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THE PULPIT AND THE PEW

The Pulpit and the Pew

Lyman Beecher Lectures delivered 1913, before
the Divinity School of Yale University

By
CHARLES H. PARKHURST
D.D.,LL.D.

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
MCMXIII

Copyright, 191S, by
Yale University Press

First printed July, 1913. 750 copies

\

IWW
L 98

CONTENTS page
I. The Preacher and his Qualifications . 1
II. Pulpit Aims  24
III. The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew . . 48
IV. Love Considered as a Dynamic . . 72
V. Ministerial Responsibility for Civic Con
ditions ...... 95
VI. Responsibility of the Church to the Life of
the Town  118
VII. Dealing with the Fundamentals . .145
VIII. The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service . 171

THE PULPIT AND THE PEW

I
THE PREACHER AND HIS QUALIFICATIONS
Every man is the measure of his work and the
measure of his word. He cannot do a work that out-
measures his own proportions, nor speak an effective
word that is more eloquent than his own personality.
Upon whatever line of service therefore a man enters,
the prime question turns on stature.
If we are to understand by St. Paul's statement in
First Corinthians 1 : 27, — "God hath chosen the weak
things of the world to confound the things that are
mighty," — that God's preference is for feeble instru
ments, the Apostle is himself the refutation of what
he asserts. Other things being equal, the rich soil
will yield the finer fruit ; the larger star will radiate
the fuller light; the tougher log will emit the tenser
heat. It has to be enkindled, of course, but once
aflame the toughness of its fiber will determine the
quantity and quality of its blaze.
It seems to have been sometimes thought — follow
ing perhaps what was imagined to be the leading of
the passage just quoted — that while success in other
departments of service depends on wealth of qualifi
cation, success in the pulpit is conditional upon

2 The Pulpit and the Pew
absence of aptitude, and that the weakest and most
unpromising of the sons is thereby marked out for
ministerial candidature.
Some years ago I was called upon by the widow of
a late Presbyterian elder, who was for some years
officially connected with one of the most prominent
Presbyterian churches in New York City, a motherly
old lady, who descanted with affectionate detail upon
the membership of her home, and in particular upon
her three sons, whom we will call Charles, James and
Henry. Charles she described as especially gifted,
both in physique and in vigor of intellectual and
moral character. Him, she said, she had devoted to
the law. Her second son, James, she represented to
me as less complete in his general build than Charles,
but surpassing either of her other children in initia
tive and acuteness, and him she had decided to put
into business. The case of Henry she briefly disposed
of by laconically remarking that she had given him
to the Lord, absent-mindedly remarking, however, a
little later in the conversation, that he was in no wise
a promising child and that she was quite doubtful
whether she would succeed in raising him. She was
probably familiar with those passages of Old Testa
ment Scripture that insist that only those animals
that are unblemished and that are the finest shall be
placed upon the altar of the Lord, but without

The Preacher and His Qualifications S
realizing, apparently, that blemished children are as
far from measuring up to the sacrificial ideal as are
blemished goats and lambs.
Passing by the entire question of physical equip
ment, as being too familiar to require rehearsal, we
shall give primary attention to the matter of disci
plined mentality, as the fundamental prerequisite to
ministerial success. This is not with any view to
showing disrespect to our candidates' moral and reli
gious faculties, to which, by many and by most,
perhaps, would be accorded the position of prece
dence. Those faculties shall have due recognition ; but
however complete the moralization and the sanctifi
cation of the individual, their practical value and
efficiency will depend upon the amount of the per
sonal stuff to which they are respectively applied.
The quality of the light in a sixteen-power electric
candle is the same as in that of one of thirty-two
power, but the latter will do more work and illumi
nate a wider area. And what we are after here is
the largest possible results. The quality of the piety
of a man of mediocre intelligence may be on a par
with that of Luther, Calvin, Chalmers, Storrs, but
its practical worth as an efficiency will be calculated
only in terms of the results to which the piety con
tributes. And it is of results that we are here in

4> The Pulpit and the Pew
pursuit. And truth, intellectually discerned, appro
priated and experienced, is the ultimate material out
of which personal stuff is built up. Other ingredients
certainly enter into the composition, just as some
thing beside bricks is essential to the construction of
a brick building, although it is bricks that are the
constituent elements.
So we come back to it that it is by a process of
thorough intellectual studentship that the foundation
of ministerial efficiency is laid. In other words we
are dealing with the same conditions here as when,
instead of its being the case of a preacher, it is that
of a lawyer or physician or of any other worker upon
high personal grounds. In this case, as in all others,
things being equal, it is intellectual strength and rich
intellectual furnishings of the mind that are the
measure of power. In keeping with the foregoing it
is in point to suggest that it is quite to the advan
tage of one who is to eventuate as a preacher that
he does not too early conceive a definite ministerial
purpose. Same one having remarked that a youth
who had arrived at the age of seventeen without
having yet distinctly fixed upon his life work was a
failure already, Mr. Reecher is reported to have
retorted that any one at the age of seventeen who
had distinctly fixed upon his life work was a failure
already.

The Preacher and His Qualifications 5
Very much of what has to be reckoned as unsuccess
in all departments is due to meagerness of prepara
tory discipline — instability and contractedness in
the fundamentals. It is an omen of good that the
church is giving to this matter more and more care
ful regard. A man cannot do a thing well unless
he is able to do something more than the one par
ticular thing that he is specifically devoting himself
to. A speaker, for example, leaves upon our minds a
dissatisfied impression if we are left suspecting that
his effort is one in which he has exhausted his entire
range of resource. We want to be able to keep our
selves well inside of our limitations. When I was a
boy and wanted to go skating my father took pains
to be sure that the ice was a little thicker than was
absolutely necessary to keep me from falling through
into the water.
Moses had already passed two thirds of his life
before finally entering upon his mission. If the tra
ditional view of the matter is correct, only ten per
cent of our Lord's years were devoted to the Chris
tian ministry; and, humanly viewed, if any one ever
had reason to be in haste to. get at his life work that
one was he. If there were more of the same in the
programme of men now entering the ministry, it

6 The Pulpit and the Pew
would save plucking from the tree fruit while it is
still green.
There is no place where haste to be doing what one
is going to spend his life in doing is more disastrous
than the pulpit. That cases can still be cited where
matters issued otherwise does not vitiate the prin
ciple for which we are just now contending. There
is no vigor of mind that can be operated along any
line of thought, that cannot be made to tell in the
service of the pulpit. There is no sort of knowledge,
whether of things celestial or terrestrial, of things
divine or human, that cannot be utilized to the effec
tiveness of pulpit discourse. No sensible person ever
commences preaching without wishing that under
neath his effort were a wider and more solid basis of
preparation. There is no doubt but that the intellectualism
involved in such preparation has its perils. Study
easily becomes an end in itself. Students possessed
of the spirit of research incur the danger of coming
to seek knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the
uses to which it may be put and ought to be put. It
is much the same impulse, only working at a higher
level, as prompts the money-getter, who earns for the
joy of earning and for the joy he finds in his accu
mulations. There is in it much of the genius of
miserliness, although working in an immaterial

The Preacher and His Qualifications 7
commodity. But the nature of the commodity does
not seriously modify the quality of the impulse. To
be greedy of gold is no better than to be greedy of
copper or brass.
I know of a theological seminary where, since the
establishment of a fellowship entitling the first
scholar in the class to two years of study abroad,
almost every fellow has finally issued as a professor
rather than as a preacher. That is a matter that in
this presence needs to be touched with great delicacy,
for it is one of those questions upon which much can
be said on either side. It can be easily claimed that
to make preachers in the classroom is greater than
to make Christians in the pulpit.
If it be said that it would have been impossible to
tie St. Paul down to a seminary, it has also to be said
that Christ confined himself for the most part to
making preachers, apostles. I mention both points
of view, for I am not speaking as an advocate, nor
trying to win a case. Yet I believe, if the entire
truth be told in the instance just mentioned, that it
was the scholarly impulse, fostered by prolonged
years of study, rather than the pure evangelical
passion that prompted the fellows to qualify them
selves for professional work.
That is the natural tendency of study. There is
an element of dryness in pure intellectual work which

8 The Pulpit and the Pew
easily diverts from service of warm personal endeavor
except as it is continually moistened by influences of
quite a distinct character. I recall the case of a man
who had spent two years fitting for college, four
years in college, three years in a chair of Greek, two
years in study abroad, who upon returning to this
country and consulting with a wise and trusted col
lege professor as to the field of service in wliich he
would best expend himself, received from him the
unhesitating advice to devote a year or two to
preaching the gospel, not with a view to remaining
permanently in the ministry, but for the purpose of
cultivating that affectional side of the nature which
is certain to be neglected in strictly intellectual pur
suits and which is essential to the balancing of
character, and without which mere intellectual dis
cipline is sure to fail of its finest and most valuable
fruits. The emotive faculty is so distinctly a feature of
the human constitution that the wonder is that so
little — even , if any — respect is accorded to it, or
emphasis paid upon it, in collegiate training, or, so
far as I know, in' the discipline of the seminary,
although as regards the latter I am subject to cor
rection. Of course, in the study of psychology the
feelings are charted as combining with the intellect
and the will to make out the complete geography of

The Preacher and His Qualifications 9
the mind, exactly as Connecticut is scheduled with
the five states to compose New England; but while
the college curriculum is constructed with a definite
view to building up the student on his intellectual
side, I do not recall in my four years' submission to
that curriculum a single suggestion as to the serious
part played in life and in service by the emotive
energies or to the necessity of developing them in
parallelism with the cultivation of the powers of
thought. This matter will call for fuller treatment in another
lecture, but could not be left without mention in our
inventory of ministerial qualifications. Presumably
my point of view upon entering into the work of the
ministry was not markedly different from that of
most inexperienced preachers, in supposing that men
could be syllogized into the kingdom of heaven ; that
they could be snared in a sort of logical trap and
transported at the impulse of an inevitable conviction.
One lesson that a theologue ought thoroughly to
have learned prior to ordination is that while people
have convictions they are not very much given to
making use of them, and treat them — especially
moral and religious ones — very much as they do
bric-a-brac, which is designed rather for decoration
than for consumption.
So that logically to have fastened a truth upon a

10 The Pulpit and the Pew
hearer's mind is no slightest guarantee of practical
religious results. Iron cannot be hammered into
shape when it is cold. Between frigid thought and
sentiment that is gentle and tender, considered as
moral dynamic, there is the same difference as between
hailstones and raindrops viewed as means of fertili
zation. It was my great privilege to know and to love the
late Richard Salter Storrs. He has now been a long
time gone, but my admiration for him as the prince
of preachers grows with the years. A distinctly new
quality entered into his discourses as time passed, as
has been testified to by those who were his accustomed
hearers. His earlier sermons were rather in the nature of
addresses, evidencing the thoroughness of his scholar
ship and distinguished for their massive elegance, for
the wealth of their diction and for the masterly way
in which his thoughts were marshaled. So that the
responsive hearer — and all his hearers were respon
sive — retired from his pulpit service overwhelmed and
sometimes well-nigh crushed by the staggering blows
of his eloquence. And yet its splendor was rather
the cold brilliancy of an icicle than the warm caress
ing flush of a summer sunset.
But as time passed over him, with that accompani
ment of burden and bereavement that are the sure

The Preacher and His Qualifications 11
attendants of the years, and with that mellowing
influence, which, under such circumstance is certain
to visit a soul as gifted and capacious as his, there
entered a new note into the music of his discourse, a
note that was soft and sweet, and one which, without
trespassing upon the vigor of his thought, endowed
it with the subtle power of gracious penetration, so
that his words fell upon us with a certain majestic
sweetness, that not simply touched our understand
ings but melted their way into our hearts.
There was a lesson, in pulpit service of that com
plex efficiency, which was bound to remain as a
permanent possession of all who had the privilege,
even though limitedly enjoyed, of coming within
reach of its peculiar inspiration of commingled might
and graciousness. The thought was there and the
feeling was there, and yet married, each to each, in
a way that created the consciousness of unity rather
than of duality. It was a vitalized summary of the
two ministerial qualifications thus far specified. Even
as in the preaching of Christ, of St. Paul and of St.
John, there were tears in his utterance even if not
in his eye.
This is no plea for sentimentality, which is simply
sentiment run riot, undisciplined hysteria, emotional
ism gathered about no fixed intelligent point of
crystallization. It is a demand rather for a culti-

12 The Pulpit and the Pew
vated and developed faculty of affection which shall
be an easy match for a cultivated and developed
faculty of thought, so that, while the action of the
brain shall give support to the play of the heart, the
play of the heart shall add luster and warmth to the
action of the brain.
It having been indicated that it is one's person
ality that constitutes the foundation of one's fitness
for ministerial service, it is a question of some diffi
culty and delicacy, requiring always to be solved,
whether there exist those constitutional aptitudes that
put one into natural relation with work of that order.
It should be laid down as a fundamental principle,
applicable to all occupations, that the sanctity of a
man's work does not depend on the nature of the work
but on the character of the impulse inspiring it, and
that all work is holy when done with a hallowed intent,
done in loyal service to a Divine Master; so that
different lines of engagement, if pursued in that
spirit, are not to be classified into grades of unequal
religious value.
A Christian broker, lawyer, manufacturer, who
conducts his business in loyal observance of Christian
principle, stands, in point of character and service,
at the same level of sanctity as the clergyman, priest,
evangelist or apostle possessed of the same consecra
tion of purpose. The ideal Christian life is the same

The Preacher and His Qualifications 13
for all. This truth if more distinctly impressed and
emphatically urged would correct the notion that
often lies in the minds of even Christian young men,
when considering the question of vocation, that a
lower degree of devotion is compatible with the Chris
tian practice of the profession of law or of medicine
or of any other secular pursuit, so called, than with
that of the ministry ; which means, of course, that it
is a little more wicked for a minister to do what is
not quite right than it is for a layman, and that it is
prudent to work in a field where there is the broadest
moral margin.
With the understanding then that all functions are
holy functions if christianly exercised, and that in
itself the calling of one who pleads before the bar is
as holy a calling as that of one who preaches from the
pulpit, we come back naturally to the proposition,
stated a moment ago, that the question of one's life
work is to be settled on the basis of constitutional
aptitude, and that the Christian young man is under
no kind of obligation to enter the ministry and ought
not to enter the ministry, on the mere ground that he
is a Christian, but on the ground that, added to that,
he is by nature adapted to that character of service,
if so be that he is so adapted.
We never do well that which we do not enjoy doing,
that toward which our faculties of thought, feeling

14< The Pulpit and the Pew
and temperament do not converge with unanimity of
assent. Success in the best sense of the term and in
the higher lines of achievement, is unattainable, if,
while certain of our powers throw themselves into
effort with glad spontaneity, other of those powers
stand by in frowning dissent. A man in order to do
perfectly well must be unanimous. Such unanimity
makes out a great deal of what is usually understood
to be genius. Genius is energy at play. Energy at
work is something else.
It would be of interest to know what percentage of
those who preach are doing it because it is the thing
they love to do and the only thing they want to do,
or because they think it is the thing that they can
do with least likelihood of failure. An acquaintance
of mine said on a Saturday, "I am going to preach
tomorrow, but if my late uncle's will, which is to be
opened the coming week, reads as I think it does, the
sermon that I preach tomorrow is the last one I shall
ever deliver." The instance is probably an unusual
one, but howr unusual no one can say, for scarcely
would any one be so insensible to the significance of
the ministry and to its splendid opportunities of
service as to be willing to confess that he availed of
it merely as a bread-and-butter occupation.
It is through this medium of aptitude that God's
purpose respecting us becomes known to us. It is in

The Preacher and His Qualifications 15
that way primarily that his call reaches us, whether
it be a call to the Christian ministry or to some other
department of service. The word "calling" implies in
itself a personal summons, — a fact of which we are
unmindful when we use the term of occupation in gen
eral but associate the idea of God's purpose, and
God's communication to us of his purpose, only with
the work of the ministry.
We seem willing to pauperize other occupations in
respect of their religious possibilities in order to
secure funds for capitalizing the single profession of
the preacher. Our religious appreciation lacks sub
stance sufficient to cover the entire area, somewhat
after the manner of the people in the Old Testament
record with whom "God was the God of the hills but
not the God of the valleys." According to the testi
mony of the thirty-sixth of Exodus, the merely me
chanical and artistic skill of Bezaleel and Aholiab
were inwrought with the same divine spirit as were
the ministration of the priest that afterwards offici
ated in the tabernacle which those two holy architects
contributed to construct. They were prepared to
serve the Lord, and their natural equipment pointed
out to them the path along which their service should
be rendered, and their office became a holy office,
because, although material in its form, it was devoutly
ministerial in its spirit and purpose.

16 The Pulpit and the Pew
Aptitude considered as means by which God makes
known his will respecting us need not exclude other
means of a more apparently supernatural character ;
but to one who thoroughly acknowleges the doctrine
of the divine immanence the difference between natural
and supernatural is a difference only in point of view.
The twofold term is rather in the interest of mental
convenience than of exact truth. Nature becomes
identified with super-nature and vice versa to the
mind that is comprehensive enough to view realities
disrobed of their appearances.
So that whether God communicates to me his
thought concerning me, and his purpose respecting
me, through the counsel of a friend, through the
shaping of circumstances, or by a dream, a vision,
a burning bush, a great light, or less startlingly, but
more in consonance with the usual method of divine
procedure, by the drawing of my own temperament
and the peculiar fitness natively inherent in me, my
calling in the latter case, equally as in the former
ones, is a calling from the Lord.
So considered, aptitude becomes a matter of even
solemn seriousness. Solemn because it is a kind of
original divine ordination ; solemn because absence of
aptitude is a disqualification that is so numerously
unheeded. The church is made poorer by every man
who stands in the pulpit without having been born

The Preacher and His Qualifications 17
into relations with the pulpit, — ministers that are
such by accident ; that are such at the impulse of an
undisciplined hyper-conscientiousness ; that become
such by the pleading constraint of a devout mother;
that are such out of the idle disposition to follow the
line of least resistance and enter the ministry because
that is a door that opens to them more easily than
any other and with less promise of unsuccess.
The only other ministerial qualification that I
mention today connects itself with the matter of
experience. The only truths that we can preach with
effect are the truths that we know, and the only truths
that we know are the truths that we know experi
mentally, truths that have been run in the grooves of
our own thinking, saturated with the juices of our
personal feeling and interpreted to us by the disci
pline of our individual living.
Neither ethics nor theology are matters that can
be committed to memory. St. Paul's Letter to the
Church in Galatia testifies that the Christ whom he
preached was not a Christ that had become his by
any process of outside indoctrination, a Christ whose
lineaments of character had been stamped upon his
intelligence by classroom delineation, but a Christ
become his by a process of inward revelation ; original,
therefore, not a transcript; an experience, not a
quotation. Knowledge that is made ours experi-

18 The Pulpit and the Pew
mentally becomes an immovable factor in our life,
something which we do not have to buttress in order
to the comfort of our own thought, and something
that we do not feel it necessary to sustain by logical
undergirding in commending it to the acceptance of
others. Christ never argued.
There are two classes of convictions, classes that
are to be more sharply discriminated than usually
occurs. One class is of the convictions that we hold;
the other is of the convictions that hold us. Those
comprised in the first class are matter simply of
intellectual baggage — baggage, not vehicle ; we carry
them, not they us. Like common impedimenta, we
label it that we may be sure that it is ours. We check
it that we may be able to claim it at the end of the
route. Like other baggage, we lose it sometimes,
and cling to it that it may not become lost.
It is not an uncommon thing to hear people say
that they are clinging to their old religious convic
tions. It is hard work and very pathetic work. One
of Yale's distinguished graduates, afterwards the
pastor of a church in Hartford, tells the story of the
way in which, here in New Haven, his religious con
victions slipped away from him, all but one, in spite
of the tenacity with which he clung to them. It is
a sad bit of autobiography. It occurs in an article
of his entitled the "Resolving of Doubts." The story

The Preacher and His Qualifications 19
is a sad one, but most illuminating and cheering in
its issue, for the subtraction of a negative quantity is
substantial addition.
But the class of assurance that really concerns us,
and the only one that is practical in its effect, is not
an act of clinging but a state of being clung to. So
understood the conviction that we have of any reality
is the grasp that that reality has on us, not the grasp
that we have on it ; and if it is a tremendous reality it
makes us titanic, — holds us fast and moves us about
with all its muscular intensity, so that its colossal
energy becomes our energy and we are converted into
a kind of right arm, through which that reality does
its work and deals its blows.
I have seen big boulders, come down from the moun
tain, held in the jaws of a sliding glacier, and as the
glacier crept with an impalpable but colossal tread, I
have seen the boulder — a vast but inert block of
granite — go scouring along the rock-bank that the
glacier grazed against, and seen it score itself on
that rock-bank in lines indelible for a thousand or
two thousand years. That is the picture I have
before my eyes when I talk or think about conviction.
There is nothing lethargic in the matter we are on.
We are in the region of dynamics, personal, spiritual
dynamics. The power was not in the boulder. It might have

20 The Pulpit and the Pew
weighed a thousand tons, and, so long as there was
nothing but boulder, might have tarried up in the
sun-stricken and storm-blasted world of the upper
Alps till by slow process of disintegration it had
become dissolved into dust and been meaninglessly
and productivelessly transported by wind and rain,
waterfall and brook, to the lower valleys. It was the
enginery of the ice holding the boulder in its jaws
that did the work and that inscribed those geologic
memoranda that some human eye may be reading
ages upon ages after your reading and mine has all
been done.
And, moreover, it was not the immensity of the
boulder to which was due the imperishable groove that
was plowed into rock; it might have been merely a
pebble, but even so, once frozen into the crystalline
massiveness of the moving ice- river, even then it would
put its indestructible chirography upon tablets of
stone as easily as the pen held between the thumb and
finger traces our autograph on blank paper.
Once in tl\e region of genuine conviction, — convic
tion interpreted on its dynamic side, — we are at the
heart of a sphere of spiritual energies, energies which
do the world's work, energies that work revolutions,
and that perpetually lift the times out of old slavery
into larger liberty. For what the boulder or the
pebble is in the maw of the ice-river, that a man is

The Preacher and His Qualifications 21
when held fast in the relentless embrace of something
that is everlastingly real, something that carries the
weight, the push, the tension of the eternal and the
flavor of all the ages.
We must remember that all the way from the sun
down to the raindrop nothing goes unless it is
carried. And the same is true of personality, even
though of a gigantic order. Things go when they
are picked up and carried and they go tremendously
only when they are fastened upon by the impact of
the great energies and the tremendous velocities. It
is getting on to the windward side of a great truth
and letting it blow upon us ; on to the windward side
of a great man and letting him breathe upon us ; on
to the windward side of the great Christ and letting
the celestial afflatus carry us upon its own silent but
stately current, that converts us from a mere splendid
possibility into a half-divine reality, making men
heroes and able to do the work of heroes, mak
ing them prophets and able to speak the word of
prophets. It is no less an idea than that, then, that we want
to understand by experience, a conviction of reality
that is nothing other than a realization of reality;
truth, objectively considered, becomes a subjective
possession. Years ago, here in New England we
used, more frequently than now, to hear men speak

22 The Pulpit and the Pew
of experiencing religion. Experienced religion is the
only religion there is, and certainly it is the only
religion that makes out the proper content of
preaching. We have to preach the truth as we know it. If
our deliverances are genuine they will therefore carry
not only the complexion but the flavor of our indi
vidual personality. We are not phonographs nor
dictagraphs, to give forth in stupid mechanical repe
tition what has been told into us. Christ says of
himself not simply that he told the truth, but that he
was the truth. Personality is what counts, and truth
is made available by becoming indistinguishably
absorbed in personality. Incarnation lies at the basis
of influence, is the secret of influence. Truth is not
live truth, and able therefore to do live work, till it is
taken up into personality. The parts of the Bible
that are the effective parts are consequently the por
tions that are biographical.
The men and women of the Bible are so many
separate and original truths going about in clothing
of flesh and blood and set talking to us and person
ally setting forth truths before our eyes and ears in
a dramatic way. Truth by that means acquires
breath and pulse, intellect and heart, and therefore
reenforces our respiration, stimulates thought and

The Preacher and His Qualifications 23
quickens heart-throbs. The impersonal does not
count. In that sense of the term, when we preach we have
to preach ourselves or it is not preaching but lectur
ing, and lecturing to a congregation never changes
the congregation. It may illuminate it, but illumi
nation is like winter sunshine, which brightens things
but cannot make them grow.
In keeping with that it occurs to me to define
inspiration as the overflowing of a soul that God has
filled. To insist upon the doctrine of verbal inspira
tion,' or upon any doctrine that approaches thereto,
seems to me to be quiddling with a reality that is too
immense to deserve handling in any so paltry a way.
The man who said that phonographs would eventu
ally be set up in our pulpits in place of preachers had
probably sat under the ministration of preachers
who were phonographs. Preaching is not the retail
ing of other men's visions. Inspiration is always
original. We are like St. Paul in this respect, that
we can truly preach only that wliich has been made to
be individually our own by commerce with the Divine
Spirit, with this understanding, however, that what
has been divinely made over to us has to submit itself
to human limitations and to go forth with the form
that has been impressed upon it by the mould of our
individual eccentricities of thought and sentiment.

II
PULPIT AIMS
Lecturing is not preaching. The functions per
taining to the platform and the pulpit are distinct;
or if to some degree they seem to coalesce, their pur
poses are distinct. If they do not always appear so
it is because the platform is sometimes removed from
the public hall and set up in a sanctuary in place of
the pulpit which has been taken down and moved out.
Socrates was not satisfied to be a lecturer; he
wanted to be more than a lecturer and to be a
preacher. If he had been contented to be a lecturer
he would have been allowed to live. But as he insisted
on preaching, the Athenians fell back from him and
gave him hemlock tea.
Aristotle was not satisfied to be a lecturer. He,
too, wanted* to be more than a lecturer and to preach.
If he had been contented to lecture he might have
remained at Athens, but as he insisted on preaching,
although he was not executed as Socrates was, he
found it convenient to remove from Athens.
Formerly, then, preaching was a dangerous pro
fession. It was sometimes so in old Hebrew times.

Pulpit Aims 25
John the Baptist maintained himself in his pulpit for
a time with unabated popularity, but in one lucky, or
unlucky, moment, he delivered a short discourse that
was rather more evidently and pointedly applicable
than usual and he lost not only his pulpit but his
head. That might have occurred before if the parish
to which he preached had had the same power over
life and death that was possessed by the king who
executed him.
Jesus Christ never lectured. What he said, so far
as it has been preserved to us, was distinctly sermon.
His pastorate lasted about three years. He was
crucified for being a homiletical irritation, nuisance,
if you please. There are ministers in New York who
have stood in the pulpit ten times as many years as
Christ preached in Judea, Samaria and Galilee, and
yet apparently without a desire that they should be
crucified, except perhaps on the part of a very
limited number.
Not long after, Stephen, the proto-martyr, was
stoned. His pastorate was only a brief one. So far
as we are informed, he preached but once ; but it was
preaching. The earlier part of the discourse was
rather after the lecture order — historical, and the
Jews were always fond of history, that is to say the
records of their own people. The lecture portion had
continued for quite a long time before the hearers

26 The Pulpit and the Pew
began to sense its drift. Fifty verses out of the fifty-
six were spent in lifting the hammer before bringing
it down on to the nail, but when it reached the nail
there was howling and teeth-gnashing, and the only
reply they could make was to throw stones at him,
till, as the records say, "he fell asleep."
It is an interesting incident of that same scene that
Saul was there, who afterwards became Paul. He
heard the sermon ; probably he saw the hammer, the
nail, the stones and the death. Without that sermon
there might have been no Paul. Preaching that has
hammer and nails in it and that hurts was, at that
time, the kind of discourse that preachers preached.
A man who is in a dead sleep cannot be awakened by
sprinkling him with lavender water.
Then as to the Twelve Apostles, tradition has it
that all of them but one died a violent death. That
was because they did not attempt to discharge their
apostolic functions by lecturing, but by preaching.
They went about it affectionately, as did Stephen.
No man ever preached with a tenderer, sweeter spirit
than did Stephen. His last words were, "Lord, lay
not this sin to their charge," gentle and forgiving
even in death agony. And yet he worked with
hammer and nail.
But to go back a little, and indicate by reference
to Socrates, Aristotle and others what it is that

Pulpit Aims 27
distinguishes preaching from lecturing and that
makes preaching to be preaching.
John Stuart Blackie, of the University of Edin
burgh, was setting forth the character of Socrates
as a preacher and at the same time indicating the
difference between that and lecturing when he said:
If the speaker has a real vocation to address his fellow-
men on moral subj ects, and if he does not dwell in vague
and trivial generalities, sounding very pious on Sunday,
but having no distinct and recognizable reference to the
secular business of Monday, then a good sermon may be
compared to a discharge of moral electricity which will
arouse many sleepers, or to the setting up a sure finger
post which will direct many wanderers.
Therein lay the difference between Socrates and
the sophists. The sophists talked for the sake of
talking; argued for the sake of arguing; and when
they were through arguing and talking, things were
just where they were before, their audience un
changed, and they themselves in no slightest danger
of crucifixion, for nothing had occurred either to
stimulate particularly the intelligence of their
hearers or, which is more important, to touch or
irritate their consciences.
The author from whom I have just quoted handles
Aristotle in the same way, and in the biographical

28 The Pulpit and the Pew
sketch which he has prepared of him includes the
following paragraph :
Once and again in the first two books of his treatise
does he repeat the solemn warning that our object in
inquiring into the nature of virtue is not that we may
know what virtue is, but that we may be virtuous. Once
and again does he enter a protest against the tendencies
of his countrymen, always ready to stand and debate
even when the solution of the problem was to be found
only in motion and action. Subtleties of any kind indeed
are not suitable for a moral discourse. Ethical philos
ophy refers as distinctly to a deed as a sword refers to
a cut ; and all questions of morals are idle and pernicious
that do not bear directly on some practical result.
We have already spoken of the tone of John the
Baptist's address to the throngs that gathered to his
preaching in the wilderness. He leveled his instruc
tions to what he knew to be their need. He made no
apologies for the directness of his discourse. There
was no attempt to win them to himself, but only to
point out to them the path of personal and individual
duty and to insist on their walking in it. His preach
ing was motived by no disposition to make truth
acceptable to his hearers or duty easy for them.
Instead of abating the strenuousness of obligation
and letting it down to the lower level of the life they

Pulpit Aims 29
were leading, he aimed only to elevate them to the
higher level of the life they were not leading.
He worked for results. There was no dramatic
representation of what men in general ought to be,
but an undecorated exhibit of what the men in front
of him ought to be. We can depend upon it that
when his hearers went back to their respective busi
nesses, they did not go congratulating themselves on
the attractive presentation of truth to which it had
been their great pleasure to listen.
Very likely it had not been to them altogether a
pleasure, for what he had dwelt upon had not been of
a kind to appeal to their dramatic instincts or to
induce in them complacency and self-felicitation. In
other words, John the Baptist was a preacher, and, as
already intimated, when some time later he pushed
his moral poignard down a little deeper into the place
where the nerves lie so thick and so sensitive, the
victim of his discourse struck back and he had to
bleed for it. The blood he shed was proof presump
tive that he preached, not lectured.
All of that which we have been remarking of John
the Baptist is equally true, more than equally true,
of the discourses of our Lord. We have an idea that
there was a certain gentleness about the way in which
Christ dealt with his audience that can not be predi
cated of the Baptist. But even so, the larger part of

30 The Pulpit and the Pew
what is preserved to us is very much in the nature of
a surgical operation. His surgery was ordinarily —
not always — exceedingly courteous and considerate,
but it was surgery. He stripped off the cuticle and
operated among the nerves, — and that hurts.
When he said unto them, "Woe unto you, scribes,
pharisees, hypocrites," the operation was not only a
surgical one, but one that was untempered by tender
ness of method. It is not easy to understand exactly
what is meant by people who expatiate serenely and
comfortably upon the winsomeness of the lessons that
are taught in the gospels and the appeals that are
distributed through them.
Take, as an example, the Sermon on the Mount,
with its ominous conclusion. The Decalogue is not
an approximation to it in the severity of its demands.
The latter puts before men an ideal of what they
should do ; the former an ideal of what they should
be. Anybody can do right if he tries hard, but he
has to try a great deal harder in order to be right.
We do not have to exert ourselves in order to abstain
from killing our neighbor, but how about loving that
neighbor, — not simply loving James, whom it may be
easy to be fond of, but loving William, despicable,
ugly, dirty William?
There is, to be sure, a great deal of love wrought
into the texture of the gospel, and so the slopes of the

Pulpit Aims 31
high hills are covered with flowers of ineffable beauty,
and one can pick flowers and scent their fragrance
without taking account of the blunt rock that lies
to immeasurable depths underneath.
Misapprehension of the real situation grows out of
this fact that Christ's law of life has been interpreted
in a way to exempt from the duty of obeying Christ's
law. Those fiery bodies that we call the fixed stars
are beautiful when seen at this distance, but the heat
that is in them would make it uncomfortable to live
there. So Christ, viewed at the distance of twenty
centuries, is attractive. We are impressed by his
gentleness, his loving kindness, sympathy and patient
service rendered to all kinds of need and destitution.
But were he to come among us he would be just as
unpopular as he was twenty centuries ago.
An ideal expressed in words is very winsome, but
an ideal dressed in flesh and standing at our elbow,
with its very sublimity uttering itself in silent denun
ciation of our own moral turpitude and spiritual
paltriness, would be just what the Bible calls it, "a
consuming fire." It would be like Hving in the hot
star Sirius, so resplendent in its distant complexion
but so torrid when approached near enough to become
a neighbor. We should become like Peter who "fell
down at Jesus' feet saying, Depart from me for I am
a sinful man."

32 The Pulpit and the Pew
That was the secret of Christ's loneliness when
upon earth. He wanted people, but they did not want
him. When it came evening, as we are once told, all
the people scattered to their homes. He had no home,
and no one cared to entertain him for the night, and
so he went forth and passed the night among the hills
and under the stars. He would be treated here just
as he was in Jerusalem and be called an impossible.
Things have not changed in the course of two thou
sand years, the great things, I mean, the large
relations. Perfect holiness is the same as it was in Jerusalem
and sin is the same. And the two are as far apart.
And sin hates holiness as it did at the moment when
the nails were being driven into Christ's body pre
paratory to crucifixion. I have read that long
before Christ came it was declared by a certain Greek
that if perfect holiness should appear on earth it
would be crucified. Perhaps that is only a story. It
may not be true. It might be. They will not come
to the light, said Jesus, because their deeds are evil.
It is not so much hearing about goodness, having it
described, etc., that is disquieting. On the contrary,
it is rather soothing, caressing. It is only when it
comes so close as to be exacting, menacing, that it
begins to ruffle us.
It is pleasant to sit before an open wood fire and

Pulpit Aims 33
see the play of the flames and think long thoughts
and see visions in the tongues of fire, but if the heat
begins to become more than just so intense we say
that it is getting too warm and we move back. Flame
is pretty, wondrously fascinating, till it approaches
contact with us, then it is horrible.
It is strange that a thing can be at once so charm
ing and so repulsive ; that Sirius can be so beautiful
to look upon at a distance and so excruciating to
live in. It is the weakness of the existing pulpit that
its portrayal of holiness and sin impresses people
neither with the beauty of the one nor with the hate-
fulness of the other and therefore with the contrast
between them.
That is why we preachers get along so harmo
niously with our people. It was a remark made by
a former pastor of a very prominent church in New
York City that if he preached the whole truth and
brought that truth close to the consciences of his
congregation, he would not be allowed to remain long
in his pulpit. That might seem an exaggerated
statement. You can have your own opinion of it.
He has since left that pulpit and is pursuing a course
of instruction less distinctly religious.
Sin is not a frequent topic of pulpit discourse.
Much less so than formerly. More is done to bring
Christ down to the level of men than to bring men

34 The Pulpit and the Pew
up to the level of Christ. The preference of people
is to be let alone. No one objects to having truth
dramatized, but to have truth preached is different;
that is, if it is preached in the spirit of the text, "If
ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them."
There is willingness enough on the part of people
to have truth represented in a way to stimulate the
intellect and to warm the heart, but not to prick into
the conscience. We like as much goodness as we have,
but do not care for any more. We are glad we are
not as bad as some, but are not ambitious to be
better than we are. We are more disposed to accept
Christ as one who will save us in our sins than as one
who will save us from our sins. Which means, if
frankly expressed, that Christ is mostly a super
fluity; that it is not literally true that we need any
saving, that what Christianity substantially amounts
to is that it is a divine arrangement by which, out of
the abundance of God's love and consideration for
human fallibility and depravity, and the difficulty
involved in* getting rid of depravity, we can be
reckoned as good when we are not.
And because sin is dealt with, by the modern pulpit,
with a delicate reserve not predicable of the great
preachers of the Old Covenant nor of the great
Apostles of the New, there has come to be a corre
sponding decline in the emphasis laid by the pew upon

Pulpit Aims 35
the personality of Christ and his redemptive func
tion. It goes without the saying that a sense of sin
and a sense of moral helplessness go together. The
intensity of the one comes and goes with the intensity
of the other. Only the invalid who realizes the
seriousness of his invalidism is moved to seek the
ministrations of a physician.
The preacher cannot exaggerate the grandeur of
human nature as that nature lay prefigured in the
mind and purpose of the Creator, but that grandeur
in no wise diminishes or neutralizes the significance of
those antagonistic energies of the flesh which,
strangely enough, are so easily able to hold man's
native magnificence in subjection, and make the soul
a plaything and a slave of the body. And till there
has been begotten in the pew, under the direct hand
ling of the situation by the pulpit, a realization of
that enslavement, there will be developed no com
pelling consciousness of the need of an Emancipator.
The majority of our clergymen, as well as of our
laymen, are probably believers in the general theory
of evolution; but simple observation would seem to
be sufficient to constrain us all to hold the doctrine
in such way as not to fall into error of supposing that
what is bad can by process of unfolding develop into
what is good.
Things develop undoubtedly ; that is the universal

36 The Pulpit and the Pew
tendency; it is part of the scheme of nature and of
supernature; but they can develop downward as well
as upward. Things can go on growing or they can
go on rotting. It is just as much in the nature of a
young apple, that, under certain conditions, it should
become more and more decayed, as it is that under
other certain conditions it should become more and
more rosy and luscious. St. James unconsciously
confessed himself an evolutionist when he wrote,
"When evil desire hath conceived, it bringeth forth
sin ; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."
It is not the purpose of these paragraphs to discuss
the doctrine of evolution, but only to assert the prin
ciple that only that which is good can grow into what
is better, while that which is bad tends, at the pres
sure of an inherent force, toward what is worse, so
that only by the interference of a power above nature
can nature's tendencies be withstood and overcome.
And out of that fact springs naturally the suggestion
that a twentieth century preacher can only equal
himself to the demands of existing conditions by
making himself familiar with the thoughts that
people, especially young people, are thinking upon
such matters. This is a point that will offer itself
for later consideration, if time shall permit.
It will be, furthermore, a part of the preacher's
practical handling of his congregation to rub into

Pulpit Aims 37
the consciousness of its members the fact that engag
ing their intellectual attention and enlightening them
is of only subordinate value, and at most only a means
to a remoter end. To say of one that he is an inter
esting preacher, or even that he is an instructive
preacher, may mean much, and may mean nothing
at all. "He came that they might have life," says
the Gospel of John, and light is not life, not neces
sarily. Mere illumination will not make a plant grow,
nor restrain the leaves on the trees from decaying
and falling to earth.
A highly educated congregation is not to be dealt
with in a manner different from that to be pursued
in addressing an uneducated one, except so far as the
mode of address is concerned, but not so far as
relates to its matter and the object had in view.
One great difficulty involved in addressing culti
vated listeners lies in the fact that if the discourse
be what is called an ably constructed one, the enjoy
ment that they take, in feeling their own mental
machinery moving responsively, they will suppose to
be religious enjoyment. Experiencing the revolution
of the wheels of our mentality is a pleasurable one
always. And very often that is all that a person
means when he says of his minister that he likes his
preaching. If he understood himself better he would
say that he is fascinated by his own cerebral activity.

38 The Pulpit and the Pew
Or he may say that he likes his preacher because of
the way that he put things ; he is entertained by the
preacher's intellectual agility.
The same thing is true in the sanctuary as is true
of the majority of attendants at a concert hall, who
come away from the rendering of a celebrated violin
ist charmed, they say, with the music which he dis
courses, while the real fact in the case is that they
are captivated by his digital dexterity, and were
anxious to sit where they could see him, since it is
with their eyes that they listened rather than with
their ears. So in listening to a pianist, so in listening
to a vocalist, who is certain to stir the house to
tumultuous applause if she is able to bring her flight
to a finish by lighting at sky-C.
By making the pulpit the medium for dealing
directly with people with a view to promoting their
more and more complete emancipation from sin and
sin's power, and by giving it to be definitely under
stood that that is the pulpit's prime mission, the
pulpit has .secured to it a character that differen
tiates it from every other appliance worked in the
interests of human uplift, and so creates for itself
a clear place among the instrumentalities of progress.
In this way it flatly meets the question, quite often
proposed, and in many instances honestly proposed,
What occasion is there for the maintenance of such

Pulpit Aims 39
an institution in addition to all the other influences
that are being operated in man's behest, and operated
with such an outlay of money, time and talent? It
is a proper question to ask and one to which the
pulpit, by the way in which it uses itself, and by the
programme whose pursuance it publicly announces
for itself and binds upon itself, should make a frank
and sufficient reply. And that reply it furnishes by
holding itself consistently and pronouncedly to the
work of emancipating men individually and collec
tively from the power of sin. In that field the pulpit,
using the term in its comprehensive sense, stands
practically alone.
It is not a field that can be fairly said to be occu
pied by the press, certainly not the secular press.
Its point of view if not irreligious, — as a good deal of
it is, — is at any rate unreligious. If it chronicles
events occurring in the religious world, it does it in
a colorless way carefully inexpressive of any moral
sympathy with that which the event may be supposed
to import.
There is no objection to be urged against this. It
is proper and to the public advantage that each
aspect of our many-sided life should have its journa
listic organs.
Each class of matters is best treated by experts.
St. Paul could not have made a success of the New

40 The Pulpit and the Pew
York World, any more than Mr. Pulitzer could have
creditably edited the Epistles to the Romans. This
is no reflection upon either the deceased editor or the
Apostle. This is not saying that our secular papers do not
contain a vast amount of edifying material. Society
would be poorer without them. They promote intel
ligence by furnishing material for thought; they
bring unrelated individuals into a kind of mutual
touch, help to promote a sense of the solidarity of the
race, and make each several man a sharer in the life
and experience of the race.
And still farther it is to be gratefully allowed that
all of our best newspapers are fosterers of morality.
But morality is not religion and does not carry in it
even the flavor of religion's essence, — a matter, how
ever, which must be reserved to another address as
being too large to be considered in this particular
connection. As for our religious journals, not as much is to be
said for most of them as it would be pleasant to say.
Speaking broadly, they do not make large contri
butions toward the evangelizing of the world. It is
a well-known fact, frequently illustrated, that they
are individually so moribund that two or more have
to pool their issues in order to make one live thing.

Pulpit Aims 41
Another expedient is to court popularity by reducing
to magazine form and padding with secularity.
This is said in all respect to such few papers as
continue to be in fact what they are in their claims,
and serve as a kind of legible pulpit, presenting
Christianity in its essence and with a combination of
intelligence and piety that commands respect. There
are three elements essential to the success of religious
journalism, — three that are rarely found in combina
tion, — an unlimited amount of capital, an inexhaust
ible supply of brain and a rich infusion of the
evangelical spirit.
The more amply, therefore, the pulpit fulfils its
distinctive function as an implement of God for
delivering the soul from the thraldom of sin, the more
inadequate becomes the claim put forth by Sunday
journalism that it brings to the reader thoughts
that are as elevated in their tone, as nutritive to the
intellect, as what the pulpit brings to the listener,
and phrased perhaps in terms more finished and
cultivated in their diction than any of which the
average preacher may be capable.
No one will deny the literary, intellectual and
possibly also the ethical claims of our best secular
journals, especially in their Sunday issues, which,
saving the coarse and flashy cartoons with which most
of them are disfigured, are the choicest of the week.

42 The Pulpit and the Pew
But even so, they are not constructed, and are not
intended to be constructive, in a way to accomplish
what is properly the prime purpose of Christian
preaching, -viz., to hold the soul consciously in the
presence of its God and thus to deliver it out of the
power of the devil into a growing experience of
divine sonship. Second only to the lusts of the flesh,
Sunday journalism and the automobile are the worst
enemies of sanctuary worship.
Nor any more than the press does the stage cover
the territory specifically accorded to the pulpit. In
an interview which it was my pleasure to have with
Madame Bernhardt a year or two ago, one question
which I asked her she failed to answer. She had told
me that any inquiry I put to her she would reply to,
but in one instance she was evasive, and very much to
my regret, for I felt that her answer to that particu
lar question would reveal a good deal to me as to the
moral and rehgious attitude of the great actress.
The inquiry to which I failed to receive a reply was
this : "Do yeu give your preference to the pulpit or
the stage considered as means of human uplift?"
She is too bright and too experienced a person not
to have a rather definite opinion upon a question of
that kind, lying so close as it does to the line of her
own interest and pursuit. I have always wondered
why it was that, communicative as she proved to be

Pulpit Aims 43
upon all other matters to which her attention was
called, she was so reticent upon this.
Even among distinctively church circles there has
been during the last fifty years a decided change of
opinion, or at least of usage, as toward the theater.
Whether the truth of the case is to be stated by
saying that change of sentiment induced change of
usage, or change of usage induced change of senti
ment, is a question about which opinions might differ.
We know that in such matters people sometimes alter
their customs and habits first, and then adjust their
opinions to match. It is rather commonly the case
that we shape our doctrines to fit our behavior
rather than our behavior to fit our doctrines, and,
having learned to allow ourselves modes of living and
doing that conscience would at one time have for
bidden, turn around and fix over our doctrine in a
way to satisfy the necessities of our altered and
perhaps deteriorated behavior ; for we do like to keep
our conduct and our creed somewhere in sight of each
other, whether by prodding the one or curbing the
other. This is not, however, to be taken as a critique
upon the theater, for that which the theater has to
offer — assuming of course that it is untainted —
undoubtedly meets a legitimate demand, in that it
ministers refreshment that is rational without being

44 The Pulpit and the Pew
mentally wearying and that is diverting without
being sensuously debasing.
All of this, however, is simply preliminary to my
confident contention that except in the very rarest
instances are people made either finer in their piety
or even purer in their morals by what is offered them
by the stage. A man is not religiously nor morally
bettered by any influence that does not tend to some
sort of moral or religious action, and that is a result
which, judging from observation and from experi
ence, is not predicable of dramatic exhibition. The
whole movement upon the boards is maintained in an
unsubstantial atmosphere of make-believe. A suc
cessful actress, who consulted me in regard to certain
matters that touched closer to the line of actual living
than those that were traversed by her own dramatic
experience, once said to me, "That which you say is
probably true but I have lived so long and so con
stantly in the realm of the unreal that I am not able •
to discriminate between what is true and what is
false." A whole audience may be brought to sob with
tender emotion without a single member having his
heart permanently softened into a condition of finer
altruism. Tears wrung from the eyes by fictitious
sin or fictitious sorrow neither spring from the heart
nor soak back into the heart in gracious irrigation.

Pulpit Aims 45
The preacher of today has to address himself to
people who are in almost every respect in a condition
of unsettlement and revolt, and to the extent that he
realizes that fact it will be one of his aims to secure in
them quietness and establishment of mind. When
we speak into a storm our voice will not carry. The
pulpit today faces an attitude of denial. The age is
a thoughtful one and if feeling produces among
people relations of convergence, thinking produces
correspondingly a state of divergence. People feel
together, but think apart. The situation, so far
forth, is a wholesome one, but it is a difficult one to
face. It is better to be a sincere heretic than to go
stumbling along under the burden of a barren tradi
tion. It is better to think wrong than not to think
at all.
At the same time, while there is a stimulus in
speaking to a congregation made up of men and
women who think that there is not in addressing a
crowd of intellectual dummies, or an assembly of such
people as the preachers of fifty or a hundred years
ago had to address, who in all matters of Christian
doctrine expected the parson to do their thinking for
them, and during his ministrations patiently slept out
of confidence in his doctrinal infallibility, yet the
altered situation subjects the preacher of the present
to a strain that while stimulating is also perplexing.

46 The Pulpit and the Pew
In another lecture I shall speak of prophetic
authority considered as a qualified preacher's pre
rogative; but whatever of truth there will be in the
point for which I shall then contend, it still remains
a fact that in these days the people in the pews are
slow to believe a thing is true simply on the strength
of the preacher's ipse dixit. It will not be true to
them because he says it is true. So far forth, he is
the prisoner in the dock and they are the jury, and
after the service is over and the benediction pro
nounced they will gather about their respective dinner
tables and bring in their verdict.
As things are, very little will be accomplished by
any direct attempt to refute existing errors of
opinion, certainly not if they are errors that are
sincerely entertained, as very likely they are. There
is, however, an underlying basis of orthodoxy in every
man's soul. It is at that point that the preacher has
to put in his work. The foundations of our nature
are not laid in the false but in the true. The consti
tutional veracity latent in the human is our one
available point of access.
To whatever extent error may have developed,
fundamentally we are not fools. However far inward
depravity may have pursued its corrosive course, we
are not totally corrupted. Unless a man has ceased
to be human there still survives in him a spot, a

Pulpit Aims 47
residuum, of original soundness. And it is that spot
really that does the only effective homiletical work.
Every man has to be his own preacher. The testi
mony of his own soul is about the only testimony that
he puts unreserved confidence in.
A man cannot be argued, nor argue himself, out
of what he himself personally testifies to. What I
know, I know, even if it is something that I do not
like to know. It was when the prodigal came to
himself that were constructed in him the beginnings
of a new life. It was when Nathan had succeeded in
penetrating to the original David and in making
David reason with himself, that he gained the object,
and gathered the fruits of his discourse.
Sin can be resolved into environment and heredity
till the sinner has been forced to forget his sur
roundings and his ancestry and to look straight into
his own eye, and his consciousness has become defi
nitely and exclusively self-consciousness. And, in
general, the preacher will have accomplished the
legitimate purpose of his sermon if he shall have
succeeded in sending his hearers out of the church
less mindful of the thoughts and phrases that have
come to them from the pulpit, than they are of the
discourse that is being delivered to them from the
closer and more persuasive oracles of their own
hearts.

Ill
THE PULPIT'S ESTIMATE OF THE PEW
Psychology is as essential as theology to the
proper presentation of pulpit truth. The candidate
for orders is always assumed to have a knowledge of
God. It is sometimes an assumption contrary to fact,
but so much is supposed, — supposed by the congrega
tion to which he ministers, previously supposed by the
council or presbytery by which he has been com
mended to the congregation. It is assumed that he
has made himself rationally acquainted with the
Divine Idea, and empirically acquainted with the
Divine Being, so that he is in condition to say out of
a full and honest heart, "I know whom I have
believed." The ground which this opening paragraph has
suggested is so familiar as scarcely needing to be
traversed in, this presence, and serves me simply as
a point of departure from which to go on and say
that the reverent intimacy with God, required of a
preacher, in order that he may have in thought and
sentiment the matter that it is his office to present,
needs to be matched by a complementary, familiar
intimacy with man, in order that the message which

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 49
he brings may be effectively fitted to the nature and
condition of those whom he brings it to.
It is scripturally related of Christ that one of his
ministerial qualifications lay in the fact that he knew
what was in man. This complements that other
knowledge which he had of what was in God. The
preacher is in that respect something like the skilled
sharpshooter, who, while understanding how to
handle his piece, insists upon having definitely in
view the object to which — not toward which, but to
which — it is to be discharged.
One effect of this will be that the preacher will be
disposed, frequently at least, to particularize his
message. What I want to say is that every congre
gation is made up of a number of contributory con
gregations. There is a sub-congregation of the old
and another of the young; one of the rich and
another of the poor ; one of the learned and another
of the untaught; one of the converted and another
of the unregenerate.
Each sub-congregation requires its specific treat
ment. Preaching that is excessively homogeneous in
its quality and style is likely to prevent heterogeneity
in the make-up of the congregation, and therefore
to work its impairment in strength and efficiency.
We know that Christ shaped his treatment to
match the character and condition of those with whom

50 The Pulpit and the Pew
he was dealing. Certain matters he presented to the
multitude, other certain matters to his disciples.
Even as regards his disciples he made a difference.
There was among them an outer and also an inner
circle, receiving, respectively, exoteric and esoteric
treatment. That principle will not absolutely exclude preach
ing that has in it an element of universality, the
presentation of truths that are universally appli
cable, — what, in all respect, we might designate as
blunderbuss preaching, calculated for general effects.
Still I think that, as a rule, presentations of truth
that are shaped with a reference that is specific,
carries with it, on the part of speaker and hearer
both, a livelier sense of personal touch, for the hearer
will best feel the truth when he feels the preacher and
when he realizes that he is himself the one that is
being particularly approached and addressed.
The preacher feels that he has accomplished some
thing when on Monday he is told by a parishioner,
"I felt as though you were talking to me yesterday."
To that extent there is an advantage in small con
gregations. The personal element is economized. A
hearer occupying a front pew, who had been accus
tomed to appropriate to the occupants of the pews
behind whatever practical lessons were delivered from
the pulpit, never made personal application of them

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 51
to himself till, on an inclement Sabbath, he discovered
that he and the sexton constituted the entire congre
gation. The effective pleader at the bar applies this prin
ciple with a seriousness and confidence not always
predicable of the preacher, and makes it part of his
practice to deal not altogether with the jury as a
whole, but, in important cases, specifically with each
individual juryman.
An example of this is recorded in the biography of
Rufus Choate. I do not recall the offense charged
against the defendant, in whose behalf the dis
tinguished attorney was pleading ; but at any rate
the suit was one in which Mr. Choate was deeply
interested and which he was especially concerned to
win. In the course of his plea a card was handed to
him on which was written, "Will Mr. Choate kindly
suspend his plea for a moment and have a word in the
ante-room with the person whose name is on this
card?" Mr. Choate considered the request for a
moment, then turned the card over and wrote, "Yes,
presently ; I have already got all the jury with the
exception of the red-headed fellow on the back seat.
I shall have him in a few minutes and then I will come
out." That principle sagaciously applied was part
secret of Mr. Choate's phenomenal success with a

52 The Pulpit and the Pew
jury. Other things being equal, what each hearer
will appropriate to himself will, in quantity, vary
inversely with the number of hearers. Under such
circumstance the arithmetic law still holds, that the
smaller the divisor the larger the quotient.
Christ accordingly avoided large congregations,
not courted them. Some of his most memorable
words were spoken to a single hearer. He spent most
of his time with an audience so small that some of us
would not think it worth our while to minister to it.
Anxiety to stand before a thousand or two people is
quite as likely to proceed from the preacher's ambi
tion to exploit himself as from any holy passion to
give widest possible currency to God's truth, and to
submit the greatest number of souls to its gracious
governance. While discussing this matter of the human element,
and of preaching that is direct and particularized,
and in which the speaker has a vivid sense of the
individual hearers whom he is addressing, it will be
quite apropos to interpolate a paragraph or two
touching the comparative merits of written and
unwritten discourse.
There is no absolutely best method of preaching.
The question is like that of the best form of govern
ment. The best form of government is that which is
most consonant with the qualifications of the gover-

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 53
nor, and the condition of the governed. In like
manner the best method of preaching is that which is
most in keeping with the aptitudes of the pulpit and
the condition of the pew.
If the preacher's use of a manuscript is such as to
deaden his consciousness of those whom he is supposed
to be addressing, such, that is to say, that either he
or his hearers feel that the manuscript forms a barrier
between the pulpit and the pew, then certainly the
manuscript ought to be dispensed with. Preaching
proper, like any other kind of teaching, involves an
interchange of personalities, and anything that
embarrasses the exchange and interrupts the circuit
is fatal. But in cases where there is no such sacrifice of
results there is a good deal that can be said for
sermons delivered from manuscript. Yet it has to be
conceded that my own habits of discourse have
created in me a prejudice that decidedly impairs the
value of my own judgment upon the matter, for I
have rarely preached what is called "extemporane
ously" without its resulting in a strong inclination to
retire from the ministry.
Not to go into the matter lengthily, therefore,
written preparation helps to secure the preacher
against monotonousness of idea and monotonousness
of expression. It encourages in him compactness of

54 The Pulpit and the Pew
style. It affords him greater opportunity to put
things in that acuminated manner that will help to
make them stick in the memory of the hearer. It
helps to say more in the same length of time.
I once heard it remarked of the late Dr. Storrs,
that it took him forty-five minutes to say as much
extemporaneously as he had been previously able to
say in thirty, when he preached from notes ; and
when Howard Crosby was asked how long a sermon
should be, he said, "Thirty minutes, with a leaning to
mercy." It will, moreover, be one of the by-products
of the written method that it will secure a certain
conciseness of phrase, a certain unforgetableness in
some of its utterances, which will be recognized, if
repeated before the same congregation, and tend,
therefore, to discourage the idle habit of preaching
old sermons.
In learning to know what man is, our first attention
will require to be given, not to men individual or
otherwise, as we see them about us, but to man as he
exists in God's thought, to man as he was divinely
anticipated and contemplated when were spoken
those original words, "Let us make man in our
image." Even when we study humanness as imperfectly
illustrated in ourselves and our contemporaries, the
thing of largest interest and import is still not the

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 55
defective shapes in which it today evinces itself, but
in the traces which it affords of undecayed, primeval
originality, even as students of art seriously con
template the splendid ruins of Greek, Roman and
Oriental architecture, not out of interest in the decay,
into which that architecture has largely fallen, but
out of loving admiration and veneration for the
unconsumed splendor which that decay imperfectly
disguises. History affords us rare instances of more or less
close approximation to man in his ideal perfectness,
but only in the person of Christ does God's thought
of man come to its complete utterance. Christ is
man as God saw him, felt him, loved him, before
there was a man, even as he saw, admired and cher
ished the tabernacle in the wilderness, before the
divine tabernacle-concept had come to its architec
tural embodiment at the hands of Moses. Everything
was, before it existed.
We are not going to be tempted, at this point, into
any feats of theological analysis. Analysis is fatal.
We are not here to deny anything but only to affirm.
To attempt the explanation of what is essentially a
mystery robs it of the power that belongs to it as
mystery, without making any addition to the sum of
our available convictions. It is enough to say that
Christ's relation to God was such that he could

56 The Pulpit and the Pew
authoritatively reveal the divine, and his relation to
man such that he could authoritatively reveal the
human. More use has been made of him in the former rela
tion than in the latter, although it is certainly as
important that we should have an understanding of
humanness as of divineness, and as yet we are as far
from comprehending the mystery of the former as we
are from comprehending the mystery of the latter.
That is not a thing to surprise us if we accept in
its literalness the language descriptive of man
employed by the Psalmist, as given in the revised
reading : "What is man that thou art mindful of him
and the son of man that thou visitest him ? For thou
hast made him a little lower than God, and hast
crowned him with glory and honor."
It was the purpose of the theology under whose
pulpit influence some of the older ones of us were
brought up, to lay the emphasis not on the natural
dignity of human nature, but on its acquired corrup
tion, and having driven in the nail to head it down by
the rendering of such hymns as, "O what a worthless
worm am I !" And having produced or attempted to
produce the impression that man is so vile as not to
be really worth saving, invite divine grace to the
incompatible task of doing what is not worth doing.
We are not going to underestimate the bad signi-

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 57
ficance of sin, but sin is bad not only, as we have
elsewhere remarked, because it is against God, but
just as much because it is against ourselves. A black
spot is very nearly as black when seen against a sheet
of white paper as when seen against the sun. If
human nature is inherently vile, then the most com
mendable and consistent thing it can do is to do vile
things. The depth of our fall is to be measured only
by the height from which we have fallen. So that
the very word "fall" is suggestive of altitude. A dog
cannot sin because he is by nature at the bottom and
no moral altitude is given him to drop from.
Sin is related to the moral constitution as disease
is to the physical. Health we recognize as our normal
condition, and sickness as a mere contingent. So
that if we are ill we are not satisfied till there has
been effected in us -complete recovery. We have so
much respect for our body that it discontents us
unless all its organs function perfectly. If we
cherished the same low estimate of our body that
some of our theology cherishes of our soul then we
should accept invalidism as our normal condition,
be satisfied with it, and enjoy ill health. As it is, we
estimate our present physical condition from the
standard of perfect health, and because of that allow
to invalidism no substantial place in our bodily creed ;
and whatever our decrepitude it is a physique in its

58 The Pulpit and the Pew
absolute completeness that is the criterion of our
estimate and the aim of our endeavor.
We have then an ambition for our bodies that we
have not for our souls. When we are physically ill
we try to get well. When we are morally ill we only
try to get a little better. The souls of those in the
pew are not, as a rule, thrilled with the ideal of per
fection, and the preacher, embarrassed by the knowl
edge of that fact, is hesitant in his insistence upon
the doctrine of perfection.
And they are not thrilled with the ideal for the
reason, in part at least, that the ideal is made insuffi
ciently familiar to their regard. We teach our con
gregation to imitate Christ, but only half-heartedly
do we insist upon their becoming reproductions of
Christ in all that relates to the moral and the spirit
ual life. We are afraid we shall lose our hold upon
them if we deal with them too urgently and are
strenuous and exacting in our demands upon them.
We allow them to be satisfied with themselves if they
have squared thought, feeling and act to what is only
approximately ideal.
Or I might state it by saying that we as preachers
do not encourage the members of our congregations
to cherish toward themselves the respect due to
themselves in virtue of the dignity inherent in their
constitutional make-up. In a way they reverence the

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 59
divine, but they do not reverence the human. They
call themselves children of God, and once in a while in
their impassioned moments they venture to adopt
the Scriptural appellative and to designate themselves
God's offspring.
The sentiment they entertain toward themselves is
not such that were there no other God they would
feel moved to prostrate themselves in worship before
the presence of their own souls. I do not mean idolize
themselves, — we do that enough already, — I mean
worship themselves, thrilled with the sense of their
own unspeakableness, stand in an attitude of holy
amazement before the incomprehensible mystery of
their own being, alive to the sense of what it means to
be able to translate into terms of everyday speech the
silent language that is traced in the forms of nature,
that first great volume of divine revelation, competent
to think the thoughts of Almighty God over after
him, to gather up in their affections the interests of
all his children, to feel the pulsings of the infinite
heart, to probe imaginatively the depths of the
eternal past, to crowd their intuitions up toward the
dim heights of the eternal future, and to realize that
years and centuries are too contracted to match the
expansive possibilities of their souls, and that to live
as long as God lives is the least that can satisfy the
capabilities and the ambitions of the souls to which

60 The Pulpit and the Pew
the Great One, who is both Father and Mother, has
given birth.
It is a thing for us to remember, as preachers, that
people never surpass the line laid down for themselves
in the expectations which they cherish for themselves.
Neither on the other hand will they fall very far short
of that line. When the distance between the character
one allows to himself and the ideal he cherishes for
himself becomes more than about so great, the pain
induced by a sense of that distance provokes to the
improvement of character. A man will not do a bad
thing when the pleasure experienced in doing it is
less than the self-contempt excited by the doing of it.
The security against wrong-doing Hes in part, then,
in a sense of insult done to ourselves by the wrong
doing. The thinner the skin the slighter the prick
needed in order to disquiet the underlying nerves.
Our preaching, therefore, must be of a character
to induce moral sensitiveness. Everything, then, that
makes for higher ideals makes for character. We
never realize how much dust there is in the air till,
through a pinhole in the wall, we let a single sunbeam
strike through into a room otherwise dark. I have
immense confidence in Hght considered as an energy
of redemption. We may be so black as to hate it,
but we are so human as to be fascinated by it, as the
blaze charms the moth even though it singes its wings.

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 61
And the joy and comfort in preaching is that there
is soundness enough left in any and every heart to
feel the force of all this, remembering always that it
is the soundness in men's hearts that we are to address
ourselves to, and not the unsoundness. The sheep
lost upon the mountains was a lost sheep, but a sheep
still and valuable enough still to warrant going in
pursuit of it.
So that a good text to preach from, and frequently,
too, is, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father
who is in heaven is perfect." Much as we may some
times shrink from laying upon the hearts of our con
gregations the burden of so exacting a doctrine, I
am persuaded that the great mass of our hearers have
a respect for moral thoroughness that they do not
have for any kind of moral compromise. Religion
suffers more from being belittled in the pulpit than
from being magnified, from being dealt out in
homoeopathic than from being administered in allo
pathic appHcations.
There prevails even among the irreligious, the con
viction that refigion, whatever it may be, is such a
thing that it ought to do a great deal for people.
So that the more exacting the demands that the
pulpit makes upon the pews, and the more exacting
the demands that the pews make upon themselves, the
more there is accomplished toward maintaining the

62 The Pulpit and the Pew
respect naturally and popularly cherished for reh
gion, and the greater the consequent faciHty in
securing for it popular adherence.
Any object regarded as being possessed of value
becomes increasingly valuable in people's esteem by
the very difficulty involved in securing it, so that any
pulpit that makes religion easy makes it unpopular,
by leading men to feel that if that is all there is to it,
there is no clearly distinguished difference between
that and no rehgion, and therefore no necessity for
concerning one's self about it. It is Hke the case of
a man who will travel four thousand miles to cHmb a
fifteen thousand foot mountain, who will not bestir
himself out of his dooryard to ascend a hundred foot
hillock only a stone's throw distant. In the latter
case, there is in point of altitude so Httle difference
between the level of the two, that what little widening
of prospect might be gained would not be sufficient
to pay for the trouble.
It is for that reason that we weaken the cause,
whose strength it is our ambition to maintain, when
ever we preach the doctrine of an upright life in a
way to hold it out of relations with law considered as
involved in the divine will and the divine righteous
ness. That is only a rather labored way of saying
that a Christian pulpit is no place to present
moraHty.

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 63
In the scheme supposed to be promulgated from an
evangelical pulpit there is no such thing as morality
considered apart from religion. It is a waste of time
to try to teach people, old or young, to do right,
except as what we call "right" is something which is
guaranteed by divine sanctions. That is the signifi
cance of the Old Testament story that the Decalogue
was written by the finger of God. It means that
what is right is something that God is back of ,— not
right because people have agreed to call it right, not
right because it would seem to be a safer rule to go
by, and one that is perhaps more likely to leadi on to
prosperity, nor even because it is more consonant
with people's ethical taste, but right because, as I
said, it is involved in the will and righteousness of
God. That puts morality where it belongs. So far from
its being something more or less distinct from reli
gion, it is involved in religion, because every act of
man stands in definite and prescribed relations to
God's will. Just as there are lines divinely laid down
from the foundation of the world, to which all the
processes of the flowers, the seas and the stars con
form, so there are lines of obligation divinely estab
lished from the foundation of the world to which it is
intended that aU the acts and the entire behavior of
men shall conform.

64 The Pulpit and the Pew
We have to tell the members of our congregations
that when we sin we do not sin against each other,
nor against the rules of society, but against God.
When David came to himself in the matter of Uriah
and Bathsheba, he did not say that it was against
either of these that he had sinned. His words were,
"Against thee, 0 God, and thee only have I sinned."
Viewed from a Christian pulpit's standpoint, morality
is not a thing to talk about. Even the word "moral
ity" does not, I believe, once occur in the Bible. It
is the term which is used in an ungodly way to repre
sent the idea of respectable behavior being maintained
without any reference to God's will in the matter.
It is a godless word, an unbiblical and irreligious
word. Such points as this I emphasize here because it dis
closes the inner tendencies of men's mind, the
processes by which it works when left to itself, the
way in which it gravitates away from what is ideaUy
prescribed; and so gives us something very deliber
ately and intelligently to address ourselves to in aU
our sermonic dealings.
A thorough appreciation of what man is ideally
and a similarly thorough appreciation of the intel
lectual and moral vagaries into which the ideal man
has lapsed, the intricacies into which the threads of
his thinking have become ensnarled, and the methods

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 65
and motives by which he has become shaken off from
the foundation upon which humanness was originaUy
estabhshed, — all of this the pulpit needs to be
thoroughly versed in.
Healthy prescription always depends on safe
diagnosis, and a preacher who does not know both
the ideal man and the man actual, is no more fitted
to preach than a physician is qualified to practice who
is not famiHar with anatomy and physiology, both
normal and abnormal. While we do not as ministers
and in our preparation for the ministry pursue the
monastic life, yet there is after all a flavor of monasti
cism about it. We easily and almost irresistibly
think and study ourselves out of touch with the
secular Hfe.
I prize, more than I can tell, the years which I
spent in purely secular pursuits before entering
college, also the years that I spent as a secular
instructor after graduating from college, and at a
time when I had not the ministry at all in view ; also
some interesting, even if rather trying, experiences
which I have had since my ministry commenced, and
which gave me more insight into human nature in
its luxurious variety of quafities and types than I
could have acquired in any theological seminary in
the course of a thousand years.

66 The Pulpit and the Pew
But that is rather in the nature of a parenthesis.
One word more about the legalities of Hfe. We have
spoken of the fact that, rightly construed, in every
thing that a man does there is some eternal law that
is exactly and imperiously relevant to each particular
act. And there is nothing more offensive to the
natural heart in all that sphere of action where he
exercises what he is pleased to call his free will than
to be made to feel that he is working in the presence
of objective authority. It is always, under such
circumstance, a case of will confronting will and that
is, in the very nature, irritating, all the way from
the infant to the octogenarian.
It is a state of things that we do not kick against
till we come into the domain where prevail the prin
ciples of right and wrong. In the erection of a build
ing we do not quarrel with the plumb-line nor strive to
replace perpendicularity and horizontality by any
obHquities of our own originating. By the quietness
and unresisting good nature with which, in that
instance, we ^ubmit to what is, without trying to
repeal or amend it, we show our respect for objective
authority. Then there is the matter of a monetary standard.
A recent presidential election turned on that question.
Some of our people did not want any standard, or I
should say that they wanted two, which is the same

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 67
thing really as not wanting any. In matters entirely
outside of moral considerations, no man any longer
estimates things by his feelings, nor weighs them by
his imagination or preference, or measures them by
the length of his own particular forearm, but
measures them by the gauge that is the ten-millionth
part of the earth's meridian quadrant.
Which is to say that he renounces himself con
sidered as standard of computation, and takes as his
tape-fine a quotation from the great globe. And we
never find any fault with it, nor do we, except where
it is a matter of personal and selfish interest to our
selves and the principles of right and wrong begin to
become involved, go about to construct a yard-stick
with as many inches as may happen to suit our indi
vidual convenience, or, as in the instance of the sugar
trust, doctor our scales in a way to contradict the
testimony of gravity.
I went into a jeweler's lately to see how my watch
was running. The air was full of the gentle throb of
all sorts of ticking apparatus, such as one always
hears in a jeweler's shop. But there was one tick
that beat itself out from second to second with a
distinctness and a certain air of authoritativeness,
chronometric lordliness, that seemed to say: "Hear
me tick, and if you want to know what time it is,
Hsten to me, and I wiU teU you. I do not tick by

68 The Pulpit and the Pew
fancy, I tick by the law of the universe, and by the
will of God."
I said to the jeweler, "What is it? Where does it
come from?" "It comes from Washington," he
answered. Well, all sorts of tilings come from Wash
ington, so that was no reHef to me. But he added,
"It comes from the Washington observatory." That
took the matter higher up, and made it begin to mean
something. "But where does the Washington obser
vatory get it?" "Gets it from the sun." That
settled the matter for me. A quotation from the
firmament. Telephoned down from the Throne.
And so as the jeweler's apparatus had the whole
of God's universe back of it, and as it was no selfish
concern of mine to have my watch set backward or
forward a little, I gave it to him to adjust, so as to
have it tick in beat with the pace of the firmament
and the mind of God. That is an instance of respect
shown to constituted divine authority ; and there
would have been no impulse on my part to have my
watch run by anything but standard time unless, for
some reason of my own, and in pursuance of some
individual purpose of mine, I had wanted my watch
to show an hour that I had myself personally fixed
upon — had wanted, that is, to set up a Httle chrono
metric observatory electrically disconnected from the

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 69
one that interprets time according as time is in the
Almighty thought.
Now we have to impress it upon our people that
every thought, feeling and action stands properly
in just as rigid relation to the movement of God's
thought as the second-hand of every watch in the
world stands related to God's horologue of the ages,
and that there is no moral Hberty proper to man
other than what is consistent with that fact, no
proper margin of moral choice that is any broader
than the margin of physical choice pertinent to the
flower in its development from the germ or to the
planet in its revolution about the sun; and that the
most that we can mean by liberty in the moral sphere
is the ability to run without any conscious self-
constraint or self-restraint, upon the divinely con
structed and ballasted track of moral duty, —
righteousness of Hfe become our second nature, so in
sympathy with God's wiU as to be able to do that
will without being conscious of it as an objective
propulsion, as the stars describe their orbits without
any sense of the gravity that holds them to their
orbits ; able, that is, to think, feel and act by the
power of a renewed life.
The purpose of our discussion today has not been
at all to give a systematic analysis of the inner work
ings of the human life and its experiences, but only

70 The Pulpit and the Pew
to draw attention to those experiences as constituting
the object to which as preachers we have to address
ourselves, or as constituting the conditions which
require to He closely to our own understanding and
thought while our appeal is being made. We must
know who and what it is that we are talking to.
Humanness is the instrument which it is the function
of the preacher to play upon, and he must know how
to finger the manual in order to draw the desired
response from the instrument's various registers.
"The proper study of mankind is man" is an
injunction pecuharly pertinent to the preacher, even
if not interpreted in precisely the sense in which Pope
intended it, — humanness in its ideality as evinced in
the single instance of Jesus Christ ; humanness in its
abnormal conditions. In some respects abnormal
mental and moral anatomy, even of the extreme kind,
. serves the preacher the best, even as analogous abnor
mal physical anatomy and physiology have an
especial value for the physician.
Had time allowed I should have liked to speak of
the way in which the legitimate operations of the
conscience, and of the intellect when appHed to reli
gious questions, are swerved from their normal course
by the influences exerted by scientific inquiry, par
ticularly when that inquiry is amateurishly prose
cuted and carried only to a sophomoric stage.

The Pulpit's Estimate of the Pew 71
I have, however, accompHshed the object which I
had in view, if, instead of foolishly trying to cover
the entire territory, I have simply suggested some
thing as to the extent of that territory, yts intrinsic
interest, and the essential service which careful
acquaintance with it renders to the preacher in his
effort to bring the hidden things of God to the
hidden place in the heart of man.

IV
LOVE CONSIDERED AS A DYNAMIC
The gospel is not an idea but a passion, the out
flow upon the world of an infinite affection. This
fact should both determine the spirit in which we
seek to quaHfy ourselves for the work of the pulpit
and put its constant complexion upon the method
in which we discharge the duties of the ministerial
office. I have therefore undertaken to say something
respecting the dynamic efficiency of the heart, moved
thereto by the conviction that in our attempts to
arrive at the secret of things, human and divine, an
over-emphasis is laid upon educated thought and an
under-emphasis laid upon cultivated affection, and
that the brain is allowed to crowd out the heart in
the process of arriving at truth and in the work of
making truth effective in individual Hfe and in social
relation. While we shall carefully guard against the charge
of disparaging the intellectual energies, and while
we have no purpose of exhibiting brain and heart as
though they were mutually antagonistic, yet our
present distinct purpose is to put to the fore the

Love Considered as a Dynamic 73
claims of our affectional nature, and that not only
because of the power that resides in our emotional
faculty, but because the Hberal exercise of that
faculty is essential to rendering even our intellectual
attainments capable of the best and largest results.
We are not anxious to state what it is exactly that
we mean by heart. There is a broad meaning in the
word, and by defining it we should narrow it. That
is the effect of definition always. Definitions are in
this respect like pictures of natural scenery, which
always miss the very thing most needed to make
them complete; like a photograph of an apple
orchard in bloom, which excludes both color and
perfume. "Heart" is a word that is constantly recurring in
Scripture. "Brain" is, I believe, a term that is not
once found there. Heart, in the sense in which it is
currently understood, suggests the warm center of
life. When we say of a man that he has a good deal
of heart we mean that he is summery ; he may be bril
liant and he may not ; but he is such sort of a person
that snuggling up to him away from the chilly expo
sure, that there is so much of, is like getting around
upon the south side of the house in midwinter, and
letting the sunshine feel of us, and watching the snow
slide off the twigs, and the tear-drops swell on the
points of the pendent icicles.

74 The Pulpit and the Pew
We are not trying to be precise. Precision is
fatal. But there is what we may call the tropical
side of a man. There is what admits of being termed
the heart of civilization and the heart of rehgion, as
opposed to its brain and gristle. And there is what,
without anything Hke fancifulness, could be desig
nated the tropical area of the Bible, as distinguished
from other portions that show a lower temperature
and He nearer the Pole.
The emphasis of current thought lies on light,
rather than on heat. A bright man is listed at a
higher figure than a man with fervid impulses. Brain
counts for a good deal more today than heart does.
It will win more applause and draw a larger salary.
Emotion we are a little afraid of. We are cautioned
not to let our feeHngs run away with us. We want
to know that a conclusion has been reached in cold
blood before we are disposed to submit our judgment
to it. Exuberance is in bad odor.
We are not disposed to surrender ourselves to any
influence or impression that we cannot intellectually
construe. Criticism deals with art, literature, and
even the word of God much in the temper with which
a surveyor plots a piece of ground with theodohte
and chain. The current demand is for ideas. There
is a great deal of highly disciplined intelligence that
finds its complete satisfaction in the mere process of

Love Considered as a Dynamic 75
inspecting such clever and glistening forms of truth
as may come before it, and inspecting them with an
exclusive eye to their cleverness and gHsten, some
thing perhaps as we look at the stars and are inter
ested in their brilliancy without its occurring to us
to wonder what, if anything, they have to do with us
or we with them, or whether there is anything back of
their entertaining sparkle that relates them to us or
to our world.
Eyes are so related to Hght that luminous things
amuse them. Intelligence is so related to scintillant
forms of truth that those forms interest and enter
tain it; and the entertainment may all be there
without the thought having begun even to touch the
vital tissues which the form defines and conceals. A
cold thought has very Httle of the power of penetra
tion in it. And yet that is the attitude in which, in
general, members of a cultivated community, educated
members of a congregation, are likely to stand
toward the truth.
I can cite as an extreme instance of that the fact
that during the four years I was in college I did not,
I suppose, hear more than that number of discourses
that lifted my moral tone or quickened my spiritual
life. This is not a reflection on the preaching, and
I do not care to think that it is any reflection on me.
It means simply that I brought to the preaching the

76 The Pulpit and the Pew
same faculties of mind precisely that I exercised
during the rest of the week on Greek roots and
algebraic equations. That is one reason why the
work of coUege chaplains is so often a failure, that
their deliverances, however true to Scripture and
however pat to human needs, are so Hkely to be sur
veyed by their hearers through purely intellectual
spectacles. And what holds true of a student community is
true, only in less degree perhaps, of any community.
People who have learned to think, love to think, and
enjoy having something given them that they can
think upon; something as eyes that can see love to
look at rockets, lightning and glow-worms. It means
nothing in particular. Any power that we have is
restless tiU opportunity is afforded it for exercise.
But the fact that one can think keenly and takes
pleasure in it is not to be understood as sympto
matic, in any shghtest degree, of interest in the
interior substance of the truth, with whose delightful
exterior it has been so fascinatedly busy.
It is something to reflect upon the amount of
mental energy that a man can expend upon matters
of Christian truth, for example, upon the verbal
forms of Christian truth and the relation of those
forms to each other, without being touched, still
less being quickened, by the realities that those forms

Love Considered as a Dynamic 77
were intended to represent. When a speaker is
handling a truth, it may be of religion or philosophy,
or whatever else, if he does it with dexterity, and if
in the process his own mind is quickened into unusual
activity, his activity communicates itself to the minds
of his hearers, as the movement of one wheel com
municates itself to the companion wheel into which
it gears. Some time ago I asked a member of my church
whether he thought a certain friend of his who had
lately taken to church-going, and who was excep
tionally brainy, was really becoming religious. "Oh,
no," he said ; "he likes to hear preaching because he
has an active mind and enjoys the way in which
things are homiletically laid out before him."
Mere intellectual activity upon religious themes is
not religion any more than working a flying trapeze
in a church is what the Bible means by "Godly exer
cise." An ox can devour the painting accidentaUy
left upon the easel in the pasture where he is grazing,
without becoming himself aesthetic.
It is the special function of pure intellect to deal
with the forms of truth, to deal with the shell within
which truth is encased, without, necessarily, any
practical regard being had to what the shell encloses ;
just as little children can play with diamonds, and
yet if we take away the diamonds and substitute

78 The Pulpit and the Pew
cheap white beads, there will be no diminution of
their enjoyment because it is the shape and the glisten
and not the quafity of the interior substance that
amuses them.
Matters of the most serious moment can be calcu
latingly handled; the entire gamut of theological
controversy can be thoughtfully run; and that, too,
to the maintenance of an unflagging interest; even
the great things of God and of the human soul can
be treated in terms as adequate to such high themes
as is possible to human thought, and yet with no
stirring of those deep waters in the human spirit
that underHe their fretted intellectual surface.
On the contrary, said Solomon, three thousand
years ago, "The issues of life are out of the heart."
Passion is axial. Heat is power. Heat is enginery,
whatever be the style or order of machinery. In the
last analysis there is scarcely a terrestrial activity in
ground, sea or air, that does not owe itself to that
great sphere of material passion we call the sun.
The throb .of the sea, the currents of the air, the
very coal on your hearth that converts winter into
summer and turns evening into daytime, is old sun
shine preserved in cold storage till needed for present
effects. God means something by all this. It is
divine satire on cold-bloodedness ; and it is the way
that nature takes to rebuke the notion that results in

Love Considered as a Dynamic 79
the intellectual, artistic, moral and spiritual world
can be hammered out by cold calculation.
AH the best thoughts in the world, into however
frosty a form they may since have become chilled,
were molded from metal that was once molten.
Geology surmises that the world began hot. So
every thought that has had a history began as a
passion. We can manufacture in cold weather, but
all creating is done under a high temperature.
What is true of thought is just as true of art.
Art is enthusiasm taken shape. The grand cathe
drals are old pulse-beats. The master paintings,
and they are all rehgious, are holy mediaeval passion
thrown upon canvas. Art is imitative now rather
than creative because the thermometer is down. We
can make wax work with the mercury at zero, but
we cannot grow flowers there.
Moses built the tabernacle, but he patterned it
from what he gained a gfimpse of when he was up in
the mount. We are not criticising draughting tools,
but we need a vision of something in the heavens with
which to set those tools afire and ablaze.
It is the same over again when we skip from art to
ethics. Morafity to be safe must be impassioned.
Strictly speaking there is nothing statutory about
Christianity. The only rules properly obligatory
upon us as Christians are those that issue from the

80 The Pulpit and the Pew
legislative chamber of a renewed heart. Propriety
under Moses was a lesson to be learned. Propriety
under Jesus Christ is a genius, and like all genius is
its own law. No man can be confidently counted on
to do right till he does it at the impulse of a warm
motive working from within outward. As saith the
Lord, "I will put my law in their inward parts and
write it in their hearts," the rockiness of Sinai
transmuted into an inner passion.
We encounter the same again when we cross over
from the territory of morals to that of theology. We
cannot read one of St. Paul's Epistles without realiz
ing that it was struck out at a white heat. AU the
evidences of temperature are both in what he said
and in the way he said it. His sentences are passion
ate. If he were to reappear among us and preach in
his old way he would be given lessons in self-restraint.
His thoughts are kept in steady glow by a certain
inward state of combustion out from which, like so
many flashing sparks, his thoughts continually leap.
His grammar breaks down under the weight of what
he undertakes to load upon it. His paragraphs
crack apart under the strain of what gets crowded
into them. The links in the chain of his argument
melt asunder by the fever of the temperature at which
he undertakes to weld them. There is nothing which
suggests elaboration, review, revision.

Love Considered as a Dynamic 81
That was the way theology was made 1800 years
ago. Only it was not thought of as theology. We
never begin to call reHgious truth theology till the
warm blood that was in it has commenced to cool
and to coagulate, just as we never think of anatomy
till it is a dead body that we are handling. Theology
is a precipitate from an old religious experience. All
the theology that is in the church today is in the
Epistles, but it isn't there as theology. So all the
bone-dust that is in the graveyards today was once
in society, but it was not there as bone-dust.
Mechanics is not art. Patching is not creating.
Doctoring is not regenerating. Intellect is not
vision. Calculation is not inspiration. History is
not administered by experts. It is heart that com
poses the core of civilization and of Christianity, not
head. The moving energy in the world's history
today is not a philosophy but a cross. And the con
summating act by which Christ fitted the church for
its work was not the founding of a university, but a
baptism of the church with the Holy Spirit and with
fire. Feefings, then, are the enginery of life, and think
ings and actings and speakings the machinery
through which that enginery works itself out into
accomplished result. Other things being equal, the
power and sweep of a man's life will be measured by

82 The Pulpit and the Pew
the intensity of his loyalty, that is to say, by the
heatedness of his devotement to the purposes he has
in view. In every way success is the child of passion.
"Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily," which is Paul's
way of discouraging apathetic plodders. What a
man cannot do heartily, at least in the better ranges
of service, he cannot do. Success is the product of
self-expenditure. There is no heat without combus
tion ; although it should be said that a man has no
right to burn himself up, for there is always fuel
enough at hand to keep the fire flaming. Consump
tion and production are correlates. Something has
got to burn up. Success is short for incineration.
Passion is the vestibule to every temple, whether
devoted to God or Mammon. That holds in every Hne
of productive activity, scholarship, money-making,
art, holiness, evangelization. Enthusiasm is the
road-breaker. When you talk of motive power,
generating impulse, that is in your bosom, not in
your skull.
Christianity is in this particular of a piece with
everything else. It is an energy. It is not an idea.
It is not a picture, nor a philosophy, nor a theology,
nor a memory. It is a producer, it is spiritual
dynamic, and of course, then, like everything else
that does things, begins in a passion; not brain,
although like all passion, amenable to brain ; like all

Love Considered as a Dynamic 83
fire, to be restrained from becoming mere conflagra
tion. It is a passion ; first of aU, it is the passion of
him who "so loved the world that he gave his only
begotten Son, that whoso believeth in him should not
perish, but have everlasting Hfe."
Redemption is not the outcome of God's inteUect.
It is love, not thought, warmth, not light. Divine
love has been disclosed in inteUigent ways, but it is
the love itself that makes out the genius of the matter
and that does the work ; so that a scholar, purely as
such, can no more accomplish redemptive work than
a mathematician, purely as such, can become a foun
tain of personal baptism, or than the polar zone can
grow flowers.
It is the passion of love, derivative from him who
is himself love, that is driving the gospel machinery
the whole world over. Argumentation is not an
energy. Love is. Love is a peculiar, forceful exer
cise of personality, whether of God or of man, that
works in the human sphere with effects Hke those that
are wrought in the works of nature by the inflowing
upon it of warm sunshine and the south wind. Such
analogies help us a little to appreciate its meaning,
but it is not a thing to be defined, only we can say
that love is a warm, subduing force, something very
positive, a kind of tropical pressure which a heart
that is full of summer temperature exercises over

84 The Pulpit and the Pew
other hearts that are still bound under the frosty
fetters of self-interest, and of those icy bonds of an
evil mind that are sure to develop themselves in an
atmosphere that is ungenial and cold.
It is the impassioned men that have made history
always, reHgious and secular both. They are pulse
to the general body that is listless and waiting. No
man has moved the world like Jesus Christ, because
no one beside him has embodied so wise, so warm, so
divine an enthusiasm. It costs more than thinking, it
wears more. An affection, if one's entire soul be
invested in it, takes more out of one than an idea
does. Our loves we coin from our hearts, our ideas
we make up principally as we go along.
Hence it comes about that Christianity easily
degenerates from a condition of fervid love to God
and man into a condition of highly organized intel
lectual interest in problems of religious or social or
economic truth. Ministers preach pohtical economy
from their pulpits only when the fires of Christian
devotion have become extinct. It has always been
so. So long as feelings remain feelings there is no
disposition to analyze and classify them, or to con
struct them into a system. It would have been as
impossible to make a creed on the day of Pentecost
as it would have been for Peter to kodak a photo
graph of Moses and Elias on the Mount of Trans-

Love Considered as a Dynamic 85
figuration. There was too much in the air. A drop
of blood has to be taken out of the vein before there
will be any disposition to count its corpuscles.
We who have any experimental knowledge of the
gospel realize that it is God's own passion of love
that carries with it and draws after it all that is
essential to the production of perfected Christian
character and life. And as love is love in both
worlds, upon no other spiritual sustenance can the
preacher be more wisely or confidently fed, or with
greater assurance and constancy nourish the Hves of
those to whom he ministers.
There are some things that we can talk about but
that we do not experience. On the contrary, there
are some things which we experience, but which we
cannot as easily talk about. Love is of the latter
kind. We see its workings ; we feel its workings. It
is like gravity, which no one explains, but which is
the name that we give to the disposition that objects
of the same nature have of drawing toward one
another. The word gravity is a convenient one,
but explains nothing. The word love is a very con
venient one, but explains nothing. The fact, though,
that it stands for is a large one. We would like to
know more about it, but we can experience it and we
do, and that is the richest kind of knowing.
But it is the drawing toward one another of two

86 The Pulpit and the Pew
souls — gravity translated into the spiritual world.
Souls that love recognize themselves in each other.
Much more than that we cannot say, — not yet;
perhaps we can sometime. It is pleasant to remember
that eternity is going to be so long that we shall have
time to find out about things.
But to find ourselves reflected in each other is a
mutual tribute, and implies an underlying oneness
and a certain amount of equality. You can love a
person who is inferior to yourself, and yet you love
him because you find in him something that is equal to
what is the best in yourself : and that gives the touch
of equaHty. And without that touch of equality,
without that sense of a certain comradeship, there can
be no true intercommunication between person and
person. Genuine education is an exchange of
personalities. It is only in the act and relation of love that you
and another personally touch and can perfectly com
mune. It is the only existing relation in which the
centers of »two separate souls become coincident in
such way that there can be an unobstructed flow from
one to the other.
There is certainly a kind of mutual access and
companionship in identity of opinion, in similarity of
taste, in resemblance of occupation. And yet two
people may think alike and still be far apart. Two

Love Considered as a Dynamic 87
men working side by side in the same occupation may
yet be living in different worlds and each be exempt
from the other's influence.
It wiU serve our purpose also to notice that two
souls do not come into contact when there is merely
the exercise of authority on the part of one over the
other. When you give a command to your servant,
even though he obey, you have touched him only in
his act, not in his personality. Authority is likely to
preclude rather than to promote unhindered exchange
between the two. A servant may love his master, but
not because he is his master, but in spite of it. The
whip may burn the flesh, but it does not warm the
soul, rather freezes it. Mount Sinai was hard and
cold and was particularly valuable in showing what it
was incompetent to do. It was a vast, colossal
menace, a kind of immense divine frown — made only
the more awful by the lightnings which illuminated
it, and the thunders with which it reverberated.
It would seem that a man as thoughtful as Moses
would have felt at the time as though some experi
ment — perhaps we ought rather to say some expe
dient — less flinty than Sinai would have to be adopted
before God and mankind would come to any fair
understanding with each other, and before God would
avail to gain a grasp upon man's interior life.
We were just saying that the relation of love is the

88 The Pulpit and the Pew
only one in which the centers of two separate souls
become coincident in such a way that there can be an
unobstructed flow from one to the other. There is
more that is fine and effective in this intercommunica
tion between souls than we sometimes recognize. You
touch the organ key and the pipe sings to you. You
touch the harpstring and it becomes musically
tremulous. You speak to the ear or address the eye
and there returns to you a look of recognition.
Everything is a kind of instrument waiting to be
played upon.
The spirit is also an instrument, most dehcate in
its make, most sensitive in its responsiveness. The
time is mostly passed when people doubted the fact
of one mind telhng upon another mind, one spirit
upon another spirit. It is so evidently the case that
the mystery of it no longer shatters or even shakes
our belief in it.
The influence — that is to say the inflowing — of
one upon another is one of the incontestible facts, and
how effective the working of that influence will be wiU
depend upon how near to the center of the personal
Hfe it is able to come and exert itself. The effects
that we take from others are sometimes of quite a
superficial and therefore transitory character. They
pass over us as a shadow passes over us, leaving no
print behind, or at least, no recognizable print.

Love Considered as a Dynamic 89
Other influences penetrate into a somewhat deeper
stratum of experience and life and become perma
nently woven into life's tissues.
In that way we are continually receiving importa
tions introduced into us by the remote approach to
us, or the closer contact with us, of the people among
whom we live and move; so that we are, to a very
considerable extent, a mass of quotation. Were it
possible, it would be an interesting and curious pro
cess to dissect ourselves mentally, morally and spirit
ually and to discover to whom we are indebted for
this, that and the other ingredient, respectively, of
which we are composed.
, Among the variety of operative influences, that
which goes deepest is affection. It finds its way where
nothing else wUl. While perhaps there is a hidden
spot in each life that is sacred only to itself and the
heavenly Spirit, yet love comes nearer to reaching
that spot than any other influence. And the point
especially to be made is, that it not only reaches
there, but that it works there. For love is not merely
a sentiment cherished by the party who loves, but I
would Hke to represent it as a kind of personal cur
rent passing from the one who loves to the object of
that love.
The matter is too serious and too far-reaching in
its bearing to indulge in any fanciful treatment of

90 The Pulpit and the Pew
it, and when I represent affection as a kind of per
sonal current of influence I mean just that.
If you take a potted plant that has been standing
in the shade tiU it begins to show the discouraged
aspect incident to being confined in a dark place, and
then remove it to a spot where fresh air, warmed by
the sunshine, can drift across it, you certainly attri
bute the consequent altered aspect to the new, clear,
genial light and warmth that you have allowed it to
respire. Without undertaking to explain how it is that a
more brilliant and tropical atmosphere can so insinu
ate itself into the plant, and so mix itself in its Hfe,
as to create there a kind of resurrection, you never
theless accept the fact and do not consider that you
are indulging in fanciful ideas or fanciful language
when you say that between the sunny air and the
flower there has been the actual passage of some kind
of influence that has penetrated the plant and that
has worked within it encouragingly and quickeningly.
What is more, it works in the plants all kinds of
result, not limiting itself to one special variety of
effect. It not only puts fresh verdancy on the leaves,
but a brighter tint in the blossoms, and a general
revived appearance as though it had in some way been
created anew and been born again. The mystery of
this universal inner working we become accustomed

Love Considered as a Dynamic 91
to and do not stop to explain, and simply let it pass
by saying that if you want your plant to grow and
blossom keep it in the sunshine.
Now it is one of nature's secrets that by a single
influence it can produce such a diversity of result ;
but the same thing precisely occurs over again, only
in a finer and more fascinating way, if we transfer
our attention from plant life to what goes on in the
Hfe and growth of the spirit when the vernal influence
of affection is allowed access to it. It is apparent in
the home and in the schoolroom. A summer-like do
mestic atmosphere operates in all variety of ways to
the child's upbringing and uplifting. In such
environment everything that is in the father and
mother, especially in the mother, tends to duplicate
itself in the child. First of all, it mellows the child's
sensibilities. The mother's love tends to become the
child's own love. It is a common thing to say that
love begets love. That expression has become pro
verbial and so we speak it carelessly, but it is exactly
the point that I am just now trying to make. Paren
tal affection is an inflowing and tends to foster the
rudiments of fifial affection.
But the same genial atmosphere operates to pro
mote in the offspring whatever other gifts and graces
distinguish the parents. For affection is a current
that carries over with it whatever freightage is

92 The Pulpit and the Pew
loaded upon it at the source from whence it flows. So
that in such a home the inteUigence of the father and
mother become duplicated in the child's mental long
ings and inquiries, and the hearthstone becomes the
most perfect seminary in all the world, and all the
more beauteous for being so natural and delicate,
a seminary in miniature.
It is hardly necessary to say that in such tempera
ture of parental affection the moral and religious
impulses most naturally and unaffectedly secure
their germination and development. A loving home,
presided over by a father and mother, who are at the
same time priest and priestess of the mysteries of
God and of His Son, Jesus Christ, is almost certainly
destined to prove to be a little church, — a little
home, a Httle state and a little church, all in one, and
therefore the rudiment of all that is finest and sweet
est in the collective life of the world.
But we cannot conclude this lecture without briefly
adding to the foregoing the fact that love is not
only an energy but also an intuition. Love is vision
as well as force. It is Hke a sunbeam which not only
puts a complexion upon the surface, but perforates
and externalizes what is hidden.
This is true in the relation of man to man. There
is a kind of knowledge which we gain of each other
while standing to one another in an attitude of cold

Love Considered as a Dynamic 93
speculation, but it is only when we enter into
another's Hfe along the track of sympathy that we
secure for ourselves genuine admission. There is not
in thought that susceptibility that can feel what is
hidden beneath the surface. Thought brings us near
to people, almost within touch of people, but does
not penetrate. We are Hke the electrons which com
pose an atom and which revolve about one another
at a terrific rate of speed, but that never come quite
into actual contact with each other. Distance seems
to be the law of nature ; but love is supernature, skips
the distances, and reaches the goal.
But it is true also in the relation of man to God.
Let it be said in all reverence that man and God are
a good deal alike, ought to be if we are his offspring.
Love is the same in both realms, has in both the same
efficiency, whether as a force or as an intuition. We
cannot perfectly find out each other by studying each
other, but by loving each other ; neither can we, say
the Scriptures, find out God by searching. We can
reason toward him but we cannot reason to him. The
story of the electrons over again : revolution but not
contact. St. John lived eighteen hundred years before Her
bert Spencer, but he could have taught Herbert
Spencer lessons, if the latter had not been so enam
ored of his own philosophy as to be oblivious of St.

94 The Pulpit and the Pew
John's Gospel, for, wrote the Apostle, "He that
loveth, knoweth God." Spencer was sound perhaps
on his own grounds, but there are more things in
heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philoso
phy. We are not criticising his philosophy ; only in a
domain as universal as the truth, it is better not to
enclose human speculations within fences that cast
what is very likely to be the larger part of truth into
realms of outer darkness.
Love then, according to St. John, is a form of
vision, a mode of unhindered intuition that travels
everywhere, everywhere in the realm of spirit, finds
its way into heart, wherever heart is, a species of
spiritual telescope that can sweep the four quadrants,
that can be turned upon what is near the ground or
focused upon what lies in the sky, admitting us to the
fellowship of our brethren and letting us into the
intimacies of our Heavenly Father. I suppose the
Epistles of St. Paul are more attractive to the bare
intellect of the world than the Gospel of St. John,
but St. John's Gospel lies closer to the world's life,
and even S*t. Paul had to admit that "the greatest of
these is love."

MINISTERIAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR CIVIC
CONDITIONS
Two vitalized institutions, though they be as dis
tinct as Church and State, cannot exist in contact
without being mutuaUy influential. Each will teU
upon the other. They may teU too much. They may
tell too little. They may tell mistakenly, but they
will tell. And the question that I attempt to handle
today is, To what extent, and in what way the
Church, at the inspiration of the ministry and under
its leadership, is authorized to exert a determining
influence upon civic life.
Whatever my relation to the Church, I have no
ambition to see its influence extended over territory
that does not belong to it; but it is important to
realize what its proper territory is, and how much
there is of it. And it is furthermore important to get
industriously to work occupying that territory,
covering it with the best thought we know how to
think and to utter, and with the most discreet and
vigorous activity we know how to exercise.
There seems to be a particular propriety in
urging this point just at this time. The condition

96 The Pulpit and the Pew
of things in our larger cities, which are the con
trolling centers and the storm-centers of American
life, is one of continual menace. The causes operat
ing to make them so it does not He within the scope of
my present purpose to enumerate. Mr. Bryce has
specifically designated them as our nation's danger-
points. It is not becoming us as Christians to worry about
the situation, any more than it is the suitable atti
tude of the Christian mind to worry in regard to
any other matter of concern. Worrying about what
is evil simply exhausts the power that might other
wise be employed in helping to correct the evil. And
yet frankly the political situation is bad. Periodic
spasms of virtue — virtue so extreme as to be almost
painful — do not take the place of a steady growth in
virtue. What then can the Church do? Do anything
reasonable that it sets its heart and hands to. The
Church lacks the courage of its convictions, and is
possessed of a purpose almost infinitely narrower
than its opportunities. It is timid, and so loosely
consoHdated that the organized political influences
of the State foster that timidity. Solidity of organi
zation is everywhere and always the secret of result.
A handful of compacted Spaniards had no difficulty
in rending the laxly welded power of the host of Mexi-

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 97
cans under Cortez four centuries ago, which would
otherwise have been irresistible.
Then again the Church is so afraid of doing what
is not ecclesiastically proper, that it leaves undone a
host of things that it is ecclesiasticaUy wicked for it
to neglect, and has grown more or less oblivious of
the times when, under the Hebrew Theocracy, the
Church was the State, prophets the law-givers and
statesmen, and civic administration recognized as
leaning back directly upon the throne of God. I am
not pleading for a revival of the Old Hebrew The
ocracy, but God's throne has to be brought into the
business somehow, and not expediency, but righteous
ness, made the central column around which the social
structure shall cluster. That is the ideal which is to
be steadily held in front of our thought and purpose,
and it is an important function of the pulpit to lead
the Church inteUigently and inspiringly as well as
unrestingly toward the achievement of that ideal.
The Church, in times past and to a very consider
able extent even yet, has, through its ministerial
representatives, laid an awkward and too exclusive
emphasis upon the salvation of individuals, forgetting
that in St. John's vision of "the city come down from
God" is taught the truth that the final destiny of the
race is to find its consummation in a redeemed com
monwealth, not in a disintegrated mob of converted

98 The Pulpit and the Pew
individualities, and that when Christ talks about the
kingdom of heaven, he is thinking of the reconstruc
tion of society, not merely of a miscellaneous crowd
of men and women separately labeled for transporta
tion to a realm unknown. There is a sense doubtless
in which souls have to be saved one at a time, and
that I shaU notice tomorrow, but even so an individual
is a mere vulgar fraction till he is gathered in with
his feUows to form an organized whole.
There has been with many so much more disposi
tion to consider religion as a kind of passport to a
heavenly world situated somewhere in the future than
purpose to make the present world heavenly today,
that where we are now has been treated rather as a
place to get out of than as one to remain in, with a
view to making it so pleasant that one would not care
to get out of it at all.
It has always seemed to me that the fact stated in
Scripture that Christ spent the interval between his
death and his resurrection in the attempt to improve
and brighten up the underworld, ought to be accepted
by us as indication that there is nothing so bad as not
to be redeemable, that in whatever place we are put it
is selfish and cowardly to regard it as a point of
escape, and that it is a mean kind of evasion in any
man when his first thought in regard to the spot he is
now occupying is that it offers means of access to

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 99
another spot that he expects to like better and to
find more comfortable.
To treat the place or the position that we are
filling at present as a stepping-stone to a more capa
cious place or a more responsible position, tends to
disqualify us for that position should we ever be
elevated to it. That applies to young ministers
settled in a small parish as well as to the larger
matter which we have just now under consideration.
One fact tending to the disheartenment of minis
terial leaders seeking to champion a movement look
ing to better conditions in society and State is that
good people, so many of them, display such a lack
of staying power. Depravity is always sprightly,
never gets discouraged, never knows when it is beaten,
never becomes worried and tired and retires from the
field to recuperate.
A wicked man grown old in wickedness will do a
bad thing in as fresh and enthusiastic a way as
though it were the first time he had done it. There
is about it aU an exhaustless spontaneity that is
fascinating. You almost hesitate to find fault with
a bad man for misbehaving, he does it so weU and so
cheerfuUy. Virtue, on the contrary, is Hkely to
carry upon it the aspect of pulling up grade. Half
of the man goes up and the other half stays down so
that he does not really get anywhere.

100 The Pulpit and the Pew
Virtue cannot ordinarily be relied upon as con
fidently as vice to maintain its interest in the cause
it is devoted to. So far as relates to civic matters
Christians are Christians only during the months of
September and October and the first week of Novem
ber. Politicians are politicians all the year round.
"Patient continuance in well doing" is a text that it
is becoming to the pulpit to use, with a good deal of
freedom and frequency.
Few people seem able to keep holy indignation
steadily in stock. Indignation is exceedingly tiring
and consuming. It is only the saints that require to
have inculcated the doctrine of perseverance. There
are a great many graces and potencies of character
that have a very direct relevancy to public matters,
and the pulpit will leave part of its duty undone save
as it publishes those graces and potencies in their
distinct relation to such matters.
On a critical day in the history of a town or city
virtue is more afraid of getting wet than iniquity,
more susceptible to atmospheric changes. Vice wiU
go to the polls on foot ; virtue waits to be carried.
Christians think as much of their religion as sinners
do of their commodity, but are more economical in
their use of it.
This economy in matters of pubhc Hfe comes
perhaps in part from supposing that in civic con-

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 101
cerns the ordinary moral obHgations are not strictly
appHcable. It is a good deal of an undertaking to
serve God in everything and rather a relief to secu
larize a part of his kingdom and thus to find a little
neutral territory to play in where God is not felt to
be standing by and looking on, and where one can
do as one likes and God not care.
That was the situation as recorded in Scripture
when the Hebrews commenced clamoring for a king.
The prophet Samuel had held them with a tighter rein
than was altogether comfortable and they reasoned
that if in pohtical matters they could have a ruler
that was less of a prophet and more like the common
run of people, they would be saved the trouble, so
far forth, of behaving otherwise than as was con
venient. In modern terms, their ambition was for the
secularization of their civics.
So that the eighth chapter of the First Book of
Samuel is another section of the armory of Scripture
truth from which the pulpit can draw in dealing with
Christians in their relation to the State, for no more
now than in Samuel's days is there the willingness to
have the territory of civic concern recognized as
lying fully inside the domain of divine government.
And yet at least nine tenths of the questions that
come within the range of political life are ethical in
their very tissue, and thus fall as definitely within

102 The Pulpit and the Pew
the legitimate scope of the modern prophet as they
did within that of Moses, Samuel or EHjah. That
position, however, is not sustained by public senti
ment. That I have learned to my own embarrass
ment and sorrow. There exists a widely prevailing
prejudice against anything being said inside of the
sanctuary about matters that are distinctly civic,
except perhaps to the extent of prayer being offered
in behalf of the President and those who are asso
ciated with him in authority. It is agreed to aUow
to the pulpit somewhat more leeway on days of
national fasting and thanksgiving, for the reason, I
suppose, that those occasions are considered as pos
sessing only a fraction of sabbatical sanctity, allow
ing therefore a percentage of secularity sufficient for
putting in a Httle work regarding such matters as
legislators, aldermen and mayors.
What makes this conservative attitude so inexplic
able is that no one objects to pulpit disquisitions on
the bad civic conditions that existed three or four
thousand years ago, and on the tricky politicians
and scheming demagogues that manipulated those
conditions to their own advantage. Even that is a
tacit confession, both on the part of the pew and the
pulpit, that in the days of Moses, David and EHjah
the kingdom of God embraced the State and all civic

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 103
interests as much as it did the Tabernacle and the
Ark of the Covenant.
But under ordinary conditions, when the civic
temperature is only normal, and the occasion is not
one of national appointment, and election is still
some months away, and the Ahabs and Jereboams are
pushing their schemes with only moderate enthusiasm,
homiletical references to civic concerns are commonly
regarded as out of taste and as a postponement of
the interests of the kingdom of heaven to those that
that kingdom is not much interested in and has
nothing in particular to do with.
While saying this, it should at the same time be
conceded that there is what I, from my point of view,
should consider a wholesome broadening of sermonic
interest over a wider range of territory. Religion
is coextensive with life, and while it is not to be sup
posed that any accredited member of our faith would
take everything into the pulpit, there seems in that
no sufficient reason why he should not take the pulpit
into everything.
My conception of the kingdom of heaven is of
something that just at this present time is particu
larly concerned in what is going on at present, in
today's Ahabs and Jezebels, rather than in antiquated
ones, and in events that make up the national life of
today rather than in those that are only the outworn

104 The Pulpit and the Pew
remains of peoples that are obsolete ; it being always
understood, however, that such themes are germane
to the pulpit only when they are not introduced
there with a view to what are known as sensational
effects, effects, that is, which are for the purpose of
sensation, rather than in pursuit of results which
properly aroused feeling is calculated to produce.
In the conservative sense of the word preaching is
not preaching unless it is sensational.
The duty of the twentieth century, as much as it
was the duty of Elijah and Jeremiah, is to take
eternal principle, and to measure existing conditions
and institutions against the principle as standard and
as frankly and eloquently as possible to declare the
amount of discrepancy between the two.
That does not involve entering into the discussion
of political technicalities that have no direct and
evident relationship with ethics, nor into the discus
sion of methods of administration or matters of legis
lation so far as no distinct moral principle is
involved. ^But as already said, nine tenths of the
entire matter is wrought out of moral ingredients,
and wherever that is the case the Church itself, and
the Church under the leadership of, and in coopera
tion with, its chosen ministerial representatives, has
something to say and is disloyal to itself, and above
all to its Divine Head, if it does not say it.

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 105
That is the way I feel about it. And when I see
in aU our large cities, New York, Philadelphia,
Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, churches by the hun
dreds throwing their distinctive emphasis on a heaven
that is going to come by and by, and on iniquity that
prevailed thirty centuries and more ago, dangling
little spotless babies over a Christian font but dumb
as an oyster to conditions that ruin children and
youth faster than we can baptize them, I am pretty
sure that the Church is false to its calling, a traitor
to its prerogatives, and condemned by its failure to
do what it was divinely organized to do.
It is the kingdoms of this world, Scripture tells
us, that are to become the kingdom of our Lord, and
of his Christ. So that it makes exceedingly little
difference how many individual converts the churches
make in a year, if in the course of that year something
has not been done to elevate the tone of the general
Hfe. We ought to work to redeem this world, not
merely to populate the next.
This does not at all mean that I am not fully aware
of the splendid efforts that certain individuals and
certain societies and institutions are putting forth
with a view to purifying society and commumcating
to the civic conditions of city and state a finer and
stronger impulse ; and all of that is in the main
attributable to influences that are nurtured by the

106 The Pulpit and the Pew
Church, and fostered in the Church by the preaching
of gospel truth. And yet the fact is that the entire
situation, social and civic, deplorable, unutterably
deplorable, as it is in certain respects, is not mastered,
because the churches in their individual membership
are not massed with a distinct view to the correction
of the situation and its replacement by a better.
The possibilities of godly sentiment, as those possi
bilities exist in our churches and in our synagogues,
are sufficient to do anything and everything that they
will cooperate in doing. If in New York, for example,
each denomination had its bishop, and there were an
archbishop over all, with the inspiration of a prophet,
and a prophet possessed withal of something of the
absolutism of the old prophet of the Hebrews, it
would be about as easy to dissipate the iniquity and
the deviltry prevailing in our civic conditions as it
is for the rising sun to scatter the mists and evaporate
the dew. Evil spirits always keep step with the beat
of the devil's drum. The anarchy of the saints is no
match for the organization of the sinners.
I am not moved to this way of stating things out
of any pessimistic impulse. I believe in the Church
and I believe in it tremendously. Its possibilities of
effect are enormous, but its experience is too dull and
its godliness speckled with too many spots of world
liness to have a clear sense of separateness from the

Responsibility for Civic Conditions .107
forces it is set to overcome, and therefore out of
condition to achieve its destiny of conquest ideally
appointed to it.
It would seem to go without the saying that the
State is such sort of edifice that its solidity and per
manence are imperiled save as it is constructed in
observance of certain well-ascertained principles.
The same holds as in ordinary architecture. A cer
tain amount of discretion and of independent taste
can be exercised in the putting up of a building, and
yet all such independence requires to be subordinated
to the principles of the art. In the erection of a
building it is the architect that furnishes the prin
ciples and it is the builder that applies them under
the architect's supervision.
This seems to me to state with approximate accu
racy the functions respectively of the Church and of
the State — of the churchman and of the man, whether
churchman or not, who is charged with the State's
legislative, judicial and executive functions.
Now to dispense with the former — the Church —
would be to leave the State in the condition in which
any structure of wood or stone would be left if, in
renunciation of the underlying and eternal principles
of architecture, the builder were to go on and put up
whatever sort of edifice his own convenience or caprice
might suggest, leaving it without underpinning, if

108 The Pulpit and the Pew
underpinning were expensive, or disregarding the
lines of perpendicular and horizontal, if the exigen
cies of the location suggested it, or if obhquity of
vision rendered the appreciation of those Hnes
difficult. The distinction thus made indicates clearly enough,
I should think, the difference between the statesman
and the pohtician. The statesman conforms his acts
to the requirement of that which is fundamental and
estabhshed, works upon long lines and with regard
to next year and all the years. The politician extem
porizes his procedure, makes up his acts as he goes
along, and binds himself only by the exigencies of
the moment, and especiaUy by the exigencies of his
own ambition or convenience.
This was illustrated in my own state a year or two
ago when twenty-five senators, under the influence of
graft, we suppose, or its equivalent, voted to dispense
with the constitution and to act in contempt of its
distinct requirements; or as was illustrated on a
smaller scale by a single Albany senator who, upon
my asking him what was his first thought, upon a
new bill being presented for senatorial action, replied,
"My first thought always is, What effect will my
attitude toward this bill have upon my political
future?" How much of permanent advantage to

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 109
the State is obtainable from that sort of legislative
equifibrism it is easy to surmise.
It is the function of the Church to announce the
principles upon which government requires to be
administered in order to the maintenance of that
established foundation upon which the security of
the State depends, and not only to announce them,
but to reiterate them with that unanimity of emphasis
which should render the non-observance of them
impossible. And if the Church is not too busy with
the matter of securing salvation for itself, and with
the business of Christianizing the heathen the other
side of the globe, it can do it.
I certainly beheve in salvation both for ourselves
and the pagans abroad, but it is a sad way of evan
gelizing heathenism elsewhere to foster it in our own
midst, and to let it sap the foundations of our Chris
tian civilization at home. If we want to win foreign
nations to the American type of Christianity we
shall have to do it not merely by exporting mission
aries but by giving to the world an illustration of
what Christianity will do for the nation that calls
itself Christianized.
It is in the interest of foreign missions as well as
of home missions that we should be nationally repre
sentative of the principles of wholesome Christian
faith and doctrine. In these days of rapid inter-

110 The Pulpit and the Pew
national communication by steam and electricity,
what any people is in point of character is known the
world over. I have read in papers pubfished as far
away as Austrafia and Tasmania as fair and appre
ciative an exhibit of the political corruption existing
among us as any that I have met in the New York
Sun, and in some respects more so.
In order that it may be understood by the Christian
ministry how heavy is the burden of responsibility
resting upon the Church, and in the first instance
upon the ministers as leaders and inspirers of the
Church, I want to say that not much is to be hoped
from politics as at present existing nor from the
average newspaper. Please observe the discrimina
tion which is involved in that mode of statement.
Partisan politics — and almost all politicians are
partisans — is a system of opportunism, by which we
are to understand expediency as opposed to principle,
the adoption of any pohcy that will conduct to quick
results. A striking example of that was Bryan's
readiness to,flirt with Tammany Hall in the presiden
tial campaign in which the battle was waged around
bimetallism. Bryan, as I interpret him, is essentially a godly
man. Under ordinary circumstances he would be
almost the last to court the association of thieves,
grafters and blackmailers of the stripe comprised in

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 111
the Fourteenth Street organization. But when it
came to be a matter of politics, such Scripture injunc
tion as "Come ye out from among them and be ye
separate," no longer obtained. The man who carries
his Bible with him into the sanctuary is not certain
to put it in his pocket when getting ready to attend
a partisan convention or a political mass meeting.
That has been a common feature of our pohtical
life in New York City, and there has been no differ
ence between Republicans and Democrats in that
respect. There has been such an amalgamation
of righteousness and depravity that righteousness
becomes despoiled of its natural effect. One of the
saddest features of the whole matter is that a man,
whatever his original integrity, has hard work to be
in politics without losing the power of moral sensi
tiveness and discrimination. The prevaiHng political
sentiment is a depraved one, and only an exception
ally vigorous constitution can continue to respire
corrupt atmosphere without becoming tainted by it.
The fundamental fault consists in not treating
moral rectitude as something that covers the four
quadrants of life, and in regarding depravity when
displayed on civic ground as being a little more
tolerable than when displayed on other grounds ;
taking the gristle out of the normal conscience ;
watering the Decalogue, and for the sake of carrying

112 The Pulpit and the Pew
a point stepping down to a cheap level with political
tricksters, whom we are bound to love as men, but just
as much bound to scorn so far as relates to mutuality
of effort in questions that concern the supreme inter
ests of city, state and country. A man, unquestion
ably godly in some of his impulses, will, when brought
into the political arena, hobnob with a perverted
wretch of the caucus chamber, touching hands with
a low-Hved, scheming intriguer, knowing all the time
that he is a Har and a scoundrel, and yet, because it
is a pohtical pool that they are mixing their issues in,
will coalesce with the speckled fraternity with no
sense of shame or blush of mortification.
It has been frequently urged upon me that pushing
things too far and insisting upon the ideal is inexpe
dient. I beheve that it is a good thing sometimes to
do what is inexpedient. Remembering what an un
godly conglomerate crowd Moses had to deal with,
how absurdly inexpedient it would have seemed to be
for him to draft a scheme of morals so inexpressibly
fine that for more than three thousand years it has
been attributed to a divine origin. Compromise
always puts one more rivet into the bonds of iniquity
with which the individual or the State is bound. We
may not achieve the ideal at once, but the only way of
ever attaining it is to strike for it at once. Jane
Addams of Hull House put herself at a commanding

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 113
and impregnable position when she insisted upon the
policy not simply of seeking to reduce the amount of
commercial vice, but of going to work to exterminate
it. Now there is no poHtical party in existence that
will stand for so drastic a programme. If we are
striving toward social perfection, and that is the only
proper aim of the ministry and the Church, we need
expect no help from the politicians. That is why men
in politics prefer that the preachers should keep their
hands off of civic concerns. Principle and expediency
are in 'deadly conflict with each other. There is no
greater relief that could come to the weary, fretted
heart of the mayor of New York than to know that
henceforth all the ministers of the city were going to
confine themselves to what he understands as the
simple gospel of Jesus Christ, by which he means a
careful avoidance of all moral problems except such
as relate themselves to the other world, where he is
not known to have expressed himself as expecting to
hold anything other than an unofficial position.
Nor any more than from politics can we expect
very much from the press. It would be quite unjust
to the press to make against it any sweeping allega
tions. It is much easier to criticise journaHsm than
to be a journalist, and it would be ungenerous to fail
to recognize the services which in special lines are

114 The Pulpit and the Pew
rendered by our better class of newspapers and
magazines. We must in justice, however, remember that they
are published and circulated as matter of business,
and the purpose of business is to make money, and
no man ever does an ideally good thing when the
prime motive is shekels.
We cannot criticise a man or a corporation for
trying to make a newspaper pay, any more than we
could criticise the same man or corporation for
trying to make a manufacturing or banking business
pay; but with that object primarily in view, the
management is anxious for nothing so much as for
a large constituency, and that means catering to the
people, telling people what they want to hear instead
of instructing them in what they ought to know. So
that an ideal newspaper cannot be issued in an unideal
world and have the business pay. The pulpit is the
one only place where the ideal can be pubHshed and
is expected to be pubHshed. And even there it is
sometimes difficult to close the financial year with a
credit balance.
It is unusual for a newspaper to decry what is bad
simply because it is bad, or to eulogize what is good
simply because it is good. It is rare to find one that
measures men or estimates events from the frank
standpoint of absolute righteousness. That is a

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 115
function of which the pulpit has the almost exclusive
monopoly. Even the best journalistic endeavors in
that direction are almost certain to be in some
degree thwarted by the prejudice of poHtical parti
sanship. If you vituperate Democratic wickedness,
Republican journals will support you and say all
manner of pleasant things about you. And vice
versa. If you attack Tammany, in whichever of the
two parties the Tammany spirit happens to be incar
nated, the anti-Tammany papers will idolize you,
not necessarily because they hate iniquity, — for there
may be the same amount of iniquity on their own side,
although of a more reputable kind perhaps, — but
because they hate Tammany. Pulitzer backed me in
'94, not because he loved me or was interested in the
Decalogue, but because he hated Dana.
Perhaps I can best put the situation before you by
a quotation from my own experience, if you wiU
allow it. For instance; suppose I say something
today in criticism of the moral obliquity of some
Republican compatriot on the Board of Aldermen or
of the Albany Legislature. Tomorrow morning a
Democratic paper warmly effulgent comes out with
something like the following: "The Rev. Dr. Park-
hurst, with his customary keenness and vigor, says of
Mr.  so and so." Then I realize what strength

116 The Pulpit and the Pew
and encouragement there is in having so powerful a
journal as a moral ally.
In the meantime it occurs to me to allude to the
ethical irregularity of some member of the Fourteenth
Street brotherhood; and on turning, next morning,
the pages of the same sympathetic sheet my eye wiU
be greeted by some such headline as this : "More of
Parkhurst's blatherings." Same paper.
Please remember that my reference to the press has
not been for the purpose of criticising it, but only
with a view to illustrating the fact that it is to some
other source that we have to look for the securing of
ideal, social and civic conditions. That is one of the
mischiefs of political administration and party
government that it obscures the vision and debases
the moral standard of men partisanly inclined, be
they Republicans or Democrats, one as much as the
other, if not more so.
It is then by the preaching of righteousness, pure
and unadulterated, that the vices of society are to be
efiminated and the faults and weaknesses of civic
conditions corrected ; a preaching of righteousness so
distinct that it cannot be misunderstood, so concrete
that it cannot be misapplied; a preaching by men
that are so obsessed by their passion for the ideal that
civic obliquity costs them a pang, and at the same
time Hving so close to the world, to the men that are

Responsibility for Civic Conditions 117
in it and to the transactions that go on in it, that
they can address themselves to those conditions with
an intelligence that will command respect and with a
sort of prophetic passion that will create courage and
purpose in the sound-hearted and create a quaking
among the foul spirits with which in our social and
civic life we are so disastrously infected.

VI

RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCH TO THE
LIFE OF THE TOWN

We are come together this afternoon as a body of
Christians, with views differing somewhat, probably,
in matters of detail, although substantially identical,
but certainly at one with each other in this, that we
are sharers, aU of us, in one common responsibility.
It is part of our common confession that Christ is
the Saviour of the world, and yet he has seen fit so
far to put himself under limitations that the progress
of the world's redemption is quickened or retarded
according to the availabiHty of those whom he has
already brought into his kingdom. So that while
he is the one original Redeemer, how long it wiU take
to effectuate a world-wide redemption will depend
not upon him but upon his Church.
It was God that brought the children of Israel
into the Promised Land ; but in obedience to his estab
lished policy of action he was forty years late in
bringing them in, and for the reason that they were
not immediately available for his purpose. Practi
cally they held God in check. There is in the woven

Responsibility of the Church 119
web of history a human woof as well as a divine warp,
and the world is an entire generation behind what it
would have been had not the spies that were sent up
to search out the land become panic-stricken by the
stature of the Anakims.
There are several reasons why the Church does not
stand up to the level of its caUing, and one is that it
does not altogether realize its calling, and has no
defined conception of what it is in the world to do.
A feeble sense of purpose is sufficient to neutralize
even the most complete possibilities of effect. Ability
that does not clearly know what to do with itself is
no better than inability.
It is not an uncommon occurrence, indeed it is not
at all out of the usual, to find, upon receiving new
members into the Church, that they are unable to give
a rational account of the step they are taking: and
it is not infrequently the case that they will live in
it and die in it without at the end being any more able
to give a rational account than at the beginning.
Therefore, for the purpose of coming to a clear
understanding and with a view to saying something
that is fundamental, I lay it down as my basal pro
position, that the exclusive work to which the Church
is called is to be the instrument in God's hands of
stimulating in men the desire, and fostering in them
the abifity, to become what it lay in God's mind to

120 The Pulpit and the Pew
have them become when he said, "Let us make man
in our image."
Such a proposition affords to the Church a large
field of operation, but at the same time indicates the
limits within which its operations require to be con
fined. And we do less that is germane to our calling
than we should do if we were not so ready to cross
the frontier of our obHgation and to occupy our
selves in fields where our churchly license does not
authorize us to operate.
The validity of this principle and the method of
its application is exemplified by Christ's mode of
dealing with the devil-possessed Gadarene. The man
was naked. There were two things, therefore, that
he needed, inward soundness and outward habili
ments. To furnish the first lay within the scope of
Christ's ministry ; to furnish the second did not. He
therefore cast out the evil spirit and left it to the
Gadarene to meet contingent necessities in his own
way. That is the principle upon which the doctrine
of Christ proceeds, that a man wiU be able to provide
for his external needs when everything has been
supplied which the gospel is able to furnish toward
answering his internal requirements.
It is noticeable that money plays no part in the
first chapter of Christian history. Christ disclosed
the inner nature of his calling and drew a sharp line

Responsibility of the Church 121
between person and circumstance by making no use
of money. He had none to use. He thereby indicated
that the growth of his kingdom is to be secured by
what the Church does for the inward man, not by
what it does for the outward man. He was not a
banker, nor a tailor, nor a baker, and when he had
raised the dead girl to life he told her parents that
he would leave it to them to provide her with some
thing to eat. So of Peter : "Silver and gold have I
none, but what I have that give I unto thee. Stand
up." St. Paul initiated the crusade against slavery. His
method of doing it is laid down in his brief letter to
Philemon. The outward condition of enslavement
he did not touch. He maintained no direct warfare
upon the institution, neither purchasing the emanci
pation of Onesimus, nor encouraging him to run away
from his master, but the contrary. What he did do
was to play off the gospel influence of brotherly love
upon the heart of Philemon his master. That is to
say, he worked exclusively for internal effects, know
ing, which is always the case, that sound inward
condition will always, in the long run, create whole
some outward circumstances.
There is no short cut to healthful results. Physi
cians who try to cure symptoms kill their patients.
The function of the Church is to improve the breed.

122 The Pulpit and the Pew
The issues of life, the Scriptures teU us, are from
within. The man must take care of his circum
stances, but the Church must take care of the man.
It is easier to pay a man's bpard than it is to qualify
him to pay his own board; hence the reliance upon
money. There is a feehng abroad that the Church
is directly responsible for the hard conditions under
which so many people live, directly responsible, I say.
I recently received a letter from a workingman who
claimed that he received two shilhngs a day less for
his labor than was his due, and he charged up that
deficiency to the Church. You see what the Church
gets by not keeping itself snugly inside of its own
diocese, and by not distinctly announcing to the
public what the limits of that diocese are.
Peter sets us an example in that particular by
definitely declaring, "We have no money for you ; we
have something for you, and we are going to give
it to you, but it is not shekels." Now it is the dis
regard of that principle which prompts Christians to
issue their check instead of issuing their personality.
We encounter a beggar on the street. He wants
bread. Whatever his physical hunger, there is in
him a big necessity that is far deeper than any gastric
craving. He many not know it, but we know it.
Nevertheless we flip out ten cents and the incident is
closed. We have relieved his circumstance but have

Responsibility of the Church 123
not helped him. We have put a suit of clothes on
the naked Gadarene, but we have done nothing
towards casting out his devil. We have acted toward
him as any pagan might act. There is no Chris
tianity in a dime.
Personality dealing directly with personaHty is
the Christ poHcy and the apostolic policy. Christ's
method of saving the world is just as prescriptive
as a method as his doctrine is prescriptive as a
doctrine. As things are the personality of the
Church, with some exceptions, is not touching the
personality of the world. The Church raises money
and hires a minister ; raises money and pays a choir ;
raises money and hires Sunday school teachers ; raises
money and pays a missioner to preach to outside
sinners that have no churchly attachment. But the
Church in the great body of its membership, in the
totality of its life, is as far from the outside masses
as it is from Madagascar. We put the meat in the
cellar and the salt in the attic and then wonder why
the meat does not keep fresh.
Some of us are not as interested as others in trying
to save people for the life to come. While thoroughly
believing in the future life we believe it is a fine thing
to be beautifuUy, sweetly and soundly human even
though there were to be no future life. Goodness is
good, whether it last longer or shorter. There are

124 The Pulpit and the Pew
animals that last but a few days or even a few hours,
but they are pleasing to the eye of God so long as
they do last.
We have to grant that life does, of necessity, part
with some of its significance as soon as it is put under
limitations of time. Could we have known before
being born what earthly Hfe is, and that life here is
all there is to it, and were it then optional with us to
be born or not to be born, most of us would, without
very much hesitancy, have declined birth. And that
so few people, comparatively speaking, commit sui
cide, is to be taken as proof of a general underlying
suspicion that there is something more and larger
and better after these few years are finished.
But grand living is grand even without the future,
although touched by a superlative splendor by the
future; so that, as Christians, while rendering
churchly service to men and women in the prospect
of the larger Hfe to come, we may not foster the
superb possibilities that are in them with too constant
an eye to tfie hereafter, as though true living would
commence only upon our arrival yonder, but foster
those superb possibilities rather at the impulse of the
motive that fine living is fine living under all circum
stances, that living of any other kind carries in it the
disgrace of moral suicide, and that if we are fit to live
in the world we are now in, we shall certainly be fit

Responsibility of the Church 125
to five in any other sphere in which God may subse
quently put us. Just enough of future prospect
flavors present years with a quality that is indis
pensable, but too much of it creates a certain haziness
and sense of unreality that robs today of its solidity
and robustness. So that, as said a moment ago, some
of us are more interested in helping to qualify men
to live than in trying to prepare them to die, and
instead of repudiating this world and throwing at it
all the opprobrious epithets of our vocabulary and
treating it only as an admirable place to escape from,
doing our best to make this world a better world and
so sweet and attractive that we shall have no desire
to escape from it, assured, as I suppose we are, that
this world is as good a one as God knew how to make,
and that perhaps we shall not be through with it
when we have finished what we call our mortal career.
And then, also, while some of us are disposed to put
a certain amount of time limit to the churchly plans
we formulate and the churchly service we render,
we are likewise disposed to set to them a considerable
degree of geographical Hmitation. Jesus Christ
carried upon his heart the entire world and yet, while
on earth, never did anything outside of a little fringe
of territory on the east coast of the Mediterranean.
There was where he gained his touch upon the world,
and chose it as being the best specific locality through

126 The Pulpit and the Pew
which to come within reach of the world at large and
man universal.
Providence and birth fixes for each his natural
place of working. As Americans our supreme inter
est will be our country. Patriotism will mean to the
Christian Church not so much a grateful appreciation
of what our country yields to us in the way of
benefits, as it will mean a tender and prayerful desire
to see it made an integral part of the kingdom of
our Lord. So great is the geographical extent of our
country that it constitutes a pretty wide area for our
churchly affection to diffuse itself over. Diffusion is
regularly at the expense of depth, and intensity
varies inversely as the cube of the area.
While, therefore, we shall from time to time send
out and send up devout thoughts for the salvation of
the world, and more frequently labor with our
prayers for the redemption of the United States,
Providence seems to indicate to us who are gathered
here this afternoon, that we should regard our own
town as being practically, so far as we are concerned,
all the world that there is.
This is the principle adopted under Nehemiah for
the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, where each
householder, instead of concerning himself with the
reconstruction of the wall in its entirety, occupied
himself with only so much of it as lay over against

Responsibility of the Church 127
his own house. Concentrated interest produces the
largest results. I have always had an admiration for
the policy of Gardner Spring, once pastor of the
Brick Church in New York City, who was so exclu
sively devoted to his own particular field that when
he prayed, "Thy Kingdom come," everybody knew
that what his prayer really aimed at was the increase
in the spirit and membership of the Brick Church.
So far as I have experienced and observed, the
Church in each locality, be it city or village, is very
far from mastering the life of the locafity, either
socially, industrially, commercially or politically.
It seems not to lie definitely formulated in the mind
and heart of each several church that it belongs to
it to put itself consciously and deliberately to the
work of converting its own precinct, and making it
in character and conduct a part of the kingdom of
Jesus Christ.
Let us not, however, commit the easy fault of
generalization. There is no life and conduct of the
city or town apart from the life and conduct of the
individual men and women of whom the urban or rural
population is composed. People are brought into
the kingdom not in crowds or gangs, but man by man,
woman by woman. When the husbandman hoes what
he calls his field of corn, he does not hoe the field at
all, but the hills of corn, one at a time. When I say

128 The Pulpit and the Pew
then that the Church is not mastering the life of a
locality, what I mean is that the individual members
of the Church are not mastering the individual
members of that locality.
It is never to be forgotten that there is a work,
and a most important work, to be done in confirming
and building up in the faith those who are already
beHevers, redeemed believers. But only to do as much
as that is simply to hold our own and gives no promise
of the eventual complete coming of our Lord's
kingdom. Confirming and educating the faith of believers
is the prime office of the clergy; but to initiate into
Christian belief those who are not believers, to bring
men to Christ, as contrasted with building up in
Christ, is, I claim, not the function of the clergyman,
but of the layman. Some suspicion of the truth of
this position appears to have been the impulse lead
ing to the inauguration of what we know as the "Men
and Religion Forward Movement." The matter is
referred to .here because of the opportunity afforded
to impress upon ministers their obligation, in the
interests of the Christian cause, to teach their con
gregations that it is sin for a Christian layman to
do nothing toward bringing to Christ those who are
out of Christ.
Saul was the prime instrument which the Lord

Responsibility of the Church 129
used in tipping the early disciples out of the com
fortable nest of the Jerusalem church, putting them
upon their own wings and scattering them upon
divergent lines of Christian evangelization.
The Apostles, we are told in the eighth chapter of
the Acts, remained at Jerusalem. Those who were
scattered abroad were the unclerical members of the
church at Jerusalem. They were the laymen, but
even so, went everywhere preaching the gospel.
"Preaching" is too formal a word to express accu
rately the idea of the Greek original. It would be
more exact to say that they went everywhere telling
the story of the gospel. It was a work of communi
cating to others, in a simple colloquial way that which
had been communicated to them in a manner more
formal. The disciples that were scattered by persecution
through Judea, Samaria and outlying districts, did
not go about talking to the non-Christian popula
tions because the Apostles back in Jerusalem were
not discharging their duties, but because they
realized that they had themselves a duty to do and
an opportunity to avail of. They wanted to fulfil the
mission that as believers belonged to them, and were
too appreciative of the responsibility resting upon
every follower of Christ to make his cause known
and his gospel accepted, to be willing to leave all

130 The Pulpit and the Pew
the responsibiHty of it resting upon the shoulders of
a dozen Apostles. Such neglect of opportunity and
evasion of duty and privilege would not have been
fair to the Apostles, saying nothing of its indicating
a lax loyalty to the cause and to the Lord of the
cause. The place where it belonged to the Apostles
at that time to remain was Jerusalem. Perhaps the
lay Christians — impelled by the natural preference
to be ministered to rather than to minister, to
appropriate the bread of life rather than to distribute
it — would have remained there too had they not been
whipped out by the scourge of persecution. But
they were whipped out and the consequence was that
concentric waves of evangeHzation began expanding
themselves in every direction from Jerusalem out.
It would be immodest and unjust to eulogize the
faithful activity of the clergy, for while I do not
think that, take them as a whole, they are a lazy
body of men, yet it cannot be claimed that they have
stretched themselves out to the full length of their
opportunity ; but as a body we have the feehng that
we are made responsible for the growth of Christ's
kingdom on the earth to a degree that is not justified.
The pulpit certainly occupies in relation to the
evangelization of the world a position of immense
responsibiHty, but its relation to the Christians in the
pews is to a certain extent pictorially illustrated by

Responsibility of the Church 131
the relations which Christ sustained to his disciples
in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, so far only as
this, that he furnished the bread and fish to the
disciples and they did the distributing of it to the
multitude. Please to understand that the parallelism between
the two cases consists only in this, that it is true of
the preacher, as was true of Christ in the miracle,
that he cannot reach the multitude personaHy and
directly. The preacher's prime place is in his pulpit
and the members of his church answer to the disciples
whose function in the miraculous feeding of the multi
tude was to distribute what Christ put in their hands
to distribute. The bread did not stop with the
disciples. They were intermediaries for its distribu
tion. While not failing to recognize the large number
of splendid exceptions which exist and to which our
strictures are altogether inapplicable, yet in general
there has grown up between clergymen and laymen
a distinction so marked and so deeply grooved as to
be fruitful in discouraging results. If as large a
proportion of the work of orally presenting the
truths of the gospel had been left to the Apostles or
their official successors as is now being left to the
pulpit, Christianity would hardly have survived its
first century. The pulpits are not doing the work

132 The Pulpit and the Pew
and what is more they cannot, and something in the
shape of a layman's movement is not only to be
desired but demanded, and absolutely demanded, by
the conditions of the case, if Christianity is not to
lose more and more its hold upon the people, and that
it is at the present time losing somewhat of that hold
is a fact top evident to be contested.
Mention was made a moment ago of the fact that
the sorry and languid condition into which Christian
ity has fallen is due to a large extent to the sharp
line of demarkation that has grown up between the
clerical and the non-clerical classes, that is to say
between the pulpit and the pew, although it should
be remarked that the meagerness of Christian
results is hardly a thing to discourage us when we
remember the comparatively small amount of direct
personal Christian power brought to bear in pro
ducing results.
If all the laymen that count themselves Christians
were bringing their spiritual energies directly to
bear upon .the situation, — directly I say, not through
hired proxies, — and if then there were nothing more
to show in the way of increasing product, there would
be ground for disheartenment and reason for the
conviction that Christianity is an outworn institution ;
but not now. Things are moving very well consider
ing the comparatively limited number of those who

Responsibility of the Church 133
are doing the moving. People are waking up to that
situation and that is why so much is being said about
a laymen's movement.
If there is something to be done, and somebody else
wiU do it, it is human nature to let him do it. Out of
that fact has in part developed the wide separation
now existing between ministers and laymen in the
matter of personaUy seeking to extend to others an
experimental knowledge of Christ and of the meaning
and power of the Christian faith. The Scripture
injunction,. "Let him that heareth say come," is uni
versally appHcable but has been largely forgotten.
The gift of spiritual Hfe made over to us in Christ
Jesus is itself a commission to be personal instruments
for the extension of that life to others. "As my
heavenly Father hath sent me, even so send I you."
In the miraculous feeding of the multitude the
loaves and fishes put in the hands of the disciples
did not stop with the disciples. For those who listen
to the preached word and receive the bread of life at
the hands of the preacher, to confine that bread to
themselves and devote it exclusively to their own
personal consumption is the same as it would have
been for the disciples to use the loaves and fishes for
the satisfaction of their own appetites and to let the
multitude go unfed and hungry. I have preached in
my pulpit in New York City thirty-three years and

134 The Pulpit and the Pew
to the extent to which the truth which I have given to
the congregation has stopped in the hearts of its
members to that extent the thirty-three years have
been wasted, so far as bears upon the extension of
Christ's kingdom.
Where perhaps the pulpit has itself failed is in
omitting to press home upon young Christians that
truth more distinctly and constantly, so that as they
grew up into years of increasing influence and oppor
tunity the sense of evangehcal function would be an
increasing factor of experience.
This leads me on to say that to the extent that the
members of churches are sincerely Christian, and
thoroughly impregnated with the spirit of our holy
faith, they will be possessed of the idea that Chris
tianity is the world religion, and destined to prove
itself such, to which aU other religions are in point
of completeness mere approximations ; so that non-
Christians, whoever they are, and wherever they are,
constitute the area germane to Christian endeavor.
There are portions of that area where efforts that
are put forth will require to be exercised with very
special wisdom and discretion, ground upon which it
is exceedingly difficult and delicate to tread, but the
delicacy and the difficulty are no sufficient warrant
for neglect and evasion, and that such is the fact
will be recognized according to the distinctness with

Responsibility of the Church 135
which one appreciates the supreme claims made upon
the soul by evangelical Christianity, and I would go
even farther than that and say Protestant Chris
tianity, i
Underlying all such aggression should be the
emphatic realization of the beauty of hoHness wher
ever it exists, and in however attenuated and even
tainted a form, be it in Catholic, Jew, Mohammedan
or Buddhist. Religion is religion the world over and
is to be dealt with as fundamental ground upon which
with heavier or Hghter pressure all men stand. Our
Christianity we shall therefore present not as a dis
placement of positions already held, but as something
supplementary to those positions, in keeping with the
words of Christ who said, "I came not to destroy but
to fulfil." The principal churches in New York
City are moving away from certain parts of the town
on the ground that they are occupied by people of
means so Hmited that churches and church services
can only with difficulty be maintained, and occupied
by Jews and by Catholics.
As to the first class — the poor — Christ struck
out for the poor, and the ignorant, and the indecent,
knowing that the kingdom of God on earth is like a
tree, which, although rained upon and sunlit from the
sky, nevertheless grows from the ground up, not
from the sky down. The Church has been standing

136 The Pulpit and the Pew
off from the common people, and now the common
people are standing off from the Church, and social
ism is appropriating the product and is anti-prop
erty, anti-Church and anti-religion. That is what
comes from originating a policy of our own for pro
moting the enlargement of the kingdom.
As for the Jew, if he is as much a Christian as the
pure gospel can make him, and as for the Catholic
if he is as much a Christian as the pure gospel can
make him, then we ought to let them both alone. But
Jesus did not let the Jews alone, but laid in them the
foundations of his Church; and Luther did not let
the Catholics alone, and it is mightily fortunate for
us that he did not ; and he did not because he realized
more distinctly than most Christians what Christian
ity means, and how wide a difference there is between
Christianity that is pure and spiritual and Chris
tianity that is more or less carnal and formal, and
also because he had more chivalry than most Chris
tians, and was more ready than most to resist the
current instead of floating down with it. He had
grace but he had the grit that communicates to grace
its efficiency.
Propagandism must always be distinguished by
its elements of gracious enticement. There are
Mohammedans now that are being touched by
Christianity for with their belief in the One Only God

Responsibility of the Church 137
they are some of them willing to regard Christ as
being at least an authorized teacher and able to throw
some light on the character of the One Only.
All that we can accompHsh along such lines will be
by work that is distinctly constructive, not pulling
down, but building up. I have two hundred born
Catholics worshiping in the lecture room of my church
every Sunday afternoon. They were organized into
a church three or four weeks ago. I do not know
whether they would consider themselves Catholics or
Protestants. Neither word is ever used in their
service. They have the gospel given them, under
rated and undiluted and with no label but simply the
label of "Christian." And they Hke it, and are
growing under it. If Mr. Gordiano had started in
by telling them that they were a pack of ignorant
CathoHcs, and that their only hope for this life or the
life to come was to repent of their delusion and folly
and be baptized with the baptism of Martin Luther
and John Calvin, the birth and death of the enter
prise would have synchronized.
If one method of educating children is better than
another we want to avail ourselves of it and give to it
all rational pubhcity. And likewise if in our judg
ment one style of rehgion or one style of Christian
religion is better calculated to improve the breed than
another style, it is incumbent upon us to turn it to

138 The Pulpit and the Pew
account, to adopt it into our system of operation and
without any subterfuge or circumlocution, to put it
to the fore unapologized for.
Now there are two ways in which we can operate
in fulfilment of our churchly obligation, to the
improvement of what I have called the breed, to the
change of our social character, to the production of
a city, or town that in its external aspects and inter
nal quaHty shall not constitute so savage a contrast
to what is apocalypticaUy represented as the City of
God come down from heaven.
We can work restrictively and we can work recon-
structively. The Church has not made its influence
very markedly felt along either line. And that is not
because there is not Church enough. Where Church
is involved arithmetic is not an element. God told
Abraham that he could save Sodom by fifty men or
by ten men, it made no difference to him which, if
they were the right sort of men. Ecclesiastical sta
tistics are almost the most insignificant symptom of
efficiency Jhat there is a-going.
One method, then, is what I would call the restric
tive. I know something about it. I do not prize it
as highly as I once did, but I prize it. It does not
directly create righteousness, but it puts obstacles
in the path of iniquity. As applied to a local election,
it does not, to any considerable extent, make men to

Responsibility of the Church 139
be better men, but it does to some degree operate to
prevent them from becoming worse, and may operate
temporarily at least to throw the worse elements of
the town out of commission even if it does not throw
them permanently out of business. Even if successful
it is no guarantee as to what the election following
will result in and may be nothing more than an oasis
in the desert ; and that is all that it usually is.
That is the course that our town and city life
regularly runs, showing that our restrictive work, our
attempt to dislodge the worse element, has done
nothing more than scratch the surface of the situa- '
tion. It has not touched down to the vitals of our
public necessity. It has affected our conditions only
as caging or filing the teeth of a gorilla affects the
goriUa. It has not domesticated him. So long as he
is caged he will do no harm. If his teeth are filed they
will not cut so deep an incision. But the process has
contributed absolutely nothing toward humanizing
his bestiality.
We have learned the truth of all this by local
experience. There are seasons when our municipal
physiognomy in New York City wears a virtuous
flush, and we then think that we are municipally
recuperated and send out word to Philadelphia and
Chicago how well we are; the night-watch is sus
pended, the nurses discharged and the physicians

140 The Pulpit and the Pew
have their biUs paid. Faithful work has doubtless
been done and it is not altogether in vain. The
patient has been kept from dying at any rate, and
that is something, but health that is sufficiently
healthy to maintain itself without some form of
medication has not been arrived at.
There remain as many drunkards, as many
gamblers, as many murderers, as many prostitutes.
The estimated amount now being paid annually in
New York City by white servants or white slaves —
whichever you may prefer to call them — to their
male masters is a little in excess of one hundred and
fifty million dollars.
The temporary victory gained by the better ele
ment may hinder to some extent the increase of
depravity but does not correct depravity, does not
convert it into virtue, is not constructive, does not
indicate that the immense amount of Church that we
have here is functioning in a way to make the town
a part of the kingdom of God.
A fact "whose serious significance in this connection
is not appreciated is that it is not the city that is
wicked, but the individuals that inhabit it, man by
man, woman by woman. Generalizations are danger
ous; they tend to prevent that concentrated indi
vidualization of effort that alone contains in it the
promise and the power of positive result.

Responsibility of the Church 141
There is no such thing, for example, as the social
evil apart from the individual men and women that
are licentious. To deal with that matter by a system
of generalization, to compose essays about it, to
constitute boards of commissioners to devise schemes
for getting the mastery of it, as though it were
some vast entity that could be handled in the lump,
is to confuse the mind, and to conceal from it the
fact that the matter reduces to the perfectly simple
question that Mr. Smith is a libertine and Mrs. or
Miss Jones is a prostitute and that they both need
to be converted.
There is no problem about it. It is not necessary
to send anybody to Europe to investigate foreign
conditions. The simple fact is and the plain English
of it is, that man has beastly impulses and is very
likely to yield to them, and that a great many do
yield to them. That is the beginning and the end of
it and aU that there is between.
Now this policy of individuaHzed work indicates
the proper and peculiar function of the Church. I
know very well what the other kind means and that
for permanency and depth of result it is utterly
inadequate. I have tried it and I know its worth and
its worthlessness. The business of the Church is to
bring people into the kingdom of heaven, one by one ;

142 The Pulpit and the Pew
the unit method is the only method. That was
Christ's poHcy, and Christ's poHcy is prescriptive.
He picked twelve men, picked them one by one.
The crowd ran after him, but he did not run after the
crowd, but avoided it rather, and when he could not
otherwise escape it, took a boat and shoved out to
sea, or fed it and sent it home.
It is easier and pleasanter in our efforts for the
world's improvement to generaHze than it is to par
ticularize. It is a symptom of human conceit to
prefer working in large ways to working in ways
more limited. There is more in it that is dramatic.
It is human nature to want to make a spectacle of
one's self. The qualitative is not in as high repute
as the quantitative. We put upon our own work and
the work of others an arithmetic estimate.
Christ did not attempt to convert the world, nor
even Palestine, nor even Galilee or Judea, but only
twelve men, each one a man by himself.
If when Christ had started in to gather together
his little group of disciples he had pubHshed an
advertisement that he wanted to have collected a
congregation of all the fishermen doing business
along the shores of the sea of GaHlee in order that
he might have an opportunity to persuade them to
give up their business and engage in another line of
pursuit, they, in the first place, would not have

Responsibility of the Church 143
responded to the advertisement, and, in the second
place, of those who might have come, out of curiosity
probably, none, or few if any, would have forsaken
their boats and fishing-tackle and have thrown in
their lot with the new adventurer.
There needs the personal touch, and that is largely
sacrificed in a crowd. The Samaritan woman, stand
ing alone with Jesus at Jacob's well, was easily drawn
away from her previous Hfe and became herself
presently an effective gospel teacher; but this would
scarcely have occurred had he talked to her as one
of a congregation, instead of talking with her in a
manner of gentle, famiHar intercourse.
There is in this matter of individualizing effort for
Christ that which gives both to preacher and people
something serious to think upon. We are somewhat
off from the track upon which Christ did his effective
work and are upon a track of our own choosing which
seems to be condemned by the feebleness of the accru
ing results.
This does not obviate the necessity for places of
public worship. Christ himself honored the temple
and preached in a synagogue; but the work of his
that was fundamental, that laid the basis upon which
all subsequent work has been placed, was done while
he was in the intimate attitude of face to face relation
with such ones as he sought to draw under his

144 The Pulpit and the Pew
authority and power and imbue with his spirit.
Whether human or divine, it is personality after all
that tells, and personality too in its direct and close
and individualized pressure upon the one soul that
it seeks to influence.

VII
DEALING WITH THE FUNDAMENTALS
It would have been greatly to the advantage of the
reHgious world if it had clung more closely and
more constantly to the great fundamental truths of
our holy faith. It would have nurtured more effec
tively our intellectual powers, for great befieving
makes great knowing. It would have created deeper
soil in which the derivative truths of the gospel would
have found for themselves more secure rooting; and
in that way would have operated to hold beHevers
together in a more binding fellowship in the face of
the divisive influence exerted by the less basic doc
trines of Christianity.
It is on that account that we who preach would
be rendering to our congregations a special and
essential service if we would hold before them, at a
somewhat different angle than is usual, the lessons
comprised in what we sometimes designate as the
back part of the Bible.
There is a certain majesty of tone and represen
tation characterizing the Old Testament Scripture,
which in less degree distinguishes the New. Each of
the two has its own distinctive service to render. We

146 The Pulpit and the Pew
are sensible of moving in a different region of
thought and sentiment on moving over from the
territory of the earlier part of the Bible to the
newer part. One makes a mistake in forgetting that,
in divine truth as in geography, it takes two conti
nents to complete the world. Or, to vary the illus
tration, the older and more colossal verities of the
Hebrew Bible concur with the supplementary gospel
in something the same way as that in which the
heavier foundations of an edifice combine with the
superstructure to the production of the completed
building, whose perfection is composed not of beauty
alone but of beauty and stability.
Consistently with the contents of the Old Bible,
and with the requirements of a safe theology and of
a robust Christian character and life, I have found
myself more and more constrained, by the condition of
current thought, to lay a steadily increasing empha
sis upon two features of God's character that find
themselves set forth with special insistence in the
Hebrew Bible; the first of these is his immutability.
"The word of our God shall stand forever." The
word "stand" is a great word, full of Saxon ring.
St. Paul uses it effectively in his charge to the
Ephesian Christians: "Wherefore take unto you the
whole armour of God, that ye may be able to with
stand in the evil day, and having done all things to

Dealing with the Fundamentals 147
stand. Stand therefore." Everything with which
we are familiar is in a state of flux, the victim of
change. The air is full of currents and so are the
rivers and the seas. Night alternates with day. The
seasons replace each other. The heavens are an airy
mass of instability. Our bodies are pursuing an
uninterrupted career of decay and recovery, death
and resurrection, in infinitesimal installments. Even
considered in our interior condition of mind and senti
ment, were we to meet ourselves as we were thirty or
forty years ago, we should scarcely know ourselves.
Mutation is the law of the universe. "The grass
withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God
shall stand forever." "With whom is no variableness,
neither shadow of turning."
So considered, the divine character makes no
appeal to sentiment. The rock upon which we con
struct may guarantee the security of the building we
erect upon it, yet so far forth is destitute of aU
affectional quality. Neither massiveness or flintiness
is in itself lovable. The eternal unchangeableness of
God is, when viewed in itself, unseasoned by any
gospel flavor. It may utilize itself in the service of
the gospel, but is not itself gospel. The substructure
of the house you live in may utifize itself in the service
of the apartments you occupy, but is not itself
habitable.

148 The Pulpit and the Pew
In our reading of the Bible, particularly of the
Old Testament and stiU more particularly of the
Psalms, we have observed with how great frequency
the steadfastness of God is emphasized and how often
it is represented under the figure of a rock. Eternal
solidity was the aspect under which God disclosed
himself to the Hebrew mind. Familiar examples, all
of them taken from the Psalms, are the foUowing:
"Unto thee will I cry, O Lord, my rock" ; "Thou art
my rock and my fortress" ; "Lead me unto the rock
that is higher than I" ; "God only is my rock" ; "God
is the rock of my heart and my portion forever."
It is written in the prophecy of Isaiah, "In the Lord
Jehovah is the rock of ages."
There is a quiet sublimity about such portraiture
that was a feature of Hebrew faith and consequently
a feature of Hebrew Hfe. If our character determines
for us to some extent our conception of God, our
conception of God also determines for us our char
acter. We shall not be altogether unlike the thing
that we realize God to be, — not simply what we
picture him or imagine him to be, but what we feel
him as he is, is the final secret of the human soul's
true godliness. It is therefore that we study him as
we are doing this afternoon, not that we may carry
away an intellectual portrait of him to be hung before
our thoughts for occasional inspection, but that by

Dealing with the Fundamentals 149
holding ourselves close to him in this character which
is comprised in him we may have the like character
fostered in ourselves, in accordance with that law of
aU culture whereby we grow into the likeness of that
which we behold.
And so I say that that experience which the great
religious statesmen of Hebrew times had of a certain
rigidity inherent in the Divine Being reproduced that
quality in themselves and made them the towers of
strength which the history of those days demon
strated them to have been.
Undoubtedly to use the word "rigidity" as expres
sive of any feature of God's character is Hable to
produce a degree of surprise if not of resentment.
That HabiHty is in part the reason why I have used
it, for such an effect it ought not to produce. And
I would go still farther and say that the liability to
be so affected by the use of the term as an expression
of one aspect of God's being is one of the prevalent
and serious defects in the thoughts which men have
of God at the present time, a defect therefore which
naturally reproduces itself in the present-day char
acter and actions of men, for, as remarked a moment
ago, men will very largely be what they sincerely
realize God to be. And that that feature of rigidity
is one which asserts itself less emphatically now than
in the times of old Hebrew nobility is made evident

150 The Pulpit and the Pew
by everything like an appreciative reading of the
Hebrew Scriptures; and that it asserts itself less
emphatically now than fifty years ago is easily
enough recognized by those who have followed the
drift of religious tendency during the past half
century. Rigidity, however, is not obstinacy. Obstinacy
is pride of will ; it is the desire to have one's way for
the sake of having it. It is a mean quality and is the
product of human littleness and would be the product
of divine littleness if the divine could be Httle. Great
things can be explained by small ; it is that feature in
a human parent, rigidity is, by which he is held fixed
and unrelenting in the grasp of those principles of
character and administration in which he has become
established and which he cherishes as criterion of
conduct and as rule of government. It is not antago
nistic to affection, but it lies back of affection ; may
be exceedingly serviceable to affection, as the rocky
hills give support to the drapery of verdure with
which their slopes are clad ; but the rockiness is not
itself verdure, nor fragrance, nor blossom.
And those are the best and the greatest fathers.
There may not be in them much or even any of that
affectionate pliancy that we are more likely to find
on the maternal side and to which the child is apt to
resort in its efforts to secure for itself those things

Dealing with the Fundamentals 151
which paternal fixity of principle may disallow. And
there may be sometimes in such fathers a certain lack
of graciousness that leaves the rigidity bare and too
much in evidence to render to the children its best
effects, for, valuable as foundation stone is, it serves
its purpose best when built over with superstructure ;
and, massive and stalwart as are the hills of granite,
they make their sweetest contributions to the land
scape when they are so mantled with a vesture of
Hving green that we are able to feel the massiveness
of them without being made too conscious of the
unsentimental geology out of which that massiveness
is composed. And yet, when we have said all of that, there has
been no abandonment of the position here contended
for. The human father, loyal to the principles of
character and of administrative rectitude in which
he stands intrenched, if he be a true father, will not
yield to the child's attempt to wrench him from the
grip of those principles, cannot yield without a
breach of fatherhood. The child must bend to the
father and not the father to the child, and, if the
child could but know enough to reafize all that that
means, it would be the child's supreme joy that to it
and not to the father belongs the privilege of pfiancy.
That, then, is the first fact that comes to the front
in all fatherhood, human and divine, and therefore

152 The Pulpit and the Pew
it is to the setting forth of that fact that the intro
ductory portions of Scripture revelation are devoted.
The old Hebrew Bible is a great book, and those who
never respire its atmosphere nor aUow their thoughts
to move through the superb and massive scenery of
its deHneations of the Divine Being, deprive them
selves of a religious tonic as essential to strong and
elevated living today as it was before the times of
the Advent, when the coming of the Lord at Bethle
hem lay in the thought of the world only as a great
prophetic dream.
Christ never declined the Old Testament. We must
never forget that that was the only Bible there was
when he Hved and preached. That he overspread
with a vesture of warm light, or with a mantle of
alluring verdure, the stern heights of old unyielding
truth no man who knows the gospel will be able to
deny; but neither the warm light nor the alluring
verdure has rubbed out the rocky heights, or made
soft and plastic their original density. That is a
God that is worth worshiping. That is a Father that
the world may well be proud of : a God for the world
to grow up toward, instead of a divine apology mini
mizing itself and accommodating itself to the world's
pettiness. I do not understand how any one, however loose
in his thinking or careless and invertebrate in his

Dealing with the Fundamentals 153
Hving, can give his thought to considerations of the
kind just presented without experiencing a sort of
inward bracing-up, stiffening-up, if you please, as
though an infusion of iron had somehow been con
veyed into the interior of his moral constitution. To
men and women of the species that rather widely
abounds, whose lives are rubber and their conception
of divine things composed principally of unproduc
tive elasticity, the contemplation of God as one who
in the deep recesses of his being possesses more than
the massive rockiness of the great hills and the high
mountains, must come with the power of vast sur
prise, not unmingled with pain, even at the very
moment that it throws the soul back upon itself in
thoughtfulness and seriousness.
And the first thought of such a soul, if it is an
honest and searching thought, will be: If God is
not going to bend to me, then I shall have to bend to
him or there can be no abiding peace between him and
me, either present or eternal. That is what the child
comes to before it is through with its struggle with
the human father of the kind that I have been depict
ing. There are fathers that give up to the chil
dren, — unfortunate fathers, more unfortunate chil
dren, — fathers that relax the straight fine of
rectitude, that suspend the righteousness and the
proper authoritativeness of fatherhood at the demand

154 The Pulpit and the Pew
of the young anarchists and nihilists that breed at
the hearthstone.
But the other Father that we have to deal with is of
different fiber. We and the mountains can meet
together, but we have to go where the mountains are.
We and God can meet together, but we have to go
where God is. There is an old view of salvation, that I
have seen dramatically acted out on the revivahstic
stage, to the effect that Christ's office is to stand as a
shield whereby man may be protected from the anger
of God, and stand as a persuasive whereby God may
be constrained to alter his attitude toward sinful
man and to condone what his righteousness would
have condemned had that righteousness not been
plead with and reasoned with. But the word of
Scripture is that "God was in Christ reconciling the
world unto himself," not reconciling himself unto the
world. God's moral inflexibility forbids his lowering
himself to the level of sin, but there is no surrender
of that inflexibility, but rather its assertion, in using
means whereby the sinner may be lifted to the level
of God's righteousness.
It is the same principle that operates in human
fatherhood of the best type. The disobedience of the
child creates a distance between it and its father.
That distance is not going to be traversed by the
father. If father and child get together again it will

Dealing with the Fundamentals 155
be because the child has come to the father, not the
father to the child. In the story of the Prodigal the
wayward boy had to return from the far country to
his home ; the father did not move the home out into
the far country. That feature of the story wherein
the father is represented as watching for his boy's
return and seeing him while he was stiU afar off,
demonstrates graphically the meUowness and the
yearning intensity of the parental affection; never
theless he did not go to the boy ; the boy had to come
to him. There is inflexibility. There is rock. But
there is no inconsistency between the granite ledge
and the flowers that bloom just above it. The
flowers help to disguise the rock and the rock helps
to hold the flowers in steadiness and strength.
And that is the note upon which I desire that our
meditation upon this first attribute of God should
close — the rock helps to hold the flowers in steadiness
and strength. Just as the solidity of the foundation
of an edifice communicates itself to every part of the
superstructure imposed upon it, so the rigidity, the
unchangeableness that we may think of as the basal
element in the divine character, enters to secure fixity
and strong durabiHty in every one of the divine
qualities to which it gives support.
The element of which we are speaking enters into
God's justice to render it adamantine. We know that

156 The Pulpit and the Pew
we can depend upon his doing right by us, deafing
with us forever and ever upon principles of absolute
righteousness. The full strength and determination
of his infinite personality are in it. He can never do
any wrong, neither can he ever regard sin with any
degree of allowance. We might sometimes wish that
he could and would, and, because some have encour
aged themselves in imagining that he can and does,
they have ceased to cherish for him the respect due
to no one, either human or divine, who makes a con
venience of his principles. To reaHze his unswerving
holiness in character, act and deahng may not draw
out our hearts toward him affectionately, but it
challenges our respect, it holds our regard toward
him reverently ; if we have not learned to appreciate
what Scripture calls the beauty of holiness, it
impresses us by its solemn purity, and it sounds a
note into harmonious accord with which we somehow
feel that the music of the world will eventually be
sung. The element of which we are speaking enters, of
course, into the structure and pursuance of all of
God's purposes. With God planning means ultimate
execution, for the entire massive rigidity of his per
sonality is in what he sets himself toward. We believe
that, and our Hfe of service, service to our fellows and
to our times, would be a far quieter, steadier, sweeter

Dealing with the Fundamentals 157
service if only we realized it as well as believed it. It
would correct our impulsiveness and hysteria; it
would withdraw the chill from our anxieties and
reconstruct our pessimism into cheerful and confident
expectancy. We should drive our steeds with the
glad assurance of the Httle child through whose
hands the reins are passed but held in the grip of the
charioteer who sits behind.
And then, best of aU, or at any rate most com
forting of all, this same element of God's unchange-
ableness, immense unchangeableness, enters into his
love, making it massive and eternal.
There is a great difference in love. There is love
that is irresolute; love that is passionate and burns
itself out ; love that is a misnomer for physical selfish
ness; love that puts a complexion upon Hfe without
entering deeply enough to weave itself into the tissues
of life.
It is a great thing to be loved when the lover has
invested himself in his love, even though it be but a
human love. But when that lover is a divine lover,
whose love is the giving himself in all his fullness and
with that unvarying persistency of affection that
means love clear out to the end, — a love that does not
forget, that is never chilled, never becomes weary
while the days pass and the centuries go by, then we
can thank God that he is the Rock of Ages in whose

158 The Pulpit and the Pew
cleft we can abide, amid the vicissitudes of the pres
ent, and in the face of the vast unknown into the
midst of which we are being hurried by the flight of
the years.
The second feature of the divine character to be
noted for the basal simplicity of its Old Testament
representation is that of God's unity as opposed to
any theory of tri-personality. This is a matter of
concern to us, not from any mere academic or theo-
logic interest in the questions involved, but because of
its practical relation to us as preachers and to those
that we preach to.
The custom has extensively prevailed, and in some
quarters been industriously fostered, of making the
acceptance of verbal statements of truth essential to
entrance into the kingdom of our Lord. This has
been a stumbling-block to many, and especially to
those who have been inteUectually disciplined, and
whose natural tendency it therefore is to try to reduce
the problems of the heavenly kingdom to their philo
sophic solution rather than to come in under the
power of that kingdom and to become participant in
its benefits and perquisites.
We are not questioning the honesty of the impulse
prompting them to submit such problems to intel
lectual test, but we should all of us be reminded of
this, that if the ability to construe and to translate

Dealing with the Fundamentals 159
into the terms of human thought the doctrines of
Christianity was essential to membership in Christ's
kingdom, the system never would have been sub
mitted by him to the acceptance of people in general,
regardless of their condition of culture or of the lack
of it, and especially would he never have indicated
that to none are the doors of entrance into the king
dom so widely open as to the children. In such
matters we are to accept the evident intention of
Christ rather than the insistence of the professional
theologian. The harmful feature of the situation lies in this,
that these statements, whether occurring outside of
Scripture or inside of it, are treated as being in such
way an inherent element of Christianity, that they
require to be accepted; and not only that, but their
significance understood before one's citizenship in the
kingdom can be established. So that with the class
of people that we are just now considering, years and
years of suspended judgment go by, with the door
of the kingdom perfectly open, and yet not entered
because of the difficulty of bringing about an adjust
ment between human intelligence and the truths
purporting to be offered to that intelligence.
Now assuming that these people are absolutely
honest, we cannot ask them to accept any truth
which they can accept only under mental protest.

160 The Pulpit and the Pew
We only confuse confusion by accepting in a formal
way that which, with intellectual integrity, we decline.
Enforced belief is no belief, and to cherish an enforced
belief is to foster mental and moral disintegration.
It is an attempt to project ourselves in two directions
at the same time, and cleavage is certain to eventu
ate. It is just as necessary to be true to ourselves
as to be true to the truth, and the former of the two
conditions the latter.
A truth, no matter how true it be, is of value to us
only to the degree in which it is adjustable to our
mentality. It is Hke food which becomes to us a bit
of nutriment only to the extent that it is digestible.
That is not saying that it is not inherently nutritious,
but that it is nutritious only up to the measure of the
energy possessed by the digestive organs.
I look at a page of Chinese. One look is enough.
But I do not curse it. I do not stamp upon it. I do
not even deny it. I simply lay it one side. There
may be mind in that page. There may be truth in
that page*although it doesn't look so. The page and
myself do not get together. It and I clearly think
our thoughts in different linguistic key. We cannot
conclude that the page is foolish. The presumption
is rather that there is meaning in it. But I turn it
down, not because I am foolish, and not because I am
wicked. I may be a good scholar ; I may be fairly

Dealing with the Fundamentals 161
respectable in character ; I hope so ; but I don't know
Chinese. I simply am not up to it. Perhaps some
time I shall grow to it.
Now there is a great deal of Chinese in the Bible.
And if there is anything divine about the book, there
ought to be. Some time since I undertook to read a
book that was learnedly occupied with discussing the
constitution of matter. The volume opened in an
easy way such that my thought, although not scien
tifically trained in such matters, could without much
difficulty keep up with the author's presentation.
But he soared to heights to which my unfledged wings
declined to carry me, and the last three quarters of
the volume had to remain unread. That much of it
meant nothing to me. To say that I accepted the
contents of the entire volume would signify nothing
except that I presumed that the author knew what he
was writing about. To say that I denied the truth
of the last two hundred pages would have been a con
fession of my stupidity, for it would have been to
claim that my mind was the measure of aU truth and
that whatever did not adjust itself to my intelHgence
thereby condemned itself as false.
A prominent educator from Eastern New England,
who frequently exploits his rejection of certain doc
trines set forth in the New Testament, has recently
repeated himself and publicly denounced Justification

162 The Pulpit and the Pew
by Faith, Atonement and the Trinity. Now all that
that really denotes is that those doctrines do not
adjust themselves to his intelligence. They may be
true, they may be false. But all that can be signi
fied by his denial of them is that they refuse to gear
into his mental machinery. That may be the fault
of the doctrines; or it might be the fault of his
machinery. The consciousness which he is known to
have of the excellence of that machinery naturally
leads him to attribute the fault to the doctrines.
If he had stopped with saying that the doctrines
really meant nothing to him, as you would say upon
looking at a page of Chinese, or in listening to an
Indian address given in the language of the (Choc-
taws, we would acquit him of presumption. But flatly
and uncompromisingly to deny a positive proposition
that has any degree of respectable authority back of
it, is intellectual arrogance, for it is to lay claim to
the possession of a mind that is itself the measure of
truth; and there is only one Mind of whom that is
predicable. It is neither prudent nor becoming to
pronounce one's self in detailed terms of finaHty in
regard to matters either scientific, ethical or
reHgious. Some room should always be left for expansion
possible to be secured by later research or experience.
The Church has been an offender at this point in its

Dealing with the Fundamentals 163
relation to certain scientific theories, and in its
dogmatic denial of their truth. If, when the leaders
of the new astronomy announced the doctrine of the
earth's revolution around the sun, the Church had
been contented simply not to accept the theory
instead of blankly denying it and castigating poor
Galileo for suggesting it, the Church would have
saved its credit and would have, in a way, promoted
scientific investigation instead of doing what it has
rather uniformly done, discouraged such investiga
tion. It has been too much given to "knowing what
isn't so," and denying what is so.
And it is the same kind of offense, only committed
against reHgious doctrines instead of against scien
tific ones, that is practiced by men Hke the educator
just mentioned, when they denounce a doctrine of
religion, not simply leave it one side, but denounce
it. One such doctrine is that which appears in evan
gelical phraseology under the title of the Trinity.
This is accounted a troublesome doctrine. If by
that is meant that it does not explain itself to human
thought, I do not understand why it should be
considered troublesome.
For even the world of common, everyday things
that we five in the midst of, is at least nine tenths of
it a mystery. For a thing not to be mysterious
means mostly that we have become so accustomed to

164 The Pulpit and the Pew
it that we have forgotten that we do not understand
it. Nobody is troubled about gravity, about the
phenomena of electricity, about how it is that what
we receive as bread becomes transmuted into flesh.
Even science does not at all explain such things.
All that it does is to tell us what exists, to state to
us the facts. This would be a very wearisome world
if we fretted ourselves about mundane mysteries in
the way that some disquiet themselves over celestial
ones. It is certainly a very pleasant thing to be able to
resolve a mystery into an idea that is thoroughly
intelligible. Even if nothing more it is gratifying
to our inteUectual pride. We always feel better
about ourselves when we have done a difficult thing.
We acquire an added self-respect. But one of the
charms of the world's arrangements is this, that we
do not need ordinarily to understand things in order
to get the benefit of them. Light is just as illumi
nating whether we have or have not given attention
to the scien.ce of optics. Flowers are exactly as
fragrant whether we are or are not botanists. It
may not have occurred to you that that is one of the
world's interesting and benevolent features.
It looks as though it were the Creator's thought
that we were not going to have mind enough or time
to secure mind enough to understand things and that

Dealing with the Fundamentals 165
therefore he would shape them in a way to give us
the comfort and the blessing of them even without
the understanding of them.
Theologians spend considerable time seeking to
penetrate the mysteries of spiritual reafities, the
nature of the Divine Being among other matters.
Whether they know more about him than the rest of
us, so far as pure inteUectual discernment is con
cerned, is an open question. But it does not appear
that they are made any better Christians by the
fruits of their intellectual research. So that in
religion, just as in botany and in optics and acoustics,
matters are divinely shaped and engineered so as to
yield us the blessing without a previous compre
hension on our part of the mystery of the shaping
and the engineering.
My earthly father, for example, was a kind of
trinity of body, mind and spirit, but I never dissected
him either with a scalpel or by my psychology; yet
I did not on that account receive from him any less
paternal benefit and blessing ; rather more probably.
The astronomers have latterly learned something as
to the materials of which the sun is composed, but it
does not result from that, that it fills our eyes with
any more light than it did before, or that it warms
the earth into any more abundant productiveness.
That anything which purports to be a divine revela-

166 The Pulpit and the Pew
tion should contain intimations that put into a
condition of query minds that have a natural passion
for solving conundrums, whether human or divine
ones, is entirely exphcable.
One such suggestion is that of the existence in God
of some sort of threefoldness. But it does not go
beyond the point of suggestion, and the very variety
of form under which it is made is sufficient indication
that it is not important that we should have framed
to our minds any definite conception of it. And
nobody has any such definite conception, or if there
be such an one who imagines that he has figured out
the arithmetic of Deity, his very presumption convicts
him of folly.
There is one thing, however, that at that point
should not go without the saying, that whatever may
be the solution of the problem of what we caU the
Trinity that solution cannot be expressed by saying,
as the old catechism does, that there are three persons
in the Trinity. That is polytheism ; that sets before
us three gods and is false to the genius of the Chris
tian, as it is to the Jewish religion. That there is one
only Being that can be caUed God is the fundamental
doctrine of our holy faith. It is a doctrine to stand
by, to be preached without any quiver or reservation
in the sanctuary and woven into aU the reHgious
instruction given to the children. I had a triune

Dealing with the Fundamentals 167
earthly father, but I had not three fathers. And it
was of infinitely greater concern to me to realize the
oneness of that father than it was to understand how
the three elements that were in him could combine in
one father. If my consciousness of him had engaged
itself with the arithmetic of his nature instead of
with the disclosures of himself that came to me out of
the diverse and abounding fullness of that nature,
then I should practicaUy have been fatherless at the
very moment that I was strenuously striving to com
prehend the mystery of his manifoldness.
Studying the problems of Christianity is not itself
Christianity, and does not prepare one to be a Chris
tian, any more than studying optics helps a blind
man to see. That is not to deny the interest that
attaches to these problems nor the intellectual
strength that comes from mentally grappHng with
them. But bright minds are making the mistake of
their lives in trying to enter the kingdom of heaven
over a roadway of clarified and settled doctrinal
opinions in regard to questions which, from the very
nature of the case, intelligences of the most gigantic
type can hardly touch. Remembering our humanness
it is sacrilege to attempt probing the mysteries of
the divine nature.
It sometimes seems as though the apparently con
tradictory ways in which some of the deep sugges-

168 The Pulpit and the Pew
tions in Scripture are put are for the purpose of
warning us away from the intricacies of the divine
mind and constitution, as though to tell us that our
only concern is with so much of heavenly hght as faUs
easily and naturally into our eye and so much of
heavenly warmth as wins unconstrained access to our
heart, but that the foundations of it aU and its
unspeakable mechanism he back undisclosed and
unrevealed in God's own eternal consciousness.
And not only does the general tenor of Scripture
carry that idea with it, but in instances we are
definitely instructed that to construe or even to
attempt to construe the great realities of God into
terms of human thought and map out inteUectuaUy
the varied regions of the Divine Being, is false to the
purpose of revelation and utterly without the bounds
of human faculty.
A marked instance of this is stated in Christ's own
words as recorded in the eleventh chapter of Matthew,
where he says, "No man knoweth the Son but the
Father." JSTow if we take that for what it says,
there is an end, or ought to be, of aU fine argumenta
tion, or imagination, or guesswork, about all such
matters as the interrelation of what, rather pre
sumptuously, perhaps, are caUed the members of the
Trinity. But as observed already, that does not prevent

Dealing with the Fundamentals 169
my getting the benefit of it aU. Personally I know
nothing, absolutely nothing, about the sun in the
sky, but when the sun rises I get the baptism of it,
just as well as though I had some of it here and could
take it into the chemical laboratory and analyze it.
And no one knows better than those whose thoughts
are tied up into a hard knot, puzzHng over the doc
trine of the Trinity, that Christ's coming into the
world was a kind of sun-rising in which, without at
all giving to the inteUigence of men an explanation
either of himself or of Divine things generally, the
Divine Life has come nearer to us, or we have come
nearer to the Divine Life, and an impression left upon
the soul which was not there before, as the risen sun
creates darkness into light and warms the chill that
has pervaded the night.
And the closer one keeps to Christ the brighter and
warmer the light that he stands in and the fuUer his
sense of all those qualities that he believes to inhere
in the character of God. Which is a way of saying
that when I am in that posture God touches me.
And when I say God touches me, I do not mean any
delegated God but the original God, the only God
there is. That is what I want, and all that I want
or need. And in Christ or through Christ — use
whichever preposition you prefer — I secure it. How
it is that the one only true God made himself present

170 The Pulpit and the Pew
in Christ I do not know and it does not concern me
to know. But whether in my devotions I address
myself to him or to the Father, I am praying to
absolutely the same person, the one only true God;
I am not a polytheist.
That is a point to be guarded. There is a Chris
tian polytheism that is dangerous. There are men
who, in their anxiety not to be unitarians, attempt to
worship three Gods, and are drawn away from the
one only original by allowing themselves to become
ensnarled in the web of a divine triphcity. I may be
permitted to say that that was the experience of the
late John Bigelow, as confessed in his posthumous
volume, a religious compHcation, an apostasy to
paganism, from which he was not recovered till far
into his adult years. Orthodox unitarianism, with all
its insufficiency, is better than trinitarian polytheism.
No one shall surpass us in our loyalty to Jesus
Christ, but it is only to the one only true God who
asserts himself in Jesus Christ that our loyalty is due.
There is no room in Church or pulpit for anything
less than honest evangelicism, but it must be an evan-
gehcism that rests solidly on the basis of the one
God, eternally one and immutable, without any mist
thrown athwart the Divine Face by theological
refinements or any confusion wrought in the human
mind by philosophical discriminations.

VIII
THE SANCTUARY AND SANCTUARY
SERVICE
It is the sanctuary that constitutes the focal point
in the religious life of the community. Historically
we know it Xo be so. Experimentally we feel it to be
so. If we "have been planted in the house of God,"
we appreciate the significance of congregated
worship. We have learned to know its reflex benefits,
and to understand the philosophy of the Scriptural
injunction "not to forsake the assembHng of our
selves together."
All of this notwithstanding the fact that there is
a certain element of formafity in the appointment of
stated places of convocation and in the erection and
dedication of particular edifices specificaUy desig
nated to the purpose, and notwithstanding the fact
that it is one of the features of the Holy City come
down from God that there is no temple to be found
therein. But the gait at which we move in our reH
gious life is not yet so spiritualized that we can afford
to dispense with more or less of unspiritual crutch,
and a stated place to worship, as weU as a stated day
upon which to worship, will continue for some time

172 The Pulpit and the Pew
stiU to be essential appurtenances of our Christian
life. Placing the emphasis, then, that we do upon the
sanctuary, it is not possible that our attention should
not at least be arrested by the claim that its influence
is a diminishing one, and that while formerly those
who were non-attendant at its services were the
exception, now those who are attendant are the
exception. That is the claim. It is not our purpose
to argue for the claim or against it. ReHgion and
arithmetic have very little to do with each other. The
reduction of piety to the terms of the addition or
multiplication table is not a fascinating proposition.
Ecclesiastical statistics are the most indigestible of
aU reHgious pabulum. Figures will not He, but liars
figure. But more important than the question of
increase or of decrease is the fact that there are a
great many who are not church attendants. That
fact is unquestionable and it is regrettable, although
it should never be forgotten by those of us who love
just such a sanctuary as that in which we are accus
tomed to gather, that the true and original taber
nacle is after all the individual heart, and we can
never tell how many there are who sincerely worship
God in that hidden sanctuary who never meet with us
in the temple made with hands.
Still, religion is not exclusively an individual

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 173
matter. It is also a social matter. It is an influence
which, in bringing us nearer to God, in the same pro
portion brings us nearer to each other. It should also
be mentioned that numbers accentuate the power of
the spoken word. The hearts of listeners, Hke so
many reverberatory surfaces, enlarge the volume of
the word's influence. There is a deepening of impres
sion that accrues from mutuality. The Apostle in
writing to the Christians at Rome says, "I want to
be comforted by the mutual faith both of you and
me"; which is to say that a sense of one another's
faith really conduces to an increase of each one's
faith. It is a case where the larger the divisor the
larger the quotient — not smaller.
So that tiU the circumstances of Hfe change and
till human nature changes, something which is at
least akin to the existing form of sanctuary and
preaching service will be almost a necessity of the
religious experience of the individual and of the
extension of Christ's power in the world. So that if
it is the case that in the minds of people a diminishing
emphasis is being laid upon sanctuary service, there
is that in the situation which should render us, not
apprehensive, but disposed to search out the grounds
of so lamentable a tendency.
It need not be said that this situation has been
made matter of frequent study and explained in a

174 The Pulpit and the Pew
variety of ways which, however, in general, do not
seem to me to reach altogether to the fundamental
point of difficulty.
The claim is Hberally alleged that the pressure
which is laid upon all classes and conditions of people
by the urgency of the times excuses one from certain
obligations that obtained when the six days were less
fiUed than now with the cares and burdens of secular
Hfe. That is so usual a way of stating the situation
that it need not be enlarged upon, except to say that,
if the sanctuary and its services be to any degree
efficient in stilling the distractions of the mind, and
in equipping the soul for the warfare of life and in
fortifying it against life's constant temptations, the
severer the strain to which secular life subjects us,
the more essential becomes the ministration which the
sanctuary has to offer.
Somewhat more pertinent and striking more closely
to the heart of the situation, is the reason offered for
non-attendance at church by those who, upon com
paring pulpit deliverance with such presentations of
truth as are to be found in books, papers and maga
zines, find that the comparison favors the latter
rather than the former, and that literature answers
our needs quite as well as preaching, while involving
less of expense and inconvenience.
So far as relates to the question of Hterary value,

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 175
both as regards the matter and form of what is
printed, the pulpit has very much more to compete
with than it had even fifty years ago. The pew was
formerly quite dependent upon the pulpit for the
material of its thinking. The parson did the think
ing for the parish. Only the small minority of parish
ioners had opinions of their own. Pastorates not
infrequently extended to fifty years, and at their
close all those who had sat under the preacher's
instruction had become his larger or smaUer dupfi-
cates in point of doctrine and practice.
Literature is now as abundant as it was then rare,
and as attractive as it was then forbidding. Every
one, almost, thinks his own thoughts. Even the
children frame a philosophy of their own and begin
to cherish their little theological heresies before they
have entered their teens. How many there are who
have been so trained in the art of thinking as to be
able to think well and to the purpose, is a question by
itself ; for one cannot think with effect without having
been disciplined to it, any more than one can sing well
or paint well without having been trained to it.
Nevertheless, minds all about us are at work, either
systematically or fantastically, and reading, which
might be caUed thinking with a crutch, — leaning
upon some one's else mind, — is the common habit of
all classes, ages, sexes and conditions.

176 The Pulpit and the Pew
That, then, is the situation which the pulpit has
at present to face as compared with what it was a
half century ago ; and although we have what we like
to call an educated and a cultivated ministry, yet
there are few, if any, congregations in which there
are not laymen at whose feet the clergyman could
afford to sit in all quietude and docility. Not the
intellectual ability, the orthodoxy, not even the piety
of the pulpit afford, then, sufficient grounds upon
which to base the claims of sanctuary service.
Bearing upon our matter there are two principles
requiring to be stated, to which, when fairly set forth,
cordial assent will, I believe, be accorded.
First. Only a portion of the results deserving to
be accomphshed by the service of the sanctuary is
due to the intellectual ability of the pulpit or the
intellectual appreciation of the pew.
The charge that is to be brought against the
theology in which some of the older ones of us were
reared, or rather, perhaps, against the mode in which
it used to be presented from what was then called
"the sacred desk," was not that it was too strenuous
in its pursuit of the truth or too emphatic in its
enunciation of truth, but that while it put a highly
educational strain upon the mental faculties of the
hearers, it afforded too little play for those other
energies of the soul, — its love, its sympathies, its

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 177
sweet and holy confidences in the goodness and shep
herding care of God, — energies which remain inert
so long as the atmosphere is one of cold inteUec-
tuality, and which begin to show signs of life and
movement only when the sharp edges of truth have
been mellowed by the touch of a warmer impulse.
One Sabbath, Dr. WiUiam Adams, first pastor of
the Madison Square Church, had with him in the
pulpit a Pennsylvania divine, who preached the dis
course. At its completion the Philadelphian, upon
sitting down, turned and remarked to Dr Adams,
"That is what I call the very bones of the gospel."
"Yes," gently retorted Dr. Adams, "but we Hke a
Httle flesh on ours."
It is by the cultivation of sweet Christian senti
ment as much as by the inculcation of strong religious
doctrine that the sanctuary accomplishes its mission.
Judging from the example of our Lord's dealings
with his disciples, it seems prudent to go even a step
farther, and to claim that the softening of the heart
and the quickening of sentiment must precede the
indoctrinating of the mind. People do not commence
putting seed into the ground until after the frost is
out and the soil has been so far warmed as to give to
the seed a loving reception. And the soul works in
Hne with the operations of nature.
It was as much because Christ cultivated the

178 The Pulpit and the Pew
tenderness of his disciples as because he stimulated
their understandings that he was able to lodge in
them the truths of the gospel, and he wrought in them
gentleness of feeling before he began his work of
seed-sowing. The gospel is quite as much an expression of the
heart of God as of his mind. So that a sanctuary
service, in order to be true to the spirit of the gospel,
must move primarily in an atmosphere of feeling
rather than exclusively in one of thought. It is, or
should be, a nursery for the growing of religious
affections, so that any amount of keen mentahty that
the preacher may possess, or any amount of intel
lectual nutriment that his congregation may secure
from outside sources, affect in no wise the need that
people are under of entering the sanctuary and shar
ing in its service, provided its spiritual atmosphere
be of a temperature to develop the dehcate impulses
of reHgious emotion, affectionate and trustful rever
ence toward God and love toward man. In order to
a winning and successful service, it is as essential to
have produced a mellow spiritual temperature in
order that men's hearts may be warm as it is to have
a good fire kept up in the furnace in order that their
feet may be warm.
Hence the need there is that our sanctuary prayers
should move in the region of the sensibilities of our

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 179
people, and that the holy office should be used not to
the end of indirectly conveying moral lessons to the
pew-holders or of imparting information to God, but
as a means of gathering the Great Spirit and our own
smaller spirits within the bonds of reverent and
sympathetic fellowship and companionship.
I have no love for and very Httle respect for the
aridity and frigidity of a good deal of existing sanc
tuary service. I believe in introducing just as much
form as can possibly be made the vehicle of spiritual
influence. People love it, and within the Hmits just
specified the more of it the better. It is both a rest
and an impulse. I have experimented with the matter
for thirty-one years. In '80 I began with the old-
fashioned three-hymned service. Even the introduc
tion of the Lord's prayer was offensive to one or two
members, as being a leaning in the direction of
Papacy. We have a ritual now that combines the
dignity of the Presbyterian cult and the grace of the
Episcopal. The old-fashioned truth is preached but
the bones are kept well covered. Next to the Holy
Spirit the preacher's main stay is his choir, whose
services are secured not at all with a view to giving
us a Sunday concert, but rather and exclusively to the
end of touching and stimulating those hidden foun
tains of reverent devotion and tender sentiment
toward God and man which can never be so directly

180 The Pulpit and the Pew
reached or so gently and yet powerfully stimulated
as by music when rendered by those who combine the
gift of song with the spirit of worship. There is
nothing to indicate that there will be any preaching
in heaven. Music is the only art that is enrolled
among the attractions of the celestial world.
In this great matter of rendering the services of
the sanctuary attractive, the second point to which
I wish to advert is that of the preacher and his pulpit
deliverances, in particular the pecuhar quality that
ought to distinguish those dehverances because of the
unique experience by which it is to be assumed that
those deliverances will be inspired.
John the Baptist, in his singular and desolate
wilderness sanctuary, was able to draw the multitudes
to his preaching because he was able to tell them
something which they did not know, something which
they needed and were interested to know, and some
thing which he was able to state to them with
authority and as from a source from which they
themselves w«re not able to draw. He worked in the
exercise of the prophetic office.
The prophet is not so much the man who foretells
as the one who has a differing experience from most,
an experience which carries him farther into the
reality of things than most are carried, which dis
entangles him from the complication of what is

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 181
ordinary and confused, and qualifies him to speak
from a standpoint so far raised above the common and
perplexed point of view as to exhibit facts and truths
in their just perspective, and moreover to do it with
that clear and unmistakable consciousness of vision
that carries with it its own certification.
In the transfiguration scene the disciples for the
first time beheld their Lord in his true relations to
the celestial world. Only imagination can conceive
the effect wrought upon them by this dazzling dis
closure of his heavenly connections, or the distinct
epoch that would be thereby created in the history
of their belief in him. Although the revelation was
comparatively but momentary, yet there was the
revelation. The Lord for an instant stood before
them in the manifest light of God. A glory that was
neither from land nor sea had touched his face with
a complexion that betrayed his kinship with the
Great Spirit above and his citizenship in regions that
were far abroad.
And the meaning of the scene in something of the
immensity of its import entered their souls, and
recorded itself there in lines that were ineffaceable.
Whatever the scene of distress and humiHation
through which they might subsequently see him pass,
there stiU remained in them indelibly printed the
memory of the day when they had seen him stand

182 The Pulpit and the Pew
upon the Mount, close in under the cover of the sky,
enveloped with a splendor which nature could not
explain and in the midst of companionship whose
belongings were in the great years and in the realm
supernal. It was a great moment, great in its instant
impression upon them, great in its indestructible
hold upon them.
What it signified at the moment to the three disci
ples that witnessed it and what it continued to denote
as a permanent element in their experience, we can
easily infer from the language subsequently used by
one of them who wrote : "For we have not foUowed
cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto
you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty. For he
received from God the Father honor and glory, when
there came such a voice to him from the sublime glory
[that is, from God], This is my beloved Son, in whom
I am well pleased: and this voice which came from
heaven we heard, and were with him in the Holy
Mount." »You perceive how that impression had
stayed by, how it had worked in the mind of him who
had witnessed the great transaction, and had become
a fixed factor in his own reaHzation, and made him
forever competent to speak a strong word, so full of
conscious truth as to cut a broad swath of irresistible
persuasion whenever the word was spoken. It was

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 183
the gHmpSe that the Apostle gained, on that trans
figuration day, of a profound world underlying,
overlying, enveloping the common shows of things,
that made the Apostle great, widening him a little to
the width of the spiritual universe that was for a
moment uncovered to him, enabhng him to interpret
facts in all their high and briUiant import and to
assert those facts with an assurance begotten of a
searching experience.
What we have just tried to state is a necessary
prerequisite to all fine living, large speaking and
great working. The powerful doers of the Bible,
old and new, had something shown to them before
they commenced work. The chieftains of events may
have had to live on low ground, but they would never
have been able to become chieftains if at some time
something had not come into their eye that low
ground never would have lain near enough to the
sky to be able to show them. Moses had been doing
small things, tending sheep and other paltry business,
too pusillanimous ever to have gone upon the record,
for eighty years before the vision of God came to him
in the flame at Horeb, and then for the first time the
true life of the great general, lawgiver and states
man began. That bush introduced Moses to the
world because it introduced the world to Moses, the
great world I mean, that world that is made up of

184 The Pulpit and the Pew
eternal meanings, and which holds in its vast
embrace this small globe of rock, forest and ocean as
a tiny island is held in the lap of the sea.
Whether in that scene at Horeb Moses heard God's
voice is not so important. We must aUow a good
deal of margin for the pictorial tendencies of a
picturesque age. There is no harm in thinking of
some olden parts of the early Bible as being picture-
book — remembering though that there may be just
as much truth in a picture as in a paragraph, perhaps
more. But whether that Horeb chapter is prose, poetry
or painting, Moses found himself at the frontier, at
the point where the lights from below are met by
the lights that sift in from the other way, and he
began then to be Moses. And the Hght sifting in
from the other way put that celestial complexion
upon things that read into them their great meanings,
as the transfiguring light upon the Holy Mount
wrought God's complexion upon the face of the
man Christe Jesus and to the three stricken disciples
revealed the man, in what Peter calls his majesty.
It is much to see things in their majesty.
Even our Lord, as it would seem, never stepped
forth upon his career of active service till there came
to him at the Jordan that great revelation, that
opening of the sky above him, in whose interpretative

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 185
light his own being became disclosed to him, and his
relation to God and to man set forth under a trans
figuring ulumination. The small significance of
things will not answer. There is a great deal of
splendor in them if the Hghts are arranged in such a
way as to strike them from above, and coax out their
larger import. Even pictures that seem common
develop wonderfully when properly placed and seen
in an atmosphere that is richly luminous.
St. Paul's real life commenced with seeing what he
called a great "light." It would be of no particular
advantage to try to probe the mysteries of that
event. Excited emotions may to some extent have
furnished the colors in which he portrayed the scene
that transpired on the way to Damascus, but there
was in some way and at that time a great uncovering
to his eyes, or to his heart, of what had before been
concealed. Whether it was that his powers of vision, spiritual
vision, were unnaturally strengthened or that by
some means the atmosphere, in which the activities
of mind operate, was conveniently cleansed of what
ever tends to impede those activities, is of little
importance. But it is sufficiently evident from what
he himself tells us of the event, and from the entirely
new tone and direction communicated to his life by
that event, that altogether a new world was at that

186 The Pulpit and the Pew
time disclosed to him ; not that things were changed,
but that a celestial complexion was put upon them,
a heavenly significance communicated to them, and
they stood forth before him transfigured in the glow
of the mystic illumination.
The reports preserved to us of such experiences
have oftentimes to be discounted, but that will have
to depend mostly upon the general quality and struc
ture of the person of whom the experiences are
predicated. That Abraham was a man of such fiber
and proportions as to be able to dominate religiously
the forty centuries that have intervened between his
day and our own would seem to be rather convinc
ing endorsement of his claim to have stood at one
time where both ground and sky were brightened by
the ineffable Presence, and where even the long track
of the ages to come lay out partly disclosed to him
under the transfiguring Hght that fell upon that
track from above.
That Moses was a man of such grasp upon the
moral foundation of things, having a moral intuition
so keen in perforating the very tissue of character
and act that his ethical system today, after so long
a time, still lies at the basis of our own moral struc
ture of duty as between man and man, and man and
God, — aU of this creates a tremendous presumption
in support of his claim that he wrought not alone by

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 187
the light of a candle humanly kindled ; a tremendous
presumption that he was warranted in insisting that
his ethical code was a quotation from the mind of
God; and that it was because human relations of
obligation stood out before his eye under the glow
of a heavenly transfigurement that he was able to
state those relations in a way that should be true to
the finest conscience of the finest men for a period
of 3,500 years.
Men who can do that have got to be believed.
Likewise of the man St. Paul, that rugged old Apostle
to the Gentiles. Words that such people speak,
claims that such people make, will have to be taken
at their face value. When you bethink yourself of the
fact that nineteen centuries of strong religious
thinking rest down complacently upon the massive
propositions enunciated by St. Paul, it is silly to the
point of imbecility to deny the vaHdity of a light so
intense as to singe his bodily eyes into temporary
blindness, to have come, as he tells us in his Corin
thian letter, within reach of utterances incapable of
being translated into terms of any earthly vocabu
lary. These are some of the facts of our holy religion
and attested by the testimony of men who have been
too practical in all their dominance of historic event,
too self-contained in all their administrative life to

188 The Pulpit and the Pew
be obnoxious to the charge of either insanity or
delusion. You may not have seen a great light but
St. Paul did, or nineteen hundred years of great
doctrinal thinking are the mere baseless fabric of a
dream. You may not have seen the clouds parted
above you and a radiant avenue opened before you
into the realm celestial, but Jesus did, or the great
Christian era with all of light, love and power in it
that we call Christian is an unfounded stupidity
shared in by milHons of what purported to be intelli-
gent souls, but who were aU of them the dupes of a
silly fancy when they Hved and the victims of a crazy
delusion when they died.
The declarations of men like Paul, Jesus, Moses
and Abraham, who have marshaled the centuries by
the power of their thought and Hfe, are not declara
tions that you can finger and sort over and blot out at
the impulse of a jejune cynicism. It is not credulity
to bank on the utterances of such men; it is incredu
lity not to bank on them. The average man may not
have had their experiences, but what is the average
man that he presumes to blue-pencil the unequivocal
declarations of men who have moved as giants in the
midst of the years, masters of events and creators of
destiny ?
And so we come back to it that it was the glimpse
of great things, touches of transfiguration, beholden

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 189
by men who once in a while stood at the frontier where
the light from the ground was met by the Hght that
beamed from on high, that was the secret of their
long thinking and great working.
It is much to stand down in the valley of a beauti
ful landscape and to imagine the distant course of
the rivers and to fancy the miles of stimulating
prospect that must lie out, an easy picture to the
eye of one who looks upon it from the heights. But
it is a distinct thing to stand upon those heights, to
Hve in the companionship of the lofty places of the
earth and follow with an easy vision the long lines of
the rivers that like glistening threads of silver wind
in and out among the hills.
Such transfigurement is fraught with unspeakable
stimulus, even when it is merely mountains and
forests that are interpreted by the Hght that falls
upon them from a superior altitude. And how much
more when it is the features of a moral and spiritual
landscape that are passing under review — when it is
duties not things, men and not rocks, processes of
history and not geography, souls and the life and
destinies of souls and not material impersonalities
that are to be interpreted and valued in the trans
figuring light that cometh from above.
Prophets require no credentials, and are always in
demand. When Elijah confronted Ahab and pre-

190 The Pulpit and the Pew
faced his declaration to him with the words, "As the
Lord God of Israel Hveth, before whom I stand,"
Ahab asked no questions, entered into no argument,
attempted no disproof of the authority with which
Elijah spoke. The character with which a preacher
is popularly credited is that he is a layman who has
been instructed along theological lines. That does
not make a prophet of him. Second-hand knowledge
does not count- — not in the great things of life.
The only things that persuade are the things that
come from the heart that knows. The words that
came from Moses have been the foundation of civili-
zation for three millenniums and a half, and he did
not secure them by probing the wisdom of Egypt or
by digging in the sands of the wilderness. He swayed
the wild men that he brought with him out of Egypt
because his conferences were with the powers above,
whom they but imperfectly knew, but whom they
knew that he knew. They felt in him the authenticity
of the word that he brought. They appreciated in
his utterances the flavor of the thunder-resounding
and the lightning-stricken mountain down out of
which he brought his message. They never disputed
the Decalogue. They accepted it because they
accepted him, and because they believed that he had
been up where things of that kind grow.
"This is life eternal that they might know thee, 0

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 191
God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent," and
such a lesson as that surely is one which has no final
chapter. How far along in the series of its chapters
men and women, who are necessarily burdened and
stricken with the cares and the exhausting business
of life, ought to advance, is something for each to
determine for himself; but the preacher is bound by
the obligations of his prophetic office to have stepped
far enough on in advance of his people to teU them
of things which they have not yet seen, and so, little
by little, to entice their vision toward the prospect
always opening itself out more and more clearly to us
as we go on.
The secret of the power and work of St. Paul is
expressed in his words, "Neither did I receive the
gospel from man, nor was I taught it, but it came
to me through revelation of Jesus Christ." In that,
too, lies the secret of his fascination and his abiHty
to draw human thought to him and to compel its
confidence in him.
I am afraid that we have read his letters so much
or that we read them with so Httle insight into their
contents, as to fail of feeling how afive every sentence
of his is with his own personal experience. There is
no suggestion of hearsay about them. He is felt to
be speaking with authority, and such authoritative
ness the world believes in and gathers to it.

192 The Pulpit and the Pew
He was himself in aU that he says. If it is love
that he is talking about, we know that the whole
track of his thought is Ht up with the love wherewith
he himself loves. He never has to quote. If he
touches upon the realities of the world invisible, we
feel that at the very moment, when he was writing,
his own eye was wide open to the realities of that
world and sensitively and almost painfully filled with
them. We know that he is not doing into words of his
own some report of unseen reahties that another has
made over to him.
His own heart distinctly touched the object it
described, the truth it relates. There is no sugges
tion of inference in what he declares. He does not
say that this is true— major premise — and that is
true — minor premise — therefore something else is
true. There are with him no "therefores." Realities
stand out to him in their own Hght. There was
nothing second-hand about his dehverances, so that
the vitafity of them has struck into the hearts of
people and dominated religious thought for almost
a score of centuries. People have eyes for what is
direct and ears for what is original.
In the clause just quoted, he tells his Galatian
readers that the gospel he has been preaching to
them is not something that he picked up at school
and then went upon the platform with it, or into the

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 193
pulpit with it. He tells them that his abiHty to
address to them long discourses is not due to any
long memory of his, or to the gospel material with
which that memory of his had been crammed. People
are not slow to appreciate the magnitude of the work
he did for the world, and for the centuries, but are
not closely attending to it that it is what he is here
saying about himself that made him able to do it.
I meet with students who are looking forward to
the Christian ministry, and who are deeply agitated
over the question as to where they shall take their
preliminary course, and under what set of instructors
they shaU be taught concerning Christ and his
gospel. It is not my thought that we should urge them to
keep away from such instruction, but it is clear that
we ought to remind them that there are things that
never can be learned by such means, that the things
that make out almost the whole of a man's true equip
ment for the Christian ministry cannot be learned by
such means, and that St. Paul, the consummate
preacher of the Christian era, not only never
depended upon such opportunities, but wanted it
definitely understood that he never did.
He could have attended a school of the prophets
and learned a great deal about the Lord, but to know
a great deal about the Lord is one thing, and to know

194 The Pulpit and the Pew
the Lord is a different thing. We might go into a
cave lit with a tallow candle, and spend forty years
fathoming profound treatises upon the sun and stars,
and yet in all those years gain less that would make
us stirring expositors of the splendors of the firma
ment than one moment's contemplation of the rising
sun or of the winter constellations. People always
beheve in the man "that has been there" and will
follow him even into the wilderness. It is difficult to
be greatly moved by the deliverances of a mocking
bird. Therein then lies the power of the pulpit, in the
ungrazed pastures of spiritual and heavenly truth
into which the prophet-shepherd, going on before,
leads his flocks. There is a quantity of unpardonable
nonsense perpetrated upon the question why the
masses do not throng the churches. It is not the fault
of the masses. People will fill the churches as fast
as God fills the ministers.
If it be the case that there is decay in attendance
upon sanctuary service, it is because there is decay
in the exercise of the prophetic function of the pulpit,
and because the shepherd moves in the midst of the
sheep instead of going before them and leading them
forth into uncropped fields. Moses could lead his
people because of the region of higher Hght in which
he walked, and which came to him first in the flames of

The Sanctuary and Sanctuary Service 195
the Burning Bush. John the Baptist could stir the
heart of Jerusalem and of all Judea, because his own
ear was tuned to disclosures which they uncon
sciously had wanted to know, but which they had been
either too busy or insufficiently sensitive to discover.
In the Mount of Transfiguration the three disciples
had uncovered to them a mysterious world that lay
out of reach of ordinary vision, but a world whose
spirit and power were a strange but enticing element
in aU the message which they afterward delivered to
the people. The Hght which flashed upon St. Paul
when he was on the way to Damascus never faded out
of the eye of the old Prophet-Apostle, and somewhat
of the touch and caress of that Hght came into the
experience of those who afterward waited upon his
word. These are all of them Scripture examples of a per
manent truth. The secret of pulpit power and the
secret of sanctuary attractiveness must always remain
what it was in the days of the old prophets and
apostles, that it is a place where the souls of the
people have their vision uncovered to an always newer
and fresher prospect of the great things of life and
God. People will always gather under a cloud and
look up, if only there be a rift in that cloud allowing
a little farther entrance into the light celestial.