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John Elliott Fund'

THE FREEDOM OF
THE PREACHER

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO ¦ DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON ¦ BOMBAY ¦ CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA. Ltd.
TORONTO

THE FREEDOM OF
THE PREACHER

BY
WILLIAM PIERSON MERRILL
Minister of the Brick Presbyterian Church
in the City of New York

THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURES ON
PREACHING, FOR THE YEAR 1933

jRtto got*
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922
All rights reserved

FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEEICA

Copyright, 1922,
Br THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and printed. Published October, 1922.

WvV

Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.

"Life is freedom, inserting itself within
necessity, and turning it to its profit."
Hbnbi Bergson.

CONTENTS
PAOE
CHAPTER
I. As Prophet  1
II. As Preacher  23
III. As Priest  39
IV. As Churchman  58
V. As Administrator  "°
VI. In the Social Order  95
VII. In the World Order  112
VIII. In Christ  131

I
THE PROPHET

THE FREEDOM
OF THE PREACHER
CHAPTER I
THE PROPHET
The prophet is the preacher's ideal. The humblest
preacher looks at the spokesman of God, afire with the
truth, filled with the Spirit, accredited by the touch
of the Eternal Word, and says, "That is what I would
be, if I could." Yet few attain to the ideal.
The preacher is at once more and less than the
prophet: — widely more, immeasurably less. More, be
cause he must serve and run and walk on many lines,
while the prophet sends his full fiery force down one
straight line; less, because only at rare moments, if
at all, does he enter into the glory of inspiration, when
he knows that what he speaks is the living word of the
living God to living men, which they question at their
peril. These lectures are designed for preachers, rather
than for prophets, for the many who> stand in common
places, not for the few called to stand on some Mount
Carmel. Yet, just because the prophet is the preacher's
ideal, and because, few though they be, the prophets
are the choicest possession of the church and among
l

& THE FREEDOM OP THE PREACHER
the greatest gifts God bestows on the race, we may
well begin the discussion of freedom of speech in the
pulpit, its rights and limits, with a clear declaration
of the right and necessity of prophetic liberty.
The prophet means more to religion than any other
man, or all other men taken together. There is simply
no comparison between him and the priest, as to their
value to religion.
The church has leaped forward at those rare times
when prophets appeared, men speaking with authority,
and not as scribes. The church has languished or
moved at a dull, dead pace, when authority was all
found by scribes, in the past and its records. As one
reads church history, he wonders if the most typical
scene in it may not be that in which, after Judas Mac-
cabaeus had recaptured Jerusalem, the leaders of the
victorious Judeans debated what to do with the dese
crated altar. Swine's flesh had been offered upon it.
It had become an unholy thing. How might it be
cleansed? Could it be cleansed at all? Unable to
decide aright, they carefully laid the stones of the altar
aside "until a prophet should arise, who should tell
them what the will of the Lord was." All through
the course of religious history, we see the wisest men,
the saintliest, the boldest, laying aside practical prob
lems, great questions, until there should stand up a
man of God, a prophet, who would know what should
be done.
How the prophet is needed throughout the world's
life to-day! Never has there been so vivid and pro
found and diffused a consciousness that things are
wrong, so utter a bewilderment as to how they may
be set right. There is an excess of critical analysis,
and a dearth of constructive synthesis. We are tak-

THE PROPHET 6
ing down our altars, educational, political, physical,
ecclesiastical, social; we are conscious that they have
been denied by the foulness of war; we are carefully
setting the stones one side, until a prophet shall arise
to tell us what the will of the Lord is. We long to
hear his voice, but we do not detect it either crying in
the wilderness or arresting the attention of the city's
busy throng. Priests? We have enough of them, far
too many. Ministers? They tell us there is a dearth
of them, but we suspect that the truth is that the world
wants fewer churches served by fewer and better men.
But how we need a prophet or two, who can see
straight and far, can speak with passion and with
authority, and can prepare the way of the Lord, laying
straight into the dim time to come the lines on which
God's Kingdom may get forward.
It is not in religion only that the prophet is needed.
Everywhere there is the call for men of imaginative
insight, moral passion, and the voice of authority.
Yet always there will be a certain spiritual aloofness, a
definitely religious character, about the prophet. Very
likely he will not be a churchman; but certainly he
will not be a business man. It is eternally significant
that the great hero who stands out from the mists of
ancient history like a granite mountain half-seen
through the fog, the man the impress of whose great
ness is on all modern civilization, was neither priest
nor ruler, but man of God. Moses made priests; he
appointed rulers; but he was unquestionably above
them all, though he held no office. And this man, the
one indispensable man in the whole horde, was most
at home in the "Tent of Meeting," where his soul was
alone with God's spirit. One of the best promises in
all the wealth of divine assurances of good is the prom-

4 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
ise that from time to time God will raise up a prophet
like unto him. God's greatest gift, man's sorest need,
is such a prophet.
Always, for such a prophet, the tent of meeting, or
the meeting house, will be the real home. It is to the
church, more than to any other institution of society,
that we turn, and have a right to turn, for the leaders
the world needs for its moral and spiritual guidance.
Two practical questions present themselves: What
can we of the church do to facilitate the coming of
the prophet? And, What shall we do with him when
he appears?
What can the church do to stimulate and foster the
production of prophets?
It is of the very essence of the prophetic gift that
it cannot be standardized. It is not subject to the
working of that process called "Quantity Production,"
best illustrated in the making of Ford cars. No
mechanism will avail. The true prophet is hand-made,
and the hand that makes him is that of the most High.
There will always be few of them, under the most
favorable conditions; and the moments when ordi
nary preachers, artists, statesmen, and editors catch
a bit of the prophetic gleam, must be far between.
Yet we might and should have more of such men,
and more of such moments, than we do. We would
have more, if we prepared the way for them. It is
well to remember how once four great seers came
within a few years of each other. Something in the
eighth century before Christ favored the emergence of
the prophet. How can we reproduce those condi
tions? It is well also to remember the long centuries
of barrenness and mechanism, when no voice was
heard to speak with original authority. It would be

THE PROPHET 5
well could we realize how, in every century, men who
might have been spokesmen for God have dwindled
into phonographs, playing standardized records. How
many youths every year who might have spoken with
prophetic power have had the spark of inspiration
quenched by the untoward conditions in church and
school and social order, God alone knows. Did we
know it, we would be appalled at the criminal waste
of the world's greatest treasure.
Our social life is, to far too great an extent, organized
to quench inspiration and encourage conformity. It is
quite inevitable that our state schools should be mainly
devoted to the production of the largest possible num
ber of average useful citizens, men and women so
trained that we know how they will act in given con
ditions. That is one half of the problem of democratic
training, — the more obvious, the simpler, immensely
the larger part in bulk. But the other and more de
cisive half we are leaving to chance forces, the foster
ing of individuality, the production of leaders, whose
conduct is not predictable under given conditions, be
cause they look at conditions not as fixed arbiters of
fate, but as plastic elements to be shaped to the service
of ideals.
In an age of standardized education, when practical
efficiency is the goal, and training becomes more and
more vocational, and the individual withers in the
process, the church should view it as one of its supreme
aims to correct this false emphasis, and to encourage
that development of soul which is fading out of our
educational processes more and more.
How can the church do this?
First of all, by insisting on the adequate recognition,
all through our educational processes, of the truth that

6 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
religion is an indispensable element in education for
citizenship; by using all the influence it possesses or
can set in motion to make this recognition operative in
the educational processes of America.
Every true American will guard with jealous care
the established American policy of the separation of
church and state. Better education utterly devoid of
religion than education controlled by any one religious
body, or used as a field for sectarian disputes and rival
ries. It is very hard, it may be impossible, to make
religion an integral part of the training in our state
schools. Something vastly more is needed than the
reading of the Bible, and it is hard to provide even
that. But there are private schools, colleges, and universi
ties. They came forth from the life of the church.
They are free, as state institutions cannot be, to follow
whatever they see to be the true line of development
in the training of youth. The church should exert all
the influence it can wield to make such schools and
colleges see their opportunity and duty to demonstrate
the superiority of an education which makes generous
provision for religious culture. Let the universities
and colleges stand like a rock against any and every
attempt to limit freedom of thought or to restrict the
absolute rights of the scientific method and its results.
The Church should heartily stand with the educa
tional institutions in this, quick to resent and to resist
the intrusion of ecclesiastical influence into the field
of facts where science has absolute right to free opera
tion. But the church should insist, and the univer
sities and colleges should recognize, that religion is as
important an element in true culture as is science, and
that it should be given equal freedom and encourage-

THE PROPHET 7
ment. No college would dream of leaving the cultiva
tion of the sciences to a voluntary organization of the
students. It is equally foolish to leave the cultiva
tion of religion to a voluntary organization of the stud
ents. Just as a college feels it to be its duty to see that
every member of its faculty shall possess the scientific
spirit and attitude, and rightly judges that to make
such a requirement is no infringement of the sacred
principle of academic freedom, so should it demand
that every member of the faculty shall possess the
religious spirit and attitude, rightly understanding that
such a demand does not in the least impair the proper
working of the principle of academic freedom. It
would be wrong to require that all members of the
faculty of a college or any designated percentage of
them, should be members of any particular religious
body; but it is fair and right to require that no man
or woman shall teach in any department, no matter
how brilliant his intellect or how thorough his special
equipment, who is not reverent and sympathetic in his
attitude toward religion, and that for the simple
and sufficient reason that religion is an essential ele
ment in the character and equipment of an American
citizen. Why cannot our great privately-endowed and pri
vately-controlled universities and colleges and schools
see that to them is given the opportunity — to them
almost exclusively — to work out one of the hardest and
most urgent of the problems in our national life, the
problem of holding together knowledge and religion for
the production of sound manhood and womanhood?
When will some one of these great schools see and
seize its opportunity to announce as its policy that the
religious spirit and attitude shall henceforth be given

8 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
the same freedom and recognition as the scientific atti
tude and spirit, and for the same reason, a conviction
that it is necessary for sound training of youth? It
ought to be as impossible to choose as head of such an
institution a man who does not believe whole-heartedly
in God as it now is to choose a man who does not
believe whole-heartedly in the spirit and method of
modern science.
But inside its own life the church can do much to
foster the free spirit of prophecy.
For one thing, the church can consciously and inde-
fatigably stand for the culture and encouragement of
the personal life.
There is much talk about the dwindling function of
the church in the social order. Some tell us, with
sorrow, and some with satisfaction, but all with assur
ance of fact, that the church has been slowly but surely
crowded out and back until little part is left to it in the
real ongoing of life. Once education was in its hands,
the care of the sick, the administration of charity, the
cure of souls. Now the state educates, public and pri
vate philanthropy cares for the sick and poor, and the
psychoanalyst looks after the soul. Has the church
ceased to have a true raison d'etre f
At the least, however, there is this one function of
immense and growing importance which the church
can discharge better than any other institution. It is
the function of fostering the personal life in a day of
mass movements, organized forces, and standardized
living. It is no small task to be the chief agent for
fortifying the soul against giving way to mechanism
and externalism.
If the church would "serve the present age," justify
its existence and its place in the social order, and

THE PROPHET 9
stimulate the possibilities of the prophetic in men and
of the appearance of the prophet among men, let it
resist to the utmost in its own life the tendency to
trust in mass movement and organized effort and
standardized machinery, and set itself to reminding
men of the preeminence of the person, the sacredness
of individuality, what our fathers called "the worth
of the soul." Somehow every Sunday the ministry of
the pulpit, and of the entire church service, should con
vey to men and women, benumbed, beaten down, lost
in the crowd all the week, the message: "You are worth
something in yourself, apart from the crowd, aside
from your social relations. Let the thing that is hid
den in your heart come out and sun itself here in the
presence of God's Spirit."
In one of the letters of William James is a para
graph much quoted of late, which the church might
well take as the statement of its spirit and attitude: —
"As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness
and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible
molecular forces that work from individual to indi
vidual, stealing in through the crannies of the world
like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing
of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of
man's pride if you give them time. The bigger the
unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the
more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against
all the big organizations as such, national ones first and
foremost; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth
which always work in the individual and immediately
unsuccessful way — underdogs always, till history comes,
after they are long dead, and puts them on the top."
To adopt, and steadfastly to maintain that attitude,
would be to encourage the prophet and the prophetic.

10 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
There is acute and severe arraignment of the thoughts
and ways of to-day in the saying of Gerald Stanley
Lee: "Some people wonder how Jesus of Nazareth
ever accomplished anything, when He never was a
member of a Committee." Ministers are too readily
content with a church that is a huge machine for good
works, with every member properly geared into it.
The weekly bulletin of a prominent church proudly
proclaims: "In this church even the babies are organ
ized." We must come back to the realization that the
church is here for the intensive cultivation of person
ality. And only to such a church, that takes that as
its chief end and aim, perpetually calling men to be
souls and not cogs, will the messenger of the covenant
ever appear. Out of such a church will come men to
speak with authority in the name of the Lord, men in
whose hearts the spark of inspiration would have been
speedily quenched in youth, had not the house of God
cared for it, feeding and fanning it week by week, year
after year.
Every preacher should go into his pulpit every Sun
day full of faith in the absolute and unquestionable
preeminence of "the spiritual; fearful lest the divine
flame of the prophetic gift should be quenched in some
child or youth there present; in a very agony of dread
lest, through dullness or insensitiveness on his own
part, he thicken rather than keep plastic the cooling
and hardening surface of the souls before him. "Thirty
minutes to raise the dead" is Ruskin's definition of a
sermon. Can any one ask a heavier responsibility, a
more important function, than that? Let the church
service first of all and all through be alive and life-
giving, calling out and encouraging the personal life,
the play of individuality, the flame of the spirit.

THE PROPHET 11
Josiah Royce was not far from the inmost truth of the
matter when he said that the great saying: "This mor
tal must put on immortality" meant that this general
and common human nature must "take on individ
uality." That should be the high calling of every
sermon and every prayer and every song, not only to
the end of reviving the dying flame of personality in
the souls of all, but also for the glorious chance that
some time in the atmosphere of such thought and
feeling one of God's great spokesmen may be caught,
roused from growing lethargy, and started on the way
to be a prophet among men. It would be sufficient to
justify the existence of the American church, the time
and strength and resources spent in its maintenance,
if somewhere in this land, sometime within the next
decade, the divine flame in the soul of a single youth
were, through the influence of the church, kept from
dying, fanned and fed until it became a fire in the
bones, and an Isaiah, an Amos, or a Jeremiah appeared
in our national life. One such prophetic figure would
be worth infinitely more than the cost of the church.
And part of the glory of preaching is that one never
knows whether the ministry of his own pulpit may
not be the humble but effectual means of saving a true
man of God from death of the spirit, and leading him
into the exercise of the prophetic function.
If we would increase the prophetic element in the
life of our time, we must also care for our church
schools, and for the religious education of our youth.
A great many earnest and able men and women are
awake to the importance of religious education, and
are doing valiant service in its cause; but too often
they put all their efforts into making church schools
more pedagogically perfect; and pedagogical perfec-

12 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
tion may stifle rather than stimulate the prophetic
impulse. One could scarcely find a surer way to kill,
as by a late frost, the buds of prophecy in a child's
soul than by intrusting his spiritual nurture to a
church school the chief aim of which was accuracy of
pedagogical method. The aim of all our religious edu
cation should be inspiration, the kindling of the imagi
nation, the deepening of the God-instinct, the con
firming in strength and steadiness of every impulse of
worship, service, and devotion, the setting free of the
soul. Right method can help wonderfully in that
task; and we should welcome and use all that educa
tionists can tell us as to ways and means; let nothing
that I am saying be used as a plea against the fullest
advance in educational method on the part of all our
church schools. But let method be servant, not mas
ter; means, not end. Better far intrust a growing
child to a teacher or class-leader who is fervent in
spirit but wrong in method, than to one who is correct
in method but cold in heart; better the teacher who is
ignorant of pedagogical method and hopeless in theo
logical outlook, but whose sense of reality is vivid and
wholesome, whc«e faith in Christ is a living passion,
who will surround the child's soul with the holy in
fluences of prayer and belief, and will continually call
that soul to the worship and following of eternal ideals,
than the teacher smoothly correct in every detail of
instruction, and faultlessly equipped with the most
modern view of things, but caring more for the mind's
hold on facts than for the soul's hold on God. The
best hope that our church schools shall prove to be,
in the truest sense, schools of the prophets, where no
divine spark shall be quenched, but all shall be quick
ened, lies in the presence and power, through all their

THE PROPHET 13
teachers and leaders, of a passionate faith in the ideal
and eternal possibilities of youth, an eager and prayer
ful determination to bring to full consciousness and
free development the sacred grace of personality in
every child, and to lead it to the altar as a whole
burnt-offering. The church can do something to encourage the pro
duction of prophets by emphasizing the importance
of home life and of home training in religion.
Here is the most vital and indispensable source of
the prophetic in our social life. Men of God come
out of godly homes. Moses, Samuel, John the Baptist,
Jesus, — their biographers do not feel that they have
adequately accounted for the line these great souls
took and followed until they have told us of their
birth, yes, of the longings and prayers, the faith and
devotion, of their parents before their birth. Prophets
are made by their fathers and mothers more than by
any other human influences. Out of homes where
God is known come the men that know Him; they
know Him so well because, from earliest days, they
have lived with Him every day.
If the church would provide prophets in the day of
the world's deep need of guidance, let the church do
its utmost to revive and deepen and broaden family
religion ; let it seek to inspire parents with a vision of
what their sons and daughters may be if they take in
the consciousness of God with their daily food, and
breathe His spirit in the atmosphere of the home, and
receive His great ideals as a simple heritage. Even
were the priests as weak as Eli, or as wicked as his sons,
and even were the ark of God in the hands of the
enemy, there would still arise men like Samuel, were
there mothers like Hannah; yes, men like Jesus, were

14 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
there mothers like Mary. It is not easy to see or to
say just how the church may best exert real influence
over the home life; but certainly the church is better
able to exert such influence than is any other factor in
our social order. And what would count for more in
our common life than the exerting by the church of a
strong and steady influence over parents, making them
see the power and glory which they may bring to light
if they will set their children in the way of God's
thoughts and purposes.
The church can do much to encourage the growth
of the prophetic spirit by giving larger freedom in its
own ongoing for the play of individuality in religion.
There is a strong conviction, and it is too fully justified
by facts, that the church prizes conformity rather than
freedom, and likes the old better than the new ; that it
holds back the makers of trails and honors those who
drive in the ruts. So far as this is true the church is
discouraging the prophets and making their appear
ance less probable.
The church ought to be known as the institution
which, more than any other, calls men and incites them
to freedom, freedom of thought, of speech, of action.
Were that the common and current impression of the
spirit and attitude of the church, we should see some of
the finest and most promising of our youth eagerly en
tering the ministry, which now they pass by with
scarcely a thought that it may be the place for them.
Once let the church begin to put a premium on bold
ness and the ministry will become the most honored
and sought of the professions.
Prophets are born, not made. Yet birth is not
enough; newborn babes may be killed or stunted or
developed to the fulfillment of their promise, accord-

THE PROPHET 15
ing to the way they are treated. Once let all our theo
logical schools begin to watch for the germs of pro
phetic power, to welcome freedom rather than con
formity, to look on their students as possible dynamos
rather than as possible storage-plants, and these
schools of the prophets may become producers of pro
phetic leaders of the life of the world.
But the church at large must also play its part in
maintaining that atmosphere of freedom in which
alone prophets naturally grow. When shall we see
sessions and presbyteries, standing committees and
councils of ordination, churches and congregations, in
their choice of men for the ministry caring more for
freedom of spirit than for conformity, delighted at
every revelation of original thought and feeling, more
afraid of quenching the spirit and despising prophesy-
ings than of allowing variations from the faith once
delivered by the doctors? Once there was a youth
who sat in the midst of the theological leaders of His
day and of His church, asking them questions, and
astonishing them with the freedom and originality of
his point of view, and He became the preacher Who
"spake as never man spake." Once two men stood be
fore an ecclesiastical council and were recognized as
companions of Jesus by their boldness. The same
characteristic might put them on probation or under
suspicion in many an ecclesiastical council to-day.
What an age of glory and power would dawn for the
church if ecclesiastical bodies, great and small, should
prize above all evidences of conformity and correctness
that freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free, and
should find surest proof of the presence and guidance
of the Holy Spirit in that liberty of soul which is
always found where the Spirit of the Lord is. One of

16 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
the grave and persistent sins of the church through all
the ages has been reluctance to trust the leading of
the Holy Spirit unless He leads us along well-trodden
paths. Under such conditions, prophets must fight
their way, and many of them fall by the way. It is
well to stand for "soundness in the faith;" but we may
at least remember that it is the "aged men" who are
exhorted to be "sound in the faith," and that they are
also urged to be equally sound in love and in patience,
qualities they do not always display in dealing with
their younger brethren. One of the grave matters for
which the church must give account in the Day of
Judgment is the choking of prophetic promise in ec
clesiastical examinations, or in hidebound churches
and church commissions, where those who might have
been voices of the Lord have been dulled into echoes
of ecclesiastical councils.
What shall we do with the prophet when he comes?
Two things. First of all we must give him an unlim
ited allotment of freedom. We must clear the track
and let him run at full speed.
Freedom is not only the necessary condition of his
appearance, it is .the necessary atmosphere of his con
tinuing power and influence. The church will never
have very many prophets ; let it try severely and thor
oughly all who aspire to that office; but once the
church finds a man in whom is anything of the fire of
prophecy, let its policy be that enunciated by the tomb
of Lazarus, "Loose him and let him go."
This is the first thing, to leave the prophet free,
absolutely untrammeled. The second thing is to fol
low him, to trust his prophetic leading.
The lament of the Eternal Wisdom over every age
and stage in the religious development of humanity

THE PROPHET 17
might well be, "0 fools, and slow of heart to believe
all that the prophets have spoken." It is only half
to leave the prophet free. If he goes on alone and we
stay in our tents or in our burrows, he fails and we
fail. A certain measure of opposition, of hard fighting,
may be necessary to the making of the prophet. But
once he has proved himself, what would it not mean
if the church took up its baggage and followed him,
or even followed, leaving its impedimenta behind!
Sometimes we wonder what the church would be now,
what the world would be, had Israel whole-heartedly
followed Amos or Isaiah, had the church as a whole
followed Savonarola or Wiclif or Luther. What would
the American Episcopal Church be now, had it fol
lowed with all its heart Phillips Brooks? The tragic
fact is that we have let the prophets go forward alone,
or have followed in their train afar off, timidly, and by
compulsion of outward, slow-moving circumstance.
Of course the plea for prophetic freedom and for
implicit following when the prophet appears does not
mean that we should accept every self-commissioned
representative of the Lord. We must try the spirits,
for many a man stands up and claims to be a prophet
who is only an egotist. We need to face many would-
be leaders of religious progress with a question the
shrewd Scotch mother put to her son after she had
heard him preach a woeful sermon and then heard him
protest that God had called him to be a preacher,
"Jock, lad, are ye sure it was no some other noise that
ye heard?"
But it is not impossible to identify the true voice
of prophecy with clear certainty. This we may know
always, that personal pretensions and forward-thrust-

18 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
ings of self are utterly inconsistent with the character
of a true man of God. The man who insists on being
regarded as a prophet may instantly be written down
as mistaken. Fundamental to the character of every
true spokesman of God, every leader of the spiritual
advance of humanity, is a great and deep humility
which would keep him silent and lost in the crowd but
for the overwhelming compulsion of a message which
must be spoken. Every prophet bears that hall-mark
of humility. Moses shrinks from the task: "Who am
I? I am not eloquent, either before or since Thou
hast spoken to Thy servant." Amos disclaims any
prophetic authority: "I am not a prophet, nor the son
of a prophet. I am a herdsman. But the Lord Jehovah
hath spoken; who can but prophesy?" Isaiah cries out
of an unclean heart and unclean lips. Jeremiah pro
tests that he is a child, utterly incapable of great words
or works. John the Baptist disclaims the very titles
Christ later gives him. He is no Elijah, no prophet;
he is just a voice. So the true prophet always comes,
asking no recognition for himself, accredited only by
the obvious and unassailable truth of his message,
eager to be but a voice for the message of the Living
Spirit of the Eternal. Give all men the right to speak
freely; encourage liberty of prophesying to the fullest
extent; loose the bands of ecclesiastical conformity;
and then follow with heart and soul and mind and
strength those leaders, and those only, whose words
bear the stamp of their origin in the spirit of the Liv
ing God, revealed in Christ our Lord, sealed with the
grace of a deep, true, humbleness of spirit.
Freedom is the atmosphere in which the prophetic
spirit may thrive; freedom for the prophet when he
appears, that no syllable of the Word from God

THE PROPHET 19
through him may be lost to us and to the world
through repression; freedom and promptitude in fol
lowing him, however strange the path he takes; that
is a condition of true Christian progress. The church
of to-day should hold every other consideration sec
ondary to the recovery of the fire of the Spirit, that
once more God may lead His church and His world
through His chosen and inspired messengers.
This, this is he for whom the world is waiting,
To sing the beatings of its mighty heart.
God send the prophets; and God grant us grace to
know them when they come, to give them free course,
and to follow them whithersoever they may lead.

II
THE PREACHER

CHAPTER II
THE PREACHER
If all the Lord's preachers were prophets, the mat
ter of their freedom would be easy in theory, however
difficult it might remain in practice. For the right
way would simply be to let them have free course and
be glorified. The prophet is like the special train, for
which everything else must be side switched, while it
thunders down the main line, the track cleared for its
swift and unimpeded passage.
But there are few special trains, and many regular
expresses, locals, and freights, making their way over
the line. There must be much adapting of individual
preference to general necessity, much obedience to
orders, a great deal of accommodation. The question
of freedom becomes an important and an intricate
one, when we deal with the ordinary train or the aver
age preacher.
What are the "metes and bounds of liberty" in the
case of the average preacher? How shall he achieve
the largest possible measure of freedom consistent with
the best possible service in his church and community?
There is a wide difference of judgment as to the
opportunity for freedom in the life of the average min
ister. Some will tell us that the minister is, of all men
in the community, the one most hampered by conven
tional restrictions, least free to live his own life and go
his own way, most bound by precedent and custom.
23

24 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
Others will declare the minister to be the freest man
in the community. Where does the truth lie between
those two extremes?
Let this be said first of all: The ministry, like all
other professions, has certain natural obligations and
restrictions which it lays upon the man who enters it.
And he is acting in an unjustifiable and foolish man
ner who, entering it, chafes at the entirely normal re
strictions which it demands. The freedom which the
right-minded minister seeks is, above all, freedom to
be a good minister, not freedom from the natural and
rightful obligations and limitations of his calling. No
man should stay in any calling who is not cheerfully
willing to pay the full price of remaining therein.
We may well set as our motto in dealing with the
question of the freedom of the preacher the great def
inition of Life given by Henri Bergson : — "Life is free
dom, inserting itself within necessity, turning it to its
profit." That is the minister's life. He enters a net
work of necessity, fixed ways, customs, precedents. If
it only serves to entangle him, so that he cannot move
readily, to bind him and hold him down, he will be
made ineffective by it, and will fail in his work. But
he will be certain to fail at least as completely if he
tears the net, breaks the bonds, and tramps on his
rough-shod way. His free soul must insert itself
within the necessity, and, keeping itself free, turn the
necessity to its profit; not defying the conventional,
but making it serve the spiritual; not flying in the
face of established custom, but out of its heavier-than-
air material forming a machine that will lift him with
itself and fly like an eagle. It is one of the fundamen
tal problems of the life and work of the minister, how
far he may be free, how far he must be bound; what

THE PREACHER 25
limits he must respect; how his freedom may realize
itself within the bounds of necessity, and work out
therein the glory of God.
We shall touch specifically on certain outstanding
phases of this problem in the next five lectures. In
this one we think of the general problem, especially as
related to the personal life and conduct of the minis
ter, and his preparation for pulpit ministry. I know
I shall be pardoned if there sounds from the discussion
far more of the note of personal experience than is
usually comfortable for a speaker or acceptable for his
hearers. The man who enters the ministry finds himself, as
do men in few other callings, fitted with habits of a
conventional cut. The clerical garb is a symbol of
something strongly operative even in the lives of those
who eschew the wearing of it. There is a more or less
widely accepted ideal of what the minister should do
and should not do, how he should dress and act ; there
are certain presuppositions as to his habits and cus
toms. We may well be glad that there is far less of this
artificial idea in operation than in times gone by.
There are few communities now in which the minister
is compelled to restrain his sense of humor on pain of
being adjudged "worldly." It is only on the stage or in
comic weeklies that the minister is still understood to
be a sanctimonious, silly, fussy, effeminate creature,
shocked at strong language, quite at home at pink teas,
set apart from a manly life. But there remains, in
many a parish, a sort of mental and spiritual uniform
ready for the minister to don.
This is the place for a cheerful assertion of free in
dividuality. It is a much mooted question whether
a minister should or should not indulge in certain prac-

26 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
tices commonly used with entire freedom by respect
able men and women in the membership of the church.
Should he attend the theater, play cards, use tobacco,
and the like? "Trivial questions," we say impatiently;
but sometimes they are not too trivial to wreck a man's
usefulness if he make a misstep in the direction of one
of them. Should he or should he not adopt distinctive
dress or other professional mark? He should face all
such questions seriously and with the exercise of the
best thought and judgment of which he is capable.
But this is perfectly clear, — that the man who abstains
from this or adopts that custom simply because the
conventional idea of a minister in the particular com
munity includes that particular action, is wrong,
wholly wrong, only wrong. Freedom should be accom
modating and ready to sacrifice; but it should never
abdicate. Is not one of the chief duties of the minister to
sharpen the faculty of moral discrimination in his peo
ple? To that end he must draw definite lines always
between those things which are to be classified as
right and wrong because of their clearly marked social
value or harmfulness, and those things which are called
right and wrong only because people have agreed to
call them so. Here example will speak far louder than
precept. A minister ought to have and to show great consid
eration for those commonly called weak brethren, — a
somewhat incongruous designation for some of them,
in view of the bulldog tenacity with which they cling
to their opinions and judgments. But he ought also
to have a care, in the sight of God, lest through undue
yielding he confirm them in their narrow prejudices.
It is one thing to be patient and considerate of the

THE PREACHER 27
weak; it is quite another thing, — and a disastrous thing
it is, — to be bullied by the weak. Conformity to their
prejudices will leave them weaker. There are con
gregations which need nothing so much as a clean blast
of moral reality such as would come from the pres
ence of a minister who, in habits and ways of personal
conduct, should walk straight through their prejudices
with sturdy stride and cheerful mien.
This is the principle — is it not? — which may well'
guide in relation to these little, but vexing and often
important, questions of personal action and conduct, —
that the preacher shall do that, and that only, which
commends itself to his own free conscience and judg
ment in the sight of God, as likely to make him a bet
ter man among his fellows and a better minister in his
church and in the community?
We have a right contempt for the minister who ab
stains from certain common practices solely for the
reason that it is expected of him as a minister, in def
erence to mere blind tradition, that he shall so abstain.
But we ought to have a contempt even stronger for the
minister who indulges in such practices simply be
cause he intends to assert his personal liberty, whatever
any one may think, or whatever the effect may be on
other minds and lives. The man in the ministry who
will not hold each and every matter of personal free
dom subordinate to the consideration of the largest
possible influence for Christ in the community is not
worth his salt. How can he talk to any one about
readiness to sacrifice?
Here then, as elsewhere, a man needs all his wis
dom, all his poise, all his consecrated sense of divine
guidance, that he may neither wound sensitive con
sciences nor confirm unreasonable prejudices; that he

28 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
may neither exalt petty personal indulgences into ob
stinate and inflexible principles, nor fail to strike for
the right of the Christian to be free from those "empty
ways of living handed down from our fathers," from
which St. Peter tells us that Christ died to set men
free. The minister must seek in all his personal living
to be a faithful example of the proper interplay of
freedom and love.
He may well remind himself at times that he is by
his very profession brought into peculiarly intimate
relations with people and that therefore manners make
the man far more than is true in other professions. To
be slovenly in dress, or careless in personal habits, to
fail in courtesy or graciousness, is a serious matter for
a minister. One of the best known teachers of candi
dates for the ministry a score of years ago used to tell
his pupils that "there are two invariable rules for suc
cess in the ministry, namely, 'pray without ceasing,
and shave every morning.' "
Every preacher rightly aspires to be a free man in
the preparation and delivery of his message. No
bondage is more distasteful than slavery in the process
of self-expression.
Yet here the average preacher needs great good
sense and discrimination, that he may clearly discern
wherein true freedom consists, and how it may best be
attained. The fact that Henry Ward Beecher found
his sermons for Sunday evenings as he walked in his
garden for a few minutes Sunday afternoons proves not
that that is the ideal method, nor that all men would
find their way to true freedom of expression by follow
ing his example, but only that he was a rarely gifted
soul. I have known men who, seeking to be free by
following, Mr. Beecher's method, have simply sue-

THE PREACHER 29
ceeded in becoming slaves to their own slovenliness.
Here, as always, the prophet is a law to himself, and
an inspiration and a challenge to others rather than an
example, a leader of the spirit rather than a teacher
of method.
In truth, every man must make his own way into
that freedom of utterance which is the goal sought by
every public speaker. And he must be sure that he
seeks and finds the best rather than the easiest way.
There is only one ultimate test of methods, "by their
fruits ye shall know them."
This is sure for most of us, — that the largest and
most satisfactory freedom we can attain will come
through strict discipline. In the production of any
work of art, a strange and delicate adjustment is nec
essary between inspiration and diligence. It is a fool
ish saying that genius is only the infinite capacity for
taking pains. Were that true, every German would be
a genius, and every ant-hill would be an art gallery.
But it is true, deeply and eternally true, that genius
gets nowhere without unlimited willingness to take
pains. Ruskin defines an artist as "one who has sub-^
mitted to a law which it was painful to obey, in order
that he may bestow a delight which it is gracious to
bestow." That is the plain path for most preachers.
In their patience they win their souls. There is a
freedom about Fritz Kreisler's playing that cannot be
approached by an asolian harp. Here and there ap
pears a divinely gifted soul which seems to do the right
thing by instinct. Yet, even in such cases, we are sur
prised, as we come to closer contact, at plain evidence
of hard work, of resolute and steadfast discipline. Few
works of art are more surely stamped as products of
genuine and perfect inspiration than is the Andante

30 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
movement from Beethoven's "Fifth Symphony." We
are struck by its charming artlessness. But it happens
that the notebook has been preserved in which was
jotted down the theme as it first occurred to the com
poser, and the changes subsequently made in it. It is
a commonplace theme; one's first reaction is that al
most any one of average talent and a simple knowledge
of music might have written out that bit. Then one
follows along through the changes which, after months
of reflection and patient care, produced the exquisite
melody and harmonic setting recognized by all as
worthy of immortality. We call it artless, but it is the
result of the patient application of consummate art.
As completed, it is far more free than in its original
form. It was the patient, persistent work of the artist
which wrought the freedom. There are a few glorious
bits of music, like some of Schubert's creations, which
joyously affirm: "I was free-born"; but most of the
mighty masterpieces of art soberly declare: "With a
great price obtained I this freedom."
Among modern masters of musical composition
there are few who make so strong an impression of
absolute spontaneity, passion, and inspiration, as does
Tschaikowsky. * You imagine his music as surging,
white-hot, from his soul in some exalted mood. Yet
it is precisely Tschaikowsky, of all the modern mas
ters of music, who has left on record the rigid disci
pline out of which his art took shape. Every day, he
tells us in his memoirs, he went to his desk and wrote
music. Much of it was trash, finding a speedy end
in the waste basket. All his good music, he says, was
the product of exalted and special moods. But he was
convinced not only that that daily rigid routine, writ
ing whether or no he felt like doing it, facilitated the

THE PREACHER 31
full use of the mood when it came, but that often it
led to moments of inspiration which would never have
come without the steady attention to the practice of
the art to which he held himself with inflexible resolu
tion. One of the greatest temptations to which the
preacher is subject is to use his liberty as an occasion
to the flesh. There are few vocations in which a man
is so free to choose his own method, to make his own
schedule of work, to keep training or to break it, as in
the ministry. The average preacher, wanting to fol
low the gleam, must eternally beware lest he follow a
will-o'-the-wisp of irresponsible freedom into a swamp
of ill-prepared and slovenly talk. The wise minister
will begin with a schedule of regular work for the
week, an assignment of hours to which he will — not
rigidly, but very faithfully — adhere, even at consider
able cost. Such a method will mean, of course, that
sometimes a sermon will be dragged out painfully,
word by word, in a dreary and wearisome process, on a
day wholly devoid of inspiration. But in the long run
sermons produced from a life that is faithful in self-
discipline, a life that works conscientiously according
to a well-designed schedule, will average far higher
in value than sermons produced by the man who waits
for the mood, and then writes in a fury. I have known
a considerable number of preachers who scorned sched
ules, and waited for the proper moods, because they
would be free. And in every case the result has been
not a growing liberty, but an increasing tendency to
put off sermon-preparation to Saturday, which became
thereby a day of slavish torment, full of discomfort for
themselves and for their households. Instead of fol
lowing the divine example, working for six days and

32 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
resting on the seventh, they trifle through the week
and spend the seventh day in frantic and nervous toil.
And this is true in almost every case, that the preachers
within the range of my knowledge who have thus
waited for moods have grown less effective with the
passing of the years, while those who have worked
faithfully by prearranged schedule have become more
free and more effective with the advance of time.
Their thoughts have widened with the process of the
suns. The false notion that lawlessness is more godlike
than law has worked havoc in more fields than the
theological. The idea that freedom is incompatible
with discipline has wrecked many a promising career
in the pulpit. In an application quite different from
the original, it is true that "eternal vigilance is the
price of liberty"; and that preacher is wise who will
ceaselessly watch and work and keep training, to the
end that he may be more free as the mouthpiece of
the Divine Spirit. Blessed is that man whose delight
is in the law, rather than in the lawlessness, of the
Lord. Of course the^preacher must always remember that
a schedule needs constant watching, lest it become a
tyrant. Only less foolish than the man who will not
submit to discipline is the man who forms a schedule
and then makes of it an unchangeable fetish. The
end, after all, is not the schedule, but the sermon.
It is the part of wisdom, as a man grows and
changes, to change his method of sermon-preparation
and delivery from time to time, and that radically. I
recall an interesting case of a man who did this with
good result. He went to a leader in the church and
asked for assistance in finding a new field. He said

THE PREACHER 33
that he had been ten years in one field, and he felt that
the people were so accustomed to him, his ways and
his words, that a change would be beneficial for him
and for the congregation. But no other field seemed
to open for him; and so, some months later, he came
again to his friend, and said, "I cannot get a new field,
but I am going to give my people a new minister."
He changed his methods in most radical fashion, in
preaching and pastoral work. He had been writing
and reading his sermons; he began to speak without
notes. Wherever he could find any other way of doing
anything that seemed as good as the way he had been
following, he changed and took the new way. The
result was new life all through the worship and service
of his church, and new satisfaction and joy for him
self in his relationship with the church and its people.
It was my good fortune to be minister in one field
for nearly seventeen years. About midway in that
ministry, I deliberately made a radical change in my
method of pulpit-preparation. I believe the new
method was better adapted to my stage of develop
ment than the old; but even had it been in itself no
better, the change would have been wise, for the fresh
ening of interest it brought to preacher and hearers.
Recently, under the stress of a sudden necessity, I have
made, with some foreboding, another radical change
in the method of preparing sermons. Again the re
sults give decisive evidence of the wisdom of making
the change.
The preacher must make his way toward freedom
in the pulpit clearly and surely in three arts, — the art
of gathering material, the art of clear and ordered
thinking, and the art of effective delivery.
The minister who would be free can never avoid the

34 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
obligation to read and acquire material. He must read
widely and insatiably. He should especially seek out
books of human interest. Theological writings will be
indispensable; but detective stories will have a value
also. I suppose it is important that a minister should
keep up with the progress of theology and church his
tory and the other specialties of his profession. But I
know it is vital, that he read much of good literature,
of biography, fiction, poetry, history, all that in which
the soul of man finds free expression, even though it
has little or nothing of a distinctively religious flavor
about it. He must not only study the Bible critically,
that he may know its contents; he must read it ap
preciatively and uncritically, that he may catch its
unrivaled style, and be caught in the swing of its
mighty emotions. A good English style is as essential
to the preacher as a good delivery wagon is to the
grocer. There are too many men in the pulpit who
know a good deal, and think well enough, but have
never gained the mastery of effective and simple lan
guage, through much companionship with the best
writers, through deliberate and painstaking cultivation
of a homely forceful use of words. A preacher with
out skill in words is like a knight with no knowledge
of sword play.
No less vital is the art of ordered thinking. In the
long run men will be most impressed and most helped
by sermons which, without making the logical frame
work stand out, nevertheless do proceed through or
dered argument to a clearly indicated conclusion.
There is too much preaching of the type described by
a critic as "truly apostolic," because the preacher took
a text and then, like the apostles, "went everywhere
preaching the Gospel."

THE PREACHER 35
Among all the brilliant and forceful characteristics
of the preaching of Horace Bushnell none is more
significant than his daring fashion of announcing his
theme at the outset, usually in the form of a thesis to
be maintained. At once that method challenges at
tention, and compels the speaker to the discipline of
ordered thinking. It may be overdone. Bushnell
overdid it, with the result that his sermons at times
have a scholastic flavor. But most of us would gain
immensely from a habit of stating our subject in clear
words, at least to ourselves, at the outset, and then
carrying it through an ordered process of thought to
an irresistible conclusion.
The subject, I say; yet we need to bear in mind that
in preaching the object is even more important than
the subject. Every sermon aims at definite action.
It is meant to make a difference in the lives of the
hearers, or it is no true sermon. Here also there is
need of skill in orderly treatment, human as well as
logical skill, that the object may be enforced at the end
with full and compelling effect.
Because of the vital need of such ordered thinking,
every preacher should from the beginning of his work
subject himself to the discipline of thinking through
his material. Especially should those gifted with flu
ency of utterance compel themselves to write and
analyze. Most men can safely venture to preach by
an ex tempore method only after years of careful prac
tice in ordered thinking and writing.
In the preparation of sermons the wise preacher will
avail himself of true labor-saving devices wherever
possible; and that for two reasons: first, for the sav
ing of his time for the details of modern pastoral work;
and second, for the reaction upon his thought and

36 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
style, that he may catch his thoughts as nearly as pos
sible in fluid or living form. Thoughts harden with
appalling rapidity; and he is fortunate and free who,
through knowledge of stenography or abbreviated
longhand, typewriting, or the use of dictation, can
shorten the time of composition without impairing its
quality, or even with addition to its value.
Of importance also to the real freedom of the
preacher is careful attention to the art of delivery.
There is vastly more involved in this than the exter
nals of voice, gesture, and manner, but these are vital.
There are few ministers who would not gain by in
struction and practice in the art of delivery ; and there
are many who fail of the effect they might have,
through lack of attention to the manner in which they
present their message. Every preacher should be hum
ble and eager in welcoming criticisms. I shall always
thank God for what I gained once from that much-
despised source, an anonymous letter.
But the chief concern in the delivery of the mes
sage is the condition of the man at the time of speak
ing. The preacher should give careful and constant
attention to the .problem of being at his best when in
the pulpit. There are three main elements in the com
plete make-up of a good and effective sermon ; the get
ting of a good subject; the working out of the mate
rial; and the state of mind and body and soul at the
time of delivery. I would arrange these three in order
of importance thus: first, the subject; second, the right
condition of the speaker; and third, the work done in
preparation. Experience and observation confirm that
judgment more and more. It is hard or impossible to
overestimate the importance of the physical and spir
itual condition of the preacher at the time of the de-

THE PREACHER 37
livery of his message. Happy is the man who comes
to the pulpit with a clear head, a clean heart, an un-
flurried mind, a confident faith, a sense of thorough
well-being and vigor, and straight from personal con
tacts of an inspiring and not of a depressing sort. It
is needless to say that of all personal contacts the
best with which to preface preaching is calm and trust
ful prayer. I once had an elder, a good and useful
man, whom I had to request particularly not to speak
to me before the service. He left me blue and de
pressed. I know also what it means when the right
sort of friends come for prayer with a minister before
he goes into the pulpit.
One may easily fail to appreciate how much it
means to the average busy man or woman to find in
the pulpit Sunday morning a man obviously radiant
with physical and spiritual energy. Recently a min
ister of my acquaintance was urged to undertake the
conduct of a discussion class just before the morning
worship. He received a very earnest note of protest
from one of the most active and intelligent men in the
congregation, begging him not to do it. "You do not
know," he wrote, "the tremendous value to busy and
tired men of contact with your fresh, vigorous, untired
personality. The greatest service you render me is in
that impression of spiritual vigor you give me each
Sunday." So, throughout his life and work, the preacher will
best attain his high ideal and discharge his divine
function, if he fulfils the conception of Bergson, of
freedom inserting itself within necessity, and turning
it to its profit. He will be happiest and most helpful
who best realizes his freedom through happy adjust
ment to circumstance, that he may learn to become

38 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
through the use of it a bigger and freer man. All
around the average preacher are conventions, customs,
obligations, demands, a network of necessity. It is
futile and wasteful to rebel at it all, and insist upon
a freedom that means the unrestrained exercise of one's
present unrestrained self. It is pathetic to lose one's
freedom in the tangle and go through the motions of
the preacher, with never a flash of free inspiration,
never free from the compulsion of the network of con
ventional influences. But it is glorious, a growing
gain, a deepening joy, to maintain one's freedom within
the network of necessity, actually becoming more free
through increasing discovery of the way to turn neces
sity to the profit of one's work and the realization of
one's ideals, entering more and more under the guid
ance of God's good Spirit of growth, into that larger,
finer, more real freedom which comes only through full
and glad submission to discipline, until necessity be
comes simply the opportunity for a wider exercise of
that liberty which is life.

CHAPTER III
THE PRIEST
The sermon does not stand or fall alone. It is set
in the midst of an ordered service of worship, more or
less elaborate. The effect of the sermon may depend
very largely upon the skill and insight with which
sermon and service are made to function harmoniously
and to a single end, so that a unified impression comes
to the devout worshiper.
To some preachers the fact that the sermon is thus
inextricably related to the other parts of public wor
ship seems a restriction to be endured rather than
welcomed. I have known preachers whose conduct
during the opening part of the worship gave plain evi
dence that they were waiting, with none too great pa
tience, for the coming of their real opportunity with
the beginning of the sermon. They would view as the
ideal situation such a condition as that which obtained
at the City Temple in London in the old days, when
Joseph Parker preached, and no one cared about any
other detail. Or they wish the sermon could be like
one of Joseph Cook's lectures, a Ding an sich, unre
lated to other exercises.
In fact, however, the preacher has in the details of
worship amid which his sermon is set a wonderful
asset. If he is willing to restrict slightly his unli
censed freedom, and patiently plan to give to prayer
and praise full scope, he will find these elements of
39

40 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
worship giving wings to his words; greater power and
greater freedom will come to his preaching for thought
ful and eager use of the values that lie in liturgy and
music. Dr. Gunsaulus achieved a success in the Cen
tral Church of Chicago fairly comparable with that of
Joseph Parker in London. And those who studied his
methods know how largely that success was due to the
care he gave to the worship, even making it a rule to
attend the weekly rehearsal of his choir, and to give
much time to counseling with the director of music,
planning with him the details of every service.
There are parts of the worship for which the minister
is no less directly responsible than for the sermon.
These are the lessons from the Scriptures, the Respon
sive Readings, the prayers and the hymns.
Constant service in the pulpit has afforded me scant
opportunity for observing the conduct of worship ; but
it is my decided conviction, based on such observation
as I have been able to exercise, that, in our free or
non-liturgical churches, there is a marked tendency to
slight the value of these parts of the worship. There
is often to be noted evidence of hasty selection and
thoughtless -rendering of the lessons from the Scrip
tures, of scant care in the choice of hymns, and of
prayer unregulated as to length and order.
Here again we come upon a phase of the general
struggle between freedom and order, where, as in other
parts of it, the ideal course is neither slavery to order
nor unlicensed liberty, but "freedom, inserting itself
within necessity, and turning it to its profit." It seems
beyond question that there are immense values in the
free ideals and practice of our non-liturgical churches.
There are more people who will respond to such wor
ship than to a highly-regulated order, taking only our

THE PRIEST 41
normal Protestant constituency into the account.
And I am confident also that this tendency to find
greater satisfaction in free than in prescribed worship
will increase rather than diminish in the immediate
future. Men are most moved by prayers that come
from the heart at the time, and by readings from the
Bible selected to voice the emotions and thoughts natu
ral to the mental and spiritual state in which they find
themselves on a particular Sunday.
But the minister to whom free prayer means
thoughtless and irresponsible praying, and free selec
tion of lessons hasty and careless selection, is abusing
a great and sacred privilege, and wasting an immense
advantage. Any one who sees in the practice of free
prayer and free selection of lessons from the Scrip
tures only a matter of liberty has not begun to ap
preciate the meaning of it. It means the assumption of
a heavier responsibility. Those who serve in liturgical
churches possess a certain liberty which others lack.
To attain real freedom, and to make full use of it as
an agent in soul-culture, the minister in a non-litur
gical church must give serious and costly attention to
the conduct of public worship, the selection of read
ings, the choice of hymns, and the preparation of
prayers, lest these, which the Westminster Directory
for Worship rightly calls "the more important duties
of prayer and praise," become mere adjuncts to the
sermon. Better the most slavish use of prayer-book
and rubric than the sort of freedom that exposes a
congregation to the momentary whims of a careless
soul. Here, as everywhere, freedom is a hardly won
grace, a delicate adjustment to be worked out continu
ally, an art to be acquired only by process of discipline.
No preacher is rendering what is due to himself, to

42 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
his congregation, to the Word of God, or to the church
as a whole, who does not spend time and patient
thought on the selection and preparation of the lessons
to be read. Let me here avow myself a firm believer
in the idea, — which it is the fashion to disparage just
now, — the idea of unity of thought and spirit through
an entire service, from beginning to end. I do not
mean that hymns and prayers and all else shall be
stretched into palpable and artificial uniformity, so
that the service is like a harp with one string, the open
ing prayer clearly stating what the subject of the ser
mon is to be, and the closing prayer asking God's help
to realize in our lives, one, two, three, as set forth in the
sermon. That is a caricature of unity. There are
weighty interests and common values, which should
have first place always in the worship, whatever the
subject of the sermon. But I do mean that, like a
tinge of color, like a delicate but decided flavor, like a
keynote dominating a rich harmony, some one great
simple thought or spiritual value should be in every
part of each service, sermon, prayers, lessons, music,
so that the worshiper shall go away impressed with a
single direct phase of truth.
The preacher who would have his sermon gain its
full and free effect will give care to the selection of
readings and will also prepare to read them effectively
from the desk. It is painful to record the fact that
more often than not when I have heard ministers read
from the Bible in public worship, there has been some
slip, some error in emphasis, some hesitation or stum
bling, some obscuring of the plain sense, which has
given unmistakable evidence that the reader had not
carefully read through and thought through and
studied through the passage in advance, with a view

THE PRIEST 43
to making the reading of it take hold of the heart and
conscience of the hearer with full power. And some
times it has been my privilege to hear the Word read
so forcibly, so luminously, with such plain intelligence
and feeling, that it was like a kindly light shining in
the dark. How can we expect people to take seriously
our claim that the Bible is the Word of God, and of
unique value for the spiritual life, if they find us care
less and dull and uninspired in the public presentation
of it? I once heard the Scripture read in a Scotch
church, by a Scottish minister, in so beautiful, rever
ent, illuminative a fashion that I should have felt
richly fed and served, had there been nothing more
to the worship that morning. I once dropped in to
hear a famous English preacher, and carried away as
the best gain from the service a matchless reading of
the Parable of the Prodigal Son. I fear there are few
American ministers who make the reading of the Bible
stand out as an event in the worship. Every one of us
could, and should.
Of course, there are varieties of gifts. Some have
voice and manner lacking to others. But any man fit
to stand in the pulpit can, if he will, present the Word
of God to his people in a way that will be helpful and
impressive. To do this, one must have a good general familiarity
with the Biblical material. He must spend time with
that version of it from which he reads at the Sunday
worship. He must read thoughtfully, and meditate
upon it. It will save much time in the end if a min
ister, at the outset of his ministerial life, will go
through a systematic course of Bible study and read
ing, which will give him for all time a background of
knowledge of the varied material therein. This ought

44 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
to be given him in the theological school. But if it is
not he should win it for himself early in his min
istry. To be able readily, out of such a rich store of
knowledge, to select the passage best suited to a par
ticular occasion or subject will save him very often
either from the necessity of long searching, or from the
tragedy of an inappropriate lesson. Freedom in the
use of the treasures of Biblical truth is a possession
richly worth gaining.
Care in this particular portion of the weekly wor
ship is seen to be of especial importance when one
realizes how little contact with the Bible is the lot of
even the favored youth of the present day. To many
this is the one regular means of coming into touch with
the treasures of God's Word. Is it not richly worth the
expenditure of time and patience necessary to make
this brief reading from the Bible impressive and at
tractive to all who hear, so that it shall open their
eyes to behold the wondrous things in God's Word?
It is only a sloven who, in his desire to give unity
to the service, will always read the passage in which
his text is found. Often a far stronger impression is
created by the*reading of a passage which, from a dif
ferent angle, and with a different emphasis, unfolds
and enforces the same principle or ideal as that in the
text. The wise minister will have in mind, or on paper,
a list of the best passages, which lend themselves well
to public reading, with which he is so familiar that he
can readily seize on one or another as suitable for a
particular occasion.
One must not easily assume that the unity of the
service should always be secured by ranging all de
tails about the sermon and its theme. There are oc
currences and movements of common interest, which

THE PRIEST 45
may well provide the central idea of the worship. The
preacher should be ever on the alert for such indica
tions, and ready to shape his sermon to fit this unify
ing idea. If, as we believe, God is revealing Himself
in the unfolding life of humanity, how better present
Him to people than by emphasizing that in which He
reveals Himself day by day?
Public prayer presents to the minister its special
problem of ordered freedom. It must be neither an
"extemporaneous effusion" — to recall the words of the
Westminster Directory — nor a cold form prepared in
advance. Every man must find his own way. Two
of the most inspiring and helpful leaders in public
prayer I know have methods diametrically opposed;
one writes his prayers with great care; the other has
found that writing hampers him, and goes to the wor
ship on Sunday with but a few thoughts in mind about
which the prayer forms itself.
But, differ as individual methods may and must,
there are certain great and simple facts which all
should take into account.
One of them is that we may well develop, in non-
liturgical churches, a far larger use than has been cus
tomary of prepared prayers. There is a wealth of de
votional material from which a minister may cull
prayers useful for certain seasons. Most of us have
dull Sundays, when we are in no mood to pray. At
such times it is a blessed relief to us, and a spiritual
gain to the congregation, if we have at hand forms of
prayer, of tried worth, personally selected, which we
can use simply and devoutly.
One who would pray worthily and helpfully and with
true freedom must be at pains to develop a devotional
style. There is a language suited to prayer, and one

46 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
needs to be at home in it. Here again emerges the
necessity of knowing the Bible, for there is no other
language so fitted for use in prayer as is the language
of our English Bible. One should also familiarize
himself with the best devotional literature.
We have something to learn from the silent worship
of our friends, the Quakers. No one can have partici
pated in the simple worship of a Friends' Meeting and
not feel that there is something there which would en
rich our worship could we catch it. One of the great
preachers of our time, a man of rare gifts in praying,
is making increasing use of a method of prayer in
which he indicates one by one, in sentences quietly
spoken, objects for which all may well pray, and then
leaves, after each sentence, a moment of silence, in
which all may present before God that special in
terest. There is much to be commended in this
method; it emphasizes with peculiar force the re
sponsibility of each individual worshiper. It might
well come more fully into use in our worship. We
have much to learn from the Episcopalian on the one
hand, from the Quaker on the other, and from all the
varieties of religious experience in between.
But this above all is sure, there is no way to power
and worth in public prayer that does not demand sin
cere practice of prayer in private. One must be a man
of communion with God in his own life if he is to help
others commune with Him. It is one of the mighty
advantages of the ministry that the necessity of leading
in public worship keeps a man faithful in the practice
of his private fellowship with the Spirit of the Eternal
and Unseen.
The preacher should put real thought and consid
erable time into the selection of hymns. Here is an

THE PRIEST 47
opportunity for an educational work of real value. A
modern hymnal is a rich mine of spiritual treasure,
both in hymns and in tunes. Many a minister is con
tent with placer mining, leaving the rich veins un-
worked. It is amazing, if not shameful, the small range
which many a minister allows himself and his people
among the great hymns. He forms a little circle of
favorites, and contentedly moves around within it.
Some pious folk will chafe, of course, whenever a
new hymn is introduced. But with reasonable care to
mingle unfamiliar numbers with well-known favorites,
a minister can go far in the way of introducing his
people to the best treasures of Christian song. His
ideal should be that set forth by the Master, bringing
forth out of his treasury things new and old, even if
there are people who insist that always "the old is
better." Such use of the hymnal will necessitate on his
part a familiarity with the hymnal comparable to that
urged in the case of the Bible. One of the first con
cerns of a minister should be to know thoroughly the
hymn-book used in the church he is to serve. Even
the busiest minister may well put one or two hours a
week into selection of hymns, and study of the hymnal.
It is a serious question, to which every one who be
lieves in the value of public worship, and longs to see
it come to its full power over our common social life,
should give prolonged and careful attention, — whether
we have not come to a time when we need to investi
gate, with patience and care and open-mindedness, our
whole theory and practice of public worship, with a
view to changes, perhaps of a very radical sort. There
is many a church, in the denominations that call them
selves free, Congregational, Presbyterian, Baptist, and
the like, that is slavishly bound to inherited ways of

48 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
worship that are bald and cold and unbeautiful. There
is need of open and courageous revisal of our ways and
forms, that our worship may be truly free — free to
range through the rich fields of spiritual experience
and its expression by masters of the art of worship.. I
am not truly free in my worship, if I am not free to use
the treasures of Common Prayer, of art, of music, of
symbolism. One may well be modest and careful about venturing
into this new field with confident and detailed sugges
tions. Many souls must work at the problem, there
must be many experiments, some failures, much col
laboration, before we shall find the way to a worship at
once free and rich. But two specific predictions I am
willing to make. One is that we must find ways of
producing and maintaining a spiritual atmosphere in
our worship ; the other is that we must give larger rec
ognition and place to music.
As a whole, our Protestant worship lacks atmos
phere. We are afraid of effect, and we are afraid of
silence. There must always be something going on.
We forget too easily the voice which says, "Be still,
and know that I. am God." Our church services sug
gest too often a program of things to be done, one
after the other, with a certain business-like precision.
The very manner in which many a minister enters
the pulpit discourages rather than enhances the spirit
of reverence. The preacher should constantly remind
himself that his conduct in the pulpit may be as potent
a force in drawing the souls of men toward God or
driving them from God as any spoken word. I do not
like to speak of the sins of my brethren; but it is a
simple and sad fact that seldom have I attended a
meeting for public worship at which several ministers

THE PRIEST 49
were seated together on a platform, that the reveren
tial atmosphere of the service has not been hurt, or
ruined, by the lack of reverent attitude, by whispered
conversations, inattention, obvious interest in people
entering, or passing of notes. Everything that needs
to be said or done by way of preparation should be said
or done in advance; and from the time those who are
to conduct the worship enter the church they should
be reverent and silent, as men who know they are in
the presence of God.
Every possible precaution should be taken in advance
against the intrusion of anything that would mar the
atmosphere and spirit of the service. The worship in
some churches is conducted in a spirit of cheerful
bustle; a hymn is announced as if it had just occurred
to the minister that it would be a good thing to sing a
hymn at that particular moment, and he had happily
hit on just the right hymn to be sung; and he prob
ably announces it by asking the atrocious question,
"Shall we sing the 151st hymn?" — a question I never
hear without mentally expecting, and almost hoping,
to hear some sturdy worshiper shout back, "We shall
not!" Tennyson was right when he said that as knowledge
grows to more and more, more of reverence should in
us dwell. We of the free churches must learn how to
make our public worship a source of the spirit of rev
erence which our American life so sorely needs and
lacks. We must have quiet places in our worship,
times of silence, an organ interlude after a prayer,
brief opportunities for meditation, and over all must
brood the spirit of reverential quiet which can be
maintained only if the preacher himself leads the peo
ple in it, is himself quiet and reverential, conducts

50 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
every detail of the worship as in the presence of the
Most High God.
The second assured fact for the future of worship is
that we must give far larger place to music. We must
give it more adequate recognition, support, and oppor
tunity. There are few matters in the realm of church life
and practice as to which I am so ready to prophesy
confidently as that the future will show a very great
increase in the use and value of music in our worship.
Music will cease to be a mere ornament, an attraction,
a concession to the desire to be entertained, and will
become more and more a chosen means of worship
which can do for us what no other means can do.
There are clear reasons why music, in itself, and be
cause of its essential nature, is fitted to render a unique
religious ministry just now. Music has four qualities,
which give it peculiar power in the religious life of the
present age, and will make it increasingly useful in the
further development of the religious life. It is vital,
symbolic, communal, and catholic. And the religious
spirit of our time is marked by those very four quali
ties. It is characteristic of religion to-day that it is vital.
It lays stress on experience. Religion means life, real
life; we seek in it a help in living our life now in the
flesh. Religion is less and less concerned with the
past, as past. It is concerned with present experience
of life with God, and with man.
Now music is unique among the arts, almost unique
among the common practices of the human spirit, in
that it is vital in its very essence. It has not come
down to us from the past; it must live and move in our
presence. Raphael and Titian left us great works of

THE PRIEST 51
art, to be set in galleries and museums. We want to
see their own work, not any reproductions of it.
But no musical composer ever left a work of art.
We do not care to see his original manuscript, except
from an instinct of reverent curiosity. Bach and Bee
thoven have left us not works of art at all, but direc
tions for producing works of art. When we would get
the best these masters left us, we do not go to gal
leries and museums. We go where organs and choruses
and soloists and orchestras set these works before us
in living, pulsing reality. The musical scores of the
great masters are nothing more than their notes, say
ing: "This is how I made my music. Make it live
again." Where else can one find a more perfect type of reli
gion, as we think of it, and desire it to-day? The
Bible is not an art gallery; it is rather a collection of
musical scores, directions for living. The supreme con
cern is that we make the music which the Word of
God shows us how to make, that we sing over afresh,
with our own voices, the song with which Jesus in
spired the world. Religion is vital, as music is vital.
It must be set forth in terms and means of present
living experience, or it has no more value than have
the scores of the great symphonies, set away on a
shelf. The whole value of religion is in its vitality,
and music is its perfect type.
Music also fits with peculiar power the religion of
to-day, because it is essentially symbolic in character.
It expresses what lies beyond words.
Unquestionably the religion of to-day craves more
and more a medium that goes beyond logic and defini
tion. There is prevalent what Donald Hankey so well
called "The religion of the inarticulate." The soul of

52 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
our time is full of "fancies that break through lan
guage and escape." Men feel themselves in the pres
ence of infinite and unfathomable realities, which are
dwarfed and cramped in precise creeds and forms of
words. Yet some expression must be given or the soul
remains unsatisfied.
What can meet this need as can music? The sacra
ment helps. We should make more use of its values.
We should be eager to make room for a greatly en
larged use of symbolism, all through the life of the
church. But music has a peculiar if not a unique
function in this regard. Who knows what music is?
It defies definition or description. Yet nothing more
vividly and certainly is; and somehow it expresses
emotions and soul-experiences which words try in vain
to define.
Music also is essentially communal in nature, and
therein fits the religion of our day. Christianity is be
coming conscious of its social meaning and outworking.
A reaction is setting strongly against the overdeveloped
individualism of Protestantism. We see that religion
is a community matter.
What is there in our life that can so well express
this communal instinct as does our singing together
or playing together some great product of musical art?
It is interesting to pick up one book after another deal
ing with current social problems, and find that the
most common and appropriate illustration of the coop
eration needed in a business, a community, or a world,
is an orchestra, in which each man plays his own in
strument, but all produce harmony. To exalt the mu
sic in our churches is to further in the readiest way
the progress of social religion, the sense that no Chris
tian lives to himself, but that each is part of a "beloved

THE PRIEST 53
community," through which we realize our oneness
with God in Christ.
Our religion to-day is catholic in spirit, impatient
of disunity. And nothing in our practice of religion so
emphasizes this catholicity as does our music. Our
creeds divide us; our organizations are fences; even
the Sacrament holds us apart, to our shame be it said.
But when we sing we are all one. Congregations which
would be scandalized were a Catholic priest or a Uni
tarian minister brought in to lead the worship sing
with unalloyed joy Faber's hymn, "There's a Wide-
ness in God's Mercy" or Holmes' splendid "Sun-Day"
hymn, "Lord of All Being, Throned Afar." And even
more catholic than the hymns is the music to which
they are set. Christians in Asia and Africa sing words
utterly unintelligible to us. But we catch the tune,
and our hearts join with theirs in the emotions awak
ened and the associations recalled by "Jesus, Lover of
My Soul," or "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me." Music
is a universal language, needing no translation, need
ing only living interpreters to make it live in our pres
ence. How can church unity be better set forward
than by giving larger place to music, until the church
shall sing its way into its ideal, of "The Holy Catholic
Church, the Communion of Saints"?
So music stands out, the best vehicle for religious
truth and beauty, especially fitted to the deep and
painful needs of an age groping after a God too great
to be set in precise words. The most inspired preacher
must bow his head in the presence of music, as the
English poet did, recognizing that
Here is the finger of God, a touch of the will that can,
Existent behind all laws, that made them, and lo! they are;
And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man,

54 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but
a star.
Consider it well, each tone of our scale in itself is naught;
It is everywhere in the world, loud, soft, and all is said.
Give it to me to use, I mix it with two in my thought ;
And, there! Ye have seen and heard. Consider, and bow
the head.
It has seemed right to give larger space to the dis
cussion of the value and place of music than to that of
any other element in worship, not only because of the
peculiarly powerful appeal which music makes to-day
to the soul of man ; but also because it is an element in
our worship that has never received adequate recogni
tion and attention. We preachers have tended to look
at it rather as a pleasing adjunct to worship, an appeal
to the lower nature, or even as a necessary evil, than
as one of the noblest and most effective means of de
veloping in the soul of man, and expressing for that
soul, the instinct of worship. We have suffered se
verely from the Protestant propensity to deify talk.
It may chasten the spirit of the preacher, and help him
to a better mind, to realize that such glimpses as the
Bible affords into the glory of the life to come show
us never a sermon, but many a song; a city of God
without a temple, but never without music. The true
city of God is like that magic city of Arthur of which
Tennyson tells us that it was "Built to music, there
fore never built at all, and therefore built forever."
No one is making, or beginning to make, full use of
his ministry, who is not doing his utmost to give music
the largest possible place in the life and worship of
the church. Few ministers and churches begin to take
music seriously as an agent of religion. One of the
most neglected opportunities in this country is to be

THE PRIEST 55
found in the many church organs silent save for a few
minutes each week, and indifferently handled then.
Music should be ranked with preaching and teaching,
as one of the three indispensable elements of the wor
ship and life of a church.
In a certain church in a great city there is held
every noon a simple service of worship. From thirty
to a hundred and fifty people attend. But once a
week that noon hour is wholly given to music; and
then the church is crowded to its utmost capacity, and
often hundreds are turned away. No one who watches
that throng can possibly think that the difference is
due entirely, or even very largely, to the fact that the
people enjoy entertainment more than they delight
in the worship of God. The explanation is rather that
they find in music an expression of their desire for
fellowship with God, a voicing of their ideals and
aspirations, an instrument of worship, more appealing,
more helpful, than they find in words of prayer and
exhortation. Sidney Lanier, who knew better than
most the meaning both of music and of religion, gave
a definition as true as it is beautiful, when he said,
"Music is love in search of a word." Is not that
descriptive of the religion of many a soul to-day? It
is "Love in search of a word." Is it strange if music
appeals to us as no other voice or form can do ?
For love well knows he never may express
In words a tithe of all his tenderness;
But music is a house not made with hands,
Built by love's Father, where a little space
The soul may dwell; a royal palace fit
To meet the majesty of its demands;
The place where man's two lives unite; the place
To hold communion with the infinite.

56 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
One concrete inference from a realization of the
value of music in religion is that we should give to the
leader of the music in a church far greater recognition
as a religious leader than has ever been given. The
director of music should be set apart by some simple
service of recognition comparable with the ordination
of a minister. He should be looked upon as an asso
ciate in religious leadership. We should no more think
of setting over the music of a church a man lacking
in religious faith and experience, however great an
artist, than we would think of putting into the pulpit
a man lacking in religious experience and faith, how
ever brilliant an orator. The first requirement for the
director of music in a church should be that he be a
man of God.
Between him and the minister should be maintained
the most cordial, intimate, and continuous cooperation.
If the minister is by temperament unmusical, let him
trust implicitly in the guidance of the director, impart
ing to him constantly his own earnest religious spirit,
ever counting him an indispensable associate. If the
minister is blessed with a musical nature, there are rich
possibilities of combined ministry, which will make his
preaching immensely more effective. His best sermons
will be given wings by the fitting music that surrounds
them ; and many a sermon will spring out of the music
itself. So here, as everywhere, the preacher finds the best
and truest freedom by gladly inserting his free spirit
within this network of necessity, this elaborate com
bination of Scripture-reading, and prayer, and song,
and anthem and organ-playing, which seems to de
mand of him so much time and care that he longs to
give to the preparation and delivery of his message.

THE PRIEST 57
The more he seeks to fit his sermon into the worship,
the more he gives time and sympathy and enlarged
place to the symbolical elements of the worship, and
the musical expression of devotion, the more will he
find his way as a preacher into the truer, higher lib
erty wherein the whole truth and beauty of God is set
free in the soul and society of man.

CHAPTER IV
THE CHURCHMAN
Every man of the right sort who enters the ministry
longs to spend himself altogether on high levels of
thinking and action, free from all the clinging gar
ments of tradition, and all the rigid ways of institu-
tionalism. More young men than we imagine wish
they might preach in the fields as Jesus did, or in the
streets and by the way as St. Francis did, free from
responsibility to any organization. The desire to
escape from the institutional and to live wholly in the
vital and spiritual is doubtless more widely and deeply
felt to-day than for decades or centuries past.
But, wish this as he may, the minister finds it a
dream hard to realize. It fades in the cold light of
facts. If he is to fill a preacher's place in the church,
there is a local congregation, with its ways and
thoughts and traditions, into which he must fit. More
over, there is a denominational connection to be seri
ously held, and maintained, by the congregation and
the minister. Whether we like it or not, the fact is
that Christianity is institutionally organized; and
that means that, for the vast mass of preachers, —
with exceptions so few that they may be disregarded,
— one must adapt himself and his ideals to the
thoughts and habits, the intellectual and practical re
quirements, of a local congregation, and of a particu
lar denomination with which it is connected.
58

THE CHURCHMAN 59
True of the homeland, this is at least equally true
of Christian service abroad. Mission work is institu
tionally organized. And one must demonstrate his
general loyalty to the points of view and ways of
working which characterize the particular denomina
tion under the patronage of which he is to do his work.
There is a growing tendency to standardization and
unity, yet along with it goes a startling reaction to de
nominational loyalty. It may be long before the vari
ous parts of the Christian Church will abandon their
particular demands for conformity on the part of
those who would enter their service, at home or
abroad. Here then is a mass of creeds, forms, customs, tra
ditions, into which a preacher comes. How shall he
maintain his freedom in the midst of it all? Nay,
rather, how shall he find it possible to insert his
freedom within this necessity, and turn it to his
profit? The cases are very few where one may well venture
to take his lonely way, unconnected with any institu
tional form of Christianity, quite irresponsible. Liv
ingstone was right in severing connection with mission
boards; but Livingstone was a man in a million, with
a clear call to a definite work which, plainly, could be
better done in absolute freedom. And Livingstone, be
it well remembered, did not break with the institution
until he had served under it for long years, and saw a
clear path to greater usefulness through severing the
relationship. On the whole it may be said that the men who hold
aloof from denominational and institutional connec
tion lose power thereby enormously. Usually they
cripple their usefulness. I know a young man of the

60 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
finest type, financially independent, devoted in soul to
the missionary ideal, so set on keeping free from the
trammels of denominational control that he will not
serve under any Board of Missions. The net result of
that attitude, — admirable in its motive as it is, — has
been to keep him irresolute and idle for several years.
He is still undecided how and where to go ahead, while
comrades of his, duller in mind, less ardent in spirit,
far more poorly endowed internally and externally,
have found their way into satisfying usefulness and
worthy results.
For that sort of freedom one can easily pay too high
a price. It might be a truer way of putting it to say
that such a man is in reality less free than he would
be through reasoned and cordial conformity to some
organized branch of the Christian church. He would
be submitting to limitations on his liberty, he says, by
such a course. Is not his freedom limited by the lack
of opportunity to which he condemns himself by his
isolation, — limited too in the most serious way, for he
is less free to do good honest work for the Kingdom
of God?
Unless a man has a direct and unmistakable call of
God to a task which can unquestionably be better done
independently of all institutions, he will be more free,
more honest, more successful, more useful, for cordial
and loyal affiliation with some organized church body.
He will have regrets, of course ; he must make delicate
adjustments between his individuality and the tradi
tions and beliefs of his institution ; his honesty will be
more open to question, more difficult to maintain; but
all that is a part of life. Life gets forward when free
dom is willing to insert itself within necessity, when
free spirits stay with the established order of things

THE CHURCHMAN 61
and carry it all on to better thoughts, truer convic
tions, wider views, and sounder ways.
It is especially hard in our day for the preacher to
conform, because of the revolution that has taken
place in the forms of our religious thought. True
though it be that "every age is an age of transition,"
there do come certain times when the distance between
vanguard and rear is greatly extended, when it is pecu
liarly hard for those who have caught the new view
and those content with the old, to get on well together.
We may venture to hope with some confidence that we
are getting out of the fierce fight between old and new
theology, that a reasonable modernism has won its
right to real respect in the church; that the present
upflaring of theological reaction is only the last effort
of a dying cause; yet we are in the penumbra of the
struggle; and it is still hard for one trained to look at
life from the modern viewpoint to live comfortably
with those who cling to older thoughts and ways. It
is one of the most perplexing and vexing questions,
what are the rightful limits of personal independence
of thought on the one hand, and accommodation to the
thoughts and ways of a congregation or a denomina
tion on the other?
It is not, as it is so often represented as being, a sim
ple question of honesty. That would be an easy mat
ter. It is the far more difficult and delicate question,
how far one should give weight to his individual judg
ments and opinions, how far fit into the general
thought and feeling of certain groups with which he
must work. One should never say that he believes
what he does not believe ; one must be honest and sin
cere, at whatever cost. Of course; that is the abc of
action. But one is not a preacher simply in order to

62 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
make clear to the world exactly what he individually
believes and thinks. What does the world care for his
individual opinion? Society gets forward not because
some men get outside and shout their individual con
victions, but, far more, because a great many men stay
inside and keep their convictions quietly and forcibly
and progressively at work among relationships held
unbroken. "Like a mighty army moves the church of
God"; the analogy is far from perfect, but there is
truth in it. And it is not a mighty army, but a mighty
poor army, in which every man acts with absolute in
dependence, and refuses to submit his freedom to the
yoke of discipline.
This is one of the hardest and most important prob
lems for every preacher, to work out the rightful
limits of freedom and conformity, so that he will be
neither a slave to his congregation or his denomina
tion, nor a free lance tilting at it. If there is one fact
clear to-day it is that success demands the maximum
development of team work. Other things being any
where near equal, the man who can manage to work
with reasonable freedom within the institution of the
church will accomplish ten times as much as the man
who can keep free only by remaining unrelated.
How shall one solve this problem? Each must solve
it for himself. Yet there are certain common features
of the problem which may helpfully be discussed in a
general way.
This problem of freedom and conformity naturally
falls into a twofold division. It presses upon the
preacher in the two fields of thought and act. We
limit our attention to the former, reserving the matter
of freedom of action in ecclesiastical affairs to the next
chapter.

THE CHURCHMAN 63
The question we are discussing relates to one's
thoughts, his beliefs, his intellectual approach to Chris
tianity. How can one, while preserving his honesty
and candor unstained, and his liberty of thought un-
violated, yet maintain working relations with those
who differ with him, and loyalty to his denomination?
Let us make the approach to it very concrete. Here
is a young man, trained in a good theological school.
That means that he has caught and cordially adopted
something at least of the modern point of view in the
ology, Biblical criticism, psychology, religious educa
tion, and the rest. He is called to minister to a con
gregation of the average sort. There are good people
there, an overwhelming majority of them, whose hearts
are right, whose motives are good, whose piety is real.
There are, perhaps, a few trouble-makers, people who
watch for causes of offense. There are many untrained
minds so far as theology is concerned, who hold simply
and without much question a faith given to them in
earlier days. There are men who, because they have
been successful in business, think they have a right
to pronounce positively on questions of theology.
There are some also whose religion is like that of Dr.
Kennicott in "Main Street," of whom the author says,
"He believed in the church, but seldom attended its
services. He believed in Christianity, but never
thought about it. He was worried over Carol's lack of
faith, but was not sure just what it was she lacked."
Be sure there are also in the congregation young people,
and some older ones, who have found the old forms
of belief increasingly unsatisfying, and are longing for
light on the way to beliefs which they can honestly
hold and on which their soul's life can depend. There
are also children to be so influenced that they shall

64 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
grow normally into forms and ways of thought and
belief that shall be natural and satisfying for the day
in which they must live their lives. There are students,
away at college, needing to be held in strong relation
ship to the institutional church.
Into this congregation comes as preacher a man who
has been trained in the latest and best view of Chris
tian truth, to whom now is given the wonderful oppor
tunity of helping all these people to think and to be
lieve, of leading them into thoughts of God and of
life ever better and truer, of developing the congre
gation into a power house of Christian thought and
feeling. What shall he do? If he is insincere, he will
lose them all. But, on the other hand, if he has that
overtrained sincerity which is at heart self-assertion,
and obstinate independence, he will hold and lead but
a small group, and those the ones who need it least.
What should he do?
First of all, he must cheerfully and courageously de
fend his right and duty to state the Gospel in terms
adapted to the modern mind. His motive in so doing
need not be, and should not be, the defense of his per
sonal right to liberty of thought. He should assume
that, not claim it. His motive should be a missionary
motive, an eager desire to present Christian truth in
terms that shall give it power over those who need it
most. Whenever there comes a choice between the
comfort of the contented and the winning of the
troubled, the true preacher will not hesitate. Better
a thousand times to disturb the placidity of old and
settled believers than to fail to minister to young and
questioning souls. Any good shepherd will neglect the
ninety and nine who are safe-folded, and go after that
which is lost. And the youth of our time are lost, not

THE CHURCHMAN 65
as the prodigal was, but as the sheep was, bewildered,
caught between the demands of a rigid orthodoxy in
the church and a no less rigid agnostic philosophy in
the college and university. It is one of the supreme
functions and privileges of the preacher of to-day to
put the Gospel in terms intelligible to the modern
student. In the Bible itself is a magnificent illustration of the
power of such reinterpretation of essential religion in
terms to meet a new and urgent need. We never should
have had the Fourth Gospel had not its author dared
to restate the life of Christ in terms fitted to meet the
new and prevalent philosophy of his time. It was an
appeal to what was then modern thought. Here was a
world thinking in terms of the "Logos," while Chris
tianity up to that time had been cast in terms of the
"Messiah." What should be done? Cling to the Mes
sianic terminology as divinely ordained and unchange
able, let what might happen to the world at large?
Doubtless there were good souls of orthodox Jewish
antecedents who insisted on the duty of talking the
more in terms of Messianism the less intelligible and
real those terms became. They called it loyalty to
the faith once delivered to the saints. But this great
soul spoke out in terms of the thinking of his time, in
terpreting Jesus as the Eternal Word, the light of life,
rather than as the fulfillment of racial dreams ; chang
ing the scene of His promised coming from the clouds
of heaven to the spiritual life of the race. By bravely
and brilliantly rethinking and restating the meaning of
Christ and His Gospel in terms of current philosophy,
he gave a new impetus to Christianity which it feels
to-day and will feel forever. Let the thinker and the
preacher of to-day be as eager and as forceful in re-

66 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
stating the essentials of Christianity in terms that shall
appeal to minds swayed by the conceptions of modern
science and the philosophy of evolution as John was
in appealing to minds swayed by Alexandrian philoso
phy and Oriental mysticism.
Let the preacher take for granted the right and duty
of appealing to the modern mind in the name of Christ.
Let him clearly show his congregation that it is vastly
more important to "hold knowledge and religion to
gether," for the young than to leave the old undis
turbed in their traditional inheritance. Let him say
with Paul, when in similar circumstances, "From
henceforth let no man trouble me."
But let him be sure he can finish the sentence, "For
I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Let
it be clear beyond the shade of a possible doubt that he
is ever acting and speaking in the spirit of Christ, and
for the sake of the spirits of men.
The preacher must realize, — most of all if he be of
the modern and liberal sort, that he is a missionary to
souls, not a propagandist for ideas. Let him remind
himself of it over and over, let him keep it before him
self every moment of his ministry — that the main ele
ment in true religious experience is not the intellectual
construction of religion, but the practice of it.
That will not mean that he will despise or neglect
the intellectual construction. Every true preacher will
be constantly training his congregation in theology;
his ministry will be seriously defective otherwise. But
it will, and it does, mean that he will always hold in
tellectual development, and theological correctness,
clearly subordinate to the development of spiritual
experience. He will give expression to his own theo
logical convictions only as such expression will help

THE CHURCHMAN 67
forward the spiritual aim and object he has in view
in the sermon.
He will quickly give, and steadily maintain, in his
preaching, the impression of one who cares first of all
for the spiritual development and upbuilding of the
people set in his care. He will want most of all, and
through all, to build them up in Christ Jesus, to help
them forward, and to go forward with them, into an
ever-ripening, ever-enlarging, never-ending appropria
tion of what God has for His Children in the Gospel,
and in the life of which the Gospel is the supreme in
terpretation, — the life of the Spirit.
One who stands in the pulpit every Sunday in that
attitude, so that no one can mistake his primary spir
itual aim, can always voice his convictions freely and
fearlessly. It may be laid down as an absolute law,
that, given clear confidence on the part of the hearers
that the speaker seeks first their spiritual upbuilding,
that his main concern is with the spiritual life and not
with the propagation of certain views, and he can say
anything he honestly believes, and carry the whole
some respect and attention of practically all in the
congregation. With this primary and steadfast regard
for spiritual experience and growth must go, — indeed
it is a vital part of it, — tender and thoughtful consider
ation for every person in the congregation, in the form
in which the truth is presented. Here is the place
where many fail. They confuse loyalty to their con
victions with rigidity of language.
I know certain apostles of modern faith who boast
that they have discarded the familiar terminology of
the church. They will not use the words "atonement,"
"salvation," and the like. They call their attitude
honesty. It is not. It is the foolish, unnecessary, and

68 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
unjustifiable casting away of a great asset. The right
spirit is that of Jesus, who came "not to destroy, but
to fulfil"; it is right in line with His mission to take
these old words, and fulfil them, fill them full of timely
meanings, raise them from the dead and set them to
living and working again.
Just as the greatest poet is not the one who scorns
common terminology and goes afar in search after new
words and conceits of literary form ; but rather the one
who can express the profoundest realities in the sim
plest of common words; so the truest preacher is not
he who will smite his people in the face with new ex
pressions and phrases, but rather he who will make
time-honored and precious and simple words and
phrases glow with life, and serve as the vehicles of the
ever-growing teaching of the Spirit, Who guides us
into all the truth.
A minister of my acquaintance had lately come to a
certain congregation. The church was a conservative
one; the man was of the progressive, or modern type.
Shortly after his coming, he became aware that many
of the younger people were having serious trouble over
the Bible. They could not take it any longer in the
old literal fashion; they knew no other definite way
in which to take it. They were disturbed and over
awed by the dominance of the conservative view.
To meet this need, he preached one Sunday on the
modern view of the Bible. He began by saying that he
supposed most of the members of the congregation
were quite satisfied with their inherited view of the
Bible. But he had found a considerable number who
had felt constrained, under the force of their neces
sary thinking in other lines, to abandon, or change
radically, their old view of the Bible as inerrant. He

THE CHURCHMAN 69
asked permission to address this special group, to
show them what was left to them, what the authority
and value of the Bible might still be to them, even if
they took an extreme modern view of it. He then
frankly discussed the matter, outlining the essentials
of the modern view of the Bible, pointing out how lit
tle one loses in giving up the idea of a magically in-
errant book; how actually there may be positive gains
in a more human and natural view of the Hebrew
Scriptures; and ended by emphasizing the abiding
values of the Bible, which hold through all shiftings
of formal theory about its inspiration.
When the service was over, one of his hearers, him
self a minister of modern mind, said to him, "I was
thinking how so-and-so (naming a brilliant man of
very radical attitude) would have preached that ser
mon. He would have meant just what you meant.
But he would have begun by declaring, 'It is now gen
erally admitted that the Bible is not the Word of God,'
and would have had his congregation by the ears at
once." In this case, the preacher gained the sympathy of
all at the outset, by clearly affirming a spiritual aim, a
missionary motive, for the discussion. He carried
through the whole sermon a constructive attitude and
a reverent temper. He spoke of old forms of faith
with respect, not with contempt or ridicule. The re
sult was that, without a shadow of insincerity, with
out any covering over of his convictions, he won and
kept the sympathetic interest of all, and left the most
reactionary of his hearers more generously inclined
toward modern views of the Bible. A congregation
faced in that spirit will insensibly grow into a larger
faith.

70 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
"Speaking the truth in Love," — that is a simple
phrase, but a wonderfully good motto. The preacher
who speaks every Sunday, unmistakably, from a great
desire to serve the souls of the people, and with living
consideration for their point of view, will seldom if
ever have cause to complain that he is not free to tell
the truth about God and life and theology as he sees
these great realities. He may not be free to speak out
all that he privately thinks. Why should he? To take
the pulpit as a soap-box, whence one may cry his own
individual opinions, is insufferable egotism. The true
preacher will not want to use his pulpit for expressing
any of his views save those which will make a vital
difference in the spiritual experience of his congrega
tion. He will have enough to occupy him if he keeps
within those limits. It is foolish to stray outside them,
seeking a freedom which is in truth a restriction.
Ministers of modern mind are sometimes greatly
exercised over the repeating of the Apostles' Creed, as
part of the worship in their congregations. The case
we have in mind and need to discuss is not that in
which a congregation is facing the question whether to
adopt the practice of reciting the creed each Sunday,
or at special services. Nor are we dealing with the
question whether it is well to repeat any creed as a
part of worship, or whether some simpler or more sat
isfying creed cannot be found.
We are dealing with a fact; that fact is that there
are still many churches in which the repetition of the
Apostles' Creed is a part of the regular order of wor
ship; and many persons value it highly as an expres
sion of the community of faith in the church, and as a
solemn act in which all can readily take part.
What should be the attitude of the minister of mod-

THE CHURCHMAN 71
ern mind toward this part of the worship? It is per
fectly plain, of course, that the man who positively
disbelieves the major affirmations of that Creed ought
not to join in repeating it. But any man who does not
believe really and heartily in God the Father, in Jesus
Christ, in the Holy Spirit, in the church, in forgiveness
of sins, and in eternal life, ought not to be in the pulpit
of any Christian church.
But what of the man who, believing these great af
firmations, is in doubt about certain minor words and
phrases; uncertain about the literal truth of alleged
facts, in the past ; indifferent as to whether Christ was
or was not born of a virgin ; repelled by the materialis
tic import of such a phrase as "the resurrection of the
body"; or impressed with the inadequacy of a creed
which omits the Kingdom of God, and certain other
important truths? What shall he do?
I have known preachers, under such conditions, who
insisted that the creed be eliminated from the worship
when they were to lead it; or who left the leading in
it to some other, and stood silent during the act. I
cannot see how they can, in the name of liberty and
honesty, so grossly intrude their personal likes and
idiosyncrasies upon an ordered worship. If the pastor
of a church honestly believes that the recitation of the
creed is harmful rather than helpful to the spiritual
life of the people, let him take up the matter with the
officers and people to get it elided from the service
quietly in good time and in good temper. But, so long
as it forms part of the accepted order of the worship,
and he is in hearty accord with its major affirmations,
let him devoutly take his part in the recitation of it.
Is the personal preference, or point of view, of one
man, and that on minor points, to decide what form

72 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
the combined expression of congregational worship
shall take? The recitation of the creed, at a church
service, is not an expression of individual belief; it is
an act of worship. If it were what some seem to think
it, a theological test thrust into the midst of the wor
ship, it would be insufferable. But it is clearly in
tended as an act of worship, exactly as are the hymns,
the reading of the Scriptures, and the other acts. The
recitation of the creed is an acknowledgment that
Christians share in a great common faith, which has
been given a great common and simple form. We
rise and recite this faith of the church, as an imperfect
statement, not adequately setting forth the views of
any individual Christian; but the best we can find in
which all may take part. To refuse to repeat it be
cause one does not accept every article of it as part of
his private and personal belief, is a hysterical individu
alism, quite one with the practice in which some over
sensitive worshipers indulge, — of searching each hymn
to make sure that it represents exactly what they be
lieve, else they will not join in the singing of it. This
is Protestantism become a disease, an exaggeration of
one's little personal experience into a wall to shut one's
self from all large and generous cooperation in com
mon experience. The proper totem for all that tribe
is Kipling's "Cat that Walks by Himself," and it is the
symbol of a passing phase of Protestantism.
In addition to the adjustment of the preacher to his
local congregation, its beliefs and customs, there is nec
essary also some adaptation of the minister to that
particular branch of the church with which he is im
mediately connected. Most of our Protestant denom
inations demand that candidates submit to certain

THE CHURCHMAN 73
theological tests, or require subscription to particular
creeds. With the rapid advance of theological knowledge,
and the growth of independent thinking, it is becoming
increasingly hard for ministers heartily to subscribe to.
any ancient form of words as the confession of their
personal faith. Many have come to see that creed sub
scription is an anomaly, and to question if it be not a
huge mistake to base church fellowship and organiza
tion, and to determine good standing in the ministry,
on intellectual conformity. There are many of us who
are sure that the church would be immensely stronger
and sounder if the basis of fellowship and good stand
ing were made a matter of real faith, of purpose and
spirit, and if the intellectual form of one's belief were
left and encouraged to be free. In short the church
should have a spiritual rather than a creedal basis.
But the great body of the Christian church is at
present on a basis of creed subscription. What shall
the minister of the modern type in thought and atti
tude do in such a situation? It is the same problem
which he confronts everywhere. It is easy for the un
compromising radical, who frankly casts away the
evangelical faith. Let him be non-conformist, and
glory in it. It is easy also for the man at the other
extreme, whose faith naturally takes on forms like
those the fathers used to make. But these extremists
are few in number. What of the large body of men
who, warmly evangelical in spirit and sympathy, find
that seventeenth century language does not well voice
their real convictions?
They will be wisest and freest if they make the best
of a situation far from ideal, by taking the steps neces-

74 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
sary for connection with that denomination of the
Christian Church with which they are most heartily
in accord, in its spirit, traditions, and ways of working.
It is well understood that the terms of subscription in
all our denominations are far from being ironclad.
They imply a general attitude rather than a particu
lar endorsement. Moreover, the outstanding creeds
to which subscription is asked are themselves charac
terized by a certain largeness and generosity of spirit,
or even hold within themselves variations of wide
range. Take what may justly be called the most out
standing of Protestant creeds, the Westminster Con
fession of Faith. It is clear to any student of it that
that document contains two clearly differentiated
strands of thought, — the legal and the vital, the for
mal and the spiritual. One could go through it, trac
ing the two tendencies, and emerge with two docu
ments, as decisively marked as of different spiritual
origin as are the Priestly and the Deuteronomic ele
ments in the Hexateuch. If the conservative forces
insist that subscription to such a creed involves full
acceptance of its formal and literal views, the liberal
forces can with e*qual right insist that subscription in
volves frank and full acceptance of its spiritual and
vital principles, which play havoc with literalism.
Under such conditions, a man of real evangelical
spirit, whose beliefs take on modern forms, may well
with great cheerfulness, and with unclouded soul, sub
scribe to such an ancient document as a means to fel
lowship and service in that body of the church with
which he is most naturally in sympathy. To insist on
remaining free by refusing to subscribe is to retain the
form of freedom while losing its real meaning and
value.

THE CHURCHMAN 75
The church is, first of all, and beyond all, a working
fellowship, a missionary body. One who has true
Christian faith and zeal in his soul wants to work with
that body. He may well, to that end, agree to limit
somewhat his absolute liberty of theological state
ment, and to adhere to ancient forms of words not
wholly suited to his thoughts; meanwhile working
steadily, as in all loyalty he may and should, towards
a better and simpler form of creed or of creed sub
scription, or toward the laying aside of formal creeds
as a basis of church fellowship, and the substitution
of a statement of loyalty to Christ and to the ideals
of the Gospel.
An incident from the ecclesiastical history of a gen
eration ago may have value. During the conduct of a
noted heresy trial in the Presbyterian church, a reso
lution was introduced in the General Assembly of that
denomination, declaring that the Bible is free from er
ror. An amendment was offered, declaring that the
doctrine of Holy Scripture as contained in the West
minster Confession, is satisfactory and adequate. The
amendment was defeated, clearly proving that the re
actionary party then in power in that church was in
reality trying, not to enforce the accepted standards,
but to impose a view not found in the standards. This
is but one decisive bit of evidence of the large liberty
to be found in ancient creeds, the freedom that exists
within the elements of subscription to a varied confes
sion of belief.
No one with any regard for progress, or with any
thing of the Christian spirit and outlook, would urge
that any one should stifle or cramp honest convictions,
or profess a faith he does not share, or purchase fellow
ship and recognition by intellectual or practical dis-

76 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
honesty. But any one capable of large and true views
will see that creed subscription is, by nature and of
necessity, a compromise, in which men and groups
of differing views unite on a common statement which
on the whole serves to set forth the great principles on
which they agree to work ; that every form of words is
susceptible of different interpretations, and that sub
scribers reserve personal liberty of choice among the
varieties of interpretation, and, above all, that the right
to work with other Christians in a great, strong, or
ganized fellowship of service may be worth more than
the right to untrammelled liberty in constructing and
stating one's intellectual beliefs. It is a question
whether the soldier, definitely enlisted in the fight for
a noble cause, and thereby brought under definite re
strictions of speech and action, is not really a freer
man than the bushwhacker, who
Won't obey no orders,
Without they are his own.
There may be a flavor of the sacramental about the
taking of orders. Robertson, Maurice, Kingsley, Bush
nell, Beecher, Bruoks, these were not only freer than
the small and timid reactionary churchmen who
snapped at their heels, or barked "heretic," — they were
in fact freer than those who, in the name of freedom,
broke with the church, left its fellowship, started pri
vate and independent movements, and lost the inspir
ation and strength of unity with the great common
organized ongoing of the Christian Church.
It is not easy to be a free man in soul and intellect
and speech and act, and at the same time to be a true
and loyal minister in some branch of the church. One
will be sure to meet suspicion and distrust from both

THE CHURCHMAN 77
extremes, and to meet much impugning of motive and
of honor. But like all hard courses, most of all those
hard courses which hold close to the common heart and
the common ways of humanity, and keep vigorous
some larger unity, it is a glorious course, very close to
that freedom of spirit which was in Christ and is in the
true Christian.

CHAPTER V
THE ADMINISTRATOR
One of the hardest problems the average minister
faces is how to be at once a preacher, a pastor and a
man of affairs. How can he keep his pulpit work
fresh, vigorous, worth while, and at the same time
meet the incessant and increasing demands of his par
ish, his community, his denomination and all the other
interests which call upon his time and strength and
thought? What are the proper limits of the freedom of the
preacher from pastoral work and administrative de
tail? How far may he hope to be able to insert his
free spirit within these necessities, and actually turn
them to its profit?
Here, as elsewhere, the exceptional preacher may be
justified in declaring his full independence, and de
clining to undertake pastoral and administrative work.
He may give his church officers, as Dr. Watkinson is
said to have done, a choice between his head and his
feet, declaring it impossible that they shall have both.
The man in the exceptional field may also find a way
out, through division of function among a large staff.
But such instances do nothing for the average preacher
except to arouse feelings of hopeless envy. Such a
solution of the problem is like a solution of the prob
lem of domestic service announced by a wealthy
woman in Chicago. It consisted in having relays of
78

THE ADMINISTRATOR 79
servants, so maintaining an eight-hour day. She
innocently forgot that most homes count themselves
fortunate if they can get and keep one or two helpers
for the general work of the household.
So the minister in the exceptional field, where re
sources are abundant, and a large staff is possible, may
serenely announce that the problem confronting us can
be solved by the application of the principle of divi
sion of labor, by which the preacher turns over to
others the burden and responsibility for parish and
community work. Undoubtedly something may be
done through that means. We must come to fewer
and larger churches, with a highly differentiated staff,
if the church is to play its rightful part. This neces
sitates, in smaller centers, some outworking of the
very interesting and perplexing problem of the "com
munity church." In some way it must be discovered
how denominational churches may combine into a real
community church, drawing denominational lines into
one strong cord, without thereby losing practical and
living contact with the great national and interna
tional movements of the church. The man who can
solve that problem will be one of the great benefactors
of the church.
I think we have come, or are coming, to a time which
will demand very courageous and decisive action in
the way of combinations of churches which shall
greatly reduce their number and as greatly increase the
power of the units so produced. We have been work
ing at church unity from the top, trying to bring about
coalescence of denominations. It may come more
surely, and even more swiftly, from the bottom,
through the union of churches of various denomina
tions in a town or neighborhood, to produce one strong

80 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
and adequate church. There are dangers along that
way. Much of our present ecclesiastical machinery
will be wrecked if the church as a whole takes that
path to a solution of the problem of its divisions. But
if ever the churches begin to go down that line (and
there are signs that they may be drawing near to such
a decision) it will be the part of wisdom for denomina
tional Boards and other agencies to adjust their work
to the new conditions as rapidly as possible, even at
considerable sacrifice. It may be the divine way of
removing church unity from the realm of amiable talk
into that of actual accomplishment.
But until such a solution comes, — and it is scarcely
visible on the horizon as yet,— and to a large extent
after it comes, — the bulk of churches must be minis
tered to very largely each by one man, who must be,
to an extent and in ways which might have paralyzed
the great apostle himself, "all things to all men."
One who has a real gift for preaching often finds
himself longing ineffectively that he might be a
preacher and nothing else. But here is his parish ; and
here come counsels from church officers, and editorials
and articles in a. ceaseless stream, calling for more pas
toral care on the part of the minister, and for a revival
of parish visiting; solemnly assuring him that no ex
cellence in the pulpit can make up for neglect of per
sonal contacts with his people. Here is some Forward
Movement in his denomination bombarding him each
week with demands for a new organization of the men,
or women, or children, or young people, or infants, of
his congregation. Here are worthy movements and
organizations calling for the appointment of a commit
tee on every possible subject; designating the use of
one Sunday after another for special purposes, until

THE ADMINISTRATOR 81
he finds it hard to make room for any real preaching.
Here is his community, with its schools, its charities,
its common social enterprises, asking, as it has the
right to ask, his practical, sympathetic and considerable
service on boards and committees and special under
takings. The benevolent and missionary agencies of
his denomination reproach him if he is not continually
in a state of full information about all of them, so that
he can adequately present them to the congregation,
or to individuals, at any time. Here is the fringe about
his parish, the people who hang to its edges, the un
churched of the community. Might he not reach them
if he gave more time to them? But they demand so
much time, the demand of a family for interest and
attention varying inversely as the square of the dis
tance between the family and the church life and work.
So this man who would be a preacher finds himself
pulled in many ways, all leading out from his study,
all taking him away from that quiet of soul, that in
tensity of thought, that leisure for reading and medi
tation, which is so vital to worthy work in the pulpit.
The wise preacher will eagerly welcome the largest
available measure of volunteer assistance, on the part
of the men and women of his congregation. He will
do more than welcome; he will foster it, and seek to
call it out. No minister is adequately discharging his
responsibility for that group of people over whom the
Lord has made him. overseer who is not doing his ut
most to see that they know the joy and worth of ren
dering real service.
The interest awakened in recent years in the possi
bilities of laymen's work is of great value to the min
ister who wants the largest possible measure of relief
from the burden of administrative detail. Too often

82 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
the preacher fails to trust the laymen of his church
with real responsibility; he will not exert himself to
make the necessary division and differentiation of
tasks and functions; he will not spend himself to in
spire them with the desire for real service. It takes
time and grace to make real workmen for God, to
overcome the ready pleas of incapacity, and of lack
of time. It often seems easier for the minister to
shoulder the load than to apportion it among his lay
men. But the minister who consistently aims to put
the largest possible amount of responsibility on the
shoulders of the men and women of the congregation
is not only helping them very greatly; he is preparing
the way for his own greater freedom for his own defin
ite work ; and he is cultivating among the people of his
parish the needed sense that the minister should be
kept free from matters of business and administration,
to put undivided strength into his spiritual work and
service. The lesson of the sixth chapter of the Acts of
the Apostles might well be taken to heart in many a
church, where the ministers are neglecting the Word of
God and prayer in order to serve tables. The preacher
should definitely, expect real service and leadership on
the part of the people, should trust them to furnish it,
and should not too carefully oversee or direct them in
the way they do it. Strong men and women will re
spond, if called to give real service, and given real and
full authority in the rendering of it.
The problem is not really and wholly solved even
where a minister is fortunate enough to have con
nected with his church a staff of workers. That may
ease the situation greatly, especially if he be wise
enough to trust his subordinates largely, and to exer
cise only a general supervision. Otherwise, if he is one

THE ADMINISTRATOR 83
of those men who must oversee every part of the work,
he is only the more a slave of administrative detail for
every assistant added to his church staff.
But, as we have said, even in the most favored cases,
where there is a well-organized staff, with clearly de
limited functions, the problem is not solved. For it is
the man who speaks from the pulpit who is wanted in
other places. It is he whom the community wants, he
whom the parishioners wish to see in their homes.
And in his heart he knows that they are right; that
the preacher must also be the private friend and the
public servant.
So emerges a difficult problem, which drives many
a man to despair, which makes the ministry a hard
calling, even at the best. How can one be a preacher,
and yet meet faithfully and capably the demands
made upon the minister of a parish?
First of all, he must cultivate, among the people of
his parish and his community, a sense of the central
importance and dignity of the preaching function.
Somehow he must get them to be at one with him in
estimating the message from the pulpit as one of the
greatest and most vital factors in the life of the church
and of the town. He cannot do this unless his pulpit
work is of the highest possible order. The man who
allows his preparation for preaching to slacken and
degenerate through absorption in other work, however
good and worthy, is killing his own usefulness. The
man who makes his sermons indispensable will speed
ily have many joining to protect him in that freedom
from detailed business which is essential to the best
preaching. Is it not time we were setting ourselves resolutely
against the tide of opinion and talk which is running

84 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
with accelerating pace against the preacher and his
business? Men are writing and talking of the passing
of the pulpit, of the decadence of preaching. They are
telling us that the coming of the journal and the maga
zine and the book has largely, if not wholly, done away
with the necessity and the usefulness of preaching.
There is also plainly discernible a rising tide of interest
in worship, a sacramentarian tendency, which threatens
to submerge the pulpit.
Those of us who believe, what there is every reason
for believing, that preaching is one of the permanent
factors in religion, and that religion is the greatest fac
tor in individual and social life, should take pains to
assert and reassert the dignity and importance of the
pulpit. We may and should make way for a great
development of the symbolic, for a far larger recogni
tion of the emotions in our public worship, for more
music, greater use of the sacrament of the Lord's Sup
per, and a richer liturgy. But woe to the church if
this shall mean a weakening of the pulpit, or acquies
cence in a general disparagement of it. When one con
templates on the one hand the bare and chilly devo
tional atmosphere of our non-liturgical churches, and
on the other the thin and careless pulpit work which
so often characterizes the liturgical churches, he begins
to dream of what the power of the church might be, if
once there should arise a church characterized by a
union of the two elements, vigorous, thoughtful, pas
sionate preaching set in colorful, heart-moving wor
ship. Here, as elsewhere, the preacher must maintain him
self at the highest level, whatever he may do on other
lines also. We must emphasize the importance of the
preaching function. The more it is depreciated, the

THE ADMINISTRATOR 85
more must we give our souls to it, to make it indis
pensable and glorious in the sight of men, and to com
mend it as not wholly unworthy in the sight of God.
Yet, so curiously tangled is the web of life, that in
actual practice the minister cannot preach in a way
to make people think his sermons indispensable unless
he is in thorough and quick contact with the life of
the community, and in relations of utmost friendliness
with the individuals and homes in his parish. He
could hardly make a greater mistake than to try to
build up a sense that his sermons are worth while by
holding himself aloof from the main currents of the
general life. Men and women want to hear a man of
their own, who knows their affairs, and is alive to their
interests. But he can so live with them, and work with them,
and enter their friendships and their homes, that al
ways they shall think of him as the man with a mes
sage, and shall want most of all to save his strength
for the pulpit. If he himself has such a conception of
the central importance of preaching, and unflinchingly
acts on it, others will also come to feel in that way
about him and his work.
Help will also come from a constant recognition on
his part that his preaching needs the stimulus of per
sonal contact with the people to whom he speaks from
the pulpit. Let him say frequently to himself that,
were a man free from personal relationships from Sun
day to Sunday, coming to the pulpit out of a week of
undistracted study, meditation, and writing; he might
produce more finished sermons, but they would lack
something vital. The best preaching has its roots deep
in personal fellowship. The best sermons spring out
of contact with men and women and children. There

86 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
is no message so potent as that which comes from the
man well-known, loved, and trusted, by those who
listen. A wise old friend delivered the charge to me
when I was ordained. He set forth many reasons for
being thankful that I was going to be a minister. The
one I remember best, — probably because I have so
often had cause to prove its truth, — was that after
once the people had come to know their own minister,
they would rather listen to him than to a better
preacher, and would prefer him to the brilliant
stranger. Maltbie Babcock was once asked by some one who
felt the power of his prayers how he prepared for pub
lic prayer. He answered that his method was very
simple. He would look over the congregation, during
the early part of the worship, and think about the
people; here would be one who had just met a great
sorrow; there a man who had met a crisis in business
during the past week ; here some one who had just en
tered upon some great joy or satisfaction; here a youth
home from school. So his mind would stray over the
congregation, and he would be ready to lead them in
prayer. Such a method depended on knowing the
people through personal contact.
Like those prayers, the best sermons come to a min
ister out of his relations with people far more than out
of his work in the study. That man will preach best
who writes and studies in sermon-preparation with a
concrete vision of his people before him. That is why
one's best sermons cannot be preached to a new set of
people without extensive alterations. They are made-
to-fit, not ready-made.
So one must be at once preacher and minister.
There is no royal road to take through this tangled

THE ADMINISTRATOR 87
country of pulpit work and pastoral work. The road
will twist and turn. But there are certain small sug
gestions that may have some value.
One's best hope of salvation is through constant and
conscientious self-discipline. Here again that much-
abused tool, the schedule, is useful. No man who does
not plan his time will find time to be both a good
preacher and a good pastor. Card-indices, record-
books, systematic planning of calls, are all essential to
the man who would meet successfully the double op
portunity. Self-discipline is valuable and necessary also in the
cutting off of things that do not count. All one's time
and strength will scarcely be enough for the work; to
let any of it slip away uselessly is to court failure.
There is much that is pleasant, that is quite well worth
doing, which nevertheless must be cut to small meas
ure, or wholly put away, if a man is to be preacher and
pastor. And this applies not only to self-indulgences
and personal pleasures, but even more to many tempt
ing opportunities to use time and strength for social
and semi-public ends. There are few ministers who
can afford to accept invitations to speak which are
not fairly in the spirit of their regular service. The
best preachers I know will not speak at banquets, or
public meetings unless they can give a definitely re
ligious message. They say, "This one thing I do, and
this one thing I know," — not because they are narrow,
or bigoted, or over-pious, or fanatical, but simply be
cause they cannot do their proper work if they allow
their minds to wander far or frequently from the close
vicinity of that work.
If one is wise he will early learn, in rendering serv
ice to the community, to accept few or no positions on

88 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
useless or ornamental committees or public bodies. He
will take up the two or three pieces of real public serv
ice in which he can work most effectively and most
readily, and will cheerfully decline the most pressing
invitations to overburden himself. He will especially
welcome those openings which offer opportunity for
ministry to the personal life of men and women and
children in the community. He may well realize also
that the best service a minister can render to his com
munity is in giving large place in the life and work of
his church to a spirit and program of community serv
ice, service of the common good generously rendered
without thought of return.
Self-discipline is necessary in the matter of one's
ways of working. One must school himself to rapid
action; must learn to cut out useless motions and
delays of mind and soul; must acquire the ability to
turn at once from one interest to another, and back,
without cooling down, or losing interest and motion.
He must somehow get what owners of motor cars value
so highly, the power to "pick up" quickly. One can
drill himself in this. I have known many ministers
who put several, mornings on a single sermon, with
great groanings and creakings; and from one-third to
two-thirds of the time was absolutely wasted in moon
ing over the subject; thinking they were thinking;
trying to get started instead of starting; beginning
with a subject, finding a bit of hard going, and aban
doning the path, instead of plunging ahead and going
on through. Of course a men may well spend several
mornings on one sermon, if he has it to spend, and be
only the gainer for it, if he really works all the time.
One of the best preachers I know tells me he spends
five mornings a week on his single sermon. He is so

THE ADMINISTRATOR 89
situated that he can. He has no pastoral responsibili
ties. Happy man! They are great sermons. But
that man really works for the whole of the five half-
days. He spends no time in unproductive motions.
The man who is, by the grace of God, to be preacher
and pastor and administrator in chief in a varied par
ish, must drill himself to work without waste of mo
tion. He must learn the value of early morning mo
ments, those times so precious, because relatively free
from interruption. He must school himself cheerfully
to forget one set of duties while caring for another;
yet there is one exception to this, for a man may get
surprising results if he keeps his prospective sermon
floating in his mind, somewhere between the conscious
and the subconscious, amid his varied doings through
the day and the week.
It is good for a man that he get his theme very
early, if possible before the previous Sunday is past.
For if it lie in his mind thus for a few days, it will come
up with a surprising amount of valuable material gath
ered out of the corners of his brain.
It helps toward the solution of this double problem
if one can get his people to come to him with their
specific needs, and not expect him always to seek them.
Incidentally it furthers real pastoral work; for one
visit from a parishioner, coming on a definite errand,
may be worth a dozen calls from the pastor, which may
or may not find the parishioner in a mood for serious
religious treatment.
Some ministers depend exclusively on the use of of
fice hours, and insist on the right to seclusion except
at such specified times. But it is a question if that
adequately meets the need. Some of us at least feel
the necessity or advisability of greater accessibility.

90 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
If personal testimony may be permitted, let me say
that for the thirty years of my ministry, I have ordi
narily closed my study door only one morning a week,
when I prepare my Sunday morning sermon. Even on
that morning the door may be opened, and it is under
stood that it will be opened in case of any need for
religious ministry to an individual. All the other
mornings the door is open to any one who needs the
minister. A reasonable amount of sifting is carried
through by a secretary, who tries to eliminate all who
come for other than genuinely pastoral help. And if,
as sometimes happens, some one enters the study who
has the mistaken notion that to sell the minister some
insurance or a set of books is business partaking of a
spiritual nature, he is quickly made aware of his error.
But to the people of the parish, and to all honestly
wanting to see a minister on life business, the door
stands open. Looking back over rather more than
thirty years, I can gladly affirm that, just from the
standpoint of the preacher, the policy of the "Open
Door" pays richly. Many a sermon has been set back,
and some have been ruined, by these personal interrup
tions. But far more sermons have been warmed, set
forward, toned up in their human interest, by live
contact with souls; some sermons have sprung, almost
full fledged, from unexpected visits of that sort; while
some experiences have come out of that policy of the
open door, certain interviews and talks, worth more
than any sermon, set forever among the precious
treasures of one's life.
One must apply self-discipline and unremitting
watchfulness to the pastoral side of his work no less
than to his preaching. He must save every possible
moment of time, must eliminate perfunctory and

THE ADMINISTRATOR 91
purely social routine calling, must cultivate an instinct
for knowing who really need him, and when.
It is well to realize that, in order to be a good pas
tor, one need not be ever pursuing his people with so
cial attentions. There is such a thing as over-coddling
a congregation. It does the people of a parish a real
and considerable service when their minister is able to
bring them to see that the demand for attention from
the minister is a selfish demand, unworthy of a Chris
tian; that one should join the church "not to be min
istered unto, but to minister." When a church mem
ber or family takes umbrage at the fact that the pas
tor has not called for a long time, the minister should
call, but not to apologize ; rather to show in plain and
loving language, and in the name of the Lord, how un
worthy of a Christian such an attitude is. The minis
ter who expects from his people a high-minded, self-
forgetful generous spirit and attitude will find that
attitude growing among them, and will at once lessen
the burden of pastoral oversight and encourage his peo
ple in the growth of Christian graces. When some one
mentions, in a wounded tone, the fact that he has been
ill for some weeks and the pastor has not taken notice
of the fact, it is rendering a genuine religious service
to that person if the pastor, instead of apologizing,
plainly asks why he did not let the minister know, thus
showing him that he has failed in his duty. It is well
to arouse in every possible way in the congregation
the sense that the church is a mutual fellowship, in
which all care for each, and in which all are eager to
lighten the load of pastoral care by earnest cooperation
and generous judgment. Such a spirit makes not only
an easier pastorate, but a stronger and more Christian
church. One of the worst faults of Protestants is the

92 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
tendency to assume that they have a right to be cod
dled by their ministers.
The first business of a minister on going to a new
field should be to get to know everybody in that field.
Following that he should seize every opportunity for
real and close contacts with the people at critical mo
ments. An hour, or an afternoon, spent with a man or
woman at some time of special need is worth a life
time of perfunctory pastoral calling. It is hard to
understand the custom into which many ministers of
large parishes fall, of limiting their participation at
funerals to the service at church or home, declining to
go to the grave. All the more in a church where pres
sure of duties makes pastoral work difficult, should
one be eager not to miss the opportunity for sealing
personal friendship which comes from revealing one
self as ready to "stand by" in a supreme hour of need.
The wise minister will be eager to seize every such spe
cial opening for friendly ministry. I have known peo
ple to be caught and held in an unbreakable loyalty,
which made further pastoral attention practically un
necessary for a lifetime, by a single brief note, coming
from the heart, on some sacred anniversary of a birth,
a death, a wedding or a confession of faith. It is so
easy to keep record of such days, and so easy to make
helpful use of them, — if one really loves his people.
There is the heart of the matter. It is still absolutely
true that one may speak from the pulpit with the
tongues of men and of angels, and bestow all his time
and use up his body in pastoral calling, and yet, if he
have not love, he is nothing. The first and greatest
essential for finding one's way with any real success
through the difficult adjustments of preaching and
parish work is a great and genuine love for people.

THE ADMINISTRATOR 93
That love will find a way, if only along with it go
alertness to seize every possible means of redeeming
the time, and conscientious determination to bring to
bear every day and every moment a whole self on each
part of the task.
There is one more secret, the deepest, of success in
this task of finding time and strength to be both
preacher and pastor. It is found in one's real faith in
God. A man must know how to draw constantly, and
very largely, on those spiritual resources which lie in
heart-communion with the Unseen. The minister
must himself drink deep every day of that fountain
of the water of life to which he invites his people.
Only a man alive all through can possibly be at once
strong in the pulpit, strong in pastoral oversight, and
strong in administration of the organized work of a
parish. And that life comes out of contacts with God
kept fresh and bright. It is not mere pious talk, it
is practical sense, that meets us in Luther's dictum,
that the busier one is the more careful must he be to
maintain his practice of prayer. It is not only beauti
ful mysticism, it is the best solution of the problem of
a busy life, that is found in Brother Lawrence's "Prac
tice of the Presence of God." The priest, Caponsacchi,
in "The Ring and the Book," voices a noble and prac
tical ideal for the preacher,
To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, th' eternal, and that not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home.
To freshen one's soul each morning by quiet, undis
tracted contact for even a brief moment with the God

94 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
who meets us in His Word and as we pray; to live
through the day, in all its clash of details and duties,
in the sense of the presence of the eternal Friend, helps
best to make great things stand out, and little things
fall into place, and all things take on order and sym
metry, as one tries calmly and humbly to do the will
of God in Christ.
And what a reward awaits the man who succeeds
by God's good grace in being at once a preacher and
a pastor. For nothing on earth or in heaven can be
more heart-satisfying than the experience of preaching
what one knows to be the truth of God, set in strong
and worthy words, to people whose hearts are one with
the heart of the preacher through long-tested friendli
ness and fellowship.

CHAPTER VI
IN THE SOCIAL ORDER
The most obvious and decisive test of the courage
and sanity of a preacher is in his dealing with the
social and industrial order. It calls for sanity and
courage in equal parts. One needs to be not only wise
as a serpent and harmless as a dove, but also bold as
a lion. Here is the sensitive point in our modern life. If the
preacher is either too timid here, or too rash, he does
great harm. The radicals line up on one side and the
reactionaries on the other, and the preacher must run
the gauntlet. Even if he keeps well in the middle, he
will catch a drubbing if he moves forward at all. But
woe to him and to the church for which he stands, if
he veers to the one side or the other from the course
of perfect justice and fairness.
A dozen years ago or more Walter Rauschenbusch
told us, in "Christianity and the Social Order," that
the really dangerous heresies in the present day are
economic rather than theological; that it demands
little courage to-day to stand for liberal theological
ideas ; but that if one would find his way most quickly
to the lions, he need only question the accepted eco
nomic theories, and industrial methods and practices.
It is true testimony. The place of danger to-day is on
the front line of the industrial struggle.
It is therefore exceedingly important that the
95

96 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
preacher shall work out with care the problem of his
rightful freedom in handling questions related to the
social and industrial order. He is bewildered by a
babel of voices. On the one hand stand the radicals,
who want "to lay the old world low," and "behold the
new world rise." Some of them are men and women
of deep religious fervor. Many of them are keen-wit
ted enough to discern the tremendous power of religi
ous faith, the potential force that is in the church;
and, clearly or dimly, they feel a certain unity of sen
timent between the Gospel and all forward moving en
terprises. There are few radicals who know Jesus at
all, who do not feel His strong attraction.
The papers have recently quoted an alleged utter
ance of the Russian Soviet government, defending the
confiscation of church property. They plead that,
inasmuch as the proceeds are to be used for education,
they have the sanction of Jesus, who said, "Suffer the
little children to come unto me."
From the radical groups in society comes then nat
urally, inevitably, a strong, passionate surge of pro
test against what they call the silence of the pulpit, a
demand that the church shall champion new economic
and industrial theories, or a contemptuous criticism
of the church as a defender of the capitalistic order.
All this hurts and stings and upsets the preacher.
Sometimes it stings him into blind partisanship of rad
icalism which speedily ends his usefulness in the
church. Sometimes it drives him into equally blind
reaction which may hold him in his pulpit, but renders
him equally useless. Always it makes him uneasy,
lest he fail to find the path of real fairness and honor.
Nor is the pressure less from the other side. It is
no less impassioned, no less determined, and far more

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 97
steady. From many influential quarters, whence
comes much of the backing of the work of the church,
comes a strong and insistent demand that the preach
ers shall steer clear of social, economic, and political
matters, and limit himself and his sermons to the
"Gospel." And by the "Gospel" these men and women
mean the application of Christianity to the individual
soul, and particularly to its preparation for another
world. They want the church to be wholly a soul-
saving, not at all a life-directing, institution.
Between the two groups the preacher is hard-beset.
He honestly wants to do the right thing. How shall
he steer his course?
Fundamentally, he must find his guidance where the
Master found His. "My judgment is just; because 1
seek not mine own will, but the will of Him that sent
me." Clean hands and a pure heart, a life set on the
doing of the will of God, this is the surest and best
sort of guidance.
One hesitates to offer counsel, or to attempt to blaze
a trail, in so tangled a situation. But certain prin
ciples or facts may be asserted with confidence, the
clear sight and acceptance of which will at least help
toward the finding of the just course.
First of all, in a day like this, when the whole indus
trial order is under suspicion, when earnest men chal
lenge the very basis of our economic system, no man
who preaches should let himself be entangled in any
business enterprises, or should draw gain from indus
trial operations that are open to serious objection.
The preacher must be above suspicion.
Aside from any other consideration, the preacher
should be like Agassiz, in having "no time to make
money." Part of the price one cheerfully pays for the

98 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
right to preach should be the definite and absolute
abandonment of the right to put time or ability into
business enterprises. Of course this does not exclude,
it rather encourages, thrift; provision for one's family
through insurance against death, disability, or acci
dent ; and the proper investment of one's savings. But
it does mean that one shall not become personally in
terested in business enterprises; or use his personal
fellowships for economic ends; or invest his savings
in enterprises of doubtful social value. Too often the
influence of ministers has been wrecked on reefs of
that sort.
The present industrial order is on trial. Let a min
ister hold himself fit to sit on the jury.
When the Interchurch Report on the Steel Strike
came out, when its serious allegations remained un
answered except by personal attacks on the men re
sponsible for the report, and a single exhibition of
special pleading in a sermon widely distributed, — a
sermon which did not touch the real merits of the
case, — when months went by and the allegations were
still unmet, a minister of my acquaintance sold his
stock in the Steel Corporation. That was taking the
right step to defend his freedom as a preacher. The
Report may have been wrong and the Company may
have been right; but, in the sensitive state of the pub
lic conscience to-day, no preacher can afford to be tied
in a profitable relationship with any concern that is
under suspicion.
Of course I do not say that every preacher should
take the course just described. Every man's con
science must face the matter in the sight of God.
Moreover, most of us ministers are fortunately quite
free from the necessity of disposing of holdings of any

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 99
sort of stock. But let us take it as a law from which
there is no escape, that he who would be free in the
pulpit to discuss the industrial order must shake his
hands from the taking of bribes, must see to it that no
direct profit comes to him from any questionable op
erations of the present economic order. There is
enough cause for concern over the way we all tend to
profit indirectly by the maintenance of the present or
der with its abuses unchanged.
The preacher who would guard his freedom must
also be on watch unrestingly against the insidious dan
ger that the church shall be dominated by money.
The church must not be controlled by conservative
wealth to its own advantage or in its own interest.
There is a general awakening to the social value of
the church for which on the whole we should be deeply
thankful. Leading men in the business world are say
ing good words, appreciative and strong, about the
tremendous values of religion, and the consequent im
portance of the church.
But, while we rejoice in this new appreciation, most
of which is absolutely honest and helpful, we need to
beware lest there grow up in some quarters an admira
tion for the church quite like that which one feels
toward a good trusty watchdog. When men begin to
value the church as a guardian of the present system of
things, as a narcotic for social unrest, as giving assur
ance or help in maintaining present conditions un
changed, it is time to remember the warning of the
Master, "Woe unto you when all men speak well of
you." It would be a shameful fate for the church of
the Living God to come to be valued chiefly as a cus
todian of property, a defender of things as they are.
"Things as they are" — that is Phillips Brooks' defin-

100 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
ition of the world, to which Christians are not to be
conformed. The preacher may well covet the counsel of men of
wealth and of business capacity on business matters
connected with the church. Indeed he may well leave
such matters largely to their judgment, frankly ad
mitting that his experience in that field is too limited
to warrant any interference on his part. But the
preacher should set his face like a flint against the cur
rent and almost universal tendency to let money talk
with authority on any and every subject. Every age
has its own peculiar form of idolatry. To-day our
danger is "marketolatry," subserviency to the judg
ment of successful business men, and a tendency to
count economic interests paramount. There is a right
ful respect due to the man or woman, who, through
ability, keenness of mind, daring, or other fine qualities,
has amassed a fortune and gained the power that goes
with it. But success in business, even the highest suc
cess, is absolutely no guarantee at all of wisdom to de
cide on theological, moral, or religious questions; nor
does it argue any superior judgment or wisdom even
with regard to . economic or industrial principles.
Many a man can run a business well judged by finan
cial results, who is wholly incompetent to judge
whether the principles on which the business is run
are socially just or unjust, morally good or bad.
One of the most serious tendencies in present-day
living is the tendency to accept and follow the opinion
and judgment of successful men of business rather
than of experts in any special line. We educate a man
until he has special and expert knowledge on some
particular subject. A question arises in that very
department of knowledge. And we discount his opin-

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 101
ion, on the amazing ground that he is a "professor,"
a student, a man of trained intellect and special knowl
edge, and take the judgment of a man who, however
successful in the business of making money, may be as
ignorant as a babe on this particular question, his
judgment often being based on nothing sounder than a
childish prejudice.
We must somehow recover the habit of trusting the
scholar in matters of theory, the minister in matters
of religion, the professional man generally in matters
of expert knowledge, instead of deferring to the judg
ment of the business man on any and every point.
On the moral and religious issues of industry and social
life the average minister can judge far better than can
the average business man ; and the minister must stand
for his superior right and power of judgment in such
matters. One of the most encouraging and hopeful signs of
vitality in the church is the quick revolt manifested
here and there against unrighteous attempts to bring
or keep the church under the control of financial in
terests. The whole church is under obligation to the
Young Women's Christian Association for its firm
loyalty to the accepted social creed of the churches,
unmoved by threats of financial loss or even by actual
carrying out of the threats, or by the defection of in
fluential individuals. That great organization never
more worthily than in that course demonstrated the
soundness of its claim to be simply an agent of the
Church of Christ. We owe a real debt to the ministers
of Pittsburgh for the dignified but unmistakably clear
fashion in which they protested against the attempt of
certain commercial interests of that city in the spring
of 1921 to limit the freedom of the church by applying

102 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
financial pressure. The preacher must be ready in
stantly and always to protest against and to repudiate
any and every attempt to make the church the servant
of property interests, or to influence its policies and
pronouncements by allegations of the effect they may
have on business, or by application of financial pres
sure. There is abundant proof in history that the
church can far better afford to be poor than to be
unjust, or untrue to the highest spiritual and social
good of humanity.
The preacher needs to have his eyes open to the
fact that, in many cases, men cry out for the "old
Gospel," and resist the application from the pulpit
of Christian principles and ideals to the social and in
dustrial order, that they plead for an evangel exclu
sively individual, because they fear the result of apply
ing Christianity to our social affairs. They know that
many comfortable conditions in present business would
be rudely shaken by a fearless application of the teach
ings of Christ. They are pleading for an enervated
and mutilated Gospel because the real Gospel is dis
tinctly disturbing. They call it the "Old" Gospel, but
in truth it is only "Middle-aged." It is not as it came
from the soul* of the Master, not as it was carried into
the world by His apostles. That was a Gospel meant
for every fact and phase and part of the life of hu
manity; its aim was nothing less than to "bring every
thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ."
Only such a whole, unemasculated Christianity can
save this present age, or any other. Let the preacher,
on pain of Christ's judgment, stand inflexibly for the
right and duty to declare the whole Gospel, in its
world-wide application, let it hit where it will and
hurt whom it may.

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 103
Yet the preacher, if he would be just and right, and
fill the place of a true servant of Jesus Christ, must
guard himself with equal care on the other side. He
must match the emphatic statement that the suc
cessful man of business is not qualified by his success
to pass judgment on moral and religious questions
with as emphatic an admission that the preacher, how
ever good or godly or learned or keen, is not thereby
qualified to advise a man how to run his business.
There has been far too great a tendency on the part
of progressive ministers, alive to social developments,
to pass judgment on details, to lay down the law about
business method and policy, to tell the business man
just how he must act in his business in order to be a
Christian. The commercial leader rightly resents such
utterances from the pulpit. They are intrusions of
the preacher into a realm where he cannot speak with
authority. They weaken his influence, rather than
strengthen it.
The preacher must not become a partisan. He can
successfully and rightly defend himself and his pulpit
against attempts to use them in defense of vested
rights only by holding himself and his words abso
lutely clean from the espousal of any particular social
propaganda or any special group and its interests.
The fatal defect of Professor Rauschenbusch's great
book on "Christianity and the Social Order" was the
plea at its conclusion that the church definitely line
up with the Labor Union Movement. The preacher
must jealously guard himself against the slightest
rightful suspicion of partisanship.
Here is a task that calls for all the grace that is in
a man. It is so easy to be a partisan, so hard to hold
the helm straight and sail down the right course. Per-

104 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
haps one of the best possible proofs that one is keeping
straight is that he gets denunciations and criticisms and
complaints from both sides. When the radical brands
him as a coward, and the reactionary denounces him
as a Bolshevist, a preacher may well thank God and
take courage. It is like seeing the red and green lights
that mark the true course lying in the dark between
them. There are certain simple things the preacher can do
to make more sure the finding and keeping of his right
and straight course.
Let him be sure that he is well-informed. The apos
tolic counsel is good here, "Let every man be swift to
hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath." Much of the
irritation and clashing that has followed discussion
from the pulpit of social or economic issues has in
reality been caused by hot vaporings boiling off the
top of a poorly-informed mind. He who would preach
the real Christ to this real age must seize on every
opportunity to know the facts of our economic and in
dustrial order. Good books and periodicals are acces
sible in considerable numbers, which give accurate and
valuable information about social principles and indus
trial conditions. Such volumes as Tawney's "An
Acquisitive Society," and the essays on "Social Recon
struction" issued by the War-time Commission of the
Federal Council, are indispensable for the preacher
who would be well-informed. Even if he sees no way
at present to meet or use the facts, let him keep on
gathering and studying them. Two men were passing
in a railroad car through one of the gigantic industrial
districts which lie on the outskirts of our great cities.
One of them pulled down the shade. "Why do you
do that?" asked the other. "Because I hate to see that

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 105
dehumanizing place," was the answer. "I know it is
wrong, but there is nothing I can seem to do to help
it." "There is one thing you can do," came the an
swer. "What is that?" "Stop pulling down the
shade." Face the facts, know all you can of them,
read, talk, listen, observe. That is one of the prime
requirements for one who would be a good preacher of
Christ in an industrial age.
The preacher must be on guard continually against
the tendency which is strong in our day to assume,
more or less unconsciously, that any book or journal
or society or committee which makes statements that
reflect seriously on the justice of the present order must
of course be partisan and prejudiced. If he is min
istering in a church largely made up of men and women
who are gainers by the operation of the present eco
nomic order, he must quietly but determinedly resist
their natural tendency to conclude hastily and as a
matter of course that damaging statements, unpleas
ant revelations, exposures of conditions that call for
radical change, must be condemned as untrue. He
must stand always for the right and duty to have the
light of publicity turned full on every corner of our
life, and to face what that light reveals, whoever may
have turned it on or however unpleasant or upsetting
its revelations may be.
Of course he must be equally on guard against the
opposite error, of assuming that the present system
of things is wholly wrong, and that any document or
committee or group that denounces it must be telling
the truth.
Nor must one seek to be well informed by studying
only the facts of to-day. He must restudy the Gos
pel, till he has in his soul the wealth of its social mean-

106 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
ing. What is this Gospel in which we say is the hope
of man's salvation? It somehow meets every age with
a new vision of truth. There is something kaleido
scopic about it. The simple bits of unworldly wisdom
thrown together in the New Testament fall into a new
pattern of bewildering beauty and freshness, with every
turn of the wheel of time. The preacher must get
afresh into the heart of the teachings of Jesus and
of the apostles, under the guidance of the social spirit
of this age. Then he will have something to say. He
can speak with authority. There are words hidden
away in the Gospels that are bombs for power, arc-
lights for radiance. To one who seeks, it seems that
the whole New Testament is aglow and alive with a
social Gospel. What is needed more than thousands
of average ministers, hundreds of Bible classes in aver
age churches, restudying the New Testament to get
from it true light on the social application of the Chris
tian Gospel of redemption?
It is of the utmost importance that the preacher
should see clearly that it is his business to declare
principles and ideals, rather than to make their appli
cation specific. I know that that course exposes him
to the scornful accusation that he deals only with
theory, and never comes to grips with actual facts.
It brings out floods of the easy criticism that the pul
pit deals only with vague generalities. But neverthe
less it is the right course. And he who ceaselessly,
week in and week out, sets forth Christian principles
and keeps the social ideals of the Gospel shining be
fore the men and women of his congregation, does
make a difference, and counts for progress.
Much may be done through forums and meetings
of men's and women's associations, to have facts set

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 107
before the people of the churches, and definite appli
cation can thus be made of Christian principles to in
dustrial details. But that should be done by experts.
The minister cannot by any possibility become an ex
pert in the details of modern business and industry. By
the very conditions of his work he is shut out from
authoritative and helpful statement of the application
of Christian principles to industrial details.
Let him eschew as dangerous and wrong the impulse
to pass judgment on this or that specific application
of Christian principle. Let him take as part of the
inevitable accompaniment of his position the charge
that he deals only in glittering generalities. Let him
frankly admit that the Christian business man, and
not the preacher, must fit the principles to the particu
lar industrial or commercial situation.
But let him bear hard on the other end of that claim.
Let him admit to the Christian business man, every
Sunday, that the preacher must be content to pro
claim the principles, but let him insist also, every Sun
day, that the business man is to put them into opera
tion. Let there be no uncertain note to the trumpet
through which he voices the eternal obligation of the
Christian to do the will of God, at any cost, right where
he lives and works. Let him clearly declare that any
Christian who is connected with a business or industry
which is not in full accord with Christian principles
has no right to be content, but must either get out of
that business, or stay in it to redeem it.
These three things then the preacher may do, and
should do, continually, in dealing with the outwork
ing of Christianity through the social and industrial
order: First, declare the Christian principles and ideals

108 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
uncompromisingly; second, point out definitely any
and all conditions unmistakably wrong in the light of
those principles ; and third, insist on the duty of Chris
tian men in business and industry to apply those prin
ciples unreservedly, whatever the result. Whenever
any bit of the social order is Christianized by this
method, the greater glory and credit goes to the busi
ness man, who works in the actual. But the preacher
does his part, and has his own peculiar satisfaction.
There are two more general convictions or realiza
tions the preacher may well hold constantly in mind
as he works his way through the discussion of the social
order. One of them is that he stands in the pulpit a repre
sentative of all his congregation. He is not there with
a free license to say what pleases him. He has been
chosen by a company of men and women, all of them,
to say what will be helpful to them in their spiritual
life. He must lead, of course. He must not keep his
ear too close to the ground. He must have Samuel's
ear, not that of Polonius. He is responsible to His
Lord and theirs; he must represent the best, most
progressive, most forward-moving spirit that is in the
people. But always he must speak for all, not for him
self alone.
That will inevitably influence the matter, and still
more the form, of what he is to say. A very com
mon and harmful mistake made by many a preacher
is a half-conscious sense of an invisible audience con
sisting of all the world, a dulled or even a deadened
apprehension of the fact that he is to speak to these
particular men and women, and that he must take
them as they are and where they are and try to lead
them to better thoughts, higher ways, and a deeper

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 109
and wider practice of essential Christianity. Outside
critics help confirm the preacher in this mistaken no
tion, by judging his words as if they were addressed
to all the world, not to a particular set of people. Let
the preacher never forget that even the Master of us
all, in His last prayer, spoke most of all of what He
had done for "His own," those the Father had given
Him. The nearer the preacher can keep to the best
that is in the heart of all the congregation, the surer
will be the effect of his leadership.
The second fact he must not forget is that one great
primary function of the church is to hold people of
differing groups together. One who has ever come
upon Phillips Brooks' conception of the church as a
"universal solvent, lying back of all our differences
and composing them," can never quite get away from
that ideal, is haunted by it always. Sometimes one
must preach that which will divide, will arouse oppo
sition. But ordinarily the preacher misses his true
opportunity, if he does not choose, so far as righteous
ness and loyalty to Christ permits, that which will
unify the group committed to him, and lead them
unitedly into a broader and bigger theory and prac
tice of the Christian life.
Strong men, leaders in the business life of their com
munity, are quite right in feeling and expressing a
restless dissatisfaction when a preacher becomes a
muckraker, in the currently accepted meaning of that
word, an unsparing and unfair critic of present condi
tions, who rejoices in iniquity as well as in the truth,
ever playing up the worst side of social and industrial
conditions. But let the business leader remember,
and let the preacher help him do it, — that the original
idea of a. muckraker was different, and far more seri-

110 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
ous. As John Bunyan drew the man with a muck
rake, he was a type not of the carrion crow variety of
critic, but of the man whose first and controlling in
terest is money and material success. It is part of the
rightful concern of the preacher not to become a muck-
raker in the modern sense of the term; but it is a part
of his concern that is immensely more important and
serious that he do his best to keep the men and women
of his church and of the community from becoming
muckrakers in the original sense in which John Bun
yan used the word. He will best discharge that func
tion who is not content with criticism and denuncia
tion, or with honest and unsparing presentation of the
rightful principles of Christian life and work, but who
continually presents a glowing and fascinating con
structive ideal of the Christian and his life; who fires
men with a vision of the possible meaning and mission
of Christianity in the world; who preaches not only a
Christ Who steals from door to door, knocking for
admission to every heart, but a Christ in the glory of
supreme authority over the world, a Christ on the
white horse, out to drive the four horsemen back to
the pit where they belong, and to make the whole life
of mankind godly and brotherly. It is his place to
point to the Christ of the Gospel, with His great words
and greater spirit of social justice and brotherly love,
and proclaim to the whole world of society, of indus
try, of commerce, of politics, "Neither is there salva
tion in any other; for there is none other name under
heaven, given among men, wherein we must be saved."
It is hard, — one of the hardest things in the world, —
to preach the Gospel of the Living God freely in a day
of social unrest. It calls for all there is of goodness,
wisdom and unselfishness in a man, and then sends

IN THE SOCIAL ORDER 111
him to the infinite supply of God's grace for that which
will make up his glaring and humiliating deficiencies.
But what an adventure it is, what a life for a man to
live, what a task for a Christian to undertake, what a
joy and glory if he win in it even the least success.
This world of industry will never be right until it is
altogether set on the lines of Christ's clear gospel of
love, brotherhood, service, and faith in human per
sonality. What a privilege to have the right to say
that, to remind men of it, to keep that torch burning
in their sight as they slowly work their way toward
the better day "when the world grows fair."

CHAPTER VII
IN THE WORLD ORDER
Many years ago a great preacher said, "The world
is my parish." But, great man though he was, and
deeply as he meant it, he could not say it with one
half the truth and emphasis with which the average
preacher of our day can make the assertion. For,
since his day, the world has become a parish, a neigh
borhood, bound by bands of steel, and threads of cop
per, and waves of ether into a vast community of
thought and purpose, a world in which each part affects
and is affected by every other part.
It is a task at once daunting and inspiring to preach
worthily in such an age. How can one stand up and
speak in the face of such vast opportunities, in view
of so broad a field for the Christian truth and life?
How can he handle such a rich confusion of living prob
lems? How can he be free in thought and speech and
spirit, in the face of such responsibilities? The Mas
ter said long ago, "The field is the world," but what a
little world it was! How much more that saying
means now! "The field is the world," all this vast,
throbbing, varied life to be touched, vivified, unified,
redeemed by the Gospel of Christ. "Who is sufficient
for these things?" the preacher asks, with an intensity
in the question that even Paul could not feel. It is a
task calling for courage, poise, insight, breadth and
depth of view such as few men possess. No man can
112

IN THE WORLD ORDER 113
rightly fill the place of the preacher to-day who does
not always have the world in his view. No parochial
or provincial spirit can meet the demands of to-day.
Here emerge some of the most untried and difficult
problems the preacher has to face. What are the lines
and limits of his freedom? How can he move con
fidently amid the concerns of the great world-life, with
a message big enough to match the age?
Out of the wartime just back of us rises one acute
problem, felt more keenly for our realization of failure
to face it properly in the sharp exigency which faced
us then. What is the right relation of the Christian
and of the church to war? And, larger than that, what
is the right relation of the church to the state, the or
ganized political life of the nation?
Organized Christianity made a sorry show of itself
in its dealing with those questions during the war. It
seemed to have no sure mind, no clear voice. It was
belabored and denounced on the one hand because it
supported and encouraged the war, and on the other
hand because it sat like Peter by the fire warming him
self, and shirking the responsibility. It is not to be
wondered at if, in the eyes of the world, Christ was
divided. Some preached non-resistance in His name,
and some preached killing enemies in His name. Some
individual preachers swung from the one extreme to
the other with startling thoroughness and rapidity
when our nation entered the war. On the whole the
church, here as in other countries, backed the govern
ment, once the war was on.
The confusion lingers. One still comes upon lamen
tations over the failure of the church as shown in its
supine abandonment of Christ's doctrine of non-resist
ance, eloquent pleas to Christians to take the position

114 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
that war is in itself and always evil and utterly incon
sistent with Christianity; and occasionally also one
finds severe strictures upon the church for its failure
to support more promptly the cause of the right. Is
it, as a leading American churchman said during the
wartime, the highest function of the church to foster
patriotism? Or should the church try to set in the
place of patriotism a devotion to humanity, an inter
national mind, proclaiming, as a church in New York
City proclaims, "We know no nation"?
The fact is, the church is as much at sea in this
matter to-day as it was a generation ago about the
relation of Christianity to social and industrial life.
Through the confused issues of that question the mind
of Christ is slowly beginning to take on shape, for those
who really want to see it. But many years of discus
sion, with clashing of varied views, and much confusion
and bitterness, had to be passed through before the
question cleared at all. We must not expect a quick
consensus of Christian judgment on this intricate ques
tion of internationalism, of the relation of Christianity
to war and to patriotism.
But this one. fact is as clear as the sun at noon of
a cloudless day, that it is high time to awake out of
sleep, and to stay awake; time for the church as a
whole and in all its parts to wrestle with this question
until we know what the mind of the Lord is. Surely
we can see this at least, that the question of the right
relation of Christianity to war cannot be faced and
decided when war is on. Then passion rages, patriot
ism is at white heat; criticism is ruled Out; the lid is
clamped down. Now, after the war, with its hateful-
ness and filthiness still vivid, with a chance for free
discussion and the formation of calm judgment, now

IN THE WORLD ORDER 115
is the time for beginning the long, hard journey that
shall end in clear views and decided convictions, which
may hold as principles of action if ever, as God grant
we never must, we face again the outbreak of a war
in which our country takes a part. The best thought
of the church, and of every man in it, should be given
to the effort to discover what Jesus really teaches and
shows as to the rightful attitude toward war. And,
as we learn better the truth as it is in Jesus, we should
teach it from the pulpits, in our church schools, to all
Christian people. This work should begin now, and
continue uninterruptedly, until the church as a whole
is ready to stand for the real program of Christ. We
hope and pray with all our souls that never again may
war come. But along with that prayer goes another:
that if, in the providence of God, or through the sin
fulness and stupidity of man, another war should come,
the church may face the emergency with clear vision
and resolute will, knowing what Christ wants, and
ready to do it, whatever the cost. Should the church
take its stand uncompromisingly on the position that
loyalty to Christ demands abstention from war under
any and all conditions? Perhaps not; but let us at
any rate face the question honestly and squarely. The
pacifist at least presents a consistent policy, and bases
it on words and ideals of Christ. He must be met not
by denunciation or evasion, but by clear, patient, un
questionable exposition of the Christian position. To
brand him as a coward, to dismiss him as an unprac
tical idealist, does not meet the case. The only ques
tion is, What should Christians do? On the surface,
the pacifist has a good case. He must be met, not by
moving off the ground of Christian ideals, but by going
deeper into that ground to find hid treasure of truth.

116 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
It will be richly worth while for the church to set
its best thought at this difficult question. Some of us
are of the opinion that the pacifist takes the short cut
in one of those cases where the longest way round is
the shortest way home; that he slashes through a knot
which God means us patiently to untangle ; that there
is need not only of seizing an ideal, but also of keeping
touch with common processes of slowly advancing so
cial life. It is Christian to revolt from the hideous
cruelties and inhumanities of war; but may there not
be something Christian in the refusal to break away
from one's fellows if and when this grisly, gruesome,
hideous horror of war comes upon that community
which we call the nation? "War is hell" ; is it not pos
sible that one may at times keep nearer to Christ by
descending into hell? The church must so think and
speak and act as to parry the keen thrust that she
ever condemns war in the abstract, and always sup
ports wars in particular. She must also avoid the
Tolstoyan error of turning her back on society and
washing her hands of its troubles, saving her own soul.
Moreover there is this which the church may and
should do, — see that the case against war is not allowed
to degenerate into a cool presentation of economic
arguments and considerations. The true accusation
against war is not that it wastes treasure, inexcusable
as that waste is; not even that it wastes human lives,
horrible and tragic as is that ruthless destruction of
the world's supreme treasure. The worst indictment
against war is found in what it does to the spirits of
men, its denial of the principles of Jesus and of all
godly and human life and faith. The worst thing is
not the hurt that follows the bayonet thrust, but the
cultivated hate that delivers it; not the taking of life,

IN THE WORLD ORDER 117
but the degradation of the soul and the society of man.
The church should be glad of all the help economists
can give in freeing the race from the curse of war; but
the church should never abandon leadership in the
crusade. Something is wrong, fatally wrong, if the
church is not ever striding on ahead of every other
human institution or group or influence toward a world
free from war.
No one sees the true and straight way through that
jungle as yet. But it must be found, and it can be
found, if the church sets its mind, its prayers, its soul,
at the task. Amid all the divided counsels, two things
are absolutely clear. One is that we should unitedly,
fervently, with ruthless honesty, seek to know the real
mind of Christ as to the right of Christians to par
ticipate in war; the other is that now is the time to set
forth strongly, unremittingly, in season and out of
season, the beastliness, the utter abominableness of
war, its hideous inconsistency with the spirit and way
of Christ ; to protest against the idea that war is neces
sary, natural, or inevitable, and to teach that it is
unnecessary, and that to begin it or allow it to come
on is a sin of the first magnitude. Every time any
one speaks well of war, glorifies it or palliates it, the
church should spring forward to strip the golden mask
of glory from it and show the hideous beastliness of
it. The church should never let a good word be said
for war, an excuse offered, an argument advanced in
its favor, without protesting in the name of Christ.
We should make much of the fact that our own gov
ernment has plainly and officially indorsed the view
that preparation for war makes for war, not for peace.
All this we should begin to do now, and this we should
carry on unremittingly, until the straight path of the

118 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
Lord lies plain before us, and we can go on our way
without hesitation or apology or division of counsel.
Let every preacher of Christ claim and exercise his
freedom to discuss this question of the rightfulness of
war with an eye single to the interests of the Kingdom
of God, and with frank and utter disregard of any and
all other considerations or interests.
Closely allied to this question is another, which arose
out of the smoke and tumult of the war, and has lin
gered on to vex us.
How far is the church bound to support the national
government and its policies, and how far is it free to
criticize or oppose them? Is it the highest function
of the church to foster patriotism? And does that
mean that the church and its pulpit must always up
hold the existing political order of things?
The exigencies of wartime made necessary a consid
erable exercise of repression of free speech; it also
accustomed us to the ways of propaganda. It would
be strange if it had not affected, and that for some
time to come, the ability to think and speak freely on
matters of critical moment. The preacher needs a
steady hand -on the tiller and a good eye for signals,
if he is to steer straight. There is a large and influen
tial group which thinks it a sufficient statement of the
proper attitude of the church to take in a narrow and
literalistic way Paul's statement, "The powers that be
are ordained of God." There is also a group of radi
cals which is ever ready to assume that the powers
that be must necessarily be wrong.
Straight and concerted thinking is needed to make
clear the relation between the church and the state.
We are all loyal to the fixed policy of America, the
separation of church and state. But we see, with in-

IN THE WORLD ORDER 119
creasing clearness, that the church has a rightful func
tion of moral influence in the life of the nation, and
that the nation has a right to expect a measure of
support from the church. What are the proper
bounds? In the excitement of the wartime, laws were passed
by the Federal Government, and in some of the states,
and machinery of espionage and social judgment was
set up, which opened the way for unjust and unwar
ranted intrusion into the separate realm of the church.
Attempts were made, some of them able and persist
ent, to use these laws and agencies as means of com
pelling churches to support the existing economic order,
or of limiting the free use of churches for the expres
sion of public opinion on public questions. It is the
unquestionable duty of the church to protest against
such policies and acts as are thoroughly opposed to the
American policy of a free church in a free state. To
insist that patriotism involves the indorsement of any
particular social or economic order, and to brand as
treasonable or seditious free discussion of suggested
changes even of a radical sort, is in itself subversive
of the right principles of Americanism.
The church should stand for patriotism. It should
be eager to teach its children the principles and ideals
of our American political order. It should make much
of the great days in the national calendar. Prayer for
the nation and for its officers should form a recognized
part of public worship. It is a good sign, a real gain,
that in many churches the flag, set up in the enthusi
asm of the wartime, remains as a symbol of the holi
ness of the patriotic spirit. There is absolutely no
reason why the flag should be displayed in a church
in wartime, and not in time of peace. The relation

120 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
of the church to the nation must be a constant, not
an intermittent, affair.
But there is need of hard, straight thinking to "mark
the metes and bounds of liberty" in this matter of the
relation of the public utterances of the pulpit to the
national life. The church must learn how to develop
and encourage patriotism without repressing that free
and independent criticism, without which patriotism
becomes a fetich, dangerous to the nation, and menac
ing to the world. It is one of the conditions of health
in a democratic state that there be in it a free and
independent church, with an influence that can be felt,
loyal to the great inherited principles and ideals of
the nation, standing always for the supremacy of law,
slow to speak on questionable issues, a unifying rather
than a partisan force, but alert to discern and voice
the moral issues involved in public policies, and quick
to resent and protest against any attempt to limit its
right of moral judgment. Every preacher in America
should help work out this unsolved problem of the
proper relation of the church to the nation by prac
tical experiments that shall be at once wise and dar
ing; and by .encouraging the holding of conferences at
which the problem may be seriously discussed.
But the function of the church and of the preacher
cannot be limited to protest. Christianity is always
constructive. The Master we follow is one "in whom
is the yea." True Christianity is never satisfied with
attacking an evil ; it seeks to set in its place a positive
value. It would be but a half gain if the church should
work out a clear and consistent policy about participa
tion in war, or even about the broader question of free
dom from state control. The church should be at work

IN THE WORLD ORDER 121
at the same time on constructive propositions for mak
ing itself a force in the ongoing and upbuilding of a
right world-order. There are three lines along which
the church, and every preacher in it, should be moving
now and constantly ; the awakening of an international
conscience; the encouraging of cooperation between
the church forces of the various nations; and the
setting forward of the world-program of Christianity.
We have heard much of late about the need of "the
international mind." The need has been shown to be
serious by repeated demonstration of the incapacity of
the representatives of the people in our national Sen
ate to act in a large way on world-problems. A crude
and ignorant nationalism has revealed itself as one of
the marked characteristics of American life.
In the work of substituting for this temper an inter
national mind, other agencies than the church may
have an even larger part to play. Universities and
colleges, Chambers of Commerce, and many other vol
untary organizations, may well take the lead. But
there is needed not only an international mind, but
an international conscience; and here the Christian
church finds its opportunity. We should begin to ap
ply to the nation in its international relationships
those great principles which are generally accepted as
the rightful law for the individual: — "No one liveth
to himself" ; "we are members one of another" ; "bear
ye one another's burdens." We must cultivate the
sense of universal brotherhood which is one of the
essentials of the Christian faith. There is too much
of a sense of duty bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans, Canada and Mexico. The conscience of
America should be so sensitive to considerations of
national honor and international responsibility that it

122 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
would rise in overwhelming demonstrations when
timid leaders of public life play safe in the face of
great world-needs and calls.
The preacher who in these days allows himself to
remain unintelligent and uninformed about world con
ditions and the moral aspect of international questions,
is unworthy of a place in the pulpit. He should know,
and should make known to his people, the facts about
the League of Nations, the World Court, the treaties
resulting from the Washington Conference, the prob
lems of America's relation to the Far East. He should
keep informed as to the changing conditions in Europe
and Asia. And he should count it one of the priceless
privileges and solemn responsibilities of the pulpit to
create or quicken, by ceaseless care, by reiterated word,
by ever-present consciousness of its vital and present
importance, an international moral sense on the part
of the people over whom the Spirit of God has set him.
It is cause for profound satisfaction that, on the
whole, the religious forces of America are leading in
this work of fostering and expressing a true interna
tional spirit. Had the decision rested with the church
people of tljis country, there is scarcely a shadow of
doubt that we would now be playing our full part in
the League of Nations. When, a year ago, the plan
of calling a conference of nations on disarmament
hung in the balance, signatures of twenty thousand
ministers were secured in less than two weeks to a
petition urging that such a conference be called. A
similar petition was sent to the Senate this spring,
praying for the prompt ratification of the treaties re
sulting from the Washington Conference. The
churches of America are comparatively well organized
for the exerting of moral influence in the field of inter-

IN THE WORLD ORDER

123

national relations. There are strong and reliable
cooperative movements ready to inform, to encourage,
to unite forces. Every preacher should be eager to
make of his pulpit the strongest possible instrument
for the cultivation of an international conscience, and
for its free and strong and consistent expression.
The second item in a constructive program for the
preacher is that he enter heartily into efforts to bring
about the largest possible measure of cooperation of
religious forces for the promotion of international good
will and friendship.
The church of Christ has an immense and indispen
sable part to play in the establishment of a true inter
national order. For such an order, however well-
drawn and well-started, will fail unless in every nation
there is a large force of good will, operating constantly
and powerfully. As long ago as 1795, in his great
essay on Permanent Peace, Kant laid down as one of
the three conditions of lasting peace a large increase
of the spirit of good will between nations.
What is there more clearly indicated as the proper
province and function of the church, in any and every
place, than to take the lead in the great and vital task
of providing this universal stock of good will? Here
also promising beginnings have been made. Under the
very shadow of the war, in the year and month when
the storm broke, at a meeting held in the very country
where it started, a movement was begun as unpre
tentious as a grain of mustard seed, but with large
promise of growth and use. It is known as the World
Alliance for Promoting International Friendship
through the Churches. It has councils now in 27 coun
tries. It has a single and simple aim, — to stimulate
the church forces in every nation, just as and where

124 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
they are, without waiting for church unity or any other
condition, to begin to act as the natural agents for
producing and fostering good will on the part of that
nation toward other peoples. Here is something con
crete, definite, immediate, and vital.
Every preacher should have a part in this move
ment; not necessarily in the organization; that is but
the servant of the idea and spirit that is so greatly
needed, and lies so close at hand. There is no reason
why every church in this land, and in every other
land, should not be now and always a potent center
for good will, where wholesome and kindly feelings
shall be encouraged toward the men and women of
other lands; where evil rumors and insidious or mali
cious propaganda shall be faced and shamed back to
their unclean holes ; whence shall stream forth a steady
current of generous good will and confidence and eager
readiness to believe the best, that shall form part of
the river of life in the midst of the street of the city
of God, a river on the banks of which may spring up
those trees the leaves of which are for the healing of
the nations. There are tasks in the presence of which
the church stands abashed, sadly confessing its impo
tence to act because of its divisions or some other evil
condition from which it sees no present way of escape.
But here is something the world needs, which the
church can begin to give now, this moment, if every
pulpit becomes a fountain of international good will
and generous judgment. How eager we were in the
wartime to play up the good points of the nations
that were associated with us in the struggle ! How we
gloried in the heroism of France, the unyielding inde
pendence of Belgium, the dogged courage of Britain,
and all the rest! Was it all talk, propaganda? It is

IN THE WORLD ORDER 125
the high privilege of the church always to talk thus of
our neighbors in the best terms, to set them in the best
light, to dwell on that which is finest and highest in
their spirit and conduct. It is there now, as it was in
the days of the war. Let the church set itself and all
its forces at discovering and making the most of the
best that can be said for our neighbors. Let it eagerly
seize and use to the full every opportunity for bringing
together the churchmen of the various nations, that
they may know one another better, and be the better
able to serve as friendly intepreters of one nation to
another. But the greatest constructive service the preacher
can render to the world order is through exalting the
world program of Christianity. It is not enough to
protest against war. We must set over against the
vanishing glory of war the growing glory of the Chris
tian mission.
No preacher is making real use of his freedom to-day
who does not enter his pulpit every Sunday with the
world in his heart. To be parochial or provincial is
to be foredoomed to failure. No church service is
right and worthy from which the people do not go
away with a wider horizon, and with a deep sense of
the bigness of the Christian task. To be true to his
calling the preacher must ever feel his religion to be
a faith with a mission, and that mission as wide as
the world.
The preacher who would make of himself and his
pulpit the best possible instrument for true interna
tionalism has right at hand a natural and powerful
means. More than ever before, it is a time for lifting
up the world-mission of Christianity as the great dis
tinctive fact in the life of the church. The church is

126 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
a body with a history, a noble history, in which we may
well take pride. The church is a body with a creed,
a splendid creed which we may well defend. But the
church is also a body with a mission, and that is its
truest glory. Without that mission the history is dead,
and the creed vain. Christianity looks forward. The
last book in its sacred Scriptures looks forward, not
back, catches the glory of the future, not of the past.
The Bible ends not in a lock and bolt, but in an open
door. The preacher of to-day will be surest of filling his
true place, exerting his full influence, making the best
use of his freedom, by exalting the world-mission of
Christianity. This is the real case against war; not
that it is condemned by abstract considerations; but
that it is the antithesis of what the church stands for
and is doing; that we have something glorious at which
we are aiming, of which war is the brutal and bestial
denial. Here is internationalism at its purest and best, in
this missionary movement of the Christian church,
which holds the best it has in trust for all men, irre
spective of race, color, or tongue ; which sends its best
to the lowliest, and shows its faith in human brother
hood by freely giving its best for all the world. Can
any one doubt that the chief reason why the church
forces of this country are so far ahead of average sen
timent in the possession of a truly international mind
and conscience is that the work of the church in foreign
lands has fostered in the church a spirit naturally re
sponsive to international considerations, a readiness to
take world views, a real acceptance of Christ's spirit of
universal brotherhood?
There is deep and serious need just now for defend-

IN THE WORLD ORDER

127

ing the full liberty of the missionary enterprise. In
many, if not in all, of the branches of the Church of
Christ, a determined effort is being made to shut out
from the missionary ranks all who hold modern views
of religious truth, to disparage and prevent union
movements, and to stand uncompromisingly for some
narrow sectarian conception of truth and program of
effort. Evil as is the effect of such divisive and reac
tionary movements here in the homeland, it is ten
fold more serious on the foreign field. Two great facts
are as clear and sure as sunlight; one is that the best
and most influential elements in the Oriental nations
will not, and cannot, adopt any religion which cannot
live on terms of mutual respect with modern thinking;
the other is that Christianity is the only religion that
has demonstrated its ability to adapt itself to the
modern mind. Those facts put upon the Christians
who stand for large freedom, and for the right and
duty of the Christian Church to go forward, unafraid,
into all the truth, the double responsibility of pushing
the enterprise of foreign missions with all their might,
and of defending the large and full freedom of that
enterprise. For the sake of Christ and of the saving
of the world we must keep the dead hand off from the
forward movements of Christianity. We must send
out the saving Gospel of Christ in terms that appeal
to the mind of to-day, with an unfaltering confidence
in Him Who said, and still says to the whole race of
men, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall
make you free."
Through the whole range of his thought and activ
ity, the preacher must stand for the things that unite,
and against the things that divide ; he must stand for
comprehensive, not for sectarian, policies and pro-

128 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
grams. He must love the world more than any part
of the world, and the truth better than any part of
the truth, and must have an unbounded confidence
in the almighty power of the free spirit of Christ, when
given its way among men.
The world is suffering to-day, — sometimes we fear
that it is dying, for lack of unity, need of something
to hold together its severed and clashing parts.
Matthew Arnold's words come to us as if written for
this very day, rather than for a half century ago : —
See ! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending? — A god
Marshall'd them, gave them their goal.
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe;
Factions divide them, their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.
— Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
l3ole they shall stray; in the rocks
Stagger for ever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.
And the true preacher to-day is he who so lives, so
speaks, so looks out upon the world with the eyes and
in the spirit of Christ, that the noble words may be
truly said of him,
Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardor divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!

IN THE WORLD ORDER 129
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling and prayers
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.
The international function of the Christian Church
was never more beautifully or impressively expressed
than in words that come from an unknown writer in
the second century of our era :
"What the soul is in the body, that are Christians
in the world; for the soul holds the body together;
and Christians hold the world together. This illus
trious position has been assigned them of God, which
it were unlawful for them ever to forsake."
Here is the opportunity of the Christian Church.
Here is an open door for the Christian minister. He
is the representative of a Leader who made it His
chief function to break down middle walls of partition
and produce one new man; so making peace. He is
servant in the earliest movement in history which has
been international in spirit from the beginning, which
broke through all the artificial restrictions of race, and
language, and aimed at a universal brotherhood, a
movement which has its eye set on the goal of a city
of God in which a multitude from every nation and

130 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
people and tribe and tongue shall live together in joy
and peace. How can he be anything else than a tire
less, impassioned, loyal apostle of world -brotherhood?
He will think of his own country as the great unknown
prophet thought of Israel, with deep and fervent patri
otism, but with the sense that the noblest destiny for
his country is that it may heed the call "Thou are my
servant. It is too light a thing that thou shouldst
care for thine own people. I will set thee for a light
to the nations, to be my salvation unto the ends of the
earth." His church, whether little or great, his pul
pit, whether well-known or humble, will be glorified by
the splendor of a mission as broad as the world, and a
spirit as high as that of Christ. In the world-order, —
yes, in the world disorder of our time, the preacher of
Christ will stand not afraid, or abashed, or constrained ;
but bold, sure, and free in his consciousness of a mes
sage and a power that can redeem the world, and that
gives to that local church and its pulpit a vital con
nection with the uttermost parts of the earth. The
field is still the world, and the world is still our parish ;
yes, in a more immediately promising sense than for
that man of God, John Wesley, or even for the Son
of God, Jesus Christ our Lord, Who has brought us to
this place of wider privilege and greater opportunity,
that we might bring nearer the Kingdom of God.

CHAPTER VIII
IN CHRIST
Of making many sermons there is no end ; and there
are libraries of the works of gifted preachers which
ministers may use with much profit. But there is one
sermon by a layman, a thin volume of some twenty
small pages, which no minister can afford to neglect.
In that "Christmas Sermon" Robert Louis Stevenson,
after describing in his winsome way the sort of man
one wants to be, exclaims: "Here is a task for all that
a man has of fortitude and delicacy." Such is the
judgment of the preacher as he surveys his own par
ticular task. And the longer the time he is privileged
to spend in this service the more do its possibilities
and ideals loom high above his poor performance. He
goes on with Stevenson to say: "He has an ambitious
soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who
should look in such an enterprise to be successful."
Is it not the preacher of whom this keen and kindly
critic is thinking, when he says: "Year after year, he
must thumb the hardly varying record of his own
weakness and folly. When the time comes that he
should go, there need be few illusions about himself.
Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed
much: — surely that may be his epitaph, of which he
need not be ashamed. There, out of the glorious sun-
colored earth, out of the day and the dust and the
ecstasy — there goes another Faithful Failure!"
131

132 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
It is a daunting task, a discouraging career. The
minister, more than most men, is haunted his life long
by the sense of shortcoming. But how glorious it is
to be set at a task which demands that one be at his
best every moment, and that in every part of his
nature, to be placed by a divine call where the utmost
one can be and do will scarce avail to meet the inces
sant demands. Such a life is life indeed. One won
ders that the spirit of generous youth does not leap
forward and seize such an opportunity; he wonders
why it is that the ministry does not suffer violence, and
all college graduates press into it. Perhaps they
would, did the church let them see it as it is, unbe-
littled by traditional and conventional ideas.
We have been thinking of the problem of the
preacher's freedom, how he may win and maintain his
rightful liberty amid the countless influences that seek
to bind him, and hold his soul in servitude. There
are two final words to be spoken, in which, far more
than in all the rest, lies the secret of the preacher's
true liberty. He can be a free man, amid all the con
ventionalities of his position, and its details of admin
istration; he can walk with easy stride despite the
clinging garments of inherited faith and traditional
conduct; he can speak freely on critical and controver
sial themes; and in it all maintain himself and his in
fluence in strength and usefulness, if he has found two
great and simple possessions, which are in truth one
and the same; they are freedom from self, and free
dom in Christ.
Freedom from self; that is the preacher's first, and
last, and deepest need. Given that, he is free indeed.
The dark shade that hovers over his best work is his
own shadow. He never finds himself until he has lost

IN CHRIST 133
himself. He is never free until that old man of the
sea is off his back. And how he clings ! How he finds
his way back, and springs on one's shoulders, and holds
tight, just when one thinks he is free forever from the
incubus !
A strange tale is that little story from the Norse-
land of a man who was uneasily though dimly aware
of some one ever following him. He could not be sure
that he heard steps ; he could see no one ; but the con
sciousness of a malicious sprite or troll dogging his
steps grew ever clearer. He wandered far to escape
the pursuer, even to the lonely, frozen North ; but the
steps sounded ever louder. At last he turned sud
denly, — and was face to face with himself.
That is the demon that dogs the steps of the
preacher, holding him back from the truest success,
making him fearful when he should be free. Somehow
he must be saved from himself.
It is not only nor chiefly in its coarser forms that
self-interest hurts and hampers the work of the
preacher. We may leave aside these more obvious and
outward aspects of the self-centered life. It is axio
matic that a minister can do nothing but fail, if self-
advantage bulks large among his motives. What we
have in mind is the subtler play of the self-motive.
Why is it that the preacher cannot speak with free
dom? Most of all because he cannot get free from
himself. We have a way of saying, when a speaker
rises to a height of true eloquence, "He forgot himself
in his cause." There is the true freedom. "He that
hath ceased from his own works, doth enter into rest."
I never hear Kreisler play that I do not say to myself,
"There it is! That is what the preacher longs to be,
and should be, a man who has forgotten self, and

134 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
become a perfect instrument for the use of the master
whose thought he is expressing."
That which strikes one about the greatest preachers
is their self-unconsciousness. But we are mightily
mistaken when we suppose that this is in every case
a native gift, or an easily acquired attitude. It may
be the supreme and most hardly won achievement of
their souls.
Patience, discipline, hard work, practice, — these are
absolute essentials, without which no man can preach
effectively. But these alone can never carry him to
any real success as a spokesman for God. If he works
by clockwork his hearers will see or hear the wheels
go round. The wheels must be there; but the spirit
of the living creature must lift up the whole in a daring
flight of self-forgetfulness.
The problem of the preacher is not unlike that of
the devotee of a sport which has great charm for min
isters. One cannot become a good golfer without
hard work, steady practice, careful discipline and drill.
But woe to the man, who, when the game is on, goes
into it with the spirit of patient, plodding attention
to detail; who is carefully conscious of himself each
moment, watching every movement of wrist and arm
and foot with painstaking devotion. The works of the
flesh must be lost in the life of the spirit, or he will
never enter into the joy of the game.
So the freedom of the preacher must be above all
freedom from himself. Not only self-indulgence, but
self-pity, self-excuse, self-contentment, all the seven
devils of self-concern must be exorcised, if one is to
play freely, gladly, and helpfully the great part of a
preacher for God to men.
Of course, this is but one way of stating the prob-

IN CHRIST 135
lem. One might say, with equal truth, that what the
preacher really needs is, out from among the many
possible selves that lurk within him, to choose, to
develop, and to bring to dominance his best and high
est self. But it is no less true, and more vivid, to
picture the task as that of winning freedom from one
self. This is what the preacher needs, not only in the
delivery of his message, but to conserve his strength
and insure his value, in the details of his ministry to
men and women.
Nothing so clears the mind of doubt, and sets the
path of duty in a shining light, as does the possession
of a soul clean from self-concern. Those close deci
sions which wear men's souls, between conflicting lines
of duty and of opportunity, — and ministers have more
of them to make than most men, — are amazingly for
warded when one's soul is utterly free from fear of
consequences to oneself, absolutely careless as to the
personal outworking of the decision. Nothing so un
fits one to give helpful counsel to souls in difficult per
sonal problems as the intrusion of self-concern. Better
close one's study door, and turn away the troubled
seeker after counsel and sympathy, than admit him
to the presence of a mind only half-attentive, the
keener half restless to get back to the unfinished and
interrupted task. He only is free whose soul is whole
at each moment and for each varying opportunity;
and the secret of that freedom is freedom from self-
love and self-concern.
Nor does the problem stop with the matter of free
dom from one's personal and petty concerns. There is
a larger self from which one must be set and kept free.
Each of us is closely connected with the group-life;

136 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
he belongs to a social circle, to a particular denomina
tion of Christians, to a nation. It is terribly easy to
have one's loyalty to these group-interests become a
mere enlarged self-interest, so that one's denomina
tional loyalty, or one's patriotism, shall be nothmg
more nor less than a more diffused, less offensive, but
no less dangerous egotism. The jingo in politics, the
bigot in religion; these are but cases of enlarged sel
fishness. How can one escape from this haunting, harmful
presence of himself, so that, in his message, and in his
ministry, he may serve with perfect freedom and joy,
set at liberty from the ball and chain of his own self-
consciousness and self-interest?
This is but one phase of the great human, religious
problem for the solution of which the preacher is sent
of God into the pulpit and into the ministry. Here
is our answer: — the preacher must experience in his
own soul, and throughout his life and work, that salva
tion which he offers from God and in the name of
Christ to all men who hear him.
Through all the shifting confusion of present-day
thinking on religion one can discern a question that
means more than any other: What is salvation? What
is it really that we offer men in Christ? The lack of
a clear and definite answer is the weakest element in
the message and ministry of the church to-day. The
eschatological answer is no longer convincing. Men
are more or less indifferent to a religion that offers
them nothing more immediate than the issue between
heaven and hell. Religion must make a vital differ
ence now. The answer in terms of character is vague
and cold. It seems to have more kinship with Marcus
Aurelius than with Jesus of Nazareth. Are we not

IN CHRIST 137
coming to see with increasing clearness every year,
that the essence of salvation is being set free from one
self? The man most truly saved is he who has en
tered most fully into the experience of forgetting him
self in a great adventure, a compelling loyalty, so
noble, so glorious, so hard, yet so hopeful, that his
whole soul is claimed by it, leaving no shreds of him
self to be caught at and held and distracted by the
motive of self-interest.
It is in such terms that Jesus Himself presented
salvation, and called men to come and secure it. His
is never the cry of "safety first." "Come and be saved"
never means "Come and be preserved"; it always
means "Come and be spent," in that earliest and purest
Gospel of Jesus' own words and thoughts. He came
to men lost in themselves to save them from them
selves. So far as one can venture to put the experi
ence of Christian salvation in a phrase, we may say
that it consists in the joy of self-forgetfulness.
Here we come upon the kernel of truth in a fan
tastic and repulsive dogma which held sway in New
England theology a few generations ago. It was held
that no one is truly saved unless and until he is will
ing to be damned if that be to the glory of God. It
was a monstrous heresy, and we give thanks to the
Spirit of Light that its shadow has been driven out.
Yet somewhere within every doctrine that has gripped
the souls of men is a truth ; and the truth below that
monstrous dogma is this great fact that no one is truly
and fully and really saved who has not ceased to care
very much about himself; who cannot say with a
whole heart, "God be glorified, no matter what happens
to me"; who has not really lost interest in the petty
question of his own fortune, or success, or even that

138 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
enlarged self of the group to which he belongs, because
with all his heart and soul and mind and strength he
is in love with something greater and worthier.
Thus the preacher's hope of attaining that freedom
from self which is the root and basis of all true liberty
of prophesying lies altogether in his entering for him
self, really, wholesomely, utterly, into that saving
grace of God which he offers to all men. He must
himself feel and know, as an experience that is at
once a vivid joy and a calming and steadying influence,
he must know in pulpit and pastorate and personal life,
through all his word and work and walk, the grace of
God in Christ that saves a man from himself, by cap
tivating his soul with the glory of a cause, a mission,
by claiming all his love and loyalty for the person of
a divine leader, in all the world the only object worthy
of a soul's whole love.
It is "in Christ" that the preacher finds that free
dom which is the condition of his true success. The
phrase comes from the greatest of Christ's men, the
supreme example of the missionary, the churchman,
the man of God at the business of saving and serving
the world of men. To Paul everything was possible,
because everything was "in Christ"; and "if any man
be in Christ, 'he is a new creature; old things are passed
away; behold, they are become new"; for this is what
it means to be "in Christ"; that one henceforth lives
"not unto himself, but unto Him." "The life that I
now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of
God." The simplest, surest, straightest way, — I do not hesi
tate to call it the only way, — to that freedom from self
in which is the essence of all liberty is "in Christ."

IN CHRIST 139
He has found the way to freedom in preaching who
can say, "To me to live is Christ."
To lose oneself, and find oneself, in Christ, — that is
the simple but hard solution of the whole problem.
It is at once simple and hard because it demands the
whole of one ; no part can suffice. It is "neck or noth
ing, heaven's success, or earth's failure."
Here is the condition of freedom, and its assurance,
in each of the divers fields through which we have
strolled. How shall the youth in whose soul is a
prophetic spark keep that precious gift from dying,
fan it most surely into a flame ever brighter and
clearer? How shall the church escape the shame and
condemnation of quenching the prophets in their
youth, or stoning them in their maturity; how shall
the church be wise enough to cherish and develop to
the utmost this best gift of the spirit of prophecy?
"In Christ" is the answer. The youth of sensitive
soul, who sees visions and hears calls from the unseen,
will find at once the fire of his imagination fanned
and fed, and his sanity and balance held well-poised,
so that he may become neither an echo, nor a discord,
but the true voice of the Living God, if he loses him
self and finds himself "in Christ"; keeping close to
Him, catching His spirit, learning ever more of His
wisdom, until he sees with the Master's eyes, feels with
His heart, thinks with His mind.
Where lies the real hope that the church shall ever
cast off its fears and reactions, loosen its timid hold
upon the past, and welcome the spirit of free prophecy
as its guide? We talk of enlightenment, and educa
tion, and progress, as the necessary conditions; and it
is all true; but it is all less than the truth. What is

140 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
needed, all that is needed, for the attainment of that
unity, progress, spirituality, and power which all true
sons of the church long to see realized in its life, is
that the church should forget everything else "in
Christ"; that it should mean what it says when it
asserts that "Jesus Christ is the only Head of the
church." Why, we have taken that as if it were noth
ing more than a mere denial that the pope is the head
of the church. If once it were taken all through the
length and breadth of the church as a denial of the
right of any man, any teacher, any creed, any council,
Luther, Calvin, Augustine, Paul himself, to supreme
authority, the assertion that Christ alone is our Mas
ter, so that we care only for that for which He cared,
insist on that only on which He insisted, and take Him
as our sufficient Lord, the church would leap forward
toward that unity and victory for which we have long
prayed in vain. For then the church would be
free; the prophets would have free course; the
word of God would live and glow and burn before
men. It is a sober and saddening fact that the three issues
which have most effectually divided Christians into
disputing and warring camps in the last half-century,
the inerrancy of the Scriptures, the virgin birth of our
Lord, and the Apostolic Succession of the ministry,
are, each and all, matters on which Christ never said
a syllable, to which, so far as we know, He never gave
a thought. It ought to make a Christian sick at
heart to realize that the table of the Lord, established
by Him to be a symbol and means of fellowship, is
still a means of separating Christians one from an
other; and all because we set other commandments
alongside of, or ahead of, that which He deemed

IN CHRIST 141
worthy to be His one commandment. We think we
know more than He does.
The church will be free when it is willing to lose
itself and find itself wholly "in Christ." Then will
come days of prophecy beside which that glorious era,
the Eighth Century before Christ, will seem but the
faint glimmer of early dawn in contrast with the shin
ing of the sun in his glory.
There is no way by which the preacher may walk
more readily and more surely on the straight and
narrow path that leads between the extremes of self-
indulgence and asceticism in his personal life and
habits, no way by which he may be more easily and
wholesomely free as a man among men, in the world
and yet not of it, at once unmistakably spiritual and
wholesomely human, than by living his life "in Christ,"
so that he is free from the judgments of men, careless
of their criticisms, yet never harming a weak soul
through the exercise of a selfish liberty. Christ kept
to that path; never a soul so free; never a soul so
considerate. To catch His spirit, to walk in His way,
to know nothing and care for nothing save Jesus
Christ, is to have the open secret of a life that shall
give force to the words spoken from the pulpit.
Nor is there any other one fact or force that can
so surely and steadily give to a man's utterance that
freedom for which the preacher always longs, that
"liberty" which is the joy of preaching, as can a com
plete, quiet, joyous trust in Christ. Many a preacher
knows what it means to pass through a week in which
proper pulpit preparation has been impossible, driven
away, crowded out by duties a servant of God could
not ignore, to come to the hour of worship utterly
unready, to say to himself and to God, "This is no

142 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
longer my concern ; it is God's ; He must speak through
me, and He will"; and then to find such joy and power
in the message as has seldom made itself evident. This
is something wholly different from careless, indolent,
magical reliance on Divine inspiration as a substitute
for hard work and careful thinking and self-discipline.
It is only in the preacher's extremity that God's oppor
tunity comes. But to know in one's soul, beyond all
question, that God is there, and may be trusted, that
He is the ultimate hope and will not fail, that is to
find freedom and joy in the pulpit such as comes
from no other source. It sets one free from the fear
of men, from the dread of failure, from the curse of
self-consciousness, from the haunting sense of in
capacity. There is a special meaning for the preacher
in the great assurance, "They that wait upon the Lord
shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles."
It is by dwelling "in Christ" that the preacher can
best preserve his serenity of soul, his clearness of
vision, his spiritual sensitiveness, while busy with the
innumerable details of administrative work and the
care of individuals in his parish. It makes a differ
ence which is described adequately only when we call
it infinite, when he must turn from his thoughts and
study and kindling visions to deal with the needs of
some individual visitor, if he sees there only an inter
ruption to be dealt with as patiently as possible, or
if he hears the voice of the One he loves best and
longs to serve, saying, "Inasmuch as ye do it unto this
one of mine, ye do it unto me." When he greets the
intruder in that spirit, he goes back to his work and
thoughts actually refreshed, entering into the experi
ence of the Master who said, "I have meat to eat that

IN CHRIST 143
ye know not of," because His soul had been invigorated
and refreshed by talking with a poor, foolish, sinful
woman who broke in upon His rest when He was
weary. It is the man who is really living "in Christ,"
who best solves the difficult and delicate problem how
to be a good pastor and a strong church leader and at
the same time maintain the freedom of soul necessary
to true success as a preacher.
How can one walk at once easily and steadily, turn
ing neither to the right hand nor to the left from the
path of simple truth and honor, in his dealing with
the tangled thoughts of present-day theology? How
can he lead the men and women into the full light,
without blinding and dazzling them? How can he be
faithful in meeting the need of youth for brave deal
ing with truth, and the need of older minds and souls
for quiet joy in the religion which has proved their
strength? Here, as everywhere, the answer is simply
"in Christ." The man who will, at any cost, by any
sacrifice, whatever the consequences, uncover whatever
of the truth in Christ is hid by current and accepted
theology; but who gives little heed to theology old
or new which is not an interpretation of Christ and
His Gospel; the man who in the pulpit has no time
for anything but the truth as it is in Christ Jesus ; will
be at once free and helpful; a true leader of the souls
of men into the greater light, without being a need
less disturber of the peace. He will disturb the peace
of some souls, because it is an ungodly, an unchris
tian peace, out of which they need to be shaken. But
the preacher who always holds himself and his message
"in Christ" will always be free and sound and strong
and helpful.
It is by being thoroughly at home "in Christ" that

144 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
the preacher will most surely find his way into and
along the true path of sound influence on the social
and industrial outworkings of Christianity. Let him
preach his own views, assert his own authority, stand
for his personal and private convictions, and he will
surely get into trouble, as he ought to expect. But
let him speak always out of a real knowledge of Christ's
principles and ideals, a deepening and growing knowl
edge of them, and out of a passionate and utter loyalty
to Christ which makes him neither afraid of what
others think, nor solicitous for what he himself thinks,
but desirous only that the way and thoughts and will
of Christ shall have free course, and he will preach
with freedom, without fear, and without disaster, on
this hard and confused matter. He knows, and his
people know, that his business in the pulpit is to make
clear the whole teaching and spirit of the Master as
applied to the whole life of man and his world; and
once they know that the preacher has only the one
desire, to find out what Christ wants and to declare it,
he will be free, and the best of them will defend his
freedom even when it challenges their accepted ideas
and judgments, .and cuts across their personal or group
interests. How shall the preacher be free to range through this
newly opened, vast, uncharted field of international
relations, of world-conditions and world-needs and
world-policies, save as he thinks and speaks always
"in Christ"? It is Christ Who has set in the world a
fellowship of men meant to become a brotherhood of
man. He is the author and the perfecter of true in
ternationalism. The preacher will speak most freely
and most authoritatively about the world-order and

IN CHRIST 145
its ideals who speaks in the name and in the spirit of
Christ. Here is the simple principle, in which is "the con
clusion of the whole matter," — that he who would be
a preacher in the Christian church must himself be
heartily a Christian. The Christian religion, as it has
come down through the ages, has gathered much to
itself, custom, creed, tradition, organization. It has
entered more and more intimately into the life of the
world; it has become a part of the common ongoing
of our communal life. At times the mass of accumu
lations catches and jams and blocks the flow of the
living water; then men who love pure doctrine and
pure life more than they love their own comfort must
risk much to break up the mass and set the water
flowing again. Often we long to get rid of all the
accretions, good and bad, valuables and rubbish to
gether, and get back to primitive and idyllic purity.
We cannot do it. The slogan "Back to Christ" is a
poor one. What we need is to go on with Christ.
God has put the church in the world, that it may work
out, in and with the life of the world, the perfect and
complex life of the Kingdom of God. But that great
end can be worked out only as men and women are
truly Christians, honestly living and thinking in terms
of Christ and His simple, divine, eternal ideals. The
preacher must be, above all, and below all, himself a
Christian, with the patience of Christ that ever comes
not to destroy but to fulfill, and with the free spirit of
Christ, that will see and say what is the truth of God.
"Where the spirit of the Lord Christ is, there is
liberty." Emerson might have had in mind the preacher and

146 THE FREEDOM OF THE PREACHER
his life of "freedom inserting itself within necessity and
turning it to its profit," when he said, "It is easy in
the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy
in solitude to live after one's own; but the great man
is he who, in the midst of the crowd, preserves with
perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." So
Christ lived. And the surest way so to live is to live
in Him.
There are other steps that follow us, another figure
that haunts us ever, beside that persistent little troll,
or demon, that turns out to be oneself. There is the
presence Francis Thompson felt, the hurrying steps he
heard, the constant call of a "love that will not let us
go," the Heavenly Friend ever at hand, in whom we
find our perfect peace and freedom. Think of the
great preachers of the past. How they have differed,
in gifts, in service, in manner, in method, in every
thing! Yet in one great matter they have been alike.
Always the great preacher for Christ has lived and
spoken and served and suffered and doubted and tri
umphed or faithfully failed, "in Christ," in the power
of an unreserved, deep, glad, complete loyalty to Jesus
Christ, in whose name he has spoken. This is the only
way. Yes, Christ can and does take even the "Faith
ful Failure," the man most conscious of his poor efforts,
and transfigure his ministry, even as out of His own
cross came the glory of the Resurrection and of man's
hope of the Kingdom of God.
Never was the truth about a man and his calling
better expressed in a material form than in the memo
rial statue to Phillips Brooks, where back of the
preacher, protecting, strengthening, inspiring him, life
of his life, truth of his thought, joy of his spirit, is the
figure of Christ. In that unseen presence is to be

IN CHRIST 147
found the secret of the power and influence felt and
seen as the true preacher moves among men.
On all sides one hears voices to-day, strident, in
sistent, critical, accusatory voices, telling us what is
wrong with the church, what it needs, what it must be.
We who know the church from within, who love it
and serve it, and through it try to serve truly God and
man, know well that what the church needs is a new
birth of that freedom wherewith the Son makes us
free, a fresh surge of the spirit of prophecy, a new
assurance in its message, a spirit more at home in the
great things of God than in the little thoughts of men.
Who shall find and show and make glorious the way
of such freedom if not the preacher, the leader of the
life and thought of the church? And where shall he
find it, if not "in Christ"?
The greatest need of the preacher to-day, needed
even more than better preparation, and improved
methods, more than any and all other qualifications
or possessions, is the free spirit once given shape in
noble words by that rarely gifted man of God, Fred
erick W. Robertson, as the expression of his own
ideal: —
"To live by trust in God, — to do and say the right
because it is lovely ; to dare to gaze on the splendor of
naked truth, without putting a false veil before it to
terrify children and old women by mystery and vague
ness, — to live by love and not by fear; that is the life,
of a true brave man, who will take Christ and His mind
for the truth, instead of the clamor of either the world
ly world or the religious world."