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Page 2
One might think profitably on that first question in these very
informal days. We are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms of
authority which, while salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not
many of us err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status.
Many of us instead are terribly at ease in Zion and might become less
assured and more significant by undertaking the subjective task of
a study in ministerial personality. "What we are," to paraphrase
Emerson, "speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say." Every
great calling has its characteristic mental attitude, the unwritten
code of honor of the group, without a knowledge of which one could
scarcely be an efficient or honorable practitioner within it. One of
the perplexing and irritating problems of the personal life of the
preacher today has to do with the collision between the secular
standards of his time, this traditional code of his class, and
the requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the smug
conformities, the externalized procedures of average society, somewhat
pietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary people,
of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in _The Way of All Flesh_, that they
would be "equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted,
or at seeing it practised?" There are ministers who do thus content
themselves with being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt the
standards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the code
and manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at the
risk of becoming an official, a "professional"? Or does he possess the
insight, and can he acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis
of Assisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic and thus join
that company of the apostles and martyrs whose blood is the seed of
the church? A good deal might be said today on the need of this sort
of personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative and
significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too
purely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of
the needs of this moment.
Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own
particular and gradually perfected human skill. An interesting study,
then, would be the analysis of that rich content of human insights,
the result of generations of pastoral experience, which form the
background of all great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious,
or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition of that
intuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that sane
and tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the reward
given to the friends and lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals not
with the shallows but the depths of life. Like his Master he must be a
great humanist. To make real sermons he has to look, without dismay or
evasion, far into the heart's impenetrable recesses. He must have had
some experience with the absolutism of both good and evil. I think
preachers who regard sermons on salvation as superfluous have not had
much experience with either. They belong to that large world of the
intermediates, neither positively good nor bad, who compose the mass
of the prosperous and respectable in our genteel civilization. Since
they belong to it they cannot lead it. And certainly they who do
not know the absolutism of evil cannot very well understand sinners.
Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not weaklings and traitors who
have declined from the standards of a respectable civilization. They
are positive and impressive figures pursuing and acting up to their
own ideal of conduct, not fleeing from self-accepted retribution or
falling away from a confessed morality of ours. Evil is a force even
more than a folly; it is a positive agent busily building away at the
City of Dreadful Night, constructing its insolent and scoffing society
within the very precincts of the City of God.
He must know, then, that evil and suffering are not temporary elements
of man's evolution, just about to be eliminated by the new reform,
the last formula, the fresh panacea. To those who have tasted grief
and smelt the fire such easy preaching and such confident solutions
are a grave offense. They know that evil is an integral part of our
universe; suffering an enduring element of the whole. So he must
preach upon the chances and changes of this mortal world, or go to
the house of shame or the place of mourning, knowing that there is
something past finding out in evil, something incommunicable about
true sorrow. They are not external things, alien to our natures, that
happen one day from without, and may perhaps be avoided, and by and
by are gone. No; that which makes sorrow, sorrow, and evil, evil, is
their naturalness; they well up from within, part of the very texture
of our consciousness. He knows you can never express them, for truly
to do that you would have to express and explain the entire world.
It is not easy then to interpret the evil and suffering which are not
external and temporary, but enduring and a part of the whole.
So the preacher is never dealing with plain or uncomplicated matters.
It is his business to perceive the mystery of iniquity in the saint
and to recognize the mystery of godliness in the sinner. It is his
business to revere the child and yet watch him that he may make a
man of him. He must say, so as to be understood, to those who balk at
discipline, and rail at self-repression, and resent pain: you have
not yet begun to live nor made the first step toward understanding the
universe and yourselves. To avoid discipline and to blench at pain is
to evade life. There are limitations, occasioned by the evil and the
suffering of the world, in whose repressions men find fulfillment.
When you are honest with yourself you will know what Dante meant when
he said:
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