* on-^ 28 1922 * 
 
 McConnell, frai 
 .!,ri;lacher and the peopl! 
 
 The P" 
 
OTHER BOOKS BY BISHOP McCONNELL 
 
 CHRISTIAN FOCUS 
 
 THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
 
 RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 
 
 CHRISTMAS SERMONS 
 
 EDWARD GAYER ANDREWS 
 
 THE DIVINER IMMANENCE 
 
 THE ESSENTIALS OF METHODISM 
 
 UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 
 
 PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 
 
The Preacher and 
 the People 
 
 FRANCIS JOHN McCONNEIX 
 
 Bishop of the Methodiat Episcopal Church 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK CINCINNATI 
 
Copyright, 1922, by 
 FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
TO 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
 WHO, THEOtIGH HEB HUBBA>fD AND SONS, 
 
 HAS SPOKEN IN MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED 
 
 TEARS OF METHODIST PREACHING 
 
CONTENTS 
 1. POPULAR PREACHING 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Prefatory Note 9 
 
 CHA.PTEB 
 
 I. What We Mean BY Popular Preaching 13 
 
 II. A Word About Originality 23 
 
 III. The Preacher's Use of the Bible .... 33 
 
 IV. Helping Men to Understand 43 
 
 V. Helping Men to Think 53 
 
 VI. The Guidance of Religious Feeling . . 63 
 VII. The Quickening of the Will 72 
 
 2. THE PREACHER AS THE VOICE 
 OF THE PEOPLE 
 
 VIII. Pastoral Work and Preaching 83 
 
 IX. The Congregation as a Force 93 
 
 X. The Message of the Congregation. . . 103 
 
 3. THE LARGER HUMAN VALUES 
 
 XI. A Christian Public Opinion 115 
 
 XII. Unfolding the Human Ideal 126 
 
 XIII. The Expansion of the Moral Sphere. 136 
 
 XIV. The Church and the Social Imagina- 
 
 tion 146 
 
 XV. The Social Spirit and Personal Piety 156 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 This little volume is the substance of three 
 lectures delivered at De Pauw University, 
 Greencastle, Indiana, in April, 1921, on the 
 Matthew Simpson Foundation for lectures on 
 preaching, a lectureship made possible by the 
 generosity of the daughters of Bishop Simp- 
 son. The book deals only with the min- 
 ister as preacher. In these days a successful 
 church requires much more than preaching. 
 It demands the trained services of educational 
 directors, of church visitors, of highly special- 
 ized staffs of institutional workers. In all of 
 these I thoroughly believe, but I do not deal 
 with them here. These lectures are concerned 
 almost solely with the work of the church as 
 that work is carried forward by preaching. 
 
 My thanks are due to Dr. George Richmond 
 Grose, President of De Pauw University, for 
 the opportunity to deliver the addresses and 
 for innumerable kindnesses shown me on the 
 occasion of their delivery. 
 
1. POPULAR PREACHING 
 
WHAT WE MEAN BY POPULAR 
 PREACHING 
 
 A DISTINGUISHED professor of sociology some 
 time ago announced as his opinion that no 
 popular preaching can be honest. We all know 
 at once the preaching the professor had in 
 mind — the type that expresses itself in utter- 
 ing what will please the people, or will enter- 
 tain them, or say only what they want said. 
 This is what altogether too many of us have 
 in mind when we speak of popular preaching. 
 
 There is another sense, however, in which 
 the word "popular" can be used as applied to 
 preaching, and it is with the latter sense that 
 we shall deal in these lectures. If the present- 
 day world-wide movement toward increasing 
 popular influence — if not control — is to con- 
 tinue through fields in which the people are 
 interested at all, we must take more and more 
 account of the people as people ; that is to say, 
 as units in audiences, congregations, churches, 
 and denominations. We need not be reminded 
 that people exist only as persons. Everybody 
 knows that; but it is becoming a fact of in- 
 
 13 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 creasingly common knowledge that persons as- 
 sembled together as congregations and think- 
 ing together as churches and denominations are 
 not quite the same as those same persons acting 
 as isolated, or separate, individuals. The late 
 Dr. Figgis once said that no man joins a church 
 without becoming a new creature just by the 
 fact that he joins a church, whether he be- 
 comes adequately evangelized or Christianized 
 or not. The man enters into a new set of re- 
 lations from those he knows as a separate per- 
 son, and these relationships are likely to draw 
 out of him a new set of activities. Beyond all 
 this is the duty of the church to-day in shap- 
 ing that force of public opinion which we look 
 to for changes in social and national and inter- 
 national life, that public opinion which is not 
 merely the sum of thoughts of individuals but 
 something more organic. It is reported that 
 Phillips Brooks used to say that during the 
 afternoon services at Trinity Church, at the 
 season of year when the light would become a 
 little dim before he had finished speaking, he 
 would lose sight of the individuals in the au- 
 dience and there would seem to be before him 
 one composite face — the face of an audience, 
 a congregation, a church. Much of the power 
 of Phillips Brooks lay in his ability to speak 
 t^ the common man in each of us. Moreover, 
 
 14 
 
POPULAR PREACHING 
 
 lie spoke not to the common man as the aver- 
 age, or common denominator of his congrega- 
 tion. He appealed to men raised to a higher 
 collective power as worshipers rather than to 
 men as separate units. Under Phillips Brooks 
 Trinity Church was a popular institution in 
 a deeper sense than we sometimes consider. 
 If all this seems to ma,ke of a group of people 
 something beyond and above persons compos- 
 ing the group, may we say that we wish to use 
 the word "popular" as applying to people "just 
 as we find them," or the "plain people," or the 
 "man in the street"? 
 
 In this emphasis on popular force Abraham 
 Lincoln uttered the charmed phrase, "0/ the 
 people, 'by the people, for the people.'' The 
 words have become hackneyed and trite 
 through too glib repetition. Suppose we take 
 them, if we can, as if we were hearing them 
 for the first time, and ask ourselves in what 
 manner the pulpit of the church can be 
 of the people, and by the people, and for 
 the people; that is to say, in what sense 
 does the pulpit belong to the people? At 
 what must preaching aim? How can preach- 
 ing put people in possession of the truth 
 to which they have claim? Do the people 
 of a church or a congregation speak through 
 preaching? In what terms must the preacher 
 
 15 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 speak if he is to minister to the masses of man- 
 kind? These general questions will be in our 
 minds during this brief series of addresses. 
 
 We may as well confront at the outset the 
 critic who tells us that if preaching is to deal 
 ■with people, we do not need a professional 
 group of ministers. People, we are told, are 
 not interested in theology, or scientific bibli- 
 cal study, or elaborately refined organizations 
 or rituals. People want life. A socialistic 
 critic of all existing social institutions once re- 
 marked that in the reorganized social state 
 there will be no class of professional priests 
 or preachers. Such persons as may be inter- 
 ested in religious matters will informally meet 
 together and call upon some one of their num- 
 ber to talk to them, or they will one after an- 
 other rise and speak what may happen to occur 
 to them. This, according to the critic, is the 
 only religious service that can be popular in 
 the fundamental sense — and this service va- 
 cates the office of trained minister at once. 
 
 Such criticism as this — be it noticed — is a 
 survival from a conception of social organiza- 
 tion fast passing out of date. A few years ago 
 popular development was supposed to be sure 
 to take on the form of one mass movement 
 reaching into everything. The people as a 
 whole would pass judgment on everything, 
 
 16 
 
POPULAR preachi:ng 
 
 and would thus directly make their control 
 effective. The emphasis to-day, on the other 
 hand, is on the people as working through 
 many and diverse groups, the groups them- 
 selves being measurably self-determining and 
 making up in the final total an organism rather 
 than a mass. So that if some fancied social 
 Utopia were sprung upon us over night, the 
 next Sunday would probably see the re- 
 ligiously minded getting together to hold a 
 meeting, and after the meeting appointing a 
 committee to provide for further meetings. 
 Thus we would see them on the highroad to a 
 permanent organization and the establishment 
 of a ministry of men set apart to serve the or- 
 ganization. 
 
 The above criticism too forgets that we at 
 present have the religious service that our 
 socialistic friend suggests, and that it does not 
 altogether meet the need. Almost every church 
 holds meetings in which a leader may call upon 
 anyone present for discussion of religious 
 problems, or in which anyone can rise and 
 speak as he pleases. Prayer meetings are such 
 services, and it is a desperate problem in many 
 quarters to keep them alive. Prayer meetings, 
 or meetings in which anyone can feel free to 
 take part, are indeed of value, but their value 
 is mostly to those who take part. One reason 
 
 17 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 why it is so difficult to get support for a prayer 
 meeting is that hearers want discussions 
 founded on thoughtful and skilled prepara- 
 tion — and the ordinary midweek service is not 
 given to just such discussion. The prayer 
 meeting that does best is the one in which the 
 program is most thoroughly thought out, in 
 which the extemporaneous element is kept to 
 a wholesome minimum. 
 
 It is recognized to-day that popular insti- 
 tutions must stand or fall largely with their 
 reliance upon experts. Division of labor rules 
 in the sphere of religious effort as well as else- 
 where, and division of labor makes experts. 
 We can hardly defend provision for the expert 
 in religious service which sets apart specialists 
 to do all the praying for the people, or to hold 
 chief means of access to salvation, or to monop- 
 olize in themselves the virtues of godliness. 
 That would be priestcraft indeed. We are 
 speaking now of the presentation of truth in 
 preaching, and the presentation of truth im- 
 plies much that can be achieved only by the 
 trained and practiced mind. 
 
 By the way, it is a strange notion that the 
 people distrust experts. On the contrary, one 
 of the shortest and quickest paths to popu- 
 larity has always been through expertness. 
 Historians sometimes say that the American 
 
 18 
 
POPULAR PREACHING 
 
 emphasis on equality came out of the early 
 frontier days when every man was approxi- 
 mately the equal of every other man. In the 
 terrible struggle with forest and swamp and 
 beast and savage only two tools were at hand — 
 the ax and the rifle. All men were alike equal 
 before a daily possibility of a tragic fate. 
 There was equality too in that men resented 
 any assumption of overlordship by their fel- 
 lows. Every man thought he was about as 
 well fitted to rule as any other, and there was 
 a feeling among the hardy frontiersmen of 
 good-humored adequacy to or superiority to of- 
 ficial tasks. So that when Andrew Jackson, 
 the exemplar of that popular sovereignty 
 which preached the equality of every man to 
 every other, raised the cry of claiming the 
 spoils of office as the right of the victor he 
 voiced the feeling of the frontiersmen about 
 offices. Offices were good things to be enjoyed. 
 If they were serious responsibilities, one man 
 could discharge them as well as another. We 
 would woefully misread that pioneer notion of 
 popular equality if we said, however, that it 
 had no place for the expert. In the handling 
 of the ax and the rifle there w^ere experts whose 
 prodigies of skill were repeated in the frontier 
 story as long as the frontier itself lasted. 
 Anybody might be expert enough to fill an of- 
 
 19 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 fice. Not everybody was as expert in reading 
 forest signs, or in tracking wild beasts or In- 
 dians, or in extricating liimself from appar- 
 ently hopeless plights as was Daniel Boone or 
 Andrew Jackson. Nowhere has the expert 
 received more honor than in those early pioneer 
 days out of which the contempt of the expert 
 in American life is supposed to have arisen. 
 Moreover, there were experts in public 
 speech in those same days. The pioneer 
 preachers became masters of an oratory all 
 their own and attained that mastery by de- 
 voting their whole time and strength to preach- 
 ing. If we were to pick out an expertism as 
 distinctive as any, we could find it in the 
 preaching of the circuit-riders in the day when, 
 we are told, the characteristic doctrine of the 
 frontier was that any man was as good as any 
 other. No : we are not to turn our backs on 
 an expert ministry in urging a more and more 
 deeply popular preaching. Just an instant's 
 reflection shows us that one road to genuine 
 desert of public favor is through the develop- 
 ment of expert skill. So long as his fellow man 
 does not attempt to lord it over him by airs 
 of superiority, the ordinary man, the plain man 
 whom we think of as the source of popular 
 movements, is likely to give that fellow man 
 unstinted admiration for skill in any direc- 
 
 20 
 
POPULAK PREACHING 
 
 tion, including public speech. One element in 
 the power of many an orator is his command 
 over the admiration of the man who cannot 
 himself speak effectively to a group, for the 
 man w^ho can thus speak. 
 
 There is point in the criticism of the trained 
 minister, but the point holds generally only 
 against those who become technical and over- 
 specialized. The overspecialized expert is the 
 one who loses sight of his ends in the use of 
 his means, who keeps his instruments so con- 
 stantly in the foreground that he seems to for- 
 get what the instruments are for. When men 
 say of such preachers that they are "dry" the 
 criticism means that the preachers have some- 
 how lost life. What groups of Christians as- 
 sembled to hear preaching most desire is that 
 the preacher shall refresh them into life. The 
 ordinary experiences of daily life are likely to 
 result in the evaporation of faith. Faith dis- 
 appears as did the oil in the lamps of the vir- 
 gins — it burns out. If a preacher can address 
 one hundred, or ten hundred, hearers every 
 Sunday and send them away from his preach- 
 ing "feeling better," "braced up," "refreshed," 
 "quickened" in the higher ranges of their liv- 
 ing, he has performed well his main task. This 
 is why there is sometimes so large a demand for 
 young men in the pulpit — ^just because they 
 
 21 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 are young. They are full of life. People catch 
 the life and are invigorated thereby. The sad 
 feature is that the life of the preacher who is 
 lively merely because he is young, whose life 
 is the springing buoyancy of youth itself, so 
 often ceases to be lively when he grows older. 
 It might almost be said that the problem of 
 training the preacher for popular effectiveness 
 is that of keeping him young, or of increasing 
 his youth as the years go by. For such spirit- 
 ual youth is possible. When we speak of the 
 preacher as an expert we refer chiefly to ex- 
 pertness in getting hold of inner springs of life. 
 The preacher must be toward himself a wise 
 physician or a wise trainer. He must avoid 
 all that cuts into the fountains of life. For 
 the people demand life, and the essential in 
 serving people is to bring them life, if w^e are 
 to be followers of Him who came that men 
 might have life and might have it abundantly. 
 This does not mean that the lively young 
 preacher who puts in his time scampering 
 through the fields with "our young people" is 
 necessarily the worthiest fountain of religious 
 life, for there are higher forms of life than 
 this. 
 
 22 
 
II 
 
 A WORD ABOUT ORIGINALITY 
 
 It is the task of the preacher to put people 
 in possession of what they should have by 
 right, to give them what is their own, in other 
 words. The life which is in Christ is theirs. 
 The preacher must see that they get that life 
 in so far as the life can be communicated in 
 preaching. We limit ourselves to preaching, 
 but that does not mean that we forget that, 
 after all, it is the preacher's total personal 
 force which counts. We will try not to forget 
 that it is the man back of the preaching who 
 makes the preaching go. When I was a young 
 minister I prepared a sermon with all the care 
 possible to me at the time. As I now recall, 
 I wrote the sermon in full, and then most care- 
 fully revised and rewrote. My people were 
 only mildly interested. A little later an older 
 preacher came into the neighborhood who 
 preached in my pulpit on a theme somewhat 
 similar to mine. I had to admit to myself that, 
 judged by any standard of effectiveness, the 
 older man's sermon held the attention of the 
 people more closely than had mine. I had to ad- 
 
 23 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 mit also that as far as formal preparation went 
 the older man's sermon was not as well 
 wrought out as mine — and the whole outcome 
 was a puzzle to me. With the advancing years, 
 however, I have seen that the difference lay in 
 that there was more back of the older man's 
 utterance than back of mine. There were fifty 
 years more of Christian experience, for one 
 thing. I may have had the more accurately 
 shaped homiletic bullet, but the older preacher 
 had the greater driving power. If I had been 
 wisely advised, I would have been told that it 
 was not my fault that I was not fifty years 
 older than I was. All of which is to be kept 
 In mind. We cannot make people older than 
 they are, or other persons than they are. We 
 know that the bigger the man the bigger the 
 preaching: but we are now taking preachers 
 just as we find them and are asking how they 
 can make the most of their capabilities and op- 
 portunities for the preaching of the truth. 
 
 We may think for the moment about origi- 
 nality as the secret of much power of religious 
 leadership. What is originality? Surely not 
 the ability to say things remarkable for smart- 
 ness — or queerness — or even to say things 
 which no one has ever thought of before. Some- 
 times the greatest originality shows itself in 
 expressing what almost everybody has at least 
 
 24 
 
A WORD ABOUT ORIGINALITY 
 
 half thought of before. Originality starts from 
 so working ideas into ourselves that when they 
 come forth from us they move again as from 
 a new origin. All depends, at the outset, on 
 how much in the world of spiritual force we 
 can seize and make our own. The energy of 
 a stream depends on the extent to which it 
 takes advantage even of the shape of a con- 
 tinent to merge rainfalls into its own current. 
 Or, to speak in terms of life, the physical force 
 of a man depends not upon any absolute origi- 
 nation of powers in himself but upon the de- 
 gree to which his organism can transform into 
 energy the food which he consumes. The 
 preacher must make spiritual energies his own 
 by a similarly intensely vital seizure. 
 
 It was said of a leader in a realm which 
 called for superior technical knowledge that 
 he had the power to "digest his knowledge out 
 of sight" so that all trace of his knowledge as 
 scientific information was lost in the final de- 
 cision, with no suggestion of scientific termi- 
 nology or of complicated process. Only the 
 young or half-trained physician talks in the 
 language of the professional school. The 
 knowledge of the older expert has been di- 
 gested — it has passed into him, it is part of 
 himself. This is the difference between gen- 
 uine utterance and superficial utterance. 
 
 25 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 Borden P. Bowne once said that if a thinker 
 will make a thought his own, utterances "on 
 the outside" will grow into utterances 
 "from the inside." When the people rejoiced at 
 hearing Jesus it was because he spoke with au- 
 thority, not as the scribes. Jesus said things 
 from within. The scribes talked about things 
 on the outside. 
 
 The essential of Christianity is the doctrine 
 of the Christlike God. If we can believe that 
 God is like Christ, everything else worth while 
 follows, not by the implications of strict 
 formal logic but by the spiritual necessities of 
 such a God. If God is like Christ, we have 
 forthwith the right to believe in the dignity of 
 man, man's immortality, the possibility of de- 
 liverance from evil and growth into unending 
 power. This central truth, however, cannot be 
 adequately preached merely by being an- 
 nounced to men. The gospel is indeed the 
 good news of God, but preaching is not over 
 with the bare pronouncement of the news. I 
 once knew a devoted itinerant who went into 
 every city and town of a Central America 
 state simply announcing the gospel. He 
 fancied that by so doing he was obeying the 
 command whose fulfillment would bring the 
 return of Christ in the flesh. He spoke of hav- 
 ing "evangelized" Costa Rica, in particular. 
 
 26 
 
A WORD ABOUT ORIGINALITY 
 
 Evangelization means the preaching of the 
 good news and not the bare publishing of the 
 news. We cannot tell how new the good news 
 about God is, or how good it is, without preach- 
 ing. The headlines of a newspaper may carry 
 the news of a scientific discovery, or of a legis- 
 lative enactment, or of a social revolution. 
 The meaning of that announcement may ex- 
 haust the interpretative powers of scores and 
 thousands of students. It may require a thou- 
 sand books to tell what the newspaper an- 
 nounces in ten words, for the implications of 
 good news have to be wrought out into clear 
 understanding and forceful speech and effec- 
 tive action. 
 
 The preacher has, or is supposed to have, 
 the good news of God; but other people may 
 not have that news. The phrases about the 
 Christlike God may mean nothing until they 
 are carried out into their implications. Then 
 they begin to show what a difference they 
 would make for human life if they were actu- 
 ally believed. The working of an idea out into 
 its implications is done, we repeat, as the 
 preacher thoroughly makes the idea his own. 
 A long step toward popular success in re- 
 ligious ministry is taken w^hen the occupant 
 of the pulpit shows that he has heard the good 
 news himself. I once stood by a man in a 
 
 27 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 foreign land who was announcing to a com- 
 pany the names of a visiting party from Amer- 
 ica. The official was announcing correctly and 
 politely enough, but with remoteness of inter- 
 est which sometimes goes with correctness and 
 politeness. At the utterance of a particular 
 name the visitor announced said, "Doesn't that 
 name call up something in your memory?" 
 Then the mere announcer became a friend, re- 
 membering his friend's name and clasping the 
 hand of a companion whom he had not seen 
 for twenty years. The light of welcome in the 
 transformed face was far beyond formal po- 
 liteness. The face of the preacher sometimes 
 likewise lights up when his word about God 
 shows that he has himself heard the good news 
 and that the news is in a peculiarly intimate 
 and personal sense Ms news. We say again 
 that the more personal a man can make his be- 
 lief in God the wider social hearing he can get 
 for his message. The more that message is his 
 own the more he can give it to others. The 
 more he gives it to others the more he makes 
 it his own. 
 
 May we here enter a plea for the habit of 
 brooding meditation by the preacher? We 
 shall have so much to say about the need of 
 formal effort in study that to some this little 
 book may seem to repeat the speech of the bar- 
 
 28 
 
A WORD ABOUT ORIGINALITY 
 
 ren homiletic manual. All the more reason, 
 then, why we should make clear that around 
 and through and over all the specific and me- 
 thodical and systematized study should go that 
 deep brooding which ripens knowledge into 
 wisdom — the hours upon hours spent in hold- 
 ing the central themes before the mind, with 
 the mind as it were waiting to see what will 
 come from them, in asking and reasking the 
 same questions, in letting the imagination, or 
 even the fancy, carry out the implications of 
 the theme into all directions, in unhurried 
 movement toward a conclusion or away from 
 a conclusion. 
 
 It is well for those of us who are trying to 
 preach the gospel to remind ourselves that a 
 sermon is a growth rather than a product of 
 mechanical labor. In all that we say, then, 
 about the mechanics of sermon-making we 
 trust that we shall be understood to mean 
 that we are dealing with the gospel as a living 
 seed, with the minds of ourselves and of others 
 as soil. The mechanical devices we conceive of 
 as hoes or plows or harrows or pruning knives 
 rather than as the tools of a factory. We are 
 cultivating fields and gardens rather than 
 building machines. For all this we have the 
 sanction of the Master's own example. He was 
 the sower of seed and the reaper of harvests. 
 
 29 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 If this means anything, it means that the 
 development of the power to brood gives our 
 minds a chance to treat the truth according to 
 their own laws and peculiarities, to put upon 
 the truth the peculiar tang which makes it 
 our own. These minds of ours — ours, indeed, 
 by all the distinctiveness of separate personal 
 individuality — are not entirely under the di- 
 rect control of our own wills. We are mys- 
 teries even to ourselves. Thoughts and feel- 
 ings which bear all the marks of our own selves 
 at times seem to have arisen outside of our- 
 selves. Now, such ideas and impulses, flavored 
 as they are with the feeling that they have come 
 from a source above ourselves, are likely to be 
 those that must carry with them, both to our- 
 selves and to others, the tingle of living proph- 
 ecy. The fact probably is that these ideas are 
 the truest growths of our minds, made possi- 
 ble as we allow the minds to have their way 
 with themselves and with the truth. 
 
 Heaven forbid that this may be taken as an 
 advocacy of daydreaming or of letting minds 
 merely drift along by the law of association. 
 I once knew a preacher who said that he sim- 
 ply lay flat on his back and dreamed out his 
 sermons. From the lulling, soothing effect of 
 his sermons I am inclined to think this was 
 true. There was certainly nothing in them to 
 
 30 
 
A WORD ABOUT ORIGINALITY 
 
 arouse anybody's attention. What I am plead- 
 ing for is something beyond that systematic, 
 scheduled thinking which must arrive at a par- 
 ticular point according to time-table, some- 
 thing, on the contrary, which turns around an 
 idea and gazes upon it from every angle, and 
 which refuses to be hurried. Some mighty 
 theme — and what is mightier than the doctrine 
 of the Christlike God? — should be in the 
 preacher's mind as a vine which yields fruit 
 as the mind works like a husbandman upon the 
 vine. Implications of central and fundamental 
 conceptions should be allowed to ripen; but 
 ripening is not a forced mechanical process. 
 It is intense — this ripening process — but it is 
 altogether natural. Ideas should mature thus 
 naturally. Or, to employ another figure, we 
 may refer to the wonderful suggestiveness of 
 the passage in opening Genesis which tells us 
 that the Spirit of the Lord brooded upon the 
 face of the deep as a bird over her nest. That 
 first chapter of Genesis might well be studied 
 by the preacher as a hint about the creative 
 mood. The purpose of the scriptural writer 
 is to show the divine orderliness of creation, 
 and the orderliness as coming out of the divine 
 brooding. 
 
 The modern psychologist rightly lays stress 
 on the activity of the subconscious self. What 
 
 31 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 arises out of these subconscious depths which 
 seem to stir of themselves will largely depend 
 on what we send down into them from open- 
 eyed thinking. I once worked for hours over 
 a mathematical proposition and finally gave it 
 up in despair. The next day, as I was walking 
 down the street, the solution suddenly flashed 
 upon me. I said to myself, boy as I was, that 
 if such were the way algebra solutions were 
 to come, I would thereafter just let them come 
 without any further struggle. For the next 
 lesson the solution did not come. So I learned 
 that purposeful thought is indispensable, but 
 that to season or ripen that purposeful thought 
 it is best to let the juices of the subconscious 
 soak into it. To do this the preacher must 
 fight against all the distracting influences in 
 his parish that make against the brooding life, 
 that those powers which we call collectively by 
 the name of "time" may get a chance at his 
 thinking. The skill which the expert in any 
 activity has comes from just such slow ripen- 
 ing. 
 
 32 
 
Ill 
 
 THE PKEACHER'S USE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 It is not my purpose to try to suggest to 
 preachers detailed schemes of study. We shall 
 all admit, however, that the one book which it 
 is essential for the preacher to know is the 
 Bible. The preacher must read the Bible in- 
 cessantly. He must read it with a double aim, 
 so far as his work as a preacher is concerned, 
 namely, to find what a passage meant for the 
 man who wrote it, and, secondly, what the 
 passage has of significance for men and women 
 and children to-day. 
 
 Underneath everything in the use of the 
 Scriptures is the resolution to learn what the 
 scripture meant to the original writer. A 
 preacher may make any homiletic use of a text 
 he pleases, within the limits of good sense, if 
 he first learns and declares the original mean- 
 ing of the text. Everything must start from 
 that open and honest declaration of what the 
 passage first meant. After that it is legitimate 
 for the preacher to say that the text suggests 
 something quite different to himself, or that 
 the biblical figure of speech warrants our 
 
 83 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 carrying out the figure to implications which 
 the writer may not have had in mind, or that 
 the reflection of the centuries has loaded the 
 passage with a significance of which the au- 
 thor did not dream. 
 
 In learning what the scriptural passage 
 meant to him who first wrote it the preacher is 
 entitled to look for light in any quarter. It 
 will be his duty especially to see what the mod- 
 ern methods of scientific biblical study have 
 to teach. This does not mean that he must 
 accept what the present-day scientific student 
 declares to be the meaning of a. particular 
 scripture, but he ought to know what the scien- 
 tific verdict is. There cannot be anything 
 more foolish than to ignore the teachings of 
 those who bring the scientific method to bear 
 on the search for scriptural meanings. The 
 scientific method, in general, has, within the 
 past half-century, all but made over the world 
 in which we live. It has, indeed, led to much 
 skepticism and even materialism, but these 
 have been more than offset by the positive good 
 obtained. Now, the scientific method has 
 wrought as decisive victories in the field of 
 biblical research as anywhere else. Before 
 long there will be general recognition of the 
 debt of religion to that method. Science asks 
 insistently as to what the passage meant to the 
 
 34 
 
THE PREACHER'S USE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 man who wrote it. Even if the author wrote 
 miraculously that question remains. To an- 
 swer the question scholars have labored over 
 old manuscripts, excavated ancient cities, de- 
 ciphered inscriptions by the thousand — in 
 short, labored with overwhelming industry. 
 The majority of men who have worked thus 
 have had no other thought than to find the 
 meaning of the scriptural revelation. The 
 important results have been made so accessible 
 that the humblest preacher cannot honestly 
 claim that they are beyond his reach. How a 
 man can think of himself as an expert worker 
 in the Lord's field if he pays no attention to the 
 instruments thus spread out before him is one 
 of the major mysteries. It is possible for a 
 man to cut a harvest of grain with the old 
 hand-sickle, but there are better instruments 
 made possible by the progress of science. In 
 the end the people will lose confidence in him 
 who does not seem to be using the best tools. 
 The popular demand for up-to-dateness may be 
 the itch for novelty. It is so, for example, in 
 the demand for novelties of dress or adorn- 
 ment. It is not so in the demand for medical or 
 surgical remedies or for more wholesome food 
 or clothing. In such realms the "last word," 
 the "latest thing," may be the word or the thing 
 that saves a life. 
 
 35 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 We still hear occasionally, though not as 
 often as formerly, that to introduce the scien- 
 tific method into biblical study leads at once 
 to a discriminatory judgment which puts dif- 
 ferent parts of the Scriptures on different 
 levels, and thus introduces standards of value 
 which may end in leaving us all at sea, to say 
 nothing of doing away outright with the doc- 
 trine that all scripture is inspired. To which 
 we must reply that Bible readers in all ages 
 have done the same thing — they have made 
 more of some Scripture passages than of 
 others, no matter how firmly they may have 
 insisted that all scriptural writing is alike 
 inspired. Any Bible of a saintly mother or 
 a devout Christian worker tells the story by 
 revealing the parts that are well thumbed. 
 Every devoted Bible reader makes his own 
 Bible by selection, at least. It is folly to main- 
 tain that Bible readers put John's Gospel on 
 a level with Ecclesiastes, or Job with Chroni- 
 cles, or Paul's Epistles with Esther or Prov- 
 erbs. The saints have always been radical with 
 the Bible in that they have kept closest to the 
 "root of the matter." 
 
 Now, modern biblical method has added to 
 the range of the significant portions of Scrip- 
 ture. It has shown us the meaning — or at 
 least a meaning — in passages that we once 
 
 36 
 
THE PREACHEK'S USE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 passed by as mysteries. The difference is that 
 we do not now need to pass them by. In the 
 light of the fuller knowledge we understand 
 the part that even imperfect conceptions 
 played in leading on and up to the fuller reve- 
 lation which came with Jesus. The newer 
 methods of study have thus brought unused, 
 or slightly used, passages of Scripture out to 
 fuller usefulness and have even added to the 
 usableness of the greatest passages. 
 
 The students going out from theological 
 school have too often been of one of two classes :: 
 either they have lugged all their scientific ap- 
 paratus into the pulpit with them, or they have 
 seemed to think that the scientific method is 
 something to be looked at and then put to one 
 side. It is hard to tell which type does the 
 more harm. The first type of student ought 
 to reflect that the popular demand for any- 
 thing is more for results which speak for them- 
 selves than for descriptions of the processes 
 which bring the results. Will the reader please 
 remember throughout these discussions that 
 we are talking of preaching and not of Bible- 
 class instruction? There is ample place in 
 the church program for consideration of pres- 
 ent-day biblical methods, but that place is in 
 the class where questions can be asked and 
 answered. A large part of the wretched re- 
 
 37 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 action of to-day toward antiquated biblical in- 
 terpretation is due to the failure of churches 
 to put before the layman Bible-class oppor- 
 tunities to become acquainted with the better 
 methods. For the preacher, however, to lug 
 into the sermon debatable points in biblical 
 opinion, or to talk about processes at all except 
 on most appropriate occasions, is about as wise 
 as for a surgeon to describe to a patient the in- 
 strument with which he intends to operate on 
 him. In well regulated hospitals the patient is 
 mercifully anaesthetized before he sees the in- 
 struments ! If this seems to lend itself to the 
 claim that the ministry should be an esoteric 
 profession with secrets all its own, we dis- 
 avow any such intention forthwith. There 
 ought not to be any secrets to be kept from 
 anyone who desires to know. Nor are we urg- 
 ing any preacher to keep back from his people 
 any part of the truth. We are simply saying 
 that the sound and reasonable public demand 
 in every sphere is for results and not for the 
 discussion of processes except for those who 
 wish such discussion. The Bible is the food of 
 the soul. It is the business of the preacher to 
 put the food before the people in attractive 
 form. I know a fine establishment where most 
 excellent food is supplied to the customers; 
 but opposite every item on the bill of fare is 
 
 38 
 
THE PREACHER'S USE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 printed the exact number of the calories which 
 a given unit of the food can be expected to 
 yield. The figures are disconcerting and appe- 
 tite-destroying. All talk about balanced ra- 
 tions, about proteins and starches and car- 
 bohydrates is a terrible affliction at a dinner 
 table. This scientific truth is valuable for 
 the housewife who presides over the cooking, 
 but she ought not to bring the formulas to 
 the table. 
 
 The other type of preacher makes no use of 
 scientific method at all. So that we have from 
 him an inaccurate representation of biblical 
 truth which may lead off to aberration. Or, 
 rather, he gives himself to preaching which is 
 not fundamentally biblical. His texts are 
 starting points to almost anywhere. If such 
 a preacher is of lively inventiveness, or pos- 
 sesses a touch of poetic fancy, or is so mag- 
 netic a speaker that it does not make much 
 difference what he says, the lack of biblical 
 understanding may not noticeably count. We 
 are concerned, however, with a higher grade 
 of preaching than this if we are to meet the 
 deeper popular needs. 
 
 There remains the group of preachers — in- 
 creasing, let us trust — who get all the light 
 they can on what a passage meant to its au- 
 thor and who then try to see and say what the 
 
 39 
 
THE PKEACHEK AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 passage means for us to-day. In other words, 
 they take the Bible as dealing with living men 
 and living issues in its day and then try to 
 make the truth live for our day. So that there 
 comes into the preaching the accent of life, 
 w^hich in the end is mighty with the people. 
 The majority on the face of this earth do not 
 live in a make-believe world. We might say, 
 therefore, that they ought to be lifted out of 
 this actual world for an hour or two on Sun- 
 day and transported into the land of ideals. 
 To be sure, they should; but woe to the 
 preacher who brings his hearers back to earth 
 saying, "After all, it is only dreams or fancy." 
 The professional entertainer can carry hear- 
 ers or spectators into the land of dreams, but 
 people know such dreams for what they are 
 and do not expect anything solid. The 
 preacher, on the other hand, is dealing with 
 an order of realities, above the sordid and 
 humdrum round of prosaic activities. He is 
 trying to make men see that there is a sky over 
 the earth, but it must be a sky and not a 
 painted canvas. The depths must be there, 
 and the sun and stars must be genuine. Very 
 truly indeed the sky we see is not the sky of 
 the astronomer, but our sky is not delusion nor 
 illusion. We may have to make repeated cor- 
 rections as we gaze toward the heavens, but 
 
 40 
 
THE PKEACHEE'S USE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 we are dealing with something real, not with 
 the skies of fairyland. 
 
 Whatever else the Bible may or may not be, 
 it certainly is a record of the struggle of men 
 grappling with substantial problems. The at- 
 tempt to get at its meaning on a fact basis is 
 a step toward imparting into our own lives 
 the quick awareness of the real which marks 
 the Scriptures. Keality is a fearfully over- 
 worked word, but there is no other. In this 
 connection we may refer to the unwillingness 
 of the biblical leaders to befool themselves, 
 or anyone else. One difference between the 
 Hebrews and the peoples round about was just 
 this unwillingness of the scriptural leaders 
 to live in a world of make-believe. There is 
 an element of faith in all religious knowledge. 
 We shall have occasion later to lay emphasis 
 on the teaching of Jesus that out of the will's 
 doing aright there comes the knowledge of 
 God. Since we must have faith let us have a 
 faith based not on what we think, or what we 
 feel, but upon what we do. Throughout the 
 Scriptures obedience leads to knowledge. Not 
 enough emphasis has yet been placed on the 
 opposition which appeared among the He- 
 brews at least as early as the time of Saul to 
 soothsayers and witches as revealers of divine 
 knowledge, or on the absence of reliance on 
 
 41 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 trancelike states in the biblical search for 
 truth. When the seers of the Bible had visions 
 the visions were something worth seeing. 
 
 There is a capacity of imagination which 
 spends itself in painting pictures which have 
 no touch with anything actual in the heavens 
 or on the earth, an imagination which may 
 at times well serve us. There is a higher 
 imagination which starts on a basis of 
 fact and makes the facts live, not as bare 
 facts, but as facts suggestive of far-reach- 
 ing principles. It is this type of imagination 
 for which the preacher who would grip men 
 where they live must seek, the type that be- 
 holds the men of the Scriptures actually liv- 
 ing in an actual situation, and which makes 
 those men live again in a wider relationship 
 embodying ever-recurring problems of human 
 experience. If we can once see these men as 
 they were, we shall recognize them as like our- 
 selves. It is the task of the preacher to make 
 scriptural characters live again, that we may 
 share their life. 
 
 42 
 
IV 
 
 HELPING MEN TO UNDERSTAND 
 
 One of the most Christian words in our lan- 
 guage is the word "help." Help does not mean 
 doing everything for a man. It means aiding 
 a man to make the most of his own powers. 
 It implies one's supplementing another's 
 own strength. Outright giving is different. To 
 give a cripple the ability to walk might imply 
 any degree of power up to the miraculous. To 
 help a cripple to walk might mean the lending 
 of an arm on which the unfortunate might 
 lean. One of the finest New Testament charac- 
 terizations of the Spirit of God is of the Spirit 
 as Helper — supplementing our powers as we 
 ourselves make effort to exert them to the ut- 
 most. 
 
 In putting people in possession of the truth 
 the aim of the popular preacher should be to 
 help, first of all to help to understand. We 
 must never ignore the elementary axiom in 
 psychology that a mind is not a holder of so 
 much cubic content. The mind is not passive 
 but active. Even when the student tells us 
 that pictures of the outside world are photo- 
 
 43 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 graphed on the delicate tissue of the eye we 
 must not forget that someone must see the 
 picture, and that seeing the picture means 
 building it in the mind by an active mental 
 process. We can take the boy to the school, but 
 we cannot make him think any more than we 
 can make him eat if he will not eat. Thus al- 
 most at once we dispose of one type of author- 
 ity in preaching. Dogmatism in preaching is 
 of slight value unless it is freely assented to 
 by the hearer. Formerly w^hen dogmatic au- 
 thority ruled everywhere even hearers in the 
 church might take dogma hospitably, but 
 dogma is not by its nature calculated to make 
 men understand. We doubt if some dogma 
 was ever intended to be understood. It was to 
 be believed, and belief meant a bolting of in- 
 tellectual food, or medicine, without much 
 question. 
 
 No severer intellectual task is exacted of 
 any professional expert than this of helping 
 men to understand. Think of the different 
 grades of intelligence in any audience, no mat- 
 ter how homogeneous the audience. There are 
 children, young men and women, mature men 
 and women, old men and women. Yet it is 
 the task of the preacher to place before all, in 
 practically the same statement, truth that will 
 minister to all the lives. For this is preaching, 
 
 44 
 
HELPING MEN TO UNDERSTAND 
 
 the setting of truth before men so that it can be 
 appropriated for a life purpose. Every effort 
 is to be directed toward such appropriation. 
 For a preacher to be helpful in this task is to 
 deserve highest praise. 
 
 The first step is to help people to under- 
 stand. These addresses are intended to be 
 suggestive rather than exhaustive. May I 
 therefore indicate two characteristics of 
 preaching which seem to me to be always 
 needed? They are formally contradictory 
 though the contradiction is only apparent. I 
 refer to the power to simplify and the power 
 to amplify. Look first at the need for sim- 
 plicity. The purpose of the preacher should 
 be so to state his truth that the lowest normal 
 intelligence before him will see at least the be- 
 ginnings of its meaning. We are not pleading 
 for simplicity of thought or for statement that 
 attempts the impossible feat of rendering the 
 whole gospel of the Christlike God intelligible 
 at a glance. We are asking, though, for the 
 simplicity of statement that enables even the 
 child in the audience to see some distance into 
 the truth. 
 
 Let not anyone imagine that we are calling 
 for an easy achievement in urging the im- 
 portance of simplicity. For simplicity every- 
 where costs. We have been told in a conven- 
 
 45 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 tional formula of evolution that progress is 
 from the simple to the complex. Of course we 
 understand that the formula is declaring that 
 progress comes through increasing fineness of 
 adjustment in organisms. There is, however, 
 a progress from the complex to the simple 
 which is equally important. At least there is 
 a demand that the parts of which the complex 
 is composed shall be themselves simple. The 
 simpler a tool the better. The simpler an 
 artistic creation the better. The simpler a 
 statement the better. The simpler a sermon 
 the better. Moreover, the struggle for sim- 
 plicity in statement is one of the hardest of 
 the intellectual strains. 
 
 The young minister makes a grievous mis- 
 take if he starts in to preach chiefly to what 
 might be called the top minds of his congrega- 
 tion. He goes, let us assume, to a church in 
 which he has before him Sunday after Sunday 
 eight or ten school-teachers, two or three law- 
 yers, a doctor or two, possibly one or two re- 
 tired ministers, out of a congregation of two 
 hundred. Suppose, now, that he keeps think- 
 ing, as he prepares his sermon, of these fifteen 
 or twenty persons more technically educated 
 than their fellows in the community. He asks 
 himself if this select number will be pleased. 
 He judges his success by the kind words they 
 
 46 
 
HELPING MEN TO UNDERSTAND 
 
 say to him after the sermon ; and if their praise 
 is forthcoming, he may flatter himself that he 
 is doing an intellectual grade of preaching. 
 Indeed, the preaching may be of a noteworthy 
 intellectual quality ; but in statement at least 
 it will not be of so high an order as if the 
 preacher had spoken with the one hundred and 
 fifty or one hundred and seventy-five in mind. 
 It is not possible to move the ordinary audi- 
 ence by preaching chiefly to the top intellects. 
 If, on the other hand, a man is so skilled in 
 phrasing his truth as to make it clear to the 
 lowliest intelligence, he benefits every intel- 
 ligence above the lowliest as well. More than 
 that, the higher the intelligence the more 
 heartily it appreciates simplicity of statement, 
 just as the higher artistic discernment appre- 
 ciates keenly the simple in painting or sculp- 
 ture. It is only the half-intelligent hearer 
 who delights in literary or historical or scien- 
 tific allusions which, he fancies, no one else 
 in the audience can appreciate but himself. 
 
 In every sermon — with an allowance for an 
 occasional handling of a peculiarly difficult 
 theme — there should be some passage stating 
 the essential thought so simply that it will be 
 intelligible to the child of school age. By the 
 way, this is the effective preaching to children 
 — to beget in their minds an alert expectancy 
 
 47 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 (if the preacher is interesting at all) and to 
 make them feel that they are part of the con- 
 gregation. All this requires intellectual 
 power in the preacher. 
 
 Now, someone is tempted to break out that 
 our emphasis on simplicity is overdone, that 
 nothing profound can be uttered simply. How 
 could anyone phrase simply the nebular hy- 
 pothesis, or the doctrine of evolution, or the 
 law of diminishing return? The subject mat- 
 ter of religion is at least as profound as the 
 Einstein theory of relativity, and magazines 
 and books have only made themselves ridicu- 
 lous in trying to simplify Einstein. All of 
 which might be pertinent if the preacher were 
 to be conceived of as an expounder of theology 
 or philosophy. His duty, however, is quite 
 different — that of making vital to men the life 
 out of which theology comes. We shall never 
 get anywhere until we see this underlying pur- 
 pose of preaching. Let the preacher enrich his 
 own life by the profoundest theological study 
 of which he is capable, but before his congre- 
 gation he must always make the return to life. 
 To do this demands strenuous intellectual 
 effort. 
 
 The second power which the preacher 
 needs in helping people to understand is that 
 of amplification. This does not mean saying 
 
 48 
 
HELPING MEN TO UNDERSTAND 
 
 the same thing over and over again in the same 
 way, but does mean looking at the one truth 
 from all available angles. We assume that 
 at the outset the preacher has chosen some- 
 thing worth saying, something big enough to 
 be approached from a variety of points of view. 
 This being the case, it is well if the preacher 
 knows how to make the one essential thought 
 the center around which everything marches, 
 or the point of departure from which every- 
 thing in the sermon starts and to which every- 
 thing finally returns. We remind ourselves 
 that we are dealing with the task of trying to 
 make people understand. Few listeners in the 
 Sunday congregation are impressed even with 
 the simplest and clearest statement on the 
 first putting. 
 
 In the search for efficiency we may well con- 
 sent to learn from present-day advertisers and 
 newspaper propagandists. These worthies are 
 indeed usually children of this world, but they 
 know how to deal with their contemporary gen- 
 eration. Their problem is to arouse a sus- 
 tained public interest in their wares, whether 
 the wares be material or of a more intangible 
 category. The trick is turned by finding new 
 and arresting ways to say the same thing 
 until the idea finally gets through and sticks. 
 It is astonishing how many methods these ex- 
 
 49 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 perts discover to tell us where to buy the best 
 shoe or automobile or how to get rid of capital- 
 ists or Bolshevists. With a nobler subject mat- 
 ter the preacher ought to be able to develop 
 even a finer skill in amplified presentation. 
 
 If I may be pardoned a word of reminis- 
 cence, my first sermon, delivered over a quar- 
 ter of a century ago, dealt with evolution, mod- 
 ern biblical and social theories, all in twenty 
 minutes. At the end I sank into the pulpit 
 chair with the sickening query as to what there 
 was left for the next Sunday. Since then I 
 have learned, I trust, something of the wisdom 
 of Father Tyrrell's shrewd comment about 
 breaking bread to the multitudes, namely, that 
 breaking bread is obviously intended to get 
 the bread into small enough pieces to be used. 
 Without irreverence it may be said also that 
 preaching is an art of almost miraculously 
 multiplying the pieces till the multitude is 
 fed. The one truth is broken into many pieces 
 by the preacher and each piece invested with 
 a score of life-giving qualities. 
 
 Here, again, the preacher may feel that he 
 is being asked to perform a task which is some- 
 what beneath his trained intellectual powers. 
 Let him not deceive himself as to the mental 
 force which all this requires. If he will for- 
 give another reference to the children of the 
 
 50 
 
HELPING MEN TO UNDERSTAND 
 
 world, let him remind himself that the talent 
 of a first-class advertiser or propagandist is 
 rare and costly. If we were dealing with sheer 
 repetition, the situation would not be one 
 calling for intense intellectuality, but in 
 preaching the repetition must be with a differ- 
 ence, and it is that difference for which the 
 preacher has to pay with the best that is in 
 him. From the beginning the hearers may be 
 willing to accept the preacher's statement of 
 his fundamental proposition without disa- 
 greement. They may even ask what there is 
 in such a proposition to discuss. Why not say 
 it and pass on? Some of the greatest sermonic 
 victories are won in bringing people to see the 
 force of truths which they ordinarily accept 
 without question. The preacher surprises such 
 hearers into looking at the old idea from a new 
 angle which reveals a new size, or shape, or 
 color ; and so on to the end — possibly with the 
 listener in a state of wonder at the newness of 
 something at which he has been looking all 
 his life. 
 
 An acute student once told me of his satis- 
 faction in listening to the lectures of the late 
 Josiah Royce. In a given lecture Royce would 
 deal with but one theme; his progress through 
 that theme had something of the circular, 
 scouring swing of a rising flood of waters 
 
 51 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 which advances with a whirl rather than with 
 a direct attack. ''So," said my friend, "if I 
 don't catch him fully at the first statement, I 
 catch him as he swings around again." 
 
 Is not life in considerable part just looking 
 upon a few elemental truths from the changing 
 points of view which come with spiritual ascent 
 toward higher altitudes? If it is not too gro- 
 tesque, may we not say that our spiritual 
 ascent is like the spiral rise of some monarch 
 of flight who sees below him always the same 
 earth or sea but who sees it ever in a larger 
 setting? If the preacher is to catch anything 
 of the secret of popular ministry, he must 
 acquire this power to help men see again and 
 again and again the enlarging meaning of some 
 principles they may think they understand at 
 first glance. 
 
 52 
 
HELPING MEN TO THINK 
 
 It would be a meager ideal, however, which 
 would be content with merely helping men to 
 understand. A hearer might understand and 
 yet not adequately understand. While in all 
 the responses of an audience to a preacher the 
 will element of the listeners is involved, more 
 is required for full understanding than barely 
 the degree of attention and grasp of the speak- 
 er's thought w^hich discerns a meaning. The 
 preaching which helps people gets them to do 
 everything that they can do for themselves. 
 Hence the preacher must on his side do all in 
 his power to help his people to think. 
 
 We have spoken in the previous chapter 
 about the need of amplification. In their di- 
 rect statement, I very much fear, my chapters 
 will seem to be warring with one another. I 
 may seem to be taking back in one section all 
 that I have said earlier. Even at the risk of 
 seeming contradiction, however, may I warn 
 that with all his amplifying the speaker is not 
 to amplify too much. In the development of 
 the theme itself he should leave something to 
 
 53 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 the constructive activity of the listener. Un- 
 derstand, again, what preaching is, or what 
 it is not. It is not the bare communication of 
 fact. Facts there must be, but facts with 
 meanings and implications. If the preacher 
 were a scientist stating an exact formula and 
 were to leave out one factor, the formula would 
 not work. If he were a physician writing a 
 prescription, it would be imperative to get 
 everything in, and in the exact proportions. 
 If he were a lawyer, it would be necessary to 
 introduce the last shred of evidence. While 
 the preacher at times makes statements like 
 those of a scientist or a physician or a lawyer, 
 primarily he is a life-giver, and life-giving 
 means the calling forth of men's own powers. 
 So that the wise preacher is not he who says 
 everything himself. Better leave a sermon no- 
 ticeably incomplete, if the hearer is thereby 
 compelled to think out a conclusion for him- 
 self, than to allow the hearer always to quit 
 the church saying: "That is final. That is 
 finished. That is settled." If the issue is a 
 practical surrender of will in consecration, the 
 sermon should lead to finality, but we are not 
 thinking of such surrender just now. In the 
 etymological sense the preacher should be an 
 educator — he should seek to lead out the possi- 
 bilities of his hearers. Or if the Christian life 
 
 54 
 
HELPING MEN TO THINK 
 
 is fundamentally walking with God, he should 
 try to help men to walk; he should not carry 
 them or provide intellectual vehicles for them, 
 or even allow them to lean too heavily on him- 
 self. It is sometimes said that the most com- 
 petent executive never himself does anything 
 that he can get anyone else to do. So it might 
 be said that the most competent speaker will 
 not himself say what he can get his hearers to 
 say. This stands in need of qualification — 
 qualification which we shall make in due time, 
 but it does state an aspect of wisdom which 
 should not be overlooked. 
 
 A second rule for helping hearers to think 
 is to use stimulating figures of speech. If 
 speech has one characteristic above another as 
 a revealer of the common mind that character- 
 istic is the tendency to the figurative in any 
 utterance at all popular. Every step away 
 from the concrete to the abstract is a step away 
 from the people's thinking. The power of ab- 
 stract utterance is, to be sure, one of the great- 
 est gifts to the human mind, and this power 
 is granted only to the masters ; but the power 
 over the abstract is not the only mastery which 
 deserves to be called great. All leaders in lit- 
 erature as such have been masters of the con- 
 crete. 
 
 The virtue of the figure for the preacher is 
 
 55 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 that it makes a connection for his sermon with 
 the world of things in which his hearers live. 
 Abstract logical coherences mean little to most 
 of us. We live among things and among peo- 
 ple, and the very fact that one thing is related 
 to another establishes in the mind of the hearer 
 threads of relationship which may indeed not 
 be logical but which are altogether vital never- 
 theless. For simple illustration of figurative 
 utterance as the prolific producer of utterance 
 from those who hear, think of an apt figure 
 of speech in a prayer meeting as a stimulus to 
 talk. One reason why prayer meetings are 
 often so lifeless is that nothing in the remarks 
 of the leader starts others to talking. There 
 is no hook by which we can take hold. If a 
 happy turn of phrase pricks minds into think- 
 ing, the meeting is likely to be interesting 
 enough. 
 
 I once dropped into a noonday prayer service 
 in a large city where the attendants were 
 mostly day laborers just off the streets. One 
 often hears the most striking figures of speech 
 used in such meetings to set forth conceptions 
 of the religious experience. The meeting of 
 which I speak was dragging heavily until a 
 teamster arose who emphasized the need of 
 dying to self in order to live unto Christ. He 
 concluded by saying that he came into the 
 
 56 
 
HELPING MEN TO THINK 
 
 kingdom of heaven by the "death-route," The 
 figure did not appeal to me as extraordinarily 
 appropriate or even elegant, but it took. That 
 is to say, it caught the imagination of the 
 crowd, and the meeting noticeably livened up. 
 
 All that I am now saying must be understood 
 within the limitations imposed by good sense 
 and good taste, but the effectiveness of the 
 figurative to quicken hearers to thought and 
 speech on their own account must not be de- 
 spised. It is distressing to see a figure go on 
 all fours, but not so distressing as not to see 
 it go at all. If we were to drop out of Chris- 
 tian thinking all that has been implied by fig- 
 ures of speech, we should not have much left. 
 With Christ as the Way, and the Light, and the 
 Shepherd and the Sower, the disciples have 
 heard from the beginning figures so suggestive 
 that almost of themselves these figures have 
 carried the minds of believers along to inevita- 
 ble progress. 
 
 Again, the preacher must cultivate that 
 sense of balance in utterance which enables 
 him to put truth positively and boldly, boldly 
 enough even to provoke a reaction in some 
 quarters. Balance — balance — balance — how 
 many sins of public speech are committed in 
 thy name ! Because of the excesses of the half- 
 baked or the unripe we have been told that in 
 
 57 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 discussing spiritual themes we must keep our 
 balance — and be sane ! That word "sane" has 
 been so abused in these latter days that any 
 forth-right preacher of positive temperament 
 might well consider himself offered a deadly 
 affront in being called "sane." For balancing 
 too often means thrusting in qualifications too 
 trifling to be mentioned as compared with the 
 main idea. The fact that some qualifications 
 are even mentioned gives them a significance 
 not inherently belonging to them. A diag- 
 nostician summoned to determine whether a 
 patient had heart trouble would not feel it 
 necessary to prepare his report of a serious 
 disorder by complimenting the patient on the 
 color of his hair or the contour of his face. 
 Genuine balance goes straight to the center 
 of a trouble in the effort to restore a lost 
 equilibrium. If a boat is liable to capsize, 
 the sudden shout to the crew is the only bal- 
 anced procedure. If the house is on fire, too 
 studied utterance is the mark of serious mental 
 handicap. The Old Testament prophets were 
 not particularly given to padding their sen- 
 tences with the purpose of bringing all possible 
 qualifications of any idea within the field of 
 view. Elijah running eighteen miles in frenzy 
 before the chariot of Ahab does not strike us 
 as altogether sane, and yet Elijah was sane 
 
 J 58 
 
HELPING MEN TO THINK 
 
 enough to see that the conflict between the 
 Jehovah of Israel and the Baal of Phoenicia 
 had to be a battle to the death. If preaching 
 means anything, it means that the preacher 
 is dealing with themes heavily weighted with 
 spiritual values. The preacher is not, in the 
 pulpit at least, a judge making a decision be- 
 tween fine issues. The issues are compara- 
 tively simple in sermons — or they ought to be 
 — and the sermons should be positive enough to 
 carry the hearer along or to throw him into 
 opposition. 
 
 We urge with all our might that this is not 
 a plea for rashness. We are not striving for 
 that brand of harangue or invective which 
 splits churches. We are not sanctioning the 
 introduction of needlessly divisive elements 
 into preaching, but we do feel that the preach- 
 ing should be strong enough either to call 
 forth the amen from the hearer which shows 
 that his mind is actively sanctioning, or, on 
 the other hand, to put the hearer into the op- 
 position which shows that his mind is fully 
 alert. If we could have divisions under 
 preaching without splitting congregations, the 
 outcome would be spiritually wholesome. 
 
 Suppose, however, the preacher is mistaken ; 
 suppose he is in a particular sermon off his 
 balance. We are not dealing with cracked 
 
 59 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 brains, but with men of training and sacrifice 
 who have never passed through any unfor- 
 tunate cerebral crises. We affirm of such men 
 that if they honestly overstate a position, or 
 even if they abound in contradictions, some 
 good will result in the end by the quickening of 
 Christian thinking, if in no other way. There 
 is a measure of justice in the claim that the 
 ages of controversy in the church have also 
 been the ages of progress, provided the con- 
 troversies have not been so bitter as to let in 
 unrighteous tempers or to lead to the use of 
 carnal weapons. For thinking is of the es- 
 sence of the religious experience, and while 
 men have been thinking they have been gen- 
 erating life religiously self-communicating. 
 As for contradictions, we can never afford to 
 drop out of our reckoning the contradictions 
 of thinkers as a factor in progress. A student 
 of philosophy once remarked of Kant that if 
 Kant had himself cleared his system of contra- 
 dictions, there would not have been much work 
 for the philosophers of the one hundred years 
 following Kant. 
 
 Finally, the preacher must have confidence 
 in the soil into which he casts the seed which 
 is the Word of God. He must get rid of the 
 paternal in his relation to his hearers if he is 
 to deal fairly with them as hearers of the word. 
 
 60 
 
HELPING MEN TO THINK 
 
 If the farmer did not know beforehand the 
 course through which a grain of wheat runs 
 after it is planted in the ground, he might see 
 nothing but destruction in what the soil at first 
 does with the grain, if he could behold the un- 
 derground processes. Swollen, burst, torn to 
 shreds is the seed after the properties of the 
 soil get their chance at it ; but that is not the 
 end of the story. The harvest is the end of the 
 story. So with the mind's attack on the word 
 of the Truth. The Truth at first is apparently 
 torn into shreds by the soil of the mind, the 
 difference between soil and minds being that 
 the minds are likely to speak out as to what 
 is going on. Now, the preacher must not 
 meddle too much with the consequences of his 
 own preaching. His preaching should have 
 consequences. One of the watchwords of mod- 
 ern education is "investigation by the pupil 
 under guidance" — a fine watchword for the 
 preacher, if he is willing to let the truth come 
 to a harvest with which he may not wholly 
 agree. If the preacher is patient and tolerant 
 and commands the confidence of his people, 
 only good can come of his stimulating the 
 people to think. The danger is that the 
 preacher may become scared at the results of 
 his own preaching and attempt to stop the 
 thought processes at some fixed limit. Then 
 
 61 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 there is a bursting-forth that may seem to him 
 very alarming. Fundamentally, though, this 
 is only the Christian soil insisting upon its 
 right to deal with the Christian seed in the 
 manner that leads to the Christian harvest. 
 
VI 
 
 THE GUIDANCE OF KELIGIOUS 
 FEELING 
 
 It has been our wish to arrange the themes 
 of this section in the order of their importance, 
 ascending constantly to higher phases. Only 
 roughly can one phase of religious experience 
 be called more important than another. More- 
 over, in dealing with thought and feeling and 
 deed successively we are likely to fall into the 
 fallacy that these aspects of spiritual activity 
 are somehow separate from one another, 
 whereas there cannot be pure thought or pure 
 feeling or pure will. Thought, will, and feel- 
 ing presuppose each the others. We can see, 
 however, that in one or another phase the ele- 
 ment of thought or feeling or volition may pre- 
 dominate. 
 
 In considering religious feeling we may well 
 remember that human values have their seat 
 for us in the sensibility. We shall try to show 
 in our next section that the final goal of preach- 
 ing is to produce action, or at least attitudes by 
 wills. This is not, however, for the sake of 
 just getting things done; instead the object is 
 
 63 
 
THE PEEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 the spiritual and inner consequences following 
 to him who acts and to him who is the acted 
 upon. In one sense even the action toward 
 which the preaching drives is not the end but 
 the beginning. Preaching directs itself to- 
 ward the will. The wise preacher strives to 
 start men to thinking and to make them feel 
 deeply in order that they may set their wills 
 toward God. With the will thus set the value 
 of the will's attitude is shown in the pro- 
 founder thinking and the profounder feeling 
 which then arise anew out of the religious 
 obedience. 
 
 So we must not neglect to help men to feel. 
 We must do all we can to arouse and guide 
 feeling. If a preacher can take an audience of 
 two hundred or two thousand people, coming 
 to church on Sunday tired and jaded after the 
 toil of the week, and merely send them away 
 "feeling better" after the sermon, that is worth 
 while. This, by the way, is the secret of the 
 power of some preachers whom their contem- 
 poraries occasionally look down upon as not 
 especially intellectual. The hearers may not 
 remember long what such a preacher says. 
 They do not know what it is about him that 
 helps, but something helps. The help is the 
 glow and contagion of a live humanity. There 
 is warmth, even fire in the better sense. As 
 
 64 
 
GUIDANCE OF RELIGIOUS FEELING 
 
 long as daily existence rushes at such break- 
 neck speed as now we may be grateful for such 
 life-bringers. We who try to preach should 
 strive always to keep ourselves even in such 
 physical condition that everything about us 
 suggests quickening and enkindling vitality. 
 
 Here we may as well speak of a certain aes- 
 thetic possibility even in the shaping of the 
 sermon itself. Not many men who sit in the 
 pews are able to judge a sermon from the point 
 of view of the finer shades of skill in workman- 
 ship, but almost all realize the difference be- 
 tween a sermon which shows traits of an art- 
 ist's craftsmanship and one which reveals bun- 
 gling. Sermonic beauty has little to do with 
 ornament — with quotations of poetry or al- 
 lusions to flowers. Beauty may be inherent in 
 the structure of the sermon itself — in its pro- 
 portions, in the directness of its phrasing, and 
 in the dignity of all its material. As likely as 
 not the stamp of beauty may add marvelously 
 to the effectiveness of the sermon as an instru- 
 ment. Every generation has to mold over a 
 deal of raw thought stuff which has been with 
 men from the beginning. Each generation 
 must shape this thought into terms of expres- 
 sion of its own. Since the instinctive craving 
 of men is for excellence in that something we 
 call "style," and since this craving shows itself 
 
 65 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PP:OPLE 
 
 in all realms of creative effort, the minister 
 may well seek to meet this demand in his 
 preaching. There is a professionalism which 
 is ruinous to the preaching of the gospel. There 
 is a nobler professionalism which sets the gos- 
 pel on high. The people are drawn by this 
 highly skilled mastery of preaching whether 
 they can describe just what it is or not. 
 
 As with the sense of beauty so also with the 
 sense of humor. This too has its place in 
 preaching. We are speaking of the guidance 
 or control of feeling to religious ends. Con- 
 trol does not necessarily mean repression. 
 When we tell a child to control his feelings we 
 too often mean that he shall not laugh or cry. 
 Control ought to mean use for the highest pur- 
 poses. We do not have in mind the joke-teller 
 when we say that preaching should show a 
 sense of humor. For much opposition to Chris- 
 tianity vanishes in an atmosphere charged 
 with an appreciation of the humorous. Ridi- 
 cule has often been deadly as a foe of some 
 forms of Christianity, but ridicule can be even 
 more deadly when turned against the enemies 
 of Christianity. There is indeed a heart- 
 broken skepticism among men which comes out 
 of sheer disappointment, of thwarted plans, of 
 shattered dreams. Such skepticism is entitled 
 to respect because of the human agony out of 
 
 66 
 
GUIDANCE OF KELIGIOUS FEELING 
 
 which it springs. There is another skepticism, 
 that of intellectual arrogance and spiritual 
 conceit. This is entitled to no more respect 
 now than when the old prophet let the fierce- 
 ness of his wit play around the idea of a Baal 
 who perchance was asleep and had to be 
 awakened. Elijah's fire of sarcasm on the 
 heads of the priests of Baal was almost as con- 
 vincing as the fire which afterward fell on the 
 sacrifice. So too with the scorn of Isaiah over 
 the idol-makers who used the left-over idol 
 stuff for fuel. 
 
 There is another and deeper meaning in hu- 
 mor. It is akin to the satisfaction we feel 
 when we see a hard problem solved, or some- 
 thing out of place put into place. The smile on 
 the faces of men as they behold a problem fall 
 into orderly solution is not only the joy of re- 
 lief. It is the satisfaction which arises as the 
 feeling for the fitness of things is gratified. 
 One of the most encouraging of scriptural 
 promises is that those who mourn shall one day 
 laugh. If mourning comes partly as the sense 
 of strain when things are wrong, laughter 
 should follow when all things fall into their 
 proper place. 
 
 There may be decided resentment at the sug- 
 gestion that one element in popular preaching 
 should be the right use of pathos. Pathos in. 
 
 67 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 the pulpit has been fearfully abused and that 
 too because of the popular demand for pathos. 
 Some of the contempt which many good people 
 feel toward popular appeal as ordinarily un- 
 derstood is directed at the emphasis which 
 preachers have so often laid on tears as the sur- 
 est sign that speech is effective with an audi- 
 ence. Surely, there is a diviner pathos than 
 that which the moving picture or the cheap 
 novel strives after. There must be a higher 
 pulpit pathos than what the youngsters to-day 
 call "sob-stuff," if we are not to abandon the 
 pathetic altogether. 
 
 The fundamental element in the popular re- 
 sponse to pathos is not a wanton propensity on 
 the part of hearers toward the maudlin. If 
 the response to the pathetic is not thoroughly 
 bridled, it does indeed soon become maudlin; 
 but bridles are instruments for guidance 
 and not for repression. Underneath our re- 
 sponse to the pathetic is the recognition of the 
 universal fact of tragedy in life. A hearer who 
 Sunday after Sunday listens to sermons which 
 betray no trace of recognition of the shadow 
 which always hangs over human life begins 
 to wonder if he is hearing true preaching. A 
 presentation of human life in which the sun- 
 shine always predominates is simply not 
 sound. We need not be tearful nor gloomy, 
 
 68 
 
GUIDANCE OF RELIGIOUS FEELING 
 
 but we recognize life as it is when we let the 
 shadows touch the presentation of the truth. 
 Life is neither the glare of the mid-daj nor the 
 blackness of midnight. It is a half-light, or 
 a landscape over which the clouds float. All 
 the masters of pathos have known the control 
 of light and shade, which, as in all art, plays 
 so large a part in effectiveness. To ignore the 
 shadow altogether brings, as we have said, a 
 hint of falsity. To speak too bluntly of sorrow 
 and tragedy is cruelty, but there is a course 
 in between which cannot be prescribed or de- 
 scribed, which touches firmly and yet lightly, 
 and more by suggestion than by direct state- 
 ment. Happy the preacher who in just a word 
 can call up a forgotten boyhood, or people 
 the memory again with faces that have faded 
 from sight, or recall to us the dreams of youth, 
 or so throw light upon a grief or a defeat that 
 we feel soothed and gratified rather than har- 
 assed or distracted. Happier still if the mas- 
 ter in the pulpit knows how so to clothe all 
 experience with majesty or sublimity that the 
 feeling of pathos is transfused into the feeling 
 of awe and wonder. 
 
 People will respond to this loftier emotion- * 
 alism. They may not know exactly the differ- 
 ence between the true and the false note struck 
 upon the feelings, but they are aware of the 
 
 €9 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 difference, and in the long run yield to the true 
 note. Among the most widely read passages 
 of Scripture are those that touch upon the 
 pathetic. The story of Joseph, the cry of 
 David over Absalom, the mourning of the wor- 
 shipers by the streams of Babylon, to say 
 nothing of the inexpressible sadness of the 
 more sacred scenes in the life of our Lord, 
 are among the passages to which Bible readers 
 by the scores of thousands turn first. 
 
 We are not to attempt a catalogue of the 
 feelings of the human heart. May we speak, 
 however, about the enthusiasm for the Christ- 
 like God? We do not wish to make conscience 
 an emotion, or put moral feelings on the same 
 plane as the aesthetic, though all are indeed 
 manifestations of spiritual life. If, by the 
 way, we think it worth while to coin such 
 terms as "omnipotence," "omnipresence," and 
 "omniscience" as describing a God deserving 
 worship, we might just as well coin one more 
 term and speak of God's "omnisensibility," by 
 which we would mean God's power to gather 
 up within himself all worthy phases of feeling, 
 especially the feeling revealed in Christ. I 
 spoke in one of my opening pages about mak- 
 ing men believe the good news about God. If 
 we can believe that in Christ we have the heart 
 of God laid bare ; if it is true that the Christ- 
 
 70 
 
GUIDANCE OF RELIGIOUS FEELING 
 
 spirit and feeling rules at the center of the 
 universe; if, without regard to theological 
 speculation about the Logos, Christ expresses 
 the meaning for which all things were made; 
 if we can believe all this and make men believe 
 it, we have touched the springs of an uncon- 
 querable enthusiasm, which does not, indeed, 
 give itself to tumult or to shouting, but which 
 moves forward nevertheless to the conquest of 
 the world. 
 
 It is the business of the preacher to create 
 reserves of enthusiasm that do not run off in 
 flood and escape. To this end there should be 
 something about preaching which solidifies the 
 enthusiasm for the nobler values and stores 
 it in the realm of permanent motive or impulse. 
 A great worker for his fellow men was once 
 asked if with so many drains on his compassion 
 he did not at times fear that his pity would dry 
 up. His reply was that pity as a conscious 
 state of feeling might indeed come and go, but 
 that pity as a motive remained. Likewise 
 rightly to control the emotions of the people 
 who hear us preach is not to encourage that 
 expression with which the emotions vanish, 
 but to sink them down to that realm where they 
 abide among the lasting motives of our lives. 
 
 71 
 
VII 
 
 THE QUICKENING OF THE WILL 
 
 We have said that we have planned to ar- 
 range these chapters in an ascending scale. 
 We come to the most important of all in this 
 aspect of our consideration of preaching — 
 preaching as a help to make men act. 
 
 The will must stand at the center of any sys- 
 tem of religion which is to be fair to all men, 
 to people as we find them, for the will is the 
 one force over which each of us has a measure 
 of control. If the kingdom of God had at its 
 entrance welcome only to thinkers, it would 
 shut out multitudes. If it welcomed only those 
 capable of rapt states of emotional experiences, 
 it would shut out other multitudes. When, 
 however, the requirement is that men do the 
 will of God, that test is one which every man 
 can reacL — a test which is within the grasp of 
 the child and of the sage, of the barbarian and 
 of the philosopher, of the bond and of the free. 
 The will of God cannot mean the same for all 
 alike, or for any two alike, but so far as it can 
 be understood by each it can be obeyed by each. 
 This makes the kingdom of God a kingdom of 
 us all. 
 
 72 
 
THE QUICKENING OF THE WILL 
 
 What do we mean by doing the will of God? 
 We mean simply doing whatever appeals to our 
 thought and conscience as the will of God. If 
 we are to erect artificial tests, of course we may 
 find ourselves in confusion, but we have in 
 mind something more fundamental. By doing 
 the will of God we mean in the last analysis 
 the resolution to live in the spirit of the Christ- 
 like God. Many of us have become perplexed 
 at some expositions of the doctrine of the "wit- 
 ness of the Spirit" so called. Rightly inter- 
 preted the doctrine can only mean the witness 
 of assurance, the firmness of conviction of the 
 presence of God which is the heart of Chris- 
 tian privilege. The doctrine has indeed often 
 been expounded as a mystic, almost magic tes- 
 timony in an altogether extraordinary inner 
 feeling. To one perplexed it may be well to 
 remember that there is a witness a good man 
 can always have, namely, the witness of his 
 own spirit. He can know what he intends to 
 do. He can know what side he chooses. He 
 can know what world of values he votes for. 
 To bring men to deliberate purposef ulness like 
 this is a major part of Christian preaching. 
 
 We repeat that it is the duty of preaching to 
 help. Just as the kingdom of heaven is fair 
 in that it puts forth a test for admission within 
 the reach of every man, so it is fair also in that 
 
 73 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 it seeks for the free — not the compelled — as- 
 sent of a man's will. No preaching is justified 
 that finally overrides the wills of men. Sup- 
 pose a preacher to have a strong overwhelm- 
 ing personality which in an irresistible rush 
 carries men along with it toward righteous- 
 ness. Righteousness is indeed good on its own 
 account, but such compelling preaching would 
 not be altogether Christian. Christianity 
 never encourages reliance upon another to act 
 for us. It rests down upon profounder respect 
 for human choices than we often realize. Jesus 
 said: "Behold, I stand at the door and 
 knock." Jesus would not have been loyal to 
 any trait of his own gospel to have forced an 
 entrance. The only Christian compulsion is a 
 compulsory attraction which persuades. So 
 that Christian preaching is to be conceived as 
 helpful, setting before minds noble courses, 
 and aiding men to feel the pull of a new af- 
 fection. 
 
 In helping men to side with God and to do 
 his will the preacher can clear the ground of 
 some misconceptions, one of them that doing 
 the will of God involves necessarily a new and 
 different round of deeds so far as the deeds 
 themselves are concerned. If the problem is 
 that of a life abandoning a career of selfishness 
 and transgression, a different course of con- 
 
 74 
 
THE QUICKENING OF THE WILL 
 
 duct — even involving violent change from the 
 past — is admittedly necessary. Moreover, as I 
 shall try to show later, society in its moral 
 progress discerns that some activities are evil 
 which were once esteemed good, and again the 
 Christian must break with the past. For many, 
 many people, however, doing the wdll of God 
 would not necessitate action different from 
 previous conduct. The conduct as conduct has 
 been worthy. The difference would be in the 
 new deliberate purpose of the will in the do- 
 ing. If the purpose has been selfish, it must 
 be made unselfish. If it has been indifferent, 
 it must be charged with purpose. If the work 
 as such is worth doing at all, it is worth doing 
 with all the might of a Christian will. We say 
 this, commonplace as it is, because so many of 
 us judge the success of Christian preaching 
 by the degree to w^hich preachers arouse men 
 to bustling activity specifically religious. 
 Every churchman seems to wish his church to 
 be a hive, which is well enough if the honey 
 produced is worth eating. Possibly churches 
 are not doing enough in specifically church 
 tasks. Undoubtedly, more men should respond 
 to specific Christian calls ; but when all is said 
 the immense workaday tasks of the world have 
 to be carried forward and these are for the ma- 
 jority the chief sphere of Christian service. 
 
 75 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 One of the self-evident claims to credit which 
 the human race has established for itself is the 
 faithfulness with which men go through the 
 vast mass of daily drudgery. Here is where 
 most of us live. Here doing the will of God 
 means living in the spirit of Christ — cheering 
 our fellow-men, protesting against injustice, 
 striving to make the scene of daily work one 
 of the mansions of the Father's house. Popu- 
 lar preaching must keep in mind the daily ex- 
 istence of the majority. The preacher is not 
 ministering just to get hold of the exceptional 
 youth for some special service. If he neglects 
 the exceptional youth and the possibilities of 
 special service he will indeed fall short of his 
 full duty. The main obligation, however, is 
 with the ordinary man, to help him see that 
 God is a Companion and Friend and to help 
 him walk in that friendship. Doing the will 
 of God is for that man just doing the next 
 thing and the next in the spirit of Christ. The 
 path is so clear that the wayfaring man need 
 not make mistake, once he is in the path. 
 
 Yet the simplicity itself may be deceptive. 
 Men may lose sight of the central importance 
 of the attitude of will and take to following the 
 strange gods of purely intellectual speculation 
 or emotional thrill. We must insist that this 
 citadel of the will is the target of all the preach- 
 
 76 
 
THE QUICKENING OF THE WILL 
 
 er'S effort. The preacher must make his hear- 
 ers see that after enough of enlightenment of 
 mind to enable them to discern the Christian 
 path, and after enough of stir of feeling to 
 prompt to action, the purposeful resolution is 
 thereafter the key to all jjrogress. We have 
 talked in these addresses as if the mind first 
 acted, then the feelings responded, and then 
 the will finally took its stand. That has been 
 somewhat due to the exigencies of systematic 
 arrangement and also to the fact that some 
 light of knowledge and some glow of feeling 
 are involved in any action. Ultimately the 
 high knowledge and the high feeling in the 
 kingdom of God are built upon the doing of the 
 will of God. 
 
 Have we not often thought of the signifi- 
 cance of the parable of the two housebuilders, 
 placed as that parable is at the conclusion of 
 the Sermon on the Mount? The difference be- 
 tween the two houses was that one had a foun- 
 dation and the other had not. One builder 
 had digged deep. By digging Jesus means 
 what he calls "doing the word," and the mean- 
 ing clearly is that the plainest and simplest de- 
 votion of the will is the foundation on which a 
 Christian superstructure — whatever it may be 
 — is to stand. Digging for the foundation is 
 the most ordinary labor, hard labor. It is the 
 
 77 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 labor that we would think anybody could do, 
 given the requisite physical strength. We 
 mean that it is not the labor held in especial 
 regard for skill or for proficiency. It is the 
 work within reach of the humblest toiler. Yet 
 the implication of Jesus is that it is this work 
 which is under the building of the house of 
 Christian wisdom. The speech or the thought 
 or the feeling may be finely enough conceived 
 and phrased, but if it does not build upon the 
 simplest doing of the will of God it will not 
 stand in the day of storm. 
 
 The same implication runs through the fig- 
 ures of speech which Jesus used. "Bear much 
 fruit. ... So shall ye be my disciples." The 
 life energies working at that intense effective- 
 ness which bears fruit involve the full-orbed 
 activity. Again, he said, "Take my yoke upon 
 you and learn of me: so shall ye be my disci- 
 ples." The figure of speech suggests once more 
 the plainest, simplest service. Out of this yoke- 
 bearing would come that understanding which 
 would mark discipleship. Another expression, 
 at least by implication, teaches the same truth. 
 Jesus told his disciples that when men would 
 revile them and persecute them and say all 
 manner of evil against them falsely for his 
 sake, they were to regard themselves as blessed, 
 for so had men persecuted the prophets before 
 
 78 
 
THE QUICKENING OF THE WILL 
 
 them. Only action can call forth the furious 
 opposition which shows itself in revilings and 
 persecutions. When the disciples came to the 
 action which was positive enough to provoke 
 persecution they arrived at new and sym- 
 pathetic understanding of the prophets. Above 
 all, the surest path to understanding is in 
 cross-bearing — not sentimentalizing about the 
 cross, or theorizing about it, but bearing the 
 cross. 
 
 This does not mean that through doing the 
 will of God the Christian will assuredly find 
 himself the possessor of a scheme of theology 
 or the recipient of trancelike visions. Obedi- 
 ence, however, does supply the data out of 
 which theologies and insights are born. Bet- 
 ter than a formal argument about God is the 
 firm conviction — based upon years of attempt 
 to do God's will — that God is. Better than 
 any ecstatic experience is the alert insight 
 into spiritual values which grows out of years 
 of faithful obedience. When Amos came to 
 Israel to denounce wrongdoing he exclaimed, 
 apparently with some scorn, that he was neither 
 a prophet nor the son of a prophet. He was no 
 doubt attacking prophets for professionalism. 
 He was calling the people away from the pro- 
 fessionally and artificially contrived message 
 and manufactured trance to simple obedience 
 
 79 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 to those commandments of God which any 
 right-minded man ought to recognize as di- 
 vine. We do not disparage worthy profession- 
 alism — by which we mean skill in helping peo- 
 ple to do the will of God — but no thought of 
 God is of value unless it comes out of godly 
 life, and no feeling about God is wholesome or 
 sound which does not spring out of the at- 
 tempt of the human will to fit into the divine 
 will. 
 
 Professor Francis G. Peabody once made an 
 illuminating comment on the passage, "I am 
 the Way, the Truth and the Life." He declared 
 that whether intentionally or otherwise the 
 order of the Fourth Gospel's terms about Jesus 
 is significant. Jesus is the Way. Walking 
 in the Way leads to the Truth. Out of the 
 Truth comes that fullness of feeling which we 
 mean by Life. So when the preacher has 
 touched the wills of men he has made possible 
 the opening of the mind and the flowering out 
 of that feeling which is assurance and joy. 
 
 80 
 
2. THE PKEACHER AS THE VOICE OF 
 THE PEOPLE 
 
VIII 
 PASTOKAL WORK AND PREACHING 
 
 We have examined, all too hurriedly, some 
 considerations which the preacher should keep 
 in mind if he would make his preaching popu- 
 lar. We come now to speak of the preacher 
 as uttering truths that have not merely been 
 revealed to him as an individual, but which 
 have been focused in his consciousness through 
 his dealing with the people. There is a sense 
 in which preaching can be said to be by the 
 people. The preacher is to be the voice of the 
 people. We do not accept without qualifica- 
 tion the doctrine that the voice of the people 
 is the voice of God, but we are searching for 
 whatever approach to the truth there may be 
 in that old adage. 
 
 Before coming to the center of this theme, 
 however, let us linger for a little over the self- 
 evident proposition that if the preacher is to 
 be the voice of the people he must know the 
 people. Hence he must give himself to all 
 available studies which will enable him to 
 know the spirit of men. In his reading, ex- 
 cept as he reads for recreation, he must keep 
 
 83 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 closest to the books which deal with men. 
 Many of us read chiefly for the sake of finding 
 illustrations, but much more important than 
 any illustration is the knowledge of human 
 life in its fundamental aspects. We may well 
 be grateful that during the past quarter cen- 
 tury so much has been done by scientific 
 study to make clear to us more and more 
 of the workings of the human mind and soul. 
 The masses of people have been broken up into 
 groups for careful observation: there are the 
 children and the young and the mature and 
 the old. We see that the spiritual character- 
 istics of these groups are not just entertain- 
 ingly charming incidents of personal experi- 
 ence, but revelations of human nature in its 
 best possibilities. How a preacher can neglect 
 the examinations of conversion in adolescence 
 and such researches as those of William James 
 in Varieties of Religious Experience is a puz- 
 zle. No matter who writes about the soul 
 and its activities, the business of the preacher 
 is to find out, if he can, all that has been said 
 that points toward wisdom in dealing with 
 souls. We have come clearly to see in our day 
 that what we call the laws of mind are revela- 
 tions of God's methods of doing just as truly 
 as are the laws of nature. Every soul, indeed, 
 comes into life with the marks of a distinct 
 
 84 
 
PASTORAL WOEK AND PREACHING 
 
 difference, but so do every flower and every 
 bird and every beast. As like as two peas in 
 a pod, we say, but peas in a pod are not alto- 
 gether alike. Unlikenesses do not prevent the 
 operations of laws which must be the laws of 
 God. If the study of individuals is important, 
 are not also important all those studies which 
 look toward the discovery of the laws accord- 
 ing to which men act, or can act, when they 
 move in groups? It will not do to assume a 
 spiritually superior attitude toward such 
 questions and sneer at formulas and statisti- 
 cal tables. Do the formulas and tables con- 
 tain any hints of value? The scientific method 
 is just the application of a common-sense 
 method over a wider field than one observer 
 can actually examine with his own eyes. If 
 there is nothing far-fetched or religiously im- 
 pertinent in asking why seven out of ten con- 
 versions in a preacher's own church have oc- 
 curred during the ages of adolescence, what 
 impertinence is there in asking why ten thou- 
 sand conversions in a hundred churches have 
 occurred during the same period? Or take 
 that other field of psychology which has been 
 relatively neglected — except as an occasional 
 novelist has dealt with it, perhaps sensation- 
 ally — the period of middle age in men. Why is 
 it that so many men who have lived apparently 
 
 85 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 good lives up to forty-five years of age sud- 
 denly go wrong? Is it because at that time 
 there is likely to be a disillusionment? Is it 
 in middle age that some men see that there is 
 no chance of the dreams of youth coming true? 
 Is it then that men realize that the success 
 they had hoped for is not likely ever to come? 
 Does the first chill at the thought of old age 
 come then? Is there then to any degree a 
 physical basis for change in character? If we 
 may legitimately ask this question about five 
 men, what is wrong in asking it about men in 
 general, even if we have to rely upon statisti- 
 cal tables and charts and other scientific ap- 
 paratus to get an answer? 
 
 We say that the mark of the man of God is 
 an awareness of God, an intuitive discernment 
 of God's will. The preacher must be a man of 
 God, but he must be a man of men also, know- 
 ing in himself how men will feel and how they 
 wall act in certain crises. Now, there are some 
 men who seem to be endowed with the aware- 
 ness of God in such manner that they can be 
 said to belong to a type of religious genius. 
 They have by nature a gift for awareness of 
 the Divine. The man who is the safest guide, 
 however, is the man who has attained to his 
 religious know^ledge by constant doing of the 
 will of God, seeking by doing God's will to 
 
 86 
 
PASTORAL WORK AND PREACHING 
 
 come into communion with God. So also there 
 are men who seem to have an almost uncanny 
 knack of understanding their fellows. With- 
 out going beyond the four walls of their own 
 houses they seem to know what men think and 
 what men will do. Still even such men are 
 likely to err if they do not mingle with men. 
 After having paid our compliments to scientific 
 knowledge of human nature which comes to 
 us in the books we must still say that all this 
 must be supplemented by the most faithful pas- 
 toral work among the people themselves. 
 
 It would seem that we ought to do this, if 
 for no other reason, for the sake of getting a 
 hold on people themselves, adding whatever 
 element of personal power we may to the truth 
 which we are preaching. We all have so much 
 to say in the abstract about the workings of 
 forces which move toward or away from the 
 kingdom of heaven that we forget how much 
 these forces take on a personal form. It would 
 not seem scientific in this day of abstract im- 
 personal statement to ask anybody to write 
 a thesis on the part played even in the might- 
 iest historical and social movements by per- 
 sonal infiuences. We are under the spell of 
 those who talk of the outworking of social laws, 
 predominantly economic. If, nevertheless, we 
 could get at what moves people at the time of 
 
 87 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 crisis, we might have to lay emphasis on per- 
 sonal influences at which the abstract thinker 
 would scoff. However it may be in the larger 
 fields, it is certain in the realm of the preacher 
 that personal interest in men is the surest road 
 to predispose them to friendly consideration 
 of the truth which the preacher is set to pro- 
 claim. How many times the preacher of no 
 noteworthy intellectual ability gets a better 
 hearing than his more lavishly endowed con- 
 temporary just because he takes more personal 
 interest in his people than does his gifted 
 brother! Especially if the preacher is trying 
 to lead the thinking of his people into new 
 paths does he need their confidence in him- 
 self, a confidence begotten by their knowing 
 him. 
 
 Though this is a little aside from our main 
 point, we must have a further word with those 
 who disparage pastoral work. Understand, 
 now, we are thinking from the point of view 
 of discerning what people are holding in mind 
 about religious matters. How can a man read 
 that thought of the people which must now 
 and again be put into expression for the sake 
 of religious advance if he does not move among 
 people? We are not trying to honor the hail- 
 fellow-well-met who thinks he understands 
 men because he knows the name of everybody 
 
 88 
 
PASTORAL WORK AND PREACHING 
 
 in town, or the brother who keeps count of all 
 the doorbells he has rung, or the other brother 
 who is always "dropping in to pass the time 
 of day." We mean instead to put in his proper 
 place the devoted servant of the Kingdom who 
 in his desire to help men is willing to do an 
 amount of pastoral calling that yields no im- 
 mediate return, for the sake of seeing into the 
 mind that is seriously perplexed about reli- 
 gious concerns, or of hearing one sentence from 
 a mind which has fought a temptation or a 
 doubt through to victory. Moreover, conver- 
 sations which may not singly mean much taken 
 together may reveal a mood or temper of the 
 people. If a leading university considers it 
 worth while to send relays of students into 
 forests to watch every hour of the period of 
 incubation of birds, how much more important 
 to give theological students to realize that the 
 human heart is understood only by careful ob- 
 servation ! 
 
 If anyone cries out that this is making cases 
 and specimens of people, that the object of 
 pastoral work is just to help a man on his own 
 account and for his own sake, we agree that 
 this is indeed the main consideration; but he 
 would be a strange Christian who would object 
 to having his own experience utilized at least 
 indirectly for the phrasing of a statement cal- 
 
 89 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 culated to help multitudes of others. The pas- 
 toral work must inevitably bear upon the 
 preaching. No one fit to be in the ministry 
 will violate confidences; but does a physician 
 violate confidence when he uses the knowledge 
 gained in a single case for statements of law 
 or principle that may save the lives of hun- 
 dreds or of thousands? 
 
 To be sure, this may damage the ordinary 
 conception of pastoral work. It may reverse 
 that conception. Instead of making the pas- 
 toral work consist in talk by the preacher it 
 encourages free and spontaneous utterance by 
 the one on whom the pastor is calling. No 
 more helpful word was ever spoken to me in 
 my work as a young minister than that of an 
 older minister who told me that a good pastor 
 did not need to be a conversationalist provided 
 he could be an attentive and interested lis- 
 tener. The brilliant talkers are often among 
 the least informed. If a pastor shows himself 
 willing to listen, and can listen without fidget- 
 ing in a hurry to get to the next call on his list, 
 he will be astonished to see how thoroughly 
 people will open to him the depths of their 
 lives, and how often they will give him a mes- 
 sage which is a genuine voice of humanity. 
 
 A successful pastor once told me of the fol- 
 lowing experience: A member of his church 
 
 90 
 
PASTORAL WORK AND PREACHING 
 
 suddenly met a terrible grief. For days the 
 stricken man sat almost in silence, but when 
 my friend called on him he was moved to talk 
 by the rare sympathy of a skilled physician of 
 souls, for my friend possessed such rare sym- 
 pathy. The mourner talked for one hour, for 
 two, for three, and found his way toward the 
 light as he himself talked. For the rest of his 
 life he held in grateful honor the memory of 
 the pastor who listened while he talked. Now 
 what the mourner gained as he thus thought 
 aloud toward the light was not less than the 
 pastor learned. The pastor heard not just the 
 man talking; he heard the voice of stricken 
 humanity and a note from that voice sounded 
 thereafter from his pulpit. 
 
 One reason for encouraging people "to talk 
 themselves clear out" is that in the experiences 
 which are most peculiarly our own we may 
 find ourselves to be most like other people. 
 Who of us has not had thoughts and feelings 
 which have seemed so peculiarly his own that 
 he has been afraid to mention them to others 
 for fear of being misunderstood and perhaps 
 laughed at? Yet who of us has not had the 
 experience of discovering that such thoughts 
 or feelings when actually expressed have been 
 those that other people have seemed to under- 
 stand best? Many of these most intimate ex- 
 
 91 
 
THE PREACHEK AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 periences are most catholic in their sweep. 
 The man who knows these peculiarly personal 
 experiences is able to preach in the widely hu- 
 man terms. Moreover, apart from all such in- 
 timacies, the preacher w^ho, with a consecrated 
 desire to serve, mingles most closely with his 
 fellows is the one who can most genuinely utter 
 the voice which we call the voice of humanity. 
 
 92 
 
IX 
 THE CONGREGATION AS A FORCE 
 
 All that we have said thus far could be ap- 
 plied to persons taking them one at a time. 
 So far we have been concerned chiefly with 
 those puttings of the truth which would likely 
 be popular with what we call the ordinary man, 
 or the man on the street. We have been inter- 
 ested in the type of preaching which would 
 make people wish to hear it as soon as they 
 heard about it. Now we wish to speak for a 
 chapter or two about the duty of the preacher 
 to mold his group of hearers — so far as he can 
 — into a unity, a force working with him for 
 the exaltation of Christianity's human and 
 divine ideals. 
 
 We are met at the outset with the old, old 
 objection that seems so profound, namely, that 
 a congregation is nothing apart from the peo- 
 ple that compose it. Let the congregation de- 
 part one at a time, and after the last man 
 passes the door there is no congregation left. 
 In so far as this is a protest against mistaking 
 merely nominal unities for realities we may 
 let it stand; but what we are thinking of is 
 
 93 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 clear on a little reflection : that men in groups 
 are different from men as separate persons. 
 Men in groups think differently, they feel dif- 
 ferently, they act differently than when sepa- 
 rate. If it is true that two material particles 
 develop different powers when acting together 
 from those which they reveal when acting 
 separately, why should it be strange that per- 
 sons reveal new powers when acting together? 
 Now all we are asking is that the preacher 
 keep in mind the spiritual force of the congre- 
 gation as a unity and try to control it for re- 
 ligious purposes. 
 
 We are witnessing to-day the development 
 of popular power along a path different from 
 that our fathers expected to see. The older 
 thought of popular force was that of a huge 
 mass of human beings whose total strength 
 might one day be available for forward move- 
 ments in every direction. In certain respects 
 we still hold to that ideal, an ideal which we 
 have before us in our conception of the public 
 opinion of a whole nation, for example; but 
 within the mass of the people we discern va- 
 rious minor groups — minor as to size and num- 
 ber — which we must think of as unities and 
 entities. Society as a whole remains one mass 
 for some purposes, but for others becomes an 
 organism of interrelated groups. This has, 
 
 94 
 
THE CONGREGATION AS A FORCE 
 
 of course, always been so. There have been in 
 all lands these voluntary and compulsory 
 groups, but it is only comparatively recently 
 that the significance of the groups has been 
 taken seriously enough by social students. 
 
 In our thought it is the business of the min- 
 istry to take heed to the significance of church 
 groups and make them count for the utmost. 
 The master preachers have always put their 
 stamp on their congregations. What we are 
 urging, however, is the deliberate recognition 
 of this possibility and of the possibility of util- 
 izing the inherent power of a congregation, 
 just by the fact that it is a congregation, to 
 reenforce the strength of the separate mem- 
 bers and to reenforce also the power of the 
 preacher in lifting the gospel on high. 
 
 Suppose we look first at the power of the 
 congregation over its own members. It is 
 quite the fashion to criticize any group influ- 
 ence on a member of the group, especially any 
 religious influence, as "crowd contagion." 
 Let us start, then, from crowd contagion. 
 There can be no doubt of the possibility of 
 such contagion, and of its perils. Kespectable 
 members of a community can be so seized by 
 crowd contagion as to join in lynching riots 
 which they never would have sanctioned for a 
 second if they had been alone. I remember 
 
 95 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 once seeing a religious assembly — ^in fact, an 
 assembly of preachers, all of them cultivated 
 and trained — swept into a fury of applause, 
 approving the rebuke directed against a pre- 
 siding officer whom they all knew to be in 
 the right. A sharp word of censure from the 
 floor started the applause, which grew by its 
 own intensity till the group was almost fren- 
 zied. The storm blew itself out in a few min- 
 utes and then every man was ashamed of him- 
 self. A psychologist has shown us that the 
 communities in the South which frequently 
 resort to horrible lynching parties are the 
 same communities which experience striking 
 and spectacular religious revivals. Only, it 
 should always be remembered that the revivals 
 are of the extravagant emotional variety. 
 
 We fully admit the peril of congregational 
 force. But is not the greatness of the peril 
 a measure of the possibility of the good which 
 can come from the same force wisely controlled 
 and directed? The same writer who points out 
 that lynching and revival meetings occur with 
 the same group raises the question as to 
 whether John Wesley did not have almost a 
 hypnotic ability to arouse intense emotion in 
 his audiences. Would it not be a fairer as- 
 sumption that the emotionalism of early Meth- 
 odism was the contagious stimulus of the 
 
 96 
 
THE CONGREGATION AS A FORCE 
 
 crowd itself, assembled together with high 
 emotional expectancy, and that Wesley's power 
 was that of controlling the crowd force for 
 lofty religious purposes? At any rate the 
 power was generated. Wesley seems to have 
 had his success in canalizing the force and 
 setting it to work. Those of us who remember 
 the Moody meetings know that the size of the 
 audience itself, and the expectancy of the au- 
 dience, contributed mightily to the irresisti- 
 bility of the evangelistic appeal. We do not 
 recall that any lynching parties followed 
 Moody's meetings or Wesley's. 
 
 The reference to evangelistic gatherings, 
 however, does bring us close to the danger of 
 crowd contagion. Before discussing the con- 
 gregational power as a force for good we are 
 anxious to be entirely fair in pointing out the 
 dangers. If a man who is living a selfish and 
 evil life is searching help to make a new start, 
 and the mass meeting by its loosing the con- 
 tagion of the mass spirit helps him toward 
 that start, well and good. Are all contagions 
 bad? Are we not to judge contagion by what 
 one catches? Probably there is no actual mi- 
 crobe that makes for good health as the pneu- 
 monia microbe makes for disease, but good 
 health is contagious at least in that we can 
 catch from the healthy man something of the 
 
 97 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 buoyancy of spirit in good health, which itself 
 tends to beget good health. We admit that 
 the danger is that in the evangelistic mass 
 meeting a man's will may be overborne and the 
 man swept to a decision which is not a decision. 
 The crowd has carried him along; when the 
 crowd falls away he cannot stand alone. Or 
 the man may rely so much on the inspiration 
 of the huge meeting that when that disperses 
 his will relaxes. Then the last state is worse 
 than the first. 
 
 Having heeded the dangers, we may now 
 recognize the advantages — the power of the 
 congregation for good. Look at its power to 
 quicken sluggish minds. Wise pedagogy is 
 to-day insisting on the power of the class of 
 pupils itself as an aid in education. When I 
 went to school almost the only function the 
 class itself served was to supply punishment 
 by humiliation in case of public failure. The 
 presence of an audience who could be depended 
 on to laugh at a too ridiculous blunder was in 
 a measure an intellectual stimulus. Teachers 
 to-day, however, feel that there is a higher 
 function for the class as a class than this, that 
 the part of the class is not fully played when 
 each pupil as a separate individual has recited 
 in the presence of the other individuals, each of 
 them thinking of his own separate perform- 
 
 98 
 
THE CONGREGATION AS A FORCE 
 
 ance. So there are being sought ways to make 
 the spirit of the class itself a quickener of all 
 the minds of the class, ways of enkindling alert- 
 ness and intellectual expectancy in problems 
 considered by the class as a class, sitting to- 
 gether as a class. 
 
 However it may be with schools, it is evident 
 that a congregation can be used to quicken 
 the minds of the separate members. An alert 
 audience is one of the best quickeners of men- 
 tal force. The hearer prone to wandering 
 thoughts finds his attention compelled by the 
 very fact that five hundred others are listening. 
 If a man who can see nothing in the nobler 
 forms of music wishes to cultivate a taste for 
 such music, he would best attend concerts 
 where such music is rendered. To sit with hun- 
 dreds of other people who are listening will of 
 itself do something to sharpen a dull under- 
 standing. Likewise statements which seem 
 tame enough if we read them in cold print glow 
 with life when we hear them as they are de- 
 livered to the congregation. We often remark 
 of such statements that what is missing as we 
 see them in print is the personality of the 
 preacher. This may be true, but hardly so 
 true as that the contagion of the audience is 
 also left out. It is simply impossible for a half 
 a thousand or more people to listen intently 
 
 99 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 at the same instant without pulling the slower 
 minds to a speed which they could not attain 
 by their individual selves. In an earlier chap- 
 ter I said that the preacher should aim at the 
 average normal intelligence in his audience. 
 This needs to be supplemented by the reflec- 
 tion that the audience of listeners has power 
 by its sheer listening to lift the average mind to 
 an ability beyond the average. Unfortunately, 
 when all this works the other way and the au- 
 dience is listless or bored every mind present 
 is depressed almost to a subnormal state. 
 
 At the risk of overillustrating may we say 
 that these congregational effects are even more 
 notable when a subject involving some play 
 of feeling is involved. Why is it that we smile 
 or laugh aloud at utterances before an audience 
 that do not seem particularly humorous when 
 we read them at home? Because the audience 
 turned upon us its cooperating sense of humor. 
 More striking still, why is it that we weep in 
 the audience at passages that would not beget 
 a sigh at home? Because we are in an au- 
 dience. 
 
 What has all this to do with the preacher? 
 Much every way. It is the duty of the preacher 
 to recognize such group forces and to control 
 them, not to repress them on the one hand or 
 to allow them to break in emotional storms or 
 100 
 
THE CONGREGATION AS A FORCE 
 
 freshets on the other. Equally urgent is the 
 necessity of the preacher's recognizing the 
 power of the audience over himself and of keep- 
 ing himself sensitive to the audience. We 
 have known speakers who have said that the 
 audience makes no difference to them, that 
 they speak for the unfolding of their own 
 thoughts without regard to the audience. Such 
 men can never be popular preachers. If there 
 is any virtue at all in Paul's figure of the body 
 of Christ, the various parts of the church act 
 and react on one another. The preacher is an 
 organ of the Body of Christ, and an organ is 
 not a self-sufflcient unity. An organ is part of 
 an organism. He is indeed a poor preacher if 
 he does not feel the power of his congregation 
 quite as truly as the congregation feels his 
 power, if his thought does not take on new 
 shades of meaning even to himself as hundreds 
 of people listen to him, or if he is not stirred 
 to better thought and expression by the pres- 
 ence of the audience in front of him. 
 
 When we say that the preacher is to keep 
 himself sensitive to his audience we do not 
 mean that he shall yield to the audience in any 
 unworthy way, all of which we shall try to em- 
 phasize later; but we do mean that he shall 
 keep the congregation always before his 
 thought. He is to serve them by expressing to 
 
 101 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 them what is noblest in themselves, by de- 
 claring to the world that Christian conscious- 
 ness a part of which at least is shaped by his 
 own group. He is not to allow any deadening 
 influence to steal into his life, to allow the 
 channels for the influx of spiritual life from 
 his people to himself to become blocked, or the 
 mystic currents thwarted. Possibly one reason 
 why speakers who suffer from stage fright at 
 first finally succeed so well is that they are 
 unusually sensitive to the audience. When 
 this sensitiveness is properly controlled it 
 tends to make the preacher a genuine voice of 
 the people. 
 
 102 
 
THE MESSAGE OF THE CONGREGATION 
 
 As we have said, the preacher must be on 
 guard against the wrong kind of sensitiveness 
 toward the congregation. This is the sensi- 
 tiveness which is merely anxious to please, or 
 the sensitiveness which asks what the people 
 think without inquiring as to whether that 
 thought is their best thought. To step for a 
 moment into another sphere, we may reason- 
 ably say that the difference between a politi- 
 cian and a statesman is that the politician 
 asks only what the people do as a matter of 
 fact think. What they think may be good or 
 bad. The politician does not trouble himself 
 except at the one point — what do the people 
 think? Having learned that, he gives it voice. 
 The old story of the politician who discovered 
 while making a speech that he was not at all 
 pleasing the crowd is in place. "Gentlemen," 
 he remarked, "I thought these were your views. 
 If they are not, I shall be pleased to advocate 
 the contrary." The demagogue is the man who 
 catches the people's thought and voices it no 
 matter what it may be. 
 
 The statesman, on the other hand, seeks to 
 
 103 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 give voice not just to the thought of the mo- 
 ment, but to the sentiment of the people at its 
 best and highest reach. He looks always for 
 the signs of these higher currents and seeks by 
 expression to make them more effective to the 
 mind of the people themselves. This is no 
 easy task. There is in the realm of historic 
 study a conflict between those who maintain 
 something of the old "great-man" theory — the 
 theory that historical advances come from out- 
 standing leaders who see what ought to be 
 done and bring it to pass — and those who hold 
 another theory which claims that leaders are 
 of small consequence, that the people them- 
 selves make world-wide demands and that dis- 
 coveries and inventions and philosophies and 
 religions come in response to those demands. 
 The expositors of this theory claim, for ex- 
 ample, that America would have soon been 
 discovered if Columbus had never sailed, that 
 the significance of Columbus was accidental, 
 that there was a demand for a new route to 
 the east and some one would have soon found 
 it. The theory claims also that Luther was a 
 relatively insignificant factor in the Reforma- 
 tion. Forces were at work which would have 
 brought the Reformation if Luther had never 
 lived, or even if he had opposed the Reforma- 
 tion. 
 
 104 
 
MESSAGE OF THE CONGREGATION 
 
 Each of these theories has its element of 
 soundness. Great movements do not come un- 
 til there is a demand for them. Great theories 
 get no chance until they fall in with the tem- 
 per of a time. But it requires a great mind to 
 recognize the demand and to phrase it and meet 
 it. For the demand of which so much is said is 
 at first not articulate. The time may yearn after 
 something and not know what it is, or only 
 half know. The people can speak best two 
 words — ^yes and no. They can accept or reject. 
 What the people are conscious of is a restless 
 impulse, and they know what it is they want 
 after it is put before them. Now, to catch this 
 impulse in its loftiest phrases and to interpret 
 it to the age itself requires genius. A man 
 may be just a voice of his time, but, after all, 
 there are differences in voices. Some are true 
 and some are false. Some are accurate and 
 some are careless, some attractive and some 
 repulsive, some stiff and some flexible. The 
 leader may indeed be only the voice of his time, 
 but the voice may indicate genius in itself. 
 The voice of autocratic command is indeed 
 gone. We do not believe in the great-man 
 theory that some benevolent intellectual 
 despot is to tell the people what is good for 
 them, but when the voice of revelation of the 
 deeper feeling of the people themselves speaks, 
 
 105 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 and speaks in terms persuasive, the people fol- 
 low, their own thought as thus uttered being a 
 guiding call. This requires of him who is to 
 be the voice the profoundest reflection, the 
 deepest submersion of himself in the life of 
 his time, the utmost loyalty to ideals, the most 
 thorough training in the power of expression 
 — attributes which we have tried to insist upon 
 in these addresses thus far. 
 
 Let us look at this more specifically from 
 the point of view of the minister. He preaches 
 a sermon which seems to him to present truth 
 in an altogether new light. The people are in- 
 terested. They say after the sermon: "That 
 was fine! I never thought of that before." 
 Let not the preacher feel too much compli- 
 mented. It may be that this new thought is 
 one of which the people ought to think. It 
 may be that the preacher should strive to sink 
 the new conception deeply into the conscious- 
 ness of his congregation. It may also be that 
 the new thought is bright and sparkling, with 
 no traces of lasting significance whatever. If 
 the people say, "That is something that I have 
 thought of, or half- thought of; that is some- 
 thing I have wished someone to say," the 
 chances are that the preacher is on the path 
 toward a message which will be a message of 
 the congregation itself. The old definition of 
 
 106 
 
MESSAGE OF THE CONGREGATION 
 
 oratory expressed so often by Gladstone is per- 
 tinent — that the orator gives to the people in 
 showers what he takes from the people in mist 
 or spray. The suggestion is legitimate of a 
 mountain standing over against the clouds of 
 the sea and condensing into running streams 
 what floats as cloud against the mountain 
 peak. This holds of all forms of expression: 
 even art must fall in with moods of the people 
 which the people may not recognize till they 
 behold the artistic expression. 
 
 As further illustration think of the minister 
 in public prayer. When the minister stands 
 before his audience to pray what is he expected 
 to do? We reply, "To lead in prayer." What 
 is "leading in prayer"? It is not praying just 
 as one would pray in the silence of one's own 
 room at home. I have no right to take my per- 
 sonal perplexities and grief to the Lord in pub- 
 lic prayer, at least not in the language 
 of merely personal petition. There would 
 be something shocking in a preacher's car- 
 rying into petition in public prayer the 
 anguish of his own soul over a purely 
 personal struggle. No; leading in prayer 
 means uttering the petition which the peo- 
 ple would utter if they could. The people 
 come in tired after the work of the week. They 
 are refreshed if the preacher prays in such 
 
 107 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 terms that they can heartily say "Amen"; if 
 they seem to hear themselves praying in speech 
 they would use if they could, speech that is not 
 theirs by their own utterance but theirs by im- 
 mediate sanction as soon as they hear it. Paul 
 said the last word on this and kindred themes 
 when he gave advice to early Christians who 
 indulged in public religious speech in an un- 
 known tongue. When a man speaks in an un- 
 known tongue he may edify himself, but how 
 can he that sitteth in the seat of the unlearned 
 say "Amen"? The masters in any field, we 
 repeat, are those who have caught the spirit of 
 their time, and have so uttered it that it be- 
 comes a genuine voice of humanity. The few 
 greatest books in the world's treasury have 
 seized and said once for all the things forever 
 true of human life. According to James Rus- 
 sell Lowell, the abiding significance of Cer- 
 vantes' Don Quixote, for example, is that it 
 sets forth in imperishable prose that conflict 
 between the ideal and the actual which is the 
 perennial mark of man's struggle. It would 
 not detract from the justice of this remark to 
 discover that Cervantes himself was not de- 
 liberately dealing with any such problem. The 
 chief significance of any man's work may be a 
 quality of which he himself is not conscious. 
 A congregation itself then may utter through 
 
 108 
 
MESSAGE OF THE CONGREGATION 
 
 the lips of a preacher a distinctive prophetic 
 message. The preacher is to recognize this 
 possibility and lift it to as high a level as may 
 be. The initiative toward a larger message 
 may indeed come from the mind of the congre- 
 gation itself as the preacher learns that mind 
 by intimate personal contact. The force in 
 the message too may come from the congrega- 
 tion, but the preacher must strive to press into 
 the wine of rare spiritual speech the best 
 fruitage of the wisdom of his people. 
 
 The preacher must be watchful against the 
 selective force of the people's listening. We 
 used to have in the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church a homiletic phenomenon which was 
 known as the bishop's sermon. In the old days 
 before the present area system was estab- 
 lished the bishops of the church traveled over 
 the whole denomination in their regular ad- 
 ministration. They seldom preached before 
 the same congregations or the same Con- 
 ference of ministers more than three or four 
 times in a quarter of a century. The result 
 was that the sermons which they preached 
 were not more than five or ten in number, but 
 were, for the most part, of unusual power. 
 The explanation of the certainty of the bishops' 
 sermons to produce a remarkable efifect came 
 from the constantly excited selective power 
 
 109 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 of audiences. Very likely in all unconscious- 
 ness the bishop was affected by the fact that 
 the people listened most intently to some parts 
 and only indifferently to others. The attrac- 
 tive passages were then more used and elabo- 
 rated and the unattractive passages modified 
 or dropped out. On the whole, the selective 
 process developed some poor preachers into 
 good ones, but it was of benefit to the stronger 
 preachers only at the point of delivery. Anx- 
 ious to make the most of single opportunities, 
 the speakers used the sermons which would be 
 most impressive at the moment, and the crea- 
 tive, more prophetic elements tended to fall 
 away. 
 
 The temptation does not confront the 
 preacher ministering to a particular congrega- 
 tion in just this form, but the problem with 
 the long-termed pastorate is often acute. It is 
 easy for the preacher to see what appeals most 
 to the attention of his people and to adapt him- 
 self to that demand. This must not be done in 
 any subservient and acquiescent spirit. It is 
 legitimate in so far as the congregation is 
 moving toward a nobler and nobler Christian 
 ideal. Some congregations mold ministers 
 outright and make them better. Others make 
 them worse. The two forces should act and re- 
 act — the force from the pulpit and the force 
 
 110 
 
MESSAGE OF THE CONGKEGATION 
 
 from the pew — for the utterance of a message 
 which embodies the deepest sentiment of the 
 congregation in the best expression of the 
 preacher, until preacher and people together 
 become a veritable organism within that larger 
 organism of the church which we call the Body 
 of Christ. 
 
 If we do this, we give congregations each a 
 distinctiveness which cannot be escaped. Do 
 we not thus depart from our search for meth- 
 ods to make preaching popular? We started 
 with an emphasis on the appeal to the plain 
 man, the man of the street, in terms that he 
 could understand. In all this stress on mak- 
 ing a congregation distinctive are we not get- 
 ting away from the main mass of the people? 
 
 If the mark of distinction is something arti- 
 ficial, or if it departs from the underlying hu- 
 man elements in religion, it is a sign of widen- 
 ing abyss between the church and the people. 
 We regret to say that there have been churches 
 with such distinctiveness — churches known as 
 fashionable churches, or rich men's churches, 
 or churches representing some minor phase of 
 belief, or even some whim or aberration. Are 
 such churches to be allowed to monopolize 
 so good a term as "distinctive"? Cannot 
 churches be distinguished by the force of their 
 emphasis on the loftiest or broadest phases 
 111 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 of the gospel? Can they not be distinguished 
 by their hospitality to all comers and by their 
 desire to make the best they have the property 
 of all who will receive? The truths of Chris- 
 tianity have as one of their marks the possi- 
 bility of being shared with all who will take 
 of them, without impoverishing but rather en- 
 riching the givers. If the best the church has 
 is comfortable sittings whose expensiveness 
 makes them a trapping of wealth and social 
 distinction, such goods cannot well be shared 
 beyond a limited circle. If, on the contrary, 
 a church stands for the best in Christianity, 
 that best can be shared. The more common 
 the church makes the truth, the more distinc- 
 tive the church becomes. 
 
 In our first section our thought was mainly 
 with the preacher. In this section it has been 
 largely with the congregation. We pass to 
 look at some of the wider human tasks to 
 which preacher and people should together de- 
 vote themselves. 
 
 112 
 
3. THE LARGER HUMAN VALUES 
 
XI 
 
 A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 One of the chief results of preacher and 
 congregation working together for the coming 
 of the kingdom of Heaven should be the Chris- 
 tianization of public opinion. We are to deal 
 with some of the more definitely social aspects 
 of the Kingdom from now on and in this realm 
 public opinion is the important factor. If one 
 were to make a crusade to-day against evil in 
 industrial and social life he would have to call 
 attention to the extent to which selfish forces 
 seek to control the sources of public opinion. 
 In the earlier days when popular government 
 w^as in its infancy the attempt of those selfish 
 interests was sometimes to buy votes outright, 
 sometimes to buy legislators or judges out- 
 right. Such crude methods are not much used 
 to-day except in crude communities. Instead 
 we have the attempt to make or to fashion pub- 
 lic opinion itself, to which legislators and 
 judges will have to bow. So the work is done 
 through press, or speech, or picture show. 
 
 It is not necessary to stop long to emphasize 
 the force of public sentiment. We have just 
 passed through a war period in which its might 
 
 115 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 has been shown for good and for ill. Those 
 who will have it that a conflict like the World 
 War is merely a struggle between economic 
 forces forget that the immediate driving force 
 is that of ideals, good or bad. Inasmuch as 
 it is impossible to kill outright an entire na- 
 tion the attempt is to break the spirit of that 
 nation. The ideals may be low or high, but 
 through them nations strike at one another. 
 Even the man who says that economic forces 
 are omnipotent in human afifairs is always 
 talking about his theory. If he were consistent 
 he would sit still and let the economic forces 
 drive. His talking itself assumes that these 
 forces, blind as they are, can be recognized and 
 controlled. We do not say that it is the truth 
 that sways people. We say that it is what 
 people think is the truth that sways them. 
 Think of the terrible lengths that legislatures 
 and executives and courts went in 1917-18 
 against those in the United States who were 
 suspected of not being fully loyal. The meth- 
 ods by which citizens were deprived of liberties 
 without adequate cause will remain a stain on 
 our history for generations. It is not just, 
 however, to blame law-makers, or police or 
 judges for all of this disgrace. They did their 
 own evil share, and did it with a vengeance, 
 but the irresistible agent at work was public 
 116 
 
A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 opinion. If the war of 1917-18 was a mighty 
 popular crusade for an ideal of popular sov- 
 ereignty — and in the mind of the people it 
 was certainly that — it was also a revelation 
 of the awfulness of the public will in its dis- 
 regard of what had hitherto been proclaimed 
 as right. In any case there can be no doubt 
 about the power of the public thought. 
 
 Forthwith we are met by the objection that 
 all this is aside from the purpose of the church, 
 that purpose being to get hold of individuals 
 and convert them one at a time. What this 
 legitimately means is that every man is to 
 make a decision for himself. Nobody and no 
 thing outside of himself can decide for him : 
 but no power is stronger than public opinion 
 in shaping the decisions which an individual 
 makes. If a decision is once made no power 
 is stronger than public opinion in helping to 
 keep or break it. Of this more later, but it 
 is interesting to hear men who want mass meet- 
 ings to help in revival campaigns protest 
 against our talking about public sentiment as 
 an evangelistic force. The world simply can- 
 not be evangelized until public opinion is cap- 
 tured. 
 
 The first Christian duty in reference to pub- 
 lic opinion is that of — upon proper occasion — 
 defying it and rebuking it. Public sentiment 
 
 117 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 is manifestly not now Christian, except to a 
 very minor degree. That being the case the 
 duty of the church, when the occasion is se- 
 rious enough, is to challenge and rebuke pub- 
 lic opinion. Happy that community which 
 possesses churches which will stand behind 
 their preachers when the preachers in pro- 
 phetic spirit rebuke the controlling force of the 
 hour ! How thrilled we all are at the memory 
 of the Old Testament prophets and their spir- 
 itual descendants of later days who in the name 
 of human and divine ideals rebuked kings even 
 at the peril of their own lives. But what was 
 the heroism of rebuking a king compared to 
 the heroism of rebuking the ruling force to-day 
 — the sentiment of the people themselves ! The 
 reach of the king was seldom more than physi- 
 cal, but the outreach of the feeling of the 
 masses is much more sure and much more 
 deadly. For modern effectiveness the prophet 
 must speak in the name of a congregation or 
 larger group. One voice may be easily stilled, 
 but the voice of a church has a volume which 
 can seldom be ignored. We need not only the 
 voice of the prophetic preacher, but that voice 
 reenforced by the thought and resolution of 
 the prophetic community. The preacher must 
 indeed be a voice, but not a voice from the 
 empty air. He must be the voice of a body. 
 
 118 
 
A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 The question has been raised in recent 
 months — during and since the war — as to how 
 far the prophetic church — preacher and peo- 
 ple — should go in defiance of a state decree. 
 A few years ago this question would hardly 
 have been raised. Through centuries of living 
 together the church and the state had come to 
 have pretty distinct spheres. Practically there 
 was not much friction. In these latter days, 
 however, of attempt to compel churches to 
 stand for all the economic and social orthodox- 
 ies, when zealous but ill-informed legislators 
 have taken it on themselves to tell school 
 teachers what they shall teach, the churches 
 would do vv'ell to look closely to their own 
 independence. The state may be the voice of 
 all society considered as a whole, but it is not 
 necessarily the voice of God. Nothing more 
 dreadful could happen to society itself than for 
 the church to condition its utterances upon 
 what society and the state want said. The 
 quickest way to make the church utterly use- 
 less is to make it the voice of a state not yet 
 Christianized. When the state acts in a Chris- 
 tian spirit the church may well applaud, but 
 never in such fashion as to lead the state to 
 feel that it can always count on church sup- 
 port. We are not now advocating anarchy. 
 We are not counseling law-breaking, but we 
 
 119 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 are standing for the church's right of pro- 
 phetic utterance in criticism and rebuke. Shall 
 the church allow this prophetic function to 
 pass to secular agents? It will be remembered 
 that the best criticism of the Dred Scott de- 
 cision came from one outside the church — 
 from Abraham Lincoln — a criticism framed in 
 terms of respect to the court and yet directed 
 at nothing short of reversal of the decree. The 
 church is not to counsel law-breaking — 
 though the early Christians were not conspicu- 
 ously successful in keeping out of jail: but 
 the church is not to withhold criticism from 
 any institution or group or individual who 
 blocks the road of the kingdom of Heaven. By 
 the way, a certain boldness in dealing with 
 public opinion is one of the most successful 
 methods of dealing with it. Terrible as is this 
 force, the church must learn not to be afraid 
 of it when it starts on a wrong course. That 
 it is so positive in its power is a reason for 
 like positiveness in resisting it. This is not 
 to preach any pose of positiveness, any theat- 
 ric assumption of firmness, but a plea for the 
 force that comes out of downright sincerity of 
 conviction and motive and method. An ad- 
 viser of speakers seeking to influence public 
 opinion once said that the secret of power over 
 public opinion is earnestness, that if earnest- 
 120 
 
A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 ness is not felt it should be assumed. Advice 
 like this is abominable. Earnestness is indeed 
 the path to success in facing public opinion : 
 but if earnestness is not sincere the speaker 
 should not speak. Here no tricks of method 
 are permissible. We are proceeding on the 
 assumption that we are dealing with moral is- 
 sues. There is no use of trying to deal with 
 moral issues immorally. 
 
 In addition to the control of public opinion 
 by direct challenge there is the duty of secur- 
 ing publicity for causes which can be decided 
 only by the people. We shall later speak of 
 definite social problems, but let us here men- 
 tion just one for the sake of illustration. We 
 refer to the industrial struggle which in one 
 stage or another is being experienced by every 
 people at the present time. Who settles an in- 
 dustrial question? Public opinion. Both 
 sides of the conflict battle to win public opin- 
 ion. Now what is to hinder the church, in 
 a particular crisis, from trying to learn what 
 the facts are and to put them before the peo- 
 ple? Grant that the church is not an expert 
 in the detail of industrial processes, has not 
 the church a right to ask questions about the 
 human effect of those processes? A steel man- 
 ufacturer recently gave it as his opinion that 
 no one should say anything about steel who 
 
 121 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 did not know the processes of making steel, 
 the question having to do with an industrial 
 dispute with thousands of workers in the steel 
 business. The pungent remark was supposed 
 to deal quite summarily with the problem of 
 the twelve-hour day, and deserved the retort 
 that manufacturers should not make com- 
 ments on social ethics unless they know some- 
 thing about social ethics. No : the church has 
 a right to ask questions and to publish the an- 
 swers to those questions. All sides have a right 
 to be heard, and it is coming more and more 
 to be an offense against the public itself when 
 any institution refuses to answer questions in- 
 volving human welfare. It will not do to try 
 to meet this by saying that the church cannot 
 understand technical processes and that she 
 has no right to inquire into trade secrets. 
 There never has been an investigation into in- 
 dustrial welfare that has found it necessary 
 to deal in any considerable degree with either 
 technical processes or trade secrets as such. 
 Any plain man, however, is entitled to know 
 whether the technical processes work against 
 the right, or whether the trade secrets are 
 harmful to men. 
 
 If the church undertakes propaganda for 
 Christianity she must remember that she is 
 dealing with the truth. She does not have the 
 
 122 
 
A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 privilege of an advocate to make out a one- 
 sidedly strong case. Having discovered what 
 appears to her as true, she is entitled to push 
 that truth as far as is consistent with the truth 
 itself. The preacl>er has no right to misrepre- 
 sent or distort the positions even of the worst 
 causes, but he is under bonds to do all he can to 
 make the truth effective against wrong. 
 
 We need attack on evil by the preacher in 
 the name of the truth. We need also the posi- 
 tive forcing of evil and good into the fullest 
 publicity. This does not mean, however, that 
 the prophet of the church is to think that he is 
 doing his full duty as to public opinion just 
 in attacking specific evil or urging specific 
 good. It is the business of the preacher to set 
 a standard and a tone toward the vital reli- 
 gious themes that affect the public which will 
 prevent seme questions from ever being raised, 
 and which will prove hospitable to other ques- 
 tions. Or the preacher must do his part to 
 make that social atmosphere or social climate 
 in which evil dies out and good flourishes. We 
 have gone far enough in making public senti- 
 ment human to know that some questions can- 
 not even be raised to-day. Suppose a man 
 should arise to preach the doctrine that all 
 murders should be punishable according to 
 the worth of the victim killed. He might make 
 
 123 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 quite a show of argument to prove that it is 
 more of an offense to kill a good man than a 
 bad man, more of an offense to kill a useful 
 man than a worthless one, and so on and on. 
 There are endless possibilities of debate here; 
 but the social atmosphere to-day would not 
 allow such questions to be raised. When it 
 comes to murder one life is theoretically as 
 much worthy of protection as another. Law- 
 yers may find a way to introduce a practical 
 inequality even here, but the open avowal of 
 such a purpose would not get far. 
 
 The sentiment of a community is to be won 
 for the kingdom of God. If we can create a 
 sentiment friendly to good and deadly to evil 
 we shall have supplied the prime requisite for 
 the coming of the heavenly kingdom. As it is 
 the moral climate is too cold, or too dry, or too 
 blustery for the growth of the finer flowers of 
 righteousness. It might show sincere conse- 
 cration to work patiently year after year to 
 ' grow roses in the open air of Greenland, but 
 ' the effort could hardly deserve the highest 
 praise after all. Some virtues in this world 
 will not get much chance till the spiritual cli- 
 mate changes. We have done creditably in 
 some elementary matters, as the murder illus- 
 tration may suggest. We have not made a be- 
 ginning in others. In some fields we have be- 
 
 124 
 
A CHRISTIAN PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 gun to put the Sermon on the Mount into prac- 
 tice, but in others the first implications of that 
 Sermon are not yet intelligible. "Love your 
 enemies" is hardly a doctrine, for instance, 
 that patriotic public sentiment would listen to, 
 unless indeed the skilled exegete could make 
 it clear that we are to show our love for the 
 enemy by shooting him for his soul's good. 
 
 125 
 
XII 
 UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 It is incumbent on the Christian church, 
 working through its prophets, in an atmos- 
 phere of increasingly Christian public opinion, 
 to unfold the implications of the human ideal. 
 The prophet of God may not always be able to 
 tell men just how to act toward one another, 
 but he should always set before them the high- 
 est human ideal that they may act in its light. 
 There is an ideal of human life — in part di- 
 rectly stated and in part implied — in the Chris- 
 tian revelation. Or the ideal is like a bud 
 whose beauty and fruitage have not yet un- 
 folded. The preacher must create the atmos- 
 phere of public opinion which will warm the 
 ideal into fullest expression. If the church 
 has a rich conception of God that conception 
 itself should carry increasing implications as 
 to the worth of a man. 
 
 We may remark in passing that in the prog- 
 ress of the centuries the ideal of manhood has 
 been expanding, and sometimes without much 
 help from the church. Leaders of opinion out- 
 side of the church have done much to unfold 
 
 126 
 
UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 the meaning of an ideal human life. This ideal 
 has in turn reacted on the conception of God. 
 As men have found a better idea of man they 
 have demanded a better idea of God. Not that 
 they have been inventing a God. They have 
 not been inventing except in the sense of find- 
 ing. They have thought of the best ideals of 
 what man should be as a trustworthy revela- 
 tion of what God is. For example, take the 
 extent to which the responsibilities attaching 
 to the human use of power have grown. In 
 the old days a king could do no wrong. He had 
 a divine right to rule. Just as God could rule 
 unchallenged over all men, so the king — a vice- 
 gerent of God on earth — could absolutely sway 
 his group of subjects. The king was respon- 
 sible to no one but God, and God himself was 
 not responsible to any one. Both these no- 
 tions are gone, or fast going. Men — often in 
 the tones of wrath — have challenged God, or 
 rather the doctrines of God in their time, in 
 the name of human rights, and have forced 
 into acceptance a better idea of God. Many an 
 honest man would have sooner gone to per- 
 dition outright than to have yielded to the mis- 
 conception of divine sovereignty preached a 
 few hundred years ago. Looking back through 
 the history of the church, we see that the idea 
 of the God of tyranny and injustice has de- 
 
 127 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 seryed about all the serious attack it has re- 
 ceived. Men have finally dared to believe the 
 best about God, when once they could believe 
 the best about themselves. They have no 
 sooner realized a new moral obligation for man 
 than they have dared put the same obligation 
 upon God. So that the idea and the ideal of 
 God have together been made more and more 
 moral. It is no longer possible to preach a 
 God who by his own arbitrary decree can make 
 good an action Vhich we would condemn as 
 bad in men. We repeat that this process of 
 moralizing the conception of God has been 
 forced quite as much from outside the church 
 as from inside. 
 
 This has to be said in all fairness. The neces- 
 sity is now upon us, however, to turn the proc- 
 ess around and make the ideal of God count 
 more than before for the unfolding of the ideal 
 of human life. If in the name of man we have 
 corrected our ideal of God, in the name of God 
 we must continuously elevate our ideal of 
 manhood. We are coming more and more to 
 the ideal of the Christ-like God. If God is like 
 Christ then his attitude toward men is like 
 Christ's attitude. If we are to be Christian 
 then our attitude toward men is to be like 
 Christ's. If we insist that men are to be 
 treated well on their own account and not on 
 
 128 
 
UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 God's account, we reply that we will not quib- 
 ble over terms. We are willing to say that God 
 treats men as men for w^hat they are on their 
 own account. Only, we ask that the preacher 
 and church work together to bring God to men 
 as their Christlike Companion and Friend. 
 
 The wrongs in Christian thinking often have 
 come out of failing to get our conceptions thor- 
 oughly moral and spiritual. Think how often 
 the doctrine of human immortality has been 
 used to hold men on earth in a hard lot. Slaves 
 have been told that there is another life be- 
 yond this, that this life at best is but a hand's 
 breadth and that the life beyond is eternal, 
 that those who suffer here shall rejoice there, 
 that the men in dire bondage would much bet- 
 ter direct their thoughts to future bliss than 
 to relief from present woes. Even in this 
 twentieth century we have heard something 
 of this doctrine. A famous military expert 
 once told me that he wished the churches would 
 lay more stress on immortality so that men 
 would fear death less. Pious industrial mag- 
 nates are often deeply moved at the failure of 
 the preachers to preach such a gospel of the 
 other life as will prevent industrial unrest in 
 this existence. All of which is pretty much 
 seen through to-day, the trouble being that 
 when the application of the doctrine is cast 
 
 129 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 aside the belief in immortality itself is likely 
 to be abandoned also. As a legitimate infer- 
 ence, however, it is hard to see how we can 
 hold to the revelation of the Christlike God and 
 not hold to human immortality. Let it be 
 freely admitted that there is no scientific proof 
 of immortality, and let it be granted also that 
 the philosophical arguments for immortality 
 are all too weak to stand the strain put upon 
 them. As long as there is no scientific dis- 
 proof of the belief and as long as the argu- 
 ments against it are not conclusive, we are 
 entitled to carry the implications of the doc- 
 trine of the Christlike God forward to the be- 
 lief in the immortality of men, because of the 
 emphasis of Christ on the worth of a man's life 
 in itself. If w^e can once get preachers and 
 churches and social sentiment to view men as 
 Christ viewed them, and then to ask always, 
 "Ought a man to be treated thus or thus?" we 
 would speedily unfold the idea of man into 
 practical consequences which would put us on 
 the path to the elimination of many a social 
 abuse. 
 
 In a word : if we believe in the God of Christ, 
 our thought of men must be that men are ends 
 in themselves and not instruments, or tools; 
 at least the emphasis is to be on the end-in-itself 
 ideal of manhood. A man may indeed be a fine 
 
 130 
 
UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 instrument for the accomplishment of a splen- 
 did purpose. It is well when we recognize 
 and honor this fitness. Noble is the privilege 
 of a man himself to take himself as an instru- 
 ment and to pride himself on keeping fit for 
 the fulfillment of the work which he can so 
 royally perform. We are not saying that the 
 individual man should take himself as an end 
 for himself. He "^dll better attain to excellence 
 on his own account if he works for the success 
 of some cause outside himself. This view, 
 however, which I may justly take of myself 
 becomes a pestilent heresy when I take it con- 
 cerning my neighbor, and begin to treat him 
 as if he were an instrument or a tool. Even if 
 he were an instrument of the loftiest artistic 
 fineness — for example, if he had a surpassing 
 voice for singing — he would have a right to 
 feel aggrieved if men spoke of him just as a 
 musical instrument. If he were of the surest 
 artistic genius, he would crave to have hear- 
 ers discern and appreciate the personality 
 sounding through the voice. 
 
 We must recognize the claim of men to self- 
 expression. One charmed word in all our edu- 
 cational theorizing to-day is service, but the 
 service shows itself largely in helping men to 
 self-expression. Men are ends-in-themselves. 
 They must be helped to self-expression. Now,. 
 
 131 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 while it would be absurd to try to eliminate tlie 
 thought of men as instruments altogether, it 
 must be insisted upon that whatever doctrine 
 or practice gets the emphasis, conscious or un- 
 conscious, on such instrumentalism into the 
 first place is not Christian if we are to think 
 of God as like Christ. Jesus made his con- 
 tribution to human welfare not especially in 
 specific rules governing human conduct but 
 in the general principles which he held and 
 acted upon as to the worth of a man in himself, 
 and in the lengths of living and dying to which 
 he went to sink that thought into the common 
 consciousness. The assumptions on which 
 Jesus wrought were sometimes more important 
 than his direct utterances. What is the de- 
 cisive argument against human slavery? Let 
 us speak of Negro slavery simply because that 
 was the form of slavery which called forth the 
 most laboriously reasoned defenses. The de- 
 cisive argument against slavery was not that 
 the Negro was badly treated, U7icle Tom's 
 Cabin to the contrary, unimpeachable as the 
 powerful book of Harriet Beecher Stowe no 
 doubt was in particular instances. The de- 
 cisive argument was not economic, evident 
 though it was that slavery was ruinously 
 expensive. On the other hand, a good deal 
 could honestly be made out of the pleas that 
 
 132 
 
UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 the Negro had more chance in America than 
 in Africa, that he could work in a hot climate 
 better than a white man, that the production 
 of cotton was essential to the world's life, that 
 the Negro could not be regarded as in the same 
 scale of development as the white man, that 
 slavery had held a place in human history as 
 long as there had been a history. Nevertheless, 
 the whole problem ceased after a while to be a 
 theme for formal argument and the battle 
 passed into the realm of ideals, the decisive 
 question being whether one man should be 
 compelled to serve as the slave of another man. 
 The offense in slavery was against the ideal 
 of what a man should be. There was no logical 
 device that could fit slavery into consistency 
 with the advocacy of a Christly human ideal. 
 
 As Christianity would attack slavery to-day 
 as a sin against the human ideal, so it must 
 wage war on all persons and institutions that 
 would treat men as other than men. Nobody 
 can to-day sit down and draw out fully the im- 
 plications of a man's being essentially a son 
 of the God of Christ, but some implications are 
 unmistakable even if they must be rather nega- 
 tively stated. The general statement that a 
 man should not be treated other than as a man 
 itself carries us pretty far. How far? Well, 
 far enough for us to see that in industry men 
 
 133 
 
THE PEEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 should not be viewed predominantly as ma- 
 chines, for one thing. Some phases of machine- 
 like activity men must always go through, for 
 the body of a man is a machine. If, though, 
 there is to be such work, it must not consume 
 too many hours of the day. The worker must 
 not be so wearied at the end of the day that the 
 more human capacities of his nature get no 
 chance. The day must not be too long. In 
 some respects man is an animal, but that does 
 not warrant our treating him like a beast of 
 burden in work hours, or compelling him 
 to live like an animal out of work hours by 
 giving him so scanty a wage that only the 
 grosser animal needs are met. A leader in 
 industry recently declared his opinion that 
 there should be no objection to single men in 
 industry living in any conditions they choose. 
 The Christian has an objection to any system 
 that houses any men in tenements or boarding 
 houses with such crowding as to make the sur- 
 roundings animal rather than human. The 
 Christian objects to terms like "labor mar- 
 kets," or "labor commodity,'' or "hands" in so 
 far as these carry any implications against full 
 human worth. Moreover, the day is coming, 
 and coming fast, when in the name of a human 
 ideal, with that ideal reenforced in the name 
 of the Christlike God, the church will insist on 
 
 134 
 
UNFOLDING THE HUMAN IDEAL 
 
 dealing with the question as to whether we can 
 lay hold on the youngest and best brains of a 
 nation and blow those brains into the mud for 
 any nationalistic or imperialistic or economic 
 ambition whatsoever. 
 
 When these more elementary requirements 
 have been met the weightier questions as to 
 how so to treat a man as to encourage his 
 larger, more positive freedom will be upon us. 
 There is a liberty due the sons of God, because 
 God is Christlike and because he values men 
 on their own account. That liberty the church 
 should follow whithersoever it leads. 
 
 135 
 
XIII 
 
 THE EXPANSION OF THE MOEAL 
 SPHERE 
 
 We often hear it said that a live church 
 must be an expanding church ; that expansion 
 is the law even of institutional life ; that if a 
 church is content to hold its own and not to 
 move forward to conquest, it is in the way of 
 death. All of which is manifestly sound, but 
 we must be careful not to interpret expansion 
 narrowly. Too often we think of new build- 
 ings and increased membership and enlarging 
 varieties of technically religious projects as 
 the significant expansion. All these marks of 
 growth have their healthy meaning, but for 
 the profoundest influence of the church in the 
 world we must think of a definitely moral ex- 
 pansion, or of what moral expansion involves 
 in our world of people. 
 
 First, we must bring more and more of our 
 acts in relation to people under the Christian 
 law of good will. The law of good will is al- 
 ways broadening in its applications if it is a 
 living force. The moral life began with nar- 
 row codes, possibly because men touched one 
 another in so few relationships. As more and 
 
 136 
 
EXPANSION OF THE MOKAL SPHERE 
 
 more actions were seen to have a moral bear- 
 ing these were taken into the moral sphere. 
 We have seen some phases of this growth be- 
 fore our own eyes. In the boyhood of men 
 now living the liquor traffic was not thought 
 to be especially deadly to society. As men 
 have pressed closer and closer together in more 
 intimately related activities the harmful re- 
 sults of this form of social evil have become 
 only too apparent. In a small village many 
 things might not be adjudged evil which might 
 carry fearful possibilities in a city. To open 
 a well on a farm might be necessary and hos- 
 pitable. Like action might fitly be regarded 
 as a crime in a city. There is inevitably a rela- 
 tive element in the moral life. It is our task 
 to take more and more of our acts under the 
 guidance of Christian conscience as we see the 
 social consequences of these acts. Those who 
 want an absolute system of ethics preached at 
 all times might just as well learn that there is 
 no such system, except in that the moral spirit 
 is absolutely binding. Now, the relativity of 
 ethics in this social sense is a severer burden 
 on conscience than any absolute code could be. 
 If we had an absolute code, we could learn it 
 once for all. As things are we have to keep our 
 morality up to date by the sternest effort. No 
 task in Christian conscience is heavier than 
 
 137 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 this of making all our acts toward our fellows 
 square with the law of Christian good will. 
 Second, if Christian social morality is to 
 live, it must bring more and more persons 
 within the law of good will. To-day this prob- 
 lem is not to be settled by adding new lists of 
 individual persons to those whom we are to 
 treat with good will. Social contacts to-day 
 are not always immediately personal. A man 
 is not to be judged by the number of separate 
 persons he treats with kindliness. We touch 
 men through institutions like business, like the 
 vote, like the public sentiment that goes out 
 from us to mold the lives of men. It is much 
 more important that we have established laws 
 of good will by which we reach groups of men 
 than that we should have a widening circle of 
 particular individuals whom we personally 
 treat kindly. There is a chance of confusion 
 here. It often happens that men whose main 
 conduct is socially harmful are most delight- 
 ful personally to increasing numbers of per- 
 sons. I know a man of positive industrial 
 genius who delights to bring an increasing 
 number of persons under his benevolent kindli- 
 ness. He is altogether charming in this be- 
 nevolence, having the rare art of bestowing fa- 
 vors without treading upon the self-respect of 
 the one favored. He would not harm a hair of 
 
 138 
 
EXPANSION OF THE MOEAL SPHERE 
 
 the head of any one purposely. Yet the man's 
 industrial activities are carried on by plans 
 outdated in communities which lay stress on 
 the human values. There is no question as to 
 personal sincerity. The difficulty is that this 
 man substitutes good will toward persons 
 in a personal relationship for good will 
 worked out into the more inclusive general 
 relationship. I have known officials with 
 appointing authority even in churches who 
 could be depended on to treat with the 
 most gracious courtesy increasing numbers of 
 personal acquaintances, and who could be de- 
 pended on also to treat unjustly those outside 
 that circle, not through intention but through 
 sheer obliviousness. In the long run, if any- 
 thing has to be sacrificed, let the personal de- 
 lightfulness be sacrificed if thereby men out- 
 side the charmed circle get a better chance for 
 justice. To drop into the realm of sport for 
 an instant, is it not a wise provision in base- 
 ball rules — human nature being what it is — 
 that the umpires are not encouraged by the 
 traditions of the sport to mingle freely with 
 the players in social relationships? For the 
 sake of being friendly to a few it is not per- 
 missible to run the risk of being unfair to any- 
 body. What we are seeking as Christians is a 
 law of good will which will include everybody. 
 139 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 All this seems in contradiction to what we 
 have previously said about seeking out per- 
 sons as individuals, but the contradiction is 
 only in the seeming. We are protesting against 
 even the beginning of anything that makes for 
 favoritism, for privileged groups, for personal 
 pulls. My illustrations may be unfortunate 
 as suggesting that one may not even have one's 
 personal friendships. No such implication is 
 intended, but what is intended is the preaching 
 of a doctrine of human contacts which will 
 prevent specialized devotion to a select list 
 from overlooking the justice due a wider circle, 
 or due anybody. 
 
 This brings us to a third reflection which 
 may seem still further in contradiction to what 
 has gone before — the possible expansion of the 
 application of good will through attention to 
 good manners. We use the term broadly not 
 as a fussing with details of etiquette. We are 
 not about to maintain that any portentous so- 
 cial consequences will follow getting the knives 
 or the forks on the wrong side of the plate. 
 Social life is, however, more and more the sci- 
 ence and art of living together. We must see 
 that even in personal contacts a thorough re- 
 gard for the other man as a person ought to 
 impel us to treat that other man with a good 
 will which shows itself in every reasonable 
 
 140 
 
EXPANSION OF THE MORAL SPHERE 
 
 consideration toward him, whether he particu- 
 larly deserves such consideration or not. The 
 wider bearings of the problem of manners ap- 
 pear when men begin to assume an attitude of 
 superiority toward those of alleged social or 
 national or racial inferiority. When we are 
 searching for causes of social and interna- 
 tional and racial unrest let us not leave bad 
 manners out of the reckoning. Think of the 
 Easter parades in some of our cities. No, dear 
 reader from outside the city, the Easter parade 
 does not quite mean a procession of worship- 
 ers marching and singing in gratitude at the 
 resurrection of our Lord. It means the after- 
 church — or before-church — display of hats and 
 gowns and motor cars. It is the parade in 
 which those who have make clear to the have- 
 nots their understanding of the beatitude that 
 blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
 earth. All this is socially wrong. For the 
 Fifth Avenues of most cities are too near the 
 East Sides, and the dweller on the East Side 
 sees a flaunting of wealth on Fifth Avenue 
 which fires him with wrath, a wrath that may 
 not die out till it has burned too far. Material 
 display is sheer vulgarity and bad manners, 
 and the trouble is that display is at least un- 
 consciously aimed at conveying a broad hint of 
 superiority. 
 
 141 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 In the field of international and racial con- 
 tacts what we call in the terminology of the 
 day "gestures" are quite important, and ges- 
 tures belong often in the realm of manners. 
 The extreme courtesy in the correspondence 
 between nations which regard one another as 
 equals is commendable, but the peremptori- 
 ness of the notes of big nations to little nations 
 leaves much to be desired. As a single illus- 
 tration, the communications of the United 
 States with the Latin- American states violate 
 now and again all the canons of good taste. 
 Mexico has trespassed upon the patience of the 
 United States to an almost intolerable degree 
 and the United States has been a model of 
 tolerance in its own eyes, but the of&cial com- 
 munications of the United States have for 
 years been brusque and impertinent and boor- 
 ish, and the temper of a public opinion which 
 has at bottom no desire for war with Mexico 
 has nevertheless been so testy as to provoke 
 war spirit on both sides of the Rio Grande. 
 International bad manners may not be the su- 
 preme cause of wars, but even if we concede 
 to the economist that most wars come out of 
 scrambles for world markets and for physical 
 existence, let it be remembered that even such 
 admittedly mighty economic forces could not 
 drive the nations at one another's throats if it 
 
 142 
 
EXPANSION OF THE MOKAL SPHERE 
 
 were not for the vulgarity and bad manners 
 which so abound in jingoistic patriotism — a 
 patriotism the reverse of Christian. 
 
 This leads on to another point, the duty of 
 carrying the ideal of Christian morality into 
 all the methods which mark the contacts of 
 groups. In private personal life we have won 
 the notable victory of securing practically gen- 
 eral consent that methods must be in them- 
 selves moral. The end does not necessarily 
 justify the means. We ask concerning a man's 
 personal success as to how he entered into the 
 success, whether by the open door of honesty, 
 or whether he climbed up some other way. 
 Unfortunately, there is not yet agreement that 
 some current methods of intercourse between 
 groups are in themselves wrong. Most dis- 
 tinguished thinkers preach to us that in the 
 larger social contacts a frankly utilitarian 
 ethics — the greatest material good of the great- 
 est number — is the best theory and that the 
 method is to be judged by its success in bring- 
 ing about this greatest good. This may be 
 allowable as practical rule of thumb, but it 
 unlocks the gate to troops of evils: war upon 
 and exploitation of weaker peoples by stronger 
 fits in remarkably well with a frankly utili- 
 tarian theory. Sins against essential human- 
 ity are nevertheless sins even if they do for the 
 
 143 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 moment bring about the material greatest good 
 of the greatest number. 
 
 Finally, another arena of conquest for 
 Christian morals is the emphasis on the neces- 
 sity of the hardest kind of hard thinking in the 
 solution of the moral problems. Ethics is 
 neither wholly intuitive nor wholly utilitarian ; 
 the feeling of good will ought to be absolute, 
 but the actual expression of good will is a 
 task for sternest thought. We have reached 
 the height where we know that we owe good 
 will to our fellow men without stopping to 
 think about it. To debate whether we owe a 
 man good will or not would argue a belated 
 moral insight. Just what to do, however, in 
 a particular moral situation may require all 
 the thinking power we possess. So that there 
 is need for the finest spirit of thoughtfulness 
 by Christian people. It is not expected that 
 the Christian shall himself be a technical ex- 
 pert in difficult moral situations which require 
 an expert, but it is not to be expected that he 
 shall lapse into unthinking silence just because 
 he cannot give expert advice. One of the tricks 
 that social reactionaries often employ to brow- 
 beat the reformer is to ask him to suggest a 
 solution to the difficulty about which he com- 
 plains. Thus overridden because he does not 
 know what to say, the reformer ceases to cry 
 
 144 
 
EXPANSION OF THE MORAL SPHERE 
 
 out. Therein he is wrong. He is to insist upon 
 the duty of the man in the industry to supply 
 the solution, or to find the expert who can. 
 
 But we are not thinking primarily of ex- 
 perts. We have in mind the necessity of the 
 Christian's being alert and open-eyed to situa- 
 tions about him, of his supplying that thought- 
 fulness which slows down social movements 
 when they are running too fast toward the 
 unthinking reactionary or to the unthinking 
 radical, the thoughtfulness which starts 
 morally progressive campaigns when society 
 becomes morally inert. We are not now speak- 
 ing of the technical expert, but of the thought- 
 ful citizen, who sees and recognizes the public 
 ills which ordinary intelligence can cure, who 
 patiently seeks for the remedies for such diffi- 
 culties, and who calls for the expert when the 
 expert is needed, all with the utmost tolerance 
 which the urgency of the case will permit. The 
 Christian should not ignore the command to 
 love his God with the mind. 
 
 145 
 
XIV 
 
 THE CHUKCH AND THE SOCIAL 
 IMAGINATION 
 
 The imagination has always been regarded 
 as the mental power especially adapted to be 
 the organ of religious revelation. All our pic- 
 tures of immortal life are in terms of imagina- 
 tion, from the book of Revelation on down to 
 the sermon of last Sunday on "Heaven." Here 
 the imagination has free, though entirely le- 
 gitimate, rein. The picturings which we paint 
 of eternal life are probably nearer the truth 
 than our abstract philosophizings. Another 
 lawful privilege for the Christian imagina- 
 tion is to make the scriptural story live again. 
 Here there is, indeed, a fact basis which must 
 always be observed, but the Bible, set before 
 us as it is to-day by exact scientific study, can 
 only be made alive by touching it with the fire 
 of a vivid imagination. Indeed, the recon- 
 struction by scientific study was itself due to 
 the exercise of that wonderful force of antici- 
 pation leading to discovery which we call the 
 scientific imagination. No scientist finds any- 
 thing by just staring about. He knows what he 
 is looking for before he begins to look. 
 
 146 
 
SOCIAL IMAGINATION 
 
 More imperative than any of these exercises 
 of imagination, however, is that of the social 
 imagination, by which we mean the power of 
 putting ourselves in the place of others and 
 of looking at life from their standpoint, the 
 power of making present to ourselves the work- 
 ing of forces which we cannot actually see. It 
 is hard to comprehend how the law of good 
 will as set before us by Jesus can ever be made 
 effective except by the use of imagination. 
 People and preachers together are engaged in 
 a regal task when they grasp this marvelous 
 power as an instrument for actually bringing 
 in the kingdom of God on earth. 
 
 Let me start with a simple application — 
 that of trying to make real to myself the out- 
 reach of the social forces which proceed from 
 me every day. There is a fine, though now 
 trite, appeal to the imagination in the exhorta- 
 tion to us to heed for a moment the number of 
 unseen servants who wait upon us at break- 
 fast: the farm-laborer who plants and reaps 
 the wheat in Montana, the coffee-grower in 
 Brazil, the sugar-planter in the West or in 
 Cuba, the dairy-keeper, the cotton-raiser, and 
 so on through an ever-lengthening line. Surely, 
 the ends of the earth reach toward the hum- 
 blest breakfast table. Now, let the breakfast- 
 ing Christian reverse the process and ask him- 
 
 147 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 self about the outreach of his own life. If he 
 is a worker in a factory, his work too goes to 
 the ends of the earth ; if he is an employer of 
 laborers, his life is an important factor in their 
 daily toil even though he may never see them. 
 It is always refreshing to hear an employer of 
 laborers talk about the necessity of the work- 
 ingmen's being superior to their environment 
 when that employer himself is the largest force 
 in the environment of his own employees. 
 When his laborers try to rise superior to him- 
 self he is likely to change his tune to something 
 about Bolshevism. Let the Christian at the 
 breakfast table take a few coins from his 
 pocket and ask where his money came from. 
 How far was that which came from specula- 
 tion earned? How far was that which came 
 from profits earned? Is there a toiler standing 
 at a machine somewhere who earned the profits 
 which have somehow got into the pocketbook of 
 the wrong man? Personally, I am quite or- 
 thodox in political economy, but I must admit 
 that these queries are disquieting. It is part 
 of the business of the Christian Church and the 
 Christian preacher to raise questions even at 
 the risk of a hubbub. That is how the church 
 works. Let us be satisfied with our own des- 
 perate lot, if need be, but how about being sat- 
 isfied with the desperate lot of our fellows? 
 
 148 
 
SOCIAL IMAGINATION 
 
 This path of imaginative effort is painful. 
 Let us try another. How are we who sit now 
 in comfortable places to understand the man 
 who works with his hands for a daily wage? 
 One of us — very comfortable — declares that he 
 does not need imagination for such a task; 
 he knows from memory. He was reared on a 
 farm and worked from daylight to dark and 
 after. He feels that it was good for him. Just 
 what connection there is between open-air 
 farm work and work before a blast furnace or 
 in a coal-mine is left not indicated. Or an- 
 other says that he himself worked in these 
 exact conditions and rose above them, as all 
 should rise. He does not mean just this, for 
 not all can rise to promotion. Neither of 
 these answers meets the question — the need of 
 trying to realize the work of the daily toiler 
 as it actually appears to that toiler. One man 
 is looking back at his past from a smug library 
 chair, with the harsher lines of the tasks faded 
 out. The other man forgets that he who rises 
 out of a day laborer's task and then says that 
 such work is not bad for the laborer in the con- 
 ditions of the heavier industries has lost his 
 social imagination. That is why it quite often 
 happens that the rich man's son — if he be a de- 
 cent human being to start with — is more open 
 to appeals to the social imagination than the 
 
 149 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 rich father who has fought his way up. Fight- 
 ing the way up in a social competitive system 
 is not a potent nourisher of unselfish imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 Some years ago there was a mine explosion 
 at the Cherry Mine in Illinois and a half-dozen 
 or more miners were imprisoned for over a 
 week. A strong-willed leader kept his com- 
 panions alive by the sheer force of his own 
 moral energy until help came. I talked with 
 that leader shortly after he had come out from 
 the horrible experience. I asked him about 
 his plans for the future. He told me that as 
 soon as his strength returned he was going 
 back to the mine. On my expressing surprise 
 he quietly remarked, "Somebody has to do it." 
 All his talk was that of a faithful servant of 
 Ws fellow men. Now, let us set ourselves the 
 task of trying by imagination to see what life 
 would look like after such an experience as 
 that of my coal-mining friend, and then ask 
 ourselves if we would be willing after such an 
 eight-days' entombment to go back, just be- 
 cause the hearths of men had to be warmed and 
 the wheels of their engines kept turning. Yet 
 we must try to exercise just that type of 
 imagination if we are to put the Christian law 
 of good will into effect. 
 
 We are striving hard to-day to contrive some 
 
 150 
 
SOCIAL IMAGINATION 
 
 international arrangement that will do away 
 with war. No arrangement will do good for 
 long that does not rest down upon the cultiva- 
 tion of the social imagination. The simple 
 question repeatedly and incessantly asked at 
 every international crisis, "How does this look 
 to the other side?" will do more to stop war — 
 if the question is asked with any approach to 
 good faith and good will — than the weightiest 
 deliberations of the statesmen if that question 
 is left out. Consider even that putting of the 
 case for war which seems so fatalistic, the claim 
 that the absolutely necessary raw materials of 
 the world are not enough for all the nations and 
 that there is no resource left but to fight to 
 see who shall have them. Granted, for the sake 
 of the argument, that there are not enough 
 raw materials for the factories of all the na- 
 tions. Does it follow that the nations must 
 fight? Not if there is any degree of social 
 imagination. For with a little exercise of that 
 gift which makes the cost of war vivid before 
 the war breaks out, and which enables us to 
 see somewhat from the point of view of the na- 
 tion on the other side of the table, it would 
 appear better all around to come to some 
 agreed-upon division of raw materials than to 
 fight. Or take that doctrine of manifest des- 
 tiny which is sometimes used by oratorical 
 
 151 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 patriots to foster war, as in John Fiske's story 
 of the flaming orator who bounded the United 
 States on the north by the Aurora Borealis, 
 the east by the rising sun, and the west by the 
 Day of Judgment. We do not hear it put just 
 so nowadays, but the rhetoric is the outcome 
 of a spirit that makes manifest destiny the 
 property of some one nation. All these pan- 
 national doctrines of ten years ago came out 
 of such spirit. All were alike absurd. Let 
 one nation conquer all the others. The mani- 
 fest destiny of that nation will be plainly only 
 a material destiny. Elementary imagination 
 will show that there is no forcing of one na- 
 tion's culture on another without that other 
 nation's free acquiescence. So that we have 
 to replace manifest destiny by manifest des- 
 tinies, each nation appreciating and respecting 
 the traditions and point of view and achieve- 
 ments of the others. 
 
 There is one realm in which the church is 
 making splendid appeal to the social imagina- 
 tion of the world, namely, the missionary 
 field. The old, old twaddle against Christian 
 missionaries which we used to hear forty years 
 ago is dead and gone, except with hopelessly 
 belated and handicapped intellects. For the 
 Christian Church has not only captured the 
 imagination of Christendom with the show- 
 
 152 
 
SOCIAL IMAGINATION 
 
 ing of the needs of the non-Christian na- 
 tions, but is making evident with increas- 
 ing vigor the human possibilities of these 
 peoples. The revelation of the human pos- 
 sibilities in China and India and Africa 
 by Christian missionaries is the outstand- 
 ing Christian achievement of our time. If 
 the church can still keep herself enough at 
 the angle of view of the non-Christian peoples 
 themselves and can respect and enforce their 
 demand for freedom from exploitation by 
 Western industrialism, and from well-meant 
 efforts of Christian leaders to patronize them 
 into a loss of self-direction, the Christian 
 Church will have made the greatest contribu- 
 tion to the progress of the religion of Jesus 
 since the days of Saint Paul. For Christian- 
 ity will only begin to show its possibilities 
 when the vast multitudes seriously embrace it. 
 There is another sphere for the exercise of 
 the social imagination which belongs pecu- 
 liarly to the church. If the church appraises 
 at anywhere near full value her doctrine of im- 
 mortality, she may draw somewhat on the im- 
 plications of that doctrine, one of the implica- 
 tions being that the lives passed from earth 
 are a host not dead at all, but living beings 
 whose opinion is the important public opinion. 
 The final public opinion, according to such an 
 
 153 
 
THE PKEACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 implication, would be the public opinion of 
 the skies. For the sake of those who accept in 
 some form or other the doctrine of immortality 
 but who feel that such a consideration as the 
 above is altogether too ghostly, we proceed to 
 say that on any theory the church must keep in 
 mind the peoples who have lived and passed 
 on, by recognizing the sacredness of their labor 
 and by trying to conserve the worthy ideals for 
 which they wrought. The poet, looking out 
 over a lordly landscape of farm and meadow 
 and village, may think of these as coming from 
 the hand of the Divine Creator, but he must be 
 careful not to forget that these came also from 
 the hands of human creators. The sobering re- 
 flection in any serious mind looking on culti- 
 vated fields in an old established country is 
 that even the soil of the country has been al- 
 most literally made and remade by generations 
 of toilers. The soil itself is the concentrated 
 product of human energies. Likewise with all 
 institutions upon which the hand of man has 
 wrought. There is a sacredness about them 
 which becomes evident the instant we let our 
 imaginations call up the innumerable armies 
 of past workers. We remember that we are 
 among the posterity for which they wrought. 
 Another appeal to the Christian imagination 
 starts from regard for those to come after ua 
 
 154 
 
SOCIAL IMAGINATION 
 
 If we are to be guided by public opinion, let 
 us remember that tlie generations yet unborn 
 are to have opinions, probably opinions more 
 completely realized than ours can hope to be. 
 It is a thoroughly Christian motive to seek to 
 make our acts such that in the light of that 
 later day the moral direction in which we are 
 tending shall be clear without an interpreter. 
 
 The earlier Christian leaders used to urge 
 Christians to look at life under the form of 
 eternity. In this our day of stupendous 
 change we would well heed the old counsel. 
 That is to say, we should seek to hold fast the 
 attitudes and the tendencies and the tempers 
 which perennially move in the direction of the 
 loftiest human ideal. Conservative and radi- 
 cal alike should keep these human values at 
 the center. The duty is a legitimate implica- 
 tion and conclusion from our doctrine that we 
 worship a Christlike God. If we are to attain 
 to the supreme blessedness of eternal compan- 
 ionship with such a God, these human values 
 must be conceived of as among the moral ideals 
 of God's own life. 
 
 155 
 
XV 
 
 THE SOCIAL SPIRIT AND PERSONAL 
 PIETY 
 
 We come at last to the bearing of the inter- 
 est in the wider social values on individual per- 
 sonal piety. It will possibly be remembered 
 that I have all along said that the only realities 
 in society are the persons who make up society. 
 Anyone who wishes the salvation of society 
 must earnestly desire the salvation of indi- 
 viduals, for a saved society is a society of in- 
 dividuals saved in their social relationships. 
 At the center of the moral life stands the will 
 to do right toward God and man. Jesus so 
 knit the command to love God and the com- 
 mand to love man together that there is no 
 separating them without death to the religious 
 life. So that any sincere social worker is 
 earnestly desirous of seeing as many men con- 
 verted as possible, for conversion means the 
 acceptance of the law of good will and loving 
 service to man and God. We must be on our 
 guard here. The instant we use a term like 
 "conversion'' good people of varying beliefs 
 and tests swarm upon us to tell us the signs 
 
 156 
 
SOCIAL SPIRIT AND PERSONAL PIETY 
 
 and marks of conversion. We are not thinking 
 now of any labels or standards except one — 
 the converted man is one who has the spirit of 
 Christ and who reveals that spirit in love to 
 his fellow man. 
 
 This service is likely to lose its zest if the 
 inner spirit of good will does not deepen as the 
 years go by. So that a socially minded Chris- 
 tian must strive for inner seizure of and by 
 the Christ-spirit. We have spoken of the need 
 of expansion which carries the Christ-spirit 
 into more and more of our acts and to more and 
 more men until the whole trend of public 
 opinion is made Christian. If the stream is to 
 spread out over such spaces, the force at the 
 central spring must increase continuously. To 
 give the gospel this wider expansive spread the 
 inner pressure must immensely intensify, for 
 wider expansion necessarily requires deeper 
 Intensity. So that the servant of the church 
 — preacher or layman — who in these days tries 
 to make Christianity a world-force must seek 
 to make his inner life increase in intensity at 
 the same time that the outer reach widens. 
 If we could use the term "entire sanctiflcation" 
 without arousing the condemnation of those 
 who have been harassed beyond endurance by 
 the professions of personal spiritual attain- 
 ment not borne out by visible fruit, we would 
 
 157 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 have exactly the term we need ; but let us use 
 the term "entire Christianization." We mean 
 such consecrated practice in doing the will of 
 God that the nature of the doer becomes trans- 
 formed. In the language of the fashionable 
 psychology, the subconscious self would be so 
 transformed that even the impulses would of 
 themselves move in the direction of social help- 
 fulness. We would be delivered from that 
 practice of repressive self-discipline which 
 makes the subconsciousness a dark cellar out of 
 which all manner of wild impulses are trying 
 to burst, and would have instead a practice 
 of control leading out of the inner recesses in- 
 tense spiritual forces "domesticated" into the 
 system of actualities around us. A domesti- 
 cated or controlled impulse is stronger than 
 a wild impulse, just as a domesticated animal 
 is usually stronger than a wild beast. In short, 
 salvation for the individual must work into 
 the whole personal nature if that individual 
 is to help much to save the whole world. 
 
 The churchman in alarm over what might 
 happen to theology if this attempt to save the 
 whole world were to become widespread may 
 reassure himself with the reflection that when 
 the Christian purpose is set toward the larger 
 human results the theology becomes more hu- 
 man to correspond. The hampering weight on 
 
 158 
 
SOCIAL SPIKIT AND PERSONAL PIETY 
 
 theology as such is its proneness to get away 
 from the human. There are those who tell us 
 that theology is among the studies to be pur- 
 sued on their own account without regard to 
 any practical consequences, like some forms of 
 art or of mathematics. If God is like unto 
 Christ, let us ask ourselves how much such a 
 God would appreciate being contemplated like 
 a work of art or of abstruse mathematics while 
 his children were dying of starvation or war 
 or preventable disease. Those who tell us that 
 there are branches of knowledge to be followed 
 only for the sake of knowledge itself do not 
 mean just what they say, for knowledge is 
 knowledge by a human being, and the knowl- 
 edge must somehow minister to that human 
 being. The ministry may indeed be of high 
 quality — above any utilitarian purpose — but 
 no matter how high the quality the ministry 
 must have some relation to a human interest. 
 Robert Louis Stevenson in the ^'Wrong Box" 
 has carried out to ridiculous lengths the con- 
 versation of an old social investigator who had 
 studied out with amazing ingenuity a set of 
 social statistics of no interest to anyone. Much 
 theological speculation has been likewise bar- 
 ren. It has required enormous mental energy, 
 but has been devoid of anything that would 
 arouse the interest of a fairly normal human 
 159 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 being. Much of this theology came out of a 
 period when the church had turned away from 
 the living interests of living men. Now, what- 
 ever else the social spirit may or may not do, it 
 will at least keep theology human. We are 
 mistaken if we assume that the social passion 
 has to do only with the more material needs. 
 Any man who works for his fellow men is 
 anxious that they get their chance in the un- 
 folding of their every capability. It is a posi- 
 tive grief to anyone who knows day laborers, 
 for example, to think how wasteful of scien- 
 tific, philosophic, artistic possibilities is the 
 system of society under which we live. 
 
 The believer with a social passion keeps close 
 to the central positions in theology. The strug- 
 gle to better evil conditions makes him think 
 of God in terms of relief to men. He has no 
 time for overrefinement of theological defini- 
 tion. If he can keep before himself God as the 
 Friend and Helper of men, he is content. 
 Healthy progress in theology is quite likely to 
 come out of thus thinking of God in terms of 
 Christ. To be sure, the formal theologian in 
 his study says that he too is thinking of God 
 in human terms, that he is trying to give men 
 a conception of God that will make God satisfy 
 all parts of redeemed human nature. All of 
 which is true with thinker after thinker. We 
 
 160 
 
SOCIAL SPIRIT AND PERSONAL PIETY 
 
 are not quite so blind to the service of the- 
 ologians as to say that only the man at work 
 in a slum district or with a group of labor 
 leaders or in a hall of legislature is serving his 
 fellow man. We have the highest esteem for 
 the theologians, but we insist that the funda- 
 mental data on which they study should come 
 out of the struggles of those who are in prac- 
 tical effort expressing their belief in the Christ- 
 like God. Otherwise the theological mind is 
 likely to run off into the empty speculations 
 which have only an abstractly intellectual 
 foundation. Without attempting to trespass 
 upon the theologian's prerogative may we say 
 that if we are to hold fast to the God of the 
 New Testament the moral rather than the 
 metaphysical attributes must be uppermost in 
 God. Better, in a word, sacrifice some of God's 
 power than to sacrifice any of his moral full- 
 ness. There are those who will have it that 
 God's omnipotence must be maintained even 
 in face of the demands of the human will for 
 freedom. If we have to sacrifice one or the 
 other, better let the divine omnipotence go. 
 This is a suggestion of what we mean when we 
 speak of the passion for men as keeping the 
 human values in the first place. The man 
 hard at work to lift men up into the true free- 
 dom is not likely to concern himself overmuch 
 
 161 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 to preserve the metaphysical omnipotence of 
 God. He would sooner have an all-righteous 
 and all-loving Father as revealed in Christ 
 than an omnipotent Sovereign. If God is to 
 create men at all, he must be willing to make 
 some sacrifices in himself, no matter how far 
 they reach. In the doctrine of the Christlike 
 God sacrifice is the first and the last word for 
 God himself. 
 
 Speaking of sacrifice leads naturally to the 
 next remark, namely, that the experience of 
 social effort is one of cross-bearing, and the 
 cross-bearing in every human aspect is like the 
 cross-bearing of the Christ. Think of this par- 
 allelism for a moment. To begin with, the suf- 
 fering of Christ was that involved in putting 
 up with the imperfections and inadequacies of 
 those for whom he was working. What often 
 wears out the social enthusiasm of the social 
 fighter who does not base his battle on the 
 Christ- view is just the sheer abundance of hu- 
 man imperfection. The worker meets so much 
 of unresponsiveness, so much of mixed motive, 
 so much willingness to make moral compro- 
 mise, so much of ingratitude and positive be- 
 trayal — in fine, so much of general "seami- 
 ness" in the life with which he works that after 
 a while his enthusiasm dies down. Jesus 
 prayed: "Forgive them, for they know not 
 
 162 
 
SOCIAL SPIRIT AND PERSONAL PIETY 
 
 what they do." This was divine charity in- 
 deed, but human ignorance itself was likely 
 one of the most humiliating and distressing 
 features of life as Jesus saw it. 
 
 Another feature of cross-bearing like that of 
 Jesus is the type of persecution the social 
 fighter meets. A socially minded Christian, 
 like his Master, seldom gets a chance to fight 
 out his battles on the main issues. The charge 
 of blasphemy brought against Jesus had no 
 shade of relation to the main reasons for which 
 the chief priests brought Jesus to death. The 
 priests were not so sensitive to blasphemy as 
 to desire the death of Jesus on that account 
 alone. Jesus had forced an issue that im- 
 periled the places and powers of the priests; 
 but the issue was never joined on that plane. 
 Jesus said to his disciples, "Blessed are ye 
 when men revile you." Eeviling is the favor- 
 ite method of attack on a social prophet who 
 gets close enough to a wrong against the people 
 to make the perpetrators of the wrong wince. 
 Almost never is such an issue met in terms of 
 the issue itself. Let a political idealist arise 
 to lead his party along lofty moral paths. 
 The battle seldom wages around the idealistic 
 measures themselves. It takes the form of re- 
 vilings against the leader. I do not now recall 
 a leader in American political reform free from 
 
 163 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 attack by Ms enemies for drunkenness or li- 
 centiousness or lack of personal integrity. The 
 plight of the more distinctively social prophet 
 is even worse. The Jews called Jesus a blas- 
 phemer because that was the worst thing they 
 could say about him. If any man leads in over- 
 throwing an evil like the liquor traffic or an 
 industrial cruelty, or pleads for a better chance 
 for men, women and children where money in- 
 terests are against such chance, he might just 
 as well make up his mind that whatever is the 
 w^orst that his enemies can say of him, that they 
 will say. After all allowance for the foolish 
 martyrs who by sheer excess of folly bring an 
 unnecessary martyrdom on themselves it must 
 not be forgotten that the wisest, most tactful 
 defender of human rights will have to take his 
 share of cross-bearing. 
 
 Again, the suffering of the social benefactor, 
 like that of his Lord, is vicarious. On the hu- 
 man side he is bearing in himself the sins of 
 mankind, the sins of a social system for which 
 he is not responsible ; and the suffering which 
 he undergoes is to free others from suffering. 
 Merely personal distresses are not necessarily 
 the Christian bearing of the cross, for such 
 cross-bearing looks toward lightening the woes 
 of others. Nor is there any virtue in suffering 
 for suffering's own sake. Cross-bearing, to be 
 
 164 
 
SOCIAL SPIRIT AND PERSONAL PIETY 
 
 Christly cross-bearing, must have this large 
 social rjeference and implication. Moreover, 
 the social spirit has an effect on the prayer 
 life of the Christian who has come to the social 
 point of view, an effect both on the quantity 
 and quality of prayer, if such terms are here 
 permissible. For the social worker knows 
 that the divine force which redeems society 
 can only arrive through human agencies. So- 
 cial results are wrought by men upon men. 
 If man's inhumanity to man has made count- 
 less thousands mourn, redemption can come 
 only through man's humanity to man. The 
 Christian worker prays to get into communion 
 with God, that from that communion there 
 may be released in himself those human forces 
 which will heal and soothe. This means the 
 incessant cultivation, not necessarily of pe- 
 tition, but of the prayer attitude and the 
 prayer spirit. The social prayer must literally 
 be without ceasing. Moreover, the prayer 
 takes on that finest form which we call inter- 
 cessory. It is not for the one praying himself. 
 It is for others, and that "for others" is the 
 sign of distinctively Christian prayer. 
 
 We have said repeatedly that every system 
 must finally be judged by its results upon him 
 who practices the system. We are willing to 
 have a social Christianity judged by its re- 
 
 165 
 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 
 
 suits on those who practice it. We believe that 
 the practice of the search for the larger and 
 finer human values in social expressions of 
 Christianity will make saints of the seekers. 
 The main goal is the help of those whose lot 
 is hard, but from this help results also the 
 sanctification of the helpers. Again, as soon 
 as a man's lot is improved by the rescue and 
 uplift which come through Christianity it is 
 the duty of that man to seek to help others. 
 Thus the number of saints grows. The truly 
 elect in the kingdom of heaven are those labor- 
 ing for the election of their fellows. The idea 
 of election and salvation must be constantly 
 expanded. From those wider expansions new 
 streams must flow back upon the lives of the 
 individuals in society. The social movement 
 starts from an expansive force in the life of 
 individuals. It must return upon individuals 
 to deepen the intensities at the personal cen- 
 ters, for when the last word is said, it is at 
 those personal centers that the spirit of reli- 
 gion abides. 
 
 166 
 

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