The young ministers used to have to learn Hebrew, Greek, and all kinds of
ponderous tomes of Theology. Now they must learn, instead, the technique
of the various practical enterprises in which the church is engaged.
Probably a young minister needs to know something of both. But he needs
to know another thing. He needs to know life.
No man is prepared to engage in the cure of souls until he has seen the
world as it is; until he knows what saints and sinners alike are doing,
saying, and thinking; and until he has seen, understood, and felt for
human life at its best and at its worst.
Unless he has seen and known these things, he is like a man trying to
practice medicine without having observed how the body is built and
without having looked not only on the beauty of its health but also upon
the horror and loathsomeness of its diseases. To look upon these things
may not be pleasant, but to be helpless against them is less so.
A minister is not a near-angel to be perfumed and laid away in tissue
paper for fear of some contamination. He is a physician to the spiritual
lives of men. He has a real battle to fight. He has conditions to face
that are ugly, and fierce, and perilous. What can he do with them unless
he knows about them? What can he know about them if his experience is
limited to leading the devotions for society meetings and wearing correct
dress at afternoon teas?
A minister needs to go about, less as a minister and more as a man.
He needs to see, and hear, and know enough to understand the mind and
heart of the world.
After a young minister graduates from the seminary and before he begins
his public work, he may need to go to the solitudes for meditation, but
he needs also to do another thing. He needs to go down where men live
their lives and, keeping his own heart clean, learn at first hand what
are the problems that he must help them to solve.