LECTURE II.

STUDY OF MEN, CONTINUED.

CERTAIN CLERICAL IN

FIRMITIES, EFFECTS ON THE PULPIT.

3. RESUMING the subject of the study of men where we left it at the close of the last Lecture, let us now observe the fact that this study is often undervalued, because of a factitious reverence for books.

This must be recognized as one of the perils of studious minds engaged in a practical profession. True, the opposite peril also exists; but it besets only indolent minds. Mental indolence finds a very cheap pabulum in underrating scholastic learning. But studious men are tempted on the side of their scholastic tastes. We need to see the relations of the two in some approach to equilibrium. We will not say with Patrick Henry, "Sir, it is not books, it is men, that we must study;" but we say, "Books and men we must study." A young man once inquired of me, "Can you direct me to a book which shall teach me to write a sermon?" I receive letters of inquiry founded on the same ideal of homiletic discipline. "No," must the answer be: "there is no such book.

From the nature of the subject there can be none." Preaching is one of the arts of life, as much so as the use of the telegraph. It never can be learned as an abstract science only. From books may be learned principles, nothing more.

Lec

tures can portray the theory of preaching, nothing else. Criticism is that theory in fragments.

The peril here named is often aggravated by an excess of the conservative temperament. This entices men of books and schools often to live as if the acquisition and classification of printed knowledge were the chief object of life, rather than the growth and the use of character. The clergy, therefore, are often charged, and sometimes justly, with reverence for the past at the expense of the present and in distrust of the future. One of the most seductive positions which can be offered to a scholar is a fellowship in a large and ancient university. But scarcely could a more perilous position be accepted by a man, who, like a clergyman, looks forward to a practical profession as the work of his life.

Whatever has been once crystallized and labeled in our cabinet of thought, we are tempted to prize at the cost of those creations which are still in the fluid state, and in the seething process before our eyes. Clerical tastes, therefore, often need a counterbalance to the conservative temperament. We must remember that a vast scene in the drama of human history is now acting. We and our cotemporaries are the dramatis persona. A link in the chain of historic causes and effects is now forging.

Specially should this be borne in mind, that divine communications to the world have always been made. through the medium of real life. Living men live a great truth, and so truth comes to the birth. The Bible is almost wholly history and biography. Abstract knowledge is given in it only as interwoven with the wants and the experiences of once living generations. God took out of the circle of universal his

LECT. II.]

TRUTH IN LIVING MEN.

19

tory a single segment, and the result is a revelation. Men lived under special divine superintendence and illumination, and the product is a Bible.

So all the great truths which have moved the world have been lived. They have been struck out by collision of thought with the living necessities of the world. Monotheism exists only as an experience vital to living men: it has come into being as a revolt from living idolatries. Liberty is a possession sprung from the pressure of living despotisms. True theory in all departments of civilized culture is a life. It has grown out of the brooding of thought over an experience of living barbarism. Scholarship, therefore, is always the pupil of Providence when it is the leader of men. It must be studious always of Providence in the experience of living generations, if it would hold its leadership. That mind lags behind Providence which studies only the past. It is always a little too late in its opinions, its tastes, its culture, and therefore in its power of adaptation to uses.

Why should we not feel for the nineteenth century somewhat of the respect which men of the twenty-ninth will feel for it? Why not place the ages abreast with each other in their chances for rank in our literary regard? Studying in this manner the phases of a living civilization, we shall surely learn something which no records of a defunct civilization can teach us. No generation of men, in God's plan, lives for nothing. Every generation is a positive quantity in the world's problem. It adds something to the knowledge or the power of the world which its predecessors never knew. The world's life is thus a growth, always a growth, without retrogression and without pause. We should

not allow ourselves, then, to undervalue for oratorical discipline the study of living men, through a morbid reverence for books as the sacred repositories of the past. "Books and men, men and books," should be our motto.

This view is enforced by the fact that accumulation is not the chief object of a scholarly life: if it were, we should never have been fated to spend one-third of our lives in sleep. The great object of life, and therefore of culture, is character, - the growth, the exercise, the use, of character. We gain, surely, as vigorous a character, and as much of it in amount, from the study of men as from that of books. No culture can be symmetrical which is restricted to either. Each needs the other as its complement.

It should be further remarked, that symmetry of culture in this respect is essential to a hopeful courage in the ministry. A minister who studies only the past is almost sure to be distrustful of the future, and despondent of the present. He sees the future in a false perspective: therefore to him the former times were always better than these, and the future is doomed to be worse than either. He is an incorrigible pessimist. Two clergymen, once companions in this seminary, met, after twenty years of labor in the ministry, in which both had had a fair measure of success. Said one in a brisk, cheery tone, "I have a hard life of it, but I enjoy a hard life. It pays to have a hard life. I have such a glorious trust in the future!" Said the other, unconsciously sinking his tone to the habit of his mind, "I have a hard life too. I try to endure it patiently, but I shall be glad when it is over. The future looks dark, very dark, to me. My chief satisfaction is in the

LECT. II.] POPULAR IDEA OF A CLERGYMAN.

21

past." This man was the more learned of the two, but he had worn out his courage by excessive conservatism. He was weary and footsore from walking backward. A few years later he was gathered to the fathers with whom his mental life had been buried for twenty years. His friend, I think, still lives; and, if so, I venture to affirm that he still has a hard life, and enjoys it as hopefully as ever. Such men never grow old. Which of the two men illustrates the better ideal of a clerical scholar? Which has been worth the most to the world? Which has the most brilliant record of self-culture to carry into eternity?

4. Enthusiasm in the study of men should be stimulated by that which is well known to be, in this respect, the popular idea of a clergyman.

The popular conception of a clergyman is that he is, ex officio, in respect to the knowledge of mankind, an ignoramus. Be it true or false, this is the popular notion of the clerical character. It produces not a little of that feeling towards the clergy which vibrates between amusement and contempt. In the popular faith we belong to a race of innocents. If not all Vicars of Wakefield, we are cousins-german to that reverend greenhorn. Men of the world feel it to be refreshing when an able preacher breaks loose from the hereditary conventionalisms of the clerical guild, and thinks and talks and dresses and acts as they do.

This popular notion is, of course, a caricature; yet to some extent the habits of the clergy foster it. For instance, no other body of men are in so much danger of excessive seclusion from the world as are the clergy. Relics of the theory on which clerical celibacy was founded yet linger among the ideas which clergymen