The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders. In the midst of
the multitude which follows there is often something better than in the
one that goes before. Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but one of
their young colonels showed them how. The junior counsel has been known
not unfrequently to make a better argument than his senior fellow,--if,
indeed, he did not make both their arguments. Good ministers will tell
you they have parishioners who beat them in the practice of the virtues.
A great establishment, got up on commercial principles, like the
Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried on, if it happened to
get good teachers. And when Master Langdon came to see its management,
he recognized that there must be fidelity and intelligence somewhere
among the instructors. It was only necessary to look for a moment at
the fair, open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of gentle, habitual
authority, the sweet gravity that lay upon the lips, to hear the clear
answers to the pupils' questions, to notice how every request had the
force without the form of a command, and the young man could not doubt
that the good genius of the school stood before him in the person of
Helen Darley.
It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman dies and leaves a widow
and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter
bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep
a school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds
herself the _prima donna_ in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas
Peckham's educational establishment.
What a miserable thing it is to be poor! She was dependent, frail,
sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping,
thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared
for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have
his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's
worth as he could get. She was consequently, in plain English,
overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,--sadder a
great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile
in capacities of suffering than a man. She has so many varieties of
headache,--sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera
into her temples,--sometimes letting her work with half her brain while
the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,--sometimes tightening
round the brows as if her cap-band were Luke's iron crown,--and then her
neuralgias, and her back-aches, and her fits of depression, in which she
thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which
men speak slightingly of as hysterical,--convulsions, that is all, only
not commonly fatal ones,--so many trials which belong to her fine and
mobile structure,--that she is always entitled to pity, when she is
placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies. The poor
teacher's work had, of course, been doubled since the departure of Mr.
Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the weariness of instruction
is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to be overtasked, but those
who have tried it. The _relays_ of fresh pupils, each new set with its
exhausting powers in full action, coming one after another, take out
all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance from the subject of
their draining process.
The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she
sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or
compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the
pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill
stair of labor she was daily climbing.
How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks! She
was conscientious in her duties and would insist on reading every
sentence,--there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or
bad spelling. There might but have been twenty or thirty of these themes
in the bundle before her. Of course she knew pretty well the leading
sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the accidents
of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence uncertain; that
virtue was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dew-drop
from the flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was
o'ershadowed with trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our
beloved teachers were to be our guides through all our future career.
The imagery employed consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds,
clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to
a meteor. Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of these
girls'-compositions,--their stringing together of the good old
traditional copy-book phrases, their occasional gushes of sentiment, the
profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that read
them as the experience of a bantam-pullet's last-hatched young one
with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's
chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes?
Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange
clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the
mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and
exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the
sensibility,--a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the
Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the Davidson sisters. In the
midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read over so
carefully were two or three that had something of individual flavor
about them, and here and there there was an image or an epithet which
showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather
marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.
The young lady teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner,
as one reads proofs,--noting defects of detail, but not commonly
arrested by the matters treated of. Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood's poem,
beginning
"How sweet at evening's balmy hour,"
did not excite her. She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and
Yankee beginners, _morn_ and _dawn_, and tossed the verses on the pile
of those she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them
in a rather listless way,--for the poor thing was getting sleepy in
spite of herself,--when she came to one which seemed to rouse her
attention, and lifted her drooping lids. She looked at it a moment
before she would touch it. Then she took hold of it by one corner and
slid it off from the rest. One would have said she was afraid of it,
or had some undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her. Such odd
fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of
these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble
the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive
objects.
This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long,
slender hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something
strangely suggestive about the look of it,--but exactly of what, Miss
Darley either could not or did not try to think. The subject of the
paper was The Mountain,--the composition being a sort of descriptive
rhapsody. It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage
scenery of the region. One would have said that the writer must have
threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as
well as by day. As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind
of tremulous agitation came over her. There were hints in this strange
paper she did not know what to make of. There was something in its
descriptions and imagery that recalled,--Miss Darley could not say
what,--but it made her frightfully nervous. Still she could not help
reading, till she came to one passage which so agitated her that the
tired and overwearied girl's self-control left her entirely. She sobbed
once or twice, then laughed convulsively, and flung herself on the bed,
where she worked out a set hysteric spasm as she best might, without
anybody to rub her hands and see that she did not hurt herself.
By-and-by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a
volume of Coleridge and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and
wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.
Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition
which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state
that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and
it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which
made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance.
The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, _E.
Venner_, and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had
excited the master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before
mentioned.
The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally
enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon
in his own. The girls had not yet entered the schoolroom.
"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.
"I was not well yesterday," she answered. "I had a worry and a kind of
fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls
and bodies! Every young girl ought to walk, locked close, arm in arm,
between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought
of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants--Tell me,
are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural
law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?"
Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his
profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which
individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with
a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of
facts.
"Why, of course. Each of us is only footing-up of a double column of
figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,--and some of
them are _plus_, and some _minus_. If the columns don't add up right, it
is commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to
say that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and
keep the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer
to a long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people
born with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature,
as you call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles, of course
they are beyond the reach of common influences. Slight obliquities are
what we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane
asylums take care of most of the right-angle cases.--I am afraid I have
put it too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know.
Pray, what set you--"
The next morning the lady-teacher took to asking me this? "Any strange
cases among the scholars?"
The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with the
question. She, too, was of gentle blood,--not meaning by that that she
was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never
rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies,
amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses
them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families.
And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst of
the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the
natural law of elective affinity. It is wonderful how men and women know
their peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of two ship-wrecked
vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once
address the other as "Our Royal Sister."
Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering
with the light which flashed from them with his question. Not as those
foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she look into
them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm,
steadfast purpose. "A gentleman," she said to herself, as she read his
expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but exhausting glance.
"A lady," he said to himself, as he met her questioning look,--so brief,
so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had taught to read
faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents,
as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few
seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any
vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression,
she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face
so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly,
he would not have said to himself, "She is a _lady_," for that word
meant a good deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the
scholarly Langdons.
"There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon," she said, "and I
don't think our school-room is an exception. I am glad you believe in
the force of transmitted tendencies. It would break my heart, if I did
not think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything but
God's special grace. I should die, if I thought that my negligence or
incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and sins of those I have
charge of. Yet there, are mysteries I do not know how to account for."
She looked all round the school-room, and then said, in a whisper, "Mr.
Langdon, we had a girl that _stole_, in the school, not long ago. Worse
than that, we had a girl that tried to set us on fire. Children of good
people, both of them. And we have a girl now that frightens me so"----
The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three
types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not have
been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in
the school.--_Hannah Martin_. Fourteen years and three months old.
Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead,
large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with little other expression.
Three buns in her bag, and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking her
provisions in school-hours.--_Rosa Milburn_. Sixteen. Brunette, with
a rare ripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes
wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate,
if irritated. Finished in high relief. Carries shoulders well back and
walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking
movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,--a
hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means to
read in school-time.--_Charlotte Ann Wood_. Fifteen. The poetess before
mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate
child, half unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does not go
much with the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry,
underscoring favorite passages. Writes a great many verses, very fast,
not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments, expressed in the
accustomed phrases. Undervitalized. Sensibilities not covered with their
normal integuments. A negative condition, often confounded with genius,
and sometimes running into it. Young people that _fall_ out of line
through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those
that _step_ out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.
The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups,
until the school-room was nearly full. Then there was a little pause,
and a light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes
turned to the door, and the master's followed them in the same
direction.
A girl of about seventeen entered. She was tall and slender, but
rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes
sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of
graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the
very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a
splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth that
was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered
dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little
fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a
short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing
listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling
it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her
long, delicate fingers. Presently she looked up. Black, piercing eyes,
not large,--a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley
bust,--black hair, twisted in heavy braids,--a face that one could not
help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from
for something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes.
They were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter turned her own away,
and let them wander over the other scholars. But they could not help
coming back again for a single glance at the wild beauty. The diamond
eyes were on her still. She turned the leaves of several of her books,
as if in search of some passage, and, when she thought she had waited
long enough to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the dark girl.
The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her
forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost
shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse,
which she could not resist, she left her place and went to the young
girl's desk.
_"What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?_" It was a strange question to
put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to come
to her.
"Nothing," she said. "I thought I could make you come." The girl spoke
in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her
articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.
"Where did you get that flower, Elsie?" said Miss Darley. It was a rare
alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks of The
Mountain.
"Where it grew," said Elsie Venner. "Take it." The teacher could not
refuse her. The girl's finger-tips touched hers as she took it. How cold
they were for a girl of such an organization!
The teacher went back to her seat. She made an excuse for quitting the
school-room soon afterwards. The first thing she did was to fling the
flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it. The second was to
wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady Macbeth. A
poor, overtasked, nervous creature,--we must not think too much of her
fancies.
After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which had
been so suddenly interrupted. There were things spoken of which may
prove interesting by-and-by, but there are other matters we must first
attend to. IS THE RELIGIOUS WANT OF THE AGE MET?
To answer this question intelligently, we must first glance at the
characteristics of the age. It is an age of remarkable activity. There
have been industrious men in other days; there have been nations of whom
it might be truly said, They were an industrious people, they lost no
time in idleness: but their rate of speed was low. Such a people could
hardly be deemed enterprising. They might continue uncomplainingly in
their accustomed round of labors, but would lack impulse to attempt
anything new. Circumstances did not compel them to unwonted efforts,
and their capabilities lay dormant. The world was wide, the population
comparatively sparse, and the means of subsistence not difficult of
attainment.
Our age is very unlike to that. People begin to crowd one another. There
is competition. The more active and ingenious will have the advantage;
they do have the advantage; and this fact is a constant stimulus. It has
been operating for thirty years past with ever-increasing power. We seem
to be approaching a climax,--a point beyond which flesh and blood cannot
go. The enterprise of the more active spirits of our day is astounding;
we begin to ask, "Will they stop at anything? What will they not
undertake?" There are a great many unsuccessful attempts; but these are
not necessarily observed, they pass quietly into obscurity, while we
hasten to observe the successes, which are wonderful, and so numerous
as to keep us ever on tiptoe, looking for new wonders. Having seen the
railways, the magnetic telegraph, and Hoe's press, in full operation,
and having been brought to accept these as a common measure of time and
motion, we find ourselves indisposed for older usages. We find our
age an age of daring and of doing. We are ready to discard the word
_impossible_; from our vocabulary; we deny that anything is the less
probable because of being unprecedented. For doing new things we look
about for new means,--being full charged with the belief that for all
worthy or desirable ends there must be adequate and available means.
In this regard, it is an age of unprecedented faith, of expectation of
success; and we all know the natural and necessary influence of such
an expectation. Sanguine expectation lights up the fires of genius;
invention is quickened for the attainment of the highest speed and the
greatest momentum. In no former age has there been anything to compare
in rapidity and power of movement with the every-day achievements of
this age. The relation of books to men, and the sphere assigned to
books, are materially modified by the characteristics of the age. Books,
as books, are no longer a charm to conjure with. The few really superior
books have a wider and greater influence than ever before; while
the great mass of common books have less, and pass more easily into
oblivion. Good books may and must help us; but books cannot make us men
of the nineteenth century, and a power in it. A thorough knowledge of
the world within us, as it stands related to the world without us, is
something quite different from mere book-knowledge. This is an element
of influence not only not confined to the bookmen, but often possessed
in a transcendent degree by those whose devotion to books is altogether
subordinate to other avocations. Our common-school education may be said
to bring the entire people upon a common plane. We are no longer the
esoteric and the exoteric; we understand our rights in the common fund
of sense and truth very well. We are not very patient with those who
affect to know better than ourselves what we want and what we ought to
desire. Most men are exceedingly in earnest, and determined to be heard
in their own cause, and well able to make themselves understood. Scribes
and Pharisees compassing sea and land to make one proselyte are
a good and bad type of our activity in the pursuit of our own ends.
Innumerable and infinitely varied are the shifts employed to secure
attention, to effect the sale of merchandise, and to increase income.
Nor are the learned professions much behind the men of merchandise. The
contest of life thickens. Competition for the fruits of labor waxes
continually more fierce. Mother Earth is too moderate in her labors; the
ranks of the producers suffer from desertion; the plough is forsaken;
the patient ox is contemned; silence, seclusion, and meditation are a
memory of the past. The world's axis is changed; there is more heat in
the North. The world has advanced, in our age, from a speed of five
miles an hour, to twenty or thirty, or more.
Whatever may be thought of the advantages and disadvantages accruing
from these movements, there can be no question of the fact, that they
have greatly affected the position and the relations of speakers and
hearers. The million have been driven to do so much for themselves, that
they are in no little danger of jumping to the conclusion, that they no
longer need teachers of religion. A conclusion so fraught with mischief
to the race will not be arrested by a pertinacious adhesion to modes of
preaching which men under the old-time training could be made to endure,
but which latter-day contrasts have rendered intolerable.
It is just here, if anywhere, that a special backwardness on the part of
the clergy to meet the religious wants of the age may, without injustice
or unkindness, be alleged. It comes about very naturally; the training
of the clergy is not in harmony with the exigencies of the position they
are intended to occupy. The endeavors of the preparatory schools are
not to be depreciated. It is scarcely possible to say too much of the
fundamental importance of thoroughness and of minute accuracy in the
rudiments of learning. But that extreme zeal in this behalf has produced
an unnatural divorce of the practical from the critical, it is vain
to deny. The devotion to the latter, which is inaugurated in the
preparatory school, is by the college inflamed to the utmost, and
the young man reaches his climax when he receives the appointment of
valedictorian; that is his end; he reaches it, and we may say it is
the death of him. He may, indeed, enter the theological seminary,
industriously resolved on more of the same supremacy; but, in most
instances, the great practical ends of a Christ-like life of doing good
have been already lost from his view, and the ways and means by which
alone such ends can be reached have become offensive to him. The
student, as he delights in calling himself, has become greatly more
interested in knowledge than in the people for whom he is to use his
knowledge. A certain unknown God, an idol, in short, quite unsuspected,
whose name is _Critical Dignity_, is installed in his heart, in
the place of the Son of God. And the man endures the trials of his
ministerial life under the mistaken impression that he is a martyr for
Christ. He compels himself to be satisfied with a measure of attention
to his utterances, which would content no sane and sensible man in any
other department of teaching. He will tell you that it is one of the
inevitable infelicities of his vocation, that to nothing are men such
unwilling listeners as to religious truth; than which nothing can
be more untrue; for to nothing are men so prepared to listen as to
religious truth, properly presented.
In order to a more generally happy and successful prosecution of the
duties of a minister of Christ, a preliminary fact requires to be
considered. That a man is found or finds himself in any calling is no
evidence whatever that he is fitted for that calling. This is just as
true of the ministry as of any other vocation. Every man-of-business
knows this. The clergy seem to us behind the age in being astonishingly
blind to it. Men-of-business know that only a very small fraction of
their number can ever attain eminent success. They know, that, in a term
of twenty years, ninety-seven men in a hundred _fail_. Here and there
one develops a remarkable talent for the specific business in which he
is engaged. The ninety-and-nine discover that they have a weary contest
to maintain with manifold contingencies and combinations which no
foresight can preclude.
The application of this general truth to their profession the clergy are
backward to perceive. The consequences of this backwardness are very
hurtful to their interests. Because of this, we have an indefinite
amount of puerile and undignified complaint from disappointed men, of
disingenuous misrepresentation from incompetent men, who have entered
upon labors they were never fitted to accomplish. Such men undertake
their labors in ways that want and must want the Divine sanction; and
they are tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of
incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their
flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural
splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for
something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have
been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who
failed,--simply failed,--not in selling horns or hides, shirtings or
sugars,--but failed to recommend Christ and his gospel,--failed for want
of head, or heart, or industry, or all three.
The man who embarks his all in hardware, drugs, or law, runs the risk
of failure. If his neighbor can rise earlier, walk faster, talk faster,
work harder, and hold on longer, he will get the avails that might
suffice for both. This unalterable fact every business-man accepts.
Do you inquire, To what good purpose do you thrust the possibility of
failure upon the attention of the candidate for the ministry? Would you
utterly discourage those who are already more alive to the perils of
their undertaking than we could wish them?
We answer, It is no kindness to encourage men to enter a ministry whose
inexorable requirements and whose incidental possibilities they may
not look in the face. It is no kindness to represent to them that the
qualities which they possess _ought_ to engage attention; and that
their talents will command respect, or else it will be the fault of the
people.
Men go into business in the face of a possibility of failure through
uncontrollable circumstances; not in defiance of an ascertainable,
insufferable incompetency. They toil on, accepting adversity with such
equanimity as God gives them, so long as they are permitted to believe
that their misfortunes are not chargeable upon their incapacity or
self-indulgence. But when it is made apparent that they are not in their
proper sphere, they think it no shame to say so, to withdraw, and
to apply their energies to something suited to their tastes and
capabilities. And it should be with the ministry; but as things now are,
with the conceptions of the ministry now entertained, pride interposes
to forbid the rectification of the most serious mistakes. It is a
question of dignity and of scholarship; whereas it should be a question
of love to God and man, and of real ability and conscious power to bring
them together,--to reconcile man to God.
Our age is an age of great devotion to secular affairs,--of men who are
great in the conduct of such affairs,--in every department in life. To
counterbalance this, our ministry must be filled with an equally earnest
devotion to God and salvation. In real ability our ministers ought to be
not a whit behind. But ability is not necessarily scholarship; though it
may, and as far as possible should, include that, and a great deal more.
Let it be fully understood, once for all, that we have no disparaging
remark to make of scholarship; a man must be foolish beyond expression,
who pretends to argue that the highest scholarship is less than a most
important and almost indispensable auxiliary to the minister of Christ.
All our concern in the matter, just here, is, that it shall be fully
understood that piety and real ability make the minister of Christ,
and not scholarship; in the words of Augustine, "the heart makes the
minister";--but we may safely assume that he meant the heart of a really
able man; otherwise we can accord but a qualified respect to this
remark.
The prevailing impression among the ministry appears to be, that the man
who cannot write "an able doctrinal discourse" is but an inferior man,
fit only to preach in an inferior place; and that it would be a great
gain to the Church, if scholarship were only so general that the
standard of the universities could be applied, and only Phi-Beta-Kappa
men allowed to enter the ministry. No doubt, those who incline to this
view are quite honest, and not unkindly in it. But those who think this
grievously misunderstand the necessities of the age in which we live.
Reading men know where to find better reading than can possibly be
furnished by any man who is bound to write two sermons weekly, or
even one sermon a week; and to train any corps of young men in the
expectation that any considerable fraction of them will be able to win
and to maintain a commanding influence in their parishes mainly by the
weekly production of learned discourses is to do them the greatest
injury, by cherishing expectations which never can be realized. Why
do our educated men of other professions so seldom and so reluctantly
contribute to the addresses in our religious assemblies? Precisely
because they understand the difficulty of meeting the popular
expectation which is created by the prevailing theory; a theory which
demands that sermons, and not only that sermons, but also that all
religious addresses, should be chiefly characterized as learned, acute,
scholastic even. An Irish preacher is reported in an Edinburgh paper as
saying lately, that "he had been led to think of his own preaching and
of that of his brethren. He saw very few sermons in the New Testament
shaped after the forms and fashion in which they had been accustomed to
shape theirs. He was not aware of a sermon there, in which they had
a little motto selected, upon which a disquisition upon a particular
subject was hung. The sort of sermons which the people in his locality
were desirous to hear were sermons delivered on a large portion of the
Word of God, carrying through the ideas as the Spirit of God had done."
And it is, in part at least, because of the prevailing disregard of this
most reasonable desire, that parishes so soon weary of their ministers.
It need not discourage ministers to accept the fact that there will be
failures in the ministry,--and a great many failures among those who
rely for their success mainly upon the weekly production of learned
disquisitions. Discouragement is not in accepting a fact that accords
with all just theories of truth, but in adopting a theory which is sure
to be invalidated by the almost universal experience of men in, as well
as out of, the ministry. A right-minded minister _may_ have many falls
in struggling up his Hill of Difficulty; but the Lord will lift him
up, and will save him from adding to the temperate grief proper to any
measure of short-coming the intolerable poignancy that comes of cheating
by false pretences,--of assuming to do what he knows or should know that
he cannot do, namely, produce any considerable number of great sermons.
Let it, then, be frankly owned, that men, very good men, very capable
men, have failed in the ministry. A. failed, because he did not study;
B., because he did not visit his people; C., because he could not talk;
D., because he was too grave; E., because he was too frivolous; F. could
not, or would not, control his temper; G. alienated by exacting more
than he received; and all of them because of not having what Scougal
calls "the life of God in the soul of man."
It is not worth while for any man to go into the ministry who cannot
relish the Apostle's invitation, running thus:--"I beseech you,
therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your
bodies _a living sacrifice_, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your
reasonable service." If that seem not reasonable, ay, and exceedingly
inviting too, better let it alone. All men cannot do all things. Better
raise extraordinary potatoes than hammer out insignificant ideas. You do
not see the connection? you were a Phi-Beta-Kappa man in college, and
know that you can write better than many a man in a metropolitan pulpit?
Very likely; but we of the few go to church to be made better men, and
not by fine writing, but by significant ideas, which may come in a
homely garb, so they be only pervaded with affectionate piety, but which
can come to us only from one who has laid all ambitious self-seeking on
the altar of God. There is a power of persuasion in every minister who
follows God as a dear child, and who walks in love, as Christ loved
us, which the hardest heart cannot long resist,--which will win the
congregation, however an individual here and there may be able to harden
himself against it. You think that the great power of the pulpit is in
high doctrine, presented with metaphysical precision and acuteness. We
have no disparagement to offer of your doctrinal knowledge, nor of your
ability to state it with metaphysical precision and hair-splitting
acuteness. But we know, from much experience, that there is a divine
truth, and a fervor and power in imparting it, with which God inspires
the man who is wholly devoted to Him, in comparison with which the
higher achievements of the man who lacks these are trumpery and rubbish.
Many, _many_ men have failed in the ministry, are failing in the
ministry every day, because their principal reliance has been upon what
they deem their thorough mastery of the soundest theories of doctrine
and of duty. They were confident they could administer to minds and
hearts diseased the certain specific laid down in the book, admeasured
to the twentieth part of a scruple. Confident in their theoretical
acquisitions, they could not comprehend the indispensable necessity of a
large experience in actual cases of mental malady. And for the want of
such experience, it was absolutely impossible that they should be _en
rapport_ with the souls they honestly desired to benefit. Can you heal a
heart-ache with a syllogism? There is no dispensing with the precept and
prescription,--"Weep with those that weep!" "Be of the same mind one
toward another!"
Theories of doctrine and of practice are not without their value; but
the minister who is merely or chiefly a theorist, whether in doctrines
or in measures, is an adventurer; and the chances against him are as
many as the chances against the precise similarity of any two cases
presented to his attention,--as many as the chances against the
education of any two men of fifty years being precisely alike, in every
particular and in all their results. The soul's problems are not to be
solved by theories. Such was not the practice of the Great Physician;
"_surely, He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows._" Theories
shirk that. "_In all their affliction, He was afflicted; in His love and
in His pity, He redeemed them._" And precisely in this way his ministers
are now to follow up his practice. Our age is growing less and less
tolerant of formality,--less and less willing to accept metaphysical
disquisition in place of a warm-hearted, loving, fervent expansion of
the Word of God, recommended to the understanding and to the sensibility
by lively illustrations of spiritual truth, derived from all the
experience of life, from all observation, from all analogies in the
natural world,--in short, from every manner of illumination, from the
heavens above, from the earth beneath, and from the waters which are
under the earth. God is surely everywhere, and hath made all things, and
all to testify of Him; and the innumerable voices all agree together.
And when this is both understood and felt, what rules shall be given to
guide and control the construction and the delivery of discourses? Shall
we say, The people must be brought back to the old-time endurance--ay,
_endurance_, that is the word--of long-drawn, laborious ratiocinations,
wherein the truth is diligently pursued for its own sake, with an
ultimate reference, indeed, to the needs and uses of the hearer, but so
remote as rarely to be noticed, except by that very small fraction of
any customary congregation who may chance to have an interest in
such doings,--some of whom watch the clergyman as they would the
entomologist, running down a truth that he may impale it, and add one
more specimen to his well-ordered collection of common and of uncommon
bugs? Our neighbors in the South do better than this; for they hunt with
the lasso, and never throw the noose except to capture something which
can be harnessed to the wheels of common life.
No, the people are not going back to the endurance of any such misery.
They have found out that still-born rhetoric is by no means the one
thing needful, and care far less for the _art_ of speech than for the
_nature_ of a holy heart. They want a man to speak less of what he
believes and more of what he feels. The expectation of bringing the
people again to endure prolonged metaphysical discriminations, spun out
of commonplace minds, cobwebs to cloak their own nakedness and universal
inaptitude, if indulged, is absurdly indulged. The whole Church is sick
of such trifling. She knows well that it has made her most unsavory to
those who might have found their way into the temples of God, or kept
their places there, but for the memory of an immense amount of wearisome
readings from the pulpit,--too often a vocabulary of words seldom or
never found out of sermons,--a manner of speech which, when tried by the
sure test of natural, animated conversation, must be pronounced absurd
and abominable. It is a wonder of wonders, that, in spite of such
drawbacks, an individual here and there has been reclaimed from
worldliness to the love and service of God.
The student-habits of the clergy most naturally lead them to prefer the
formal statement, the studied elaboration of ideas, which their own
training cannot but render facile and dear to them. And there is here
and there a man who, in virtue of extraordinary genius, can infuse new
life into worn-out phrases,--a man or two who can for a moment or for an
hour, by the very weight and excellence of their thoughts, and because
they truly and deeply feel them, arrest the age, and challenge and
secure attention, in spite of all the infelicities of an antiquated
style and an unearthly delivery. But in this age, more than ever before,
we are summoned to surrender our scholastic preferences and esoteric
honors to the exigencies of the million. And the men of this generation
have, without much conference, come with great unanimity to the
determination that they will not long endure, either in or out of the
pulpit, speakers who are dull and unaffecting, whether from want of
words, ideas, or method and wisdom in the arrangement of them, or
lack of sympathies,--and especially that they will not endure dull
declamation from the pulpit.
If any man really wish to know how he is preaching, let him imagine
himself conversing earnestly with an intelligent and highly gifted,
but uneducated man or woman, in his own parlor, or with his younger
children. Would any but an idiot keep on talking, when, with half an
eye, he might discern TEDIOUS, wrought by himself, upon the uncalloused
sensibilities of his hearers?
How long ought a sermon to be? As long as you can read in the eye of
seven-eighths of your audience, _Pray, go on_. If you cannot read that,
you have mistaken your vocation; you were never called to the ministry.
The secret of the persuasive power of our favorite orators is in their
constant recognition of the ebb and flow of the sensibilities they are
acting upon. Their speech is, in effect, an actual conversation,
in which they are speaking for as well as to the audience; and the
interlocutors are made almost as palpably such as at the "Breakfast-
Table" of our dramatic "Autocrat" In contrast with this, the dull
preacher, falling below the dignity and the privilege of his office,
addresses himself, not to living men, but to an imaginary sensibility
to abstract truth. The effect of this is obvious and inevitable; it
converts hearers into doubters as to whether in fact there be any such
thing as a religion worth recommending or possessing, and preachers into
complainers of the people as indifferent and insensible to the truth,--a
libel which ought to render them liable to fine and punishment. God's
truth, _fairly presented_, is never a matter of indifference or of
insensibility to an intelligent, nor even to an unintelligent audience.
However an individual here and there may contrive to withdraw himself
from the sphere of its influence, truth can no more lose her power than
the sun can lose his heat.
The people, under the quickening influences characteristic of our age,
are awaking to the consciousness, that, on the day which should be the
best of all the week, they have been defrauded of their right, in having
solemn dulness palmed upon them, in place of living, earnest, animated
truth. Let not ministers, unwisely overlooking this undeniable fact,
defame the people, by alleging a growing facility in dissolving the
pastoral relation,--a disregard of solemn contracts,--a willingness to
dismiss excellent, godly, and devoted men, without other reason than the
indisposition to retain them. Be it known to all such, that capable men
very department of life were never in such request as at this very hour;
and never, since the world began, was there an audience so large and so
attentive to truth, well wrought and fitted to its purpose, as now.