BEEFSTEAK FOR MINISTERS.
There have been lately several elaborate articles remarking upon what they
call the lack of force and fire in the clergy. The world wonders that, with
such a rousing theme as the gospel, and with such a grand work as saving
souls, the ministry should ever be nerveless. Some ascribe it to lack of
piety, and some to timidity of temperament. We believe that in a great
number of cases it is from the lack of nourishing food. Many of the
clerical brotherhood are on low diet. After jackets and sacks have been
provided for the eight or ten children of the parsonage, the father and
mother must watch the table with severest economy. Coming in suddenly upon
the dinner-hour of the country clergyman, the housewife apologizes for what
she calls "a picked-up" dinner, when, alas! it is nearly always picked up.
Congregations sometimes mourn over dull preaching when themselves are to
blame. Give your minister more beefsteak and he will have more fire. Next
to the divine unction, the minister needs blood; and he cannot make that
out of tough leather. One reason why the apostles preached so powerfully
was that they had healthy food. Fish was cheap along Galilee, and this,
with unbolted bread, gave them plenty of phosphorus for brain food. These
early ministers were never invited out to late suppers, with chicken salad
and doughnuts. Nobody ever embroidered slippers for the big foot of Simon
Peter, the fisherman preacher. Tea parties, with hot waffles, at ten
o'clock at night, make namby-pamby ministers; but good hours and
substantial diet, that furnish nitrates for the muscles, and phosphates for
the brain, and carbonates for the whole frame, prepare a man for effective
work. When the water is low, the mill-wheel goes slow; but a full race, and
how fast the grists are ground! In a man the arteries are the mill-race and
the brain the wheel, and the practical work of life is the grist ground.
The reason our soldiers failed in some of the battles was because their
stomachs had for several days been innocent of everything but "hard tack."
See that your minister has a full haversack. Feed him on gruel during the
week and on Sunday he will give you gruel. What is called the "parson's
nose" in a turkey or fowl is an allegory setting forth that in many
communities the minister comes out behind.
Eight hundred or a thousand dollars for a minister is only a slow way of
killing him, and is the worst style of homicide. Why do not the trustees
and elders take a mallet or an axe, and with one blow put him out of his
misery? The damage begins in the college boarding house. The theological
student has generally small means, and he must go to a cheap boarding
house. A frail piece of sausage trying to swim across a river of gravy on
the breakfast plate, but drowned at last, "the linked sweetness long drawn
out" of flies in the molasses cup, the gristle of a tough ox, and measly
biscuit, and buckwheat cakes tough as the cook's apron, and old peas in
which the bugs lost their life before they had time to escape from the
saucepan, and stale cucumbers cut up into small slices of cholera
morbus,--are the provender out of which we are trying at Princeton and Yale
and New Brunswick to make sons of thunder. Sons of mush! From such
depletion we step gasping into the pulpit, and look so heavenly pale that
the mothers in Israel are afraid we will evaporate before we get through
our first sermon.
Many of our best young men in preparation for the ministry are going
through this martyrdom. The strongest mind in our theological class
perished, the doctors said afterward from lack of food. The only time he
could afford a doctor was for his post-mortem examination.
I give the financial condition of many of our young theological students
when I say:
Income $250 00
Outgo:
Board at $3 per week (cheap place) 156 00
Clothing (shoddy) 100 00
Books (no morocco) 25 00
Traveling expenses 20 00
Total $301 00
Here you see a deficit of fifty-one dollars. As there are no "stealings" in
a theological seminary, he makes up the balance by selling books or
teaching school. He comes into life cowed down, with a patch on both knees
and several other places, and a hat that has been "done over" four or five
times, and so weak that the first sharp wind that whistles round the corner
blows him into glory. The inertness you complain of in the ministry starts
early. Do you suppose that if Paul had spent seven years in a cheap
boarding house, and the years after in a poorly-supplied parsonage, he
would have made Felix tremble? No! The first glance of the Roman procurator
would have made him apologize for intrusion.
Do not think that all your eight-hundred-dollar minister needs is a
Christmas present of an elegantly-bound copy of "Calvin's Institutes." He
is sound already on the doctrine of election, and it is a poor consolation
if in this way you remind him that he has been foreordained to starve to
death. Keep your minister on artichokes and purslain, and he will be fit to
preach nothing but funeral sermons from the text "All flesh is grass."
While feeling most of all our need of the life that comes from above, let
us not ignore the fact that many of the clergy to-day need more gymnastics,
more fresh air, more nutritious food. Prayer cannot do the work of
beefsteak. You cannot keep a hot fire in the furnace with poor fuel and the
damper turned.