THE SUNBEAM AND THE SHADOW.
The virtue of the world is not mainly in its leaders. In the midst of the multitude which follows there is often something better than in the one that goes before. Old generals wanted to take Toulon, but one of their young colonels showed them how. The junior counsel has been known not unfrequently to make a better argument than his senior fellow,—if, indeed, he did not make both their arguments. Good ministers will tell you they have parishioners who beat them in the practice of the virtues. A great establishment, got up on commercial principles, like the Apollinean Institute, might yet be well carried on, if it happened to get good teachers. And when Master Langdon came to see its management, he recognized that there must be fidelity and intelligence somewhere among the instructors. It was only necessary to look for a moment at the fair, open forehead, the still, tranquil eye of gentle, habitual authority, the sweet gravity that lay upon the lips, to hear the clear answers to the pupils' questions, to notice how every request had the force without the form of a command, and the young man could not doubt that the good genius of the school stood before him in the person of Helen Darley.
It was the old story. A poor country-clergyman dies and leaves a widow and a daughter. In Old England the daughter would have eaten the bitter bread of a governess in some rich family. In New England she must keep a school. So, rising from one sphere to another, she at length finds herself the prima donna in the department of instruction in Mr. Silas Peckham's educational establishment.
What a miserable thing it is to be poor! She was dependent, frail, sensitive, conscientious. She was in the power of a hard, grasping, thin-blooded, tough-fibred, trading educator, who neither knew nor cared for a tender woman's sensibilities, but who paid her and meant to have his money's worth out of her brains, and as much more than his money's worth as he could get. She was consequently, in plain English, overworked, and an overworked woman is always a sad sight,—sadder a great deal than an overworked man, because she is so much more fertile in capacities of suffering than a man. She has so many varieties of headache,—sometimes as if Jael were driving the nail that killed Sisera into her temples,—sometimes letting her work with half her brain while the other half throbs as if it would go to pieces,—sometimes tightening round the brows as if her cap-band were Luke's iron crown,—and then her neuralgias, and her back-aches, and her fits of depression, in which she thinks she is nothing and less than nothing, and those paroxysms which men speak slightingly of as hysterical,—convulsions, that is all, only not commonly fatal ones,—so many trials which belong to her fine and mobile structure,—that she is always entitled to pity, when she is placed in conditions which develop her nervous tendencies. The poor teacher's work had, of course, been doubled since the departure of Mr. Langdon's predecessor. Nobody knows what the weariness of instruction is, as soon as the teacher's faculties begin to be overtasked, but those who have tried it. The relays of fresh pupils, each new set with its exhausting powers in full action, coming one after another, take out all the reserved forces and faculties of resistance from the subject of their draining process.
The day's work was over, and it was late in the evening, when she sat down, tired and faint, with a great bundle of girls' themes or compositions to read over before she could rest her weary head on the pillow of her narrow trundle-bed, and forget for a while the treadmill stair of labor she was daily climbing.
How she dreaded this most forlorn of all a teacher's tasks! She was conscientious in her duties and would insist on reading every sentence,—there was no saying where she might find faults of grammar or bad spelling. There might but have been twenty or thirty of these themes in the bundle before her. Of course she knew pretty well the leading sentiments they could contain: that beauty was subject to the accidents of time; that wealth was inconstant, and existence uncertain; that virtue was its own reward; that youth exhaled, like the dew-drop from the flower, ere the sun had reached its meridian; that life was o'ershadowed with trials; that the lessons of virtue instilled by our beloved teachers were to be our guides through all our future career. The imagery employed consisted principally of roses, lilies, birds, clouds, and brooks, with the celebrated comparison of wayward genius to a meteor. Who does not know the small, slanted, Italian hand of these girls'-compositions,—their stringing together of the good old traditional copy-book phrases, their occasional gushes of sentiment, the profound estimates of the world, sounding to the old folks that read them as the experience of a bantam-pullet's last-hatched young one with the chips of its shell on its head would sound to a Mother Cary's chicken, who knew the great ocean with all its typhoons and tornadoes? Yet every now and then one is liable to be surprised with strange clairvoyant flashes, that can hardly be explained, except by the mysterious inspiration which every now and then seizes a young girl and exalts her intelligence, just as hysteria in other instances exalts the sensibility,—a little something of that which made Joan of Arc, and the Burney girl who prophesied "Evelina," and the Davidson sisters. In the midst of these commonplace exercises which Miss Darley read over so carefully were two or three that had something of individual flavor about them, and here and there there was an image or an epithet which showed the footprint of a passionate nature, as a fallen scarlet feather marks the path the wild flamingo has trodden.
The young lady teacher read them with a certain indifference of manner, as one reads proofs,—noting defects of detail, but not commonly arrested by the matters treated of. Even Miss Charlotte Ann Wood's poem, beginning
"How sweet at evening's balmy hour,"
did not excite her. She marked the inevitable false rhyme of Cockney and Yankee beginners, morn and dawn, and tossed the verses on the pile of those she had finished. She was looking over some of the last of them in a rather listless way,—for the poor thing was getting sleepy in spite of herself,—when she came to one which seemed to rouse her attention, and lifted her drooping lids. She looked at it a moment before she would touch it. Then she took hold of it by one corner and slid it off from the rest. One would have said she was afraid of it, or had some undefined antipathy which made it hateful to her. Such odd fancies are common enough in young persons in her nervous state. Many of these young people will jump up twenty times a day and run to dabble the tips of their fingers in water, after touching the most inoffensive objects.
This composition was written in a singular, sharp-pointed, long, slender hand, on a kind of wavy, ribbed paper. There was something strangely suggestive about the look of it,—but exactly of what, Miss Darley either could not or did not try to think. The subject of the paper was The Mountain,—the composition being a sort of descriptive rhapsody. It showed a startling familiarity with some of the savage scenery of the region. One would have said that the writer must have threaded its wildest solitudes by the light of the moon and stars as well as by day. As the teacher read on, her color changed, and a kind of tremulous agitation came over her. There were hints in this strange paper she did not know what to make of. There was something in its descriptions and imagery that recalled,—Miss Darley could not say what,—but it made her frightfully nervous. Still she could not help reading, till she came to one passage which so agitated her that the tired and overwearied girl's self-control left her entirely. She sobbed once or twice, then laughed convulsively, and flung herself on the bed, where she worked out a set hysteric spasm as she best might, without anybody to rub her hands and see that she did not hurt herself. By-and-by she got quiet, rose and went to her bookcase, took down a volume of Coleridge and read a short time, and so to bed, to sleep and wake from time to time with a sudden start out of uneasy dreams.
Perhaps it is of no great consequence what it was in the composition which set her off into this nervous paroxysm. She was in such a state that almost any slight agitation would have brought on the attack, and it was the accident of her transient excitability, very probably, which made a trifling cause the seeming occasion of so much disturbance. The theme was signed, in the same peculiar, sharp, slender hand, E. Venner, and was, of course, written by that wild-looking girl who had excited the master's curiosity and prompted his question, as before mentioned.
The next morning the lady-teacher looked pale and wearied, naturally enough, but she was in her place at the usual hour, and Master Langdon in his own. The girls had not yet entered the schoolroom.
"You have been ill, I am afraid," said Mr. Bernard.
"I was not well yesterday," she answered. "I had a worry and a kind of fright. It is so dreadful to have the charge of all these young souls and bodies! Every young girl ought to walk, locked close, arm in arm, between two guardian angels. Sometimes I faint almost with the thought of all that I ought to do, and of my own weakness and wants—Tell me, are there not natures born so out of parallel with the lines of natural law that nothing short of a miracle can bring them right?"
Mr. Bernard had speculated somewhat, as all thoughtful persons of his profession are forced to do, on the innate organic tendencies with which individuals, families, and races are born. He replied, therefore, with a smile, as one to whom the question suggested a very familiar class of facts.
"Why, of course. Each of us is only footing-up of a double column of figures that goes back to the first pair. Every unit tells,—and some of them are plus, and some minus. If the columns don't add up right, it is commonly because we can't make out all the figures. I don't mean to say that something may not be added by Nature to make up for losses and keep the race to its average, but we are mainly nothing but the answer to a long sum in addition and subtraction. No doubt there are people born with impulses at every possible angle to the parallels of Nature, as you call them. If they happen to cut these at right angles, of course they are beyond the reach of common influences. Slight obliquities are what we have most to do with in education. Penitentiaries and insane asylums take care of most of the right-angle cases.—I am afraid I have put it too much like a professor, and I am only a student, you know. Pray, what set you—"
The next morning the lady-teacher took to asking me this? "Any strange cases among the scholars?"
The meek teacher's blue eyes met the luminous glance that came with the question. She, too, was of gentle blood,—not meaning by that that she was of any noted lineage, but that she came of a cultivated stock, never rich, but long trained to intellectual callings. A thousand decencies, amenities, reticences, graces, which no one thinks of until he misses them, are the traditional right of those who spring from such families. And when two persons of this exceptional breeding meet in the midst of the common multitude, they seek each other's company at once by the natural law of elective affinity. It is wonderful how men and women know their peers. If two stranger queens, sole survivors of two ship-wrecked vessels, were cast, half-naked, on a rock together, each would at once address the other as "Our Royal Sister."
Helen Darley looked into the dark eyes of Bernard Langdon glittering with the light which flashed from them with his question. Not as those foolish, innocent country-girls of the small village did she look into them, to be fascinated and bewildered, but to sound them with a calm, steadfast purpose. "A gentleman," she said to herself, as she read his expression and his features with a woman's rapid, but exhausting glance. "A lady," he said to himself, as he met her questioning look,—so brief, so quiet, yet so assured, as of one whom necessity had taught to read faces quickly without offence, as children read the faces of parents, as wives read the faces of hard-souled husbands. All this was but a few seconds' work, and yet the main point was settled. If there had been any vulgar curiosity or coarseness of any kind lurking in his expression, she would have detected it. If she had not lifted her eyes to his face so softly and kept them there so calmly and withdrawn them so quietly, he would not have said to himself, "She is a lady," for that word meant a good deal to the descendant of the courtly Wentworths and the scholarly Langdons.
"There are strange people everywhere, Mr. Langdon," she said, "and I don't think our school-room is an exception. I am glad you believe in the force of transmitted tendencies. It would break my heart, if I did not think that there are faults beyond the reach of everything but God's special grace. I should die, if I thought that my negligence or incapacity was alone responsible for the errors and sins of those I have charge of. Yet there, are mysteries I do not know how to account for." She looked all round the school-room, and then said, in a whisper, "Mr. Langdon, we had a girl that stole, in the school, not long ago. Worse than that, we had a girl that tried to set us on fire. Children of good people, both of them. And we have a girl now that frightens me so"——
The door opened, and three misses came in to take their seats: three types, as it happened, of certain classes, into which it would not have been difficult to distribute the greater number of the girls in the school.—Hannah Martin. Fourteen years and three months old. Short-necked, thick-waisted, round-cheeked, smooth, vacant forehead, large, dull eyes. Looks good-natured, with little other expression. Three buns in her bag, and a large apple. Has a habit of attacking her provisions in school-hours.—Rosa Milburn. Sixteen. Brunette, with a rare ripe flush in her cheeks. Color comes and goes easily. Eyes wandering, apt to be downcast. Moody at times. Said to be passionate, if irritated. Finished in high relief. Carries shoulders well back and walks well, as if proud of her woman's life, with a slight rocking movement, being one of the wide-flanged pattern, but seems restless,—a hard girl to look after. Has a romance in her pocket, which she means to read in school-time.—Charlotte Ann Wood. Fifteen. The poetess before mentioned. Long, light ringlets, pallid complexion, blue eyes. Delicate child, half unfolded. Gentle, but languid and despondent. Does not go much with the other girls, but reads a good deal, especially poetry, underscoring favorite passages. Writes a great many verses, very fast, not very correctly; full of the usual human sentiments, expressed in the accustomed phrases. Undervitalized. Sensibilities not covered with their normal integuments. A negative condition, often confounded with genius, and sometimes running into it. Young people that fall out of line through weakness of the active faculties are often confounded with those that step out of it through strength of the intellectual ones.
The girls kept coming in, one after another, or in pairs or groups, until the school-room was nearly full. Then there was a little pause, and a light step was heard in the passage. The lady-teacher's eyes turned to the door, and the master's followed them in the same direction.
A girl of about seventeen entered. She was tall and slender, but rounded, with a peculiar undulation of movement, such as one sometimes sees in perfectly untutored country-girls, whom Nature, the queen of graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth that was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, began playing listlessly with her gold chain, as was a common habit with her, coiling it and uncoiling it about her slender wrist, and braiding it in with her long, delicate fingers. Presently she looked up. Black, piercing eyes, not large,—a low forehead, as low as that of Clytie in the Townley bust,—black hair, twisted in heavy braids,—a face that one could not help looking at for its beauty, yet that one wanted to look away from for something in its expression, and could not for those diamond eyes. They were fixed on the lady-teacher now. The latter turned her own away, and let them wander over the other scholars. But they could not help coming back again for a single glance at the wild beauty. The diamond eyes were on her still. She turned the leaves of several of her books, as if in search of some passage, and, when she thought she had waited long enough to be safe, once more stole a quick look at the dark girl. The diamond eyes were still upon her. She put her kerchief to her forehead, which had grown slightly moist; she sighed once, almost shivered, for she felt cold; then, following some ill-defined impulse, which she could not resist, she left her place and went to the young girl's desk.
"What do you want of me, Elsie Venner?" It was a strange question to put, for the girl had not signified that she wished the teacher to come to her.
"Nothing," she said. "I thought I could make you come." The girl spoke in a low tone, a kind of half-whisper. She did not lisp, yet her articulation of one or two consonants was not absolutely perfect.
"Where did you get that flower, Elsie?" said Miss Darley. It was a rare alpine flower, which was found only in one spot among the rocks of The Mountain.
"Where it grew," said Elsie Venner. "Take it." The teacher could not refuse her. The girl's finger-tips touched hers as she took it. How cold they were for a girl of such an organization!
The teacher went back to her seat. She made an excuse for quitting the school-room soon afterwards. The first thing she did was to fling the flower into her fireplace and rake the ashes over it. The second was to wash the tips of her fingers, as if she had been another Lady Macbeth. A poor, overtasked, nervous creature,—we must not think too much of her fancies.
After school was done, she finished the talk with the master which had been so suddenly interrupted. There were things spoken of which may prove interesting by-and-by, but there are other matters we must first attend to. IS THE RELIGIOUS WANT OF THE AGE MET?
To answer this question intelligently, we must first glance at the characteristics of the age. It is an age of remarkable activity. There have been industrious men in other days; there have been nations of whom it might be truly said, They were an industrious people, they lost no time in idleness: but their rate of speed was low. Such a people could hardly be deemed enterprising. They might continue uncomplainingly in their accustomed round of labors, but would lack impulse to attempt anything new. Circumstances did not compel them to unwonted efforts, and their capabilities lay dormant. The world was wide, the population comparatively sparse, and the means of subsistence not difficult of attainment.
Our age is very unlike to that. People begin to crowd one another. There is competition. The more active and ingenious will have the advantage; they do have the advantage; and this fact is a constant stimulus. It has been operating for thirty years past with ever-increasing power. We seem to be approaching a climax,—a point beyond which flesh and blood cannot go. The enterprise of the more active spirits of our day is astounding; we begin to ask, "Will they stop at anything? What will they not undertake?" There are a great many unsuccessful attempts; but these are not necessarily observed, they pass quietly into obscurity, while we hasten to observe the successes, which are wonderful, and so numerous as to keep us ever on tiptoe, looking for new wonders. Having seen the railways, the magnetic telegraph, and Hoe's press, in full operation, and having been brought to accept these as a common measure of time and motion, we find ourselves indisposed for older usages. We find our age an age of daring and of doing. We are ready to discard the word impossible; from our vocabulary; we deny that anything is the less probable because of being unprecedented. For doing new things we look about for new means,—being full charged with the belief that for all worthy or desirable ends there must be adequate and available means. In this regard, it is an age of unprecedented faith, of expectation of success; and we all know the natural and necessary influence of such an expectation. Sanguine expectation lights up the fires of genius; invention is quickened for the attainment of the highest speed and the greatest momentum. In no former age has there been anything to compare in rapidity and power of movement with the every-day achievements of this age. The relation of books to men, and the sphere assigned to books, are materially modified by the characteristics of the age. Books, as books, are no longer a charm to conjure with. The few really superior books have a wider and greater influence than ever before; while the great mass of common books have less, and pass more easily into oblivion. Good books may and must help us; but books cannot make us men of the nineteenth century, and a power in it. A thorough knowledge of the world within us, as it stands related to the world without us, is something quite different from mere book-knowledge. This is an element of influence not only not confined to the bookmen, but often possessed in a transcendent degree by those whose devotion to books is altogether subordinate to other avocations. Our common-school education may be said to bring the entire people upon a common plane. We are no longer the esoteric and the exoteric; we understand our rights in the common fund of sense and truth very well. We are not very patient with those who affect to know better than ourselves what we want and what we ought to desire. Most men are exceedingly in earnest, and determined to be heard in their own cause, and well able to make themselves understood. Scribes and Pharisees compassing sea and land to make one proselyte are a good and bad type of our activity in the pursuit of our own ends. Innumerable and infinitely varied are the shifts employed to secure attention, to effect the sale of merchandise, and to increase income. Nor are the learned professions much behind the men of merchandise. The contest of life thickens. Competition for the fruits of labor waxes continually more fierce. Mother Earth is too moderate in her labors; the ranks of the producers suffer from desertion; the plough is forsaken; the patient ox is contemned; silence, seclusion, and meditation are a memory of the past. The world's axis is changed; there is more heat in the North. The world has advanced, in our age, from a speed of five miles an hour, to twenty or thirty, or more.
Whatever may be thought of the advantages and disadvantages accruing from these movements, there can be no question of the fact, that they have greatly affected the position and the relations of speakers and hearers. The million have been driven to do so much for themselves, that they are in no little danger of jumping to the conclusion, that they no longer need teachers of religion. A conclusion so fraught with mischief to the race will not be arrested by a pertinacious adhesion to modes of preaching which men under the old-time training could be made to endure, but which latter-day contrasts have rendered intolerable.
It is just here, if anywhere, that a special backwardness on the part of the clergy to meet the religious wants of the age may, without injustice or unkindness, be alleged. It comes about very naturally; the training of the clergy is not in harmony with the exigencies of the position they are intended to occupy. The endeavors of the preparatory schools are not to be depreciated. It is scarcely possible to say too much of the fundamental importance of thoroughness and of minute accuracy in the rudiments of learning. But that extreme zeal in this behalf has produced an unnatural divorce of the practical from the critical, it is vain to deny. The devotion to the latter, which is inaugurated in the preparatory school, is by the college inflamed to the utmost, and the young man reaches his climax when he receives the appointment of valedictorian; that is his end; he reaches it, and we may say it is the death of him. He may, indeed, enter the theological seminary, industriously resolved on more of the same supremacy; but, in most instances, the great practical ends of a Christ-like life of doing good have been already lost from his view, and the ways and means by which alone such ends can be reached have become offensive to him. The student, as he delights in calling himself, has become greatly more interested in knowledge than in the people for whom he is to use his knowledge. A certain unknown God, an idol, in short, quite unsuspected, whose name is Critical Dignity, is installed in his heart, in the place of the Son of God. And the man endures the trials of his ministerial life under the mistaken impression that he is a martyr for Christ. He compels himself to be satisfied with a measure of attention to his utterances, which would content no sane and sensible man in any other department of teaching. He will tell you that it is one of the inevitable infelicities of his vocation, that to nothing are men such unwilling listeners as to religious truth; than which nothing can be more untrue; for to nothing are men so prepared to listen as to religious truth, properly presented.
In order to a more generally happy and successful prosecution of the duties of a minister of Christ, a preliminary fact requires to be considered. That a man is found or finds himself in any calling is no evidence whatever that he is fitted for that calling. This is just as true of the ministry as of any other vocation. Every man-of-business knows this. The clergy seem to us behind the age in being astonishingly blind to it. Men-of-business know that only a very small fraction of their number can ever attain eminent success. They know, that, in a term of twenty years, ninety-seven men in a hundred fail. Here and there one develops a remarkable talent for the specific business in which he is engaged. The ninety-and-nine discover that they have a weary contest to maintain with manifold contingencies and combinations which no foresight can preclude.
The application of this general truth to their profession the clergy are backward to perceive. The consequences of this backwardness are very hurtful to their interests. Because of this, we have an indefinite amount of puerile and undignified complaint from disappointed men, of disingenuous misrepresentation from incompetent men, who have entered upon labors they were never fitted to accomplish. Such men undertake their labors in ways that want and must want the Divine sanction; and they are tempted to ward off a just verdict of unsuitableness and of incompetency by bringing many and grievous charges against their flocks. "A mania for church-extending"; "a hankering for architectural splendor"; "or for discursive and satirical preaching"; "or for something florid or profound": these and the like imputations have been put forward, as a screen, by many an unsuccessful preacher, who failed,—simply failed,—not in selling horns or hides, shirtings or sugars,—but failed to recommend Christ and his gospel,—failed for want of head, or heart, or industry, or all three.
The man who embarks his all in hardware, drugs, or law, runs the risk of failure. If his neighbor can rise earlier, walk faster, talk faster, work harder, and hold on longer, he will get the avails that might suffice for both. This unalterable fact every business-man accepts.
Do you inquire, To what good purpose do you thrust the possibility of failure upon the attention of the candidate for the ministry? Would you utterly discourage those who are already more alive to the perils of their undertaking than we could wish them?
We answer, It is no kindness to encourage men to enter a ministry whose inexorable requirements and whose incidental possibilities they may not look in the face. It is no kindness to represent to them that the qualities which they possess ought to engage attention; and that their talents will command respect, or else it will be the fault of the people.
Men go into business in the face of a possibility of failure through uncontrollable circumstances; not in defiance of an ascertainable, insufferable incompetency. They toil on, accepting adversity with such equanimity as God gives them, so long as they are permitted to believe that their misfortunes are not chargeable upon their incapacity or self-indulgence. But when it is made apparent that they are not in their proper sphere, they think it no shame to say so, to withdraw, and to apply their energies to something suited to their tastes and capabilities. And it should be with the ministry; but as things now are, with the conceptions of the ministry now entertained, pride interposes to forbid the rectification of the most serious mistakes. It is a question of dignity and of scholarship; whereas it should be a question of love to God and man, and of real ability and conscious power to bring them together,—to reconcile man to God.
Our age is an age of great devotion to secular affairs,—of men who are great in the conduct of such affairs,—in every department in life. To counterbalance this, our ministry must be filled with an equally earnest devotion to God and salvation. In real ability our ministers ought to be not a whit behind. But ability is not necessarily scholarship; though it may, and as far as possible should, include that, and a great deal more. Let it be fully understood, once for all, that we have no disparaging remark to make of scholarship; a man must be foolish beyond expression, who pretends to argue that the highest scholarship is less than a most important and almost indispensable auxiliary to the minister of Christ. All our concern in the matter, just here, is, that it shall be fully understood that piety and real ability make the minister of Christ, and not scholarship; in the words of Augustine, "the heart makes the minister";—but we may safely assume that he meant the heart of a really able man; otherwise we can accord but a qualified respect to this remark.
The prevailing impression among the ministry appears to be, that the man who cannot write "an able doctrinal discourse" is but an inferior man, fit only to preach in an inferior place; and that it would be a great gain to the Church, if scholarship were only so general that the standard of the universities could be applied, and only Phi-Beta-Kappa men allowed to enter the ministry. No doubt, those who incline to this view are quite honest, and not unkindly in it. But those who think this grievously misunderstand the necessities of the age in which we live. Reading men know where to find better reading than can possibly be furnished by any man who is bound to write two sermons weekly, or even one sermon a week; and to train any corps of young men in the expectation that any considerable fraction of them will be able to win and to maintain a commanding influence in their parishes mainly by the weekly production of learned discourses is to do them the greatest injury, by cherishing expectations which never can be realized. Why do our educated men of other professions so seldom and so reluctantly contribute to the addresses in our religious assemblies? Precisely because they understand the difficulty of meeting the popular expectation which is created by the prevailing theory; a theory which demands that sermons, and not only that sermons, but also that all religious addresses, should be chiefly characterized as learned, acute, scholastic even. An Irish preacher is reported in an Edinburgh paper as saying lately, that "he had been led to think of his own preaching and of that of his brethren. He saw very few sermons in the New Testament shaped after the forms and fashion in which they had been accustomed to shape theirs. He was not aware of a sermon there, in which they had a little motto selected, upon which a disquisition upon a particular subject was hung. The sort of sermons which the people in his locality were desirous to hear were sermons delivered on a large portion of the Word of God, carrying through the ideas as the Spirit of God had done." And it is, in part at least, because of the prevailing disregard of this most reasonable desire, that parishes so soon weary of their ministers.
It need not discourage ministers to accept the fact that there will be failures in the ministry,—and a great many failures among those who rely for their success mainly upon the weekly production of learned disquisitions. Discouragement is not in accepting a fact that accords with all just theories of truth, but in adopting a theory which is sure to be invalidated by the almost universal experience of men in, as well as out of, the ministry. A right-minded minister may have many falls in struggling up his Hill of Difficulty; but the Lord will lift him up, and will save him from adding to the temperate grief proper to any measure of short-coming the intolerable poignancy that comes of cheating by false pretences,—of assuming to do what he knows or should know that he cannot do, namely, produce any considerable number of great sermons.
Let it, then, be frankly owned, that men, very good men, very capable men, have failed in the ministry. A. failed, because he did not study; B., because he did not visit his people; C., because he could not talk; D., because he was too grave; E., because he was too frivolous; F. could not, or would not, control his temper; G. alienated by exacting more than he received; and all of them because of not having what Scougal calls "the life of God in the soul of man."
It is not worth while for any man to go into the ministry who cannot relish the Apostle's invitation, running thus:—"I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service." If that seem not reasonable, ay, and exceedingly inviting too, better let it alone. All men cannot do all things. Better raise extraordinary potatoes than hammer out insignificant ideas. You do not see the connection? you were a Phi-Beta-Kappa man in college, and know that you can write better than many a man in a metropolitan pulpit? Very likely; but we of the few go to church to be made better men, and not by fine writing, but by significant ideas, which may come in a homely garb, so they be only pervaded with affectionate piety, but which can come to us only from one who has laid all ambitious self-seeking on the altar of God. There is a power of persuasion in every minister who follows God as a dear child, and who walks in love, as Christ loved us, which the hardest heart cannot long resist,—which will win the congregation, however an individual here and there may be able to harden himself against it. You think that the great power of the pulpit is in high doctrine, presented with metaphysical precision and acuteness. We have no disparagement to offer of your doctrinal knowledge, nor of your ability to state it with metaphysical precision and hair-splitting acuteness. But we know, from much experience, that there is a divine truth, and a fervor and power in imparting it, with which God inspires the man who is wholly devoted to Him, in comparison with which the higher achievements of the man who lacks these are trumpery and rubbish. Many, many men have failed in the ministry, are failing in the ministry every day, because their principal reliance has been upon what they deem their thorough mastery of the soundest theories of doctrine and of duty. They were confident they could administer to minds and hearts diseased the certain specific laid down in the book, admeasured to the twentieth part of a scruple. Confident in their theoretical acquisitions, they could not comprehend the indispensable necessity of a large experience in actual cases of mental malady. And for the want of such experience, it was absolutely impossible that they should be en rapport with the souls they honestly desired to benefit. Can you heal a heart-ache with a syllogism? There is no dispensing with the precept and prescription,—"Weep with those that weep!" "Be of the same mind one toward another!"
Theories of doctrine and of practice are not without their value; but the minister who is merely or chiefly a theorist, whether in doctrines or in measures, is an adventurer; and the chances against him are as many as the chances against the precise similarity of any two cases presented to his attention,—as many as the chances against the education of any two men of fifty years being precisely alike, in every particular and in all their results. The soul's problems are not to be solved by theories. Such was not the practice of the Great Physician; "surely, He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." Theories shirk that. "In all their affliction, He was afflicted; in His love and in His pity, He redeemed them." And precisely in this way his ministers are now to follow up his practice. Our age is growing less and less tolerant of formality,—less and less willing to accept metaphysical disquisition in place of a warm-hearted, loving, fervent expansion of the Word of God, recommended to the understanding and to the sensibility by lively illustrations of spiritual truth, derived from all the experience of life, from all observation, from all analogies in the natural world,—in short, from every manner of illumination, from the heavens above, from the earth beneath, and from the waters which are under the earth. God is surely everywhere, and hath made all things, and all to testify of Him; and the innumerable voices all agree together.
And when this is both understood and felt, what rules shall be given to guide and control the construction and the delivery of discourses? Shall we say, The people must be brought back to the old-time endurance—ay, endurance, that is the word—of long-drawn, laborious ratiocinations, wherein the truth is diligently pursued for its own sake, with an ultimate reference, indeed, to the needs and uses of the hearer, but so remote as rarely to be noticed, except by that very small fraction of any customary congregation who may chance to have an interest in such doings,—some of whom watch the clergyman as they would the entomologist, running down a truth that he may impale it, and add one more specimen to his well-ordered collection of common and of uncommon bugs? Our neighbors in the South do better than this; for they hunt with the lasso, and never throw the noose except to capture something which can be harnessed to the wheels of common life.
No, the people are not going back to the endurance of any such misery. They have found out that still-born rhetoric is by no means the one thing needful, and care far less for the art of speech than for the nature of a holy heart. They want a man to speak less of what he believes and more of what he feels. The expectation of bringing the people again to endure prolonged metaphysical discriminations, spun out of commonplace minds, cobwebs to cloak their own nakedness and universal inaptitude, if indulged, is absurdly indulged. The whole Church is sick of such trifling. She knows well that it has made her most unsavory to those who might have found their way into the temples of God, or kept their places there, but for the memory of an immense amount of wearisome readings from the pulpit,—too often a vocabulary of words seldom or never found out of sermons,—a manner of speech which, when tried by the sure test of natural, animated conversation, must be pronounced absurd and abominable. It is a wonder of wonders, that, in spite of such drawbacks, an individual here and there has been reclaimed from worldliness to the love and service of God.
The student-habits of the clergy most naturally lead them to prefer the formal statement, the studied elaboration of ideas, which their own training cannot but render facile and dear to them. And there is here and there a man who, in virtue of extraordinary genius, can infuse new life into worn-out phrases,—a man or two who can for a moment or for an hour, by the very weight and excellence of their thoughts, and because they truly and deeply feel them, arrest the age, and challenge and secure attention, in spite of all the infelicities of an antiquated style and an unearthly delivery. But in this age, more than ever before, we are summoned to surrender our scholastic preferences and esoteric honors to the exigencies of the million. And the men of this generation have, without much conference, come with great unanimity to the determination that they will not long endure, either in or out of the pulpit, speakers who are dull and unaffecting, whether from want of words, ideas, or method and wisdom in the arrangement of them, or lack of sympathies,—and especially that they will not endure dull declamation from the pulpit.
If any man really wish to know how he is preaching, let him imagine himself conversing earnestly with an intelligent and highly gifted, but uneducated man or woman, in his own parlor, or with his younger children. Would any but an idiot keep on talking, when, with half an eye, he might discern TEDIOUS, wrought by himself, upon the uncalloused sensibilities of his hearers?
How long ought a sermon to be? As long as you can read in the eye of seven-eighths of your audience, Pray, go on. If you cannot read that, you have mistaken your vocation; you were never called to the ministry. The secret of the persuasive power of our favorite orators is in their constant recognition of the ebb and flow of the sensibilities they are acting upon. Their speech is, in effect, an actual conversation, in which they are speaking for as well as to the audience; and the interlocutors are made almost as palpably such as at the "Breakfast- Table" of our dramatic "Autocrat" In contrast with this, the dull preacher, falling below the dignity and the privilege of his office, addresses himself, not to living men, but to an imaginary sensibility to abstract truth. The effect of this is obvious and inevitable; it converts hearers into doubters as to whether in fact there be any such thing as a religion worth recommending or possessing, and preachers into complainers of the people as indifferent and insensible to the truth,—a libel which ought to render them liable to fine and punishment. God's truth, fairly presented, is never a matter of indifference or of insensibility to an intelligent, nor even to an unintelligent audience. However an individual here and there may contrive to withdraw himself from the sphere of its influence, truth can no more lose her power than the sun can lose his heat.
The people, under the quickening influences characteristic of our age, are awaking to the consciousness, that, on the day which should be the best of all the week, they have been defrauded of their right, in having solemn dulness palmed upon them, in place of living, earnest, animated truth. Let not ministers, unwisely overlooking this undeniable fact, defame the people, by alleging a growing facility in dissolving the pastoral relation,—a disregard of solemn contracts,—a willingness to dismiss excellent, godly, and devoted men, without other reason than the indisposition to retain them. Be it known to all such, that capable men very department of life were never in such request as at this very hour; and never, since the world began, was there an audience so large and so attentive to truth, well wrought and fitted to its purpose, as now.