world through a literature. Millions of men have 
 learned Greek simply to read the New Testament. 
 Hebrew has been saved from oblivion among 
 Christians purely by the desire to read the ipsissima 
 verba of Israel's prophets, priests and sages. 
 
 But the Bible demands not only that men learn to 
 read. It compels them to pass out of America and 
 Europe into Asia, out of all our Aryan modes of con- 
 ceiving truth into a Semitic atmosphere, and to look 
 on life through Semitic eyes. It compels us to ap- 
 proach truth and duty and immortality through 
 forms of thought and modes of speech and action 
 wrought out by men who lived and died not later 
 than the first century of our era. It transports us 
 out of the tumultuous present into the far and finished 
 past. In the Old Testament it compels us to become 
 acquainted with institutions, movements, and ideas 
 
80 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 which have played their part and ceased to be, thus 
 exerting for hundreds of milHons of the common 
 people the same calming and steadying power as 
 that which the educated few have found in the classics 
 of Greece and Rome. It has put the chief races of 
 the modern world through the process which the 
 Germans call Selhstentfremdung, the process of being 
 lifted out of a narrow circle of selfish interests and 
 furnished with a new horizon. From a purely 
 intellectual point of view the Bible has performed 
 in modern times a vastly greater educative service 
 than the entire classical Hterature of the Romans and 
 the Greeks. For every one man who has been 
 emancipated from the petty and the transient and 
 made truly cosmopohtan by the classical disciplines 
 history can show ten men who, through study of the 
 Bible, have been placed in vital sympathy with per- 
 sons and movements of the ancient world, and have 
 experienced that kindling of imagination, that sur- 
 render to noble ideals and devotion to distant ends 
 which is the very core of all true education. 
 
 And the minister of every Christian church is the 
 chief, and often the sole, interpreter of this mighty 
 literature to his congregation. His first clear duty 
 is to know that Hterature from beginning to end, — 
 its content, its trend, its dominant ideas, its origin 
 and history. He must know it not merely because 
 he believes it to be inspired, but because the world 
 has found it inspiring. He must know it because of 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 8 1 
 
 its proved power to create character. If he does 
 not know the message of Israel better than he knows 
 the message of Athens or Rome or Weimar or Flor- 
 ence or Stratford, if he has not assimilated into his 
 own mental and spiritual fibre the insight and power 
 of Isaiah and Amos and Paul and John, he is a 
 workman that needs to be ashamed. Between Amer- 
 ica, foremost of all peoples in power of initiative, 
 and Israel, foremost of all peoples in the conviction 
 of the value of righteousness, stands the minister 
 of to-day as interpreter. How, then, shall he inter- 
 pret? His exegesis of particular passages is of far 
 less importance than his method and point of view. 
 What is the point of view to which the minister 
 should steadily hf t his congregation ? 
 
 The great essential to any genuine interpretation 
 of the Scriptures is to regard them as a historic un- 
 folding. They are the record of the progressive 
 growth of the divine thought in Israel's thinking, 
 of the gradual revelation of the divine life in Israel's 
 living. Some conceptions of the Scriptures are ab- 
 solutely unfruitful. The people must be lifted out 
 of the old and misleading idea of the Bible as a flat 
 surface of revelation — like a Chinese picture in 
 which all objects are without perspective or distinc- 
 tion of value, and must be led step by step to see the 
 Bible as a living growth, an organism of various parts 
 and values, all of them throbbing with one great 
 vitality. 
 
82 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 In a certain museum of natural history there lie 
 in the same room a meteorite and a section of a 
 California tree. The meteorite, so far as the earth 
 is concerned, has no history. It appeared without 
 warning from the depths of space, fell hissing through 
 our atmosphere, and has since remained unchanged. 
 We can wonder at it, we might worship it, but we 
 cannot use it. But the tree bears in all its con- 
 centric rings the marks of its origin and development. 
 The story of a living organism is in every fibre. 
 The sunshine, the rain, the soil, have been slowly 
 built into its substance, and struggles with the 
 elemental forces have made it compact and strong. 
 
 Do we think of the Bible as a miraculous body 
 of doctrine falling out of the sky at some remote 
 period, or as a living organism slowly unfolding 
 out of Israel's Hfe under the divine tuition? If 
 we adopt the first view, we can indeed honor and re- 
 vere and even worship the Bible, but we cannot study 
 it, for all true study is the study of origin and growth. 
 The history of a thing is the thing. The book of 
 Mormon professes to have no history. It professes to 
 have been miraculously engraved on plates of gold. 
 It can be obeyed, but cannot be understood. The 
 Koran is alleged to have been divinely dictated to 
 an amanuensis, and its divinity is supposed to con- 
 sist in exemption from the historic process. But 
 the clear superiority of the Bible to such books 
 consists largely in its enormous emphasis on the 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 83 
 
 historical process, on the lives of heroes, sages, poets, 
 kings and prophets, on that development of national 
 tendencies and ideals which Jesus symbolizes under 
 the figure of the growth of seed — first the blade, 
 then the ear, then the full corn in the ear. Instead 
 of being a collection of statutes or a series of propo- 
 sitions, the Bible is a history of persons, nations, 
 movements, in and through which the character of 
 God is revealed to men. Its message is entangled 
 in events; its "truth, embodied in a tale, has entered 
 in at lowly doors." 
 
 Endlessly fruitful is the conception of the Bible 
 which sees in it the result of an unfolding process. 
 With God, as with us, actions speak louder than 
 words. Words are but the post factum statement. 
 The real revelation is in the deed; in the fact 
 that God went forth before the armies of Israel 
 rather than in the song which celebrates the fact; 
 in the fact that a wonderful child appeared in Galilee 
 rather than in Simeon's greeting of the Christ-child 
 in the temple. From this point of view history 
 becomes, as Froude said, ''the voice of God, for- 
 ever speaking across the centuries the laws of right 
 and wrong"; and as we study the development 
 of Israel's conception of righteousness, of prayer, 
 of ritual, of immortality, of God, we are coming 
 ourselves into the possession of the truth as in no 
 other way. If we once grant, as we surely are 
 compelled by any knowledge of history to grant, 
 
84 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 that Israel was clearly chosen of God to bear to 
 the world an ethical and spiritual message, just as 
 Greece brought us aesthetic standards and Rome 
 gave us the foundation of all legal procedure, then 
 to study how that message took shape in Israel's 
 literature, institutions and heroic leaders, is the 
 surest pathway to moral verity for us. If the truth 
 came into the world through history, it can never 
 be severed from its original manifestation. We must 
 study, in the phrase of George A. Gordon, "the 
 ascertained path of the transforming influence as 
 it came upon men in the past." To tear the idea 
 from its setting may be to lose it. It is like plucking 
 a bird from its nest in the trees and putting it as 
 a stuffed specimen on a wooden peg, a thing of saw- 
 dust and glassy eyes.^ 
 
 And this historic point of view furnishes us with a 
 new and powerful apologetic. Some of our most 
 earnest Christian leaders are dubious regarding 
 the methods of modern Biblical study. They fear 
 
 ^ A purely unhistorical religion is indeed conceivable ; and it 
 finds exemplification in more than one of the great systems of 
 India — a religion that denies the worth or even the reality of 
 the temporal processes. . . . But such a religion has no kinship 
 with the spirit of Christianity or the temper of the Occident. . . . 
 Christianity ought no longer to let itself be involved in obscure 
 and uncertain issues of historical detail; but it ought still, if it 
 be true to its distinctive essence, to proclaim the worth of per- 
 sonal and racial experience under the form of time, and the 
 divineness of the historic order. 
 
 — A. O. LovEjOY, Hibhert Journal, January, 1907. 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 85 
 
 the vigor and rigor of a scientific criticism which, 
 absorbed in its devotion to truth, may be ruthless 
 and reckless in its treatment of life. I am quite 
 ready to admit that Biblical criticism has some- 
 times been arbitrary and even arrogant. That is 
 the stage through which every new science must pass. 
 But modern Biblical scholarship has achieved this, 
 — it has made attacks on the Bible such as those 
 of Paine and Ingersoll forever impossible. The 
 conceptions those men so bitterly assailed no longer 
 exist for either believers or unbelievers. The Bible 
 they resisted and repudiated was as imaginary as 
 the image which fell down from Jupiter. The real 
 Bible, laid open to modern eyes by modern methods 
 of historical study, presents no such anachronisms 
 and contradictions as those which scepticism attacked 
 and orthodoxy defended. The real Bible, revealed 
 by patient scholarship, is set free from a thousand 
 difficulties which once constituted a burden to faith 
 and an invitation to narrow-minded liberalism. 
 If Biblical study has shaken the faith of thousands, 
 it has furnished new defence for the faith of millions. 
 If it has shown timorous souls that the four gospels 
 are not stenographic reports, it has carried back 
 those gospels to an earlier date than the last gen- 
 eration dared to assert, and has transformed their 
 very divergencies into proofs of their genuineness 
 and sincerity. If it has depressed the levitical system 
 of the Old Testament as a late expression and 
 
86 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 weakening of Israel's religion, it has exalted the 
 prophets' function beyond measure, and made us 
 bow in reverence before Amos and Hosea as figures 
 eternally significant in the history of religion. If it 
 has allowed us larger latitude in interpreting the 
 story of Jonah's adventure, it has given us in the 
 book of Jonah the earhest known proclamation of 
 a divine love which knows no bounds of race or 
 creed, but enfolds every human being of a myriad 
 and motley population, "and also much cattle." 
 
 Formerly the objector used to say: ''How about 
 Jael, the murderess, whose praises were sung by 
 all Israel? When Captain Sisera fled to her tent 
 for refuge, she 'brought him forth milk and butter 
 in a lordly dish.' She bade him lie down and rest. 
 Then with the hammer she drove the tentpin 
 through the forehead of the sleeping man, and 'at 
 her feet he bowed, he fell.' Yet she is exalted 
 as a moral heroine. Is this Biblical morahty?" 
 To which we answer that we have no more reason 
 to expect to find in the days of the Judges of Israel 
 such forgiveness of enemies as is commanded in 
 the Sermon on the Mount than we have to find 
 among the Visigoths the Ninth Symphony of Bee- 
 thoven or the Sistine Madonna. Israel must first 
 learn to hate evil and utterly repudiate it, and if 
 that repudiation expressed itself in that early age 
 in gross and barbarous forms, those forms simply 
 confirm the truth of the story and the reality of the 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE Sy 
 
 moral evolution. If Jael had been represented as 
 saying, "Neither do I condemn thee, go and sin 
 no more," would any one of us receive the narrative 
 as a veracious account of veritable revelation? 
 
 Formerly men said: "Do you really beheve that 
 the Eternal once delighted in the sacrifices that 
 smoked on Israel's altars? Is the Spirit of the uni- 
 verse gratified by a system which slew thousands 
 of innocent creatures, and made the sacred shrine 
 a shambles running red with blood of beasts and 
 birds?" To which we may now answer: Once 
 every nation, even the most civilized, approached 
 its deity through the symbolic surrender of Hfe. 
 The outpouring of the blood of lamb or dove was 
 the emblem of the self-giving of the worshippers. 
 Therefore Israel was allowed under certain re- 
 strictions to continue for a time that system. But 
 constantly the prophets thundered against the abuses 
 of the system, and at times against its very existence. 
 "I spake not unto your fathers," is Jeremiah's 
 report of the divine attitude, "concerning burnt 
 offerings or sacrifices; but this thing I commanded 
 them: Hearken unto my voice and I will be your 
 God." The prophet Micah declares there is no 
 ritual requirement in worship: "What doth the 
 Lord thy God require of thee but to do justly, to 
 love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" 
 The psalmist cries: "The sacrifices of God are 
 a broken spirit," and finally Jesus gives us the 
 
88 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 complete insight: "God is spirit, and they that 
 worship him must worship him in spirit and in 
 truth." To regard the first steps in this developing 
 apprehension of true worship as the final teaching 
 of the Bible is so unhistorical as to be wholly mis- 
 leading. If we were asked to-day some question 
 as to the teachings of astronomy, none of us would 
 dream of quoting the statements in an astronomical 
 text-book of fifty years ago, unless indorsed by 
 later writers. We recognize that the science of as- 
 tronomy must be judged by its latest achievement. 
 The Bible teaches only what it teaches last. 
 
 Still the Mormon missionaries use the example 
 of patriarchal polygamy as a sanction for their 
 system. "Was not Abraham a polygamist? Was 
 he not the friend of God? If the polygamist was 
 thus accepted once, why object to him to-day?" 
 The very question exposes the questioner's mis- 
 apprehension of the whole Biblical literature. Not 
 one of the patriarchs could claim admission into 
 a modern church. Nor would any church of to-day 
 receive the saints of the thirteenth or even of the 
 eighteenth century. It is the business of religion 
 to turn good into evil, i.e. to make the goodness 
 of yesterday appear wholly inadequate for the 
 requirements of to-day. Monogamy is in many 
 nations a late development. But when Christ 
 says, "They twain shall be one flesh," all earlier 
 and conflicting ideals vanish in the clear ethical 
 illumination. 
 
MODERN USES OF*ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 89 
 
 Slavery was defended out of the Bible by an array 
 of proof-texts that from the old standpoint were 
 unanswerable. The "divine right to govern wrong" 
 has been buttressed for ages by a literalism which, 
 tearing an apostolic phrase out of a personal letter, 
 exalted it into an eternal decree, or seizing on a 
 local regulation of a single period in Israel's history 
 transformed it into a code binding on all the leg- 
 islatures of the world. Just after a recent and 
 peculiarly atrocious case of lynching, an eminent 
 and able clergyman preached a sermon and pub- 
 lished letters, asserting that ''mob-courts" find in 
 the Mosaic law a divine sanction which the jury 
 system, ''only five hundred years old," cannot claim. 
 He affirmed that the divine method of "expiation, 
 not simply punishment or warning," is revealed 
 in the thirty-fifth chapter of the book of Numbers. 
 According to that chapter the kinsfolk of a mur- 
 dered man have a recognized duty. The Hebrew 
 court which sat in judgment on the wilful murderer 
 "seems to have been constituted of those people 
 who were conveniently situated as to the crime. It 
 was a tribunal of by-standers. The trial was free 
 from formality, from technical hindrances, it fol- 
 lowed the crime immediately, and the law was 
 executed promptly. ... I believe that Moses 
 was as wise and safe a lawgiver as Blackstone, 
 and that God knew what was best better than any 
 legislative body that has assembled in England or 
 
90 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 America since the barons of England met King 
 John at Runnymede." Such a claim — that the 
 code which prevailed in ancient Israel was intended 
 to stereotype the administration of justice, both in 
 spirit and method, through all the future — cannot 
 be met by the negative method of questioning 
 Mosaic authorship or pointing out the obviously 
 irrational results. We must replace, if we are to 
 conquer. We must replace that entire attitude 
 and mental habit, by leading ministers and churches 
 into a conception of the Scriptures as the real 
 reflection of a real history, a veritable and gradual 
 unfolding of divine principles in changing human 
 institutions. 
 
 " Do you beheve," we have heard men say, ''that 
 the eternal God walked in the garden in the cool 
 of the day, and 'came down* to see what was 
 going on at the tower of Babel, and 'repented him- 
 self of the making of man?" To which we answer 
 that Israel must conceive God in a vivid way before 
 it could conceive him in a spiritual way. First 
 a powerful and impressive realism, then the re- 
 finement of the idea — that is always the path of 
 progress. Therefore those early ideas of God 
 as magnified hero were the only possible ones at 
 the time. Israel's God must be no mere ghost or 
 exhalation ; he must do things, and in striking ways. 
 He feels anger and jealousy and anxiety and re- 
 pentance — but he is alive, which was the chief 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE QI 
 
 requisite after all. The gods of Egypt were not 
 alive. With stony stare they sat in the sands of 
 Egyptian deserts looking out over the unchanging 
 horizon. The gods of Assyria did nothing — "eyes 
 have they, but they see not, neither speak they through 
 their throat." A God of conscious purpose, will, 
 energy, was Israel's first need. That idea once 
 implanted in Israel's nature, the spiritualization of 
 the idea could follow. Later came Isaiah crying : 
 **To whom will ye liken me? saith the Lord," and 
 later yet came Christ saying: "Our Father." 
 
 A well-known layman recently recounted his 
 experience by saying: "After teaching a Bible 
 class for thirty years I have just got a new New 
 Testament. For the first time in my life I have 
 been through the book of Acts, inserting in the story 
 each of the New Testament epistles at the exact 
 point where it was written. This has cast a flood 
 of light on both the history and the correspondence, 
 and so revolutionized my understanding of the 
 beginnings of the Christian church that I have 
 practically found a new New Testament." If any 
 man would go through the Old Testament in the 
 same way, placing the messages of the prophets 
 where they belong in the historic narrative, he would 
 find all Hebrew prophecy aglow with new meaning. 
 The process of placing the literature in the unfold- 
 ing history, applied to any portion of the Bible, never 
 fails to give the reader a wholly new perspective. 
 
92 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Suppose that I wished to convey to some friend 
 in Germany an idea of the significance of the life 
 and death of Abraham Lincoln. I might instruct 
 a printer to collect four biographies of Lincoln written 
 by those who knew him best. Then I might select 
 some history of the reconstructive period by a com- 
 petent scholar. Then I might select a group of 
 important letters from members of Lincoln's cabinet 
 or their friends. Finally selecting some great 
 poem, like the ''Battle Hymn of the Republic/' 
 I might direct the printer to bind all this literature 
 into a single volume. But my friend in Germany 
 must clearly understand that the various parts of 
 the volume are not by one writer. If he reads the 
 letters written before the battle of Gettysburg as if 
 they were written after the assassination of Lincoln, 
 or attributes the sentiments of Wilkes Booth to 
 Secretary Stanton, he must have only a distorted 
 conception of Lincoln and his imprint on America. 
 
 So in the New Testament we have four lives of 
 our Lord, written by those in closest touch with the 
 inner circle of his friends. Then we have in the 
 book of the Acts the religious reconstruction, out- 
 lined by Luke the physician. Then follows a re- 
 markable correspondence, holding up the mirror to 
 the life of the early church. And at the end we have 
 the great prose poem of the Apocalypse. But to 
 make no distinction between the utterances of 
 Christ and of Paul, to confuse Simon Peter with 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 93 
 
 Simon Magus, or to suppose that the allegory of 
 Hagar and Ishmael has the moral value of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, is to lose all proportion and 
 perspective, and remain a stranger to the impulses 
 which produced our New Testament and made it 
 dynamic in the history of the world. Only when 
 we see the Bible as the story of a developing process 
 under divine tuition do we perceive what our religion 
 has cost in struggle and tears and blood; only then 
 do we discern 
 
 "In what a forge and what a heat 
 Were shaped the anchors of our hope." 
 
 And this historical view-point is not for technical 
 scholars merely ; it is for every one. To some extent 
 it has always been adopted by the church. The 
 humblest Christian has always delighted to trace 
 striking utterances of Scripture to their origin in 
 events. Even the simplest faith has always found 
 in the i8th Psalm a faithful transcript of the 
 experience of David, and has remembered that 
 Paul's cry to the Athenians, ''Turn from these 
 vanities," was uttered before the superb marbles 
 of the Acropolis. But that which has been the ex- 
 ceptional must become the habitual. All Christians 
 must steadily see all Biblical truth framed in the 
 Biblical story, and interpret that truth according 
 to the "rule of three" proposed by Bishop West- 
 cott: "As were the circumstances under which the 
 original word was written to our circumstances 
 
94 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 to-day, so will be the message originally given to 
 what is God's message therefrom to us to-day." 
 
 What we have said about the permanent value 
 of the Bible, as the story of a progressive unveiling 
 of truth in the life of a single race, acquires strongest 
 corroboration from the attitude of Jesus toward 
 his Bible — the Old Testament. He turned away 
 from most of the religious leaders and religious 
 performances of his time. We know his judgment 
 on the priests around him: they ''passed by on the 
 other side." We know his opinion of the Pharisees: 
 "blind guides which strain at a gnat and swallow 
 a camel." We know his judgment on the gor- 
 geous temple which Solomon and Herod conspired 
 to build: "there shall not be left one stone upon 
 another." He would have nothing to do with 
 phylacteries and fastings and penances. Why then 
 did he not pronounce the Old Testament to have 
 served its purpose in Israel's infancy, but to have 
 grown wearisome for its maturer days? He said 
 the true worship should be neither at Jerusalem nor 
 Gerizim; why did he not add it should have noth- 
 ing to do with Deuteronomy or Genesis, with Amos 
 or Hosea ? Why did he not, as some writers of to-day, 
 pronounce the Old Testament "a mill-stone round 
 the neck of true religion"? On the contrary, he 
 fed his own consciousness upon those Scriptures, 
 and at all the great crises of life he stayed his soul 
 upon the writings of Israel. He appeared indeed 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 95 
 
 to break with the past, and in nearly every discus- 
 sion he was found on the side of freedom. As he 
 spoke men cried: "What new doctrine is this?" 
 But the new doctrine was rooted in the old history. 
 His one great answer to the perplexing questions of 
 his time was a reference to the principles embedded 
 in the Hebrew history. When men asked him 
 about marriage, he answered: ''Have ye not read 
 how God made them at the beginning?" When 
 asked concerning the Sabbath, he answered: "Have 
 ye not read what David did?" When men would 
 entangle him in riddles regarding the resurrection, 
 he answered: "Have ye not read how God spake to 
 Moses in the passage called the bush?" As the 
 shadow of the cross fell upon him, he cried: "The 
 things which are written must be accomplished in 
 me." When the utter darkness came, he quoted 
 the 2 2d Psalm: ^^ Eloi, eloi, lama sabhacthaniJ^ 
 And on the way to Emmaus he "expounded in all 
 the Scriptures the things concerning himself." 
 
 These facts are decisive as to the religious value 
 of the Old Testament. We would not indeed seek 
 to involve our Lord in modem literary controversy. 
 All our questions regarding documents, date, authors, 
 did not exist in Christ's time, and on them he has 
 given no decision whatever. One would no more 
 look to the teaching of Christ for any judgment as 
 to who wrote the iioth Psalm, than he would look 
 to John Bunyan for a theory of the electric light. 
 
96 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Christ no more gives us truth about production of 
 literature than about the production of gold or grain. 
 But the purest spirit of all history must have taken 
 some decisive attitude toward the religious value 
 of Israel's bequest. He found in it something es- 
 sential for himself, for his nation, and for the world. 
 And that one fact makes the Old Testament forever 
 significant and indispensable to humanity. 
 
 But our Lord's way of using the Old Testament 
 is fundamentally historical. He does not merely 
 quote isolated texts — always a futile method in 
 argument — but he educes principles of perpetual 
 validity. He shows us the enduring truth at the 
 heart of the most picturesque tradition. A man 
 wishing to prove the doctrine of the resurrection 
 might search the entire Old Testament for some 
 formal statement on the matter, and find none. 
 Jesus finds the truth where no mere grammarian or 
 antiquarian, no student of the dative case, would 
 dream of seeing it — in the declaration, ''I am the 
 God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God 
 of Jacob." To be the God of a man, argues Jesus, 
 cannot mean to allow that man after a few years 
 to drop into oblivion. God is not the God of dead 
 men, but living ones; therefore Israel's heroes are 
 still alive. 
 
 So it was in regard to Sabbath keeping. Any 
 rabbi could quote texts. So many paces were al- 
 lowed for a Sabbath day's journey. The prohi- 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 9/ 
 
 bition of all work was held to prevent the tying 
 of knots above a certain size or the carrying of 
 baskets beyond a certain weight. The Nazarene 
 prophet brushes at once through these thickets of 
 rabbinic casuistry. He consults no law-book, but 
 makes us acquainted afresh with the rugged David, 
 son of Jesse. He bids us look again at that virile, 
 daring figure. Did David submit to these petty 
 regulations, or listen to this phrase-mongering, 
 when human Hfe was at stake? No; he entered 
 into the holy place and seized the sacred bread and 
 fed his starving men. "Wherefore it is lawful to 
 do good on the Sabbath day." Thus as Shake- 
 speare teaches patriotism by calling us back into 
 the presence of the English kings; as Tennyson 
 inculcates the spotless life by seating us among 
 the knights of King Arthur's Court: so Jesus leads 
 us for moral direction and inspiration away from 
 all legal codes into the presence of the great per- 
 sonalities of Hebrew history. 
 
 How simple and direct and non-ecclesiastical is 
 such treatment; how free from pedantry and subt- 
 lety the whole method of interpretation ! This is 
 not the exposition of a professional exegete or casuist, 
 but of a transparent mind finding God visible in 
 nature and audible in history. Jesus treated the 
 Old Testament with a largeness of view, a freedom 
 of judgment, which we are in constant danger of 
 losing. It is indeed important to study moods and 
 
98 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 tenses of verbs, to distinguish documents when 
 they exist, to examine syntax and vocabulary. 
 But the microscopic eye may miss the telescopic 
 magnitudes; and while we succeed in reducing the 
 composition of the Hexateuch to an algebraic formula 
 the throb of the poetry and the organ tones of the 
 prophecy may escape us lamentably and forever. The 
 knife of the critic and the spade of the archaeologist 
 are a part of the equipment of the true interpreter. 
 But still more essential is it so to commune with the 
 great personalities of Israel, and so to ponder their 
 message that we shall not merely pluck a flower here 
 and there from their writings, but shall be partakers 
 of their perceptions of the unseen, their passion for 
 righteousness, their surrender to the infinite. Thus 
 we shall find in the Bible not so much a chart by 
 which to sail, as the experience of the most daring 
 sailors in the spiritual realm. It will be to us not 
 a mechanical list of things to be done or omitted, 
 not a mere diagram of dangerous roads to be avoided, 
 but the experience of the greatest travellers in regions 
 of the soul, vital and throbbing with the hard-won 
 victories of those ^'who through faith subdued 
 kingdoms and put to flight armies of aliens." 
 
 "What bard, 
 At the height of his vision, can deem, 
 Of God, of the world, of the soul, 
 With a plainness as near, 
 As flashing as Moses felt, 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 99 
 
 When he lay in the night by his flock 
 On the starht Arabian waste? 
 Can rise and obey 
 The beck of the Spirit hke him?" 
 
 It remains to speak of certain specific uses of the 
 Bible in the modern world. We particularly need 
 the Old Testament for appreciation of the order 
 and beauty of nature. The Old Testament, giving 
 much larger space to the poetical element than does 
 the New Testament, has a perception of the divine 
 presence in the visible world which is far beyond 
 any similar insight in the poetry of Greece and Rome. 
 Our prosaic Western intellect is often troubled when 
 told that a certain passage is poetry; for poetry 
 often means to us the unreal and untrue. Here 
 comes out very clearly the difference between the 
 Aryan and Semitic mind. Our hard American 
 common sense, brought up on the spelling-book and 
 mental arithmetic, often interprets Scripture as 
 if it were a section of a railroad time-table. In the 
 time-table we want no tropes, no glow of enthusiasm 
 or sympathy, only the hard facts in the briefest 
 possible form. It was a man of such temperament 
 who said that Shakespeare was evidently confused 
 when he wrote: ''Sermons in stones, and books 
 in running brooks." "Evidently," said this astute 
 emender of poetic blunders, "Shakespeare meant to 
 say, 'Sermons in books and stones in running 
 brooks!'" But a large part of the Old Testament 
 
100 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 consists of an idealistic poetic construction of the phys- 
 ical order. Hence while our theological definitions 
 are based on the New Testament, our vision of the 
 beauty of the world comes from the Old Testament. 
 The apostle Paul could sail through the ^Egean Sea 
 apparently without a glimpse of any beauty of sun- 
 set or starlight, or any appreciation of the morning 
 splendor of the Isles of Greece. His eyes were 
 fixed on his moral and spiritual mission. What 
 did he care for the crescent glory of the dawn, or 
 the gleam of the waves on a wrinkled sea? Sen- 
 suous beauty had for him no existence: as it had 
 none for John Calvin, who could live for years by 
 the Lake of Geneva without noting its exquisite 
 blue, or alluding in all his writings to the white 
 summit lifting itself into the sky beyond. Jesus 
 indeed was tremulously sensitive to the beauty of 
 nature. He saw in the lily a glory more than 
 Solomon's, in the evening cloud a prophecy, and 
 in the bird's nest a sermon. But his apostles in 
 their magnificent spiritual intensity sometimes spoke 
 of this world simply as a hostelry for pilgrims whose 
 gaze was fixed on a city out of sight. Whenever 
 Christian hymnology would sing of the splendor 
 of God's world, it has gone back to the Old Testa- 
 ment pictures of "day unto day uttering speech and 
 night unto night showing knowledge"; of the birds 
 that sing among the branches ; of the leviathan that 
 "maketh the deep to boil like a pot," and the young 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE IQI 
 
 lions that ''roar after their prey and seek their 
 meat from God." 
 
 It would be instructive to compare two descrip- 
 tions of a sudden storm, — one given by a modern 
 weather bureau and the other in the 29th Psalm. 
 The report of the meteorologist might tell us that 
 an area of low pressure has moved eastward from 
 the Rocky Mountains, that the barometer has fallen 
 rapidly, and the wind is blowing fifty miles an hour. 
 But the Hebrew poet has no instruments of precision 
 and needs none. He is dealing not with quantity 
 of matter, but quality of meaning. 
 
 "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters, 
 The God of glory thundereth. 
 
 ******* 
 The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars, 
 Yea, the Lord breaketh in pieces the cedars of Lebanon. 
 
 ******* 
 The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve 
 And strippeth the forests bare; 
 And in his temple everything saith, Glory." 
 
 Civilization would be difficult to-day without the 
 precise physical measurements of the scientific 
 observer. But civilization would be hard and cold 
 and shallow without that vision of the divine pres- 
 ence behind physical phenomena which is the often 
 unrecognized gift of the Old Testament. 
 
 For still another purpose we go to the older por- 
 tions of the Bible — for the sense of social and 
 civic duty. The New Testament is very clearly 
 
102 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the exponent of religious individualism. The in- 
 dividual had been forgotten and lost in the ambition 
 of the great military leaders of the ancient world, 
 and in the speculations of the great philosophers. 
 Alexander and Plato are at one in the complete 
 subjection of the individual to the state. Hence 
 the New Testament stirs men to individual duty 
 and action. Its characteristic cry is: "What shall / 
 do to be saved?" It covers too short a period to 
 show us the outworking of righteousness or un- 
 righteousness on a national scale. From the begin- 
 ning of Christ's ministry to the death of Paul is 
 too short a time to trace the rise and fall of kingdoms 
 and dynasties. Brief, vivid biographies of single men 
 summon us to individual allegiance and heroism. 
 But the Old Testament, covering at least fifteen 
 hundred years in its outline of events, paints its pic- 
 tures on a broader canvas, where we see how the 
 divine power raises up Pharaoh, anoints David, girds 
 Cyrus, and summons nations to execute its great 
 decree. 
 
 Moreover, the expectation of the apostles of our 
 Lord, that the end of the age was close at hand, was 
 not a stimulus to patriotism. Faith in the endur- 
 ance of institutions is essential to devotion to their 
 welfare. The duty of serving one's country through 
 holding public office, or by dying for the protection 
 of the government from its foes, is not easily based 
 on a New Testament epistle. What mattered it 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE IO3 
 
 whether Nero or some other tyrant sat upon the 
 imperial throne, when soon all governments were to 
 vanish, when the heavens should be rolled together as 
 a scroll, and the elements melt with fervent heat? 
 The influence of eschatology on ethics is too large 
 a subject to be considered at this point. Yet that 
 the expectation of the speedy ending of the age 
 affected the Christian attitude toward the state no 
 one can doubt. But Christian patriots of all centu- 
 ries have sustained themselves by the examples of the 
 great popular reformers and prophets of Israel, and 
 the commonwealth in England, and in New England 
 as well, was modelled after the Hebrew theocracy. 
 George Adam Smith has pointed out how, in the great 
 struggle of English history between royal prerogative 
 and popular rights, the kings have gone to the New 
 Testament, and the people to the Old Testament, 
 for support. The Stuarts have appealed to the 
 injunctions: ''Honor the king . . . submit your- 
 selves to every ordinance of man . . . obey them 
 that have the rule over you," while the leaders of 
 the people have found inspiration in the narratives 
 of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, and Elijah defying 
 Ahab. 
 
 It is largely to the magnificent individualism of the 
 New Testament that we owe the moral initiative and 
 energy of the modern world to-day. But the New 
 Testament presupposes instruction in the Old Testa- 
 ment, and in the latter we find justification for that 
 
104 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 great "consciousness of kind" which is sweeping 
 over the modern world. Too often has individuahsm 
 developed a certain " otherwise-mindedness " which 
 prevents civic cooperation. Too often have the 
 saints stood asunder like statues on their pedestals, 
 each admirable in itself, but each isolated and chilly. 
 The great individual devotion of the apostolic age 
 finds its natural and needed supplement in the 
 patriotic devotion of the Old Testament heroes, 
 whose life was intertwined with that of the nation, 
 and who would rather be blotted out of the divine 
 book than see their nation suffer. 
 
 Taking thus the entire library of Hebrew and 
 Christian Scriptures as the great means of instruction 
 in righteousness, we get some intimation of what 
 should be the "proportion of truth" in Christian 
 preaching. It is not what a minister believes, but 
 what he emphasizes, that gives his work its character- 
 istic quality. It is not the truths that are kept in 
 the background, or on the upper shelf, that achieve 
 results, but the truths that are persistently thrust to 
 the front and kept in the focus of illumination. 
 The minister, with freedom to select his text from 
 any part of the Biblical literature, and his theme 
 from any phase of human life, has a freedom of 
 choice such as no other calling dreams of. The 
 physician seldom can choose the ills which he must 
 treat, or the lawyer the cases he must argue. But 
 the minister has an unparalleled freedom of theme, 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 10$ 
 
 even if he be under the Hmitations of the Church 
 Year, and may easily be led into idiosyncrasies and 
 unsymmetrical presentation of truth. He may 
 preach along single lines that are attractive to him 
 personally, and leave whole realms of truth and duty 
 untouched. 
 
 While the Bible certainly furnishes no precept 
 here, it may offer much suggestion as to what should 
 be at the centre and what on the far periphery of 
 preaching. By its sheer power of survival the Bible 
 has proved its power of perpetual appeal to humanity. 
 But the Biblical emphasis is sharply in contrast with 
 that of all text-books in philosophy and theology. 
 They make central what is logically important; 
 the Bible makes central what is vital to the moral 
 life. They seek to justify the ways of God to men; 
 the Bible seeks to rectify the ways of men in accord- 
 ance with the law of God. The text-books are 
 intent, and rightly, on building up a defensible sys- 
 tem of thought; the Bible is absorbed in imparting 
 motive to Hfe. Hence the entire approach to truth 
 is by a different road, and the whole emphasis is on 
 non-theological aspects of truth and practical aspects 
 of duty. If we make prominent in our teaching 
 that which has small space in the Bible, and neglect 
 that which has great place in the Bible, then it is 
 at least probable that just because the Bible has 
 gripped the conscience of humanity, our preaching 
 will fail to do so. Our preaching is a gospel, not 
 
I06 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 a theodicy. If the Bible gives much space to ex- 
 pounding the attributes of God in their relation to his 
 essence, then we may wisely do the same; otherwise 
 not. If it argues at length for his existence, we may 
 spend much time on the theistic argument; other- 
 wise not. If the prophets and apostles have much 
 to say about the fall of man and original sin, we may 
 in practical preaching do the same. But have we 
 ever examined the Scriptures to see what space those 
 matters actually occupy? The federal headship of 
 Adam may be enormously important in a system 
 of theology; but since Adam is never mentioned by 
 Christ, and only two or three times in the entire New 
 Testament, he cannot be a very important factor 
 in Christian preaching. The virgin birth of Christ 
 most Christians accept. It may be an exceedingly im- 
 portant part of the Christian creed. If its rejection 
 implies a naturalistic view of the world as a product 
 of blind force, then such rejection is perilous to faith. 
 But if the virgin birth is mentioned in only two 
 places in the entire Scriptures, and was apparently 
 unknown or ignored in the whole apostolic preaching, 
 it cannot be a tenet which should stand in the fore- 
 front of Christian preaching to-day. If the apostles 
 gave their time to reconciling religion with current 
 views of the physical universe, we may justly believe 
 that the growth of the Kingdom continually requires 
 such reconciliation. If the Bible gives much space 
 to explaining the mysteries of creation, or to pubHsh- 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE 10/ 
 
 ing a program of divine action in the future, we 
 may well give much space to doctrines of cosmology 
 and eschatology. A noted American teacher in his 
 ''Dogmatic Theology " has devoted eighty-seven pages 
 to the doctrine of hell, and three pages to a study- 
 of heaven. If our popular preaching has reversed 
 this proportion, it has come nearer to the perspective 
 of the Bible. The conception of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, central in the teaching of our Lord, had in 
 the last generation nearly dropped out of sight in 
 our American preaching, because we were under the 
 dominance of classical rather than Biblical models, 
 and were thinking more of the logic of Cicero and 
 Demosthenes than of the vision of the prophets and 
 apostles. We cannot indeed copy any man or period. 
 We would not insist that every truth which obtained 
 emphasis in one era of the church must necessarily 
 and mechanically receive the same emphasis in all 
 eras. Many of the Biblical books were tracts for 
 the times, developing aspects of truth according to 
 the urgent needs of their own generation. But we 
 do affirm that the Bible by its power to survive and 
 transform has vindicated the essential soundness of 
 its method and the justice of its perspective. The 
 literature which has fashioned the moral climate of 
 the civilized world may at least suggest to us what 
 is great and what is small in any continuous attempt 
 at moral renovation. A Biblical preacher is not one 
 who repeats Biblical phrases, but one who takes the 
 
I08 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Biblical standpoint, acquires the same perspective, 
 and feels the same awful sense of God, the same 
 conviction of righteousness, the same yearning love 
 for men as that which made the ancient prophet 
 
 stand 
 
 "Like some tall peak, fired by the Creator 
 With the red glow of rushing morn." 
 
 One further use of the Scriptures we must not for- 
 get, — we need them for the formation of character 
 in childhood and youth. Our best students of ped- 
 agogy are agreed that nowhere else is there such ad- 
 mirable material for moral training as in the pictu- 
 resque narratives of the Bible, with their simple plots, 
 vivid coloring, and swift sensitiveness to right and 
 wrong. Mere enunciation of rules is not enough 
 for our children in home or in church. Lectures on 
 moral etiquette are often wearisome, and may pro- 
 voke reaction. But the Bible stories, presenting in 
 clear, broad outlines the issues of the moral life, 
 are beyond those to be found in any other literature. 
 The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey will always 
 attract young people. The fables of ^Esop and the 
 German Marchen have their value in inculcating a 
 certain shrewd and thrifty alertness. But for giving 
 childhood an intelligent understanding of ethical 
 principles applied to life, there is no literature in 
 the world like the stories of Joseph and Samuel and 
 David and Jesus. They furnish us with a series of 
 ideals and a religious vocabulary that is beyond 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE IO9 
 
 price. If these stories are stored in the chambers 
 of imagery in early childhood, there is no period in 
 life which they will not illuminate and strengthen. 
 To discuss the duty of repentance is well, but to 
 show that repentance in Peter, in David, and perhaps 
 in Esau, is better. To inculcate abstract benevo- 
 lence is helpful, but the story of the Good Samaritan 
 anticipates all the wisest methods of our organized 
 charity. To rebuke intolerance is a duty. But to 
 show that intolerance operating in John when he 
 would call down fire from heaven, and then to see 
 the same man slowly transformed into the apostle 
 of love — that is to teach Christian charity so that it 
 shall be as a nail fastened by a master of assemblies. 
 We must show the great virtues as they grew up in 
 the world, as they emerged in human consciousness. 
 Better than any formal exposition of the mutual duty 
 of parent and child is the picture of Jesus remaining 
 subject to wondering parents, and yet dreaming ever 
 of the Father's business. 
 
 Thus the minister facing his vast and varied task 
 finds vast and varied equipment in the Bible. The 
 sermons of the Bible must be re-preached to every 
 nation under heaven, not by servile imitation, not by 
 vain repetition, but by absorption and translation of 
 their moral passion. The types of thought furnished 
 in the Scriptures are manifold and furnish material 
 for many kinds of preachers and preaching. Paul 
 gives us one type of thought — that which has been 
 
no EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 largely dominant in the Christian church since the 
 reformation. Peter frankly acknowledges that in 
 "our beloved brother Paul" are some things hard to 
 be understood, and proceeds to develop his own testi- 
 mony as one who was with Christ ''in the holy mount." 
 John has little to say about the central concepts of 
 Paul, nor does he view the world from the standpoint 
 of Peter. To him God is chiefly conceived not as 
 offended sovereign, not as impartial judge, not even 
 as unseen friend, but as "light in whom there is no 
 darkness at all." And these three aspects of truth 
 seen through the medium of three individual person- 
 alities meet the various needs of various men. In 
 some one of the three apostles, or in all of them, the 
 preacher can find his supreme insight and stimulus. 
 The minister who draws truth from such sources 
 will never think of it as a dried formula. He is in 
 constant contact with truth at maximum intensity, 
 truth pungent, passionate, compelling. Sharp as an 
 acid is the irony of Isaiah when he sketches men 
 fashioning a graven image and falling down to the 
 stock of a tree, and crying: "Thou art my God." 
 Awful is his reverence and self-surrender as he cries, 
 "Here am I; send me." How marvellous is the 
 tenderness of Hosea, as through his broken home and 
 domestic tragedy there streams into his soul a vision 
 of the forgiving love of God. How tremendous is 
 the passionate cursing of the imprecatory psalms, 
 which in time of peace we expurgate for dainty con- 
 
MODERN USES OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURE III 
 
 gregations, but which, when witnessing the woes of 
 Armenia and the atrocities of the Turk, we find 
 all too weak to express our Christian indignation ! 
 How rapturous and sublime is the vision of John, 
 as from his rocky island he looks out over the tossing 
 iEgean and catches a glimpse of the time when the 
 kingdoms of this world, east and west, Roman, 
 Egyptian, Assyrian, are to become the kingdoms 
 of our Lord ! The man who has drawn truth from 
 such profound experiences feels his soul aflame as he 
 proclaims it. His message will come " up from the 
 burning core below." While he respects and honors 
 the task of the metaphysician and the theologian, 
 he frankly conceives his own task as quite different. 
 He stands between the history that is finished and 
 recorded and the history that is making to-day. 
 Gathering out of the great days of the past new faith 
 and power and passion, he lights his altar from the 
 ancient fire, and may yet be able to ''kindle the land 
 into flame with its heat." 
 
IV 
 
 THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 "Let men beware how they admit a great rehgious idea 
 into the hidden recesses of the heart. . . . What amazing 
 social changes, what wars, revolutions, empires, common- 
 wealths, lay in that single idea of the priesthood of all believers, 
 of justification by faith alone. . . . Even so let men beware 
 of the idea of the Kingdom. At present it is in the hands and 
 hearts mainly of teachers of religion, but its day may come 
 in the great open field. Revolutions may be in it which will 
 make the earth shake and ring, wars which will convulse world 
 society, great commonwealths on a vaster and nobler scale 
 than the world has ever known, at the last, perhaps, a new 
 world-order of social and industrial peace." 
 
 — D. S. Cairns. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 The sole aim of Christianity is to make good men. 
 But that aim is so simple and obvious that the world 
 has found it quite incredible. The world has con- 
 stantly assumed or inferred that something more 
 abstruse or recondite or ethereal must be the Chris- 
 tian goal — the defence of some intellectual citadel, 
 or the exposition of some philosophy, or the repeti- 
 tion of some mystic and life-giving rite. Therefore 
 we cannot too often repeat that all rite and ceremony, 
 all creed and philosophy, all architecture and liturgy, 
 are but transient means to a permanent end — the 
 making of good men. The aim of Christianity is 
 ethical, and it has no other aim whatever. Good 
 men, constituting a good society, living in league 
 with all goodness human and divine, — this is the 
 Kingdom of Heaven, mentioned oftener in the four 
 gospels than any other subject, and forming the cen- 
 tral idea in the teaching of Jesus. 
 
 From this it follows that one of the main functions 
 of the minister is to explain what goodness is, and 
 make it imperative and alluring. To bring and hold 
 men face to face with the Christian ideal of life until 
 
 "5 
 
Il6 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 its outlines are sharp and clear, and its summons is 
 heard like a trumpet note, is the preacher's arduous 
 and necessary task. To-day the conscience of the 
 Christian world is at the same time aroused and 
 puzzled. The moral sentiment of the community is 
 baffled. Our desire to do right has outrun our per- 
 ception of what right is. Pilate's question, "What 
 is truth?" has given place to a more imperative and 
 bewildered cry, "What is justice?" We do not 
 now need to create ethical passion so much as we 
 need to "canalize" it, to construct channels which 
 shall guide and conduct that overflowing passion to 
 just and permanent results. All around us is an 
 enormous amount of protest against injustice, a 
 protest often crude and blind or even frantic, but a 
 protest which proves that the conscience of humanity 
 is still mightier than all economic necessities. Vari- 
 ous socialistic schemes are winning their way among 
 us, not because of their superior insight or knowledge, 
 but because somehow they have allied themselves 
 with the indomitable demand for righteousness. 
 
 Our age is also richer in altruistic feeling than any 
 generation preceding. The mere list of the chari- 
 ties of the modern city is astonishing. The amount 
 of money dispensed is large, but the amount of time, 
 deliberation, organization, and painstaking labor in- 
 volved is far more impressive. A small army of 
 visitors is entering the homes of the poor. Hundreds 
 of nurses, with quiet voice and careful step, move 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP II7 
 
 in and out among the sick rooms in the tenements. 
 The social settlements number among their fortunate 
 workers some of the noblest and ablest men and 
 women of our time. The warfare against tuber- 
 culosis goes steadily on, and men and women and 
 children are attacking infinitesimal foes with the 
 same pertinacity with which our fathers drove out 
 the wolf and the bear. Specific reforms are spring- 
 ing up in every region of the country and calling for 
 our allegiance. The whole country is throbbing 
 with moral heat, and the old Puritan conscience, 
 which we thought overlaid and stifled by material 
 prosperity, is summoning our entire civilization to 
 account. Such an era offers magnificent opportunity 
 to the Christian minister. The very fact that he is 
 not a speciaHst, Umited to a Httle section of thought 
 or action, is part of his qualification for moral 
 leadership. The teacher of physics is not competent 
 to pronounce on ethical problems, the economist is 
 silent before some question of creed-subscription, 
 the expounder of the creeds has no help to offer us 
 in deciding as to care of dependents and defectives. 
 But the minister, inexpert in all these fields, is yet 
 in daily contact with the principles which underlie 
 them all. The very fact that he touches all sorts and 
 conditions of men, that he is called on to address and 
 to study men of every class and every party, should 
 give him a breadth of sympathy and sanity of out- 
 look which will make him a competent guide for the 
 
Il8 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 pulsating moral passion of our time. He is like the 
 ship-pilot, who could not himself build the smallest 
 craft, but who knows the channel, the rocks, the 
 swift-running tides, and can conduct thousands of 
 passengers, all wiser than himself, in safety to the 
 port. 
 
 Yet in this great ethical revival the church has not 
 been conspicuously leading. The church has passed 
 through a great revival of religion without knowing 
 it. It has been a revival such as Isaiah pictured: 
 "Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of 
 your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil, 
 learn to do well." It has been the revival demanded 
 by John the Baptist: "Exact no more than that 
 which is appointed you." But the churches have 
 been surprised at the movement, for they were not 
 consciously working to bring it about. They have 
 been laboring conscientiously on the old indi- 
 vidualistic lines, seeking to deal with each man as 
 if he were an isolated sinner to be transformed into 
 an isolated saint. The deacons of the church have 
 shown fine eagerness in assisting, out of the monthly 
 collection for the poor, some woman sapped of 
 strength by night work in a factory. But any 
 attempt to enact such laws as shall render night 
 work for women impossible — that is hardly yet 
 recognized as distinctly Christian effort. Church 
 members have shown genuine brotherly kindness 
 to the poor brakeman crushed between the cars, 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP II 9 
 
 but any movement to secure safer appliances for 
 coupling cars has been looked upon as purely eco- 
 nomic, or possibly political, and outside the realms 
 of recognized church activity. We have gathered 
 children by thousands into Sunday-school for in- 
 struction in Christian truth, and this is surely im- 
 portant. But have we inquired how many hours 
 those children are working in stores and mills, and 
 have we made any organized attempt to secure for 
 them a real and unstunted childhood ? Is it Chris- 
 tian to teach them how the Israelites were "made to 
 serve with rigor" and to make no attempt to save 
 them from the more terrible, because impersonal, 
 rigor of modern machinery ? In temperance reform 
 the church has always taken a leading part, not only 
 in securing individual signers of the pledge, but in 
 securing better customs and better laws. In the 
 matter of marriage and divorce the church has ut- 
 tered no uncertain sound in many of its great as- 
 semblies, and has been both spokesman and inspirer 
 of our generation. But in all questions affecting 
 industrial or commercial life the church has been 
 strangely silent. Yet it is precisely these questions 
 which present the chief moral issues of our time. 
 The church has offered pastoral attention to the 
 weary shop-girl, but made no attempt to better the 
 conditions under which she stands all day behind the 
 counter. It has assiduously carried comfort and 
 consolation to the flushed consumptive, but to wage 
 
I20 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 war against consumption has seemed somehow out- 
 side the Christian sphere. To rescue the fallen is 
 clearly Christian; but to prevent men from falling — 
 are we clear that this is a task still more deeply- 
 Christian ? We have poured in oil and wine upon 
 the wounded traveller; but to take stringent measures 
 to prevent other travellers from being wounded in 
 the same way — that we have left to Herod or Pilate 
 or some non-Christian power. But if we leave the 
 great preventive philanthropy and reform of our 
 generation to be achieved by the agnostic, then to 
 agnosticism our generation will look as the source 
 of moral power. 
 
 By way of defending the church in its inaction 
 many things may be said. It may be affirmed, and 
 rightly, that the church as a venerable institution 
 must not hastily ally itself with untried measures, 
 must not become a mere sociological experiment sta- 
 tion. It may be easily shown that many individual 
 church members are leaders in consumers' leagues, 
 in civic federations, in directorates of hospitals and 
 asylums. It may be said that if other and non- 
 Christian organizations will do this helpful human 
 work, the church is thereby set free for its own 
 purely spiritual task. 
 
 But none of us are fully satisfied with these an- 
 swers. Does the church wish to be set free from 
 its ministration to distress, and from its mission as 
 the prophet of social righteousness? Would not 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 121 
 
 that be like setting a tree free from its own branches, 
 and reducing it, lopped of all foliage and fruit, 
 to a mere wooden post? ''Alas! she is beautiful," 
 cried Heine, as he bowed before the Venus de Milo, 
 " but she has no arms ! " But a church without arms 
 is not even beautiful, because she is not Christian. 
 The church cannot indeed assume omniscience 
 in complicated social problems. It cannot justly 
 attack individuals, attempting to anticipate the judg- 
 ment of the searcher of hearts. But it can furnish 
 the basic ethical principles by which all problems are 
 to be solved and all individual careers are to be 
 tested. It is not the business of the church as an 
 organization to bring suit against the saloon keeper 
 or the lottery dealer. But it is the business of the 
 church to create a public opinion in which it shall be 
 difficult or impossible for men to grow rich by making 
 others poor. It is not the duty of the church as such 
 to investigate the trust company. But it is the duty 
 of the church to emphasize the fiduciary virtues, 
 and proclaim that all business responsibility is a 
 trust imposed by society. There is no other organi- 
 zation so well fitted to inculcate the great elemental 
 virtues, and develop the primary motives, as is the 
 Christian church. There is no other individual in 
 the community so clearly called to ethical leader- 
 ship as is the minister. If the entire aim of Chris- 
 tianity is to make good men, one of the chief duties 
 of the minister in a transitional era is to explain 
 what goodness is. 
 
122 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 For goodness is a far more complicated matter 
 than in the simple patriarchal age. When Abraharrt 
 sat at his tent-door in the cool of the day, virtue was 
 indeed difficult, as it always has been and shall be, 
 but it was far simpler than now. ''Who shall abide 
 in thy tabernacle?" cried the Psalmist, and the 
 answer was brief and definite: ''He that slan- 
 dereth not ... he that sweareth and changeth not 
 . . . he that putteth not out his money to usury. . . ." 
 In the five verses of the 15 th Psalm is the complete 
 picture of the good man in ancient Israel. But now 
 the world is so crowded that each life touches all 
 lives, and each man sustains a multitude of re- 
 lations to his fellow-men. That a man is a good 
 husband and father does not insure his being a good 
 employer of labor or a good bank president. That 
 he is a model son to his aged mother, or a zealous 
 officer of the church, furnishes no guarantee that he 
 is a good alderman or member of Congress. The 
 most contradictory codes of ethics seem to exist 
 side by side in the personality and career of the same 
 individuals. As a neighbor a certain man is a model ; 
 but as a business competitor he may "imitate the 
 tiger." As a church member he devoutly and 
 sincerely recites the beatitudes; as a Wall Street 
 operator he spurns them all. Let not these con- 
 tradictions be chaSged to hypocrisy, any more than 
 we charge John Newton with hypocrisy because he 
 wrote Christian hymns on the deck of a slave ship. 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 123 
 
 There is no more deliberate duplicity in our day 
 than there was among the Puritan churches, when 
 they erected their meeting-houses by lottery and 
 installed their ministers with liberal provision for 
 strong drink. But there is a confusion of moral 
 standards. There is an idea that individual honesty, 
 purity, affection, can be a substitute for corporate 
 rectitude and social trusteeship. There is genuine 
 agony of spirit on the part of men who find themselves 
 in such a network of relations that, whatever course 
 of action they adopt, they must hurt some innocent 
 persons. There is genuine dismay on the part of men 
 who have for years followed their uninstructed con- 
 science, and now wake up to find themselves pilloried 
 as traitors to society. 
 
 The man who thinks it easy to discern justice 
 to-day has not lived widely or deeply. "Thou shalt 
 not steal" — surely we all accept that as an eternal 
 principle of moral life. But how far may directors 
 increase the capital stock of an industrial enter- 
 prise, or how far may they withhold dividends, 
 without stealing? How far do the stockholders in 
 such an enterprise become responsible for the acts of 
 such directors and share in the guilt, as well as the 
 gain, of that kind of stealing? "Thou shalt not 
 kill" — the great command still sounds across the 
 ages. But if I persist in buying at the bargain 
 counter, or if I crowd my competitor until he be- 
 comes desperate, is that killing or not? "Lie not 
 
124 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 one to another" — is fundamental Christian teach- 
 ing. But if I enter the ministry by giving quahfied 
 assent to some venerable formula, am I selling the 
 truth to buy position, or am I simply exercising that 
 reasonable freedom which is the birthright of all 
 true children of the Spirit? 
 
 These are specimens of the fundamental problems 
 of our age. On them no minister can be silent and 
 claim moral leadership. The issues of life are be- 
 fogged. Thousands are crying: "How can I 
 understand except some man should guide me?" 
 And to say that all that men need is a good heart, is 
 to mock their deep necessity. They need, not in- 
 deed a ductor dubitantium, in the mediaeval sense, but 
 they need spiritual guides who shall see underneath 
 all complications and confusions the eternal moral 
 verity, as the geologist discerns the primeval granite 
 beneath the rolling hills and valleys. 
 
 Why then are our ministers furnishing so little 
 ethical guidance in these problems? It is not 
 because they are afraid of the pews — a slander as 
 baseless as it is ancient. On the whole, as much 
 courage will be found in the pulpit as in any post of 
 responsibility in the world. The candid minister 
 has far less to fear from his congregation than the 
 candid congressman has to fear from his constituency, 
 or the candid editor from his subscribers. No such 
 pressure is ever put on any minister as is put on the 
 mayor of every city in order to shape his opinions 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 12$ 
 
 and policies. When a clear choice is presented 
 between the expedient and the right, the ministers 
 of America will not be found wanting. It is not 
 fear of consequences that holds back our ministers 
 from fearless ethical leadership. But there are two 
 influences which obviously hinder such leadership, 
 — the tradition that Christian faith is a series of 
 propositions, and the tradition that Christian morality 
 is a series of prohibitions. 
 
 "There is in all history," says Principal Fairbairn, 
 "nothing more tragic than the fact that our heresies 
 have been more speculative than ethical." ^ The 
 propositions which are the intellectual outcome of 
 life have been regarded as the origin of that life. 
 It is as if botany were looked upon as the origin of 
 flowers, or a system of astronomy were regarded 
 as the cause of the movement of constellations. A 
 layman recently reported: "My pastor announced 
 this morning that there are seven propositions which 
 a man must believe in order to be a Christian. Five 
 of those propositions I cannot believe, and about the 
 other two I am not sure." To place at the gateway 
 of the Christian life the propositions which are the 
 final outcome of centuries of Christian living is to 
 invert the apostolic method and to shut up the 
 Kingdom of Heaven to millions. And wherever 
 Christianity is thus identified with assent to prop- 
 ositions, there moral issues are neglected, and the 
 
 ^ The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 565. 
 
126 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 supreme interest will be in orthodoxy rather than in 
 rectitude. 
 
 The other difficulty lies in the prohibitory and un- 
 inspiring character of much traditional goodness. 
 Too often has the Christian attitude toward life 
 been represented as merely one of protest. We have 
 protested against intemperance, against Sabbath- 
 breaking, against popular recreations, against fri- 
 volity; but the strength of Christianity is never 
 in what it prohibits, but in what it affirms and exalts. 
 A prohibitory code may produce men of painstak- 
 ing scrupulosity, but not men of power to summon 
 and command. "The greatest of all the command- 
 ments is, Thou shalt." Goodness is emancipation 
 and positive efficiency. Goodness is not keeping 
 out of things — it is getting into things and trans- 
 forming them. It is strange and pathetic how 
 men think of religion and its prophets as barriers 
 to freedom. They imagine that scepticism is lib- 
 erty and achievement. The minister must come 
 to the modern world, not to check its life at every 
 step, but to offer that life such direction and strength 
 that it shall be brought into allegiance to the high- 
 est and holiest, and shall own Christ as its spiritual 
 Master and Lord. 
 
 If now we realize that the great moral enthusiasm 
 of our time needs direction, and that the minister 
 is of all men in the community in the best position 
 to direct it, we have still to ask : How can he secure 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 12/ 
 
 and retain moral leadership? What are the chief 
 requisites in the moral leader? 
 
 Obviously the minister must preach an ethical 
 gospel. The gospel is vastly more than any system 
 of ethics. It is a revelation of what God is and what 
 God has done. The Christian gospel is not an im- 
 proved edition of the maxims of Confucius, or a 
 revision of the duties outlined by Buddha. Most 
 of the great ethnic faiths are laborious systems of 
 self-improvement — elaborate stairways up which 
 the penitent may painfully cHmb into consciousness 
 of virtue. The Christian gospel starts, not with 
 man, but with God. It shows us a descending 
 stairway down which the divine love has come into 
 our low estate, and back of all its commandments, 
 great and small, lies its perception of the infinite 
 attitude: ''God so loved that he gave." 
 
 But our exposition of that gospel must not fight 
 against the primary moral convictions of humanity, 
 or blot out the deepest distinctions of the moral 
 universe. It is quite possible to hold the most 
 vital truths in such a way as to encourage the evil- 
 doer. Truths are not blunt and dull — they are 
 two-edged swords which may cut both ways. The 
 doctrine of political Hberty always is in danger of 
 encouraging revolution and anarchy. The doctrine 
 of the guidance of the church by the Spirit is in dan- 
 ger of being interpreted as ecclesiastical infallibility. 
 Deep is the meaning of the fugitive saying of Jesus : 
 
128 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 *'He who is near me is near the fire." It is quite 
 possible so to present the Christian gospel as to 
 make it a scheme for blurring moral distinctions and 
 evading the moral law. The "plan of salvation" 
 which dominated Christian thinking for a thousand 
 years, which represented Christ as purchasing human 
 salvation by paying a ransom to Satan, is indeed 
 picturesque and vivid, and was easily grasped by 
 the imagination of the barbarous tribes that were 
 baptized into the Christian faith. But to gain 
 vividness it sacrificed ethical reality. Many ques- 
 tions must have arisen in sensitive natures all through 
 that thousand years. Is Satan the legal owner of 
 humanity, as the theory represents? Can we be- 
 lieve that Christ thus paid homage to Satan's power? 
 Are men thus ransomed independently of their 
 own volition? Is such a sale of humanity, even 
 at the awful price named, consonant with eternal 
 justice? Does the theory make the government 
 of God seem more deeply ethical and the death 
 of Christ more rational, or does it create a thousand 
 new difficulties for Christian faith? If the theory 
 of a ransom to Satan is nowhere held to-day, it is 
 simply because the moral consciousness of the 
 Christian world has sloughed it off as an impedi- 
 ment rather than a genuine interpretation. 
 
 The older and cruder form of Universalism, no 
 longer held to-day, which represented every human 
 being as translated at death into the beatific vision, 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 29 
 
 has dropped out of sight for the same reason. It 
 contradicted our primary convictions as to cause 
 and effect, as to the continuity of character, as to 
 the seriousness of life. 
 
 The besetting sin of the popular preacher is to 
 sacrifice the true to the picturesque and effective. 
 Is it not his duty to impress men in some vivid way 
 so that they will not forget? Surely. Then the ef- 
 fective thing must be the true thing; so argues 
 the popular orator, and so he is lamentably mis- 
 taken. What is immediately and rhetorically ef- 
 fective may be morally defective and in the end 
 pernicious. In dealing with the relation of Christ's 
 death to the forgiveness of human sin, we are surely 
 at one of the central mysteries of history. There 
 is a side of that sacrifice which is like the back side 
 of the moon — it is turned toward the firmament 
 and away from human eyes. But in dealing with 
 the side which does concern us it is easy, in the 
 attempt to make truth vivid, to introduce metaphors 
 and analogies which are confusing to all human 
 standards and dishonoring to God. 
 
 We may well believe that an awful reverence and 
 a profound penitence for sin underlay the following 
 verse when it was sung in Puritan churches: 
 
 "Rich were the drops of Jesus' blood 
 That calmed his frowning face; 
 That sprinkled o'er the burning throne, 
 And turned the wrath to grace." 
 
130 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 But did any one of all the thousands who sang that 
 hymn acquire from it a deeper conception of divine 
 love, or a deeper insight into the meaning of essential 
 righteousness? Would that conception of divine 
 procedure minister to justice in human government, 
 to affection in family life, and to candor in ethical 
 discussion ? 
 
 This is not the place to formulate any theological 
 theory. But this is precisely the place in which 
 to say that any gospel we present must honor God 
 by upholding the eternal distinctions between right 
 and wrong. "Woe unto them that call evil good" 
 — is there not a double woe if this be done in the 
 name of religion? The Christian gospel is not 
 a way of getting into heaven without character, it 
 is not a way of violating law with impunity, it is 
 not a system of legal fictions and evasions. It is 
 not belief in a distant forensic transaction in which 
 we can have no share. It is a way of ''rightening" 
 men by bringing them through faith into union with 
 the Righteous One, whose Hfe and death reveal the 
 inexorableness of law and the vicariousness of love 
 as nowhere else in history. After we have done 
 our best at explanation there is always mystery at 
 the heart of all sacrifice, human or divine. But 
 a minister who is to be an ethical teacher must at 
 least resolve that he will never, in order to be vivid 
 and effective, violate the deepest convictions of our 
 moral nature, or dishonor God in the very attempt 
 to bring him nearer to man. 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 131 
 
 But the minister must also thoroughly compre- 
 hend the Christian ideal of life. We cannot avoid 
 the fact that the Christian ideal is in our time frankly 
 rejected and repudiated by thousands. The open 
 opposition of Nietzsche and his followers is a great 
 aid to a clear understanding of what the Christian 
 life is, for truth is never sharply defined until it is 
 rejected. Nietzsche gives us ^'biological goodness" 
 unmitigated by Christian sympathy. He points 
 out the ruthless struggle of the subhuman world, 
 which has been the secret of progress. In that 
 struggle the fittest to survive is the best, and there 
 is no other meaning in the word best. "Nature is 
 red in tooth and claw," and man must live in har- 
 mony with nature and act out his strongest desires. 
 Hence the ten commandments are simply so many 
 impediments to self-realization. Christianity is the 
 chief foe to achievement and progress. ''Sympathy 
 preserves what is ripe for extinction, it works in 
 favor of life's condemned ones, it gives to life itself 
 a gloomy aspect by the number of ill-constituted 
 it maintains in life. ... It is both a multiplier 
 of misery and a conservator of misery. It is the 
 principal tool for the advancement of decadence." * 
 But the man of strength, the Superman, is the figure 
 that fascinates Nietzsche's disciples. He will never 
 fall into the immorality of weakly surrendering 
 his life for others. He will never indulge the sense 
 
 ^ Der Antichrist, § 7. 
 
132 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 of dependence, the instinct of worship, and the grace 
 (or rather disgrace) of humihty. He will abhor 
 these passive virtues, which, preached by Christian- 
 ity, have for nineteen centuries kept ahve the unfit 
 and prevented the truly fit from realizing their own 
 possibihty. Christian moraUty, Nietzsche avers, is 
 ''the morahty of slaves." "What is the supreme 
 immorality?" he cries. ''It is philanthropy — 
 Christianity." There are few better tonics than 
 such reading. It is so unblushingly and brutally 
 pagan, that every sentence confirms us in our faith 
 in the supreme value and necessity of Christian 
 ethics. 
 
 But the popularity of this philosophy has made 
 it influential in all departments of life. In modern 
 philanthropy it leads to a reaction from the old 
 sentimental and lachrymose charity, and to the prev- 
 alent feeling that benevolence may be keeping alive 
 organisms that should be allowed to perish. The 
 biologist usually has pronounced views on the duty 
 of allowing the unfit to die. In business life this 
 theory looks upon the devouring of small enter- 
 prises by large ones as an inevitable and on the whole 
 beneficent process. The average man is not fitted, 
 says this theory, to secure wealth or to use it. There- 
 fore the few must be the possessors, and the many 
 must serve. 
 
 In literature this philosophy is efflorescent with 
 epigram and paradox. It scoffs at the old ideas of 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 133 
 
 sacrifice and duty, as fetters to genuine manhood. 
 It imagines that evolution, in the sense of brute 
 struggle, is the solution of all problems and the gate 
 of eternal life. The highest morality is self-as- 
 sertion, the supreme law of life is laissez-faire. 
 The coryphaeus of this school, George Bernard 
 Shaw, declares: ''The Golden Rule is that there is 
 no golden rule." 
 
 This philosophy in international relations expounds 
 the view that a few great nations are to divide up 
 the world, and that tropical lands must be held and 
 exploited by those in the temperate zone. It looks 
 with contempt on the half-civilized races, who are 
 by blood and race-character disqualified for free 
 institutions, and views them purely as markets or 
 materials. It has forsaken the standpoint of 
 Emerson's "Boston Hymn," to which all races are 
 avenues of the infinite, and prefers the attitude of 
 Kipling, to whom the Oriental races are 
 
 "the silent, sullen peoples, 
 Half devil and half child." 
 
 Now it is good for the young preacher to be brought 
 face to face with this starding renascence of pagan 
 morals. It is good to have the Christian ideal so 
 sharply challenged that we are driven home to study 
 it. Nietzsche and Ibsen are our helpers, if they 
 give us stronger hold on the essential principles of 
 Christian living. They have already done one thing 
 
134 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 for US. They have made us realize afresh that the 
 Christian ideal is not a matter of observing rules, 
 but of attaining and preserving an attitude. It 
 is not conformity to regulation, but embodiment of 
 principles. We shall never vanquish the "Super- 
 man" by criticising certain things he has done or 
 left undone. His fundamental principle is wrong, 
 and all he does is poisoned by that central blunder. 
 The difference between St. Francis of Assisi and the 
 Superman is not that one gives aid to the weak and 
 the other does not; it is that St. Francis's concep- 
 tion of what weakness and strength are, is totally 
 reversed in the Superman. The heaven of the New 
 Testament is the hell of Nietzsche. 
 
 The Christian is not a man who can keep moral 
 rules better than other men. That conception is mere 
 legalism. Such a life is complacent but wretched. 
 *'A11 these," it cries, "have I kept from my youth 
 up; what lack I yet?" Rules bind the soul to 
 the past; ideals beckon it into the future. Rules 
 are a vis a tergo; ideals are a vis a fronte. A life 
 of obedience to rules is repressed and static — the 
 better the rules, the more effectually the life is re- 
 pressed. A life of the incarnation of ideals is ever 
 expanding and progressive. The Old Testament 
 is full of superseded rules, such as the prohibition 
 of certain foods, the law concerning usury, or fasting, 
 or payment of tithes. The New Testament has also 
 its rules which were purely temporary and local — 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 35 
 
 regarding woman's silence in the church, or regard- 
 ing the method of making the collection for poor 
 saints at Jerusalem. The challenge issued to 
 Christian ethics in our time has given us a clear 
 conception of character and attitude as deeper than 
 all specific regulations and obediences. 
 
 And this Christian character stands out in clearest 
 outline when contrasted with other historic ideals 
 of manhood. Aristotle has drawn for us a pro- 
 foundly interesting picture of his own ideal — the 
 magnanimous, the " great-souled " man. " The mag- 
 nanimous man appears to be he who being really 
 worthy, estimates his own worth highly. . . . 
 Whatever is great in any virtue belongs to the mag- 
 nanimous character. . . . Magnanimity is a kind 
 of ornament of the virtues. . . . Magnanimous 
 men have the appearance of superciHousness. . . . 
 The magnanimous man wishes to be superior. . . . 
 inclined to do but few things, but those great and 
 distinguished ... he is bold in speech and there- 
 fore apt to despise others, and is truth-telling except 
 when he uses dissimulation; but to the vulgar he 
 ought to dissemble. ... He is not apt to admire, 
 for nothing is great to him. ... He is not dis- 
 posed to praise; and therefore he does not find 
 fault even with his enemies, except for the sake of 
 wanton insult. ... He is apt to possess what is 
 honorable and unfruitful, rather than what is fruit- 
 ful and useful: for this shows more self-sufficiency. 
 
136 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 The step of the magnanimous man is slow, his voice 
 deep, and his language stately; for he who only- 
 feels anxiety about few things is not apt to be in 
 a hurry; and he who thinks of nothing is not 
 vehement." ^ 
 
 Such a character, admirable as some of the out- 
 lines may be, self-contained and self-controlled and 
 conscious of strength, is yet so far outgrown to-day 
 that we are curious to know how it could have con- 
 tented the Greeks. This self-conscious personage, 
 serene in his superciliousness, and moving across 
 his local stage with histrionic and stately tread, is 
 he the far-off ancestor of the modern Superman? 
 How impossible to write beneath his portrait : *'Not 
 to be ministered unto but to minister!" The 
 Greek philosopher could not conceive humility 
 as a virtue. To him it was the self-abasement of 
 a mean and servile spirit. The "absence of the 
 sense of the infinite in Greek ethics" largely accounts 
 for this. Where there is no infinite goodness or 
 obligation against which a man must measure him- 
 self, humility becomes a mere belittling of one's self, 
 and so of others. But where the eternal goodness 
 rises before men as an imperative and inspiration, 
 humility, i.e. the perception of the difference be- 
 tween what we are and what we may be, becomes 
 the root of all noble character and a constant witness 
 to the real dignity of man. 
 
 ^ Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. IV, Chap. III. 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 3/ 
 
 Sixteen hundred years later another ideal of human 
 life was set before the world in Thomas a Kempis's 
 "Imitation of Christ." Quotation is superfluous 
 from a book which has passed into the fibre of the 
 Christian world, and which has been the model for 
 a thousand manuals of devotion. The intensity of 
 its allegiance to the unseen, its eager longing for 
 holiness, its passionate self-abnegation, its triumph 
 over the lust of the eye and of the flesh, gave it a place 
 on George Eliot's table for years after she had lost 
 her own faith. Yet does it satisfy us as an inter- 
 pretation of the Christian ideal? Is it a veritable 
 translation of Christ's life into the life of later cen- 
 turies, or is it far removed from the Son of Man who 
 came eating and drinking? Listen to the almost 
 fierce arraignment of Dean Milman: "The Imita- 
 tion of Christ begins in self, terminates in self. 
 The simple sentence, 'He went about doing good,' 
 is wanting in the monastic gospel of this pious 
 zealot. Of feeding the hungry, of clothing the 
 naked, of visiting the prisoner, even of preaching, 
 there is profound, total silence. That which dis- 
 tinguishes Christ, — Christ's religion, — the love of 
 man, is entirely and absolutely left out. Had this 
 been the whole of Christianity, our Lord himself, 
 with reverence be it said, would have lived like an 
 Essene, working out or displaying his own sinless 
 perfection by the Dead Sea, not on the Mount, nor 
 in the Temple, nor even at the Cross." ^ 
 
 ^History of Latin Christianity, Bk. XIV, Chap. 3. 
 
138 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Here again it is good to have an accepted ideal 
 roughly challenged. How shall we evaluate ethi- 
 cally the contemplative life, so exalted by the Roman 
 Catholic Church ? Shall we dethrone it and trample 
 it in the dust, that we may exalt the "strenuous 
 life" in its place ? Is the ideal Christian of a Kempis 
 a model or a monstrosity? An ethical teacher of 
 our generation must be able to answer these ques- 
 tions, and support his answer out of the Christian 
 documents and the history of Christian faith. 
 
 Five centuries after Thomas a Kempis died, 
 another ideal of life was given to the world by 
 Benjamin Franklin. No man has more firmly 
 imprinted himself on American conduct or more 
 deeply touched the springs of American character. 
 And he has done this, not so much by the events 
 in his public career as by his proverbial philosophy 
 and by his autobiography. The great service he 
 rendered to the infant republic does not concern us 
 here; we are now concerned only with his ideal of 
 character and inner achievement. The autobiog- 
 raphy recounts his laborious and detailed plans for 
 self-improvement. It shows us the famous copy- 
 book; the thirteen virtues which he practised, one 
 of them each week, and each one four times in the 
 fifty-two weeks of the year. It shows us a man with 
 no spiritual vision, seriously polishing up his own 
 character that he might be presentable to his own 
 conscience. But it is in the maxims of "Poor 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 39 
 
 Richard" that Frankhn most clearly reached and 
 shaped American character. Those homely gnomic 
 sayings appealed to the shrewd sense of pioneers 
 in a new world as the quintessence of practical 
 wisdom. But are we satisfied with a life modelled 
 after those precepts? A man brought up to find 
 the wisdom of life in such sayings as "A bird in the 
 hand is worth two in the bush" and ''A stitch in 
 time saves nine" — is he our ideal hero? In such 
 prudential virtue, in such shrewd thriftiness, devoid 
 of any shred of altruistic feeling, do we find the 
 solution of our problems and the fulfilment of our 
 better nature? Or is there a whole region of as- 
 piration and vision and motive as far above the 
 autobiography and the maxims of Franklin as the 
 wide and starry sky is above the paved prosaic street ? 
 The ethical leaders of our time must pronounce 
 some judgment on the ideals of Poor Richard, and 
 so on those which lie at the root of American 
 success. 
 
 What, then, is the Christian ideal? It is the 
 characteristic of Christianity that its ideal is not 
 embodied in verbal statements, but in a life. The 
 Christian ideal is Christ.^ To be a Christian is to 
 absorb and share his attitude toward God and 
 
 ^ " It would not be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better 
 translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete 
 than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life." 
 — John Stuart Mill, Essays on Religion, p. 255.* 
 
140 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 man. It is no mere servile and outward imitation 
 of his garb or speech, or even of his sacred baptism 
 and pathetic supper in the upper chamber. It 
 is to regard as real what was real to him, to love 
 what he loved, to hate as he hated, to find in the 
 Father what he found, and to reaffirm his valuation 
 of life. But his central conception is that of the 
 Kingdom of God, a brotherhood of spirits over 
 which God is king because he is Father, a brother- 
 hood whose supreme law is love, and in whose 
 fellowship and service each man develops his own 
 highest personality. The ancient antagonism be- 
 tween self-development and self-sacrifice is solved 
 in this Kingdom, where each individual is both 
 means and end. The opposition, quite as ancient, 
 between morality and religion, vanishes in the 
 presence of the idea that every smallest duty is 
 to be performed "for my sake," that is as an ex- 
 pression of the divine life revealed most clearly 
 in the life of Jesus Christ. 
 
 The point at which the Christian ideal most 
 sharply breaks with that of Aristotle and Plato 
 and Franklin and Nietzsche is in making love, rather 
 than justice, the centre of the moral life. Plato's 
 Republic is avowedly a search for political justice. 
 Nietzsche's protest against human pity is founded 
 on the injustice of subjecting the strong to the 
 necessities of the weak. The demand of the socialist 
 in every age is for the establishment of justice in 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP I41 
 
 institutions and laws and in the entire social order. 
 "Not charity, but justice" is the bitter cry that 
 has become familiar. But those who would pass 
 over human sympathy and affection in order to 
 establish abstract and impersonal justice know not 
 what they ask. A society which is merely just, and 
 nothing more, would be such a society as we find 
 among the wooden pieces in a game of chess — 
 mere juxtaposition without kinship or fellowship. Is 
 not each piece on the chessboard free from oppression 
 by any other piece ? Is not the smallest pawn pro- 
 tected in its movements by the ancient laws of the 
 game? Are not chance and favoritism well-nigh 
 excluded? Is not each game a logical process in 
 which full justice is done to the supposed abilities 
 of every piece ? Yes, — and the result is a de- 
 humanized association of wooden blocks, and a 
 procedure in which all human feeling is irrelevant 
 and impertinent. ''In the course of justice no one 
 of us should see salvation," or satisfaction, or growth, 
 or gladness. 
 
 But in exalting love — which ceases to be love if 
 it becomes unjust — Christ penetrates the central 
 need of man and of society. He exalts no mere 
 maudlin sentiment, no weak acquiescence in popular 
 demands. Love in his eyes is not childishness, nor 
 is it senility. It is as pure and searching as a flam- 
 ing fire. There are no demands in the universe 
 so stringent as those made by love. The love of a 
 
142 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 mother for her loyal son is more feared by him than 
 are all the policemen of a city. The love of the wife 
 for her husband lays upon him requirements far 
 beyond any statute-book. The love of a soldier 
 for his country evokes from him heroic deeds such 
 as no court or legislature would dare demand. 
 Love is always just; but it is justice aflame with 
 human tenderness, and eager to give itself to hu- 
 manity that thus it may find itself reborn in nobler 
 life. Justice gives to others according to their 
 rightful claim; love gives according to its utmost 
 power to bestow. 
 
 When the minister begins to apply this ideal to 
 the movements and institutions of our age, he be- 
 comes the ethical teacher we need. He at once 
 exalts service as the keynote of daily living. He 
 views every owner of property as a trustee, every 
 employer as the counsellor and helper of labor, 
 every office-holder as the servant of the people, 
 every man of strength as the divinely ordained 
 protector of the poor and the weak. He puts to 
 every business man the old question which once cast 
 a lurid glare into the mind of Judas, ''Friend, 
 wherefore art thou come?" He brings modern 
 industry to the bar of the Christian ideal of social 
 service. What does a man enter business for? 
 Is it to make money? No soldier would for a mo- 
 ment acknowledge that as the object of his service 
 in the army. If we can prove him guilty of that 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP 1 43 
 
 aim, we strip off his uniform and dismiss him from 
 the ranks. No physician would for a moment 
 acknowledge the financial aim as supreme. If 
 we suspected him of working mainly for that end, 
 we should exclude him from our homes. No 
 clergyman or missionary would calmly confess to 
 such an aim. If we discerned in him such an 
 ambition, we should pay no heed to his message. 
 Why is it that the modern world tolerates in the 
 business man an object in life which it pronounces 
 inconceivable in the case of the true soldier, or 
 physician, or missionary? Simply because modern 
 business is not yet ethicized. It is still on the plane 
 of Poor Richard. It is below the level of service 
 rendered by the commonest soldier, who when he 
 dons the uniform of his country resolves to scoff at 
 gain, and live for honor, loyalty, and the common- 
 wealth. The object of the baker should be to feed 
 the hungry; of the clothier, to clothe the naked; 
 of all men in industrial pursuits, to render to the 
 community some valuable public service. We al- 
 ready realize this aim in the caUing of the college 
 professor, of the trained nurse, of the members of 
 a fire department. Why should the fireman who 
 rescues our goods from a burning store be expected 
 to live — or die — from a higher motive than the 
 man who sells the goods behind the counter ? Why 
 are heroism and self-sacrifice and public spirit so 
 rarely seen as to be never expected in commercial 
 
144 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 transactions? What we need is not a new index 
 of forbidden things in business life, but a new 
 spirit shot through the whole of it — the spirit of 
 the soldier, the fireman, the apostle. At the bar 
 of the Christian ideal all business based purely on 
 the love of gain is an anti-social enterprise, differing 
 legally, but not morally, from the work of the bandit 
 and the pirate. Whoever is not for the common- 
 wealth is against it. 
 
 The Presbyterian church of our time has taken 
 a notable step forward in organizing a department 
 of labor. For the church to ignore utterly the 
 organization of labor is to be ignorant of one of 
 the most significant developments of the age, and 
 one charged with moral meaning. Why have these 
 hundreds of thousands of men come together? 
 Is it in the spirit of class warfare, to extort higher 
 wages for men in the union, and to drive out of 
 employment and out of the city every man who will 
 not be coerced into joining the union? Is the old 
 ecclesiastical persecution of heretics by means of 
 the thumb-screw and the rack now replaced by the 
 industrial persecution which prefers the boycott 
 and the bomb? Or are these unions doing the 
 fraternal work which the church itself under other 
 conditions might do, and laboring unselfishly for the 
 uplifting of all wage-earners in the modern world ? 
 
 I have stood on Boston Common on Sunday 
 afternoon and heard the socialist orators stir their 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP I45 
 
 hearers to a white heat by their picture of a social 
 order in which poverty, injustice, and exploitation 
 shall be unknown. I have seen far greater ethical 
 enthusiasm in those little groups of unkempt and 
 uncouth hearers than in the decorous and reverent 
 congregations that assembled at the same hour in 
 the costly houses of worship just across the street. 
 What is the ethical worth of this socialistic sen- 
 timent now spreading through Christendom? Is 
 it simply the desire of the House of Want to divide 
 up the goods of the House of Have? Or is it the 
 far-off echo of the primitive Christian enthusiasm, 
 and the time when no man said that aught which he 
 possessed was his own? The ethical teacher must 
 have conviction here, or he is a belated and be- 
 fogged instructor. 
 
 So it is with the whole realm of civic duty, to which 
 Christian teachers are now awaking after long 
 silence. That silence was never preserved in the 
 heroic ages of the church. Silence on public issues 
 was never observed by English Puritanism, nor by 
 the early colonial preachers in America. But some- 
 how in the nineteenth century a strange paralysis 
 crept over our pulpits in the presence of public or 
 national issues. All questions involving the welfare 
 of the people as a whole were labelled "pohtics," 
 and the minister consented not to touch them, save 
 possibly on Thanksgiving Day. A silence not de- 
 manded by the churches was observed by the min- 
 
146 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 isters in the supposed interest of a spiritual mes- 
 sage. Yet Paul, in those ethical discussions which 
 occupy the last part of every letter he ever wrote, 
 frankly and fearlessly discussed the burning problems 
 of his time. He plunged into the moral aspects of 
 marriage, of putting away a heathen wife, of the 
 Christian attitude toward payment of taxes, toward 
 magistrates, toward the emperor, of the Christian 
 attitude toward labor in view of the approaching end 
 of the stage. Matters of woman's dress, of the place 
 of widows in the social order, of the relief of the 
 poor, of the relation of the individual to the state, 
 are freely discussed by the apostle as one who had 
 the mind of Christ. 
 
 We are coming to realize that an unworthy citizen 
 cannot be a good Christian. When a Nero is on the 
 throne, Christian cooperation with the powers that 
 be is indeed difficult. But living as we do, in a 
 Christian nation, whose chief magistrates have 
 almost without exception confessed the Christian 
 faith, we must make for civic duty a large place in 
 the Christian life. Long enough has the inactivity 
 of the best meant the opportunity of the worst men. 
 Long enough have Christian men without protest 
 submitted to the irresponsible political dictator, 
 who degrades men to the level of his purposes, but 
 will not lift them to the level of his opportunities. 
 No minister need attack any political candidate of 
 any party. Every minister must attack steadily 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP I47 
 
 and persistently every form of graft and chicanery, 
 and steadily and persistently exalt the idea of public 
 office as a public trust. The fine and delicate sense of 
 honor which pervaded the ages of Christian chivalry 
 must come back to us and replace the "law-honesty," 
 whose only motive is fear of the penal code. Our 
 good men must be good for something. Our saints 
 are not to be statues awaiting translation to some 
 divine art gallery, but soldiers of the common good. 
 The separation of church and state, which we all 
 believe in, necessitates the closest possible union of 
 citizenship with religious principles. In the ancient 
 world every great civic duty was conceived as an 
 act of worship. The election of magistrates, the 
 promulgation of new laws, the sailing of the fleet, 
 the return of the conquering general — all these 
 events were attended with prayer to the unseen 
 powers. Every Athenian youth when he came to 
 the threshold of manhood stood in the presence of 
 the chief officers of the city and took the famous 
 "oathof theEphebi": 
 
 '*I will not dishonor my sacred arms. I will not desert my 
 fellow-soldier, by whose side I may be set. I will leave my 
 country greater and not less than when she is committed to 
 me. I will reverently obey the laws which have been es- 
 tablished and in time to come shall be established by the judges. 
 I will not forsake the temples where my fathers worshipped. 
 Of these things the gods are my witnesses." 
 
 Do we call that Paganism? Whatever its name, 
 it is precisely the spirit we need to inculcate from 
 
148 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 every Christian pulpit to-day, — the indissoluble 
 blending of patriotic devotion and religious faith. 
 But religion cannot stop with devotion to the 
 fatherland; its expansive power drives it beyond 
 political boundaries and compels it to work for the 
 federation of the world. The Christian teacher 
 cannot ignore the question of the mutual relation of 
 civilized states. He may not be an expert in inter- 
 national law, but he must have deep-seated convic- 
 tions regarding international ethics. All around us 
 are voices proclaiming that Christian principles do 
 not apply to the relations of sovereign states. It has 
 even been affirmed that no moral obligation rests 
 upon the state save that of justice. Truth, honor, 
 fidelity, generosity, sacrifice, are, we are told, purely 
 individual virtues which no state can be expected 
 to exempUfy when they stand in the way of its ag- 
 grandizement. "None of the ties which bind man 
 to man," says Professor Ruemelin, ''can join state to 
 state. Although ideal aims and purposes should 
 certainly be considered and cherished by different 
 nations, in reality the latter confront one another 
 as in a state of nature, i.e. as strangers, compelled 
 to be wary and distrustful, like wanderers meeting in 
 a desert." ^ The conception of wanderers, or rather 
 
 ^ The extent to which this Neo-Machiavellianisra is willing to 
 go may be seen from further quotation: "A neighboring state 
 may be afflicted and in great distress, caused by natural dis- 
 turbances, by hostile invasion, or by internal dissensions. The 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP I49 
 
 savages meeting in a desert, is hardly the ideal 
 which lies at the basis of the Hague Tribunal. It 
 is, I do not hesitate to say, a conception which no 
 teacher of ethics can for a moment admit as valid 
 or even human. To say that moral laws apply to 
 individuals, but not to states, is hke saying that the 
 law of gravitation holds with regard to falling stones 
 and trees, but not with regard to Arcturus and Orion. 
 If there be any man or nation so great as to be 
 beyond the reach of the law of love, then that law 
 is itself defective and unworthy of our highest 
 allegiance. But if that law be indeed a universal 
 obligation, then it will show its sweep and scope 
 most superbly when a nation becomes, in Milton's 
 phrase, "one huge Christian personage, one mighty 
 growth or stature of an honest man." From such 
 a standpoint England aiding struggling Greece, and 
 the United States springing to the relief of Cuba, 
 are simply examples "writ large" of the principles 
 which moved Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen, or Robert 
 Gould Shaw at the head of his colored regiment. 
 
 decision of the question whether our own state shall ofifer assist- 
 ance depends, not upon the extent of the neighbor's need, but 
 solely upon the inquiry whether the rendering of such assistance 
 would or would not be compatible with our own best interests. 
 There may be circumstances causing us to rejoice over the weaken- 
 ing of a neighboring state and impelling us to derive a selfish 
 advantage therefrom, nay, even to strike an aggressive blow. . . . 
 We have of necessity released the state from all obligations sanc- 
 tioned by love." — PROFESSOR GUSTAV RuEMELiN, PoUHcs and 
 the Moral Law, p. 34. 
 
150 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Here, then, is the fascinating field that opens out 
 before the modern preacher. He cannot if he would, 
 he would not if he could, ignore the great moral issues 
 which are fiercely debated by his generation, and 
 which from time to time cause social upheaval and 
 re-arrangement of social strata. The minister must 
 proceed with sanity and calmness, and only after 
 adequate study. He is not ordinarily to deal with 
 individual men and measures, as is the candidate 
 for public office. But he is to feed and nourish the 
 moral sense of the community out of the great store- 
 houses of the past. He is to challenge sharply 
 all theories and policies which antagonize the laws 
 of human justice and love. He is to interpret the 
 GaHlean teaching into terms of present life. He is 
 to explain what in the gospel narrative is transient 
 custom or local rule, and what is eternal law. He 
 is to point out impartially and fearlessly the ethical 
 dangers which inhere in all groupings of labor or 
 capital, and in all new movements, social or civic, 
 fraternal or religious. He is to summon his fellow- 
 men to that aggressive fighting for the right which is 
 ''the greatest sport in the world." He is to assume 
 by virtue of conviction and position the place of 
 natural guardian of the weak, the defenceless, the 
 forgotten, the widow, and the orphan. He is to 
 champion human rights, and in the same breath to 
 insist on human duties. He is to make all men see 
 that the Kingdom he represents is no insubstantial 
 
THE DEMAND FOR ETHICAL LEADERSHIP I5I 
 
 pageant faded, but is the deepest and divinest of 
 realities, and that every man in the community may 
 find in the service of that Kingdom a task big enough 
 and arduous enough to employ forever his highest 
 powers. 
 
 A man with this conception of his calling can never 
 become a mere functionary of ecclesiastical routine. 
 He has a task that is inexhaustible and magnificent. 
 He is prophet of God's great to-morrow and educa- 
 tor of the conscience of humanity. 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 "Every child must live out completely every complete 
 stage of childhood, or he can never develop into complete 
 maturity." — Froebel. 
 
 " At first the effect of psychology is to encourage the notion 
 that everything is mechanical and that no place is left for 
 personal force and will. The very regularity of nature revives 
 belief in fate. Further insight, however, shows that we do not 
 have to choose between persons and law, but that personality 
 itself is the most perfect example of law." 
 
 — George M. Stratton. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 
 The charter of Brown University, granted by the 
 colonial legislature in 1764, includes a remarkable 
 statement regarding the character of the instruction 
 to be given in the infant college: "The public teach- 
 ing shall in general respect the sciences." Such a 
 declaration, made before the American revolution, in 
 an institution intended at first largely for the train- 
 ing of ministers, anticipates with almost prophetic 
 insight the attitude of the twentieth century. But 
 we respect the sciences, not when we pick out isolated 
 facts in chemistry or botany as illustrations of truths 
 in another realm, but when we utilize the methods 
 and results of science in the solution of our life- 
 problems. And of all the sciences there is none that 
 comes closer to the minister's task than that of psy- 
 chology. He may be innocent of physics or geology 
 without serious detriment. But the sciences that 
 deal with man — biology, anthropology, sociology, 
 psychology — are either the baseless fabric of a 
 vision, or they are vital to the minister's under- 
 standing of his task. The application of psychology 
 to education has illuminated and sometimes trans- 
 155 
 
156 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 formed the art of teaching. What service can it 
 render to the task of the preacher ? 
 
 At the outset, let us beware of extravagant claims. 
 Psychology is itself in process of transformation, 
 and like any half-grown and ambitious youth is not 
 yet fitted to serve as arbitrator in all discussion. 
 Experimental psychology has been sometimes pushed 
 to extremes. The questionaires that have flooded 
 the land have made life a burden. Child-study 
 has sometimes superseded child-love and guidance. 
 Pedantry has laboriously devoted itself to proving 
 by statistics that children delight in dolls and prefer 
 the games which every mother has taught her child 
 since the days of the cave-men. 
 
 We must also be careful not to lose the minister 
 in the psychologist. The detached scientific atti- 
 tude of the experimenter, who necessarily views all 
 experience, even the most vital and sacred, as mere 
 material for research, is antipodal to the attitude of 
 the true pastor. Vivisection has its uses, but is 
 especially perilous when the experiments are in the 
 realm of soul. All sensible men would flee from the 
 minister who regards our whispered confidences as 
 so much material for his latest questionaire, and 
 labels our penitence and aspiration as specimens in 
 his religious museum. 
 
 Moreover, it must be said that the successful 
 preachers and leaders of men have always been 
 psychologists, whether consciously or not. The 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 5/ 
 
 essence of psychology is insight into the workings of 
 other men's minds — and such insight has marked 
 all great orators, teachers, and organizers. The old 
 phrenology was a crude attempt to systematize and 
 explain our instinctive judgments regarding our 
 fellow-men. The orator who begins by reminding 
 a hostile or suspicious audience of some conviction 
 that he and they hold in common, may never have 
 heard of "apperception," but he has the essence 
 of the doctrine. The speaker who rests his audience 
 at regular intervals, by pause or change of subject, 
 or the insertion of something in lighter vein, may 
 never have studied ''voluntary attention," but he has 
 learned by experience what such attention is and 
 how to hold it. The sermons of Charles Haddon 
 Spurgeon were marvellously persuasive, not because 
 of scholarship or novelty or weight of thought, but 
 because of their extraordinary psychological insight, 
 their intuitive apprehension of how the average 
 man thinks, hopes, fears, and battles with himself. 
 Dwight L. Moody may never have heard of the "psy- 
 chology of the crowd," but he had learned it beyond 
 all the teaching of our laboratories, and the subtle 
 sway of emotional reaction over vast assemblies was to 
 him a matter of daily experience. Many an efficient 
 preacher is like Moliere's hero, who was amazed to 
 find that he had always talked prose without knowing 
 it. We want the thing itself, not the label. We 
 want a working knowledge of men, whether the 
 
158 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 knowledge comes from laboratory or library or farm 
 or factory, and whether we call such knowledge 
 psychology or common sense. 
 
 With these caveats, we may say frankly that no 
 man who proposes to change the mental attitude and 
 character of his fellow-men can afford to neglect 
 the flood of light shed on his problems by modern 
 psychology. The public school-teachers of this 
 country have found their task transfigured by this 
 new light, and all their conventions and periodicals 
 are aglow with the fervor of new discovery. Here 
 and there a theological seminary has been pene- 
 trated by the study of applied psychology, but on 
 the whole our ministerial education is not yet utiliz- 
 ing the new knowledge to any appreciable degree. 
 What help has this modern science for the modern 
 preacher? 
 
 I. It has demonstrated beyond question or cavil 
 the reality of religious experience. Twenty-five 
 years ago it was the custom of many men versed in 
 philosophy and science to look down with pity on 
 the experience of religion, as either pure hallucination 
 and mythology, or as due to neurotic conditions which 
 returning health would dissipate completely. Such 
 interpretation of religious phenomena governed the 
 old rationalistic exegesis of Scripture. Many a 
 German theologian dealt with certain phenomena 
 recorded in the book of Acts as if such occurrences 
 must have been sheer illusion, when similar phe- 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 59 
 
 nomena are familiar to-day to every man who has ever 
 attended a camp-meeting or has studied the life of 
 Charles G. Finney. Professor James, in his "Varie- 
 ties of Religious Experiences," is only the leader of 
 many writers who have vindicated forever the reality 
 and normality of that inner upheaval and readjust- 
 ment to the unseen which the church has called con- 
 version. Such writers in affirming that the highest 
 character is "twice-born" are returning almost to 
 the exact metaphor of the gospel of St. John. By 
 long and patient study of experiences once classified 
 by medicine as abnormal and neurotic, they have 
 shown us that underneath all the strange mani- 
 festations which have baffled our predecessors lie 
 the eternal needs and the imperious demands of our 
 human nature. 
 
 These students have become "assertors of the 
 soul" in a new and deep sense of the words. They 
 are affirming that what the church calls "conviction 
 of sin," "hunger and thirst after righteousness," 
 "change of heart," is no pathological condition, 
 much less an illusion, but is a crisis in the growth 
 of the normal human being, as reasonable and nec- 
 essary as the bursting of a bud into flower or the 
 swift flushing of the sky at dawn. Of course a dis- 
 ciple of naturalism may go farther, and affirm that 
 having ascertained the presence of law in religious 
 experience we no longer have reason to see in it any 
 divine working. But such an inference is unwar- 
 
l60 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 ranted. Precisely the opposite conclusion should 
 be drawn. When we have ascertained the process, 
 we have not touched upon its cause. To show the 
 how of things is not to give even a glimpse of the 
 why. To explain the ticking of a watch is not to 
 wind it up. A man who sees no God anywhere will 
 of course not find him in the experience of religion. 
 He will find only "psychoses" and "neuroses" and 
 illustrations of his favorite thesis that human life 
 is nothing very wonderful after all. But one who 
 finds God, as we do, in every sparrow that falls, will 
 find him still more clearly in every man that rises. 
 We see the divine in the normal unfolding of the 
 world and in those great crises of the soul which 
 are essential to its normal development. Psychology 
 has fortified evangelism in the last ten years, and 
 given it a permanent place in any possible advance 
 of the church. It has affirmed in clearest voice that 
 the horror of sin, the thirsting of the soul for God, 
 the battle with the "flesh," the "peace that passeth 
 understanding," are not figments of the imagination, 
 are not psychopathic phenomena, but are experiences 
 always found where religion becomes a vital power 
 in humanity, and that the soul that has never passed 
 through some crucial decisions in the spiritual realm 
 is in a condition of arrested development. Grotesque 
 as many forms of its expression may be, the reality 
 and reasonableness of a supreme religious choice is 
 to-day a part of the creed of the thinking world. 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY l6l 
 
 2. Psychology has with equal clearness shown us 
 the unreality of many conventional sins and tradi- 
 tional virtues. Often have we blamed children for 
 restlessness and disorder in school or church, little 
 realizing that such proofs of inner activity were the 
 most encouraging signs that can come to any teacher. 
 Many men now living can remember being taught at 
 the age of six or eight years to sing : 
 
 " There is rest for the weary, 
 On the other side of Jordan, 
 There is rest for you." 
 
 But the last thing in the world that normal children 
 want is rest. They want to run and shout and play 
 and toil — the one aspiration which they could 
 not possibly cherish was inculcated as the mark of 
 youthful piety. The passive and inert goodness of 
 the old-fashioned Sunday-school book, the putty- 
 like receptivity of the boy who did no wrong merely 
 because he had not courage or energy enough to do 
 it, — all that has become to our best teachers un- 
 desirable and inhuman. In every Mohammedan 
 school the children study aloud, and the buzz of sub- 
 dued voices fills the air. Is not that quite as rational 
 an idea of discipline as that which once made the 
 school a place of folded arms, and whispering almost 
 a crime ? 
 
 Frequently children have been punished for false- 
 hood, when they have simply yielded to a naturally 
 strong imagination, with no thought of deceiving 
 
l62 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 any one. The child that has never seen more than the 
 bare facts in an adventure, more than science can 
 find in the forest, or more than the written record in a 
 Biblical story, is a being of poor vitality and deficient 
 imagination. If instead of forbidding the imagina- 
 tion to work we can feed it with nourishing mate- 
 rial, then we shall have in later life young men 
 who can see visions and old men who can dream 
 dreams. 
 
 Many of us can recall the conventional virtues 
 that were inculcated in many an isolated community 
 in early New England history. The Christian life 
 was identified with abstention from certain amuse- 
 ments or occupations and with routine performance 
 of certain acts. Handed down from generation 
 to generation, a stereotyped formula of Christian 
 virtue came to have binding authority. To attend 
 church, to read the Bible in course from beginning 
 to end, to observe Sunday by refraining from all 
 pleasure, to support the "means of grace" — these 
 duties were so easily expounded and any infraction 
 so easily detected, that they were exalted into 
 supreme tests of character. A man might keep 
 slaves, or adulterate his sugar, or bear false witness 
 against his neighbor, without a tithe of the obloquy 
 which he must face for failure to observe the tradi- 
 tional routine. A man might be hard at a bargain 
 without trouble ; but if he indulged in " amusements '' 
 or found enjoyment in the woods on Sunday, he was 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 63 
 
 branded as a religious outcast. Our own moral 
 standards are too defective for us to reflect severely 
 on our fathers. But at least we may say this: we 
 have gotten into more vital contact with moral reality. 
 Any observance which genuinely expresses human 
 need, or supplies it, is forever a duty; and any ab- 
 stention which is merely a thoughtless repetition of the 
 abstentions of the past is but a shadowy and unreal 
 virtue which the soul can safely neglect. 
 
 3. Another gain from the newer psychology is a 
 knowledge of the mutual inter-relation and inter- 
 dependence of mind and body. To the older 
 *' mental philosophy" the mind was a sovereign, 
 imprisoned briefly in a ''frail tenement of clay." 
 Hence the task of the preacher was simply by logi- 
 cal demonstration of truth to convince the mind and 
 enable it to triumph over the body. But to the mod- 
 ern minister, body and soul constitute the single 
 personality, and Browning scarcely exaggerates 
 when he cries : 
 
 "Nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul." 
 
 Insight into this fact shapes the minister's entire 
 attitude toward individuals who need counsel and 
 direction. The spectres of the mind may be due 
 to microbes in the blood. Cowardice and recre- 
 ancy, doubt and fear, often have their origin in a 
 sluggish circulation. Slight surgical operations may 
 have far-reaching effects on moral character. The 
 
l64 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 removal, for example, of adenoids from a fretful 
 child has frequently removed the cause of constant 
 irritation and depression, and so effected a vital 
 change in character and disposition. Pessimism 
 has physical roots, and Carlyle's "three million men 
 in London — mostly fools," was the utterance not 
 only of the brain but of the liver. To save souls is 
 our duty only if v^e use the word in the fine old English 
 sense — the sense of the Old Testament. When we 
 read that "all the souls which came with Joseph into 
 Egypt . . . were threescore and six," we are sure 
 that what went down into Egypt was not a company 
 of invisible essences, not a group of shadows or 
 monads, but a company of living, breathing per- 
 sonalities, with minds and bodies and raiment and 
 food and cattle. Souls in that sense — beings in 
 spiritual, mental, physical, social relations — we are 
 to save. 
 
 But conversely, the dependence of the body on the 
 mind is vastly greater than either theology or medi- 
 cine has ever been willing to admit. The immense 
 vogue of certain religious varieties of mental healing 
 to-day is due to the reluctance of religion and medicine 
 to acknowledge the facts of psychology. It is the 
 palpable, but hitherto ignored or derided, facts of 
 human experience that give Christian Science all 
 its power, and make it one of the vital religious 
 movements of our generation. When thousands of 
 persons all around us are indisputably cured of 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 165 
 
 certain ills by mental means only, it is in vain to 
 object because the cures are not wrought by gradu- 
 ates of our medical or divinity schools. Granted that 
 the philosophy which underlies the movement is but 
 shreds and patches, that all true science is want- 
 ing, that all rules of syntax are broken, that many 
 cures are temporary or illusive — it still remains true 
 that thousands are healed. The extent to which 
 our varied physical ills are the direct result of varied 
 fears, we are only beginning to realize. The mental 
 bondage induced by anxiety over to-morrow and 
 regret over yesterday is inevitably and constantly 
 reflected in bodily conditions. The suggestion of 
 fatigue almost universally induces fatigue. The con- 
 dition of mental uncertainty, harassment, despair, 
 invariably affects the entire circulation, and so the 
 condition of all the nerves and the functioning of 
 every organ. On the other hand, the release from 
 physical congestions, inhibitions, and even morbid 
 growths, that may be brought about by setting free 
 the mind from "the perilous stuff that preys upon 
 it," is far greater than either science or faith has yet 
 recognized. Most of us are only half living our lives, 
 little suspecting the powers that sleep within us. We 
 seem to imagine that the only means of physical 
 recuperation is through the drugs which our best 
 physicians now use as little as possible. We are 
 amazed when under the inspiration of religious faith 
 some martyr no longer feels the firC;, or St. Paul 
 
1 66 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 shakes off the viper and feels no harm, or some 
 modern Christian undergoes a bodily regeneration 
 which appears miraculous. These are the common- 
 places of religious biography, and a religion that has 
 no place for them, and no expectation of them, is 
 narrow and inhuman. 
 
 Sensitiveness to pain has in modern life often 
 replaced the Puritan terror over sin. The fear of 
 future woe which oppressed Bunyan, after his per- 
 fectly innocent indulgence in games on the village 
 green, finds its present analogue in the fear of poisoned 
 blood and palsied limbs and mental break-down 
 which now shadows and desolates millions of human 
 lives. The baseless fear in the one case was removed 
 by the vision of the great love of God manifest in 
 the sacrificial life and death of Christ. The base- 
 less fears of present-day victims may be removed by 
 the vision of the immanent Spirit, closer to us than 
 our doubts and fears, source of order and harmony 
 and peace, filling body and soul with health and 
 gladness. A faith which cannot work these physical 
 and psychical changes, but leaves its devotees to a 
 formal profession of beliefs, and to a daily life anx- 
 ious, obstructed, joyless, and defeated, is not the 
 faith that overran the Roman empire in three cen- 
 turies. The religion of Christ gave and forever will 
 give to its adherents some control over all condi- 
 tions of mind or body that threaten their highest 
 happiness and efficiency. How far that control 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 167 
 
 may go, no wise man cares to say in advance of 
 experience. 
 
 How far the church should formally enter the realm 
 of mental therapeutics, and attempt to employ the 
 methods of suggestion and hypnosis, is a question 
 still sub judice. If it be demonstrated that mental 
 dissociation and moral impotence can be reached by 
 purely psychic forces — at least we may say that 
 the church must "by all means save some." In a 
 realm where deception is so easy, and assumption so 
 rife, and scientific knowledge as yet so small, we 
 must proceed with peculiar caution. It is best at 
 present that a few ministers or physicians and a 
 few churches should make adequate experiment, 
 and that all of us should preserve the open mind. 
 The genuine faith-healing is that which uses all 
 possible means, physical, medical, mental, and moral, 
 rejecting nothing that God has placed within reach, 
 and trusting in nothing except as it becomes the 
 vehicle of the divine and all-pervading life. But 
 few candid students can doubt that we are on the 
 verge of great enlargement in our understanding 
 of the powers of men. Delusion is easy; but the 
 greatest of all delusions is to suppose that we have 
 already explored and dissected and labelled all the 
 conscious and subconscious contents of the human 
 spirit. We have explored just far enough to learn 
 that much that we have called incredible is occurring 
 daily all about us. To the psychologist many of 
 
1 68 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the cures ordinarily called marvellous are not only 
 credible, but are to be sought for and expected. 
 The intimate blending of mental and physical in 
 one unitary personality, the constant dependence of 
 character on its physical basis, the utter transforma- 
 tion of the body through a change in mental states 
 — these are facts taught in every psychological class- 
 room, facts which should lie at the basis of a minis- 
 ter's entire career. 
 
 Such facts explain the "stigmata" of Francis of 
 Assisi; they furnish the clew to the physical phe- 
 nomena which often have accompanied genuine 
 revivals of religion; they may even throw light on 
 the methods of our Lord, as when he put clay on 
 the eyes of the blind man or touched the tongue of 
 the dumb. If it be true that bodily activity always 
 accompanies mental movement, as when the cir- 
 culation is quickened by anger or by joy; if it be 
 true that the bodily state conditions the soul and 
 shapes the character ; then these facts will determine 
 the preacher's whole attitude toward the physician, 
 the social settlement, the public park, the play- 
 ground, the fresh-air fund, and the hospital. No 
 man can intelligently repeat, "I believe in the res- 
 urrection of the body" unless he believes in the 
 preservation and development of the body as a 
 primary religious duty. No man can accept the 
 narratives of Christ's miracles of healing without 
 making the physical upbuilding of his congrega- 
 tion a part of his own pastoral function. 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 169 
 
 4. Such a conviction of the unity of personality 
 will necessarily shape a preacher's method in arous- 
 ing and holding the attention of his congregation. 
 Any man can secure attention for a few Sundays — 
 but can he hold it for twenty years? Any man can 
 secure absorbing interest by sensationalism in speech 
 or garb or action; but the penalty of using strong 
 spices is that the quantity of spice must be con- 
 stantly increased to stir the jaded palate. Mere 
 exhortation soon becomes wearisome to him that 
 gives and him that takes. Physical fervor will 
 not long serve as substitute for ideas. Pulmonary 
 eloquence soon exhausts itself and its audience. 
 A hortatory pulpit is futile except as based on con- 
 stant instruction. It is for this reason that the 
 old-fashioned "application" and "appeal" at the 
 end of the sermon have now largely vanished. 
 The application should come all the way through. 
 The strongest possible appeal is a vivid' perception 
 and presentation of the truth. Make men see, and 
 you have made ih^vn feel. "I did see all heaven 
 opened before me," said Handel, as he told of his 
 writing the Hallelujah Chorus, " and heard the angels 
 harping with their harps." "The lion hath roared," 
 cried Amos after his vision; "who shall not proph- 
 esy?" But how shall a man retain and impart 
 this vivid perception as the long, weary years pass 
 over his head? Will he not at last become tired 
 of his message, his congregation, and himself? 
 
I/O EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 The secret of ever renewed attention is expounded 
 by Professor James in his "Talks to Teachers": 
 " The subject must be made to show new aspects of 
 itself; to prompt new questions ; in a word, to change. 
 From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably 
 wanders away. . . . You can test this. . . . Try 
 to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on 
 the wall." No man can do that for any length of 
 time. "But if you ask yourself successive questions 
 about the dot, how big it is, how far, of what shape, 
 what shade of color, etc. ; in other words, if you turn 
 it over, if you think of it in various ways, along with 
 various kinds of associates, you can keep your mind 
 on it for a comparatively long time. That is what 
 the genius does in whose hands a given topic co- 
 ruscates and grows. That is what the teacher must 
 do for every topic, if he wishes to avoid too frequent 
 appeals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort." ^ 
 This explains our present revolt against the exag- 
 gerated sermon analysis of former days. The very 
 mention of "fourthly" and "fifthly" to-day pro- 
 vokes a smile or a protest. We do not care for 
 sermons built up as a carpenter builds a row of 
 houses, all of the same reiterated design. We 
 demand novelty — novelty not by the addition of 
 ornaments and anecdotes, but rather by new as- 
 pects of the subject which shall relate it to new parts 
 of our own experience. We feel a repugnance to 
 
 ^ Talks to Teachers, p. 103. 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY I /I 
 
 fourthly and fifthly, not (let us hope) because we 
 dislike coherent thinking, but because the mere 
 announcement of laborious subdivisions is a dec- 
 laration that the preacher is primarily interested, 
 not in the lives before him, but in the logical analysis 
 of doctrine. He seems to us to regard his congre- 
 gation as spectators of a process of reasoning lead- 
 ing to a triumphant Q.E.D., instead of regarding the 
 truth as a means of helping the congregation. He 
 thinks more of logical victory than of spiritual in- 
 spiration. 
 
 For this reason, the former doctrinal sermon, in 
 which logical coherence and demonstration were in 
 the forefront, has now given way to a more human 
 and direct approach in which the speaker closely 
 grapples with his congregation, according to O'Con- 
 nell's saying, ''A great speech is a great thing; 
 but after all the verdict is the thing." And this is 
 a return to the earliest methods of the Christian 
 church. The logical method was never employed 
 by the Semitic mind. We are often puzzled because 
 the sayings of our Lord are gnomic, epigrammatic, 
 pictorial, startling us like a flashlight in a dark 
 room, when our Western intellect expects proposi- 
 tions, major and minor premise, and irrefutable 
 conclusion. We are troubled and baffled because 
 Christ seems interested in people rather than dis- 
 courses, and persists in lighting up the recesses of 
 human hearts instead of helping us in the formation 
 
1/2 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 of our creeds and theologies. But he was wiser 
 than we are. We cannot, indeed, surrender our 
 attempt to coordinate truth and make it intelligible 
 in forms of thought. While the world stands we 
 shall need to rationalize our faith and put it in 
 philosophic form, hut not in the pulpit. There we 
 are to put it in forms of life, appealing to human 
 hunger, aspiration, conviction, hope, fear, affection, 
 and make the message come home to the entire man. 
 5. In the same line is the emphasis of psychology 
 on the emotions and the will as the centre of per- 
 sonality. For centuries Christian teachers have 
 apologized for the emotional element in religion. 
 It has been felt a damaging admission that conduct 
 is determined by feeling, and the ideal man has been 
 pictured as one who, after being duly instructed, 
 yields intellectual assent to statements of truth, and 
 confesses his adhesion to the venerable creed and 
 the historic organization. Is not this man who 
 becomes a Christian by intellectual assent as unreal 
 a personage as the " economic man" of the old politi- 
 cal economy ? The truth is that our feelings are the 
 mainspring of all we have and are. The feelings 
 are not signs of weakness, they are the motive power 
 in all our living. If they are wrongly directed, we 
 become slaves of passion or caprice. If they are 
 strong and steadfast, then the intellectual and social 
 life becomes potent and progressive. Every feeling 
 tends to vent itself in action, and when strong enough 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1/3 
 
 issues in deeds without any conscious choice. That 
 habitual currents of feeling wear channels in the 
 very substance of the brain, that through those 
 channels feeling discharges itself with ever increas- 
 ing swiftness and ease, that the slightest desire tends 
 to eventuate in deeds, and that no human being 
 can permanently desire one thing and act another 
 — these are the psychological facts that reenforce 
 the ancient insight : ''As a man thinketh in his heart 
 so is he." The insistence of all moralists and 
 preachers throughout the ages on judging men by 
 aspiration rather than by performance, the steady 
 declaration of the church that virtue is interior, 
 the emphasis of Christianity on "whosoever look- 
 eth" and ''whosoever hateth," — all this finds ex- 
 traordinary corroboration in psychology. It is a 
 timorous and half-hearted religion which apologizes 
 for appeal to the emotions. Only let us remember 
 that the appeal must be, not to the transient moods 
 that ripple the surface of the soul, but to the great 
 primary hungers and hopes and fears and loves 
 which sweep steadily onward like the great trade- 
 winds driving countless ships across the sea. With- 
 out these driving powers men would be less than 
 human. Instead of apologizing because we possess 
 them, we should glory in their possession. The 
 hungers of the soul are the proof of its greatness. 
 The swine in the far country could not say, " I perish 
 with hunger." Only the lost son could feel the 
 
1/4 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 attraction of the Father's house. Had we composed 
 the parable, we might have had the son brought home 
 by the exhortation of a traveUing preacher, by his 
 straying into some synagogue, by some irrefutable 
 demonstration of the existence of the Father. But 
 to picture the boy as starting homeward merely 
 because he was hungry — how disappointing to the 
 rationalistic view of man, how eternally true to the 
 divine discontents and unvoiced longings within 
 us all ! 
 
 Intellectual assent without emotional consent 
 deserves neither praise nor blame. It could be 
 given by a logical mechanism, destitute of character. 
 Character begins when the tides of feeling begin to 
 flow, and the conscious reason either inhibits those 
 tides, as men dam up a river, or yields to their power, 
 as men plunge their water wheels in the river and 
 convert its lawless flood into directed power. The 
 aim of preaching is to appeal to the primary instincts 
 and interests of the soul, to address the entire nature 
 of man with all its passions, appetites, inarticulate 
 hungers, blind reactions, and subconscious strivings, 
 as well as its perception of logical validity. Men 
 are indeed to be uplifted and moulded through the 
 presentation of the truth; but this truth is ad- 
 dressed not merely to the reasoning power, but to 
 the entire personality. The truth presses into the 
 soul as the tide sweeps along the shore, flooding every 
 bay and cavern and creek, and by a thousand inlets 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 75 
 
 penetrating to the interior. Through our instincts 
 as well as our arguments the truth comes home. 
 The instincts of men were acquired long before 
 their reason developed, and evolutionary philosophy 
 often intimates that reason is a late development 
 achieved solely as an aid in the struggle for survival. 
 To ignore the fact that the man in the pew is pri- 
 marily a creature of instinct and feeling, and to 
 address him as if he were to be moulded and up- 
 lifted by the nineteen valid forms of syllogism, is 
 wholly to mistake one's task. "In the near future," 
 says G. Stanley Hall, "education will focus upon the 
 feelings, sentiments, emotions, and try to do some- 
 thing for the heart, out of which are the issues of life. 
 It is this side of our nature which represents the 
 human race, while the intellect, and even to a large 
 extent the will, are acquired by each individual. . . . 
 The highest education is that which focusses the soul 
 upon the largest loves and generates the strongest 
 and most diversified interests." In attaining such 
 an insight the modern educator powerfully re- 
 enforces the preacher, whose task is to declare the 
 whole counsel of God to the whole content of the 
 human soul. 
 
 6. Educational psychology is also among the 
 prophets in its emphasis on the value of action in 
 the development of character. The preacher may 
 indeed say: "This is nothing new. As old as the 
 Christianity is the declaration that 'if any man will 
 
176 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 do ... he shall know.'" But to show why this 
 is true, to discover the working of the principle 
 in many realms, to expound the significance of self- 
 activity in all intellectual and moral development, 
 this is the task of psychology and constitutes one 
 of its most valuable gifts to religion. The division 
 of men into sensory and motor types has been un- 
 consciously made by every man who has under- 
 stood his fellows. The most untrained preacher on 
 the frontier is aware that some men are by nature 
 dominantly receptive, and others are of the eager, 
 executive, and achieving type. But that all men are 
 to be trained not by pouring truth into them, but 
 by inducing them to act out the truth they know, 
 is now an axiom of modern education. "Learn- 
 ing by doing" is the rough statement of a profound 
 principle which, long implicit in the great teachers, 
 preachers and organizers of men, is now at last 
 explicit in education. The schools have adopted 
 manual training, not in order to enable children to 
 produce things of commercial value, — the trade 
 school does that, — but in order to train the hand 
 as well as the eye, because inability to use the hands 
 constructively means inability to use large sections 
 of the brain. Intellectual and moral life is not 
 sheer reception of wisdom from without, it is not 
 the attitude of a pail under a pump ; it is self-activ- 
 ity, the forth-putting of mental and moral energy in 
 deeds. As Byron said, 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY I// 
 
 "'tis to create, 
 And by creation live a being more intense." 
 
 Hence character-building is to be achieved, not 
 chiefly by learning what is true, but by doing what 
 is right. The laboratory now everywhere supple- 
 ments the library, the workshop stands beside the 
 lecture room. In a former generation our children 
 studied astronomy without a telescope, geology from 
 a blackboard, botany without entering the green 
 fields, and sometimes could spell the names of all 
 the trees without recognizing any tree in the forest 
 when they saw it. Now nature-study takes them 
 beyond the book-plates and descriptions to the 
 actual flora and fauna. In the making of gardens 
 and miniature buildings they give free play to the 
 constructive impulse which lies deep in human 
 nature. The school is no longer merely a place in 
 which to listen; it is a place in which to act, to 
 build and plant, to create and achieve, and the 
 appeal to the motor side of human nature has trans- 
 formed education. 
 
 Has this new knowledge been adequately recog- 
 nized in the programme of the church? Or do 
 we still think that religion is largely synonymous 
 with passive attention, and that the test of youthful 
 piety is sitting still in church service? The church 
 will bind active young people to itself not by what 
 it does for them, but by what it gives them to do.' 
 Its greatest gift may be a sphere of action, a worthy 
 
178 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and enduring task. "What wilt thou have me to 
 do?" is the question that Hes at the beginning of 
 every great career. The most virile and vital man- 
 hood is precisely that which cannot endure merely 
 to sit still and listen, though the listening be on a 
 sacred day and in a sacred place. " Divine service" 
 is not simply praying and speaking on Sunday 
 morning at eleven o'clock. The true divine service 
 begins when the worship is ended, and the church 
 doors swing outward into the eager and struggling 
 life of the world. The true religious educator is 
 not he who continues to crowd truth year after year 
 into docile minds, but he who summons men to 
 act on what they know and himself leads the way. 
 The minister who has grasped this principle will 
 value introspection only as a means to wise and 
 deliberate action. Self-examination is merely a 
 path to self-activity. We should look at sin just 
 long enough to see what it is and forsake it. To 
 examine and analyze it, as did the mediaeval casuists, 
 is to feel anew its fascination. To dissect our own 
 feelings is not a means of grace. The habit of 
 keeping a diary is well, provided the diary is filled 
 with something more than our own pulse-beats. 
 No man grows by watching his own shadow. But 
 when a man looks backward only in order that he 
 may go forward, and gazes within only that he may 
 more effectively ''lend a hand," then he reaches the 
 true balance of contemplation and action. Our gen- 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 79 
 
 eration is indeed deficient in quiet thoughtfulness, 
 in that meditation out of which all high and clear 
 vision must come. But in its approach to religion 
 through ethics, in its attempt to reach truth through 
 action, it is in harmony with the soundest psycho- 
 logical theory. 
 
 7. One of the greatest services that psychology 
 has rendered to our time is its far-reaching study 
 of the meaning of adolescence. To John Fiske 
 we owe the first deep insight into this field, since he 
 first showed us how the prolongation of human 
 infancy has made possible the human home, with 
 all its wealth of affection and power of education. 
 Since that time a multitude of students have been 
 at work in the study of childhood and youth, until 
 our entire attitude toward adolescence has been 
 transformed. Facts wholly new to the world have 
 been brought to light, and fascinating vistas of 
 opportunity and responsibility have opened before 
 every teacher. 
 
 If it be true that every human being passes through 
 certain physiological changes at adolescence which 
 profoundly change his whole mental and affectional 
 life, then a conception of religious experience which 
 ignores these changes is clearly inadequate. But how 
 often have we tried to force little children through 
 the experience of the thief on the cross or the aposde 
 to the Gentiles! We have frequently treated the 
 child as simply an ungrown man or woman. We 
 
l80 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 have for the sake of the children taken treatises 
 intended for adults and put them into words of one 
 syllable. We have presented abstract ideas to 
 children at the age when concrete objects were 
 needed. If then they failed to respond, the failure 
 was frequently laid to inner depravity, when it 
 should have been laid to our own blindness and 
 ignorance. 
 
 The three epochs of childhood may be roughly 
 outlined as the period from six to eight years, the 
 period from eight to twelve, and the period from 
 twelve to sixteen years of age. In the first period 
 there is a constant necessity for the appeal to au- 
 thority. In those years childhood is not to reason 
 why, but is to attain freedom through the funda- 
 mental virtue of obedience. Right and wrong are 
 then rules of action enforced by superior power. 
 In the second period comes the transition. Verbal 
 memory is strong and should be filled with noble 
 passages from great writers of all time. Imagina- 
 tion is glowing and should have constant nourish- 
 ment. Right and wrong are passing from mere 
 rules into principles of action. Religion is becoming 
 not only a story of what was once, but the possibility 
 of a divine life now and here. In the third period 
 comes that marvellous efflorescence, physical, mental, 
 and spiritual, which opens up a new and dazzling 
 world of social and moral possibility. Strange 
 impulses surge through the soul; the sound of 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY l8l 
 
 distant voices is heard in all the inner chambers 
 of being; great ideals float before us and are with- 
 drawn. The youth sees "the vision of the world 
 and the glory that will be." He forms passionate 
 loyalties to new causes, ideas, persons; followed by 
 reaction into melancholy or despair. He chooses 
 one career after another as his own, and passes 
 through various creeds, social, political, and religious. 
 He sees himself as leader in many a cause, hero in 
 many a battle, and anon is plunged into pessimism 
 regarding himself and the world. 
 
 It is needless to recall the statistics of our church 
 membership, which show that this period in life is 
 the supreme religious opportunity to the individual 
 and the church. Of the years from twelve to 
 eighteen it is pecuHarly true that "now is the ac- 
 cepted time." If the budding soul, all astir and 
 athrob with the climbing powers of the human 
 springtime, — if now it fails to make any supreme 
 moral choice, fails to yield itself in any irrevocable 
 spiritual allegiance, the great opportunity passes 
 beyond recall. All later reform is at far greater 
 moral cost and difficulty. The Christian pastor 
 should know and feel that at adolescence the powers 
 of human nature are working with him. His young 
 people are by nature blossoming into new demands, 
 aspirations, and longings. The fountains of the 
 great deep are broken up. The inner life is crying 
 out for something more than food and drink. The 
 
1 82 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 soul is hungry for invisible bread. It clutches 
 eagerly at the offer of sympathy, whether it come 
 from above or below. It craves companionship, 
 assurance, gladness, victory. To this period re- 
 ligion comes with its supreme message from one 
 who knew what was in man. The Messiah who 
 himself at adolescence terrified Mary and Joseph 
 by his sudden self-assertion, and cried with a new 
 accent in his voice, "I must be about my Father's 
 business," is the same living Lord who forever 
 claims the allegiance of the newly awakened soul, 
 offering to each a yoke that is easy and a burden 
 that is light. 
 
 To recognize this marvellous awakening at the 
 time of adolescence and adapt Christian effort to it, 
 is not to ignore the divine presence and action. 
 We do not banish God when we discover his method. 
 Is he not present in physiological changes within 
 us, as truly as in geological changes without us? 
 Can we believe that he "clothes the grass of the 
 field" and yet is not acting in the great investiture 
 of the human spirit with social powers and hungers ? 
 The regular recurrence of adolescent transforma- 
 tion, forcing each new life out of isolation into 
 fellowship, out of passive routine into insurgent 
 aspiration, may be the clearest evidence of God's 
 immanence in body and soul. 
 
 8. But perhaps the chief value of the study of 
 human growth and development is in the reenforce- 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 83 
 
 ment which comes to the central truths of Chris- 
 tianity when they are interpreted in terms of life. 
 Many theological difficulties are to be solved, not 
 by the pathway of metaphysics, but by a deeper 
 understanding of the spiritual life of man. Perhaps 
 the chief advance which preachers like Robertson 
 of Brighton and Phillips Brooks made on their 
 predecessors lies here. We cannot claim that these 
 modern prophets excel their great forbears in philo- 
 sophic grasp, in logical acumen. But they clearly 
 do excel in their psychological power, in their 
 capacity for intuition into the hopes and fears and 
 remorses and aspirations of humanity. They lay 
 bare our hearts; they flash a torch in the secret 
 chambers of imagery; they expose our deepest 
 motives to our starded gaze, and interpret our 
 confused struggle with a seer's insight. Many of 
 their attitudes and methods are explained and en- 
 forced by every new treatise on psychology. The 
 pulpit and the laboratory are at one in teaching us 
 to interpret doctrine in terms of life. Through 
 such interpretation a thousand doctrinal difficuldes 
 dwindle or vanish. 
 
 For example, the emphasis which the church has 
 frequently placed on periods of religious awaken- 
 ing has been peculiarly objectionable to men of 
 philosophic temper, whose own development has 
 been at an even pace and without any marked event. 
 Is, then, the revival of religion, sweeping through a 
 
184 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 community, to be craved as a divine and gracious 
 gift, or to be feared as an abnormal stimulation? 
 To the a priori philosopher the method of even 
 and steady growth may appear superior. To the 
 student of the "psychology of the crowd," these 
 great tides of emotion and conviction, felt alike in 
 the school and the church and the nation, felt in 
 the political, the social and the religious realm, 
 are entirely normal, and constitute a rational and 
 human method of advance. The path of progress 
 is seen to be not a straight line; the line is curved 
 and knotted; it runs through crises and judgment 
 days; and to object to life's sudden tensions is to 
 quarrel with life itself. 
 
 So the insistence of the Bible on the resurrection 
 of the body has been a stumbling-block to many. 
 The Platonic idea of incorporeal immortality has 
 seemed to many a more spiritual conception than 
 that of the great paean in the fifteenth chapter of 
 the letter to the Corinthians: "The trumpet 
 shall sound . . . and we shall be changed." That 
 splendid hymn of victory has to philosophic re- 
 finement seemed needlessly explicit in material 
 and bodily detail. Is it not nobler to say with 
 Robert Browning: "What becomes of the old clothes 
 of me, I have no manner of care"? But one who 
 has been trained to conceive body and soul as 
 constituting a single unitary personality cannot 
 avoid an instinctive sympathy with the Pauline idea 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 85 
 
 of the life beyond. At farthest possible remove from 
 the Greek conception of the future world as a limbo 
 of pale and ghostly shades is the apostle's glowing 
 thought of the complete human personality, ennobled, 
 purified, and translated into the eternal Kingdom 
 of God. Innumerable difficulties may surround 
 any attempt to conceive the mode of the future 
 life; the grotesque particulars outlined by some 
 expositors may repel the reverent mind. But 
 the conception of a life, in which, in some sense, 
 the whole man attains continuing expression, of 
 a sphere in which the complete personality finds 
 a congenial home, is in harmony with the funda- 
 mental thought of those who have studied man most 
 deeply to-day. 
 
 So also the miraculous element in the New Testa- 
 ment presents far less difficulty to the psychologist 
 than to the metaphysician, or even to the theologian. 
 While the latter may busy themselves in defining 
 the relation of the natural to the supernatural, or 
 in discussing the value of historical testimony, the 
 psychologist begins his examination with the record 
 of the miracles of healing. Accustomed as he is to 
 find every great personality in history radiating 
 influences which are not to be explained by 
 ordinary formulas, he would be astonished if the 
 work of Jesus failed to include "signs and wonders." 
 Accustomed to give credence to many narratives of 
 mental and spiritual therapeutics, familiar with the 
 
1 86 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 cures wrought by faith in all ages, the calm judg- 
 ment, "Thy faith hath saved thee, go in peace/' 
 seems to him only the recognition of the supremacy 
 of spiritual forces over impotence and pain and 
 disease. If any one of us should enter the laboratory 
 of Marconi or Madame Curie, we should expect 
 some startling phenomena. We should be disap- 
 pointed to find such persons showing no greater 
 mastery of physical forces than we ourselves possess. 
 So when we enter the presence of Jesus as he lived 
 in Galilee, we find his character to be such a miracle 
 that other recorded marvels seem but natural se- 
 quences. Even in the greatest deeds, what he did 
 was less than what he was. However the "nature 
 miracles" may baffle us, the record of healing seems 
 so simple and sincere and appropriate as to win 
 immediate assent. A Messiah who did nothing 
 for the physical life of men, who merely taught 
 stoical insensibility to pain, might be another 
 Aurelius or Epictetus; he would not be one who 
 came "to preach deliverance to the captives and to 
 set at liberty them that are bruised." 
 
 Thus we might run through the central truths 
 of Christianity and find that each one of them loses 
 some point of difficulty, or offers some new avenue 
 of approach, when seen from the standpoint of human 
 experience. The Christian, like the psychologist, 
 asks not what is probable, not what will fit into a 
 system, but simply what is true. From this stand- 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 8/ 
 
 point much of our wider knowledge of moral and 
 religious experience is confirming and explaining 
 both the facts of Christian history and the familiar 
 statements of Christian truth. The Bible itself is 
 a book of experience rather than philosophy. With 
 difficulty we make it fit our credal systems ; but easily 
 it fits into and enriches our life. It is not primarily 
 a book of propositions to be believed or commands 
 to be obeyed. It is the witness of the men who, of all 
 in history, have perceived the Infinite most vividly 
 and experienced his presence most profoundly. 
 
 If now any one should be induced by these words 
 to take up again the study of psychology, he must 
 expect no marvels to be wrought by it. He must 
 constantly beware of extremists here as elsewhere. 
 He must adopt nothing because it is new. He 
 must remember that half truths are easily discerned 
 — the full truth comes only to the patient student. 
 But in the characteristic doctrines of psychology no 
 sincere religious teacher can fail to find help. Pro- 
 fessor James's chapter on Habit has been preached 
 in a thousand pulpits. His chapter on Attention 
 has moulded the methods of many Biblical teachers. 
 The modern doctrine of interest is indispensable to 
 every Sunday-school. Three months' study of psy- 
 chology will throw a flood of light on the relation of 
 thought and feeling in religion ; on the reason why a 
 suggestion is better than an exhaustive discussion; 
 on the way to introduce new ideas into a circle of 
 
1 88 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 old ones; on the power of a single inserted idea to 
 effect permanent changes in character. Even the 
 briefest study may give one the psychological point 
 of view. When we have attained that, all religious 
 phenomena become of intense interest. Even our 
 enemies we do not fear or hate, when absorbed in 
 trying to explain them. The opposition which ter- 
 rifies the inexperienced worker becomes to us the 
 expected reaction of evil. The indifference which 
 discourages many is then to us simply a reason for 
 changing our method. The falling away of some 
 co-workers is but a repetition of the universal human 
 experience, while the swift increase of the early 
 Christian church is but an intimation of the spiritual 
 powers that play about us to-day. 
 
 Not the least of the benefits of the psychological 
 view-point is that it thus releases us from personal 
 resentments and exasperations, and enables us to see 
 our local task as part of the education of humanity. 
 The religious leader is above all other men in danger 
 of acquiring merely personal standards of judgment. 
 The chemist, or physicist, or biologist is dealing daily 
 with a mass of objective fact, where personal likes 
 and dislikes must be ignored, where subjective 
 moods must not be allowed to affect conclusion or 
 action. But the man who, like the poet, or preacher, 
 or teacher, or statesman, lives mainly in the world 
 of personality, and must contend with human 
 fickleness, prejudice, and misconstruction, is in 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY 1 89 
 
 danger of estimating all men and movements solely 
 according to their relation to himself. The man 
 that agrees with him must be right; the man who 
 ignores his appeal must be depraved; those who 
 suggest another method must be malicious; those 
 who prefer to follow another leader must be schis- 
 matics and troublers in Israel. But whoever as- 
 sumes that attitude finds life full of thorns and 
 stings. He becomes tender and touchy, and his 
 work capricious and fitful. He is the sport of the 
 varying winds of popular favor. A rainy Sunday 
 or a slender congregation depresses such a preacher 
 utterly; a large and responsive assembly fills him 
 with short-lived enthusiasm. The apathy of good 
 men nettles him; the opposition of evil men calls 
 out his anathemas; and the whole world seems 
 roseate with dawn, or black with woe, according as it 
 does or does not indorse his petty personal policy. 
 But the man who is able to take the objective 
 standpoint of psychology can see things in their 
 larger and more permanent relations. He has 
 acquired a practical knowledge of human nature, 
 — the material in which he has to work, — • just 
 as the physician has mastered his anatomy and 
 physiology. He understands that good men must 
 frequently differ, and that bad men may be explained. 
 He knows that there are many gates to the City of 
 Man-soul, and if driven back at one entrance he 
 draws off and prepares to march in at another. 
 
IQO EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Like Elijah under the juniper tree, he learns that the 
 conclusion hastily drawn from his own experience is 
 refuted by seven thousand instances outside his own 
 small circle. He conquers his own temperament, 
 and views philosophically the sudden depressions 
 and elations around him. If men are obtuse or 
 unresponsive, he realizes that there are some ways 
 in which we can play on an instrument, and some 
 ways in which we cannot ; and that instead of blam- 
 ing the instrument we had better learn the stops. 
 
 "He knew what was in man." In that brief 
 recognition of Christ's insight is recorded the ex- 
 planation of that calmness amid three years of 
 tumult, of that exquisite patience with dull disciples 
 and frowning Pharisees, of the parabolic form of 
 instruction, and of the unforgettable sayings that 
 reveal all men to themselves. 
 
THE SERVICE OF PSYCHOLOGY IQI 
 
 Anything like a bibliography of recent works on the psychol- 
 ogy of religious education would be too long for insertion here. 
 An extraordinary wealth of literature has been created within 
 a few years — literature with which no religious leader or teacher 
 can afford to remain unacquainted. Many of these books presup- 
 pose acquaintance with the main facts of psychology, such as are 
 presented in some standard text-book. Professor William James's 
 "Psychology" will prepare any student for the perusal of other 
 works dealing with the applications of the science. A few books 
 are named below which apply the results of the study of psy- 
 chology to the problems of moral and religious education — 
 books which should be in every library connected with a church 
 or Sunday-school. In some places these volumes have been 
 gathered in a travelling library, and sent from church to church 
 throughout the region. 
 
 "The Spiritual Life," "Education in Religion and Morals," 
 "The Religion of a Mature Mind," by George A. Coe. 
 
 "Personal and Ideal Elements in Education," "Rational Aims 
 in Living," by Henry Churchill King. 
 
 "The Moral Instruction of Children," by Felix Adler. 
 
 "The Psychology of Religion," by Edv^tin D. Starbuck. 
 
 " Talks to Teachers," "The Varieties of Religious Experience," 
 by William James. 
 
 "The Making of Character," by John MacCunn. 
 
 "Principles and Ideals for the Sunday-School," by Burton 
 and Matthews. 
 
 The volumes containing the Annual Proceedings of the Relig- 
 ious Education Association. 
 
 "The Journal of Religious Education," published by the 
 Religious Education Association. 
 
 "The Journal of Religious Psychology and Education," pub- 
 lished by Clark University. 
 
 More general in outlook, but hardly less pertinent to the 
 director of religious education, are the following: 
 
 "The Educative Process," by William Chandler Bagley. 
 
 "Youth: its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene," by G. Stan- 
 ley Hall. 
 
 "Genetic Psychology for Teachers," by Charles Hubbard 
 
 JUDD. 
 
 "Interest and Education," by Charles De Garmo. 
 
VI 
 
 THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 "Somewhere in a nook forlorn 
 Yesterday a babe was born. 
 
 Day shall nerve his arm with might, 
 Slumber soothe him all the night, 
 Summer's peace and winter's storm 
 Help him all his will perform. 
 'Tis enough of joy for thee 
 Such high service to foresee." 
 
 — E. R. Sill. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 
 
 Every civilized community is to-day throbbing 
 with educational activity. The impulse to gain new 
 knowledge and apply that knowledge to life is 
 clearly the dominant impulse of our time. The 
 whole world is going to school. Instruction has 
 gotten far outside the schoolhouse and the college. 
 Public libraries have sprung up in every village. 
 University extension has spread out its tendrils 
 until a single university now enrolls three thousand 
 students in extension courses. Public lectures are 
 usually no longer of the old lyceum order, — hetero- 
 geneous and aimless, — but are definite courses of 
 lectures by experts in some one field of knowledge. 
 Correspondence schools, with work of varying value, 
 have multiplied, until a single school now enrolls 
 350,000 pupils in all civilized lands, most of the 
 pupils being employed during the day and pursuing 
 their studies at night. A new reading public has 
 been developed by popular journalism and the low- 
 priced magazine. Hundreds of thousands of people 
 who, when living in the old world, were accustomed 
 to read little or nothing, are now eagerly scanning 
 
 195 
 
196 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the papers and frequenting libraries. Hundreds of 
 thousands of parents who can give their children no 
 prestige, or position, or wealth, are making heroic 
 sacrifice to give those children the best possible 
 mental training. Business men, who a generation 
 ago scoffed at the inefficiency of the college graduate, 
 are now writing every spring to college presidents 
 and begging for a list of the most promising men in 
 the senior class. The finest buildings in the mod- 
 ern city are frequently its high schools. The great 
 western states are taxing every dollar of every citizen 
 for the development of the state universities, which 
 are in turn transforming the agriculture, the industry, 
 the social and political life of the people. Never 
 in history has there been seen such eagerness for 
 education as is now universal in America. 
 
 Yet while this great educational enthusiasm has 
 been leavening our national life, our schools have 
 undergone a quiet revolution. The American state 
 has consented to drop out of education all attempt 
 at religious instruction — a change almost as far- 
 reaching as the elimination of slavery from our 
 economic life. This is the logical and inevitable 
 result of the principle on which our government 
 is based, but is a result unforeseen by the founders 
 of the republic and at variance with all their expecta- 
 tions. Any reader of the diary of Judge Sewall or 
 the journal of David Brainerd can see most vividly 
 how complete is the transformation of psychological 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION I97 
 
 climate brought about by the change from the theo- 
 logical education prescribed by the state during two 
 centuries of New England history to the secular 
 education provided by the state to-day. The early 
 American colonies, with the exception of Rhode 
 Island, conceived religious education as the duty 
 of the government. Of the famous ''New England 
 Primer" about three million copies were printed in 
 the course of one hundred and fifty years, and prac- 
 tically every child in New England during that period 
 received his first instruction by means of it. But 
 that instruction was all interwoven with Puritan 
 doctrine. The letter A introduced the child to the 
 story of Adam, O made him familiar with Obadiah, 
 Z was forever linked with Zaccheus. Then followed, 
 in that famous manual, the catechism and the sum- 
 mary of Christian duty. For a century and a half 
 no child learned to read in New England without 
 being grounded at the same time in the elements 
 of New England theology. Not till 1833 was the 
 established church abolished in the state of Con- 
 necticut. Not till that time did New England schools 
 really surrender the ideal of religious propaganda as 
 their fundamerital aim. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that we are facing a problem 
 comparatively new in the Western hemisphere, the 
 gravity of which it is impossible to exaggerate. 
 Through the relentless application of our funda- 
 mental principle of soul-liberty it has come to pass 
 
198 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 that the American state will never again undertake 
 the most important part of education, the develop- 
 ment of the religious nature. Protestantism with 
 its numerous divisions of creed, and democracy with 
 its demand for individual freedom, have silently 
 revolutionized the attitude of our government toward 
 the education of its citizens, and constrained it to a 
 position which no European country, save France, 
 is willing to indorse. In the United States, Protes- 
 tant, Roman Catholic and Jew are united in believing 
 that for the state to undertake any form of religious 
 education is to do irreparable injury to religion itself. 
 This attitude of the American state, almost with- 
 out precedent in ancient or modern history, forces 
 upon every thoughtful citizen inquiries more seri- 
 ous and fundamental than any questions of economic 
 or political reform. 
 
 Here, then, is our national peril — that the su- 
 premely important task of our generation will fall 
 between church and state, and be ignored by both. 
 The church may say: "Education is no longer in 
 our hands." The state may say: "On all religious 
 matters we are silent." Thus millions may grow up 
 — are actually growing up in America to-day — 
 without any genuine religious training. It is time 
 therefore for church and school to cooperate, as army 
 and navy cooperate, in defence of our common 
 country. Power of attention, concentration, dis- 
 crimination, power to reason, to think, habits of 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 1 99 
 
 industry, thrift, promptness, fidelity, command of 
 the tools of common speech and daily life — all this 
 can be given by the school. Ideas of reverence for ^ 
 the unseen, of obedience to conscience, of the con- 
 stant recognition of God in nature and history, of 
 the place of Christ in Christianity, of the growth 
 and value of the Bible, of the method and motive 
 of the Christian life, of the relation of Christianity 
 to other religions — all these must come through the 
 home and the church. If the home and church 
 shirk this responsibility, our people will be in fifty 
 years a nation without a religion, i.e. a nation 
 disintegrating and dying. No strong and enduring 
 people ever yet existed without definite and contin- 
 uous work in religious education. If reverence does 
 not "grow from more to more," the nation is palsied 
 at its very heart. Since the state cannot, and the 
 home usually does not, undertake religious instruc- 
 tion, v/hat is the duty of the church? 
 \ Naturally we think first of the Sunday-schoolJ 
 No other institution of our age shows such a chasm 
 between possibility and performance. No other has 
 such vast powers latent and unused. It is strong 
 in numbers, strong in its position as the only school 
 allowed to meet on the one day when the people are 
 at leisure, strong in its traditional hold on family 
 life, strong in its development of a vast and varied 
 literature, strong in being the only Christian institu- 
 tion whose income is always in excess of its expen- 
 
200 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 diture, strong in having in the Bible the best 
 pedagogical material in the world, strong in retaining 
 many of its pupils for twenty-five or thirty years, 
 strong in the universal interest of young people in 
 moral and religious problems. 
 
 Nevertheless the Sunday-school is lamentably 
 weak and ineffective. It is weak in having only 
 thirty minutes of teaching each week, while the 
 pubHc schools have thirty hours, weak in assembling 
 usually in a building erected without class-rooms, 
 weak in its untrained officers and teachers, weak in 
 the subservience to anonymous "lesson papers" as 
 fountains of authority, weak in its ungraded character 
 and its fear of new truth, weak in its ignorance of 
 pedagogical ideals now dominant in other schools, 
 above all weak in its unconscious substitution of 
 exhortation for genuine education. ''From the 
 standpoint of the development of religious intelli- 
 gence," says one of our foremost students of edu- 
 cation, "the American system must be pronounced 
 the most fragmentary, partial, inefficient, haphazard 
 system in the world." ^ 
 
 Here, then, is the unrivalled opportunity of the 
 modem pastor. He finds close at hand a sword 
 already fashioned, but rusty and sticking to its 
 scabbard. He has not to begin the work of religious 
 education — it was begun in the Sunday-school 
 
 * Professor Charles De Garmo, Principles of Religious Edu- 
 cation, p. 63. 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 201 
 
 more than a century ago. He has not to induce his 
 church to organize a school, to appoint teachers, or 
 to set apart some time for instruction. The machin- 
 ery is at hand, though antiquated and creaking, 
 and sometimes a mass of revolving wheels that 
 achieve no output. To take this mechanism, re- 
 model it to suit present need, to harness it to new 
 sources of power, and put it in charge of the most 
 vital and forceful personalities in the community — 
 this is the pastor's imperative task. No other form 
 of work will bring so rich results. Vastly more 
 important than the annual round of pastoral calls, 
 which may degenerate into mere social simpering, 
 far more promising than any young people's societies, 
 more rewarding than all guilds, settlements, leagues, 
 and clubs of every kind, is the fundamental and 
 essential work of directing the religious education) 
 of the congregation. The pastor who succeeds as 
 educational director cannot fail otherwise. His 
 church has touched the ultimate springs of power. 
 It is as a tree planted by rivers of water, which each 
 year adds new rings to its growth and new diameters 
 to its shadow. Such a church is always anticipating 
 its own future, and training its own successors. The 
 pastor who depends mainly on his own eloquence or 
 ingenuity or freshness of appeal will soon reach his 
 natural limits. The pastor who depends on the 
 educational process applied in the religious field is 
 steadily planting the corn whose fruit shall shake like 
 
L 
 
 202 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Lebanon. He need not be his own superintendent, 
 or actually conduct a class. But he must be the 
 inspiring and directing power in the church school 
 of religion. He can neglect that only at the peril of 
 his entire ministry. 
 
 Yet this is the part of the church work for which 
 the average preacher has neither training nor apti- 
 tude nor inclination. With all possible respect to 
 Hebrew scholarship we ask : Might not the seminary 
 take some of the time now devoted to "Hiphils" 
 and "Hophals" and put it into mastery of the work 
 of an educational director? Is it a true perspective 
 which allows us to spend much time in learning how 
 to conduct prayer-meetings and funerals and wed- 
 dings, and allows no time for study of the history and ) 
 methods of religious education? — ^ 
 
 At what age should children enter the Sunday- 
 school? Is it wise for parents as far as possible to 
 instruct their children at home, reserving the Sunday- 
 school for those who have Httle home training? 
 Shall we adapt the methods of the kindergarten 
 to religious teaching? Should children be taught 
 dogmatically, or should they be left to grow up with- 
 out any announcement of adult conclusions ? What 
 is the ideal way of grading a school ? Are our pub- 
 lic schools satisfied with their grades, or are they 
 protesting against the rigid ''lockstep" which may 
 result? What is the essential and radical difference 
 between the ''international system" and the various 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 203 
 
 substitutes now modifying or supplanting it? Is 
 there any way of appealing to the motor powers in 
 religious education, so that the church may have 
 its "manual training"? These are specimens of 
 scores and hundreds of questions that every young 
 minister must face when first he enters his Sunday- 
 school. Inquiries will be flung at him from every 
 side if he attempts to alter the conventional routine. 
 Is the school a form of worship or a form of study? 
 Is its object to furnish a friendly teacher a chance 
 to deliver a " sermonette," or to enable a scholar to 
 master historical facts and religious truths? Should 
 the school have its curriculum and its diplomas 
 and its graduation day, or remaui a place for the 
 friendly chatting of the church family? What is 
 the best form of building, the best kind of training 
 class, the best series of lesson helps, the best form of 
 opening and closing exercise? All the fascinating 
 problems that beset a superintendent of schools 
 will inevitably confront the modern minister if he 
 undertakes the religious education of his people. 
 
 This is not the place to consider the technique of 
 Sunday-school instruction. But out of all the con- 
 fusion of questions a few luminous and illuminating 
 principles emerge. 
 
 The fundamental principle is that the Sunday- 
 school is a school. In it we pray, but it is not a 
 prayer-meeting. In it we may use liturgy, but it 
 is not organized for liturgical worship. In it we 
 
(^4 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 may win decisions for the Christian life, but such 
 decision is not our only aim; if it were, then we 
 should dismiss from the classes all who have made the 
 great decision. The supreme aim is the continuous 
 development of the religious nature, the continuous 
 education of the pupils in Christian truth and duty. 
 *'But do we not want," an adherent of the old type 
 of Sunday-school will say, "above all things to 
 make Christians?" Assuredly. But the making of 
 Christians, who will remain Christians, is best 
 achieved not by fervid and transient appeal, but 
 by implanting Christian truth in the pupil's mind. 
 The truth is seed, which once inserted by the educa- 
 tional process can be trusted to germinate and bring 
 forth fruit. The teacher who leaves with her class 
 the memory of personal pleadings may indeed render 
 a real service. But the teacher who imparts a real 
 knowledge of the pleading of Christ with those 
 apostles who persistently misunderstood and mis- 
 construed and at last forsook him, has given the 
 class memories and convictions which can never be 
 lost. The child's mind is a sensitive plate, to be 
 imprinted, not by the pressure of the photographer's 
 hand, but merely by exposure to the light. 
 '' We do not mean that the church school is blindly 
 to copy the methods of public schools. On the con- 
 trary it must be on its guard against some of the 
 errors into which they have fallen. Our public 
 schools have unquestionably suffered from over- 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 205 
 
 emphasis on formal discipline, on mere mental drill 
 apart from culture of the emotions and strengthening 
 of character. No man wants to see the Sunday- 
 school made a mere engine for the inculcation of 
 historical facts, however sacred. A list of Biblical 
 dates is no more nourishing than a list of similar 
 dates in Chinese history. Some of the wars of Israel 
 may be of hardly more significance than the feuds 
 of the ancient Saxon tribes. The Sunday-school is 
 fully justified in insisting that something more than 
 conveyance of knowledge is the object of teaching. 
 The day-school may learn much from the steadfast 
 adherence of the Sunday-school to the creation of 
 ideals as well as the impartation of facts. A barren 
 intellectualism has sometimes made the public schools 
 rigid and remote from life. The Sunday-school is 
 quite right in seeking to touch the springs of lofty 
 aspiration and produce a strong and noble character. 
 But the way to do this most effectively is by sharply 
 differentiating the Sunday-school from all services 
 whose primary aim is worship, or fellowship, or 
 exhortation, and making it, from opening bell to 
 closing hymn, a genuine school. 
 
 Obviously if it is to be a real school, it must 
 occupy more time. A half-hour of instruction each 
 week cannot possibly educate. No other school in the 
 world would expect any result under such limitation 
 of effort. Either the parents must supplement the 
 single session by regular instruction at home, or 
 
206 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 more than one session must be held. In France every 
 Thursday is made a holiday in the public schools in 
 order to furnish time for religious instruction. In 
 Germany every curriculum of the state schools 
 makes generous provision for instruction in Biblical 
 history, in the catechism and the creed. In this 
 country such teaching could be furnished by the 
 various denominations in their own churches, 
 either on Saturday or after school on other days. 
 The remarkable growth of the Lutheran church in 
 America is largely due to the fact that each Lutheran 
 clergyman regards himself primarily as the teacher 
 of the children of the church, and meets them at 
 regular hours. Such instruction is surely worth 
 far more than "junior prayer-meetings," where 
 children may be encouraged in premature intro- 
 spection and expression. Some pastors have already 
 found the most delightful hours of the week those in 
 which they meet their children after school is over. 
 More time spent in this work will give opportunity 
 for familiarity with the entire Bible, opportunity 
 for the study of Christian history. Christian missions, 
 denominational standards, and methods of Christian 
 service. 
 
 If the school is a real school, it will certainly need 
 trained teachers. The charming girl with blue eyes 
 and golden hair is not necessarily able to undertake 
 the religious education of our boys and girls. If she 
 is not willing to join a training class, or study any of 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 20/ 
 
 the methods of teaching, then she must go into 
 some kind of work where kindhness and good in- 
 tentions are a sufficient equipment. The training of 
 teachers for their work can be brought about in 
 several ways. The most effective method demands 
 the cooperation of all the churches in a community. 
 Wherever the churches will unite in forming a nor- 
 mal class or school, selecting and sending the ablest 
 of their young men and women as students, and 
 securing some man of wide experience as leader and 
 director, every participating church will be enriched 
 by new access of power in its Sunday-school in- 
 struction. If some university is near at hand, with 
 a department of education, a most helpful affiliation 
 of church and university can be formed. The 
 Teachers College of Columbia University long ago 
 opened a model Sunday-school, and now offers to 
 religious teachers training under efficient guidance. 
 Where no affiliation or cooperation with other in- 
 stitutions is possible, the individual church can 
 establish its training class for the study of methods, 
 of the psychology of religion, of the history of the 
 church, or of particular parts of the Bible which are 
 subsequently to be taught in other classes. Without 
 offering some such training no church should ask 
 individuals to experiment in the religious training of 
 our children. In the majority of our churches the 
 best teachers do not desire the work they have under- 
 taken. They have taken it up with deep hesitation 
 
208 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and under urgent pressure. They are frequently 
 discouraged by lectures on Sunday-school peda- 
 gogy, as they see a lofty ideal set before them and 
 no opportunity for attaining it offered in the local 
 church. Thus the church is compelling its most 
 conscientious and sensitive members to make bricks 
 without straw, demanding that they assume the 
 high function of religious interpreters, but offering 
 no genuine preparation for the task. 
 
 Many pastors are looking to-day for a- trained 
 Christian educator who can be placed in charge of 
 all instruction given in the Sunday-school, and can 
 systematically undertake the religious education of 
 the entire parish. Such a man would do a vastly 
 greater work than that of the ordinary pastor's 
 assistant or church missionary. He would select 
 teachers, determine the mode of their training, lay 
 out courses of study for school and home, establish 
 grades, determine standards of examination and 
 promotion, and stimulate the whole congregation to 
 continuous study of the Scriptures. Such a man 
 would avoid most of the difficulties which beset the 
 usual assistant minister. His own work, being en- 
 tirely outside the pulpit, would not come into com- 
 parison with it ; and the modern, like the ancient, 
 church would be furnished with a recognized order 
 of teachers of the Christian faith. 
 
 Let us offer the teachers financial compensation 
 if we must; but there is far greater reason for em- 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2O9 
 
 ploying a few experienced officers of the school. 
 We must secure for such officers some of the men 
 and women who have already proved their success 
 in secular education. President Harper set us the 
 fine example of the university president serving as 
 Sunday-school superintendent. Many a school 
 principal taking charge of some church school has 
 transformed its atmosphere and ideals. We cannot 
 excuse from the service of the church the very men 
 and women who know the most about educational 
 method. If they find the church responsive and open- 
 minded, they will delight to bring to it the results of 
 their maturest experience. The Sunday-school can 
 easily cooperate with the superintendent of the pub- 
 lic schools, with the public library, with the vari- 
 ous clubs and societies for intellectual and social 
 improvement. It can easily become a social and 
 moral power in the community, teaching its pupils 
 to work out, in a ministry of daily service, the message 
 received from apostles and prophets. A study of 
 the social ideals of Amos would set a young men's 
 class aflame with zeal for civic betterment. A study 
 of the methods of charity employed in the early 
 Christian church would inspire any group of women 
 with eagerness to spend at least one year in testing 
 ancient methods in some modern city. 
 
 In many churches a "mission-study class" for 
 adults has broadened immensely the horizon of a 
 group of laymen, and trained them in methods and 
 
210 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 results of missionary effort. A band of young men - 
 who have studied for six months some such topic as 
 *'new forces in old China," have been lifted out of 
 the pettiness of the weekly routine and brought into 
 sympathy with the heroism and romance of militant 
 Christianity. They are made familiar with types of 
 Christian character outside their own denomination, 
 and with racial characteristics and developments far 
 outside their own country. In many churches the 
 most thoughtful laymen have acquired a wholly 
 new understanding of the Bible through pursuing 
 for successive winters some of the courses of study 
 outlined by the American Institute of Sacred Litera- 
 ture — courses which offer university guidance to 
 the busiest man in the metropolis, or to the house- 
 wife in the remotest hamlet.^ 
 
 About graded instruction we need say little. Here 
 the battle has been fought and won. We all real- 
 ize that there must be both grouping of the pupils 
 according to maturity and ability, and grading of the 
 material according to the pupils who are to use it. 
 The visions of Ezekiel and the Pauline discussions of 
 
 ^ In one of the leading churches of the Mississippi Valley there 
 are five adult Bible classes devoted to the following subjects: 
 I. "The Study of the Bible as Literature." 2. "Biblical Archae- 
 ology." 3. "The Ethical and Religious Message of the Bible." 
 4. "The Social Significance of the Teaching of Jesus." 5. 
 "Child Psychology" — for parents only. All of these classes 
 are taught by principals or experienced teachers in the public 
 schools of the city. 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 211 
 
 pagan iniquity were not meant for childhood, and 
 should be entirely ignored by all young classes. 
 Cosmological theory can be touched but lightly in 
 the earlier years. Theological propositions have no 
 place until more fundamental things are mastered. 
 The words and works of Jesus, or the simplest of the 
 Old Testament stories, may come first, and then step 
 by step the growing mind may be led into all the rich 
 inheritance of the Christian centuries. A pupil thus 
 led can never outgrow the Sunday-school. He may 
 wish for himself the epitaph written on the grave of 
 John Richard Green: "He died learning." 
 
 But the educational leadership of the minister 
 will take him far outside of all Sunday-school ad- 
 ministration. He must himself become the teacher 
 of some portion of his congregation through which 
 he may leaven all the rest. He may, in rare cases, 
 do this on Sunday. He may do it by forming a 
 men's class to meet at any time that proves most 
 convenient. Such a group of men may becom^^ a 
 men's league, or a class for the discussion of current 
 topics, or a forum for formal debate on moral and 
 religious issues, or a St. Andrew's Brotherhood for 
 specific ministration. Leadership in such a group 
 gives opportunity for self-impartation to dominant 
 minds in the congregation. 
 
 The prayer meeting may easily be turned into a 
 meeting for Biblical study, whenever the older type 
 of meeting may seem to have done its work. The 
 
212 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Sunday evening service may be largely expository 
 in method, often to the relief of both preacher and 
 congregation. Courses of sermons — better if not 
 of formidable length — will give the preacher op- 
 portunity to develop lines of consecutive thought, 
 and so save him from the terrible desultoriness 
 which is the bane and peril of the preacher's life. 
 The subjects of sermons advertised in our Saturday 
 newspapers are a revelation of the extremes to which 
 an honest mind may be driven when it has no definite 
 path of advance. Such a mind may move, not like 
 an ocean steamship steering by the stars, but like a 
 ferry-boat bumping along the docks, until it makes 
 a happy hit and stumbles into its desired haven. 
 Such a mind may put more energy and agony into 
 finding a subject than into unfolding and applying 
 it. 
 
 The first ten years of a man's preaching de- 
 termine whether he is to be throughout his life a 
 scrappy and disjointed mind, or whether he is to 
 educate himself and his people along certain 
 definite lines. Some men's sermons are obviously 
 mere compilations and mosaics — bits of bright- 
 ness brought from all the corners of the earth and 
 stuck into a pleasing pattern. Such productions 
 are essentially agglutinative and reminiscent. Such 
 preachers are not plagiarists — they would not 
 wrong any man, living or dead. They are as 
 honest as the agglutinative type of mind can be. 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 21 3 
 
 But when we listen to them, we are conscious that 
 the whole method of production moves on the sur- 
 face of things. There is nothing artesian and funda- 
 mental in such dealing with reality. But if dur- 
 ing the first ten years after a class graduates from 
 the seminary one member of it would devote him- 
 self, for example, to Old Testament prophecy, an- 
 other to the study of the Protestant Reformation, 
 another to modern methods of philanthropy, an- 
 other to a study of Christian education, another to 
 the influence of Christian ethics, — each man 
 preaching steadily all the time, and making each 
 sermon a bud or branch from the central stem of 
 his advancing study, — what visible accretion of 
 mental and moral power we should have, and what 
 influence such a class might exert! Such men at 
 the end of their first ten years would have not 
 merely a series of sermons, for which they perhaps 
 already feel some distaste, but a grasp on some 
 realm of Christian knowledge which would enrich 
 their entire career. Any one subject, thoroughly pur- 
 sued, is sure to relate itself to many others which 
 beckon the man steadily onward, and he is no longer 
 left to the haphazard reading of the last book loaned 
 him by a friend, or the book which no one else has 
 cared to take from the public library. Such men's 
 ministry would be educative in the highest sense. 
 The congregation would surely be conscious, with- 
 out knowing why, that their leader was constantly 
 
214 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 gaining in breadth of horizon and power to translate 
 the past into the present. They as well as their 
 pastor would be saved from that discontinuity 
 which leads straight into mental dissipation and 
 moral aimlessness, and would grow with him into 
 a manhood of larger stature and deeper power. 
 
 Out of such a ministry would come that teach- 
 ing evangelism for which the world is still waiting. 
 We have already said that since deliberate choice 
 and conscious surrender are essential experiences 
 in religious development, a real and vital evangelism 
 must always have place in the Christian church. 
 Reproduction is the proof of life; a real rehgion is 
 forever propagating itself in regions beyond. It 
 flings itself into the service of the truth and salHes 
 forth to win the world to its flaming vision. With- 
 out missionary zeal we could have an Academy, or 
 a Stoa, or a Parnassus, but not a Christian church. 
 
 Why, then, does our evangehsm, so zealous and 
 devoted, produce so little result? Why are many 
 churches decHning longer to employ methods and 
 men once esteemed fruitful? It is because our 
 evangelism has been so often separated from in- 
 struction, and has secured a decision from men who 
 did not know what they were deciding. When 
 we say, " Come to Jesus," and men arise by the score 
 to say, "I come," the ethical and religious value 
 of such coming may be great or small. It would 
 be useless for us to cry, ''Come to jk; or ;y" — some 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 21$ 
 
 unknown quantity. If Christ is an unknown 
 quantity to our hearers, their wiUingness to follow 
 has no significance. When we say, "Come to the 
 platform of Tolstoi," every one knows what that is. 
 It is the extreme doctrine of the non-resistance of 
 evil as the solution of earth's problems. When we 
 say, "Come to the standpoint of Henry George," 
 all men understand our meaning. It is the doctrine 
 of the single tax as the relief from social distress. 
 But when, after nineteen centuries of debate and 
 misconstruction, we now say, "Come to Christ," 
 does the world really know what we mean? To 
 show the world what such coming really involves, 
 to explain Christ's attitude toward God and man, 
 toward the family and the church, toward knowledge 
 and joy and sacrifice and death and eternity, to 
 show what it means to enter into that attitude so 
 as again to say, "Christ liveth in me" — that is the 
 endless task of the Christian preacher. That is an 
 essential part of the task of the evangelist. If we 
 could show our Lord as he really is, if we could 
 strip off the accretions of the centuries as men have 
 stripped off the pigments from Giotto's picture of 
 Dante on the church wall in Florence, if we could 
 make clear the supreme miracle of Christ's character, 
 would not the world hasten to receive and acknowl- 
 edge him? And if we leave Christ still unknown, 
 and get men to go through the motions of a formal 
 allegiance, our evangelism has no more value than 
 
2l6 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 if we had secured recruits for a journey to the 
 mountains of the moon. The whole enterprise is 
 unreal and the whole decision futile. "Who art 
 thou, Lord?" is the first cry of the bewildered and 
 seeking soul. Unless evangelism can answer that, 
 it has no place in the Christian church. When 
 that is answered in deep and searching instruction, 
 we may be sure that the allegiance of the soul 
 cannot long be delayed. A teaching evangelism is 
 one of the crying needs of our age. 
 
 And this will naturally be followed by a teaching 
 pulpit in the regular services of the church. I do 
 not mean that we need a return to the didacticism 
 of a former generation. But I mean a pulpit that 
 shall grapple with the intelligence before it, and 
 seek to move men not only by power of appeal, 
 but by genuine communication of truth. Every 
 preacher may find a keen delight in ministering 
 to the strongest minds in his congregation. Some 
 preachers unconsciously repel their strongest hearers, 
 and draw to themselves only the more pliant and 
 docile spirits. Some denominations have driven 
 out many of their strongest ministers and laymen, 
 or at least allowed them to depart, by a repressive 
 and protesting attitude. As Spain through its 
 Inquisition banished or silenced her most powerful 
 and self-reliant minds, as Italy by feud and tumult 
 drove from her cities Dante and Savonarola, so 
 a religious body may make it difficult for original 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 21/ 
 
 and conceiving spirits to live within it. Such a 
 church must be content with men of the purely 
 receptive and innocuous type, blameless and un- 
 achieving. But a strong and victorious ministry 
 will make stout appeal to strong men. It will not 
 be content with the role of trained nurse, ministering 
 to the weak and wounded, but will set the trumpet 
 to its lips and summon the most courageous spirits 
 of the time. If it is our duty to feed milk to babes, 
 it is equally our duty to place strong meat before men. 
 In listening to some speakers we begin to discover 
 how many paths are dangerous, how few things are 
 possible, how small hfe has gotten to be. In listen- 
 ing to others, we have the sense of opening doors 
 and windows and the inrush of morning light and 
 air. We discover, as they speak, how many things 
 are possible for us all, how feeble are the lions in 
 the way, how glorious the liberty of the children of 
 God. A religious leader must be more than a 
 builder of fences. He must show us that, while 
 fences are necessary, the ledges underlie them and 
 the eagles soar over them and the stars revolve above 
 them, and that the pasture is but a little part of 
 the great and turning world. Thus the educational 
 ministry becomes a dynamic ministry. Because it 
 goes deep, it releases power. Because it is patient 
 and wiUing to labor for remote ends, it accomplishes 
 things that no hurried worker can ever achieve. 
 But the minister must be the leader of educational 
 
2l8 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 forces in a still larger sense. If the entire community 
 is, as we have said, alive and throbbing with as- 
 piration after knowledge, that aspiration should 
 naturally look to the minister for encouragement 
 and guidance. I have known a pastor to discour- 
 age his young people from pursuing Chautauqua 
 courses on the ground that the Bible is sufficient 
 for young Christians to study. I have known other 
 pastors to kindle in their young people a zeal for 
 knowledge which has permeated the whole com- 
 munity. A minister may organize his eager young 
 minds into circles for reading, for debate, for study 
 of literature or art or history. He may plant in 
 many a boy's mind an ambition which shall drive 
 him later into college and perhaps into the ministry. 
 He may form a guild for Bible study and bring before 
 it some of the foremost religious thinkers of our time. 
 The minister who each winter can bring into a rural 
 community some forceful teacher of commanding 
 powers, for even a single address, may stimulate 
 minds long inert and cold into enthusiasm and 
 devotion. The man who brings before his con- 
 gregation a series of teachers, — the missionary 
 with his picturesque narrative, the settlement worker 
 with his revelation of how the other half lives, the 
 civic reformer with his stirring appeal, the archae- 
 ologist with his latest discoveries in Assyrian sands 
 — the man who thus constantly calls to his aid 
 well-known leaders of noble enterprise is enlarging 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 2I9 
 
 the souls around him by the irresistible processes 
 of education. Each congregation contains minds 
 that would eagerly respond to such stimulus. It 
 is the minister's business to know, or at least to 
 know about, the men and women who are doing 
 things in the modern world, and to devise ways 
 of bringing such leaders into contact with the life 
 of his parish. 
 
 The average church member knows nothing about 
 the enormous evils of child-labor in America. He 
 would eagerly offer personal ministration to one 
 little child that he had discovered on the curb- 
 stone or in a cellar. But the children that toil all 
 night in the cotton-mills, the Httle boys that run to 
 and fro to escape the molten masses in the glass 
 factory — of them he knows little or nothing. He 
 still lives in the region of individualistic ethics and 
 sporadic charity. But if the facts regarding child- 
 labor in this country could be set vividly before the 
 average church, and the church could be really in- 
 structed as to what has been done and should be done 
 to change them, each church would at once become 
 a regiment of crusaders. At present our churches 
 have remained apathetic, merely because untaught. 
 A ministry which has nothing to say regarding the 
 crushing out of young life in this country by the 
 industrial Moloch is surely a somnolent affair. 
 
 So it is with the various plans for upbuilding and 
 ennobling the communities we dwell in. To whom 
 
220 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 should the village improvement society look for 
 counsel and aid with greater assurance than to the 
 minister? Every movement for civic betterment, 
 for public lectures, for night schools, for the study of 
 literature, for advancement of science, should find 
 in the minister warmest support. If he, as the 
 educational director of a congregation, is indifferent 
 toward the study of great public issues and en- 
 deavors, his people will soon catch and reflect his 
 indifference. If he is hospitable to new forms of 
 effort, familiar with the latest methods in social 
 relief, a constant student of economic and social 
 movements, the people will naturally go to him for 
 direction in reading and for guidance in action. 
 By thus bringing his local church into correlation 
 with the strongest altruistic forces and the noblest 
 organizations around it, a minister is training up 
 large-hearted and broad-minded men and women, 
 i In all this work of Christian education the ministerj 
 has the supreme inspiration of dealing with young 
 and receptive minds. The men who sit at the 
 head of the pew on Sunday morning are probably 
 beyond the period when great changes are possible. 
 Just in proportion to their success in life may be 
 their moral impenetrability. Why should they 
 wish to remodel a life which the world has honored, 
 or reconstruct a society which has given them wealth, 
 position and influence ? They can be strengthened 
 in good resolves already made; they can be com- 
 
THE DIRECTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 221 
 
 forted in trouble; but their religious education is at 
 an end, their successful career has been a finish- 
 ing school. But scattered all over the congregation, 
 or assembled in close ranks in the Sunday-school, 
 are the young and open minds that are ready for 
 intellectual and spiritual adventure. They long to 
 move, to act, to climb, to experience. To look down 
 on such a gathering is like looking down on hundreds 
 of steam-engines, standing on the track, with the 
 steam up and the mechanism panting. There is 
 no difficulty in getting them to move! The only 
 difiiculty is in getting them to move off on the right 
 rails, to take from the wilderness of interwoven 
 tracks the single path of shining steel which will 
 bring them to the chosen city. The constant ab- 
 sorbing problem is not to create energy in our young 
 people, but to give to the energy they already possess 
 outlet and direction. We are dealing with forces 
 indestructible and mighty, — the appetite for knowl- 
 edge, the craving for action, the aspiration for 
 achievement and for character. To organize and 
 guide such powers is the minister's unavoidable > 
 r duty and increasing joy. -J 
 
VII 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH AND THE 
 COLLEGE 
 
 "After God had carried us safe to New England, and we 
 had builded our houses, provided necessaries for our Hveli- 
 hood, reard convenient places for God's worship, and setled 
 the civill government, one of the next things we longed for 
 and looked after was to advance learning and perpetuate 
 it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministery to the 
 churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." 
 — New England's First Fruits (1643). 
 
 "Resolved: that we will all heartily unite as one man in 
 ... the affair of Building a Meeting House for the public 
 worship of Almighty God; and also for holding Commence- 
 ment in." — Records (1774) of First Baptist Church in Provi- 
 dence. 
 
LECTURE VII 
 
 THE RELATION OF THE CHURCH AND THE 
 COLLEGE 
 
 In an ideal society there would exist neither 
 college nor church. "I saw no temple therein," 
 says John of Patmos, and if we were to complete 
 the vision we might add: "I saw no school therein." 
 In patriarchal times the home sufficed both for a 
 place of worship and a place of study. The father 
 was both priest and pedagogue to his family. We 
 may imagine the coming of a time when religion 
 in the home shall be so deep and pervasive that the 
 family altar shall be the only altar, and when educa- 
 tion shall come to all — as it came to John Ruskin 
 and John Stuart Mill — from parents and relatives 
 with little or no instruction in formal schools. 
 
 But that time is not yet. The home is to-day far 
 from ideal, and is often lamentably unfitted for the 
 training of children or the nourishment of the in- 
 tellectual life in young men and women. We must 
 remove them temporarily from the home in many 
 cases in order to develop and train them. Hence 
 as the house of Justus "joined hard to the synagogue," 
 the modern home ought to join hard to the church 
 on the one side and the school on the other. 
 
 Q 225 
 
226 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 But here comes the ever present difficulty. This 
 differentiation of function may lead to antagonistic 
 attitudes and contradictory results. If in the church 
 the young man finds the spirit of devotion upper- 
 most and in the college the spirit of investigation; 
 if on Sunday he is taught submission to authority 
 as the highest duty, and on Monday the duty of 
 scrutinizing all authority and yielding only to reason; 
 if from the pulpit the great message is one of obedi- 
 ence, and from the professor's chair the message 
 is one of freedom; if in church the primary virtue 
 is self-sacrifice, and in the college is self-realization; 
 if in the church the Bible is made an infallible oracle, 
 and in the college is made simply the repository 
 of the legends of an ancient race; if in the church 
 the saint is the man of humiliation, self-abasement, 
 and penitence, while in the college the ideal is self- 
 respect, courage, and achievement — what is to be 
 the outcome in the character of our young people? 
 Will they react from education, and fear the light 
 which is yet to break out of God's word? Will 
 they come to share the attitude of Tolstoi, to whose 
 severe asceticism art, literature, science, law, and 
 the chief institutions of civilization are the foes of 
 the primitive and genuine Christian faith? Or will 
 they react from the church of their fathers and take 
 refuge in science and philosophy ? Or will they — 
 worst fate of all — believe one thing on Sunday 
 and another thing on Monday, living in more or 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 22/ 
 
 less conscious duplicity and self-sophistication? 
 No greater service could one render to the cause of 
 Christianiity than to help the college and the church 
 into closer mutual understanding and cooperation. 
 No greater need is now upon us than the need of 
 the integration of the intellectual and the religious 
 life of our time. What are the elements in the 
 problem? What is the nature of this obvious 
 antithesis ? 
 
 I. The college has undergone a complete in- 
 tellectual revolution in the last forty years, and the 
 church has not. How extraordinary that revolution 
 is, may be seen from reading in Senator Hoar's 
 *' Reminiscences" his description of the nature of 
 the instruction he received as a boy in Harvard 
 College. In the personnel of the faculty, in the 
 relations of the faculty and students, in the ideals 
 of life, in the attitude toward the physical and the 
 mental world, in the method of approach to every 
 study, in the criteria of truth, in the attitude of the 
 student toward the unknown and the infinite, there 
 has been a startling change. 
 
 In our colleges the study of modem physical 
 science has introduced a degree of objectivity into 
 all study which was almost unknown in the days 
 of our fathers. The study of literature naturally 
 and necessarily produces reverence for great names, 
 regard for authority, acceptance of estabhshed 
 standards, and a conservative attitude toward in- 
 
228 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 stitutions civil and religious. The study of science 
 on the other hand necessarily and rightly produces 
 reverence for fact rather than for authority, cul- 
 tivates the spirit of inquiry and personal investi- 
 gation, and inclines one to a critical attitude toward 
 accepted canons and established institutions. It is 
 for this reason that Oxford has for centuries been 
 the home of English conservatism, while the German 
 university, with its great development of science, 
 has been the home of many radical theories and 
 movements. But our colleges, though founded 
 on the Oxford plan, have in the past thirty years 
 been passing under the influence of German ideals. 
 The method of teaching has been steadily away 
 from the formal recitation, requiring of the student 
 passive listening and repetition, and toward the 
 laboratory method, in which the student actually 
 does the work under the teacher's supervision, and 
 learns to draw his own conclusion. Students trained 
 under such a method think of truth, not as a com- 
 pleted deposit to be received with becoming humility, 
 but as a growing possession to be won by each man 
 for himself. They apply the scientific method 
 not only in physics and chemistry, but in language 
 and history and political economy. Under the 
 old-fashioned college curriculum, the unity of the 
 students consisted in the fact that all were passing 
 through the same course of study. Under present 
 conditions the unity is found in the fact that all the 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 229 
 
 students, whether in philosophy, or engineering, 
 or biology, or history, pursue the same inductive 
 method of observation of facts, classification of 
 facts, inference, verification, and conclusion. 
 
 But this method of approach to truth is still 
 struggling for recognition in our churches. The 
 student in a chemical laboratory, when he finds 
 that a certain reaction has produced a wholly 
 unexpected result, is aroused and delighted. Noth- 
 ing would please him so much as the discovery of 
 some entirely novel fact, compelling the recon- 
 struction of his theory. He regards all theories as 
 working hypotheses to be modified and superseded 
 as men come ever closer to reality. Nothing in 
 recent intellectual history is more striking than the 
 attitude of men of science toward the discovery 
 of the radio-active substances. Instead of mani- 
 festing chagrin because their previous theory of the 
 constitution of matter was imperilled, instead of 
 resentment toward the discoverer, our chemists 
 and physicists, the world over, showed keenest 
 interest in the new discovery, patiently interrogated 
 the evidence, and quietly began to make room for 
 it in their fundamental theory. Would an ecclesi- 
 astical council have shown the same temper if 
 confronted with entirely new facts regarding the 
 origin of the Hebrew tabernacle, or the development 
 of the New Testament canon ? Would a minister's 
 conference always show the same temper when 
 
230 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 discussing temperance instruction in our public 
 schools ? 
 
 It will, of course, be said that the investigation 
 of the action of radium is a purely impersonal 
 matter remote from our daily interests; and that 
 this detached scientific attitude is quite impossible 
 when men come to deal with vital questions of morals 
 and religion. But does this mean that in one realm 
 of study we may expect candor, and in the other may 
 not? Does it mean that we must have one set of 
 men to study the use of alcohol in the arts, and 
 another set of men, with different temper and 
 different rules of evidence, to study the effect of 
 alcohol on the human body? Then indeed we are 
 in evil case. If it be true, as it surely is, that in 
 discussing great economic and social and moral 
 problems, our human nature is stirred to its very 
 depths, and our primal hopes and fears are in- 
 volved, all the greater is the need of men of such 
 training and open-minded habit that they will never 
 bend facts to wishes or judge truth by its conse- 
 quences to themselves. The existence of these 
 two attitudes toward truth is perhaps the chief 
 cause to-day of the bewilderment of our young 
 people. 
 
 In a religious paper recently there appeared an 
 earnest argument for the observance of the two 
 church ordinances. Baptism and the Lord's Supper, 
 urging that, whatever textual criticism might say, 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 23 1 
 
 those sacred rites must have . been estabhshed by 
 Christ himself, since it was inherently probable 
 that Christ would have gathered up the central 
 truths of his religion and have embodied them in 
 two so simple, beautiful, and significant ceremonies. 
 But this method of reasoning is one that could never 
 be used by the man of truly modern education. He 
 has long ago learned to distrust all arguments from 
 fitness and inherent probability, and to ask not 
 what might well be, but what was and is. In the ) 
 theological seminary some of us were instructed,/ 
 as the first reason for believing in the inspiration, 
 of the Scriptures, that it was ''antecedently prob- 
 able" that a divine being would reveal himself, \ 
 and would preserve that revelation in written form 
 for the guidance of men. Such an argument, 
 whatever its intrinsic value, makes no impression i 
 whatever on the n*an educated in the last thirty^ 
 years, or the man who is in touch with the thinking i 
 of the present day. Nothing is sadder than to see < 
 in many a modern church an earnest faithful preacher, 
 and before him a group of college students to whom 
 the preacher's entire utterance is not only uncon- 
 vincing but fairly unintelligible. Even when he 
 and they hold the same truth, they hold it in such 
 different ways and express it in such different terms, 
 that neither can be understood by the other. The 
 basal assumption, the method of reasoning, the entire 
 vocabulary employed in the modern church, is dif- 
 
232 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 ferent from that of the modern school. The 
 Protestant church does not indeed use Latin as the 
 vehicle of its worship. But an ancient language 
 would be no more a barrier to modern men than 
 ancient modes of conceiving, defending, and apply- 
 ing truth. In this twofold vocabulary lies a prob- 
 lem demanding the serious study of all preachers 
 and teachers. 
 
 2. The college stands for analysis as the instru- 
 ment of knowledge ; the church, whether by instinct 
 or by intention, exalts synthesis as the foundation 
 of both theology and life. 
 
 A child looks out of the window on a distant 
 forest and is taught to pronounce the word "forest." 
 But the child has only a dim and blurred idea of 
 what the word means. His thought of it is a mere 
 unanalyzed impression. In later years the growing 
 boy goes out into that forest and threads its wind- 
 ing paths. He learns to distinguish pine and 
 hemlock, oak and maple and cedar; learns where 
 the birds build their nests; where the mayflowers 
 hide under the leaves; where the nuts fall and the 
 squirrels chatter. Now the boy begins to put 
 together the ideas gained out of these varied ex- 
 periences, and to construct a wholly new conception 
 of the thing we call "forest." When now he hears 
 that word, there comes before his mind, not the 
 blurred and childish image, not the hearsay gained 
 from some book or teacher, but the distinct and 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 233 
 
 vivid experience gained by repeated personal in- 
 spection of the woods. 
 
 Our boys usually come to college with just such 
 blurred ideas of truth. Religion to many of them 
 consists in attending a certain church, or observing 
 certain ceremonies, or reciting a certain creed. 
 Patriotism is the waving of banners and marching 
 in procession. Success is achieving wealth by 
 manipulation of laws and of men. Freedom is 
 being set loose from obedience to law. Knowledge 
 is something contained in books, and to be recited 
 under fear of failure and disgrace. Law is a set of 
 statutes which men of a past generation have some- 
 how imposed on the men of to-day. Government 
 is a chance for the achievement of personal dis- 
 tinction through obedience to the party leaders. 
 Home is a richly furnished house in which one can 
 lavishly entertain a host of admiring friends. 
 
 At once the college takes those boys of blurred 
 vision, and begins to stir up their preconceived ideas. 
 After the drill of freshman year is over, the college 
 sets the student face to face with the ancient problems. 
 It teaches him the primary duty of personal inves- 
 tigation. It bids him cross-question his own ex- 
 perience. It asks him what he really means by 
 freedom, success, patriotism, religion. It asks 
 him what is the true place in our civilization of 
 knowledge, of law, of government, of the home. 
 Unless the student is a very block, he is aroused, 
 
234 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 bewildered, thrilled, when set face to face in the 
 class-room with the inquiries: What is the soul? 
 Is it series of sensations, or immortal entity ? What 
 are human rights — mere conventions of society, 
 or inalienable and eternal? Is private property a 
 modern fetich, or a divine bestowal? Is socialism 
 the revival of primitive Christianity, or its antip- 
 odes? Is patriotism a narrowing, or an enlarge- 
 ment of the individual? Is government' a shrewd 
 device of the few to restrain the many, or are the 
 powers that be ordained of God? Is the home 
 a disappointment and a tyranny, or is it the basis of 
 civilization? Is life itself the cunning and transient 
 combination of molecules, or is it shot through with 
 eternal meaning? 
 
 The student faces these world-old problems for 
 at least three years in the open discussions of the 
 class-room and the free experiments of the laboratory. 
 No true college is now content to offer a set of dog- 
 matic answers. The university method — whether 
 wisely or unwisely — has been carried down into 
 the college years. The college no longer seeks to 
 teach the student what is true in all fields of study, 
 but to give him the love of truth and show him the 
 way to find it. The college shows him that the 
 way to truth in all realms is by analysis of the facts 
 in our possession. By breaking up the ideas we 
 already possess into their component parts, by 
 separating the rock into its constituents, by ana- 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 235 
 
 lyzing the ore into its elements, by dissecting the 
 body into its tissues and filaments, by dividing 
 and subdividing the epic or history into documents 
 — by subjecting all the world within and without 
 to the critical, dissolving process of mental analysis, 
 we take the first essential step in grasping its hidden 
 meaning. The college must seize the student, 
 as it were, by the coat-collar, and shake him out of 
 dogmatic slumber. It must show him how little 
 he knows, how baseless are many of his prejudices, 
 how easy is illusion, and awakens him to a life-long 
 enthusiasm in the search for truth. This is a peri- 
 lous but essential process. Those who pass through 
 it under wise and strong guidance become men of 
 intellectual and moral power. Those who never pass 
 through it remain either dogmatists or children — 
 in either case unawakened and afraid. 
 
 But the work of the church is obviously different, 
 or rather it is with a different emphasis. It deals 
 with motive rather than with process, with personal 
 purpose and result rather than with mechanical 
 cause and effect. It seeks to combine the scattered 
 aims and hopes and insights of each individual man 
 into a single world-view, and give him a single 
 animating purpose to live by, and if need be to die 
 by. It offers each man a vision of the nearness of 
 God and the meaning of fife, and demands of each 
 man a supreme consecration of his whole being to 
 one great end. 
 
236 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 Here surely is ample opportunity for misunder- 
 standing and antagonism. Happily the antagonism 
 between college and church is far less than a century 
 ago. At the opening of the nineteenth century in 
 one famous New England college the students dubbed 
 themselves with the names of noted scoffers at re- 
 ligion, and in another only two students could be 
 found who ventured to call themselves Christians. 
 At that time atheism was the badge of culture, and 
 when the poet Shelley was leaving Oxford, banished 
 because of his disbelief, he wrote in the album of an 
 English inn: "Percy Bysshe Shelley — student, 
 philanthropist, atheist." That bit of bravado would 
 be impossible for any student to-day. Unbelief has 
 grown modest, and faith has grown kind. 
 
 But still the antithesis between the attitude of 
 analysis and the attitude of obedience remains, 
 requiring much mutual tolerance, conference, and 
 cooperation on the part of college and church. If 
 the analytic habit inculcated by education shall de- 
 generate into the mere habit of objection, into arro- 
 gant assumption, paralyzing all power to reach con- 
 clusions and to act, then the college becomes the foe 
 of the inner life. If the obedience demanded by 
 the church is mere submission to external authority, 
 mere closing of the eyes to facts in order to avoid 
 debate and delay, then the church becomes the foe 
 of truth and of Him who is the truth. If the college 
 selects for its teachers men dominated by intellectual 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 23/ 
 
 curiosity but devoid of moral earnestness, and if the 
 church exalts as its ministers men in whom good 
 intentions have replaced intellectual veracity and 
 fearlessness, then the college and the church will 
 constantly clash and our young people be left bafHed 
 and distracted. 
 
 3. The church stands for religion conceived chiefly 
 as worship, while the type of religion found in our 
 colleges makes more of action than of devotional 
 exercises, and emphasizes not so much the forms of 
 worship as the altruistic spirit. It is clear that 
 worship, the utterance of the soul to God, is not only 
 the highest exercise of which man is capable, but is 
 essential to the maintenance of Christianity in the 
 world. Without it Christianity would sink to the 
 level of humanitarianism and the church become 
 a mere mutual improvement society. Yet it has 
 been questioned whether the modern emphasis on 
 religious services, and the endeavor to secure the 
 attendance of the public upon them, finds much sup- 
 port in the New Testament. Apparently the stated 
 services of the early church were for the members 
 only, while the contact with the world outside was 
 chiefly in the form of helpful human service, or in 
 public address apart from formal worship. 
 
 However that may be, we must acknowledge that 
 the college student of our day does not find as much 
 profit in devotional exercise as did his father before 
 him. Attendance of college men at church has greatly 
 
238 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 diminished, and in some places almost ceased. 
 The college prayer-meeting is not as effective or 
 useful as thirty years ago, while the college Bible 
 class and social settlement are far stronger than ever 
 before. Reverence is not a characteristic attitude 
 of American youth. But a keener sense of honor, 
 a deeper perception of the obligations of truth and 
 courtesy and chivalry, and a sincerer desire than ever 
 before to be of service to one's fellows are prevalent 
 among college men. This change in the college is 
 only part of a change in our whole generation. The 
 desire to penetrate through forms to reality, the 
 interpretation of religion in terms of action rather 
 than terms of assent, the eager desire to express the 
 Christian spirit through social service — these are 
 marks of the whole temper of the modern Christian 
 world. 
 
 Certainly this antithesis is not fundamental or 
 hopeless. When our universities are insisting on 
 cap and gown and gorgeous hood and stately pro- 
 cession, and are returning to the mediaeval ceremonial 
 on many public occasions, they cannot consistently 
 ignore the power of religious functions in which 
 great assemblies symbolize religious faith. When 
 current Christianity is daily returning more fully to 
 the standpoint of Christ, it cannot refuse to recog- 
 nize Christlike action as the test and proof of genuine 
 religion. 
 
 4. The church stands in the popular mind for a 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 239 
 
 religion of crises; the college naturally stands for a 
 religion of growth. The church with its summons 
 to repentance, its teaching of the new birth, its doc- 
 trine of a final judgment-seat before which we shall 
 all appear, everywhere emphasizes the religious life 
 as a solemn choice, a deliberate turning from sin to 
 righteousness, an act of volition, free and responsible. 
 The college naturally emphasizes religion as culture, 
 as a growth in the soul of man, a gradual unfolding 
 of a higher life, a progressive impartation of the life 
 of God to the soul of man. Any distinct and avowed 
 evangelistic effort of the older type is now distrusted 
 in our larger colleges as an invasion of personality, 
 as an appeal to emotion apart from reason, and as 
 better suited to the rescue mission than the academic 
 hall. By all modern teachers the mind of the stu- 
 dent is conceived as a growing organism, unfolding 
 as does the seed, and needing chiefly nutriment and 
 light. Hence our teachers and students generally 
 are averse to any forcing process in the realm of 
 mind, and they look upon religious development, not 
 as volcanic and catastrophic, but as the quiet unfold- 
 ing of the soul under the inner guidance of the ever 
 present Spirit. They incline in many cases to a 
 monistic view of the world, and to the interpretation 
 of history as a ceaseless evolution of resident forces 
 acting under law. 
 
 The church, on the other hand, feels that it must at 
 all hazards affirm the freedom of man, the power of 
 
240 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 sovereign choice. It is strongly inclined to dualism 
 in philosophy and religion. It refuses to assent to 
 any reign of law which can be understood as an 
 abdication of personality. It protests against the 
 paralysis of a naturalistic view of the world, and 
 resists the " block- universe " of determinism as the 
 foe of ethics and religion. It summons every man 
 to an immediate decision, by which he shall forever 
 identify his personal life with the life of God. 
 
 Here again is the antithesis due chiefly to a dif- 
 ference of approach and emphasis. The churches 
 are steadily coming to realize more deeply the need 
 of Christian nurture, the emptiness of mere for- 
 mal decision, the necessity of the training of young 
 Christians in truth and duty. On the other hand, our 
 psychologists, trained in university laboratories, are 
 to-day everywhere asserting that normal growth is 
 not always at even pace, that the mind has its epochs 
 of development, its crises and transformations, and 
 that true life is too full of surprises to be safely pre- 
 dicted and labelled. But the difference in emphasis 
 remains. The Pauline conversion is still regarded 
 in our churches as the standard and typical expe- 
 rience, while the college looks rather for a gradual 
 increase of vision and a progressive surrender to 
 ideals. 
 
 What suggestions now can be made as to the more 
 intimate understanding and closer alliance of college 
 and church in advancing the kingdom of truth? 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 24 1 
 
 What can preachers and teachers of to-day do to 
 bring about this alliance ? 
 
 We need first of all to secure and develop in the 
 college some large coordinating and unifying pur- 
 pose. This the church in large measure already 
 possesses. The best private schools of our eastern 
 and middle states already possess it; they are closely 
 knit by a single dominant aim which moulds every 
 pupil from the day of entrance to the day of gradu- 
 ation. The college of seventy-five years ago was 
 inwardly correlated and unified by a single ideal, — 
 a course of study to be pursued, and a type of char- 
 acter to be achieved, by every student. But the 
 college of to-day is often "moving about in worlds 
 half realized." It has gained greatly in aggressive 
 effort, and lost in self-consistency. It has often 
 added new departments or courses because some 
 donor happened to be interested, not because pres- 
 ident or faculty planned or desired them. It has 
 enormously gained in extent, and become quite 
 uncertain as to its intent. The smaller colleges often 
 retain a compactness of structure and vividness of 
 ideal which fully compensate for lack of coveted 
 equipment. But our larger institutions have some- 
 times sprawled into sudden bigness, enlarging by 
 pressure from without, instead of developing from 
 a purpose within. Hence the multiplicity of courses, 
 the disconnected glimpses of truth gained from 
 unrelated departments, the conflicting standards 
 
242 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and outlooks, usually arouse and feed the student's 
 curiosity, but leave him hungry for a working theory 
 of life. On the day of his graduation he knows far 
 more facts than his father knew at the same age, 
 but is not nearly so certain as to the meaning of the 
 facts or the purpose and goal of his own life. He 
 feels a dim and vague disappointment at the end of 
 his course, — every college administrator has met 
 that feeling, — because the institution for which he 
 has shouted and fought in so many famous contests 
 has given him a vast array of knowledge, but failed 
 to bring it to a focus in any definite view of human 
 institutions and duties. We may have put the boy 
 for four years under a series of unrelated specialists 
 — as if, wishing him to build up a weak constitution, 
 we had sent him in swift succession to an oculist, 
 an aurist, a dentist, an orthopedist, and expected him 
 by faithfully following all their prescriptions at once 
 to attain robust and vigorous health. One of our 
 well-known educators has suggested that we need 
 in every institution a ''professorship of things in 
 general." At least we need teachers who have not 
 gained erudition in a small province by willing 
 blindness to all other human interests. We need 
 somehow to give our students power to "see life 
 steadily and see it whole." 
 
 Many of our colleges are beginning to realize 
 that they have gone far enough in submitting to 
 German ideals, and are now — notably in the sys- 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 243 
 
 tern of preceptors recently established at Princeton — 
 returning to the older ideals of Oxford. We have 
 long enough exalted the laboratory at the expense of 
 the library. In the laboratory men may test truth, 
 but in the library they discover it. With retort and 
 microscope they may learn the facts regarding certain 
 portions of matter, but only by thinking and re- 
 thinking, by induction and imagination do they hit 
 upon the law which coordinates and illuminates 
 their facts. For what we call new truth is simply 
 the new combination of old ideas, and such combina- 
 tion comes to us when in contact with the world 
 of thought rather than the world of materials. 
 Darwin's great generalization occurred to him, 
 not when gathering specimens on his long voyage, 
 but when reading the famous essay of Malthus on 
 population. 
 
 It will not do to set adrift the callow freshman, at 
 the age of eighteen, in some room devoted to ''re- 
 search," and expect him to discover all truth afresh. 
 It is not good for every sophomore to have imposed 
 upon his immaturity the methods of the graduate 
 school or the German seminary. He needs guidance, 
 suggestion, inspiration, quite as much as test-tubes 
 or microscopes. He needs personal human help, 
 the contagion of scholarly minds and noble characters, 
 more than he needs all syllabi and reference libraries. 
 When Mark Hopkins taught at Williams College, he 
 instructed the entire senior class in all their studies 
 
244 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 throughout the senior year. We can never return, 
 and have no wish to return, to that condition of 
 things in the American college. It is easy to show 
 how much we have gained in variety of method, 
 in electives, in specific and technical equipment on 
 the part of our teachers. It is easy to show also how 
 much we have lost in selecting as teachers so many 
 young men just out of college, or doctors of philos- 
 ophy who are full of a subject but not yet clear as 
 to their object. It is easy to show that teaching is 
 more accurate and informing than forty years ago, 
 but hard to show that it is more efficient in power to 
 mould, to summon, to inspire. Our colleges must 
 renew their allegiance to their earlier ambition. 
 They must exalt the creative above the critical im- 
 pulse. They must decline to estimate growth in 
 terms of endowment, or gates and towers, or great 
 buildings whose maintenance is annually provided 
 for by keeping down the compensation of the teach- 
 ing body. They must persistently think more of 
 men than of materials; more of men that can teach 
 than of those who can write dissertations; more of 
 making useful citizens than of gaining athletic 
 victory or social prestige. 
 
 Our theological seminaries need the exaltation of 
 the creative impulse quite as much as our colleges. 
 Dr. Richard Salter Storrs frankly confessed that his 
 course in the seminary left him so self-critical and 
 fastidious that he was distinctly a poorer preacher 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 245 
 
 at the end of the three years than at the beginning. 
 The aim of the seminary should be, not to produce 
 theological professors, but to train preachers for the 
 active service of the church. A dozen teachers of 
 the New Testament Greek would suffice for all the 
 seminaries and universities in the eastern states for 
 a quarter century. But many hundred ministers 
 will be needed during the same period to direct the 
 broadening activities of the modern church, and to 
 interpret the mind of Christ to the mind of America. 
 No mere linguistic training, no familiarity with out- 
 grown heresies, will equip our ministers for this task. 
 There are some philologists w^ho regard the Sermon 
 on the Mount with precisely the same interest with 
 which the entomologist regards a collection of insects. 
 There are men who decompose the prophecies of 
 Isaiah with the same zeal as that of the chemist in 
 analyzing a new baking powder. But the chemist 
 never dreams that his analysis may be a substitute 
 for bread. Equally useless is it to imagine that any 
 analysis of documents or periods can by itself give 
 us men of leadership and commanding insight. 
 
 A single term may be enough for the study of all 
 the heresies that have ever distracted the Christian 
 church. We need far more time than we now have 
 in our seminaries for the study of missions, of 
 Christian ethics, of religious psychology, of sociology, 
 of the methods of charity, of the relation of social 
 reform to the coming of the Kingdom of God. The 
 
 i 
 
246 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 department of homiletics in the modern theological 
 seminary is especially rich in unrealized possibilities. 
 Long enough has it dealt merely with the making of 
 skeletons and the devices of sacred rhetoric. It 
 should be the cutting-edge of the entire seminary 
 instruction. It is the meeting point between the vast 
 stores of new knowledge the world has now acquired 
 and the actual entrance of that knowledge into hu- 
 man lives as inspiring and transforming power. It 
 may do for theological education what the "case 
 system" has done for legal education and what the 
 clinic has done in the study of medicine. It may 
 bring the students into vitalizing contact with the 
 most influential ministers of our generation. It 
 should keep every student preaching or teaching on 
 every Sunday during his three years in the seminary, 
 and so make sure that, whether he have ten talents 
 or one, that which he does possess is not hidden in a 
 napkin, but ready at any instant for the service 
 of man. 
 
 Vocation, not technical knowledge, should be the 
 goal of our seminaries. They need not less scholar- 
 ship, but more persistent focussing of scholarship 
 on life. Our best schools of engineering, uniting 
 devotion to science, with the steady application of 
 science to the work of construction, may furnish 
 many a useful hint as to the training of those whose 
 higher task it is to "make the crooked straight and 
 the rough places plain." 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 247 
 
 But this reinterpretation of function and read- 
 justment of effort is quite as necessary on the part 
 of the church as on the part of the school, if the two 
 are to come into genuine cooperation. The church 
 must develop the educational ideal to a far greater 
 extent than hitherto. To keep the church in sym- 
 pathy with student life we must not only, as already 
 suggested, speak in the vocabulary of the present day, 
 but must adapt the church more fully to the needs of 
 young men and women. We must indeed comfort 
 the sorrowful, bury the dead, brighten the home of 
 the aged, relieve the poor; but we must not become 
 so absorbed in running the ambulance of the King's 
 army that we have no time to sound the trumpet 
 and lead the host into battle. The average church 
 is adjusted primarily, and perhaps naturally, to fam- 
 ily needs. With its hallowing of birth and bridal, 
 with its provision of the long pew, seen in no other 
 assembly-room, with its pastoral attention to home- 
 makers rather than to bread-winners, the church 
 shows that it considers the family as the unit of its 
 life. But meanwhile in our civilization the family 
 has been unhappily broken and scattered. No lon- 
 ger sitting together around the lamp on a winter 
 evening, no longer rising at the same hour in the 
 morning, or working at the same place during the 
 day, the members of the modern family find their 
 life transformed by the industrial revolution. The 
 unity of the family fifty years ago was expressed in 
 
248 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the fact that all the members were engaged in the 
 same regular tasks at the same hour. Waking 
 at the sound of the same bell or the call of the 
 same voice, they sat together at table three times a 
 day, worked together in the field or the store or the 
 home, and spent the evening together around the 
 fireside or at some neighbor's house. But to-day 
 family unity must be found in a common affection 
 and ideal, surviving the utmost diversity of program 
 and occupation. If all the members meet even once 
 a day, they are rarely fortunate. One must leave 
 for the city by the earliest train, another is travelling 
 through distant states, a third is away at school, 
 another is entertaining some friend for whom the 
 others do not care, and the former unity of program 
 and routine has forever vanished. Family prayers 
 have become in many cases a physical impossibility. 
 The family pew, where once father and mother and 
 children sat in solemn dignity, is now rented in frag- 
 ments and occupied by persons who never meet 
 elsewhere. Both the industrial revolution and the 
 educational renascence have carried the young 
 people far from home, thrown them on their own 
 resources, weakened denominational bonds, broken 
 up the customary religious observances, and forced 
 a new problem upon the church. Many American 
 cities contain thousands of eager students, in board- 
 ing-schools, colleges and institutions for pro- 
 fessional training. Thus the most promising young 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 249 
 
 people of the nation are away from home during the 
 most critical years of their life. If the church is still 
 following the old program presupposing the family 
 circle and the family pew, it must remain uncom- 
 prehending and incomprehensible to the young 
 men and women who crowd beneath its shadow. 
 Young men do not need to be treated as a special 
 class, deserving either special pity as prodigal sons, 
 or special respect as paragons of wisdom and virtue. 
 They need a virile type of thinking, an upright, down- 
 right mode of address, a power to strip off the husk 
 and get at the kernel, and a practical type of religion 
 which insists on going about to do good. They 
 need above all to ''learn by doing," to be set at work 
 for the Kingdom of God. We shall hold them, not 
 by what we do for them, but by what we enable 
 them to do. They covet above all else a sphere of 
 action, a chance to do things that seem worth while. 
 If they do not go to church, it is not always because 
 of antipathy to Christian faith, but frequently be- 
 cause they believe nothing very important is being 
 done there. They will not attend church simply 
 to pay compliments to religion. They will not be 
 allured by effusive greetings in the vestibule, or dis- 
 guised opera in the choir, or processions and vest- 
 ments and genuflections. They will be allured and 
 held and educated by an opportunity to engage in 
 great Christian enterprise under wise and effective 
 leadership. 
 
250 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 If any one of us received two invitations for the 
 same afternoon, one to an afternoon tea and the 
 other to a meeting of the board of directors of some 
 corporation in which we had invested half our 
 savings, there would be no question of our choice. 
 We should say of the first occasion: ''That is mere 
 formality, exchange of greetings and compliments; 
 no one will suffer from my absence." We should 
 say of the other meeting: ''There my interests and 
 those of my family are at stake. There principles 
 will be discussed, policies decided, and action taken 
 which may affect all our future — at all hazards I 
 must be there." The young people of our time 
 do not and cannot identify religion with respectful 
 attendance at a formal service which appears to 
 them to convey no new knowledge or lead to no new 
 action. If they can be led to think of worship as the 
 true and essential preparation for service, and to 
 conceive the church as a headquarters of Christian 
 enterprise, their response will not be long delayed. 
 
 Many churches would be sorely embarrassed if 
 twenty young men should apply for membership 
 in a single year. We should hardly know what to 
 do with them. If a young man is fluent in speech, 
 or able to assist financially, we can at once place him. 
 There is the Sunday-school or the Young People's 
 Society for the man who can speak, and surely there 
 are abundant opportunities for the man who can 
 give. But the man whose chief talent lies in a 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 2$! 
 
 very different direction, would sometimes find better 
 opening for definite human service in a social settle- 
 ment or a Roman Catholic brotherhood than in the 
 average Protestant church. If we could use more 
 men, we should have more men to use. The church 
 of the future will devise means to bring into action 
 the vast latent powers of its detached young men and 
 women — detached because not yet convinced that 
 the church is willing or able to harness their energies 
 into helpful, inspiring service to their generation. 
 
 From every church thus in sympathy with young 
 life there will constantly go forth a procession of 
 young people into our Christian schools and colleges. 
 Such a church must take a constantly growing inter- 
 est in education. The endowed Christian academy 
 has wrought a memorable work in our country, a 
 work not yet completed or superseded. If our 
 public schools cannot give religious instruction 
 and social watch-care, there will always be needed 
 for some pupils well-equipped private schools under 
 the fostering care of the church. To plan and 
 nourish such schools, and send to them some of the 
 choicest of its young people, will always be the am- 
 bition of a far-seeing church. It is most significant 
 that three of the foremost evangelists of the last 
 generation gave the closing years of their lives to 
 the founding and developing of Christian schools. 
 Charles G. Finney did his most enduring work at 
 Oberlin. Charles H. Spurgeon, as he grew older, 
 
252 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 devoted ever increasing time and labor to his college 
 for the training of ministers. Dwight L. Moody's 
 real monument is not in the great auditoriums that 
 he filled, or the volumes of sermons he scattered in 
 every civilized land, but in the groups of buildings 
 and the hundreds of students gathered in the Con- 
 necticut Valley. These men, gifted to an extraor- 
 dinary degree with power of personal impact and 
 suasion, came to see that their message to the world 
 would be evanescent unless placed upon an educa- 
 tional basis, and embodied in some enduring school. 
 Our foreign missionaries have slowly but surely 
 reached the same attitude. The great missionary 
 enterprise began simply with the idea of individual 
 rescue. Millions were falling daily into eternal dark- 
 ness, and by heroic endeavor a few souls might be 
 plucked from the general destruction. The most 
 the church could hope to do was hurriedly to an- 
 nounce the good tidings by itinerant evangelism, and 
 thus clear its skirts of responsibility for the general 
 doom. Later came to our missionary leaders the 
 idea of the possible evangelization of the whole world 
 in this generation. Then came the transformed and 
 transforming idea of actually setting up the King- 
 dom of God in the regions beyond, of embodying its 
 message in permanent institutions, and building 
 schools whose full development would demand 
 a thousand years. In these schools, on the Bos- 
 phorus, the Ganges, the Yang-tse-Kiang, the Congo, 
 
RELATION OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 253 
 
 are now centred the chief hopes of our missionary 
 leaders. Through such schools is coming about 
 a change of religious climate, by which individual 
 allegiance to the Kingdom of Christ will become 
 natural and imperative. In foreign missions, at 
 least, church and college, springing out of the same 
 impulse, founded in the same deep faith, are co- 
 operating for the same great end. 
 
 But the chief need of both college and church, 
 and of our entire civilization as well, is to emphasize 
 the ideal and spiritual elements in human life. The 
 trend of the colleges toward vocational courses of 
 study, for which strong reasons can be presented, 
 and the trend of the churches toward social re- 
 construction, for which equally good reasons can 
 be given — both make it clear that spiritual motives 
 and aims are in danger of being overlaid and 
 obscured. 
 
 We have become almost afraid of the word 
 "spiritual" — it has been so abused and perverted. 
 As the great word charity has sunk to mean merely 
 the tossing of a dole to a sturdy beggar, so the word 
 spiritual has often come to mean the use of a certain 
 phraseology, the exclusive dwelling on certain aspects 
 of truth, or the adoption of a sanctimonious tone 
 and manner. But the word is too noble in mean- 
 ing and association to be lightly surrendered. It 
 must be recalled to its original and lofty use. Spiritu- 
 ality is the power to pass beneath forms and formulas 
 
254 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and materials, and perceive the spirit which ani- 
 mates them and gives them significance. It is the 
 power to penetrate behind the outward appearance 
 of an object, an event, an institution, or behind the 
 visible world itself, and apprehend the spirit which 
 gives to the outer symbol all its validity and mean- 
 ing. The unspiritual man is not he who fails to 
 pronounce certain shibboleths or observe certain 
 conventions; it is he who habitually lives in the 
 mere world of appearances and materials. But he 
 who perceives the ideal within the material, the spirit 
 within the body, the eternal presence behind the 
 fickle fleeting world, is the man clothed with power 
 of spiritual discernment and leadership. 
 
 The college must indeed have its equipments 
 and endowments. It cannot remain "an old log 
 with the great teacher on one end and the student 
 on the other." The great teacher is precisely the 
 one that will not remain in that position, or narrow 
 his pupil to that horizon. The college must have 
 its apparatus for modern teaching, or remain in- 
 trospective and provincial. But it must regard as 
 still more imperative the possession of men of insight 
 into moral and spiritual values. It must realize 
 that facts are worthless until seen in their relations, 
 and events meaningless apart from standards of 
 value, and all whetting of the mental powers is 
 futile unless the spirit of man is permeated with 
 just and vivid ideas of what is truly worth while. 
 
RELATION OF .CHURCH AND COLLEGE 255 
 
 The church needs, as we have urged, new ma- 
 terials and methods. It may have its kinder- 
 gartens and sewing-classes and vacation schools 
 and guild houses, and the clubs whose name is 
 legion. It must have, as we have shown, vital 
 relation to the institutions about it, to the great 
 movements for human uplift, for sweetening the 
 life of city and country. But the amount of this 
 work it can undertake depends absolutely on the 
 clearness of its spiritual perception and the depth of 
 its own inner life. The moment it turns from the 
 vision of God, and begins merely to serve tables, 
 that moment it is crippled. If the church — the 
 only institution in our civilization which professes 
 a fundamentally spiritual aim — begins to surrender 
 its supreme allegiance to the Christian motive, and 
 consents to be merely a purveyor of second-hand 
 clothing and fresh-air funds and charity tickets, it 
 will become the heaviest disappointment of history, 
 mocking the deeper needs of men in its short-sighted 
 attempt to supply them with three meals a day. 
 We need more, not less, of humanitarian effort; 
 more equipment for healing the sick and clothing 
 the naked. But we can preserve this work from 
 superficiality and futility only as we bring it into 
 relation to the Kingdom of God. To give a cup of 
 cold water "in his name" is not merely to quench 
 a thirst that will soon return, but to do a single 
 trivial deed as part of the universal moral order, 
 
256 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and to link that thirsty man with powers that spring 
 up into everlasting life. 
 
 The need of our country is not to lift marble to 
 the fortieth story of some new office building, 
 but to lift the level of character; not to whiten the 
 seas with the sails of our commerce, but to develop 
 those simple fidelities and homely virtues which are 
 the cheap defence of nations. When Tennyson 
 wrote "The Crossing of the Bar,'' he did more for 
 civilization than if he had built any ocean-Hner or 
 man-of-war. Thomas Stevenson did much for 
 England when he built the lighthouses which send 
 their radiance each night over the tossing waters 
 of the Channel. But we owe far more to his son, 
 Robert Louis Stevenson, because he taught us how 
 to kindle a light within, how to keep the soul serene 
 and steadfast in the face of pain and death. When 
 Millet seized his brush and painted the "Angelus" 
 on the bit of canvas that cost him three francs, he 
 did more for labor and the laboring man than if he 
 had seized a spade and worked for fifty years in 
 the fields of France. Not the men who add to our 
 quantity of materials, but the men who deepen the 
 quaUty of our living, are the real benefactors and 
 educators of the world. In such high endeavor our 
 antagonisms vanish, because we become workers 
 together with God. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS 
 TASK 
 
 "One dared to die; in a swift moment's space 
 Fell in war's forefront, laughter on his face. 
 Bronze tells his fame in many a market place. 
 
 " Another dared to live ; the long years through 
 Felt his slow heart's blood ooze like crimson dew 
 For duty's sake, and smiled. And no one knew." 
 
LECTURE VIII 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS 
 
 TASK 
 
 Every minister is on the day of his ordination 
 simply an educated possibihty. He is not a finished 
 instrument, but an emerging power. He stands Hke 
 Milton's ''tawny lion, pawing to get free his hinder 
 parts." One half his nature is often still immersed 
 in the aims and ideals of the library and the lecture 
 room, the other is reaching out to the world of men 
 and of action. His creed is half formed, his methods 
 tentative, his abilities unknown, his success prob- 
 lematical. He has indeed a great overmastering 
 conviction, but which way that conviction will 
 drive him, and what sort of instrument will result, 
 no man or church can tell. " Ye are branches," said 
 Christ to the original band of Christian preachers. 
 The quality of the branch is indeed determined; 
 but its rate of growth, the direction it will take, 
 the nourishment it will find, the value of the fruit 
 it will bear — all this is fascinatingly uncertain. 
 The minister is at ordination usually plunged into 
 a wholly new environment, and the reaction of that 
 environment on his character and ideals is profound 
 
 259 
 
260 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and constant. If he is a man of tenacity and self- 
 assertion, he may change but slowly. If he is, as 
 religious men usually are, sensitive to all the in- 
 tellectual and spiritual forces that play about him, 
 then in some measure his 
 
 "nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 
 
 What is the influence, for good and for evil, of the 
 minister's task on his character? 
 
 I. Every congregation makes a silent and con- 
 tinuous demand for a certain type of preaching. 
 There are, let us say, a thousand men and women in 
 the congregation, and only one in the pulpit, and 
 the pull on the preacher often varies as the mass. 
 The preacher ordinarily does not create his position, 
 he is called to fill it. The office is many centuries 
 older, and may be far stronger, than the man. He 
 finds before him and around him a people, already 
 trained in certain conceptions of truth, certain 
 ideals of life, demanding a certain kind of mental 
 and moral pabulum, and the pull of the audience 
 on the preacher is as unremitting as the attraction 
 of the moon upon the tides. The editor of the news- 
 paper is thus conscious of his readers in every line 
 he writes. The novelist cannot draw a single char- 
 acter without thinking of the demand of the unseen 
 public. But the preacher is under far more power- 
 ful attraction. He is face to face with the men he 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 26 1 
 
 must uplift and inspire. He sees as he speaks the 
 gleam of glad response, the look of bewilderment, 
 the frown of opposition. He knows that a single 
 utterance may cause him to be labelled with some 
 unhappy designation or may give rise to long mis- 
 construction and controversy. Can he keep his 
 rudder true? Can he persist in giving his people 
 what they need rather than what they want ? Instead 
 of tamely offering a supply to meet a popular de- 
 mand, can he create a new demand and stimulate 
 a diviner hunger among his people? 
 
 Here is the secret of the deterioration of the popu- 
 lar orator. Seldom does any man address many hun- 
 dreds of his fellow-men at once for a long series 
 of years without some inner compromise. He sees 
 before him a vast assembly to be roused, stimulated, 
 impressed. He strikes a certain string, it vibrates 
 instantly. He strikes it again and again, not because 
 that particular note is the one needed, but because 
 in that direction he is sure of response. He descends 
 in soul to meet the impatient crowd. He finds that 
 an anecdote holds the audience in rapt attention, 
 and he enlarges his stock of anecdotes. He dis- 
 covers that reference to current topics rouses 
 the most somnolent hearers into eager listening, 
 and he invents a ''prelude" to the sermon. He 
 finds that pathos reaches the will without the neces- 
 sity of convincing the reason, and he falls into the 
 pathetic strain. He learns that an epigrammatic 
 
262 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 and pungent style will produce startling effects, 
 and straightway he bristles with sentences like 
 barbed arrows. He gradually becomes acquainted 
 with the psychology of the great assembly, as a lion- 
 tamer learns the moods of the huge creature he 
 must master or be mastered by. The popular plat- 
 form lecturer is tempted now to humor and flatter 
 his audience, now to startle and dazzle it. By all 
 possible devices he must hold together the assembly 
 whose dwindling would be his disgrace. If they 
 want patriotic fervor and pyrotechnics, why should 
 they not have them ? If they want social or political 
 orthodoxy and repetition of sounding formulas — 
 after all, the speaker is there to meet the public 
 demand. There are no more subtle or powerful 
 temptations in the modern world than those which 
 beset the oratorical temperament face to face with 
 the swift judgments and imperative demands of 
 a great popular audience. Let each one of us look 
 about him and see that the greatest tragedies of 
 the pulpit are not in the case of men who have lost 
 their places, but the men who have kept them by 
 descending in spirit. 
 
 The field in which a young minister first settles 
 at once begins to shape him, while he attempts to 
 shape it. To select a particular field because of the 
 opportunities it affords for personal growth is indeed 
 a small and unheroic proceeding. To go to a certain 
 parish because there one will find leisure, or books, 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 263 
 
 or intellectual stimulus, is to preach in order to be 
 ministered unto, not to minister. The best place 
 for the preacher is the place where he is most needed 
 — no other general prescription can be given. The 
 place for the leaven is in the inert mass of meal; 
 the place for the light is where the darkness is most 
 dense; the place for the religious leader is where 
 religion is rarest and most profoundly needed. 
 Who shall say whether that place be on Fifth 
 Avenue, or in the New England country town, or 
 under the walls of Pekin? There are timid souls 
 in the ministry as everywhere else, who shrink from 
 any genuine intellectual and spiritual adventure. 
 They settle down where labor seems easiest and 
 environment most responsive. And they have their 
 reward — they grow more timid and anaemic as 
 the eventless and insipid years pass. The only 
 negative counsel one can give a young man is never 
 to take a church that is already on the crest of great 
 success; for then the only thing one can do is to 
 hold it there, and that is small satisfaction to an 
 aspiring spirit. The real joy of living is found in 
 laying hold of an enterprise that is struggling, 
 surrounded by difficulties, but obviously needed, 
 and then lifting it slowly, steadily, out of its problems 
 and obstacles into strength and commanding posi- 
 tion. To pour light into darkness, power into weak- 
 ness, and the life of God into the lives of men, 
 is the minister's supreme happiness, . and the place 
 
264 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 where such work is most clearly needed is the place 
 that makes clearest and most persistent call. 
 
 But whatever the field, its silent reaction on the 
 worker at once begins. In a great city he feels 
 the constant demand for administrative ability. 
 He must each day organize, harmonize, correlate 
 discordant forces, and direct them to the achieve- 
 ment of some end. In working among the poverty- 
 stricken tenements he experiences the suffering due 
 to industrial maladjustments, and comes to insist 
 more and more on the social aspects of Christianity. 
 If he is addressing each Sunday an assembly of 
 the prosperous and successful and complacent, he 
 is steadily drawn to a roseate view of life and a 
 general contentment with the economic status quo. 
 Fight as he will against it, his church becomes his 
 training-school. The congregation steadily draw- 
 ing their preacher toward a certain ideal may create 
 a definite ministerial type. The difference in de- 
 nominational types is well known. An entire 
 denomination, surrounding a minister with certain 
 demands for a quarter century, becomes to many 
 men an irresistible power. It would be difficult 
 to imagine a John Henry Newman growing up in 
 the Methodist church, or a Chaplain McCabe in 
 the Anglican communion. The difference between 
 the contemporaneous sermons of Canon Liddon 
 and those of Joseph Parker was due not simply to 
 doctrinal tenets or distinctions of temperament, 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 265 
 
 but to the subjection of both for thirty years to 
 the almost antipodal demands of two audiences, 
 representing distinct historic evolutions and distinct 
 ideals of the prophetic message. 
 
 Happy is the minister who has in the pews before 
 him some man or group of men who will steadily 
 hold him to his best ! A few thoughtful, spiritual 
 listeners may achieve the higher education of their 
 minister. In their presence he is never tempted 
 to stoop. In their appreciation and gratitude he 
 finds support on the darkest day. The power of 
 the laity to create the ministry is seldom recognized. 
 Especially is this evident when, as so often happens, 
 the officers of the church are mature, strong men, 
 and the pastor is young and inexperienced. Such 
 men can often make or break the young minister's 
 career. They can encourage him in the flamboyant 
 and the sensational, or they can by silent or spoken 
 sympathy summon him to educational and spiritual 
 methods which shall make his ministry the joy and 
 crown of the church. 
 
 2. The task of the minister is also educative be- 
 cause of the insight it gives him into human nature 
 — the motives which actuate men, the causes of 
 joy and grief, the reasons for success and failure, 
 the passions and regrets and hungers which lie 
 in the depths of every human heart. The young 
 minister usually knows books better than he knows 
 men. But books are, in Stevenson's phrase, "a. 
 
266 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 mighty bloodless substitute for life." After spending 
 years in the study of literature and theology, it is 
 a startling and wholesome experience to be flung 
 out into a parish, and be compelled to face those 
 primitive human experiences which are the source 
 of all the theologies of the ages. The average 
 seminary gives a man so little of that clinical ex- 
 perience which is the special aim of the medical 
 school, that the young minister may feel far more 
 at home in an alcove of the library than in a group 
 of men assembled to discuss some public wrong, 
 or in a company of friends gathered to comfort a 
 bereaved household. It is his intellectual salvation 
 to be plucked out of a bookish life, and thrust into 
 the tumultuous and complicated strivings of a 
 neighborhood where the noblest and meanest pas- 
 sions of humanity are grappling for mastery. Amid 
 such lurid and pathetic realities how pale and 
 shadowy seem the class-room discussions! What 
 a flood of light is poured on the old problems by 
 the new emergency ! Actually to face the drunkard 
 and libertine and pull him out of the miry clay, 
 actually to grapple with the greed of gain as it 
 throttles leading members of the church, actually 
 to meet the sneers of the scornful with patience and 
 the objection of the sceptic with candor, to offer 
 some genuine consolation to the man whose last 
 hope is under the sod, and to rejoice with them that 
 do rejoice, — which is often harder than to weep 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 267 
 
 with them that weep, — this is to gain such insight 
 into human souls as no poetry or fiction or uni- 
 versity study can give, and to undergo inevitable 
 revisions in one's formulation of truth. 
 
 There is no relation in society quite so intimate 
 as that of pastor and congregation. The nearest 
 thing to it is the relation of the physician and his 
 patients, but this often stops with physical relief for 
 physical ill. There is no kind of mental or moral 
 burden or grief or perplexity which is not brought 
 to the true pastor. He is "acquainted with grief" 
 — a touching phrase, as if human sorrow were so 
 various and intricate that only through laborious 
 process could one become familiar with its inner- 
 most recesses. He is to be acquainted with joy, — 
 its abandon, its excesses, its reactions, its wholesome 
 enlargement of heart and life. He is to go with his 
 people through all the varied territory that Bunyan 
 has pictured, — Doubting Castle, the Valley of the 
 Shadow, Vanity Fair, the Enchanted Ground, the 
 Interpreter's House, and Beulah Land. And all 
 this contact with innermost human experience 
 should give him a psychological insight such as can 
 be gained in no other way. The pride of technical 
 scholarship vanishes as he comes to realize that 
 some men whose theology is hopelessly crooked 
 know God much better than he does. The dil- 
 letantism bred by years of academic seclusion 
 evaporates in the presence of the dire realities of 
 human need. 
 
268 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 I have seen a man of finest intellectual ability, 
 aristocratic bearing, and sensitive disposition, after 
 spending years in the companionship of Matthew 
 Arnold and Amiel, suddenly set down in a miners' 
 camp in California and compelled to address the 
 inhabitants twice a week on the things of the spirit. 
 At first his revulsion was terrible. But after six 
 months he learned that the rough miner had found 
 some things hidden from the wise and prudent, and 
 the preacher achieved a knowledge of humanity, 
 apart from all accidents of birth and occupation, 
 which changed his entire career. If every candidate 
 for the ministry could pass through some such ele- 
 mental and soul-searching experience, our preach- 
 ing would have a realism such as no hours in any 
 library can give. 
 
 3. Side by side with these opportunities lie certain 
 dangers. Among these not the least is the abuse of 
 the ''homiletic habit," i.e, a habit of viewing all 
 truth with reference to its public presentation in 
 sermonic form, and all objects and events as sug- 
 gestive of religious analogies. Such a habit is 
 indeed the mark of an alert mind and a vivid imagi- 
 nation. Just as the mountain suggests to the botanist 
 endless excursions through the fields, to the engineer 
 some new triumph in the construction of tunnels, 
 and to the artist some new canvas for the approach- 
 ing exhibition, so it suggests to the preacher truths 
 which will soon emerge in the pulpit. As he walks 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 269 
 
 abroad through the summer sunshine, or the winter's 
 whirling snow, or the chnging mists of autumn, 
 as he visits battlefields and monuments, he is con- 
 stantly storing up images that will some day "flash 
 upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." 
 He cannot go to the village post-office without 
 finding metaphors and analogies in the thistles of 
 the pasture or in the wayside pool. He cannot 
 view a military pageant without hearing invisible 
 trumpets playing, "Onward, Christian soldiers," 
 or go a-fishing without hearing a far-away voice 
 cry, "Henceforth thou shalt catch men." The 
 life of Tennyson, by his son Lionel, showed us how 
 constantly the great poet jotted down in his note- 
 book descriptions of scenery which were afterward 
 to appear as glowing images in "The Idylls of the 
 King" or "In Memoriam." We can easily under- 
 stand how such a man could stoop enraptured over 
 violets in the grass, crying out, "What an imagina- 
 tion God has!" 
 
 But this habit, so useful, so fruitful, must be 
 held in stem subjection, or it may become a source 
 both of illusion and of tyranny. Analogy is not 
 always argument, and may easily mislead us. It 
 was generally felt that Henry Drummond, in his 
 "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," while giving 
 us much keen insight and helpful suggestion, had 
 yet pressed analogy into identity and overshot his 
 mark. The ancient commentator who found in 
 
2/0 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 the four points of the compass the reason for the 
 existence of the four gospels was the father of a 
 numerous offspring. Such writers find marvellous 
 truths in every curtain of the ancient tabernacle, 
 and discern more gospel in Leviticus than in the 
 writings of St. John. A poetic fancy is a valuable 
 gift only when held in leash by a sound judgment. 
 But the chief danger of the homiletic habit is that 
 it may become so tyrannical as to reduce all truth 
 to mere grist for one's private sermon mill. It may 
 hinder a man from dispassionate and candid study 
 of great ranges of Christian thought, and induce 
 him to regard the universe as mere material for next 
 Sunday's homily. This is as if one should imagine 
 that the entire use of the Hudson or the Mississippi 
 were to fill a private drinking-cup. To study Israel's 
 history, or Augustine's Confessions, or the Great 
 Awakening of New England, merely in order to 
 extract some homiletic nuggets for next Sunday, is 
 to miss entirely the meaning of what we study, and 
 to be hampered by a fatal self-consciousness born 
 of a utiHtarian end. Let a man rather plunge into 
 the study of some great movement or some stirring 
 truth as the swimmer flings himself with abandon 
 into the sea. When he comes out dripping and 
 glowing, he may bring nothing tangible with him, 
 but he has gained a vigor and zest in living which 
 will transform every task he essays. The man who 
 has studied, for example, for six months the swift 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 27I 
 
 spreading of Christianity in the Roman empire, 
 not with a view to edifying incidents which may 
 be set before his congregation, but simply with a 
 view to mastering the truth, will rise before an 
 assembly clothed with genuine and obvious power. 
 He speaks with authority, and not as do the scribes 
 or the rhetoricians. He may possess an imagination 
 that can clothe any truth in brilliant hues; but in 
 all his intellectual product he rigidly subordinates 
 decoration to construction. 
 
 Thus also the preacher is saved from continually 
 applying truth to his neighbors, his community, 
 his state, his nation, and forgetting to preach to 
 himself. Wisdom was in Bengel's saying, "Apply 
 thyself to the text, and then apply the text to thy- 
 self." It is dangerous for a man to view the entire 
 Christian faith simply as a means of exhorting and 
 improving other men. 
 
 Many a truth is spoken in jest, as in Mark Twain's 
 description of his ascent of Mont Blanc by proxy. 
 At the hotel in Chamounix he was urged by his 
 friends to attempt the ascent of the snow-crowned 
 mountain. He shrank, however, from the under- 
 taking, and resorted to the telescope erected in the 
 courtyard of the hotel. Looking through the glass 
 he perceived a party of travellers nearing the summit, 
 and sat there through the whole morning, intensely 
 interested in their progress. When they slipped 
 backward on the icy path, he held his breath in 
 
 y 
 
272 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 anxiety and fear. When they climbed securely 
 upward, he clapped his hands in sympathetic joy. 
 When they rested for a few moments from the ar- 
 duous toil, a sigh of relief escaped him. Thus, he 
 affirms, he obtained all the exhilaration and benefit 
 of the great ascent without himself stirring from the 
 Htde courtyard. 
 
 A man may so fervently urge others to benevolence 
 that he imagines himself to have been benevolent. 
 He may so admirably depict the virtue of forgiveness 
 that he actually supposes himself to have forgiven 
 his enemies. He may so vividly set forth the beauty 
 of self-sacrifice and so sincerely feel that beauty 
 that he comes to think of himself as living a sacri- 
 ficial life. We cannot doubt that Goethe was alive 
 to the beauty of innocence when he painted Mar- 
 guerite, or that Byron as he sang the "Hebrew 
 Melodies" felt the majesty of the Hebraic conscience. 
 But the minister is more than poet or painter. He 
 is the word made flesh. He is not only to "allure 
 to brighter worlds," but to "lead the way." The 
 divorce between vision and life which the world 
 tolerates, and sometimes welcomes, in the artist, 
 it will not tolerate in the prophet. Let the prophef s 
 imagination blossom as it will in all manner of 
 figures and parables; but let him sincerely try to 
 know and live the truth before he attempts to adorn 
 it or apply it to his brother man. 
 
 4. Another distinct element in the education of 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 2/3 
 
 the minister is found in the fact that women con- 
 stitute so large a majority of the membership of our 
 churches. When we consider the vast amount of 
 time spent in pastoral visitation upon women and 
 children, when we remember the numerical prepon- 
 derance of women in the average congregation, it 
 may be said that the greater part of the minister's 
 time and strength is expended in the direction, encour- 
 agement, and consolation of Christian womanhood. 
 This situation cannot fail to react on the minister's 
 attitude toward hfe, both for good and for evil. 
 
 All the greatest seers of the world, whether in liter- 
 ature, art, or religion, have included in their native 
 endowment some distinctly feminine qualities. The 
 virility and initiative and fearlessness and crude 
 energy which we call distinctively masculine qualities 
 are not enough to qualify a man for spiritual per- 
 ception and interpretation. A certain delicacy of 
 temper, a susceptibility to changes of psychological 
 climate, a swift responsiveness to the moods of others, 
 a brooding meditation like that of Mary, who "kept 
 all these things and pondered them in her heart" — 
 these are elements in the equipment of the true 
 preacher. A church without the insight and sym- 
 pathy of womanhood might indeed be a victorious 
 army, but it would be fighting on the wrong side half 
 the tinle. Indeed, in these days of the industrial 
 opportunity and economic independence of women 
 we may yet have to struggle to retain the distinctly 
 
2/4 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 feminine elements in life, lest all the finer instincts 
 and perceptions of womanhood should be swallowed 
 up in the desire for an equality which is simply a 
 monotonous and meaningless identity. Forever will 
 it be true that ''the eternal-womanly leads us on." 
 Phillips Brooks's biographer has not failed to note 
 in that rare spirit a certain feminine receptivity 
 which was a part of the universality of his nature.^ 
 Nevertheless if constant sympathy with the ideals 
 and attitudes of womanhood should put preachers 
 definitely out of touch with the masculine ideals of 
 their generation, the Christian religion would suffer 
 irretrievable loss. Entering recently a metropolitan 
 church I heard the venerable pastor — a most at- 
 tractive figure crowned with snowy hair — announce 
 his subject, "The message of the gospel to tired 
 women," and I counted just five men in that after- 
 noon assembly. It would be unfortunate if the gos- 
 pel should come to be regarded as chiefly adapted 
 to tired women. There are clergymen who are 
 quite at home in the parish visitation of families, 
 but are hopelessly inept and awkward in any com- 
 pany of business men. Unfamiliar with outdoor 
 sports, they dread to meet a group of young men 
 discussing athletics, and sedulously avoid the play- 
 grounds of the people. Unaccustomed to com- 
 mercial life, they seldom enter a business office, and 
 if compelled to do so are obviously embarrassed. 
 
 1 Life of Phillips Brooks, by A. V. V. Allen, Vol. II, p. 299. 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 2/5 
 
 The rough contacts of the lawyer's life, the rude 
 blows of political controversy, the open enmities of 
 industrial competition — from all these things the 
 minister is habitually sheltered. And like all shel- 
 tered organisms he may grow tender and colorless. 
 It is his misfortune to see his congregation usually 
 in their best clothing, to have men speak softly in 
 his presence and avoid the themes which might 
 startle him. Hence he may acquire a superficial 
 view of the social order, and fail to grapple, man- 
 fashion, with the virile personalities and brutal 
 forces and grim realities which lie at the heart of 
 the world around him. If he would be saved from 
 that feminization which frequently overtakes the 
 poet, the musician and the artist, he must resolutely 
 decline to spend his best vitality in calling at places 
 where no men are to be found, and must resolutely 
 seek the friendship of those whom Whitman calls 
 "powerful uneducated persons." He must seek the 
 companionship of forceful men in their struggles, 
 must meet them in their rivalries, in their recreations, 
 their politics, and learn the strength of rude passion 
 and the power of determined will which lie behind the 
 achievements of the modern world. He who would 
 minister to men must himself be a man of stout heart, 
 able to endure hardness as a good soldier, unpam- 
 pered and unterrified. 
 
 5. But nothing is more obvious in the minister's 
 environment than the powerful stimulus to intellect- 
 
2/6 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 j ual and moral growth which comes from ministering 
 continuously to the same congregation for a series 
 of years. In this respect the minister differs sharply 
 from the school-teacher. The latter teaches a pro- 
 cession of pupils constantly passing through his 
 schoolroom. The minister joins the procession and 
 marches with it. In the schoolroom the pupils an- 
 nually change, and the teacher, going over the same 
 lessons year after year, is in danger of stagnating and 
 fossilizing. In the normal church the congregation 
 changes but slowly, the same men may sit in the pews 
 ten or twenty or thirty years, and the minister must 
 keep in advance of the congregation intellectually 
 and religiously, or leave his pulpit altogether. He 
 must continually surpass himself or retire. If a 
 man desires to make the most of his own powers, there 
 are few positions in life that so imperiously demand 
 constant growth as the pastorate of the same flock 
 for ten or twelve years. The itinerant minister is re- 
 lieved of this superb necessity. When his little 
 stock of early sermons — the tin dipper which he 
 filled in the seminary — is exhausted, he simply 
 moves on to another field. When difficulties in- 
 crease and clouds gather round his path, he quietly 
 retreats. The travelling evangelist is under the 
 strongest possible inducements to subside into 
 arrested development. Changing the audience at 
 the end of every three weeks, there appears to be no 
 cogent reason why he himself should change at all. 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 2// 
 
 Using the same themes, appeals, persuasions, year 
 after year, it is a marvel when he occasionally escapes 
 mechanical routine and intellectual atrophy. 
 
 But the minister who receives a boy into the church 
 and then must guide and instruct and strengthen 
 that human being through adolescence, early man- 
 hood, and perhaps into mature life, who must furnish 
 direction and stimulus and hope, and must give ever 
 enlarging vision of truth to the ever growing man — 
 such a minister will find every talent he possesses 
 brought into use, every power strained to utmost 
 tension, and will be forced into the largest possible 
 personal growth. 
 
 Here is a cogent reason for long pastorates. If 
 our churches encourage short terms of service, they 
 are encouraging in their ministers superficial habits 
 of study, reliance on materials long ago acquired, 
 desultory efforts and quick retreat. If a church 
 follows its leader through long ripening years, it is 
 summoning him, if he be a rich, strong nature, to the 
 putting forth of his utmost powers and to a develop- 
 ment of which his best friends did not dream. 
 
 Why, then, it is asked, is the long term of service 
 so rare, and the desire for change so frequent? It 
 is, we must frankly confess, because as the ripeness 
 of later years comes to the minister, the capacity 
 for moral initiative, the power to generate and im- 
 part moral energy, frequently dwindles or vanishes. 
 If garnered wisdom or sagacious judgment were the 
 
2/8 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 chief essentials to ministerial success, — as they are 
 to achievement in medicine or in legislation, — then 
 we might usually expect to see men of senatorial 
 age and dignity in our pulpits. In the bishopric, or 
 in the direction of great missionary and philan- 
 thropic effort, such ripened wisdom is the chief 
 essential, and any communion will suffer immense 
 loss if it does not create positions where men of 
 matured wisdom can exercise the statesmanship for 
 which the church is urgently calling. But in the 
 average church power to awaken and inspire and 
 initiate and energize is worth far more than power 
 to advise, and the people instinctively feel that spir- 
 itual energy is their greatest need. We cannot deny 
 that to many men the age of forty-five years is the 
 age of disillusion and the cooling of enthusiasm. At 
 that age they may have become so subtly wise as to 
 see the objections to every affirmation and the diffi- 
 culties in every program of action. They still believe 
 in the happy Eden of earlier years, but the gate is 
 now "with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms." 
 Whenever men do retain in later years their buoy- 
 ancy and vision and power to initiate, their churches 
 are glad still to follow. 
 
 Here the educational conception of the minister's 
 task becomes of immense value. By leading both 
 preacher and congregation into continuous study, 
 it constantly opens out new vistas of truth and new 
 forms of action. By fresh glimpses of the meaning 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 279 
 
 of Scripture, of church history, of missionary endeavor, 
 of the social appHcations of Christianity, it lessens 
 the demand for novelty and sensation. It provides 
 for the growing congregation successive stages of 
 instruction, experience and effort, and requires at 
 least several years under a single leader to work 
 out a definite result. The hurried pastorate of two 
 or three years in length is both cause and effect of a 
 merely hortatory pulpit, while the educational ideal 
 implies and insures time for growth as well as for 
 appeal. 
 
 And when the inevitable years have brought a real 
 waning of energy and initiative, they may also bring 
 opportunity for the best service a man can render 
 — the direction and encouragement of those who 
 are still militant and eager for the fray. Religious 
 denominations which have been thoroughly organ- 
 ized possess an obvious advantage in providing vari- 
 ous positions for men of various ages and talents, — 
 one place for the stripling flaming with zeal, and 
 quite another for the less eager but wiser man that 
 he will later become. An organization that makes 
 the same demands on Nestor and Ajax, and has only 
 one office for the venerable Simeon and for the 
 valiant Simon Peter, is certain to become either 
 recklessly aggressive or inertly wise. Even the most 
 democratic of Christian bodies can devise some 
 provision for varying gifts — old men for counsel 
 and young men for war. 
 
28o EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 But the real age of a spiritual leader is not to be 
 measured by the calendar. It is not a matter of 
 years, but of attitude. That is a pathetic descrip- 
 tion of old age in the book of Ecclesiastes : "They 
 shall be afraid of that which is high." Whenever 
 we stand timorous and querulous and faithless 
 before some lofty enterprise, we are afraid of that 
 which is high. Whoever says, ''That is true, but 
 I dare not confess it ; that is right, but I cannot do 
 it; that is ideal, but it is forever beyond me," — 
 that man, whether he be seventeen or seventy, is 
 already in his dotage and decrepitude. But who- 
 ever says, "That is true and I will proclaim it; that 
 is right and I will do it ; that is the ideal for me, for 
 my church, for my country, and I will forever fol- 
 low it!" — that man, whatever his years, has found 
 the fountain of youth ; he shall run and not be weary, 
 and walk and not faint. Such men were Robertson 
 and Bushnell and Beecher and Brooks and Maclaren. 
 There are few positions in the modern world that 
 have more stimulus to endeavor, to persistent growth, 
 to utmost personal development, than that of the 
 continuous spiritual leadership of a single church 
 through many broadening years. 
 
 The very fact that this growth is of a somewhat 
 general character constitutes the minister's peculiar 
 opportunity. While the majority of men under 
 modern conditions must devote themselves to a 
 highly specialized task, the minister is still free 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 28 1 
 
 to attain a symmetrical development. It is the 
 universal complaint of laboring men to-day that each 
 apprentice must tend a single machine and cannot 
 learn a trade. It is the perpetual lamentation of 
 the college professor that to attain eminence in his 
 narrowed field, he must neglect all other depart- 
 ments. But the minister counts nothing human as 
 foreign to his task. The great field of Biblical study 
 will fascinate him from the beginning. The light 
 thrown by psychology on Christian preaching 
 and Christian education he will eagerly welcome. 
 The relation of environment to character, and 
 of economic conditions to the moral life, the 
 morality of modern industry, the ethics of competi- 
 tion, the Christianizing of business, the true method 
 of helping the poor, the duties of citizenship — all 
 these are matters close to the heart of his mission. 
 The progress of science means to him the growing 
 revelation of the divine, and every advance in litera- 
 ture and art, in justice and temperance and truth, 
 is to him a part of the true coming of Christ. He may 
 see before him every Sunday the scientist, the econ- 
 omist, the historian — men who know more in some 
 corner of the world's knowledge than he can ever 
 hope to know. But he holds the key that fits every 
 lock, the unifying principle that underlies all occupa- 
 tions, the one message that is needed by every hu- 
 man soul, the secret of Jesus which can touch every 
 life into beauty and power. 
 
282 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 "I have not chanted verse like Homer, no — 
 Nor swept string like Terpander, no — nor carved 
 And painted men like Phidias and his friend; 
 I am not great as they are point by point. 
 But I have entered into sympathy 
 With these four, running these into one soul, 
 Who, separate, ignored each other's art. 
 Say, is it nothing that I know them all ? " 
 
 But this breadth of horizon and aim cannot excuse 
 the minister for speaking without definite and ex- 
 plicit knowledge of the facts. Merely to dream of 
 human felicity and draw pictures of Utopia will not 
 help men, unless the preacher has concrete first- 
 hand knowledge of present conditions. It is im- 
 possible to pronounce on the justice or injustice of 
 social and economic conditions, unless one knows 
 accurately what those conditions are. It is absurd 
 to condemn landlords for extortion unless one is 
 himself familiar with the tenement house, and unjust 
 to rebuke men for striking for higher wages unless we 
 have seen those men face to face. Our exposition 
 of great moral principles will be visionary and useless 
 unless based on face-to-face acquaintance with the 
 human lives around us. Hence it is necessary for 
 the preacher not only to study the constitution of 
 society, the growth of social institutions and laws, 
 but to know the men and women who live around 
 his church — to know them, not as names in a card 
 catalogue, but as breathing, struggling, human beings. 
 In one of our western cities there has been organ- 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 283 
 
 ized a bureau whose specific effort is to place in the 
 minister's hands the actual facts concerning any 
 current movement on which he may be called to 
 pronounce judgment. In the same city a pastor gave 
 six weeks of the year to continuous visitation of the 
 institutions for doing good within a few miles of his 
 church. It is far more instructive, if less picturesque, 
 to visit the organizations of help than to inspect the 
 purlieus of vice. There is a certain fund of present- 
 day information without which no man can safely 
 play the part of ethical teacher. Yet this information 
 is the most difficult of all to secure. I have known 
 a ministerquite baffled in attempting to ascertain what 
 were the altruistic agencies in a certain section of a 
 great city. They were not shown on any map. They 
 were not grouped in any directory. In despair he 
 went to the fire department and the postmaster, 
 to learn who in that region were doing good and how 
 they were doing it. Finally he was compelled him- 
 self to go from street to street, week after week, 
 and investigate with his own eyes to secure informa- 
 tion without which he had no right to speak on the 
 needs of the city. In many cities such information 
 is now obtained through the Federation of Churches. 
 Our preaching of the millennium will be but a castle 
 in the air, unless we have concrete personal knowledge 
 of the forces of good and evil that play about us to- 
 day. Our religious prescription will be rejected and 
 our judgment rightly condemned, unless we speak 
 from intimate personal acquaintance. 
 
284 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 If we have in some measure succeeded in showing 
 that the minister's calling is essential to society, 
 permanent in result, abounding in opportunities 
 and perils, and full of challenge to young manhood, 
 then every man in that calling should never retreat 
 or despair until he has "made full proof of his 
 ministry." It is easy in those moments of doubt 
 which come to every idealist — doubt most acute 
 to those whose aims are highest — it is easy then to 
 imagine that in some other calling we should have 
 found the world more appreciative and responsive. 
 Could not I have served God and man as truly 
 — is the seductive whisper — in some calling more 
 concrete and tangible, somewhere in that daily 
 supply of man's physical needs which the modern 
 world calls "business"? We need not, for answer, 
 describe the disappointments and vicissitudes and 
 disillusionments of other occupations. We need 
 simply note the difference between working on the 
 circumference of life and working at its very centre, 
 between making human life comfortable and giving 
 it meaning, purpose and character. All the honest 
 occupations of the world are indirectly contributing 
 to the one great end. They furnish threads to the 
 fast-flying shuttles that are closely weaving our 
 complicated life. But the minister's task is not 
 merely to furnish an additional thread, brighter, if 
 possible, than others. It is to stand by the loom 
 and directly determine the pattern, color and value 
 
EDUCATION OF THE MINISTER BY HIS TASK 285 
 
 of the entire fabric. There is deep satisfaction in 
 working at design rather than material, in dealing 
 with the quality of life rather than its mass. 
 
 Of course we are oppressed at times with the 
 apparent evanescence of our work. The architect 
 knows that his building will outlast his life. The 
 sculptor sees his thought moulded in enduring 
 bronze. Simply to talk to men and with men, 
 to deal in such shadowy things as emotions, aspira- 
 tions and ideas, is it not to write one's name in water ? 
 But in our hearts we realize that the thinker is the 
 doer, that thoughts are powers, and that to shape 
 the ideals of humanity is more than to build triumphal 
 arches or pyramids. Elijah outlasts Ahab, Paul's 
 *' books and parchments" conquer Csesar's legions, 
 Savonarola is heard long after the Medici are silent, 
 and John Wesley does more for the social ameliora- 
 tion and moral rehabilitation of England than all the 
 mechanical inventions and legislative devices of his 
 century. Let a man have at least faith enough in 
 his own calling to sound its utmost possibilities, to 
 hear again, behind all passing frictions and discords, 
 the great heroic note of the men who have believed 
 so profoundly in God, in the soul of man, and in the 
 value of righteousness, that they have put to flight 
 armies of aliens. 
 
 In the present age, so swiftly changing, so dazzled 
 by conflicting lights, so lured by various voices, per- 
 haps the highest form of personal courage is the 
 
286 EDUCATIONAL IDEAL IN THE MINISTRY 
 
 courage to believe. Not indeed to believe this or 
 that metaphysical proposition, — Christian faith, 
 as we have seen, is far deeper and more vital than 
 that, and such propositions are the outgrowth and 
 not the origin of religious experience, — but to 
 believe that our little life has eternal meaning and 
 consequence; that God is personal, just and loving; 
 that Christ is the supreme revelation of what God 
 is and man may become; that only through follow- 
 ing him can men reach the noblest personal character 
 or achieve social justice; and that even now the 
 Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. To believe in these 
 great realities with contagious conviction, and to 
 convey that faith by the educational process to mul- 
 titudes of others, is to feel the power of an abiding in- 
 spiration and to render a service indispensable and 
 immortal. To the humblest men who achieve that 
 service we may address the words spoken to all 
 Christian teachers in the shadow of Rugby Chapel: 
 
 "Ye move through the ranks, recall 
 The stragglers, refresh the outworn, 
 Praise, re-inspire the brave! 
 Order, courage return. 
 Eyes rekindling and prayers 
 Follow your steps as ye go. 
 Ye fill up gaps in our files, 
 Strengthen the wavering line, 
 Stablish, continue our march, 
 On, on to the bound of the waste, 
 On to the city of God." 
 
A LIST OF BOOKS FOR TEACHERS 
 
 Published by The Macmiltan Company 
 
 BAGLEY, William Chandler. Classroom Management : Its Principles 
 and Technique. By William Chandler Bagley, Superintendent of the 
 Training Department, State Normal School, Oswego, N.Y. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. xviL-\- 352 pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 The Educative Process. Cloth. i2mo. xix-\- 358 pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 BUTLER, Nicholas Murray. The Meaning of Education, and Other 
 Essays and Addresses. By Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Colum- 
 bia University. Cloth. 121110. xii -\- 2J0 pages . $1.00 net. 
 
 CHUBB, Percival. The Teaching of English. By Percival Chubb, Princi- 
 pal of High School Department, Ethical Culture School, New York. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. xvli-\- /fii pages. $1.00 net. 
 
 COLLAR, George, and CROOK, Charles W. School Management and 
 Methods of Instruction. By George Collar and Charles W. Crook, 
 London. Cloth. i2mo. viu-\-jj6 pages. $1.00 net. 
 
 CRONSON, Bernard. Methods in Elementary School Studies. By 
 Bernard Cronson, A.B., Ph.D., Principal of Public School No. 3, Borough 
 of Manhattan, City of New York. Cloth. i2mo. 167 pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 Pupil Self -Government. Cloth. z2mo. ix -\- 107 pages. $.gonet. 
 
 CUBBERLEY. Syllabus of Lectures on the History of Education. With 
 Selected Bibliographies and Suggested Readings. By Ellwood P. Cub- 
 berley. Associate Professor of Education, Leland Stanford Junior Univer- 
 sity. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. In two parts. 
 
 Fart I, V + i2g pages, $ i.§o net ; Part II, xv-\-j6i pages, $ i.^o net. 
 
 Complete in one volume, $ 2.60 net. 
 
 DE GARMO, Charles. Interest and Education. By Charles De Garmo, 
 Professor of the Science and Art of Education in Cornell University. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. xvii-\-2jo pages, $1.00 net. 
 
 The Principles of Secondary Education. 
 
 Vol. I, Studies. Cloth. i2nio. xii •\- 2gg pages . $1.25 net. 
 
 Vol. II, Processes of Instruction, xii -j- 200 pages. $ 1.00 net. 
 
 Vol. Ill, Processes of Instruction. In press. 
 
 DEXTER, Edwin Grant. A History of Education in the United States. 
 
 By Edwin Grant Dexter, Professor of Education in the University of Illinois* 
 Cloth, xxi + 66^ pages. 8vo. $ 2.00 net. 
 
 DUTTON, Samuel T. Social Phases of Education in the School and the 
 Home. By Samuel T. Dutton, Superintendent of the Horace Mann 
 Schools, New York. Cloth. J2mo. ix -\- 2sg pages. $1.2^ net, 
 
 DUTTON & SNEDDEN. The Administration of Public Education in the 
 
 United States. By Samuel Train Dutton, A.M., and David Snedden, 
 
 Ph.D. With an Introduction by Nicholas Murray Butler, Ph.D., LL.D. 
 
 Cloth, via -\- sgs pages . Bibliography. Index. i2mo. $1.7^ net. 
 
A LIST OF BOOKS FOR TEACHERS — Confrnt/ec/ 
 
 FITCH, Sir Joshua. Educational Aims and Methods. Lectures and Ad- 
 dresses by Sir Joshua Fitch, late Her Majesty's Inspector of Training 
 Colleges. Cloth. xii-\- 448 pages. 121110. $1.25 net. 
 
 Lectures on Teaching. Cloth, xiii -]r 393 Pages . ibvio. $1.00 net. 
 
 OILMAN, Mary L. Seat Work and Industrial Occupations. A Practical 
 Course for Primary Grades. By Mary L. Oilman, Principal of the Clay 
 School, Minneapolis, Minn., and Elizabeth L. Williams, Principal of the 
 Holmes School, Minneapolis, Minn. 
 
 Fully illustrated. Cloth. 141 pages. Square izmo. $.§0 net. 
 
 OANONO, William F. The Teaching Botanist. A Manual of Informa- 
 tion upon Botanical Instruction, together with Outlines and Directions for 
 a Comprehensive Elementary Course. By William F. Ganong, Ph.D., 
 Professor of Botany in Smith College. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. xi-\- 2^0 pages. $i.Jonet. 
 
 HALLECK, Reuben Post. The Education of the Central Nervous System. 
 A Study of Foundations, especially of Sensory and Motor Training. By 
 Reuben Post Halleck, M.A. (Yale) . 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. xii -\- 2§8 pages . $1.00 net. 
 
 HANUS, Paul H. A Modem School. By Paul H. Hanus, Professor of the 
 History and Art of Teaching in Harvard University. 
 
 Cloth. i2mo. X -\- 306 pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 Educational Aims and Educational Values. By Paul H. Hanus. 
 
 Cloth. i2ino. vii-{- 221 pages. $1.00 net. 
 
 HERBART, John Frederick. Outlines of Educational Doctrine. By John 
 Frederick Herbart. Translated by Alex. F. Lange, Associate Professor of 
 English and Scandinavian Philology and Dean of the Faculty of the College 
 of Letters, University of California. Annotated by Charles De Oarmo, 
 Professor of the Science and Art of Education, Cornell University. 
 
 Cloth. Large i2mo. xi-\- 334 pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 HERRICK, Cheesman A. The Meaning and Practice of Commercial Edu- 
 cation. By Cheesman A. Herrick, Ph.D., Director of School of Com- 
 merce, Philadelphia Central High School. 
 
 Cloth. XV -\- 3y8 pages . i2mo. $1.25 net. 
 
 HORNE, Herman Harrell. The Philosophy of Education. By Herman 
 Harrell Home, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy in Dart- 
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 The Psychological Principles of Education. By Herman Harrell Home. 
 
 Cloth. i2tno. xiii + 435 pages. $1.75 net. 
 
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 fessor Edmund B. Huey, of the Western University of Pennsylvania. 
 
 Cloth. Z2mo. xvi-\- 469 pages. $1.40 net. 
 
 KILPATRICK, VAN EvRiE. Departmental Teaching in Elementary 
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 Cloth, izmo. xiii -^130 pages. i6mo. $.60 net. 
 
A LIST OF BOOKS FOR TEACHERS— Cbntimed 
 
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 Edwin A. Kirkpatrick, Principal of State Normal School, Fitchburg, Mass. 
 Cloth. i2mo. xxi-\r 384 pages. $i.2§net. 
 
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 A Text-book in the History of Education. 
 
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 Joseph C. Park, State Normal and Training School, Oswego, N.Y, 
 
 C/ofA. 127710. xiii -\- jro pages , illus . $i.oo ttet. 
 
 PERRY, Arthur C. The Management of a City School. By Arthur C. 
 Perry, Jr., Ph.D., Principal of Public School No. 85, Brooklyn, N.Y. 
 
 Cloth. 127710. via +JSO pages. $1.25 net. 
 
 ROWE, Stuart H. The Physical Nature of the Child. By Dr. Stuart H. 
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 Cloth. 127710. vi-\- 211 pages. $.go7tet. 
 
 ROYCE, JosiAH. Outlines of Psychology. An Elementary Treatise with 
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 Committee on Physical Welfare of School Children. 
 
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