LECTURE XIII.

BEARING OF PROFESSIONAL PURSUITS ON A PASTOR'S STUDIES. BREADTH OF RANGE IN SELECTION OF BOOKS.

(6) SOME of the remarks already made suggest another principle of selection in pastoral studies. It is that the true ideal of a pastor's reading must be regulated in part by his professional duties; in how great part, the good sense of each must decide. The principle is vital, that reading for the direct purpose of homiletic use is a necessity, and as such should be respected. It not only is not unscholarly, but a pastor's scholarship is radically defective, without it, and this for two reasons.

One is the necessity of such study to the dignity of other literary pursuits. That is a degrading definition of literature which excludes from it professional studies. We create effeminate conceptions of it when we isolate it from the tug of real life. It becomes the accomplishment of an idle character, if you limit it to the amusement of idle hours.

Professor Henry Reed notices the popular use of the phrase belles-lettres as indicating the tendency of a certain class of minds to this degrading notion. That phrase was the invention of an effeminate taste, which sought to hide its own feebleness under the guise of a

LECT. XIII.]

PROFESSIONAL ENTHUSIASM.

193

foreign tongue. Coleridge remarks it as one of the disastrous revolutions of England, that "literature fell away from the professions." For the earnestness, and therefore for the dignity, of our literary pursuits, we need to associate them with some regular and necessary avocation in life. The necessity of labor for a living is not a hinderance, but a help, to the depth of our scholarly life. Every important vocation in life has some literature of its own: at least, it has a history which a man is the wiser for knowing. The clerical profession has a literature which no clergyman can afford not to know.

A second reason for this principle of selection is its obvious necessity to professional success. There are two kinds of interest in the clerical office. One is the direct interest in its objects; the other, interest in it as a profession. Providence has benevolently arranged, for our assistance in life's labors, that we are so made as to enjoy, not only the results, but the process to results. Pleasure is imparted, not only at the end, but on the way to the end. This professional joy is as legitimate to a clergyman as to a lawyer.

Not that it is the highest motive to clerical fidelity, but it is an innocent and a stimulating motive. The highest success is never gained without it. The possession of it, however, leads necessarily to study of professional literature. This is as it should be. Our tastes in reading ought to be tinged with the peculiarities of our profession to a sufficient extent to make them tributary to it. The two may blend, so that the one shall never be a drudgery, and the other never effeminate.

(7) Our choice of authors should cover as large a

range of literature as can be read in a scholarly way. This as a theory seems self-evident; yet in practice it is at this point that the hopelessness of the scholarly life to a pastor appears most invincible. Yet, be it ever so limited in its practical application, the recognition of the pinciple is invaluable to a pastor's scholarly spirit.

Observe, in confirmation of this, the uselessness of variety, if gained at the expense of scholarship, in reading. Adults in years are often juvenile in culture. This juvenile period is characterized by three things, — reading is amusement, the choice of authors is fortuitous, and opinions about authors are either an echo of their reputation, or a wilful contradiction of it. No profound personal sympathy with authors is yet created, and no antipathies for which scholarly reasons can be given. Our collegiate curriculum does not commonly advance a student much beyond this juvenile period of culture, unless he is above the average age of collegians, and has read more than they commonly read.

In this juvenile period the first peril encountered is that of reading too much and too variously. We are in danger of skimming the surface of every thing that falls in our way, without penetrating any thing. One very soon wearies of such reading, if it is directed to any thing which deserves to be called earnest literature. To read such literature with any pleasure we must be ourselves in earnest; and to be in earnest in it we must penetrate it in spots. The mind, otherwise, is like a bird always on the wing. This is not scholarly reading. No man will pursue it long in the use of serious literature, unless he falls into an affectation of scholarly tastes.

LECT. XIII.]

LITERARY AFFECTATION.

195

A second peril to which the juvenile period of culture is exposed is that of literary affectation. Did you never see a freshman in college, in a fit of literary eagerness, carrying to his room a huge folio in Latin, or a set of the Greek classics, under the hallucination that scholarly culture must have some such unknown and unknowable beginning in order to be scholarly? Profuse and promiscuous reading often results from such affectation of literary aims.

One of the humiliating confessions which we have to make for educated men is, that there is not a little of affected taste among them. This is of so great importance to a youthful scholar, that it demands notice by an excursus from the line of the present discussion. You will discover, as you extend the range of your reading, that there is a class of authors who at first awe you by their prodigious learning, by their glib use of the technical dialect of scholarship, and by their oracular opinions. But they are among the authors whom you most quickly outgrow. The conviction soon forces itself upon you that they are pretentious. Their dialect is not necessitated by their thinking: their reading has been discursive, not penetrative, and their productions are too heavily indebted to their common-place books. You find that other authors, less voluminous, with a less gaudy parade of the tackling of science, and with a more simple style, move you more profoundly, and their influence lives longer in your mental growth.

Religion and religious men suffer often, at the hands of the men of books, from the charge of cant. The charge is too often true. But it is my firm belief, that among any number of plain Christian men and women

chosen at random, there will be found less of that morbid affection than can be found among an equal number of literary and scientific authors and literary amateurs chosen at random. What is cant in religion? It is nothing but affectation of unreal virtue; not conscious hypocrisy, but unconscious self-deceit. As a mental phenomenon it is not confined to religion. The same thing essentially vitiates manners in society. It is witnessed in the enthusiasm of travelers, in the raptures of connoisseurs of art, in the patriotism of politicians, and in the conscientiousness of obstinate minorities. It infects as well the aspirations of authorship and the early enthusiasm of readers. It is a ubiquitous infirmity of human nature. Indeed, do we not distrust ourselves more in this respect, the more we know of ourselves? But a fragment of our experience, probably, is absolutely free from affected virtue. That fragment is commonly purified of this taint by the discipline of emergencies. Yet even death does not press it out of some natures. They die as they have lived, deceivers and deceived, or, to speak more exactly, deceived, and therefore deceivers. Authors who make the most showy parade of mental integrity are often guilty of some glaring sign of its opposite. Carlyle has been the severest censor of the English public for its insincerity in every thing; yet Carlyle's style in the very utterance of his invectives is one of the most disingenuous specimens of quackery in moderr authorship.

It is no marvelous thing, then, if we find cant in books in which we least expect it. Critics who have an honest culture complain of it in all the great literatures of our day. Addison complained of it in his