Study is an oft-repeated injunction on the Christian ministry:
"Meditate upon these things: give thyself wholly to them, that thy
profiting may appear to all" (1 Tim. iv. 15); "Study to show thyself
approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly
dividing the word of truth" (2 Tim. ii. 15). The reasons for this are
obvious. Knowledge is everywhere power. The ministry, from their
position, are the natural leaders in religious thought. To command
respect, they must be men of mental grasp and activity, and must be in
advance of the thinking of those around them. Besides, no other
profession is so heavily tasked for brain exertion. The Senate, the
Bar, and the Platform only occasionally demand the highest efforts of
the intellect. But the pulpit requires weekly its elaborate sermons.
They must have freshness, originality, force, or the pastor loses his
hold on the people. And this exhaustive drain on his resources
continues steadily year after year. No man can meet such demands
without constant, earnest study. He must be ever growing. His mental
processes must be ceaselessly active, pushing into new realms of
investigation, gathering new materials for thought, increasing his
discipline, and making him a broader, richer, deeper man.
In the life of a pastor two extremes are to be avoided. On the one
hand, he is not to be a mere book-worm, secluded in his study, with no
practical, living contact and sympathy with life around him. Some
ministers of large literary culture have been comparatively useless
from want of living connection between their thinking and the real
needs of the busy actual world in which they lived. On the other hand,
a minister may not be a mere desultory man, a gossip from house to
house, occupied with newspapers and magazines, skimming the surface of
popular thinking in ephemeral books that may attract his fancy, but
neglecting the severer processes of self-culture essential to mental
growth. Instability in the pastoral office is often a result of this.
Freshness, originality in thought and expression, is lost, and the
people, weary of repetitions and empty platitudes, cease to respect and
love the pulpit. The grand object to be sought, then, is to combine the
student and the pastor--a mind growing in knowledge and power by
habitual work in the study and growing in executive ability and social
force by constant activity in the church and contact with the people.
To secure this there must be a system--a system wisely formed and
steadily pursued. What shall this system be? In answering this I
propose to pursue two lines of suggestion--the method of study and the
subjects of study.