Jfisbers of /Ifoen, 
 
 A CHARGE 
 
 Clergy of the Jurisdiction of Asheville 
 
 BISHOP OF NORTH CAROLINA 
 1896 
 
CHARGE OF THE BISHOP. 
 
 Brethren of the Clergy: 
 
 The Canons of the General Convention do not undertake 
 to legislate very specifically upon the pastoral duties of a 
 Bishop. They barely indicate the minimum of care and 
 oversight proper to the office, and leave large liberty to 
 the individual. This is a recognition of the fact that the 
 relation of a bishop to the Church and to his people has a 
 deeper foundation than in the canonical provisions of any 
 particular national church, and involves duties the per- 
 formance of which cannot be secured by minuteness of 
 canonical requirements. But this happy reserve in our 
 legislation carries with it to a conscientious man only a 
 more constraining sense of obligation. Being left to his 
 own conscience, he is the more anxious not to be found 
 wanting; and a law which seeks not to control his action 
 elicits his most earnest endeavors to perceive its real 
 requirement, and to fulfil to the utmost its spirit and mean- 
 ing- 
 
 In this spirit of wise suggestion rather than of exact 
 
 prescription Canon 19, Section ix, Title i of the Digest 
 declares that "it is deemed proper that every Bishop of 
 this Church shall deliver, at least once in three years, a 
 charge to the Clergy of his Diocese." I do not know that 
 what I have now to say to you deserves to be dignified by 
 that name, in view of the weighty and momentous charac- 
 ter of such utterances as have under the designation of 
 charges been put forth by the great men who have pre- 
 ceded me in the Church in North Carolina. But none the 
 less I am moved to address you at this time upon a matter 
 which seems to me to be of the utmost practical impor- 
 tance, and I would fain avail myself of the above quoted 
 provisions of our Canon to give weight and authority to 
 that which I shall deliver. I speak out of deep conviction, 
 
 Art 
 
 m 
 
and I address myself to the facts of our situation. I do 
 not feel that the Canon requires me thus to speak; I but 
 take advantage of its provision to give sanction to what I 
 feel impelled to say. 
 
 From the bottom of my heart I thank God that I feel 
 under no necessity of exhorting the Clergy of Asheville to 
 be faithful to the great principles and truths of the Gospel 
 sent down to us from heaven. We are not ignorant even 
 in these remote mountains of the unrest and discord in 
 certain parts of the Church, and we fully appreciate the 
 danger which in some quarters seems to threaten the purity 
 and integrity of the faith. Knowing these things, we 
 rejoice in the comfortable assurance afforded us by the 
 noble Pastoral Letter of 1894 that our fathers and leaders 
 are sound in the faith, prompt to declare and to defend it. 
 But we have no divisions among ourselves in these mat- 
 ters. With one heart we desire the prosperity of Christ's 
 holy Apostolic Church, and with one mouth we confess the 
 faith once delivered to the saints. Nor are our peace and 
 mutual love disturbed or threatened by those who, dissat- 
 isfied with the worship and services of the Church as she 
 herself sets them forth and orders them, seek to improve 
 upon her ways by additions and variations taken from this 
 or that unauthorized source. We possess that good and 
 pleasant thing spoken of by the Psalmist; we are brethren 
 and we dwell together in unity. I know of no jars or 
 strifes or divisions among us. And this peace and love, 
 like the dew of Hermon which fell upon the hill of Zion, 
 is the Lord's promise to us, we humbly trust, of His bless- 
 ing and of life forever more. Thanking Him therefore 
 for this happy state, and rejoicing in mutual love and con- 
 fidence, let us address ourselves to the work which lies 
 before us. 
 
 The subject upon which I wish to address you at this 
 time is: 
 
 The Duty of the Clergy of whatever order to he Fishers of Men. 
 
 I. The kingdom of God in the world hath its internal 
 and its external function, its duty to its own members and 
 its duty to the world. I do not propose to institute any 
 comparison between these, or to endeavor to fix their rela- 
 tive importance. That were an unprofitable and perhaps 
 
impossible attempt. All vital functions are in their sev- 
 eral ways essential. But the peculiarity of some condi- 
 tion or situation may give a temporary importance or 
 prominence to some one function above the others. We 
 see this in the very beginning. Our Lord's commission to 
 the Apostles in the concluding words of St. Matthew's Gos- 
 pel includes the twofold function of first converting the 
 world; and second, of bringing those converted into sacra- 
 mental union with Christ and training them up to the full 
 perfection of Christian life. But the actual situation is 
 plainly indicated by the form of the divine command, and 
 the first direction has reference to the duty lying immedi- 
 ately before them: "Go ye therefore and make disciples of 
 all the nations." And so the Apostles were first of all 
 preachers. The situation made them such. Even the 
 Deacons, ordained in the first instance with special refer- 
 ence to an entirely different function of the ministry, were 
 by the necessities of the case, forced into the same position 
 as preachers, when they proved to have suitable gifts and 
 capacities. We are to-day faulted at times because we so 
 commonly license Deacons to preach, and put them in 
 charge of congregations and missions. It is to be consid- 
 ered that in some sort we but yield to the same necessity 
 which set St. Stephen to disputing with the Cyreneans and 
 Alexandrians, and with them of Cilicia and of Asia, and 
 which sent St. Philip as the first Evangelist to Samaria to 
 preach Christ unto them. 
 
 The first duty of the minister of Christ therefore is to 
 catch men. Upon his success in this part of his office all 
 his ability and opportunity to do the other parts of it may 
 depend. It was so in the beginning; it continues to be so 
 in a measure still. Even in those happy regions, if there 
 be any such, where none are outside the pale of the 
 Church, multitudes will be found who are in fact without 
 any sufficient knowledge of the saving and sanctifying 
 grace of Christ in the heart. These must be caught. Their 
 attention must be engaged, their sensibilities must be 
 touched, their affections must be called forth and developed. 
 By the hands of a man they must be drawn to the Man, 
 that in Him they may become men indeed. 
 
 II. In the multiplicity of duties which crowd upon the 
 rector of a parish, and in the business of administering its 
 various departments, and directing its activities, not only 
 
his time is consumed and his energies all but exhausted, 
 but there is danger of his forgetting the main purpose of 
 his ministry. Even a high degree of spiritual life in the 
 minister may receive such a bent as to turn him away so 
 that he does not fully see this duty of which I now speak. 
 The services of the Church, by the joy and happiness which 
 he finds in them, may degenerate into a kind of spiritual 
 self-indulgence, a bond of sweet communion between the 
 members of the Church, half forgetful of their mission to 
 the world. His sermons may unconsciously address them- 
 selves to his own moods and experiences, or at any rate be 
 such as to reach and interest those only who have attained to 
 something of his own point of view. Such services and 
 such sermons may have their place and importance in the 
 life of the Church. The zeal and energy and devotion 
 expended in the services and worship of the Church and 
 in the exercise of our spiritual faculties and affections are 
 a source of power. The life of the Church is largely in 
 the devotional life of its members. Efforts directed upon 
 itself may do something toward its own development. I 
 do not deny it. There is real power in a church full of 
 life and devotion, even when it is not fully alive to its 
 duty in positive aggressive work. In a manner it declares 
 the Word of God and brings men to a knowledge and 
 sense of the truth. But as we are situated in this particu- 
 lar field the vast body of our people lie beyond the sphere 
 of any such influences, and we have hardly one or two 
 congregations strong enough to exert any such indirect 
 power. 
 
 III. Our congregations are weak and scattered. Our 
 Clergy find themselves grappling with the problem of 
 building the Church up from the ground. Nine-tenths of 
 all the work in this Jurisdiction is the work of evangeliz- 
 ing populations entirely ignorant of the better ways of the 
 Church. Even where we have little handfuls of people 
 and feeble mission organizations our own people in many 
 cases are but ill-instructed, and the sole prospect of growth 
 lies in aggressive missionary work. Usually the mission- 
 ary finds himself without house, school, or any of the mate- 
 rial which he is accustomed to think of as the necessary 
 means and instruments of successful enterprise. Now, 
 what I wish to say to you, my dear brethren, is that in 
 
such a situation the one thing necessary, that to which 
 you must address yourself, is to catch men. It is not to 
 build school-houses, or rectories, or even churches. It is 
 to get men. It is to lay hold upon the human life of the 
 community. This may seem to you a truth so obvious to 
 notice that it is hardly worth my while to dwell upon it, 
 or even to state it. You will all agree with me at once 
 that this is so. And yet I tell you, my dear brethren, as a 
 result of my observation and experience in our missionary 
 field, that while we all say this with our lips we too often do 
 not realize it in our hearts or show it in our work. When 
 a missionary goes into such a field as I have indicated he 
 is tempted to think that the first thing necessary is a church 
 or a chapel. Or, if there be church or chapel already, he 
 thinks that he must have a school-house or a rectory. And 
 instead of putting his whole soul into the work of preach- 
 ing the Gospel to men, he is tempted to put his soul into 
 appeals for help to buy and to build. He keeps up the 
 services of the Church with regularity and goes his rounds 
 of parochial and missionary labors, but that upon which 
 he spends himself, into which he puts his hopes and efforts 
 and enthusiasm, and that by which he counts his success, 
 is this material part of his work. I suppose that one 
 thing for which a Bishop should be of use in the practical 
 life of the Church is that in overseeing his field he may 
 come to a truer knowledge of its real character, condition, 
 and needs, than one who is constantly occupied in pastoral 
 or missionary work in one part of it. For nearly three 
 years I have been overseeing the work in this part of North 
 Carolina. I have made three pretty thorough visitations 
 of the whole field. I speak not of any particular portion 
 of it, and I do fully recognize the faithful work which has 
 been done, and is being done, in all parts where we have 
 ministers. But I do say, as the result of careful observa- 
 tion and reflection, that there is this danger growing out 
 of our present condition of needing so many things, that 
 we may make a mistake as to the proper way of doing our 
 work, and of obtaining what we need most of all. It is not 
 primarily the duty of a minister to build churches, or 
 chapels, or schools, or parsonages. His first duty where there 
 is no church is to preach to men, and to bring them under 
 the power of the truth, and to minister to them in spiritual 
 things. Thus bringing men to the truth, he comes to need 
 
6 
 
 churches and all the rest. But except as he catches men 
 he has no need for all these things, and his appeal for them 
 can have no legitimate basis except in the success of his 
 more important work of catching men. 
 
 So long as we look upon those external things as the 
 means whereby we must seek to do our work, so long will 
 the Church be weak and helpless. On the other hand, so 
 soon as we put the catching of men first, and consider 
 these other things as purely subordinate and secondary, so 
 soon shall we begin to lay hold with power upon the com- 
 munities where we labor. Get the men; possess the life 
 and interest of the community; and all else will follow. 
 It would not be difficult to find instances in plenty of 
 churches and chapels erected for the purposes of housing 
 congregations to be caught by that means, which stand yet 
 unoccupied, and silent from month to month. It will be 
 difficult to discover even one single example of a faithful 
 missionary who has built a church of living souls, and 
 who has failed to find a material fabric in which to house 
 them. 
 
 Churches, chapels, schools, organs, parsonages, glebes, 
 all the externals of Church work, however necessary, are 
 not the life of the Church. They are but like the shell of 
 conch or of the pearl-oyster, or the stony envelope of the 
 coral insect, beautiful, it may be, necessary, practically 
 indispensable, essentially associated with the life as means 
 or conditions of living; but they cannot make life. On 
 the contrary, life can and does and must make them. 
 Given the life, they follow. The life secretes the shell 
 inclosing it. So the life of the Church, which is the 
 grace of God operating in and upon the hearts and souls 
 of men, cannot be created by any outward means or agen- 
 cies, but on the contrary creates them. Spend therefore 
 your efforts, your thought, your enthusiasm, pour out 
 your very life itself upon that Church which in your sev- 
 eral fields you are building out of the living stones of con- 
 verted and consecrated men and women and children, and 
 those other lesser matters will come in due time. Seek 
 ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and 
 all these things shall be added unto you. 
 
 IV. As a necessary preliminary to catching men, we 
 must know men. When a missionary enters upon any 
 field of work the very first thing he should do is to make 
 
himself acquainted with the people, all the people. He 
 must not wait for the people to seek him out; he is sent by 
 his Master to seek them out. He is not to hamper himself 
 or limit his work and acquaintance and friendships by 
 social conventionalities. He must use these means and 
 conditions of mutual intercourse, but not be ruled by them. 
 He must make himself the friend of all. He represents 
 the love of God, and the love of God is a real love, not a 
 form of words. And if the minister of Christ has really 
 come to know the love of Christ he will find a way to the 
 love and confidence of the people among whom he lives. 
 There is no such source of strength and influence in the 
 ministry as this of knowing and loving the people to whom 
 we minister. The difference between a ministry founded 
 on this close relation between us and our people and a 
 ministry merely diligent in services and functions is sim- 
 ply the difference between a ministry successful in catch- 
 ing men and one which is not thus successful. There is 
 perhaps room in a strong, rich, prosperous church for the 
 mere ecclesiastic, the functionary, but in a missionary 
 church he is an incumbrance and a weakness. The people 
 of our mountain country for the most part know nothing 
 about the Church, and in too many instances have been 
 carefully taught to hate it. The mere performance of the 
 services of the Church will have no influence on them 
 whatever. They will not listen and do not understand our 
 arguments and explanations. But they have hearts and 
 they can appreciate a good man if they come to know him. 
 I believe the superiority of the Church is seen in the supe- 
 riority of the man and woman whom she forms and devel- 
 opes. Therefore I charge you, my brethren of the Clergy, 
 to live among the people whom you serve and to cultivate 
 their acquaintance, and to know them in their families 
 and in the workshops and fields; and let them see how 
 Christ by you loves and seeks them, and when they come 
 to know this they will begin to care something about the 
 Church, and not until then. Of all the hollow and hope- 
 less failures that is the hollowest and most hopeless of the 
 missionary who does not thus build upon the love of God 
 for man, not merely proclaimed from the pulpit but mani- 
 fested in himself and exercised upon the people whom he 
 serves. The minister of the Gospel who in declaring God's 
 love does not express his own love, and who does not feel 
 
himself growing in actual love to the individuals of his 
 flock, so that he longs for their love and values their regard, 
 had better stop and examine himself and make a new 
 start, and try to get into the right way. He may minister 
 a sacrament, and that may have value, but he will prepare 
 very few persons to receive a sacrament duly, and he will 
 teach very few to desire or to seek the sacraments and 
 means of grace. 
 
 V. And thus knowing the people whom you serve, and 
 loving them, you will speak to them that which they really 
 need to know and that which they will understand. In 
 order to speak the truth effectively we must not only know 
 the truth; we must also know our hearers; and we must 
 adapt our message to our hearers. We must learn to give 
 them what they need in such a way that they will feel that it 
 is what they need. The noblest conception of truth 
 expressed in the most eloquent language has no value to 
 the man whose hearing is so defective that he cannot hear 
 the preacher. Now, suppose that instead of physical deaf- 
 ness it is an intellectual or moral obstruction which keeps 
 the preacher's message from coming home to him; in this 
 case also the preaching is equally thrown away. Now, I 
 know, my dear brethren, from my own experience that our 
 sermons sometimes fail utterly because we do not adapt 
 them to our audience. We go off upon some interesting 
 line of argument or of reflection which pleases us, and 
 leave our hearers behind. Preaching implies a hearer as 
 well as a speaker. When there ceases to be a hearer there 
 ceases to be a preacher in any real or useful sense of the 
 word. Our discourse may be learned, eloquent, true, but 
 unless it be a word spoken from our heart to the heart of 
 the man to whom we are sent, it is not the word which 
 Christ has sent us to speak. We hear of sermons above 
 the heads of the hearers; the trouble with such sermons 
 is not that they go above the heads of the hearers, 
 but that they do not come out of the heart and con- 
 conscience of the preacher. He is speaking to himself 
 or to some imaginary audience, and not to the people before 
 him. "The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." 
 
 But I will not further enlarge upon a matter in which 
 many of you might teach me. I ask you to think of what 
 I have said and to remember that I do not speak as feeling 
 myself competent to instruct you, but as being in God's 
 
9 
 
 providence called to oversee your work, and therefore 
 bound to point out, as best I can, the things needed, and 
 the means of best furthering our holy enterprise of build- 
 ing up God's kingdom. I charge you as good stewards of 
 the mysteries of God, as ambassadors for Christ, to remem- 
 ber that you are sent to the life of the world, to lay hold upon 
 it, to convert it, to win it for God. That is the great end of 
 your ministry, the glory of God in the salvation of men. You 
 are setting forth God's glory and making full proof of your 
 ministry just so far as you are bringing men and women 
 and children to know God and to become sharers of the 
 divine life. That is the purpose of your ministry, and that 
 alone. By that you shall be judged at the last. I beseech 
 you judge yourselves by that now. 
 
 Jos. Blount Cheshire, Jr.