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Page 3
"And thou shalt see those who
Contented are within the fire;
Because they hope to come,
When e'er it may be, to the blessed people."[1]
It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, and yet
speak to them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitterness
and assuage the sorrows of old age. I suppose the greatest influence
a preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material and
insight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with
living and suffering, divided and distracted men and women. When
strong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at
the sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, when
youth is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame and we,
then, want to die and cry, O God! forgive and save them or else blot
me out of Thy book of life--for who could bear to live in a world
where such things are the end!--then, through the society of sorrow,
and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and to
understand both the kindness and the justice of His world. In the
moment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another's sorrow and
my suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin--then, when
because "together," with sinner and sufferer, we come out into the
quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart of
God, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarious
suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil
of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimly
understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!
[Footnote 1: _The Divine Comedy: Hell_; canto I.]
Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped with
professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can
minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of
a human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish,
is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy
tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated
mechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons why
we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of
a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly,
therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to
offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts,
so that their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral
self-consciousness, made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive
interpretations of the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can
they approach life reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere
the integrity of the human spirit; only thus can they regard it with
a magnanimous and catholic understanding and measure it not by the
standards of temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by what
is best and highest, deepest and holiest in the race. No one needs
more than the young preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow
judgments, of exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and to
be flung out among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch their
workings, master their perceptions, catch their scale of values.
A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, would
raise many and genuine questions for us. There is the more room for it
in this time of increasing emphasis upon machinery when even ministers
are being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility. These are
not real ends of life; real ends are unity, repose, the imaginative
and spiritual values which make for the release of self, with its
by-product of happiness. In such days, then, when the old-time
pastor-preacher is becoming as rare as the former general
practitioner; when the lines of division between speaker, educator,
expert in social hygiene, are being sharply drawn--as though new
methods insured of themselves fresh inspiration, and technical
knowledge was identical with spiritual understanding--it would be
worth while to dwell upon the culture of the pastoral office and to
show that ingenuity is not yet synonymous with insight, and that, in
our profession at least, card-catalogues cannot take the place of
the personal study of the human heart. But many discussions on this
Foundation, and recently those of Dr. Jowett, have already dealt with
this sort of analysis. Besides, today, when not merely the preacher,
but the very view of the world that produced him, is being threatened
with temporary extinction, such a theme, poetic and rewarding though
it is, becomes irrelevant and parochial.
Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that professional
equipment for his task as a sermonizer and public speaker which is
partly a native endowment and partly a laborious acquisition on the
preacher's part. Such was President Tucker's course on _The Making
and Unmaking of the Preacher_. Certainly observations on professional
technique, especially if they should include, like his, acute
discussion of the speaker's obligation to honesty of thinking, no less
than integrity of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard
of mere effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of
material; of the aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated
extempore speaking and genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be
superfluous. But, on the other hand, we may hope to accomplish
much of this indirectly today. Because there is no way of handling
specifically either the content of the Christian message or the
problem of the immediate needs and temper of those to whom it is to
be addressed, without reference to the kind of personality, and the
nature of the tools at his disposal, which is best suited to commend
the one and to interpret the other.
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