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BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 THE OLD FAITH IN THE NEW DAY 
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY CHRIST 
 AN ADVENTURE IN ORTHODOXY 
 
 
 
SUFFICIENT 
 MINISTERS 
 
 BY 
 JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 
 
 Introduction by 
 BISHOP WILLIAM F. McDOWELL 
 
 THE ABINGDON PRESS 
 NEW YORK :: :: :: CINCINNATI 
 
 
 
Copyright, 1925, by 
 JOSEPH M. M. GRAY 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign 
 languages, including the Scandinavian. 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ORM ORD facie oc aicrate att See lala Nae ee 7 
 INTRODUCTION .......... SOE ee eh Ree aie 9 
 
 I. Tue PrREeEAcHER IN AMERICAN HIsToRY 
 ANDO LAVTS. .  Ceeer eR eY. see sot 15 
 
 Il. Tue PREACHER AS THE INTERPRETER 
 Oise Tis: AGH. unre: | tee is 40 
 
 Ill. THe PREACHER IN THE DIRECTION OF 
 SOCTALREFORM \0. 40 0. vc oeee ere. 64 
 
 IV. Tue PREACHER AND THE CREATION OF 
 PUBLIC OPINION.  o oc: 1 hate 88 
 VY. Tue PREACHER AND THE PRESENT Hour 113 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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FOREWORD 
 
 THE Matthew Simpson Lectureship on “The 
 Christian Ministry” was established in De- 
 Pauw University for the purpose of setting 
 forth in its true light the vocation of the 
 preacher. The Matthew Simpson Foundation 
 provides for bringing to the University every 
 year a preacher of distinction to interpret the 
 task of the Christian minister to college men. 
 This series of lectures by the Reverend Joseph 
 M. M. Gray, D.D., Litt.D., on Surricient MIn- 
 ISTERS is a noble memorial to Bishop Matthew 
 Simpson, prince among American preachers, , 
 and first president of DePauw University. 
 Among all the books that have appeared 
 recently on preaching, none gives a finer por- 
 trayal of the power and dignity of the pulpit 
 than Doctor Gray has given in this volume. 
 
 This book sets the modern prophet of God 
 in his true light as the interpreter of spiritual 
 things in the vernacular of his own age, as the 
 inspiring genius of the great social move- 
 ments, as the commanding voice crying in the 
 wilderness of confused public opinion, ever- 
 more revealing the mind of Christ to the mind 
 of the world. It will meet most effectively the 
 
 7 
 
8 FOREWORD 
 
 cheap and vociferous criticism that is being 
 heaped upon the Christian minister and the 
 church. The reading of these lectures will 
 breathe new hope into many a discouraged 
 preacher who has lost the sense of the great- 
 ness and dignity of his calling. Doctor Gray 
 has revealed to us the minister of the gospel 
 not as a frocked ecclesiastic on a pedestal, not 
 as a parish priest busy with small matters, 
 nor yet as a religious dabbler in social and 
 civic affairs, but as a man among men, inter- 
 preting eternal things with a clear mind, spir- 
 itual insight, a burning heart, and moral fear- 
 lessness, so that through the preacher the 
 people still hear the “Thus saith the Lord.” 
 
 The previous lecturers on this foundation 
 were Bishop Francis J. McConnell, of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Rever- 
 end Doctor Charles E. Jefferson, of Broadway 
 Tabernacle Congregational Church, New York 
 City. 
 
 GuHOoRGE R. GROSE. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Here is a preacher who heartily believes 
 in preaching. He takes with a noble serious- 
 ness the high task and privilege of being a 
 preacher of Christ. He regards the history 
 of preaching with a proper pride and its 
 present opportunity as an inspiring challenge. 
 He knows full well the weaknesses and im- 
 perfections of the ministry, past and present, 
 and does not conceal the actual facts from his 
 own or any other eyes. He is sensitively 
 aware how frail is the earthen vessel in which 
 the treasure of preaching is carried, but his 
 eye is always on the treasure, his rapture 
 always on the transcending power of God, so 
 that in spite of the earthen character of the 
 vessel and the weakness of the preacher him- 
 self, he “never loses heart in this ministry 
 which by God’s mercy he holds” (Moffatt). 
 And in this volume of lectures spoken on a 
 foundation established in memory of Matthew 
 Simpson this modern preacher has nobly pic- 
 tured The Preacher in American History and 
 Life, The Preacher as the Interpreter of His 
 Age, The Preacher in the Direction of Social 
 Reform, The Preacher and the Creation of 
 
 9 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Public Opinion, and The Preacher and the 
 Present Hour. And in all these pages one 
 sees flashes of revealing light from the lives 
 and spirits of those who have “kept the 
 soul of the world alive” through pioneer days 
 when the republic was in its early making 
 down to this hour when it is in its later and 
 probably its more critical period. But one 
 also sees all the time those significant revela- 
 tions of the lecturer’s own ideals and spirit, 
 insights and purposes which make his own 
 ministry in our own times. So that the 
 volume becomes, as any real lectures on 
 preaching must always become, a genuinely 
 human document and not an abstract study. 
 Any book that causes the fire of true preach- 
 ing to burn afresh is good, especially good in 
 these times when so many forces and influ- 
 ences work against preaching and the 
 preacher; when so many voices are even Say- 
 ing that the day of the preacher is passing, 
 if not already past. Of course the ministry 
 always has to face adverse conditions, and is 
 always the subject of gloomy predictions. Dr. 
 Joseph Fort Newton, in his volume Some Liv- 
 ing Masters of the Pulpit, reminds us that 
 when Professor Mahaffey wrote his volume on 
 The Decay of Modern Preaching, “Parker, 
 Liddon, Spurgeon, McLaren, Beecher, Brooks, 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 Broadus and Simpson were in the full splen- 
 dor of their powers.” He might have added 
 many other names to that list. But we 
 may well be grateful to those ministers in 
 every period who by their books, or by 
 their ministries, or both, do keep the glori- 
 ous glow upon preaching and the way it is 
 regarded in the world. I think in one of 
 John Morley’s essays, perhaps the one on 
 Wordsworth, he states that at a certain period 
 in English history “great fires were burning, 
 but they were burning low.” It is a bad thing 
 for the world and for the church in the world 
 when the fires of preaching are allowed to 
 burn low. ‘Those fires ought never to be 
 banked or allowed to get low. We recently 
 had to add to the heating facilities in the 
 house we live in. We did it by installing in 
 addition to the regular heater, four or five gas 
 stoves having a most suggestive name; “radi- 
 ant fire burners.” Make no account of the 
 fact that they burn gas. Do not work out any 
 flippancies about gas and preaching. All that 
 has been overdone and is no longer fresh 
 humor. But think of that other term “radiant 
 fire’! The names of a dozen preachers, some 
 dead, some living, leap to my lips as I write 
 the words. I see their faces and hear their 
 voices as they pour out upon the chilled lives 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 of men and women the glorious gospel of the 
 blessed God with a “radiant fire,” and in so 
 doing bring warmth and glow to the hearts of 
 men. 
 
 These are the men whose lips are touched 
 as with live coals from the altar of the Most 
 High; who “maintain the spiritual glow” that 
 keeps the world from going utterly drab; who 
 keep the “lamp aglow upon the feet of men, 
 and shining upon the paths of men”; who 
 themselves “walk in the light” of Him who is 
 ever shining in the dark places of human life. 
 
 Blessings upon all the ministers who think 
 in a great way of the ministry itself and who 
 by preaching and life make it to seem and to 
 be the noble power it is for the life of man- 
 kind. 
 
 WILLIAM FRASER McDOwWELL. 
 
 Bishop’s Residence, Washington, D. C. 
 

 
Our sufficiency is from God; who also made 
 us sufficient as ministers of a new covenant.— 
 2 Corinthians 3. 6. 
 
I 
 
 THE PREACHER IN AMERICAN 
 HISTORY AND LIFE 
 
 OnkE of the luminous phases which, here and 
 there amid our duller language, shines like a 
 sword flashed in sunlight, is the simple motto 
 of the Army and the Navy, “For the honor of 
 the service.” It suggests at once the noble- 
 ness of a great tradition and the pride of an 
 illustrious fellowship. It intimates to feel- 
 ing as well as to thought that the compensa- 
 tions of service are in no mean or mercenary 
 rewards, but in qualities of life, in steward- 
 ships of purpose, and high experiences of more 
 than common duty. “For the honor of the 
 service,” like a flag upon a coffin, will explain 
 without a detail, a soldier’s heroism, a sailor’s 
 courage, immeasureable suffering, infinite 
 labor, a lonely death. It is something of the 
 spirit thus invoked which should be vibrant 
 in any thought of the Christian ministry; and 
 it is in the hope of awakening something of 
 that feeling that this chapter is devoted to a 
 survey of the preacher in American history 
 and life. 
 
 15 
 
16 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 The limits of a single chapter prevent any- 
 thing more than the most brief outline of what 
 is, at best, an epic story. Adequately to trace 
 the preacher in his march through American 
 history and life would require a volume, while 
 to broaden the survey to the world beyond our 
 continent and our short three hundred years 
 would be to rewrite the annals of western civi- 
 lization. Notwithstanding this, when one 
 undertakes to tell the preacher’s place in his- 
 tory he is involved in perhaps the most aston- 
 ishing of life’s ironies of unrecognition. For 
 the preacher is the maker of history of whom 
 historians are mute, the builder of empires of 
 whom emperors have never heard, the creator 
 of states whom statesmen have ignored, the 
 herald of democracy whom demagogues and 
 people have forgotten, the founder of educa- 
 tion whom educators have scorned, the leader 
 of philanthropies whom philanthropists dis- 
 credit. Preachers, for the most part, have 
 been obscure; yet without their presence soci- 
 ety disintegrates into a dangerous individu- 
 alism, human life grows cheap, conventions 
 tested by generations of moral enterprise 
 wither in disuse, and laws cannot be enforced. 
 Since the time of Saint Paul the preacher has 
 been made a spectacle unto all men. Nothing 
 is at once more ludicrous and misleading than 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 18's 
 
 the preacher of fiction, except the preacher of 
 the stage. On the stage, marriage ceremonies 
 are performed backward, which is typical of 
 the ridiculous misrepresentation of the minis- 
 try in those arts which most presume to hold 
 a mirror up to life. With few exceptions, the 
 hypocrites, the clowns, the crooks, the carica- 
 tures of the ministry are given ample pub- 
 licity, while the real preacher who, more than 
 any other man, has established schools, initi- 
 ated philanthropies, maintained the inherit- 
 ance of culture uninterrupted, and in crucial 
 epochs shaped confused political thinking into 
 moral purposes and use, has not yet come into 
 his own. 
 
 That preacher bulks large in American 
 experience. To look at, he is not an heroic 
 figure; but his life, for the most part, is an 
 heroic life. He is not always well educated ; 
 but he is generally more widely read and more 
 disciplined to think than the average of his 
 neighbors. He is not always well bred; but 
 nevertheless he adds to the durable values of 
 the community. He is not always tactful or 
 patient, and he is sometimes selfish, for he 
 also has his treasure in an earthen vessel; but 
 there are generally large aspects of generosity 
 about him, and he is almost always capable of 
 great sacrifice without advertising it. Behind 
 
18 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 all that makes the splendid story of the nation 
 —its rougher conquests, its loftier aims, its 
 greatening freedom, its more solid prosperi- 
 ties—is the innumerable company of its 
 preachers, unhonored, unremembered, unre- 
 warded, who were as faithful as they have 
 been forgotten, and whose unrecorded labors 
 have been indispensable in the making of a 
 history which, as Channing put it, “has not a 
 place even in the margin for the minister and 
 the school mistress.” 
 
 There is no better beginning for such a sur- 
 vey as has been indicated than with the 
 preacher as pioneer. Someone, speaking to 
 this theme a few years ago, remarked that in 
 all the settlement of America only in Virginia 
 was the church an afterthought; and in the 
 origins of settlements the church, of course, 
 means preeminently the preacher. It was a 
 preacher, John Robinson, who from the quay 
 at Delft, put courage into the aching hearts 
 of the Pilgrims as the Mayflower slid slowly 
 down the lonely highway of the sea. From 
 the Mayfiower, for two hundred years the 
 story of New England is the story of stern 
 Puritan preachers whose hands, though they 
 sometimes lay heavy on the developing colonial 
 life, were nevertheless always shaping it 
 toward the most permanent and highest good. 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 19 
 
 It is the story of Puritan preachers who were 
 always building the strongest intellectual and 
 moral bulwarks against the tides of social 
 license and personal evil such as have, since 
 their day, beaten violently around our elder 
 American ideals. The shadow of the minis- 
 ter of Scrooby still falls in benediction across 
 the progress of democracy. 
 
 In the rifts which mar the harmony of New 
 England Puritanism, it is the preacher who 
 still preserves amid his heresy the essential 
 good, as the story of Rhode Island will illus- 
 trate. For the history of Rhode Island can- 
 not be told in the glowing recital of its pros- 
 perity; its timbers and textiles, its Corliss 
 engines and colleges, its politicians and dyes. 
 Its history and, fundamentally, its social char- 
 acter, root back in Roger Williams, a preacher 
 who, banished from one colony, established 
 another and became the founder of this proud 
 commonwealth. 
 
 The story of New England is practically 
 the story, with slightly different colorings, of 
 most of the continent. To follow the migra- 
 tions of the early settlers of America is to 
 travel in the footsteps of the pioneering 
 preacher. It was the Jesuits who penetrated 
 what they called the northern wilderness and 
 invited men to the Mississippi Valley. The 
 
20 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 settlement of Pennsylvania is a story of Ger- 
 man Protestants led by their pastors, and of 
 Quakers whose preachers were no less devoted 
 because they claimed no professional stand- 
 ing. The Huguenots who peopled the Caro- 
 linas with faith and sacrifice, were accom- 
 panied, where they were not led, by their min- 
 isters; and it was the devotion of Moravian 
 missionaries that consecrated the soil of Ohio. 
 If one extraordinary figure is wanted, it is 
 that of David Brainerd, feeble in frame and 
 melancholy in temperament, and dead at 
 twenty-nine; but who at his death had made 
 the pathways among his Indians safer for 
 white feet than they had ever been before. 
 While from Massachusetts to Georgia, from 
 Cape Cod to the Great Lakes, every mile was 
 traveled by the horses of Methodist circuit 
 riders, as Pilmoor and Boardman and King 
 and Williams and Embury and Strawbridge 
 and Garrettson and Lee and McKendree and 
 the long heroic line broke out, amid a bitter 
 wilderness, a highway for free grace. “The 
 whole country,” as President Roosevelt said, 
 ‘is under a debt of gratitude to the Methodist 
 circuit riders, the Methodist preachers, whose 
 movement westward kept pace with the move- 
 ment of the frontier, who shared all the hard- 
 ships in the life of the frontiersman, while 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 21 
 
 at the same time ministering to that fron- 
 tiersman’s spiritual needs, and seeing to it 
 that his pressing material cares and the hard 
 and grinding poverty of his life did not wholly 
 extinguish the divine fire within his soul.” 
 There can be no finer portrait of the labor of 
 the pioneer preacher than that given by Doctor 
 Tipple of Francis Asbury, the leader of them 
 all, who “for half a century, like a spiritual 
 Atlas, bore the American continent on his 
 shoulders; who in his day builded altars in 
 almost every city and town in the United 
 States, and kindled thereon fires which have 
 not yet gone out; who heralded the doctrine 
 of human democracy when the nation was in 
 the throes of a gigantic conflict with pater- 
 nalism and aristocracy; who inculcated 
 respect for law and created ideals of righteous- 
 ness and citizenship along the mountain roads, 
 and through the trackless forests, where Civi- 
 lization walked with slow yet conquering step; 
 who kept Hope alive in thousands of hearts 
 where Despair ever stood at the door with a 
 coffin.’ 
 
 Asbury was the forerunner, but there were 
 many who followed. In 1800 there were only 
 two hundred and fifteen settlers in all of what 
 is now Illinois; yet within four years Meth- 
 
 1Tipple: The Heart of Asbury’s Journal, p. xii. 
 
 
 
22 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 odism had Benjamin Young preaching to that 
 frontier. One cannot appreciate all the fac- 
 tors which have gone to the making of that 
 great State without taking account of him, 
 and of a greater than he, Peter Cartwright; 
 yet there is published at least one not incon- 
 siderable history of [linois in which neither is 
 mentioned, though Peter Cartwright was 
 twice a candidate for the United States Con- 
 gress against Abraham Lincoln, and once 
 defeated him. A survey of the raw territory 
 of Alabama in 1803 will disclose Lorenzo Dow 
 pioneering there on behalf of the gospel as 
 other men were pioneering for home and fam- 
 ily; and a year later a Methodist preacher was 
 pushing westward the frontier of Indiana. 
 Tracing the progress of American expansion 
 from Plymouth Rock to the Pacific slope, there 
 will always be discovered in the crest of the 
 advancing wave a preacher, rough-clad, unaf- 
 frighted, daring men and whatever devils 
 there may be in the name of civilization and 
 Christ. 
 
 There is no more moving story than that of 
 the settlement of the Oregon country. It is 
 a story told in the heroisms of brave men and 
 braver women, some known, but more already 
 forgotten by the careless inheritors of the 
 empire their labors made possible. Two are 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 23 
 
 not forgotten, Jason Lee and Marcus Whit- 
 man, preachers both. Jason Lee and his 
 gigantic energy in the interests of his Indian 
 missions and the expanding nation, his inces- 
 sant missionary activities and his perilous 
 return to the East to recruit more settlers and 
 to rouse Congress to the value of the North- 
 west, constitute a record of patriotic and 
 religious service which history is proud to pre- 
 serve. What tale of tragedy is more com- 
 pelling than that of his terrible journey at 
 the risk of his life, with the bewildering hour 
 when the Indian messenger overtakes him with 
 the word that his young wife and infant child 
 are dead together and together in their grave; 
 —that lonely but indomitable journey for- 
 ward, with a broken heart, only to find a blind 
 Congress saying, “We are nearer to the remote 
 nations of Europe than to Oregon,’ and 
 repeating Senator Benton’s remark, made in 
 1825, that “The ridge of the Rockies should 
 be forever a national boundary!” 
 
 The story of Oregon is told also in the name 
 of Marcus Whitman, who, when all detracting 
 criticism has done its work, will yet be found 
 to have given large impetus to migration to 
 the Northwest. That story of Oregon dis- 
 covers him also walking, riding, running four 
 thousand almost impossible miles, through 
 
24 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 mountain passes twenty feet in snow, through 
 incessant storms, through icy rivers, the first 
 white man to take that unknown Indian trail 
 as he, too, hurried eastward on an errand 
 which would not wait. If his interest was 
 more in the critical affairs of his Mission and 
 less in the expansion of the American domain 
 than earlier historians would indicate, yet his 
 ride is an achievement unsurpassed in the 
 annals of American patriotism. Though in 
 his recruiting for the Mission he rather reaped 
 from Jason Lee’s sowing of two years before, 
 and the elder tradition of his success at Wash- 
 ington, where Lee had failed, is gravely sus- 
 pect now; still it is undoubted that when, 
 some months later, he returns to Oregon with 
 a selected body of new settlers, it is to land 
 forever American that he goes back, identi- 
 fied for all time with the great events with 
 which he is contemporary. It is Whitman the 
 preacher, then, who seals his ministry with 
 martyrdom among the Indians to whom he 
 has devoted his life; and if his name be lower 
 in the list of heroes than once men wrote, it 
 shines the brighter for the death he died as 
 one of that incomparable multitude who have 
 been slain unto God. 
 
 There are other dramatic pages in this his- 
 tory of American expansion; none more 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 25 
 
 vibrant with the strength of fearless men or 
 more vivid with their sins of avarice and pas- 
 sion, none more eloquent of courage and 
 adventure, than that which tells the tale of 
 the ’forty-niners and the lure of California 
 gold. But that page will also show, in the 
 gold camps and gambling houses and brawling 
 streets of that lawless time, the figure of 
 another preacher, William Taylor, rebuking, 
 inviting, restraining, inspiring with some- 
 thing of better purpose, those rough and vio- 
 lent men as, in season and out, he proclaimed 
 to the pioneer the chastening summons of the 
 gospel. 
 
 Further instances need not be recalled. The 
 contribution which the preacher has made to 
 American pioneer life is unmistakable; that 
 of the Methodist preacher is conspicuous. 
 From Asbury, dead these hundred years and 
 more, to the least known living preacher on 
 the now dissolving frontier, Methodism, as 
 President Hyde has written, has been the 
 revival of grace when law had lost its grip and 
 love was dragging her anchor. 
 
 But the preacher has been a pioneer not 
 alone in the geographical implications of the 
 word, not simply as a participant in the wild 
 life of the plainsman and the settler, the min- 
 ing camp and the hunter’s wilderness; but in 
 
26 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 the enterprises of expanding life. While he 
 trod the untraveled ways of swamp and prairie 
 and climbed the slopes of alien mountains, 
 he was pilgriming in mind among the dis- 
 ciplined and lovelier engagements of estab- 
 lished culture. His body, like Abram, dwelt 
 in tents; his spirit lived in the city for which 
 he looked, that organized and more ideal soci- 
 ety which sometime was to be. He has been 
 a pioneer, not only among uninhabited and 
 hostile places, but in the creation and employ- 
 ment of those instruments which produce and 
 sustain urbanity and peace. In law, in order, 
 in philanthropy and education, he has labored 
 at the beginning of things; though to illus- 
 trate his service in all these areas of social 
 progress reference need be made to only one. 
 It is trite to remark, though no less worth 
 remarking, that higher education in America 
 began in the heart of a preacher, Harvard 
 University being no more than the oak which 
 has grown from the acorn of the Reverend 
 John Harvard’s two hundred and sixty books. 
 Yale is a monument to the faith and works of 
 ten Congregational ministers who inaugu- 
 rated the college with their personal gifts. 
 Back of Princeton are the sacrificial figures of 
 a group of Presbyterian clergymen. The name 
 of Eleazor Wheelock is unfamiliar to the 
 
IN :AMERICAN LIFE 27 
 
 present generation; but Eleazor Wheelock, a 
 minister, still speaks to this generation 
 through Dartmouth College, which owes its 
 existence to him. Rutgers and Hamilton 
 were each founded by a preacher. Iowa Col- 
 lege, the oldest collegiate institution in the 
 State, harks back to 18438, when eleven grad- 
 uates of Andover entered the young territory 
 to preach and teach. They were such men as 
 DeTocqueville might have had in mind when 
 he described the American pioneer as a man 
 who “penetrates into the wilds of a new world 
 with the Bible, an ax, and some newspapers,” 
 for they had all of these articles and little else. 
 Within a year or two they met to consider the 
 beginning of a college, only to discover that 
 their idea had been anticipated and that col- 
 lege education had already begun in Iowa in 
 the dreams and deeds of one of its prophetic 
 figures, another preacher who lives in memory 
 as Father Turner. 
 
 In Kansas the story is the same. Back of 
 Manhattan College, one of the great agricul- 
 tural schools of America, is the Reverend 
 Joseph Dennison, a graduate of Wilbraham 
 Academy and Wesleyan University. Baker 
 University, the oldest collegiate institution in 
 Kansas, organized in 1856, is the direct crea- 
 tion of the Methodist preachers of Kansas. 
 
28 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 Through those wild days upon the border it 
 was a beacon of light to show the highway to 
 the better days that were to be. It heard the 
 tramp of John Brown’s men, and marked the 
 mad passions of the border ruffians and not 
 much better border gentlemen. It looked 
 across the rolling hills and saw the flames of 
 Lawrence when Quantrell swept down upon 
 the town in a hurricane of blood and fire. 
 From its first Commencement to the present 
 time it has not ceased to send a steady stream 
 of men and women into the conflict of right- 
 eousness, and in its service to the common- 
 wealth has been born much of the boldness 
 and the glory which made Kansas, alone 
 among a circle of unregarding States, a 
 pioneer in prohibition and law enforcement. 
 It is this same story which is written around 
 the colleges of the continent. When one 
 names the universities of America which are 
 inearnating the ideals of Christian life with 
 ample scholarship and liberal culture, he is 
 identifying largely the monuments of preach- 
 ers who dared to be pioneers in the purposes, 
 the labors, the sacrifices, out of which alone 
 the means of education can arise. And though 
 it can be given no more than passing notice, 
 it is not without immeasurable significance 
 that the preacher has not only built colleges, 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 29 
 
 he has directed and sustained them. The coat 
 of arms of American education might appro- 
 priately be a Prince Albert rampant on a field 
 of brass. Edwards, Witherspoon, McCosh, 
 Dwight, Durbin, Fiske, Olin, Gobin, to say 
 nothing of the ordained men who in presi- 
 dents’ chairs and at professors’ desks still live 
 and labor, suggest a continuing service. It 
 was a noted educator of Ohio who wrote that 
 his experience had taught him to despair of 
 establishing, with any permanency, even a 
 good district school, where there was not a 
 good church and an intelligent ministry to 
 watch over and sustain it. Alike in the rough 
 out thrust of a new nation to traverse and 
 populate its domain, and in the persistent up- 
 reach of expanding life to realize the means 
 and opportunities of culture, the preacher has 
 been a pioneer. 
 
 The preacher also holds a large, if unappre- 
 ciated, place in American history and life, 
 as a patriot. He has not only pushed for- 
 ward the frontiers of his country and leav- 
 ened its society with Christian ideas and cul- 
 ture; he has been second to none in the 
 preservation of the country which he so 
 greatly helped to make. No influence more’ 
 constrained and shaped the spirit of American 
 thought and life toward the time of inde- 
 
30 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 pendence, than that of the Election Day ser- 
 mons preached before the governor of the Mas- 
 sachusetts colony and the House of Represen- 
 tatives on the day of election of His Majesty’s 
 Council. To read those sermons from 1760 
 on is to hear through them the tramp of tumul- 
 tuous events draw ever near. Out of a dozen 
 sermons which would serve as illustrations, 
 one will be enough, that of the Reverend Gad 
 Hitchcock which he preached on Election Day 
 of 1774. 
 
 It was a time of turmoil. The Boston tea 
 party had made history. A British fleet and 
 British troops were on the way to the turbu- 
 lent colony. The colonists were greatly 
 excited. Gad Hitchcock’s sermon on that 
 election day of 1774 did not gloss over the 
 inescapable facts. It was a thoroughgoing 
 exposition of government and a statement of 
 the colonists’ grievances. Governor Hutchin- 
 son was of a different temper. He was what 
 Ambassador Page, a hundred and thirty-five 
 years later, described as one of the Sons of 
 the Olive Branch. He did not want even to 
 hear the sermon; he wanted to retreat safely 
 into the governor’s castle. He was uncom- 
 promisingly forced to remain where he be- 
 longed, and as Gad Hitchcock preached, he 
 turned to the trembling governor and thun- 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 31 
 
 dered, “Let the governor in his chair of state 
 hear it, we not only mourn with groanings 
 that cannot be uttered, and all because the 
 wicked rule. ‘The castle cannot shelter him 
 from the searching thunderbolt. . . . King 
 George may say the evils which produce this 
 state of things are imaginary, but I tell you, 
 and I tell the tyrant to his face, it is because 
 the wicked rule.” That was not exactly the 
 wooing note, but it was fairly well under- 
 stood; and that is but an instance, repeated 
 again and again, of the fashion in which the 
 preacher of that heroic time wrought at the 
 structure of the patriotism which was to make 
 a nation. 
 
 We shall never let perish the memory of the 
 men who fell at Lexington, the first martyrs 
 to American democracy; but we have largely 
 forgotten that it was the teaching of the Lex- 
 ington pulpit which inspired and struck the 
 first blow for independence. Jonas Clark, the 
 Lexington minister, had feared nothing but 
 God and sin; and he had preached a gospel of 
 righteousness and fearlessness in politics as 
 well as religion. He too was at the battle of 
 Lexington ; and when it was over, he saw there 
 Jonas Parker, the strongest wrestler of the 
 village, who had sworn never to run from Eng- 
 lish ball or bayonet, lying dead where he had 
 
32 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 stood. He saw gray-haired Caleb Monroe 
 sprawled out where he had fallen, and Caleb 
 Harrington dead on the steps of the church; 
 and, looking out at the bodies of these his 
 parishioners and personal friends, he saw with 
 a prophet’s vision the far issues of that strife 
 upon the village green, and said, “From this 
 day will be dated the liberty of the world.” 
 
 Sixty-two years later, in another and a raw 
 young village in the Middle West, another 
 battle was fought to the finish in the same long 
 campaign for the liberty which Jonas Clark 
 foresaw; when another preacher, Elijah P. 
 Lovejoy, after persecutions which might have 
 broken the spirit of a regiment, was killed by 
 a mob at Alton, Illinois, and by his death won 
 in America the freedom of the press. 
 
 Those were fierce, vindictive, lawless days, 
 not possible to live through unaffected, not 
 easy to remember, after seventy years, without 
 partiality and prejudice. But the tumult of 
 their passions has long since died to silence; 
 and where yonder, in the flaming fifties, were 
 battle, massacre and pillage, now the border, 
 blossoming with its harvests, throbs to the 
 industry of growing cities, rich in patriotism 
 that knows no sectional tradition. 
 
 In all this the preacher has had his part. 
 It is his voice that rises clearly through those 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 30 
 
 raucous times of mob and violence, giving 
 courage to frightened countrysides, and sus- 
 taining the spirits of harried towns and settle- 
 ments amid the ashes of their calamity and 
 the horror of their grief. It was his influence, 
 by life and lip, which went far to soften the 
 cruelties of those reckless moods that broke 
 out in raid and outrage. On both sides the 
 line that separated free soil from slave, 
 preachers, far apart upon the principle of 
 States’ rights but one in loyalty to righteous- 
 ness, brought to the conflict of confused and 
 bitter politics the claims of conscience and the 
 challenge of comparison, and so kept open, 
 through the terror of a tragic time, the recon- 
 ciling springs of prayer and pity. 
 
 He was also in the thick of the events that 
 filled the times of Civil War, when the repub- 
 lic rocked upon its foundation and the world 
 waited, sometimes in fear, sometimes in hope, 
 for its fall. No reference save one need be 
 made to those preachers who put on, some the 
 Federal uniform and some the Confederate 
 gray, without laying off the marks of Christ, 
 and marched away in what were then the 
 greatest civilian armies the world had seen. 
 That one exception is General Leonidas Polk, 
 a missionary in spirit, whose record as a 
 Southern soldier has left unsullied his char- 
 
34 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 acter as clergyman and Bishop. But, apart 
 from them, the fact remains to be emphasized 
 that no reckoning can be made of the sources 
 of the strength of that great figure in the 
 White House, who held a discordant North to 
 its one stupendous labor and, amid the 
 antagonisms of war, treason, slander, and 
 intrigue, kept his soul unmarred by a single 
 unkind passion, unweakened by a published 
 doubt; no reckoning can be made of the 
 sources of Abraham Lincoln’s strength with- 
 out considering the preachers who built 
 around him a bulwark of personal counsel and 
 reenforcing prayer. Dr. Gurley was one, and 
 Bishop Simpson; and there were others, as 
 well, who hallowed many a midnight as they 
 knelt beside him and encouraged many a day 
 as they sustained his spirit. Nor will we for- 
 get Joseph Ruggles Wilson in his Augusta 
 pulpit on a certain Sunday morning, substi- 
 tuting for his sermon the simple announce- 
 ment that a great battle was raging in Vir- 
 ginia and the forces of the Confederacy were 
 suffering from a lack of ammunition. His 
 congregation must do its duty and at the close 
 of the services the ladies would repair to the 
 munition factory to help with the cartridges. 
 “You will now rise and sing the Doxology and 
 be dismissed.” He will represent those thou- 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 35 
 
 sands of preachers whose practical piety fed 
 the streams of Southern devotion, differing 
 from all others in that his son was to be Presi- 
 dent of a united nation during a more terrible 
 conflict than the Civil War. 
 
 It is impossible to omit one other name 
 from any just appraisal of the forces that went 
 to the saving of the nation: that of Henry 
 Ward Beecher, whose was the most command- 
 ing single voice in two continents for the cause 
 of freedom, righteousness, and inseparable 
 union. His distinguished labors in this coun- 
 try were crowned by his unprecedented serv- 
 ice on the other side of the sea when his series 
 of addresses in England on behalf of the North 
 and against the recognition of the Confed- 
 eracy constituted, as Oliver Wendell Holmes 
 said, “a more remarkable embassy than any 
 envoy who has represented us in Europe since 
 Franklin pleaded the cause of the young 
 republic at the Court of Versailles. He kissed 
 no royal hand, he talked with no courtly diplo- 
 mats, he was the guest of no titled legislator, 
 he had no official existence; but through the 
 hearts of the people he reached nobles, minis- 
 ters, courtiers, the throne itself.” He was a 
 preacher! 
 
 Those epic days have passed and America 
 will not need such an ambassador again. The 
 
36 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 rude frontiers are all but gone. But amid 
 these different days and their different de- 
 mands justice will not allow the long heroic 
 tale to be forgotten: that from the first breath 
 of freedom which blew the ships of Pilgrims to 
 New England shores, through the winds of 
 revolution in which an ancient tyranny went 
 down, in the storms that swept the separated 
 States when the republic had its test in flame 
 and blood, the preacher has taken his place 
 in American life as a patriot whose courage, 
 sacrifice, and labor are unquestioned. From 
 sea to sea the continent is in his debt. 
 
 That debt is registered on a third count. 
 It is the debt owed to the preacher because of 
 the social influences rising in and released 
 from his home; because of the children he has 
 given to the service of the world. It is an 
 often repeated statement that of sixty-three 
 names in our American Hall of Fame, ten are 
 names of preachers’ children: Bancroft the 
 historian, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry Clay, 
 Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Low- 
 ell, S. F. B. Morse, Francis Parkman, and 
 Harriet Beecher Stowe. Less than one fifth 
 of one per cent of the population have prac- 
 tically sixteen per cent of the honors, or 
 eighty times their proportionate share. In an 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 37 
 
 issue of England’s Dictionary of National 
 Biography a few years ago, 510 names of emi- 
 nent men recorded are of sons of lawyers, 350 
 are of sons of physicians, and 1,270 are of the 
 sons of ministers. It is reported that Who’s 
 Who in America for 1924 contains 25,857 
 biographies. Eleven per cent or more of the 
 names are names of those whose fathers were 
 ministers. In proportion to their number in 
 the total population of America there are 
 twenty-eight times as many preachers’ chil- 
 dren reported in Who’s Who as there should 
 be. 
 
 The parsonage has its children in honored 
 places in every sphere of life. They are beyond 
 enumeration, of course; but a few selected 
 names will suggest the debt which society 
 owes the preacher on this count. In science 
 the children of the ministry are represented 
 by Agassiz, Jenner, Field, Morse, Romanes, 
 the Wrights; in history by Bancroft, Park- 
 man, Hallam, Froude, Sloane, Muller; in art 
 by Joshua Reynolds, and Christopher Wren; 
 in literature by Jonson, Addison, Cowper, 
 Goldsmith, Coleridge, Keble, Young, Tenny- 
 son, Arnold, Kingsley, Jane Austen, Charlotte 
 Bronté and her sisters, Henry James, Stephen 
 Crane, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Anna Steele; 
 in philosophy by William James; in modern 
 
38 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 politics by Governor Morton, Senator Dolliver, 
 Senator Beveridge; in jurisprudence by Jus- 
 tices Field and Brewer and Justice, now Sec- 
 retary Hughes; in music by Reginald DeKoven 
 and Louise Homer. Four sons of preachers 
 have occupied the White House, Presidents 
 Buchanan, Arthur, Cleveland, and Wilson; 
 and seven of the mistresses of the White 
 House have been preachers’ daughters. 
 These may represent the service which the 
 preacher has given to society through his chil- 
 dren; but that service is not accomplished 
 only in the eminent and noted of them. It has 
 been as real, though unrecognized, in the 
 nameless and unknown men who pushed back 
 the frontier and in places heretofore waste 
 builded cities, societies, schools, and the ideals 
 and institutions of an enlarging culture. They 
 have wrought their spirit into the structure 
 of national life. Colleges are monuments to 
 their vision and sacrifice, churches are the 
 product of their lonely labor. Their children 
 have wakened the strings of enduring song 
 and had part in the nobler literature of the 
 world. They have been voices of righteous- 
 ness in Senate chambers and cabinets of state. 
 They have mastered space by electric com- 
 munication, conquered the air in flying craft, 
 and penetrated the secrets of nature for a 
 
IN AMERICAN LIFE 39 
 
 hundred uses. The sons of preachers have 
 been summoned to kings’ counsels and have 
 sat in presidents’ chairs; their daughters have 
 been examples to a social world. The honor 
 of the service is no empty phrase when applied 
 to the Christian ministry. It has a noble and 
 unique tradition of pioneers, patriots, pro- 
 tagonists of culture, whose lives, whose labors, 
 whose illimitable devotion, whose deaths, have 
 been the inextricable glory of three hundred 
 American years. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE PREACHER AS THE INTERPRETER 
 OF HIS AGE 
 
 In the final address which Silvester Horne 
 delivered in his series on the Lyman Beecher 
 Foundation at Yale University, he remarked 
 that “the danger of lectures that deal mainly 
 with the past is that the final impression 
 should be left, that our own time is in the 
 nature of an anti-climax to the illustrious 
 generations we have been passing in review; 
 that the great gates leading into the spacious 
 lands of opportunity are all closed, and that 
 nothing remains to us, but some shabby and 
 petty doors giving upon meager and uninter- 
 esting fields.”! It would not be surprising if 
 Some such impression had been left by the 
 preceding pages; but nothing could be farther 
 from the actual truth. As Silvester Horne 
 in the same address urged upon his audience 
 that ‘the work of the preacher in modern 
 times remains as romantic and dramatic as 
 ever,” so the chapters which follow aim to 
 make clear that the opportunity of the modern 
 
 1Horne: The Romance of Preaching, p. 265. Used by permission of 
 Fleming H. Revell Company, publishers. 
 
 40 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 41 
 
 preacher, his influence and his responsibility, 
 are as great as, if not greater than they have 
 ever been before. 
 
 For the age in which the preacher lives 
 to-day marshals a procession of magnitudes, 
 alike sublime and sinister, such as were never 
 before present in a single period. In order 
 to parallel the first quarter of this twentieth 
 century one must bring together nearly all the 
 nineteen centuries which have gone before. 
 
 Describing the present age from one point 
 of view, an observer will remark the crumbling 
 of authority, the increasing disregard of law, 
 the sudden rise to social and political posi- 
 tion of men without training in either culture 
 or citizenship or intelligent respect for public 
 interest, but whose claim to deference rests 
 wholly upon the millions they have been able 
 to accumulate by accident or cunning. Such 
 an observer will take account of an invasion 
 of the older domestic sanctities, a prurience 
 of fiction and an emptiness and indecency of 
 the drama, an erraticalness in contemporary 
 music and an eroticism in contemporary 
 amusements. He will recognize, accordingly, 
 as in a rescript, the decay and disaster of the 
 Roman civilization marked, as it was, by the 
 same decrepitude of the elder institutions, the 
 same emptiness of literature and feebleness of 
 
42 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 art, the same failure of authority in religion 
 and the state alike. This is an age of the 
 natural sciences rather than of classical cul- 
 ture; but in the eagerness of the modern mind 
 to explore and master the forces of nature, in 
 the response of the modern mood to the chal- 
 lenge of new facts, one can feel the beat of 
 that inquiring and courageous spirit which, 
 five hundred years ago, burst its ancient re- 
 straints and blossomed in the Renaissance. 
 In the revolt of the contemporary mind from 
 elder religious forms and complacencies, in 
 the widespread inquisition which has searched 
 and stung the church, in the present-day 
 assault upon traditional dogma, in the discon- 
 tent with religious forms; it needs no special 
 discernment to recognize the movement of the 
 modern mind which has been well termed 
 “Toward a New Reformation.” In the more 
 clamorous social, industrial, and political fer- 
 ment, in the disorder and violence which, from 
 time to time, menaces alike stability of gov- 
 ernment and permanence of social institu- 
 tions; one hears again the mobs that marched 
 for justice behind John Ball and Wat the tyler 
 in the England of 13881. The ferocity of 
 princes may be a forgotten evil, but the sever- 
 ity of an industrial system is a living expe- 
 rience; and no thoughtful mind, whether sym- 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 43 
 
 pathetic or not, can blind itself to the signifi- 
 cance and peril of the social resentment burn- 
 ing beneath the surface of events. 
 
 To all of this must be added the obvious 
 statement that the age in which the modern 
 preacher has his place is a time of wonders 
 compared to which the miracles of the Scrip- 
 tures seem almost small. Since 1900 the hori- 
 zons of the world seem to have fallen out, and 
 in the realms opened to the exploring intellect, 
 in the apprehension of forces hitherto unsus- 
 pected, in the reaction of discovery upon our 
 thought of the universe and life and God; we 
 are face to face with the infinite. As Bishop 
 Charles D. Williams has said, “We are living 
 in one of those supreme crises of history when 
 the long, slow processes of the world’s life 
 focus to a burning point and bring on their 
 own judgment.’* The dimensions of such a 
 time as this, as indeed of any period, its char- 
 acter and spirit, are indications of the 
 demands which it makes upon both institu- 
 tions and men; and to no man does it present 
 such obligations or offer such opportunities 
 as to the preacher. He is to-day, as in the 
 hour of his greatest service in the past, the 
 interpreter of his age. 
 
 
 
 2 Williams: The Prophetic Ministry for Today, p. 69. Reprinted by 
 permission of the Macmillan Company. 
 
44 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 There are other interpretative voices of vary- 
 ing degrees of authenticity; among which it 
 ' may be well to note the newspaper. The news- 
 paper offers primarily no interpretation of the 
 day; it presents only a review of its events, 
 and a review seen from any of a score of not 
 unprejudiced points of view, and restated 
 often with something quite other than the 
 simple desire to present an accurate survey 
 of the human scene. One cannot always get 
 even the news from a newspaper; he may need 
 almost a sheaf of them. To look for an 
 accurate account of labor aims and grievances 
 in papers controlled by large syndicates or 
 rich individuals; to expect honest expositions 
 of the progress of moral reform and of the 
 enforcement of locally unpopular laws from 
 any but a few outstanding exceptions to the 
 newspaper average; to anticipate even an 
 intelligent treatment of educational and reli- 
 gious enterprises from journals which habitu- 
 ally assign inexperienced or poorly educated 
 reporters to discuss matters projected and 
 maintained by highly specialized minds, is a 
 futile search. It goes without saying that 
 what has just been said involves no charge of 
 malice on the part of the newspapers and those 
 who produce them. From the nature of the 
 case they are what they are. “The function 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 45 
 
 of news is to signalize an event, the function 
 of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, 
 to set them into relation with each other, and 
 make a picture of reality on which men can 
 act.”> Nevertheless, though the days have 
 passed in which the pronouncements of a 
 Greeley and Dana and Watterson and Bowles 
 formed the opinions and directed the judg- 
 ments of almost a nation, the impact of edi- 
 torial thinking to-day must not be underesti- 
 mated. Only it must be appraised with an 
 understanding of its inherent and avowed pur- 
 pose. The newspaper signalizes events, it 
 does not make a picture of reality; and to 
 supplement personal observation with such 
 expositions as Owen Sinclair’s The Brass 
 Check, and Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, 
 is to appreciate the seriousness of the situa- 
 tion in which the newspaper is one of the most 
 insubordinate factors of common life as it is 
 engaged in the higher enterprises of expe- 
 rience. 
 
 The greater literary magazines may more 
 nearly claim a place as interpreters of their 
 times. Reviewing, not so much contemporary 
 events as the directions and reactions of 
 thought produced by those events, their edi- 
 
 
 
 3’ Lippmann: Public Opinion, p. 358. Used by permission of Harcourt, 
 Brace and Company, publishers. 
 
46 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 torial minds sit high above the spume of things 
 in which the newspaper lives, and offer calm 
 and reasoned definition of the ferment which 
 makes up so much of life. The defect which 
 defeats their purpose is that they sit too high. 
 One can paraphrase Tennyson and say that to 
 our question, out of the ruck of things, is 
 there any hope? their answers 
 
 “. .. peal from that high land, 
 But in a tongue few men can understand.” 
 
 With still more show of reason, perhaps, 
 claim is made for other voices that they truly 
 interpret the times amid which they speak. 
 It is made for the scientists, and not a few 
 scientists are making it for themselves. It is 
 being made for experts, here and there, in 
 some specialized and restricted knowledge, in 
 laboratories and college chairs. But no mind 
 which gives itself to a separated department 
 of intelligence, however vital and popularized 
 that department may be, can interpret an age 
 in which meet and mingle so many and~so 
 varied streams of knowledge, experience, dis- 
 covery, and revolt. 
 
 These several forms of expression have been 
 thus named in order to make more evident, by 
 comparison and contrast, that no matter how 
 favorable one’s judgment may be as to the 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 47 
 
 contribution which they bring and the service 
 they render to the age’s understanding of 
 itself, theirs is nevertheless the defect of 
 inherent limitations. 
 
 For there are three qualifications which are 
 indispensable to an interpreter. First, he 
 must be familiar with that which he under- 
 takes to interpret. His must be a broad and 
 eclectic understanding; and while to such a 
 mind the intricate and recondite details of 
 fact may be not wholly known, yet, just as 
 one may be able to translate the [liad into 
 living English without being competent to 
 write a history of the Greek particles, so one 
 may understand the spirit, passion, aims, and 
 limitations of a period without having spe- 
 cialized in the ever-changing and remote par- 
 ticularizations of detailed interests. To few 
 men indeed is given the opportunity of such 
 general familiarity with his times as is given 
 to the preacher. An editor like Godwin, of the 
 earlier Nation, may find himself in the thick 
 of things-in-general, but no more so than the 
 preacher. Preaching has been and still is con- 
 sidered a narrow occupation by those who 
 derive their opinions from impulses rather 
 than facts; and, of course, it can be made so 
 and has been made so. Even then it would 
 be difficult to make it narrower than some of 
 
48 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 those who criticize its limitations have been 
 able to make their interests. But the intelli- 
 gent preacher finds that the world is his 
 mental parish; and nothing which concerns 
 humanity fails to affect him. No other occu- 
 pation involves, in what may be called its 
 technic, an acquaintance with the entire life of 
 society. Ever so many wars may be imagined 
 between science and religion, if one’s imagina- 
 tion is peculiarly vivid, but one cannot imagine 
 a fact, a doctrine or a discovery or a claim 
 of science which does not impinge at once 
 upon the interest of the preacher. Every 
 enlargement of human knowledge amplifies the 
 conception of God. No conception of God can 
 remain unchanged through a generation, even 
 through a decade of such achievements and 
 events as the past decade has witnessed, and 
 be a true conception. The words that vibrate 
 across a continent, becoming vocal through 
 the radio, give new significance to the voice 
 that breathed o’er Eden. Bergson’s Vital Im- 
 pulse plunging through the stuff of things adds 
 inquiry and reenforcement to the preacher’s 
 exposition of the immanence of God. The 
 radio-activities of certain recently separated 
 elements must surely affect the hypothesis of 
 personal continuity on which the preacher 
 builds the inferences which join with revela- 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 49 
 
 tion to support our faith in immortality. 
 
 The preacher’s obligation to know life goes 
 further. It may still seem religious and wise, in 
 some quarters, to declare that the pulpit must 
 avoid politics; but in an age when the demo- 
 cratic ideal is invading every province of 
 thought and conduct and organization, no 
 preacher can, if he would, keep his mind free 
 or his utterances clear of the democratic mood. 
 No intelligent preacher will; for democracy, 
 while it is the most dangerous and difficult 
 enterprise of human relationship, is neverthe- 
 less inescapable. It is the test of intelligent 
 life; and the preacher’s vocation demands of 
 him such familiarity not alone with the shib- 
 boleths of society, but with the facts of social 
 experience and mood and purpose, that he 
 may speak convincingly to men and women 
 who constantly face those facts. He has to be 
 immersed in the immediate because it is to 
 men likewise immersed that he has to speak, 
 not as if they occupied the social setting of 
 the first century, but as actually participat- 
 ing in the multitudinous drama of the twen- 
 tieth century. The preacher of to-day dare 
 not be unfamiliar with whatever other streams 
 may water the intellectual and social expe- 
 rience of his age. Literature, art, industry, 
 the games men play, the amusements which 
 
50 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 engage them, the deceptions by which they 
 are lured into the twilight zones of serious- 
 ness—all of these illumine the preacher’s 
 ideas, discipline his convictions, sustain his 
 sense of duty, and again and again open the 
 springs from which derive his vital experi- 
 ences. In a word, the preacher is the only 
 man whose vocation coincides with human 
 experience, whose specialty is the broadest 
 culture, and who is the more effective master 
 of his specific field as he is more thoroughly at 
 home with the widest generalizations of 
 knowledge. 
 
 He is the conservator of society’s better 
 appreciations. In medicine the public pays 
 high honor to the consulting specialist; but 
 the health of the community depends upon the 
 general practitioner. His skill, his knowledge, 
 his precision of judgment increase with the 
 advancing wisdom of the specialist from 
 whom he takes counsel; but he himself, not 
 the specialist, is the conservator of the public 
 health. It is not otherwise with the preacher. 
 The public gives high honor to the scholar, 
 to the ecclesiastical administrator, to the 
 director of particularized social enterprises. 
 But the moral and ethical health of society 
 depends upon the preacher, whose vision 
 includes, whose insight appraises, and whose 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 51 
 
 intelligence, touched with that emotion we are 
 learning is so necessary in the comprehension 
 of life, interprets the age to itself. 
 
 For the preacher posseses, to a greater 
 degree than any other man, a second qualifi- 
 cation indispensable to the interpreter of his 
 age. He is not only familiar with the cur- 
 rents of the age which is to be interpreted ; he 
 has broad and intimate personal contacts with 
 those to whom the interpretation is to be 
 made. As he sits at the center of human 
 knowledge, so he moves at the heart of human 
 experience. 
 
 Senator William E. Borah, in one of his 
 public addresses, now appearing in book form, 
 said of Abraham Lincoln, that he possessed in 
 a remarkable way the capacity for intellectual 
 solitude, even in the midst of the throng—yet 
 he never lost faith in the throng. A recent 
 reviewer, quoting that remark, contrasts Sen- 
 ator Borah with Lincoln whom he eulogizes, 
 and points one of the qualities which seems 
 to rise like an impalpable but fatal barrier 
 between Senator Borah and the American 
 people whom he so sincerely serves. The 
 reviewer says, “While admiring the intellec- 
 tual honesty and the humane principles of 
 such a man, it is possible to lay down this 
 record of his speeches and wonder if he has 
 
52 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 ever been moved greatly by human con- 
 tacts?” 
 
 The preacher, by his very vocation, is 
 moved greatly by human contacts; and it is in 
 this light that one has to see the pastoral 
 aspect of the preacher’s life. Too much has 
 been made in the rather sentimental appraisals 
 of the ministry, of the quite negligible fact 
 that, with few exceptions, the preacher’s life is 
 a pilgrimage upon the earth, denied the domes- 
 tic securities and happy routine which gather 
 around permanent firesides and an unchang- 
 ing circle of acquaintanceship and friends. 
 That, of course, is in a measure true; but 
 entirely too little attention has been given the 
 fact that wherever he is, the preacher is never 
 on the circumference of the social scene, but 
 always at the center. If where he sits is not 
 always the head of the table, he is always a 
 good way above the salt. His associations are 
 restricted by no custom, conventionality, social 
 standards, trade or professional surroundings. 
 He dare do all that may become a man. There 
 are few other men and women in the actual 
 life of the world whose associations and con- 
 tacts are not largely carried on in specialized 
 and standardized atmospheres. Their knowl- 
 edge of and familiarity with other men and 
 women narrow quite naturally to clearly dif- 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 53 
 
 ferentiated and constant limitations, of trade, 
 of litigation, of ill health, of administration, 
 of mass labor, of the classroom. Only within 
 very small groups of personal friendships do 
 they meet and feel the more authentic and per- 
 sonal experience upon which beats the impact 
 of those great and intimate realities which 
 make the mystery, the majesty, the glory of 
 life. But it is in those impacts that the 
 preacher finds his vocation most effective. In 
 him occupation and experience coincide. One 
 of Charlotte Bronté’s heroines, after some dis- 
 turbing episode, is made to say that she still 
 felt life at life’s sources. It is at its sources 
 that the preacher lives with life. It is his 
 word which begins the home, transforming the 
 beauty of happy but untested fellowship and 
 confident but untried love into that grave 
 adventure of affection which we call the 
 domestic life. It is the preacher who touches 
 home life with a new and subtle emotion as, 
 through the rites of the church, he brings to 
 infancy an eternal meaning and informs the 
 family relationship with inescapable responsi- 
 bility. It is the preacher who walks a thou- 
 sand times through the valley of the shadow 
 and by the strange contagions of the human 
 spirit is enabled to reinforce bewildered men 
 and women with courage and hope and that 
 
54 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 tranquillity of mind which makes of suffering 
 a discipline instead of a desert. It is the 
 preacher to whom, as to no other, men and 
 women, regardless of time, place, position, or 
 character, turn amid their tragedies of sor- 
 row; and he, as no other, finds himself at home 
 in the presence of death. 
 
 The significance of this close association in 
 the intimate and crucial experiences of men, 
 is not simply that the preacher has these con- 
 tacts, but that these contacts disclose to him 
 the actual and determining mind of his age. 
 From them he knows the swift upspringing of 
 his generation’s doubt from the constant dark- 
 ness of great calamity and unassuaged grief. 
 He knows the reaction of these fundamental 
 experiences toward the enunciation of reli- 
 gious views, and can appraise the force of the 
 liberal appeal compared with that of tradi- 
 tional belief. He knows the groping wistful- 
 ness, the passionate anarchy of minds on 
 whom the human storm has broken, as no one 
 else can know it. At the same time he has 
 access to the more militant life of his day. He 
 mingles on even terms with men as they work 
 and play, puts his mind along with theirs in 
 their individual enterprises and cooperative 
 undertakings; and whether it be the Odyssey 
 of a gifted intelligence or the lament of 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 55 
 
 troubled ignorance, whether it be the vivid 
 story of successful wealth or the short and 
 simple annals of the poor, it is the preacher 
 who has opportunity to read at first hand the 
 intellectual and spiritual biography of the 
 generation to which the age is to be inter- 
 preted. Browning flings up to his “Sordello” 
 the admonition, 
 
 “Thou hast 
 Life, then—wilt challenge life for us.” 
 
 It is that high obligation—higher still, that 
 privilege—which belongs to the preacher as 
 to no other man. He has life; lives at life’s 
 sources; as the Greek maxim has it, looks on 
 death and will start at no shadows. So, then, 
 he challenges life for all others. It was Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward who wrote that “the man 
 who loves this poor human life of ours, with- 
 out ever being fooled by it, ... has a rare 
 place among us.”* She did not intend and 
 surely would not have acknowledged the fact, 
 but she was nevertheless describing the 
 preacher. For this is a summary of the quali- 
 ties inhering in his vocation and, ultimately, 
 in his character, which make him the inter- 
 preter of his age. He loves life without being 
 fooled by it. 
 
 
 
 4Ward: A Writer’s Recollections, vol. ii; p. 124. Used by permission 
 of Harper & Brothers, publishers. 
 
56 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 The preacher loves life without being fooled 
 by it because of his possession of a third indis- 
 pensable requisite for an interpreter: he is 
 dominated by an impregnable and impartial 
 principle of interpretation. No preacher in 
 modern times has exercised a wider and more 
 effective influence over his age and place than 
 did Robert W. Dale, of Birmingham. He was 
 the leader of English nonconformity. A mas- 
 ter of theology, popular, eloquent and com- 
 manding in the pulpit, he was also the voice of 
 political action and the inspiration of social 
 morality on many a platform and in many a 
 conflict. Dead for thirty years, he is still 
 speaking in British and American thought. 
 The secret of his personality and his power 
 has been given by Dr. 8S. Parkes Cadman, that 
 he saw earthly affairs in the light of the Eter- 
 nal. In a course of lectures upon some of the 
 great English thinkers, Doctor Cadman also 
 diagnosed what he called the structural defi- 
 ciency in Huxley’s mental nature, as “the 
 absence of those adventurous tentacles which 
 grope for the spiritual meaning of phe- 
 nomena.’”® There may be few or many to-day 
 from whose mental nature those adventurous 
 tentacles which grope for the spiritual mean- 
 
 
 
 5Cadman: Charles Darwin and Other English Thinkers, p. 71. Used 
 by permission of Congregational Publishing Society. 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 57 
 
 ing of phenomena are absent, but the vast 
 majority of men and women, quite to the con- 
 trary, are earnestly or instinctively feeling 
 after the spiritual significance of life and its 
 events. Against all the economic explanations 
 of history, recently so popular, put a volume 
 like Professor Shailer Mathews’ Spiritual 
 Interpretation of History. Beside the agnos- 
 tic and materialistic expositions of modern 
 science place Professor Thompson’s Spiritual 
 Interpretation of Nature, or Hudson’s The 
 Truths We Live By, or Science and Human 
 Affairs, by Professor Curtis. Balance Ber- 
 trand Russell’s pessimism and Professor 
 Dewey’s materialism, the teaching of Irwin 
 Edman and Everett Dean Martin—noting the 
 unintentional wistfulness in their attempts to 
 find altruistic purposes for life so hopeless 
 as they declare its outlook to be—with the 
 writings of Josiah Royce or Paul Elmer More’s 
 studies of Plato. It will be difficult not to 
 recognize the accuracy of A. J. Balfour’s 
 remark: “I doubt,’ he said, “whether there 
 has been for generations a deeper interest than 
 at this moment in things spiritual—however 
 different may be its manifestations from those 
 with which we are familiar in history.’ 
 
 
 
 Balfour: Thetsm and Humanism, p. 25. Reprinted by permission of 
 the publishers, the George H. Doran Company. 
 
58 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 One of the characteristic phrases of the reli- 
 gious vocabulary of a generation ago—that 
 fine and figurative vocabulary of the circuit 
 rider and the evangelist—was to the effect that 
 the preacher stood between the living and the 
 dead calling men to God. It isa phrase and a 
 figure born of that older, individualistic con- 
 ception of religion and evangelism, as accurate 
 in its insight as it was expressive in its form. 
 That older individualistic conception has been 
 greatly modified, but the strategic position of 
 the preacher has not altered; it has been given 
 wider ranges. He stands in the same place, 
 surrounded by the same inheritances of a great 
 spiritual tradition, between a living society 
 and social orders dead and dying, calling his 
 day to the recognition of its own spiritual 
 values, the spiritual implications of its events. 
 
 It need hardly be said that not all preachers 
 have consistently done this; but this has been 
 and remains their privilege, their opportunity, 
 their obligation. Mr. Walter Lippmann has 
 made a very suggestive criticism in his remark 
 that the churches “come down to us with a 
 tradition that the great things are permanent 
 and they meet a population that needs above 
 all to understand the meaning of change.’’* 
 
 
 
 7Lippmann: Public Opinion, p. 155. Used by permission of Harcourt 
 Brace and Company, publishers. 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 59 
 
 Our generation, for instance, not alone the 
 more specially trained intelligences but the 
 popular mind as well, has been so invaded by 
 the influences of modern science that it is con- 
 fused, distracted, hesitant toward inferences 
 which only color thought where it had been 
 swift in conclusions that affected life itself. 
 The passion of democracy, which has swept 
 all fields of enterprise and intelligence, has 
 become a flame in which institutions, tradi- 
 tions, faiths, and orders alike seem ready to 
 dissolve. A fierce loyalty to truth, a demand 
 for reality in those adventures of the spirit 
 where reality is most necessary, but where, 
 heretofore, it has been too easily taken for 
 granted, has brought the most cherished 
 beliefs, the most sacred formulas, to a relent- 
 less and searching scrutiny. History, religion 
 and experience have been sternly summoned 
 to present sound reasons for every hope they 
 have presumed to lift before the wistful minds 
 of men, until the age seems to question and 
 to suspect the foundations on which its fore- 
 bears reared the solemn structure of their 
 faith and worship, and multitudes of men and 
 women, in the language of the great Greek but 
 with nothing of his spirit, carry a threaten- 
 ing shadow in their heart under the full sun- 
 shine. And all of this uncertainty of outlook, 
 
60 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 this bewilderment of feeling, this skepticism 
 of good, rises within the experience of political 
 tragedy which turned the continent of historic 
 culture into a land of famine, madness, and 
 despair, confirmed the cynical remark that 
 the “history of the human race is the diary 
 of a Bear Garden,” and disclosed beneath the 
 surface of our latest civilization the ancient 
 savageries of cunning, cruelty, and selfish- 
 ness unchanged except in the employment of 
 greater instruments for vaster holocausts than 
 savagery has hitherto possessed. 
 
 It is well to face these sinister facts of 
 present-day life, for they are the facts which 
 the preacher faces, and they declare in no 
 uncertain definitions what religion dare not 
 be and what he must undertake. “Of all the 
 interpretations of the Christian religion,” as 
 Professor Jacks has written, “there are few 
 so false and none so worthless as those which 
 reduce it to a wash of rose color spread over 
 the dark realities of the world, or to a group 
 of fancies in which the soul of man, knowing 
 them to be untrue, takes a deceitful holiday 
 from the burden and the tragedy of life.’’§ 
 
 These are the facts of life; these are the 
 facts which the preacher faces; they consti- 
 
 
 
 8Jacks: The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion, p. 9. Reprinted 
 by permission of the publishers, the George H. Doran Company. 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 61 
 
 tute the stream of change which the age needs 
 to understand in connection with its tradition 
 of the great permanences. The preacher, as 
 no other man, faces them with a principle of 
 interpretation which alone can inform them 
 with constructive, sustaining, and purposeful 
 meaning. He sees earthly affairs in the light 
 of eternity. 
 
 Walter Pater has written of Marius, the 
 Epicurean, that to him the whole of life 
 seemed full of sacred presences. To the 
 preacher, responsive to the age, aware of all 
 of its mighty moods and menaces, life is full 
 of sacred presences. Amid its tumult of intel- 
 ligence and passion, of knowledge and agnos- 
 ticism, of pessimism and strange, indomitable 
 hope, he sees the achievements of men, the 
 forces they have mastered, the truths they 
 have established, the sufferings they endure, 
 the high desires that elude their definitions, 
 the mighty hopes that make them men, not as 
 ends in themselves, finished business, but dis- 
 ciplining and prophetic presences moving 
 through the solemn tragedy and pomp of time 
 like the figures Dante saw on their way to the 
 enduring light. His is the responsibility and 
 the power to present the new disclosures of 
 science which astonish and affright, in their 
 true perspective, so that, however they may 
 
62 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 disrupt old forms of faith they shall but 
 amplify the realities which those forms tried, 
 in their day of acceptance, to express. His 
 is the principle and the application by which 
 the passion of democracy is revealed as truly 
 springing, not from inheritances of a common 
 equality, but from the enduement of a com- 
 mon obligation. His it is to discern for men, 
 and thus teach them a new discernment, that 
 the realities of faith and the spirit are not 
 imprisoned in perishable documents, deliver- 
 ances or Scriptures, but are at one with that 
 vast truth which is of the very life of God, 
 “into which we have been gathered and in 
 which we share.” His it is to reiterate to his 
 age, in ever-changing forms of speech, in ever- 
 changing applications to events, but in the 
 simple continuity of the truth which liberates, 
 that “to make us spiritually were the first 
 beginnings of thought, the making of alpha- 
 bets, the making of literatures, the struggles 
 of patriots, the death of martyrs, the crea- 
 tions of genius, the researches of science, the 
 whole age-long struggle of the world.”® His 
 it is to make clear and plain that the age in 
 which his generation lives and labors and is 
 confused is but the latest stage in that increas- 
 
 
 
 _ *Brierly: Religion and Today, p.135. Used by permission of Congre- 
 gational Publishing Society, publishers. 
 
AS INTERPRETERS 63 
 
 ing procession of purpose, and it is his privi- 
 lege and opportunity to see to it that the 
 thoughts of the men of his time are widened 
 with the process of the suns. He challenges 
 life for his contemporaries. He interprets it 
 in terms of the Eternal. Out of its hurts and 
 contradictions and mysteries, he discloses to 
 them those dear and solemn beauties of affec- 
 tion, of truth, of duty, and of hope, which at 
 once chasten and sustain the mind. He uncoy- 
 ers at the heart of life’s bewilderments and 
 battle those “things of the spirit which, though 
 they disturb men, yet when they are rever- 
 enced, yield a lively and a constant joy.”?° 
 
 Cadman: Ambassadors of God, p. 23. Reprinted by permission of 
 the Macmillan Company, publishers. 
 
Tit 
 
 THE PREACHER IN THE DIRECTION 
 OF SOCIAL REFORM 
 
 ONE of the reflections suggested by the first 
 chapter in this volume is that the pioneer is 
 surely the one figure which has now passed 
 from American life. To read a book like Pro- 
 fessor Turner’s The Frontier in American His- 
 tory is to see the march of a nation across the 
 continent, and to realize the immeasurable 
 debt which our day owes those intrepid spirits 
 who transformed a wilderness into an empire, 
 punctuating the record of their heroic enter- 
 prise with many a nameless grave. But that 
 old pioneering life now remains only in the 
 pages of a history too dull ever to disclose the 
 passion that burned at the heart of the pio- 
 neer. Something of its color may still flame 
 dimly through the imagination of novelists, 
 from Washington Irving to Emerson Hough; 
 but itself is gone. With the frontier has gone 
 as well the epic figure of the frontier preacher, 
 true son of an heroic age. Asbury, Peter 
 Cartwright, William Taylor, representatives 
 of the frontier at three main stages, loom 
 
 64 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 65 
 
 gigantic down the years; but they have left no 
 successors since Van Orsdel and Iliff crossed 
 the final range. To-day is a day of social com- 
 monplace. 
 
 But there is another aspect of this matter 
 which needs be held in mind. The geographi- 
 cal frontier is gone, but is there no equivalent? 
 The frontiersman of history and romance has 
 had his day. The pioneer preacher, with his 
 rough speech and ready arm, foregathers now 
 with those kindred spirits of a vanished past. 
 Where he rode his faithful horse, his succes- 
 sor drives a Ford; and where the outcasts of 
 Poker Flat died amid the snow-bound pines, 
 forgotten by their isolated world, other men 
 and women around whom half a century of 
 science has gathered a hundred luxuries, by 
 radio enjoy at their discretion the informa- 
 tion, eloquence, and music of the pleasant 
 cities scattered across three thousand miles. 
 From one end of the continent to another, 
 from the metropolis to which the world pays 
 tribute, to the settlement amid the mountain 
 gorges, modern invention, modern science, 
 modern transportation, have standardized 
 food, clothing, literature, and amusements. 
 
 But through these commonplaces which 
 have thus leveled life to a conventional com- 
 fort there runs another frontier; as challeng- 
 
66 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 ing as the old, more difficult to transform and 
 infinitely more dangerous to ignore. It is that 
 frontier of industrial and social estimate by 
 which the community or the commonwealth 
 attempts to appraise the meaning of its social 
 conditions, to remedy and remove its social 
 discontents. On that frontier there is more 
 room than ever for the pioneering mind; for 
 that frontier is almost as various as human 
 life. Heresy and orthodoxy in social theory, 
 as Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin put it, “are mat- 
 ters of latitude and longitude.” “A social 
 outlook that is traditional in Kansas, is con- 
 ventional in Chicago, progressive in Roches- 
 ter, and anarchistic in the financial centers 
 along the Atlantic seaboard.” 
 
 This variableness in the social frontier, 
 these differing estimates put upon social con- 
 ditions, must not be permitted to obscure the 
 significance of the conditions themselves, which 
 call for wise appraisal, or to blind men to the 
 fact that hitherto the application of remedies 
 has seemed only to result in the increase of 
 social discontent. One of the discoveries now 
 being made even by those most averse to such 
 discovery is that the social ferment of the 
 time is no mild disturbance simmering in the 
 
 
 
 1Coffin: In a Day of Social Rebuslding, p. 46. Used by permission of 
 Yale University Press. 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 67 
 
 gradual warmth of untrained minds habitu- 
 ated, through generations of labor and disad- 
 vantage, to the status quo. It is a threaten- 
 ing menace, fired by passions that flame with 
 the fierce heat of long-accumulated injustices, 
 long-deferred hopes, long-betrayed confidence, 
 long-thwarted political aspirations, and now 
 kindled to fresh and constant vigor by a new 
 and inflammatory sense of power. It is being 
 fed, also, from the selfishness, ignorance, and 
 malice of not a few foreign-born disturbers of 
 the economic peace who are social rebels for 
 profit, landless and homeless by choice, heed- 
 less of the admonitions of the past and reck- 
 less of the possibilities of the future. 
 
 What has just been remarked might seem 
 to be too emphatic a reference to the indus- 
 trial discontent of the time; but it must be 
 remembered that it is in the area of industrial 
 relationships and organization that the 
 present social and political order will be vin- 
 dicated, transformed, or done away. Around 
 this industrial emergency gather the various 
 institutions of society, its remedial and cor- 
 rective enterprises which, taken together, con- 
 stitute the machineries of the social problem 
 and comprise the field for social reform. 
 
 If illustration is needed it is close at hand. 
 Here, for instance, is the enterprise of 
 
68 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 public charity, involving almost incredible 
 amounts of money, engaging the life-work of 
 a host of trained men and women who com- 
 bine personal qualities of the highest order 
 with an earnestness and social patience almost 
 religious in their devotion. They are becom- 
 ing more and more expert in searching the 
 last details of social and individual experience 
 and character in an effort, not alone to 
 remedy, but to prevent the avoidable misfor- 
 tunes which are yet unhappily so common. 
 Likewise upon this social frontier and not 
 unidentified with industrial discontent, are 
 the courts. No one will deny that they have 
 created deep resentments by their mainte- 
 nance of old injustices, by the expensiveness 
 of judicial processes, and by the development 
 and defense of intricate and unnecessary 
 forms which seem to operate chiefly in the 
 interests of overnumerous officials, employees, 
 and attorneys. Theodore Roosevelt stated it 
 mildly when he remarked that there is a 
 tendency in the law toward the deification of 
 technicalities. Rufus Choate’s observation 
 was more biting. He said, as Thomas Went- 
 worth Higginson remembered his conversa- 
 tion, that the law “was a series of fossil injus- 
 tices or petty maneuvers—like hare hunting 
 in England, splendid horses and men, dogs 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 69 
 
 with pedigrees of centuries, and when all is 
 done it is only a rabbit.’ 
 
 Not so clearly recognized but no less actu- 
 ally involved, the malefactions of politics and 
 government have their place in this social 
 frontier. Lord Fisher, that great British sea- 
 man, is reported as saying that the politicians 
 had deepened his faith in Providence. But 
 whatever they have done for Lord Fisher, they 
 have not deepened the faith of the average 
 man in the practical values of democracy. 
 In the ramifications of politics and the opera- 
 tions of government itself, the plain man can- 
 not help discerning that property is too gen- 
 erally given precedence over human life, and 
 financial investments seem more faithfully 
 protected than the rights of personality. 
 
 The claims and enterprises of public health 
 and morals must also be mentioned as forming 
 part of this unavoidable frontier. They 
 involve the community in responsibilities in 
 respect of homes, of wages adequate for decent 
 living, of restrictions upon the employment of 
 children in gainful occupations, of censorship 
 of public amusements, of police protection, 
 and the eradication, or the tolerance, of public 
 vice. 
 
 
 
 2 Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 71. Used 
 by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers. 
 
70 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 All these and others which readily occur to 
 mind are enterprises indigenous to every com- 
 munity, variously appraised, but constantly 
 dealt with; the influences of which, in one 
 way or another, impinge upon every life 
 within the community. These institutions, 
 enterprises, and the exigencies out of which 
 they rise, comprise the field of social reform, 
 the social frontier from which derive the con- 
 stant discontents, the sense of social failure, 
 and the demands which greaten with the days, 
 for such profound and structural changes in 
 the organization of society as will amount to 
 almost a new social order. 
 
 What direction those demands will take is 
 yet in the balance. To discern and wisely to 
 control them constitute the insistent obliga- 
 tion resting upon society itself and particu- 
 larly upon those minds to which have been 
 given something of social insight and a sense 
 of social responsibility. Two possible direc- 
 tions are already to be discovered. On the one 
 hand there are those who look upon the 
 present social order as they might look upon a 
 well-used car. They recall the service it has 
 rendered; the happy generations it has car- 
 ried prosperously upon the road of time 
 since Adam Smith published The Wealth of 
 Nations and James Watt invented the con- 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 71 
 
 densing steam engine. They cannot forget 
 that the wealth which has gone into popular 
 education, into state and church and inde- 
 pendent universities and colleges, into hos- 
 pitals, libraries, public parks and recreational 
 endowments, into museums of art and arche- 
 ology; the wealth which has created the great 
 highways, developed the natural resources of 
 the country, and made possible the evolution 
 and enjoyment of modern comfort and pros- 
 perity ; has all been brought to us in this well- 
 used social order. They regard it, accord- 
 ingly, not only with traditional interest, but 
 with something of affection; and they consider 
 its present condition with an eye to conserva- 
 tion rather than to change. It is defective, 
 they admit. It is badly worn. It needs new 
 parts and the readjustment of the old. But 
 all it needs is repairs. A new transmission 
 rod, perhaps; new spark plugs, it may be; 
 a new oiling system, and, by all means, new 
 brake bands—then the machine will be as 
 good as new. That is the attitude of many 
 minds alike familiar with the past and alive 
 to the present and with no lack of intelligence 
 toward the social future. 
 
 On the other hand there are those, by no 
 means less intelligent or energetic, who see 
 the social order as a car which is not merely 
 
72 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 well worn, but completely worn out. They 
 see the cost of the wealth it has carried, the 
 toll which its organization of industry takes 
 in limb and life. They see the waste in the 
 capitalistic system. They appreciate indus- 
 trialism’s by-product in personal, political, 
 and social tragedy. No amount of repairs 
 seems to them to promise any good. They see 
 the need, not for tinkering, but for entire 
 transformation. It is not the accessories that 
 are at fault, they say, it is the engine; and 
 they would abandon the old car and get one 
 altogether new. Their hope for the world is 
 not in social amelioration but in social revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Which direction is to be followed, and on 
 either, what specific steps are to be taken, 
 what modifications wrought in society, what 
 repairs are to be initiated, or what kind of 
 new machinery is to be procured, are ques- 
 tions which lie beyond the scope of this chap- 
 ter. This social emergency which, in one form 
 or another, is always confronting society, has 
 been briefiy sketched at this point in order to 
 fix attention upon the fact that in the direc- 
 tion of social reform for which the emergency 
 calls, the preacher occupies a strategic place, 
 when it becomes felt and clearly recognized. 
 
 This is not to say that the preacher has 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 73 
 
 always exercised the influence inherent in his 
 position, or that when he has exercised it, he 
 has done so wisely. Too frequently he has 
 been little more than “a half-hearted meddler 
 in great affairs.” One of the less happy 
 records which history is compelled to acknowl- 
 edge is of the indifference of the church to 
 social reform, its tardiness of sympathy and, 
 sometimes, its quickness of opposition when 
 ideals and activities toward the practical im- 
 provement of industrial and social conditions 
 have been inaugurated. One of the unpleasant 
 facts for Christian men and women to con- 
 template is that the church, in the past, has so 
 frequently been a weight against, instead of 
 an influence for, reforms which time has 
 amply exhibited as of great and enduring 
 worth; that the church has so often been a lag- 
 gard at the rear of the procession toward so- 
 cial and political regeneration; that the pro- 
 phetic spirits who have begun noteworthy 
 enterprises for the correction of practical and 
 preventable evils have too often been compelled 
 to win the church to indorse what the church 
 should have been the first to see and espouse 
 and endeavor to secure. 
 
 But that fact, depressing as it is, neverthe- 
 less witnesses to the premise which has just 
 been stated, that the preacher occupies a 
 
74 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 strategic place in the direction of social 
 reform. Social reform, to be successful, has 
 always had to win the church. This, more- 
 over, is only one side of the shield. The his- 
 tory which records the slowness of the church 
 to move in the interest of social reform, re- 
 cords, at the same time, a list of reforms for the 
 accomplishment of which society is over- 
 whelmingly in debt to the church. “Your so- 
 cial reformer,” as Professor Shailer Mathews 
 remarks, “had best give himself a course in 
 church history.”® That list of reforms to be 
 placed to the credit of the church will include 
 the abolition of slavery, the progress of pro- 
 hibition, the entire social, economic, educa- 
 tional, and personal revolution wrought by 
 Christian missions, to say nothing of those 
 transformations of womanhood, childhood, and 
 domestic life which are so wrought into our 
 civilization as to have obscured the memory of 
 their origin. History will also record the 
 church’s invasions of the fields of social and 
 economic injustice, by which freedoms, rights 
 and powers have been from time to time 
 regained for the disadvantaged many. “Every 
 now and then the gospel strikes the earth 
 under the feet of the common man, and he 
 
 
 
 ’ Mathews: The Church and the Changing Order, p. 168. Reprinted 
 by permission of the Macmillan Company, publishers, 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 75 
 
 rises up and demands to be counted as one.’’* 
 This part of the record must also be read. 
 It goes without saying that not all the 
 strategy of the preacher’s position as regards 
 the direction of social reform is due to the 
 preacher himself. There are positions—and 
 his is one of them—which give to their occu- 
 pants far larger influence than the occupants 
 themselves would have. The preacher’s effec- 
 tiveness in influencing social reform is due, 
 first of all, to the fact that he represents the 
 sources of that spirit which most impels 
 reform, and that he can practically affect in 
 large measure the resources by which organ- 
 ized reform is permanently supported. What 
 is called the social passion, apart from the 
 separated institutions through which it works, 
 derives from the church. It is the Christian 
 message which has resulted in the Christian 
 ethics. Though social movements have empha- 
 sized humanitarian rather than religious 
 ideals, and the church gives precedence to 
 religious rather than humanitarian motives, 
 there is no humanitarianism worth the name 
 which has not originated in religion and no 
 religion congenial to the present day which is 
 not humanitarian in its practical expression. 
 
 
 
 ‘Taylor: Religion in Social Action, p. 174. Used by permission of 
 d, Mead and Company, publishers. 
 
76 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 The nobler practical impulses of the day are 
 moving in one direction. It is the preacher 
 whose interpretation of the gospel identifies it 
 with immediate life, whose exposition of the 
 New Testament, whatever may be its personal 
 applications, discloses social responsibility, 
 who inspires and instructs men and women in 
 the obligations of human relationship. It is 
 in the preacher’s prophetic function that the 
 social appeal finds its most dependable and 
 constant reenforcement. 
 
 In addition, it is the men and women to 
 whom the preacher speaks prophetically week 
 after week, with whom he daily associates in 
 influential intimacies, who supply the largest 
 share of the money, time, and service which 
 maintain the movements of reform. The 
 preacher associates with these men and women 
 in relationships at once of intelligence and 
 emotion. He is constantly making those fleet- 
 ing contacts which have always played so 
 large, though unreported, a part in the awak- 
 ening of ideals and the molding of character; 
 and his influence upon their social attitudes is 
 beyond estimate. Withdraw the sympathy of 
 the Protestant churches from any philan- 
 thropic community enterprise involving sus- 
 tained effort and personal sacrifice, and its 
 failure is immediate. It is the wise preacher 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 77 
 
 who realizes these facts, not simply that he 
 may know the power for good which is in his 
 keeping, but that he may not entertain too 
 high an opinion of his personal influence and 
 opportunity disassociated from the church. 
 
 It is his relation to the church which gives 
 the preacher the high seat which he may 
 occupy in the councils of the community. The 
 history of society supports the assertion that 
 in the larger developments of social policy, 
 program, and organization no voice speaks 
 with more authority, no mind works from 
 more advantageous position than the preach- 
 er’s. No man is welcomed with more sincere 
 good will than that with which he is welcomed 
 to his community’s comradeship of social good. 
 To muster the men who are leading the great 
 social campaigns which characterize the 
 present day, is to assemble a host of Christian 
 ministers. Their pulpits are dynamic with 
 the social gospel while giving full place to the 
 demands of worship, of consolation, and of 
 faith. Their pastoral contacts, while lacking 
 nothing of that personal sympathy which 
 makes them comrades of the inner life, are 
 informed with the spirit of a wider fellowship. 
 It is their attitude which thus sets the stand- 
 ard for a multitude that looks to them for 
 guidance; and it is with more than individual 
 
%8 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 usefulness that they take their place in the 
 movements of social reform. With them they 
 bring the sympathy, the support, the convic- 
 tions of a host whom they cannot but repre- 
 sent. 
 
 The preacher has this influence given him 
 by reason of his position as the administra- 
 tive head of a church, by his place in its pulpit 
 and his life at the center of the experiences of 
 a congregation whose representative he is. In 
 addition he has a strategic place in the direc- 
 tion of social reform because of certain per- 
 sonal advantages. Hecan approach any social 
 question, can appraise any social, industrial, 
 or political movement, with a mind naturally 
 in contact with all the interests involved. 
 This does not imply that no preacher is ever 
 prejudiced; it is to say that no intelligent 
 preacher has any excuse for being prejudiced. 
 No man has more swift or sure access to the 
 truth, the misunderstandings, the diverse 
 aims of the several parties to a social contro- 
 versy, and to their unrecognized common 
 interests, than has the preacher. No man can 
 learn at first hand more easily than he can 
 learn the results in actual human life of indus- 
 trial operations, housing conditions, political 
 organizations, and the like. If it be true, as 
 is so constantly affirmed, that organized labor 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 79 
 
 is alienated from the church, it is also true 
 that organized labor includes but about fifteen 
 per cent of all American labor; and the vast 
 body of men and women whose devotion car- 
 ries on the church’s missionary enterprises, 
 whose personal faith blossoms in its shadow, 
 whose sorrow finds shelter in its peace, whose 
 lives are sustained in hope and courage and 
 high character by the streams which flow from 
 its altars—the vast body of its men and 
 women are of those majorities whose labor 
 brings them but the means of comfortable 
 living, to whom luxury is unknown and wealth 
 but a word. Even while organized labor is 
 alienated from the church, it is the preacher 
 who solemnizes its weddings, baptizes its chil- 
 dren, and buries its dead; and the preacher 
 may know its life, its thought, its fears, its 
 passions, its spirit of resignation and of revolt, 
 as no other man. 
 
 At the same time it is the preacher who sits 
 down on equal terms, socially, with those 
 against whose wealth and power organized 
 labor draws fast its lines of antagonism. His 
 very familiarity with the life and mood of 
 labor makes him significant to capital. Not 
 all preachers have recognized the strategy of 
 their position. Ministers of churches com- 
 posed of working men and their families and 
 
80 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 those whose kinship in economies and thrift 
 make, with them, a social unit, have often 
 failed to realize that their opportunity for 
 broad and intimate knowledge of that social 
 unit gives them singular importance and infiu- 
 ence, if tactfully asserted, in the minds of 
 industrial and corporation heads, political 
 leaders, and all who seriously interest them- 
 selves in social concerns. Preachers in whose 
 congregations wealth, poverty, and the average 
 and well-to-do alike sit—and such congrega- 
 tions are more common than exceptional— 
 have the prophetic authority by which they 
 may speak with the directness of Nathan to 
 the personal responsibilities which need to be 
 inspired, restrained, or rebuked. All that is 
 demanded is that they shall speak out of 
 knowledge instead of sentimentality, and shall 
 not be led by their humane enthusiasms into 
 partisanships which cannot be sustained by 
 facts. For the social facts are more easily - 
 secured than the common distortion of them in 
 the press and on the platform would indicate. 
 There is no Central Labor Union in America, 
 one dare say, to which a preacher would not 
 be voted a welcome, and in which he would 
 not be given the privilege of the floor. There 
 is no Board of Trade or Commercial Club, or 
 similar civic organization, as there is no fra- 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 81 
 
 ternal order, in which the preacher may not 
 take his place side by side with the banker or 
 the business man. His influence in the con- 
 cerns of a community grows thus out of his 
 broad contacts; and it is his amplitude of 
 experience which speaks in the counsels of 
 practical affairs. Charles Lamb somewhere 
 asks the question, “Have we never heard an 
 old preacher in the pulpit display such an 
 insight into the mystery of ungoddliness as 
 made us wonder with reason how the good man 
 came by it?” But without confirming Lamb’s 
 subtle implication as to how the good man 
 came by it, only an insight into the actual life 
 of his world gives any man the right to speak 
 concerning that world. 
 
 There are two preachers who exercise no 
 effective influence in social reform. The first 
 is the preacher whose eyes are turned wholly 
 upon his church and his responsibilities within 
 it, and fails to see what movements are passing 
 beyond his parish lines. Walter Bagehot has 
 written of Guizot that when he walks the street 
 he seems to see nothing. “There have been 
 revolutions in his life, and he is scarcely the 
 wiser.”> There are preachers who walk thus 
 through a city’s streets, seeing nothing, ignor- 
 
 
 
 5Bagehot: Shakespeare, the Man, p.4. Used by permission of Double- 
 day, Page & Co., publishers. 
 
82 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 ant of revolutions around them. On the other 
 hand there is the preacher who seeks what he 
 calls first-hand knowledge, in ways which dis- 
 credit both the knowledge which he acquires 
 and his purpose in acquiring it. He too fails 
 to exercise any permanent influence in social 
 reform. There are extremes of experience into 
 which a preacher dare not go. Frederick 
 O’Brien, in his White Shadows in the South 
 Seas, tells of a native doctor whose surgical 
 knowledge was unusually correct because he 
 knew the location of the vital organs accu- 
 rately from having frequently cut up bodies 
 for eating. One might rely on such profes- 
 sional knowledge, but nevertheless one would 
 prefer the services of a surgeon whose ability 
 had been acquired in more orthodox if less per- 
 sonal fashion. ‘Theré are preachers whose 
 insight into social ungodliness has been 
 derived from intimate association; but they 
 speak with little authority. They entertain, 
 but they do not enlighten; they gratify curi- 
 osity concerning an underworld, but they do 
 not awaken consecration to a wholesome social 
 task. 
 
 In between these two extreme types is the 
 preacher whom the world knows, hears, and is 
 ready to heed; the preacher whose knowledge 
 of his world is based upon reasonable and 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 83 
 
 intimate experience but whose character as 
 preacher is never lost in his clamorous pro- 
 fessions of reformer. In a cemetery at 
 Brighton, England, is a monument to Fred- 
 erick Robertson, who, though dead at thirty- 
 seven, was one of the great prophets of social 
 righteousness and, according to Dean Stanley, 
 the greatest English preacher of his age. On 
 that monument are two panels, one represent- 
 ing him preaching to his own people; the other 
 representing him as teaching a company of 
 workingmen whom he has called “Brother 
 Men and Fellow Workmen.” ‘There are few 
 Robertsons in present-day pulpits, but he and 
 the monument above his grave suggest the 
 position of the preacher and those personal 
 advantages which give him strategic place in 
 the direction of social reform. 
 
 But the preacher also draws his influence in 
 the direction of social reform from yet another 
 source. By training, by habits of insight and 
 thought, he faces frankly and dare assert with- 
 out equivocation the inadequacy of reform 
 which deals only with institutions. By expe- 
 rience and observation the preacher cannot 
 fail to realize that social discontent, whatever 
 may be its contemporary objects, is as old 
 as the human heart. Centuries before Christ 
 the great pessimist of the Scriptures wrote, 
 
84 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 “That which is crooked cannot be made 
 straight; and that which is wanting cannot 
 be numbered.” “He that loveth silver shall 
 not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth 
 abundance with increase.” Eight hundred 
 years ago the Persian cynic phrased the same 
 spirit : 
 
 “Ah Lova! Could you and I with Him conspire 
 
 To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, 
 
 Would we not shatter it to bits—and then 
 Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!” 
 
 The preacher, who does not forget the 
 antiquity of discontent, knows that its sources 
 are not alone in conditions, but in character 
 as well; and he can exercise an effective, if 
 not immediately recognized influence in social 
 reform, because he can easiest keep in view 
 the ultimate objectives of reformation. He 
 knows that institutions can never be reformed ; 
 that only men and women can be reformed. 
 He knows that while society and its organi- 
 zations must be regenerated, that is possible 
 and permanent only as the men and women 
 who compose society and command its organi- 
 zations are regenerated. He knows that the 
 spirit of men, the spirit revealed in the great 
 hours of life; the spirit discerned, as the 
 preacher discerns it, in their disciplines of 
 suffering, discovered, as the preacher discovers 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 85 
 
 it, in their tragedies of grief, exhibited, as the 
 preacher observes it, under the influence of 
 nature, of responsibility, of remorse, can never 
 be permanently satisfied by reconstructing the 
 social machinery. That machinery never quite 
 reaches the actual man. As William James 
 once said of modern social movements, “the 
 precipitate element is left out.” The preach- 
 er’s influence may be all the more effective, 
 though involving more difficulties in applica- 
 tion, because he alone is likely to discriminate 
 accurately between the character of social 
 reform and its origin. Without doubt, what 
 we have come to call the social passion is a 
 product of the Christian religion; but it is not 
 in itself Christianity. “The social needs of the 
 age offer a very fruitful field for work, but 
 the social passion is not a dynamic.’”® It is 
 the preacher who, seeing the life of humanity 
 under the aspect of the eternal, can most 
 surely acclimate, amid the instruments of 
 social reform, those inspirations of personal 
 character without which the noblest social 
 machinery must remain wholly mechanical, 
 and life, though organized within the best 
 articulated forms, remain still swept by dis- 
 content. 
 
 
 
 6 Kirk: The Religion of Power, 295. Reprinted by permission of 
 the publishers, the George H. Doran Ciaae. uf Abies ey 
 
86 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 If the author may be permitted to speak 
 now in character, it is to record the wish that 
 we preachers who are in the midst of life 
 to-day had accomplished all that has been 
 herein suggested as our opportunity. Unhap- 
 pily, we have been inheritors of an older and 
 less social ideal, and only slowly have we come 
 to realize the modern world. It is to our suc- 
 cessors in the present age that this strategic 
 opportunity offers itself with peculiar insist- 
 ence and admonition. It is an opportunity 
 which has been presented to us by other 
 preachers, some of an earlier day, some of our 
 own time, who braved and bore criticism, mis- 
 understanding, and the professional and per- 
 sonal tragedies which reward the social pio- 
 neer. What Governor Bradford quoted from 
 an earlier historian concerning the Spaniards 
 in America, and applied to his own Mayflower 
 Pilgrims, may be remembered of these preach- 
 ers who discovered the social opportunity 
 which rises before us: “With their miseries 
 they opened a way to these new-lands; and 
 after these stormes, with what ease other men 
 came to inhabite in them, in respect of ye 
 calamities these men suffered.”* It is an 
 opportunity which, even in this late day, 
 remains a frontier beyond which lie other 
 
 7 Bradford: Journal, p. 165. 
 
 
 
AND SOCIAL REFORM 87 
 
 lands as yet too little trodden. Upon it are 
 still the frontiersman’s conflicts and his scant 
 compensations. The preachers of the present 
 hour occupy this strategic position in the 
 direction of social reform, but they have not 
 always exercised their influence to the full 
 measure of their opportunity, or to the neces- 
 sity of the times. That is for the younger 
 generation of men who are now taking their 
 place in the long tradition of the Protestant 
 ministry. To them the present day puts the 
 question which Silvester Horne paraphrased 
 from a penetrating inquiry of John Robinson 
 as he summoned his Holland Puritans to the 
 adventure of the new world. “Will you be 
 content to go down to your graves with your 
 witness undelivered, and your bravest hopes 
 unattempted? Or will you risk something, 
 nay everything, to translate your theories of 
 Christian freedom into a veritable free soci- 
 ety ?’’8 
 
 
 
 8Horne: The Romance of Preaching, p. 198. Used by permission of 
 the Fleming H. Revell Company, publishers. 
 
Ly) 
 
 THE PREACHER AND THE CREATION 
 OF PUBLIC OPINION 
 
 THE most significant scene ever reported in 
 history was that of the crucifixion of Jesus 
 between two thieves. Much has been written 
 concerning that event, but little account has 
 been taken of the fact that all three were 
 there upon their crosses for defying public 
 opinion. Jesus was crucified for being ahead 
 of the public opinion of his time, the thieves 
 for being behind it. The effective social force 
 which found expression in their death was the 
 same in each case—the force of public opinion. 
 
 Unless one has given definite thought to the 
 subject he does not realize to what an extent 
 his life is regulated by public opinion. We 
 acknowledge on every hand the guidance and 
 restraint of the past as it lengthens behind us. 
 From it we have inherited most of our insti- 
 tutions, our basal laws, our conventions, our 
 literature, and our religion. There is a cer- 
 tain grand solidity about them all; and we 
 obey the laws, respect the institutions, observe 
 the conventions, cherish the literature, and 
 
 88 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 89 
 
 revere the religion. They, at least, are the 
 fixed and durable framework of life. But 
 when one begins to investigate them and their 
 origins he discovers that they are but the 
 organized public opinion of the past. Public 
 opinion, pushing down through time like a 
 mole beneath the surface of the ground, throws 
 up these various forms of thoughts and things 
 and leaves them standing through centuries of 
 usefulness and, sometimes, for generations 
 after their usefulness has passed. But public 
 opinion itself is always a living and effective 
 force. 
 
 It is, for instance, the one support of gov- 
 ernment. Someone has said that revolution is 
 democracy turning over in bed; but it would 
 be truer to say that revolution is democracy 
 persuaded or tricked into turning a hand- 
 spring. The effectiveness of law does not 
 depend upon judicial systems of the state or 
 upon the law-enforcement officers. The uni- 
 versal testimony of magistrates and officials is 
 that no law can be enforced in a community 
 which does not endorse the statute, The his- 
 tory of legislation in connection with disputed 
 matters touching the lives, habits, and conduct 
 of the people as a whole is that the enactment 
 of the law must always be followed by a 
 period, longer or shorter, during which public 
 
90 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 opinion is educated to effectual support of the 
 law. The statute books contain many unre- 
 pealed laws which are nevertheless as unob- 
 served as if they had never been enacted; and 
 it is a commonplace of everyday knowledge 
 that there are laws affecting our daily life 
 which are only partially enforced. The traffic 
 law, for instance, prescribes a speed limit of 
 fifteen miles an hour for automobiles; but the 
 average and unrebuked speed maintained 
 under the eye of the traffie police is from five 
 to ten miles an hour faster than the provision 
 of the law. Public opinion prevents the strict 
 enforcement of the ordinance. 
 
 What is true of the state and the local com- 
 munity is true of the church. The church’s 
 changing social outlook is nowhere exhibited 
 more vividly than in the contrast. between 
 some of its once rigorously maintained rules 
 of conduct and the increasingly liberal prac- 
 tice on the part of its membership. Rules 
 remain unaltered on its books, the disregard 
 of which is universal, the enforcement of 
 which has become impossible. 
 
 What has been termed the oil scandal in 
 connection recently with the national govern- 
 ment illustrates another aspect of the effec- 
 tiveness of public opinion. Two members of 
 the President’s cabinet resigned, and the most 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 91 
 
 prominent candidate for the presidential 
 nomination in the opposition party was elimi- 
 nated, because of their relationship to the 
 manipulations which resulted in the leasing 
 of government oil lands to private interests. 
 But in all the publicity and indignation which 
 developed from the situation, the question 
 which was not permitted to come into view 
 was as to whether the leasing of the lands was 
 not the most profitable thing for the govern- 
 ment to do. In other words, the force of 
 public opinion at any time does not depend 
 upon the soundness of the public judgment. 
 It has often been observed that prisons receive 
 as their tenants two kinds of people—the best 
 and the worst. “The man who defies public 
 opinion may do so because he is a rogue, or 
 because he is a prophet.” It goes without 
 saying, as history has the habit of demonstrat- 
 ing from time to time, that a few who defy 
 public opinion as prophets turn out to be 
 fools; and once in a while a fool whom public 
 opinion has flung aside as a jest is proven to 
 have been a prophet whose wisdom would have 
 enriched or preserved society. Accurately to 
 judge of men and events amid the turbulence 
 of contemporary moods is not a simple matter; 
 which makes more significant than ever this 
 fact that public opinion is no less effective 
 
92 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 when it is mistaken than when it is correct. 
 Society is suffering to-day “primarily not from 
 unbalanced budgets and disrupted ententes 
 but from wrong mental processes.”?! 
 
 It is amid this continuing yet inconstant 
 flow of public opinion that the preacher stands 
 and thence exercises whatever influence he 
 may, aS one of the voices that inform and 
 direct that flow. To go further and say that 
 his is the most advantageous voice of all the 
 many thus involved, is not more than the truth; 
 and it suggests a conception of the preacher 
 altogether different from that which prevailed 
 a generation ago. Then the preacher was pre- 
 sumed to be divinely indifferent to the opin- 
 ions of men. His mind was supposed to be 
 set on things above, not on things on the earth. 
 The Christian ideal, expressed in an irre- 
 proachable phrase, was to be in the world 
 but not of it. Sharp distinctions were then 
 drawn between religion and mere morality, to 
 the grave discredit of morality. Christians 
 were accustomed to emphasize the fact that 
 on earth they had no abiding city but rather 
 they were only pilgrims in this world and 
 therefore were obligated to concentrate their 
 interests and attention upon the other world. 
 
 
 
 1Wiggam: The New Decalogue of Science, p. 274. Copyright, 1922. 
 Used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 93 
 
 It goes almost without saying that this 
 other-worldly attitude of which, in essence, 
 there can be no criticism, was, in its exag- 
 gerated expression and practice, a break from 
 the example of the great religious leaders. 
 Luther, Knox, Wesley all found themselves in 
 the thick of the everyday life of men, and all 
 shaped their service and their message under 
 the impact of contemporary events and inter- 
 ests. They did not lighten the emphasis upon 
 the other world, but they recognized the 
 reality of this world, and early learned that it 
 is the pilgrim spirit which most makes habit- 
 able the lands through which it journeys. 
 Few of the later schemes for what we call the 
 socialization of religion but would be con- 
 genial with John Wesley’s mind, as the record 
 of his social outlook clearly discloses. John 
 Knox cannot be taken out of the politics of his 
 time without leaving his life-work unintelli- 
 gible; and no frank study of Martin Luther 
 but will find him, so far from being aloof from 
 his practical world, to the contrary, perhaps 
 too intimately involved in the unlovelier and 
 over-worldly accompaniments of the Reforma- 
 tion. There is an unexhausted meaning in 
 Saint Paul’s observation that he became all 
 things to all men that he might win some; 
 not that he was a hypocritical spirit surren- 
 
94 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 dering to every man’s mood, but that he was a 
 sagacious mind keeping touch with the cur- 
 rents of opinion that amid them he might pre- 
 sent this message in contacts at once intelli- 
 gible and friendly. For an example at once 
 of his use of, and his influence upon public 
 opinion, his address at Athens is almost if not 
 wholly perfect. 
 
 The preacher is to set his mind on things 
 above the earth. He is to be in the world 
 and, in a very real fashion, not of it. He is 
 to view life under the order of Eternity. But 
 it is in living contact with the forces of public 
 opinion that he must preserve these attitudes, 
 and present the spiritual interpretation of his 
 age. He dare not, then, be indifferent to the 
 mind and mood of the age; and within the 
 limits of his influence, which are the limits of 
 his responsibility, if he is to be effective at 
 all, he must contribute largely to the character 
 of public opinion not alone on religious mat- 
 ters, but on other subjects also; and he must 
 strive to influence its judgments. 
 
 It is fundamental, therefore, that the 
 preacher know the state of public opinion in 
 the community, whether it be a city or a town 
 or a countryside; and equally fundamental 
 that he be abreast of it. What is the judgment 
 of the best and directive minds as to civic 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 95 
 
 affairs, industrial and social conditions, law 
 enforcement and moral reform? To what 
 extent will these minds incarnate their judg- 
 ments in practical action, whether it be by 
 speech, philanthropy, social organization, or 
 the ballot? This is the frontier on which the 
 preacher’s mind must be at home and from 
 which he has to speak. For there is no more 
 pathetic spectacle than that of the belated 
 preacher; one who, in a day of industrial 
 democracy, is thinking in Victorian terms of 
 unorganized labor and aristocratic privilege; 
 who, in a day of vivid social responsibilities, 
 is preaching a gospel of wholly individual sal- 
 vation; who, in a day which emphasizes duty, 
 is discoursing of religion as a philosophy of 
 escape. In a day when the progress of biology 
 is popularized until it is remaking the minds 
 of reading men and women everywhere; when 
 the high schools are familiarizing young peo- 
 ple with electrons and amcebe; when the radio 
 is pouring the life of the world into the sitting 
 rooms of the farmhouse and the village as well 
 as the city; the preacher who cannot speak 
 intelligently in respect of science, who cannot 
 respond intelligently to the political perplexi- 
 ties raised by the events of this world, will 
 speak with little effect when he discusses 
 other worlds, of which it may reasonably be 
 
96 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 doubted whether he knows any more. His 
 knowledge and his outlook upon life must 
 keep pace with the best minds of his com- 
 munity. 
 
 But if the belated preacher is a spectacle 
 of pathos, the too progressive preacher is an 
 exhibition of futility. He may be a prophet, 
 but he will draw wages as a fool. He may 
 furnish entertainment, but he will provide no 
 leadership. This is not to say that he will be 
 mistaken. He may be correct in his views, 
 precise in his judgments, informed as to his 
 facts. But if these views, judgments, and 
 facts are too far removed from the mental 
 habit of his public they might just as well be 
 mistaken, as far as their usefulness is con- 
 cerned. Indeed, they might better be mis- 
 taken; because many a stoned prophet may be 
 suspected of having earned his shower by the 
 persistent folly with which he disregarded the 
 simple proprieties of common sense. No one 
 knew this more surely than Jesus who is 
 quoted as saying to his disciples, “I have yet 
 many things to say unto you, but ye cannot 
 bear them now.” 
 
 While the preacher must thus live upon the 
 frontier of the public opinion of his com- 
 munity, whether it be a city or a circuit; 
 while he must not range in public utterance 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION Ue) 
 
 too far beyond its conventional boundaries; he 
 must always be open minded to the world of 
 knowledge, feeling and adventure which ex- 
 pands beyond it. It is his established resi- 
 dence on the certain, well-known territories of 
 the public opinion of his time and place which, 
 when he goes out into those new lands, gives 
 to his community confidence to follow toward 
 larger knowledge, faith, and action. For there 
 come times when the preacher must go out 
 beyond the public opinion of his community. 
 Much has been made, and properly, in honor 
 of Samuel Hopkins, that stalwart New Eng- 
 land preacher who uttered probably the first 
 public protest in America against slavery. 
 His congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, 
 was composed principally of men whose busi- 
 ness interests and prosperity derived from the 
 slave trade; yet on a notable Sunday morning 
 Samuel Hopkins “delivered a_ testimony” 
 which his conscience could not evade, that 
 slavery was un-Christian and iniquitous. One 
 can imagine the effect produced by such an 
 utterance; and one cannot avoid the fact that 
 whatever influence the utterance had was 
 dependent upon the measure to which Samuel 
 Hopkins had kept pace with, neither behind 
 nor in advance of, the economic opinion of his 
 time. To every preacher will come a time 
 
98 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 when he must deliver a testimony in advance 
 of the public opinion of his congregation and 
 much of his community, and his success will 
 depend upon the close and sympathetic fel- 
 lowship which his mind has had with the com- 
 mon mind around him. Let a preacher who 
 has been belated come surprisingly to some 
 new and advanced light, and his contempo- 
 raries will say that he is probably as far 
 wrong in this forward direction as he has been 
 customarily mistaken in the other. Let a 
 preacher who has been ordinarily too advanced 
 announce a new, though ever so true word of 
 admonition and invitation, and his contem- 
 poraries will remark that he was always try- 
 ing to be different. But let a preacher who 
 has been fully abreast of his contemporary 
 world and local situation, who has always 
 shaped his pronouncements courageously and 
 yet so as to arouse no reasonable resentment 
 in the directive minds around him—let such a 
 preacher advocate a new advance, scientific or 
 social, confirmed by some cogency of fact, and - 
 presented in tactful and commanding form, 
 and men and women who hesitate to accept 
 his leading in this particular occasion, will 
 nevertheless find themselves saying: “He has 
 always been reasonable; there may be some- 
 thing in this which we do not see. It is from 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 99 
 
 such beginnings that social, intellectual, 
 political progress obtains.” 
 
 The preacher’s place amid the currents of 
 public opinion imposes one certain obligation 
 upon him. He must not only be responsive to 
 public opinion, abreast of it, and doing his 
 work within the ranges of its impact; he must 
 mold it. For this he has the inestimable 
 advantage of a place and a platform, a voca- 
 tion and an office to which society is accus- 
 tomed to pay deference. To him, by nineteen 
 centuries of tradition, men and women look 
 for direction, not alone spiritual, but intellec- 
 tual as well; if indeed, there can be any spir- 
 itual direction which is not also intellectual. 
 Current literature—fiction, journal, essay, 
 public address—is clamorous with the charge 
 that the pulpit has lost its place in the intel- 
 lectual life of men; that the world no longer 
 pays attention to the opinions of the preacher. 
 It is not for any one to venture ex cathedra 
 judgment on so broad a scale; but personal 
 observation seldom confirms the charge. When 
 one has taken into account the intellectual 
 shortcomings of the clergy, discarding every- 
 thing in the public attitude which might seem 
 to be an illusion of deference to, or an assump- 
 tion of respect for a clerical opinion, which in 
 reality was but a show of courtesy; then he 
 
100 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 will still be the more astonished at the weight 
 which the general public attaches to the 
 judgment of preachers who command a hear- 
 ing, though it be but little beyond their parish 
 lines. The very vigor with which a preacher’s 
 utterances are sometimes denounced, and 
 never more vigorously than when they are 
 completely misunderstood, is unmistakable 
 evidence of the importance which the preach- 
 er’s utterances carry with them. This may 
 well breed in him a noble caution that his pro- 
 nouncements shall be so grounded in truth 
 and supported by reason and informed with 
 moral purpose as to be worthy the hearing 
 they receive. But it also imposes the neces- 
 sity of a fine courage as well, and suggests this 
 very range of duty lying imperatively within 
 the broader circumference of his commission. 
 In a larger and more socially effective manner 
 than the apostle had in mind, the preacher is 
 to cast down imaginations and every high 
 thing that is exalted against the knowledge of 
 God, bringing every thought into captivity to 
 the obedience of Christ. 
 
 This is recognized at once as a service akin 
 to that which the preacher accomplishes in his 
 interpretation of his age; but it has even more 
 positive character. The preacher may be a 
 wise and faithful interpreter of the currents 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 101 
 
 of thought, the movements, events, and tenden- 
 cies of the day in which he lives, and yet not 
 appreciably mold the public opinion of his 
 place and time. There are innumerable books, 
 for instance, which instruct the mind but 
 nevertheless do not alter its attitude nor 
 remove its presuppositions concerning the 
 things in which it is instructed. There are 
 many men whose antagonism to the demo- 
 cratic ideals of labor is more intense since 
 they have become accurately informed con- 
 cerning them, than it was before they knew 
 what those ideals involve. There are Chris- 
 tian men of irreproachable sincerity who are 
 as violent in their condemnation of the more 
 liberal conceptions of religion as they were 
 when those conceptions were but nebulous or 
 a name. It is not enough, in other words, 
 that the public understand what facts are and 
 what they mean; its mental attitude toward 
 those facts and that meaning must frequently 
 be rearranged. Just as children are fright- 
 ened at false faces even when they know who 
 is behind them, so there are men and women 
 instinctively hostile to new forms of ideal and 
 purpose, though they are mentally acquainted 
 with the truth those ideals and purposes seek 
 to express. Public opinion is not simply an 
 expression of intellectual judgment; it is 
 
102 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 largely an expression of feeling, standardized 
 by inherited attitudes and preconceptions 
 which have survived the older mental and 
 moral customs in which originally they found 
 sanction. The preacher has failed of one of 
 his most important and productive opportuni- 
 ties if, after a reasonable length of time, his 
 congregation and that wider following which 
 he has beyond his immediate congregation, 
 have not begun, to some extent, to reflect his 
 outlook upon the concerns of life. This is not 
 to say that they shall think wholly as he does, 
 but that their approaches to personal judg- 
 ment shall be from viewpoints adopted, 
 though perhaps unconsciously, from him; 
 that they shall be thinking in directions 
 caught, perhaps unintentionally, through the 
 contagion of his thinking. 
 
 There are three areas of intellectual inter- 
 est, each inexorably productive in practical 
 life, in which particularly the present-day 
 preacher has the opportunity and must exer- 
 cise the purpose of molding the public opin- 
 ion of his community. The first of these natu- 
 rally is that of religious belief and discussion. 
 Notwithstanding the superficial accusation so 
 frequently brought against our generation, 
 namely, that it has lost interest in religion, 
 there are few if any considerations in which 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 103 
 
 it is more vitally engaged. Whether one has 
 in mind the stupendous budgets of the 
 churches, involving sums of money beyond the 
 imagination of the most enthusiastic church- 
 man of a generation ago; or the eager hearing 
 which all exponents of strange faiths are 
 given, from the melodious platitudes of Tagore 
 to the dull futilities of Sir A. Conan Doyle; 
 or whether one is concerned with the tumult 
 of debate which has added fundamentalism 
 to our vocabulary and introduced the comic 
 spirit into our theology; our day is profoundly 
 interested in religious considerations. With- 
 out much advertisement of the word, though, 
 it must be confessed, with some prehistoric 
 survivals of the substance, theology has come 
 to be once more a prime concern with multi- 
 tudes of men and women. While this may 
 have been more accentuated, in very recent 
 years, than ordinarily, yet it is a constant 
 fact with which the preacher has to deal. 
 Continually waves of special religious inter- 
 est move across the mental life of the nation, 
 aroused by some new propaganda, or stirred 
 by some new attack upon traditional belief, or 
 quickened by some revolt or inquiry of the 
 public mind in the face of fresh catastrophe. 
 To none of these dare the preacher be indif- 
 ferent. They are forces having practical effect 
 
104 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 upon the work to which he is called. They 
 disintegrate the traditional attitudes upon 
 which he has to work, they erect new barriers 
 or open new gates to the complete evangel he 
 has to bring. One can hardly imagine the 
 pathos when, following the casualties of the 
 war, there occurs a great revival of spiritual- 
 ism; and charlatans by the thousand capi- 
 talize the sorrow of a people and wreck for 
 multitudes the once sound structures of Chris- 
 tian faith and hope. One dare not under- 
 estimate the undramatic but insidious disin- 
 tegrations of the ideas and moralities which 
 have built our civilization around the home, 
 by the suave paganism of Oriental minds, 
 become too easily a passing but decadent cult. 
 Some years ago, to carry the illustration in a 
 slightly different direction, there was a wide- 
 spread discussion, on lecture platforms and in 
 the public press, of the question, Is life worth 
 living? The question itself raises the doubt; 
 and it was morbidly interesting to observe that 
 where the discussion emphasized the element 
 of doubt, it was followed by an increase in the 
 number of suicides. How closely related to 
 the public mind the preacher is, and how sig- 
 nificant is his opportunity, finds more recent 
 evidence in the prohibition which Roman 
 Catholic clergy are trying to make effective, 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 105 
 
 admonishing their communicants against lis- 
 tening, by radio, to Protestant religious serv- 
 ices. 
 
 Interpreting the age does not meet the 
 opportunity thus surveyed; and the direction 
 of social reform by no means completely satis- 
 fies it. It is not enough that the preacher 
 inform his congregation that the revival of 
 spiritualism is a natural reaction after the 
 casualties of war. It is not enough that he 
 trace the invasion of America by pagan lec- 
 turers and pagan literature to the curiosity 
 of minds satiated with monotony—a curiosity 
 reenforced also, as far as the lecturers are con- 
 cerned, by the financial incentives which oper- 
 ate under cover of the cultural passion. The 
 preacher must remold the mind of his con- 
 gregation upon the sounder philosophies and 
 ampler implications of the Christian doctrine 
 of immortality; he must illumine the durable 
 and indispensable principles of Christian soci- 
 ety and life by which alone our western civili- 
 zation has proved its superiority to the East. 
 
 In the present-day discussion between those 
 who miscall themselves fundamentalists and 
 those who have been labeled modernists, the 
 preacher of every pulpit has one unmistakable 
 duty, a duty which becomes, indeed, his abid- 
 ing joy. It is not necessary that he join in the 
 
106 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 warfare over the specific doctrines in dispute. 
 It is necessary—and many a preacher is dis- 
 covering it to be the opportunity for which 
 he has been waiting—that out of the specific 
 debates he take occasion to shape the mind of 
 his congregation and community into right 
 attitudes toward religious development. It is 
 his supreme opportunity, in such a time ag 
 this, to mold his public opinion to support free- 
 dom of thinking, to register unhesitant loyalty 
 to truth, to conscience and to character; to 
 recognize that the details which divide our 
 religious theories and thought, inherited as 
 they may be in ever so ancient a tradition, are 
 negligible beside the indubitable devotion of 
 the religious life. 
 
 A second area of intellectual interest, pro- 
 ductive in practical life, is that of social ideals 
 and purposes. Here also the preacher has his 
 advantaged and imperative place for the crea- 
 tion of public opinion. Reference has already 
 been made to the preacher’s strategic position 
 in the direction of social reform; but it is to 
 be remembered that no social reform will 
 progress beyond the limit to which public 
 opinion is in its favor. It is the preacher’s 
 opportunity and his obligation as well, as per- 
 haps it is no other’s, to keep public opinion, on 
 the one hand, moving forward to the support 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 107 
 
 of adequate and permanent reform, and, on 
 the other, to hold it back from reenforcing 
 those radical innovations and unsound social 
 readjustments the end of which must be the 
 failure which disillusions where it does not 
 disrupt, and that alienates the public mind 
 from legitimate reforms which, undefeated, 
 would effect enduring social good. It has 
 recently been remarked that “We charge the 
 artist with the double responsibility of creat- 
 ing both his art and his audience.”? It is as 
 truthfully to be said of the preacher in his 
 relation to the social implications of religion 
 and the social expression of religion. He has 
 not only to be effective in the interpretation 
 of the one and the direction of the other; he 
 has to create the public opinion which will 
 enforce and maintain them. 
 
 In this is to be recognized not only a grave 
 responsibility upon the preacher of to-day, 
 but one of the subtlest and most fatal of the 
 perils which menace his influence. A notable 
 English churchman has lately been criticized 
 in an anonymous and, therefore, not very cred- 
 itable volume, on the ground that his sermons 
 “proclaim rather the social energy of a good 
 citizen than the fervent zeal of an apostle on 
 
 2Wiggam: New Decalogue of Science, p. 180. Copyright, 1922. Used 
 by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. 
 
108 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 fire with his Master’s message.”* The criti- 
 cism itself is of small value because it may so 
 easily represent the stock dissatisfaction of a 
 conventional mind positive that there is no 
 fire where it cannot stereotype the blaze. One 
 may be on fire with his Master’s message, 
 while he is attacking the too common alliance 
 between a police department and protected 
 vice, or debating the coordination of a city’s 
 philanthropic agencies. But there is never- 
 theless a very real peril that, in the preacher’s 
 eagerness to mold public opinion toward cer- 
 tain social interests and sympathies, he shall 
 lose the one note which gives his voice its only 
 carrying power. It is only because any truth 
 about God is social; because, in other words, 
 any social good has its roots in religious obli- 
 gation, that the preacher has responsibility 
 for shaping, to the utmost of his opportunity, 
 the public opinion of his time and place. In 
 fulfilling that responsibility is one of the pro- 
 founder compensations of the preacher’s risk 
 and labor. There are few hours more inspir- 
 ing or more sobering than that in which it is 
 disclosed to him that, here and there, through 
 his congregation and his community, produc- 
 tive minds are being kindled to something of 
 
 
 
 8 Painted Windows, p. 93f. By a Gentleman With a Duster. Courtesy 
 of G. P. Putnam’s Sons, publishers, New York and London. 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 109 
 
 his social outlook, and slowly a reckonable 
 mental habit begins to rise in the directions 
 he has proclaimed. 
 
 The preacher has the opportunity, and upon 
 him is the responsibility of creating public 
 opinion in a third area of interest: that which, 
 for lack of a more precise phrase, may be 
 called the area of national policy. This obli- 
 gation is now rising, for the first time, into 
 general recognition; though in times of grave 
 emergency this duty of the preacher’s to shape 
 public opinion in what is called the right direc- 
 tion has been accepted even by men and women 
 who fiercely resent any pulpit utterance which 
 seems to impinge upon the conventional inter- 
 ests of national life. What is patriotism in 
 war has not yet been able to escape the charge 
 of partisanship in peace. But now men are 
 beginning to see that, whatever may be the 
 risk of misunderstanding, the pulpit must 
 speak on those great public interests which 
 form so large a part of the intellectual and 
 social habit of the nation. 
 
 That is taken for granted and widely prac- 
 ticed in the pulpits of war times. One of the 
 elements in our national experience during the 
 recent war, an element which, as we look back 
 on it, raises the most serious questioning in 
 the minds of many, was the unanimity with 
 
110 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 which the Protestant pulpits lent themselves 
 to propaganda inspired and supplied by the 
 national government. They reinterpreted the 
 history of the German people in terms of 
 avarice, cruelty, and force. They exalted the 
 services of France to the American colonies a 
 hundred and forty years earlier, and the gen- 
 erous friendship of British seamen at the time 
 of friction between the American and German 
 fleets at Manila during the war with Spain. 
 They suppressed all recollection of the rasping 
 contacts with France which have not been 
 wholly absent from American history, and 
 were nobly silent concerning British and 
 American relations during the Civil War. 
 Preachers who were too old to enter the army 
 were relentless in their enthusiasm for the 
 war; finding their support for the crusade, as 
 they called it, in the New Testament and even 
 in the words of Christ. This is not written in 
 any criticism of the temper into which preach- 
 ers and laymen alike were flung by the sink- 
 ing of ships, the reported atrocities, and the 
 whole tempest of indignation which swept 
 around them from events abroad and pro- 
 Germanism at home. It is simply illustrating 
 the fact that in these times of national emer- 
 gency the preacher has always contributed 
 effectively to the creation of public opinion. 
 
AND PUBLIC OPINION 111 
 
 It is the same part which he has now to play 
 in forming the opinion of his public toward 
 equally vital, though less dramatic, courses of 
 national action in times of peace. It belongs 
 to him, more than to any other man, to create 
 the public sentiment which will accomplish 
 strict enforcement of law. It belongs to him, 
 as to no other man, to further in the general 
 public those national tendencies and aims 
 which will reduce the friction from certain 
 international contacts. He alone can effec- 
 tively link the great nonpartisan political 
 enterprises with those moral impulses and 
 moral imperatives which appeal alike to all 
 men. He alone can effectively support great 
 moral purposes in government and diplomacy, 
 by disclosing their unrecognized sources in 
 spiritual ideals, and by reenforcing their ethics 
 with the authority of religion. To be once 
 more specific: It is the preacher who, to-day 
 and in the generation just ahead, will be the 
 most powerful voice, the most compelling 
 influence, in the creation of that public mind 
 and ideal and conscience and conviction 
 which, to use a phrase but lately coined, will 
 outlaw war. 
 
 Other great causes, of course, suggest 
 themselves, which need not be specified here. 
 Others will rise from time to time to face the 
 
112 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 nation with the duty of deeper insight, and to 
 summon the preacher to new prophetic enter- 
 prises. The years through which we are pass- 
 ing are turbulent with the fate of nations, the 
 future of peoples, the hopes of humankind. 
 Only as the host of conflicting passions hear 
 constantly some “deeper voice across the 
 storm,” only as they are merged into a com- 
 mon moral and social purpose, can there be 
 wrought that tranquil culture, that just and 
 satisfying government, that generous democ- 
 racy of ideal and life, which can shelter and 
 sustain the generations of men. Only wise 
 and patient guidance of the common mind can 
 so much as begin that unifying of our now 
 discordant life. By tradition, by place, by 
 opportunity, it is the preachers who best 
 offer that guidance, and who most surely can 
 create the public opinion in which that unity 
 will find itself at home. Because what James 
 Russell Lowell wrote of the poets is proudly 
 true of the preachers who are called of God 
 and look out upon the world of time in the 
 light of their commission : 
 “Tt is they 
 Who utter wisdom from the central deep, 
 
 And, listening to the inner flow of things, 
 Speak to the age out of eternity.” 
 
Vv 
 
 THE PREACHER AND THE PRESENT 
 HOUR 
 
 In the preceding pages and in these which 
 follow, a certain character has been assumed 
 as inhering in the Christian ministry, which 
 has not been emphasized in recent years per- 
 haps as strongly as in other generations. It is 
 its character as a special vocation, not simply 
 an occupation which the preacher chooses but, 
 rather, a cause and call which capture him. 
 One may fairly say that the minister who does 
 not feel as the profound compulsion of his 
 life, “Woe is unto me, if I preach not the 
 gospel,” has no warrant for his ministry and 
 no word for the present hour. But the true 
 preacher comes to a world to-day which waits, 
 in spite of itself, for a disclosure which only 
 he can bring. This is the hour of opportunity 
 for the prophetic insight and the proclaiming 
 voice. 
 
 This involves an unmistakable estimate of 
 the preacher’s quality and place. It is not as 
 condescendingly regarded as it once was, for 
 all the criticism which continues to beat upon 
 
 113 
 
114 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 both the man and his office. Charles Lamb 
 described the Reverend John Mitford as “a 
 pleasant layman spoiled.” The eighteenth- 
 century parson was half chaplain, half drudge, 
 who left the squire’s table before dessert and 
 as Macaulay wrote, “stood aloof till he was 
 Summoned to return thanks for the repast, 
 from a greater part of which he had been 
 excluded.” Only sixty years ago Thomas 
 Wentworth Higginson recorded in his journal 
 that he had stopped during an afternoon’s 
 walk, to read the notices posted at a tollgate, 
 and the last of them was “Clergymen and 
 Funerals Gratis.” Notwithstanding clerical 
 discounts which ought in all honor to be 
 abolished, there is little left of that old-time 
 patronizing of the preacher. Governor Brad- 
 ford’s history of the Plymouth plantation pre- 
 serves a letter written by the company agent 
 describing certain men and stuff sent out in 
 1623 ; in which is the frank remark that “The 
 preacher we have sent is (we hope) an honest 
 plaine man, though none of ye most eminente 
 and rare”; which is about as far as any depre- 
 catory observations to-day can truly go. That 
 the contemporary criticism of him is so clam- 
 orous is no slight tribute to the preacher’s 
 strength. Its very turbulence argues the 
 impact which he is making. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 115 
 
 That is but another way of saying that the 
 world estimates the preacher, as it does its 
 other servants, at about the value they demon- 
 strate in themselves. One dare not be un- 
 mindful of the fact that many preachers are 
 ineffective in life and incompetent in service. 
 Dr. Samuel McChord Crothers has remarked 
 of the clergymen of modern fiction that one can 
 hear their souls scrape; and if that cannot be 
 said of preachers in actual life, yet no one will 
 deny Dr. George A. Gordon’s charge against 
 some of their number that a mean kind of 
 retail trade has taken possession of them. 
 But at most these more ignoble members of a 
 noble order are negligible. ‘A middlin’ doctor 
 is a pore thing, and a middlin’ lawyer is a 
 pore thing; but keep me from a middlin’ man 
 of God.”? The future does not belong to him. 
 That is the attitude of the world in general. 
 What remains to be said concerns itself, ac- 
 cordingly, with that greatening company of 
 men, disciplined in mind, dedicated in life, 
 ample in knowledge, eager and unaffrighted in 
 the face of new truth, at home in the affairs 
 of other men and not unacquainted with the 
 secret place of God; who look out upon the 
 world of time in the light of eternity; who 
 
 
 
 1Wister: The Virginian, p. 214. Reprinted by permission of the 
 Macmillan Company, publishers. 
 
116 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 hear, amid the tumult of the hour, the tranquil 
 admonition of the centuries; and who, chal- 
 lenged alike by the seductions of expediency 
 and the attractions of the profitable and 
 pleasant, declare without compromise for that 
 which is right. The future does belong to 
 them. For society, swept with doubt and 
 cynical in its ferment, storms secure within 
 the uncrumbled defenses of spiritual ideal 
 and moral sanction and restraint, because the 
 preacher, whose commission comes from higher 
 than any times or all occasions, still declares, 
 amid shifting opinions and interests that fade, 
 the mighty verities by which men live. 
 
 For such a preacher as has just been indi- 
 cated, this is the hour of opportunity because 
 the world to-day is defeated by the inertia of 
 its knowledge, and the preacher offers it the 
 dynamic of a moral passion. There can be no 
 question as to what Professor Erskine has 
 called the moral obligation to be intelligent ; 
 but one of the salutary achievements which 
 the age has yet to accomplish is the recogni- 
 tion of the limits within which intelligence 
 alone has value. Knowledge may add a new 
 quality to enthusiasm; it may provide a base 
 for adventurous curiosity; it may offer an 
 asylum for the timid mind on which the spec- 
 tacle of actual life breaks with too confusing 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 117 
 
 an impact; but it may nevertheless be very 
 far from wisdom, and it is not in itself the 
 energy which sustains. “TI arrived at Oxford,” 
 wrote Edward Gibbon, “with a stock of erudi- 
 tion that might have puzzled a Doctor, and a 
 degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy 
 would have been ashamed.” It is obvious to 
 remark that in the sheer accumulation of 
 knowledge the present day exceeds any period 
 of time before it. The disclosures made in the 
 realm of natural science, and the application 
 of scientific knowledge to practical enterprise, 
 the tabulation of facts, vital statistics in the 
 interest of public health, the definite results 
 of historical criticism and the rediscovery of 
 the past by scholarship and exploration, the 
 universe of ghosts which introspection has 
 discerned inhabiting the enigma of personal- 
 ity—all these and more, the commonplaces of 
 the intelligent interest of the day, constitute a 
 store of knowledge such as no previous genera- 
 tion anticipated. The effect has been unmis- 
 takable. ‘No little of the bold hopes, the buoy- 
 ant forecasts of inevitable social progress, 
 the unrestrained confidence in the automatic 
 improvement of human affairs, with which 
 men indulged their yesterday, were due to the 
 impression made on acquiescent minds by this 
 accumulation of knowledge. It is the inertia 
 
118 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 of it all which is now so bewildering. Men 
 know so much but seem to be no more. His- 
 tory repeats with recurrent emphasis that of 
 all cunningly devised fables, none is more fab- 
 ulous than that knowledge is power. Knowl- 
 edge may offer direction, it may inspire effort, 
 it may discipline motive, but power springs 
 elsewhere. 
 
 No poets come to us with the erudition of 
 Dante and Milton, so that to cite them in 
 illustration will disarm suspicion that any 
 discrediting of knowledge is implied. In sheer 
 intellectual accumulation and range, they are 
 masters of their times. But of Dante, whose 
 knowledge is fused into the most spacious and 
 enduring art, one of his penetrating critics 
 has written that the true secret of his strange 
 power is not in his art, but in his spirit; and 
 “What you owe to Milton,” said De Quincey, 
 “is not any knowledge; what you owe is 
 power.” In connection with the latter it is 
 significant also that the most intelligent and 
 capacious figure in “Paradise Lost” is Satan; 
 so that as Professor Erskine has observed, 
 perfectly moral readers may fear lest Milton 
 may have known good and evil, but could not 
 tell them apart. What Dr. Fosdick some time 
 ago remarked of science in particular may be 
 equally well said of the accumulations of 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 119 
 
 knowledge in general which characterize con- 
 temporary life. When they have given us all 
 their power, we still need another kind of 
 power which it is not the business of knowl- 
 edge to supply. 
 
 This is not merely an academic discussion. 
 It takes practical hold upon the sinister 
 impasse to which society seems to have come 
 in Europe and which seems threatening the 
 world. Signor Nitti, the Italian statesman, 
 said to Mr. Philip Kerr at San Remo: “There 
 is a difference between you English-speaking 
 peoples and us Continentals. ... Your civili- 
 zation, your politics, rest upon moral ideas; 
 ours on intellectual.” Circumstances permit 
 one to entertain less lofty opinions of our Eng- 
 lish-speaking peoples; for it is necessary only 
 to turn to the letters of Walter Hines Page 
 to read that at the time of the Mexican Revo- 
 lution, some decade ago, in all the columns of 
 newspaper comment with which he was com- 
 pelled to familiarize himself, he did not see 
 even an allusion to any moral principle in- 
 volved, nor a word of concern for the Mexican 
 people. It was all about who was the stronger, 
 Huerta or some other bandit, and about the 
 necessity of order for the sake of financial 
 interests. “This,” the Ambassador wrote, 
 ‘Gllustrates the complete divorce of European 
 
120 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 politics and fundamental morals.”? While 
 even the most patriotic observer of American 
 public life recently could go no further than 
 to believe the divorce between our own politics 
 and fundamental morals is not irreparable. 
 
 This is not to question the sincere purposes 
 of the minds which project and develop the 
 destinies of great states; it is simply to recog- 
 nize the incapacity of intelligence alone. Of 
 Peter Stuyvesant, the Knickerbocker History 
 of New York remarks that “he wanted noth- 
 ing more to complete him as a statesman than 
 to think always right.” But the statesmen of 
 the hour need for their completion little more 
 than to will always right. It is not new inter- 
 national treaties that will do the work now 
 needed to be done; it is a new character in 
 internationalists. Not more knowledge, but 
 a moral passion is the answer to the necessi- 
 ties of the present time. 
 
 Lord Charnwood, in his penetrating study 
 of Theodore Roosevelt, quotes an illuminating 
 statement of President McKinley’s in connec- 
 tion with his decision to take the Philippines: 
 “He ‘walked the White House night after 
 night until midnight, and ... went down on 
 (his) knees and prayed to Almighty God for 
 
 
 
 _ 2Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page, Vol. 1, p. 184 Used by per- 
 mission of Doubleday, Page & Co., publishers. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 121 
 
 light and guidance. ... And one night late it 
 came to (him) this way: (he) did not know 
 how it was, but it came: that ... there was 
 nothing ... to do but to take them all and to 
 educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize 
 and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to 
 do the best we could by them as our fellow 
 men for whom Christ died.’ ”* 
 
 There is the dynamic moral passion opera- 
 tive through a President; but it is the preacher 
 who alone offers it commandingly amid the 
 inertia of the world’s knowledge. Many voices 
 are calling across the wreckage of present-day 
 desire: science, education, political expedi- 
 ency, commercial interest—a groping tumult 
 of frantic, blind intent. One voice has this 
 note of victorious constraint. 
 
 In the “Alcestis” of Euripides, Hercules 
 comes to the home of his friend Admetus, 
 ignorant of the tragedy which has resulted in 
 Alcestis’ death; and, kept in ignorance until 
 after he has feasted, he learns from a servant 
 the direful truth. Then he makes his great 
 resolve; and to read the lines is to wonder 
 once again at the genius which, after twenty- 
 five centuries, can so capture imagination and 
 awake emotion with the recital of exploits 
 
 
 
 ?Charnwood: Theodore Roosevelt, p. 123. Used by permission of The 
 Atlantic Monthly Press, Inc., publishers. 
 
122 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 which never occurred by heroes who never 
 lived. Hercules hears from the servant that 
 Alcestis has been carried away by death and, 
 standing there, suddenly dignified for all the 
 festal garlands on his head, lifts himself and 
 Says, 
 
 “O heart, O hand, great doings have ye done 
 
 Of old: up now, and show them what a son 
 
 Took life that hour, when she of Tiryn’s sod, 
 Electryon’s daughter, mingled with her God!’ 
 
 and goes out; to return, disheveled, labored, 
 but behind him, between two attendants, 
 Alcestis torn from the mighty grip of Death 
 and made to live again. 
 
 There is the preacher, meeting the tragedy 
 of the world not with a philosophy, but with 
 a passion ; not with an accumulation of knowl- 
 edge but with a divine deed. He, and he alone, 
 shows a defeated society what a Son took life 
 that other hour of destiny. The world recalls. 
 “Though we crucified Christ on a _ stick,” 
 George Bernard Shaw said, “he somehow man- 
 aged to get hold of the right end of it; and 
 if we were better men, we might try his plan.” 
 _ The preacher, with an authority none other 
 dare assume, declares anew the power of God 
 
 “ .. on this dark world to lighten it, 
 
 And power on this dead world to make it live.” 
 ~~ +The Alcestis”; Gilbert Murray’s translation, p. 48. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 1238 
 
 “This man,’ as the English Ambassador 
 Randolph wrote from Edinburgh, concerning 
 John Knox, “puts more life in us in one hour 
 than six hundred trumpets blustering in our 
 ears.” 
 
 This is the hour of opportunity for the 
 preacher, also, because the world to-day is 
 betrayed by the tentative character of social 
 reform; and only the preacher can speak with 
 authority to its conscience the effective chal- 
 lenge of personal obligation. The nobler 
 result of the Wesleyan movement, wrote John 
 Richard Green, “was the steady attempt, 
 which has never ceased from that day to this, 
 to remedy the guilt, the ignorance, the physi- 
 cal suffering, the social degradation of the 
 profligate and the poor.” It is possible that 
 this appraisal of the social results of the Wes- 
 leyan revival is accurate, but it is inapplicable 
 to the social ideals of the churches to-day. 
 The social creed of the churches now extends 
 far beyond remedies, and aims at the causes 
 of ignorance, suffering, and social degrada- 
 tion. It occupies no narrower purpose than 
 that of social justice. But the fact must be 
 remembered with increasing conviction that 
 social reform is an inescapable part of the 
 Christian enterprise, and that much of the 
 serious conditions which now prevail in so- 
 
124 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 ciety, and particularly in industry, are due to 
 the mishandling of the social adventure which 
 the church began. 
 
 The large and durable advantages which 
 have come to society as a whole from the devel- 
 opment of the social passion and the conduct 
 of the movements for social justice are appar- 
 ent. Childhood has been steadily rescued 
 from the bitterness of premature labor. Mul- 
 titudes have regained their ancient right of 
 leisure. The margin of economic security has 
 been accomplished for many who yesterday 
 had no future but fear and destitution. Priv- 
 acy, comfort, health, and a stake in the land 
 have been made possible to thousands who 
 formerly were little more than herded crea- 
 tures of events and accident. Horizons have 
 been given to men and women who heretofore 
 had only limits. For an unreckonable host 
 labor has ceased to mean social helplessness 
 and has become power, while bare existence 
 has blossomed into life. The result has been 
 easily apparent, and almost as fatal. With 
 the assumption of inevitable progress in its 
 mind, and the spectacle of physical comfort 
 and freedom before its eyes, a generation 
 rested its expectations of the future on the 
 mechanical relationships among men and on 
 the adjustment of the social order to satisfy 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 125 
 
 the persistent human need. It discovered, 
 quite to the contrary, that every improvement 
 in the condition, the comfort, the privilege and 
 the capacity of men, is accompanied by a com- 
 mensurate enlargement of desire; that these 
 increasing social gains pour in upon an unsat- 
 isfied discontent as the “rivers run into the 
 sea, yet the sea is not full.” 
 
 This betrayal, of course, goes deeper than 
 mere discontent, however violent or revolu- 
 tionary the discontent may be. Increased 
 wages, shorter hours, the privileges of reason- 
 able labor have not made workmen more hon- 
 est in their work or more interested in the 
 service it is presumed to render; just as 
 increased wealth has not made rich men more 
 just, more generous, more responsive to the 
 rights of the public, or more ready as they are 
 more competent to serve society. There are, 
 of course, fewer and less biting social injus- 
 tices than there were, and there will be still 
 fewer to-morrow. The wrongs which rise from 
 technic of organization, from class inherit- 
 ances and the solidifications of ancient custom, 
 are diminishing before the expansions of social 
 reform. But the basal wrong largely remains, 
 namely, the economic estimation of life itself, 
 which is unchanged by any changes in the 
 terms of temporal good. Society organized 
 
126 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 around high wages is just as materialistic and 
 incompetent as society organized around low 
 wages. Humanity appraised in terms of com- 
 fort is as mean as humanity indicted in terms 
 of misery. The direction of development 
 seems to be better, but there is no terminus in 
 sight; and there can be no satisfaction until 
 men discern beyond the process a result 
 which deserves and promises to be permanent. 
 Saint John’s vision of a holy city is far more 
 reassuring than any commonwealth of closed 
 shops or tax-exempt securities. Reform in the 
 machineries of materialism can never satisfy 
 the spirit. By reaction it may, on the other 
 hand, betray men into the impotence of gen- 
 eralizations. As Professor Sperry has put it, 
 “The social gospel is in a fair way to develop 
 a breed of Christians who face every moral 
 challenge with the evasion, ‘Lord, what wilt 
 thou have the social order do?’ ”® 
 
 It is the preacher who to-day thunders upon 
 the world whose tragedies have wakened a 
 willingness to hear what its self-assurance for- 
 merly ignored, the reliable solvent of personal 
 obligation. One of the banners carried by the 
 English political reformers of 1848 bore the 
 legend, “More Pigs and Less Parsons.” But 
 
 
 
 5Sperry: The Disciplines of Liberty, p. 83. Used by permission of the 
 Yale University Press. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 127 
 
 increasingly men are discerning that the more 
 pigs there are, the more parsons there must 
 be; the more material prosperity, in other 
 words, the more need there is for the repeated 
 admonitions of the higher personal life. One 
 of the associates of Bishop Bashford, speak- 
 ing of him as a preacher, said significantly, 
 “No matter what his subject, if he begins with 
 the multiplication table, he will wind up with 
 the Sermon on the Mount.”® That is the pro- 
 phetic logic with which the preacher is divinely 
 commissioned, and of which he is authenti- 
 cally possessed; and men turn, as has been 
 observed, ‘“‘to the gospel of Galilee with 
 renewed interest because the gospel of Man- 
 chester has proved such a shabby substitute.” 
 
 This is not to be taken for something of that 
 unctuous optimism which so frequently makes 
 the children of light seem more ludicrous than 
 illumined, the optimism which takes for 
 granted that the world is crowding to the 
 reproach of Christ. It is not necessary to 
 accept Dean Inge’s cynical declaration that 
 Christianity will never be acceptable to the 
 majority, in order to acknowledge that men 
 are not hurrying to the altars of the church as 
 doves to the windows. The preacher comes 
 to the challenge of the social mood to-day, not 
 
 §Grose: James W. Bashford, p. 65f. 
 
 
 
128 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 as a shepherd singing to a willing flock, but 
 as a prophet declaring inexorable and com- 
 manding truth to a generation whose betrayals 
 drive it to hear him. Around him is the 
 tumult, but in his voice is thunder; and “God 
 be thanked who has matched us with this 
 hour!” 
 
 This is the hour of opportunity for the 
 preacher, furthermore, because the world to- 
 day is imperiled by its perversions of liberty; 
 and the preacher proclaims with searched and 
 questioned, but impregnable sanctions, the 
 productive securities of law. The author of 
 a recent historical study, calling attention to 
 the fact that civilization has reached its 
 present stage only after a long and hazardous 
 mental journey, makes the arresting remark 
 that its achievements and hopes of greater 
 things are now largely in the hands of men 
 and women who know little of that hazardous 
 journey and have no clear idea of their own 
 responsibility toward the future of mankind. 
 That is a historian’s way of referring to the 
 very evident dangers of democracy, the in- 
 capacity of majorities, and the untrustworthy 
 impulses of the crowd. It also suggests, per- 
 haps, some reason for what must be patent to 
 any thoughtful observer of contemporary life 
 —its mood of fretful independence, its dis- 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 129 
 
 regard of old restraints, its rejection of the 
 disciplines of conduct, relationship, and 
 desire, all of which are features in and factors 
 of these yeasty times. What Thomas Carlyle 
 wrote eighty years ago remains still true. 
 “Brethren, we know but imperfectly yet, after 
 ages of Constitutional Government, what 
 Liberty and Slavery are.” 
 
 To a thoughtful mind the contemporary 
 world presents aspects of revolution, no less 
 significant because sheer force of arms, on any 
 universal scale, is, as yet, but a figure very 
 dim amid the shadows. Here, for instance, is 
 the newer criticism, analyzing the making of 
 mind, and apparently mistaking disintegra- 
 tion for deliverance; assuring the inquiring 
 present that the only meaning of the past is 
 that it has no meaning whatever. Here is a 
 practical psychology exhibiting the secret 
 places of the heart in order to demonstrate 
 that the baser passions are the deepest and 
 most authoritative disclosures of life’s char- 
 acter and intent; and that the glory of personal 
 experience is to escape from the restraints 
 which differentiate humanity from the beasts. 
 Here, also, is a new liberalism in religion; not 
 the reverent and cultured liberty of a Chris- 
 tian man which, while lacking the evangelical 
 fervors, has given to Protestantism a grate- 
 
130 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 ful sweetness and light; but, rather, a blatant 
 denial of the older imperatives of religion, an 
 indifference to the sanctions of millenniums 
 of spiritual insight proven in noble living; a 
 noisy insolence of thought and feeling in revolt 
 against the austere admonitions of experience. 
 While across the broad landscapes of social, 
 industrial, and political concern comes storm- 
 ing up the menace of the armed class war. 
 The strength of the danger draws from the 
 passion to which this revolutionary mood 
 appeals, the high and hallowed prerogative of 
 freedom which it invokes. The inviolable inde- 
 pendence of the personal spirit, the right to 
 express one’s life unimpeded by the restraints 
 of ancient custom or inherited prudence, or 
 social conventions which have survived the 
 occasions which first gave them sanction— 
 these are the principles on behalf of which 
 the elder inhibitions are battered down by the 
 pressure of indulgences which history does not 
 authorize and experience has not confirmed. 
 In thought, in life, in labor, in the realms of 
 faith and order, the world seems to have 
 accepted an arrogance of unrestraint for the 
 proud but humble pursuit of just responsi- 
 bility which is the true pledge of liberty. Men 
 have become so obsessed with freedom that 
 they have forgotten what they are free to do. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR 181 
 
 They are so engaged with their independence 
 that they are slaves to the transient hour. 
 They are so eager to be themselves that they 
 fail often to be right. As Principal Forsyth 
 put it, they have been brandishing liberty 
 instead of exercising service. That imperial 
 sobriety with which men once accepted, as a 
 chrism, the solemn opportunity of self-direc- 
 tion, has been lost in the uninformed selfish- 
 ness which admits no master and acknowl- 
 edges no God. 
 
 It is to this hour that the preacher comes 
 with one prophetic and, ultimately, inescap- 
 able reality to which society and individual 
 thought alike must return. Amid the waver- 
 ing accents of legislation which has failed and 
 legislators who are frightened; amid the acid 
 irreverence of the criticism which would 
 crumble the reproachful past and the profane 
 selfishness which disintegrates the nobler pos- 
 sibilities of the present; amid the pessimism 
 which identifies narrowness with zeal and 
 ignorance with orthodoxy, and cries mourn- 
 fully of vanished times—amid them all the 
 authentic preacher stands declaring the one 
 reality in which liberty and law are synthe- 
 sized in effective life. 
 
 One of the luminous though little remem- 
 bered portraits in English literature is that of 
 
132 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 the father of the Bronté sisters, led into his 
 pulpit and standing there, “a gray sightless 
 old man, his blind eyes looking straight out 
 before him,” while his words keep falling with 
 all the force and vigor of his best days. There 
 is a mystic, seerlike atmosphere which haunts 
 that portrait and suggests something of the 
 noblest qualities of the preaching ministry. 
 But there is another figure more apt as an 
 illustration of the preacher of to-day: George 
 Whitefield, as Dr. S. Parkes Cadman charac- 
 terizes him, who “had the art of mingling the 
 infinite with the commonplace, which is one 
 requisite of effective preaching.” Of White- 
 field, Dr. Cadman writes that “he exalted God 
 until everything pertaining to law, duty, and 
 conduct became strangely solemn and momen- 
 tous.”* Not otherwise will law, duty, and 
 conduct become solemn and momentous now; 
 and it is the preacher alone who challenges 
 and checks and eventually will rectify the per- 
 versions of liberty with the subduing recogni- 
 tion of a rediscovered God. 
 
 Finally, also, if a paragraph may be devoted 
 to what might engage a chapter, the preacher 
 finds the present age his hour of opportunity 
 because, amid the progress of knowledge, the 
 
 
 
 7Cadman: Ambassadors of God, p. 69. Reprinted by permission of 
 The Macmillan Company, publishers. 
 
AND THE PRESENT HOUR = 13838 
 
 programs of social readjustment, the inspira- 
 tions of expanding freedom, to him alone has 
 been committed the ministry of consolation. 
 What has just been said has dealt with the 
 more heroic aspects of his vocation and life, 
 amid which the preacher stands as a com- 
 manding and strategic figure on a wide-flung 
 battlefield. But it is not to be forgotten that 
 on every battlefield are many casualties. Men 
 are not yet done with what Walter Pater 
 called “the stream of human tears always fall- 
 ing through the shadows of the world.” There 
 are a hundred altering experiences of dis- 
 illusionment, but the tragedy of suffering, loss, 
 and sorrow remains basally single and un- 
 changed. One cannot apprehend the world as 
 it is to-day and leave out of account the wist- 
 ful anguish of a generation which, by war and 
 pestilence augmenting the procession of mor- 
 tality, has been driven to storm the gates of 
 mystery to learn what landscape lies beyond 
 its graves. The prominence of a renascent 
 spiritualism, and the response which it has 
 received, ornamented, as it has been, by emi- 
 nent intelligences and eloquent of noble 
 names, does not argue simply the multiplica- 
 tion of curious minds, but, rather, the eager- 
 ness of broken hearts in whose bewilderment 
 knowledge has proven inadequate and faith 
 
134 SUFFICIENT MINISTERS 
 
 too dim. Amid their sorrows men and women 
 still “stretch out their hands in love of that 
 farther shore,” discovering anew that no mere 
 continuity of existence or of consciousness 
 from which moral significance and a personal 
 God alike are absent, can satisfy their illimit- 
 able griefs. 
 
 But as Charlotte Bronté wrote, “there are 
 some consolations ... too fine for the ear not 
 fondly and forever to retain their echo; caress- 
 ing kindnesses—loved, lingered over through 
 a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, 
 and answering the call with undimmed shine, 
 out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death 
 himself.” No man can speak those consola- 
 tions as can the preacher. The vision sustain- 
 ing humanity’s ideals and endeavors may 
 draw from many springs; but the only stream 
 by which its sorrows may be tranquillized to 
 strength and patience is that which proceeds 
 out of the throne of God. In Matthew 
 Arnold’s words, “The Cross still stands, and 
 in the straits of the soul makes its ancient 
 appeal.” And life, bewildered, broken, lonely 
 amid its memories and hysterical among its 
 hopes, knows no figure as authentic as the 
 spokesman of the Cross. 
 
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