Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage's influence and popularity
as a preacher is his ethical intensity.
In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place.
I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage
labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where
he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type
of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been
brought about by his or any man's device. For generations it has been
pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry,
and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he
only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had
found favor among the people. He emphasized these and vitalized anew
their application to the Christian religion. In this section I shall
devote myself to a study of the ethical intensity of his ministry.
The Rev. Mr. Savage's ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in
Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many
critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic
qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from
the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from
that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.
The first thing to be noted is the candor of the man, the great
sincerity which marks whatever he says and does. His theology is simple;
his creed, which is neither the Apostles' nor the Nicene, nor the
utterances of modern pontiffs, but in a measure his own, is readily
comprehended, and betrays a sweet reasonableness which invites the
subscription of anyone without fear or trembling or convulsive
revolution. And while some of his fundamental beliefs impinge against
current prejudices and awaken enmities, he fearlessly submits them to
the judgment and common sense of mankind. What he believes he preaches,
and what he does not he rejects with all the vehemence of a man of
conviction. Correct modes or forms of religious thought he conceives to
be necessary, and the more so the firmer will be one's principles of
duty. Yet essential and sanctifying as this is, more essential in his
opinion is an honest mind,--a mind that is faithful in the pursuit of
truth and true to its own convictions and inspirations. He believes that
the most perfect man is he who is most diligent in duty and fervent in
spirit; who incorporates the truth into his selfhood; who toils with a
prompt and ardent devotion to know the truth, to maintain his opinions
firmly, to diffuse and propagate them by every means consistent with a
perfect character. With unselfish courage Mr. Savage resists every
allurement to compromise. Never timid, never complaisant or patronizing,
he exhibits some of the rarest virtues of the human mind. Oh that there
were more like him in this indolent and obsequious world!
Compared with Mr. Savage's strength of character, how contemptible are
some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and
waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of
divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer
of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with
which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and
professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason,
intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and
sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our
clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are
everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping
and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the
American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the
obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might
of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are
faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency
to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of
to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out
in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the
courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which
the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world,
have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters,
too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for
game,--for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere
with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.
Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of
the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel
inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not
make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute
veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never
depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not
deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher
and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but
never a deficiency in character,--in the word and spirit of what he
proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should
rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating
reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight,
truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions,
that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what
man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true
sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of
religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction
should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our
theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised
into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning
some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion.
He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be
looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person
and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public
gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be
due to some sacred calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he
evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and
truth's propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a
teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of
this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with
the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve
himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his
dignified position.
The creed-test of the Andover theological school may be unwarranted at
the present time. Yet while there is such a test, and the old creed
comes up and insists upon being reaffirmed in its original meaning by
each incumbent, we are bewildered the moment we attempt to harmonize
what happened there recently with stalwart conviction and vital piety.
Within a few months we have seen the Andover creed, over which there has
been so much wrangling, and some of whose doctrines make the human heart
to-day sink in despair, receiving unqualified indorsement. With
unfaltering confidence this ancient creed was reaffirmed by a professor
of that school of divinity without modifying the conditions of
subscription. This surprises us. It may be that the recently inducted
Professor of Sacred Rhetoric did not signify explicit allegiance to this
creed, whose doctrines are so inflexibly maintained by our older
theologians, but simply gave his assent, just as the clergy of the noble
Church of England are giving their assent, but not their strict
adherence, to the Thirty-nine Articles. And yet what is progressive
orthodoxy, so boldly and ably enunciated, but a growing away from the
old Andover creed?
Or is it only a question of emphasis, not of dogma? Are we to infer that
the old dogma abides, while only the emphasis alters? It may be that
progressive orthodoxy is not what it professes to be, that instead of
giving religious thought a definite impulse and being a necessary onward
step in sacred learning, religious thought is only receiving a richer
and deeper volume as it lies in its old bed. Be this as it may, the
verbal assent and subscription of the new incumbent gave fresh force to
every dogma of the old faith. True, we could not expect him to be so
recreant as to disown this venerable creed, to break the traditional
thread and cease to be the heir of his sires.
Yet we should like to see progressive orthodoxy, or the New Theology, of
Andover mean something; represent, without the slightest misgiving, some
distinctive dogma, some fresh insight into religious truth. At present
it is an unintelligible hypothesis. It does not appear to be definitely
settled. A master hand has sketched it, but there are none to complete
and make it triumphant. Why not go to the root of the matter?
Progressive orthodoxy is yet only "in the air." On paper it is
inspiring; in practice, a paradox to the discomfiture of every friend of
the revival of religious thought. It is subtle and disputatious, and
predicts for itself a reforming mission, but it has not the courage of
its convictions; it looks like a clever juggling of divinity. We may
speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but unless we have deep
convictions and feel the intensity of the principles we are attempting
to promulgate, we are as sounding brass; we lower the dignity of truth
and moral worth, we offend the purity of conscience. Filled with the
ecstasies of an office while enacting an untruth is satanic; it is
unworthy of any trained intelligence. Honest conviction is the
indispensable condition of the preacher and teacher. Without it he
compromises the sacred character of his particular commission, of his
appointed trust.
All this is meant to throw light upon the artless simplicity, the
outspoken but sensitive judgment, the indefinable strength of character,
of the Rev. Mr. Savage. Beneath all he says and does we may see the calm
utterance of unwavering convictions and an individuality unimpaired. He
is thoroughly possessed with the sense of duty; he has his being there.
There is nothing spurious in him; he disguises no hypocrisy. We see in
him no secret acquiescence with what he cannot conscientiously accept.
Always standing in the full light of the incomparable obligation and
privilege of his work,--which is a cheerful, happy exercise, not a
doleful and despondent one,--he influences the world not only as a
teacher, but as a character. He proclaims the sanctity of his office not
by a set of pious phrases, but by a spotless devotion to it, as the only
way by which he most completely can subserve the public welfare. This
perpetually invests the man and his ministry with interest and with an
almost magic power.
The ethical intensity of Mr. Savage's character unfolds itself in his
preaching as a consistent result. In the sermon the convictions of the
man are not sacrificed. He puts more than words into his sermons; he
puts himself. He speaks the truth "bluntly," as if it were not a hard
but an easy attainment, and an element of human nature. Without
pretension or self-exaltation, craving no man's praise and envying no
man's distinction, he endeavors in an unwavering and high-spirited
manner to disclose in his sermons the great verities, the substantial
realities, of life.
In the broadest sense of the word Mr. Savage is not a man of scholarly
attainments or tastes; not many are. He is nevertheless a highly
cultivated man. Whether he addresses us through the faculties of speech
or through his written compositions, we always feel the independence of
his intellect, his delicate and discriminating moral sense, and his love
of truth. His sermons, his public utterances, and his devout invocations
exhibit a maturity of mind and a range of culture which enable him to
impress other minds with whatever has possession of his own. In the
pulpit, in authorship, in every mode of religious activity, we meet the
cultivated, sincere, and reverent man. We feel the influence of his
sympathetic mind and singular chasteness of spirit in hearty and
symmetrical development. A culture like this, combined with a nature
deeply religious, brings one into possession more or less completely of
truths which make a direct appeal to the understanding. It has enabled
Mr. Savage to enjoy a certain lordship in the realm of mind and mental
life. He is an example of the dictum, that he who would think truly on
spiritual things must first be spiritually minded. In both his acted and
his written life he seems to comprehend and to realize the truth, to
have reached the loftiest heights of fellowship with eternal wisdom.
Judging from his own serene, unclouded, and practical vision of the
truth, one is driven to the conclusion that he is proclaiming and
formulating the ultimate gospel of mankind.
Some may sneer and scoff at his "deadly notions" and "perverted
thoughts," but in his demand for personal life, development of
conscience, and attainment in righteousness, his ministry is potent; its
inspiration is constant. He believes and preaches only those truths
which are possible to rational belief. With that exquisite instinct
which characterizes all his thinking, he places, as if he were in
apostolic succession, man's greatest need in coming to himself and in
making religion inseparable from personal thought and character. Mr.
Savage holds this forth as man's paramount task, to refuse which is
alone to be faithless and hopeless and unforgiven. His idea of religion
consists in nothing external or formal; nothing can avail with him but
the culture of the soul and the quiet discharge of duty. It is his
superlative merit that he enables one to feel his own capacity of
thought as a positive and independent efficacy, and to rest upon the
authority of his own conscience as the hope of glory and as a
cooerdinating power with Holy Writ. He makes a broad survey of human
nature, and commands men to traverse the whole range of their being and
to call themselves to rigid account until the germs of moral debility
are cast out of the heart. Man is not to waste his energies in grasping
the immense and misty proportions of the beliefs of this or that
traditionist or minute systems to which souls are often bent in
unwilling conformity. The object of his ministry is to summon men to
reckon with themselves every day, and to regenerate themselves by right
thinking and by deeds of piety. In his opinion each person is a
spiritual agency, a marvellous display of divine power and goodness, not
only in the majesty of the truth which he apprehends, but in the dignity
of the life which he may live. Temptation may open its alluring paths,
evil may solicit us, sin may lead us astray, sorrow may drag us down;
yet they need not. His public ministry is devoted to the infusion of
this better sentiment,--that man is not the mere victim of
circumstances, the necessary prey of temptation, or the helpless subject
of wrong; that he need not contemplate life in indolent despair, but may
check the dominion of sin and impurity, rise above not only intemperate
indulgence, but every intemperate desire and impulse, and form
dispositions of peculiar excellence, of original strength and beauty.
Mr. Savage's ministry, then, is full of truth and power. It is strongly
personal and ethical. There is no abler advocate of this important truth
and master-word of the Gospel and of religion. It is a divine truth ever
working in him, breaking into utterances, and giving to his beliefs and
his life the highest dignity. With him it is a persistent and
overwhelming duty to give to his ministry this practical content, this
ethical intensity. In this he is evangelical.
The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments assert or imply that
without our personal agency, and without the truth in the substance and
texture of our characters, there can be no spiritual elevation or final
perfection. In the terms of the Scriptures the divine resources are
infinite; but instead of overwhelming our personal agency or
responsibility they make a stupendous demand upon us. The truth must be
received with unhesitating acceptance and assimilated to our individual
being.
To teach such consummate truths the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., strong
in every fibre of intellectual and religious faith, has devoted his
talents, his strength, and his life, and for that reason he stands
before the American people as one of their most noted preachers.