The so-called learned professions are only another example of the Division of Labor. We usually say there are three learned professions: Theology, Medicine and Law. As to which is the greatest is a much-mooted question and has caused too many family feuds for me to attempt to decide it. And so I evade the issue and say there is a fourth profession, that is only allowed to be called so by grace, but which in my mind is greater than them all—the profession of Teacher. I can conceive of a condition of society so high and excellent that it has no use for either doctor, lawyer or preacher, but the teacher would still be needed. Ignorance and sin supply the three "learned professions" their excuse for being, but the teacher's work is to develop the germ of wisdom that is in every soul.
And now each of these professions has divided up, like monads, into many heads. In medicine, we have as many specialists as there are organs of the body. The lawyer who advises you in a copyright or patent cause knows nothing about admiralty; and as they tell us a man who pleads his own case has a fool for a client, so does the insurance lawyer who is retained to foreclose a mortgage. In all prosperous city churches, the preacher who attracts the crowd in the morning allows a 'prentice to preach to the young folks in the evening; he does not make pastoral calls; and the curate who reads the service at funerals is never called upon to perform a marriage ceremony except in a case of charity. Likewise the teacher's profession has its specialists: the man who teaches Greek well can not write good English; the man who teaches composition is baffled and perplexed by long division; and the teacher who delights in trigonometry pooh-poohs a kindergartner.
Just where this evolutionary dividing and subdividing of social cells will land the race no man can say; but that a specialist is a dangerous man, is sure. He is a buzz-saw with which wise men never monkey. A surgeon who has operated for appendicitis five times successfully is above all to be avoided. I once knew a man with lung trouble who inadvertently strayed into an oculist's and was looked over and sent away with an order on an optician. And should you through error stray into the office of a nose and throat specialist, and ask him to treat you for varicose veins, he would probably do so by nasal douche.
Even now a specialist in theology will lead us, if he can, a merry "ignis-fatuus" chase and land us in a morass. The only thing that saved the priest in days agone was the fact that he had so many duties to perform that he exercised all his mental muscles, and thus attained a degree of all-roundness which is not possible to the specialist. Even then there were not lacking men who found time to devote to specialties: Bishop Georgius Ambrosius, for instance, who in the Fifteenth Century produced a learned work proving that women have no souls. And a like book was written at Nashville, Tennessee, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, by the Reverend Hubert Parsons of the Methodist Episcopal Church (South), showing that negroes were in a like predicament. But a more notable instance of the danger of a specialty is the Reverend Cotton Mather, who investigated the subject of witchcraft and issued a modest brochure incorporating his views on the subject. He succeeded in convincing at least one man of its verity, and that man was himself, and thus immortality was given to the town of Salem, which, otherwise, would have no claim on us for remembrance, save that Hawthorne was once a clerk in its custom-house.
A very slight study of Colonial history will show any student that, for two centuries, the ministers in New England occupied very much the same position in society that the priest did during the Middle Ages. As the monks kept learning from dying off the face of the earth, so did the ministers of the New World preserve culture from passing into forgetfulness. Very seldom, indeed, were books to be found in a community except at the minister's. And during the Seventeenth Century, and well into the Eighteenth, he combined in himself the offices of doctor, lawyer, preacher and teacher. Mr. Lowell has said: "I can not remember when there was not one or more students in my father's household, and others still who came at regular intervals to recite. And this was the usual custom. It was the minister who fitted boys for college, and no youth was ever sent away to school until he had been drilled by the local clergyman."
And it must further be noted that genealogical tables show that very nearly all of the eminent men of New England were sons of ministers, or of an ancestry where ministers' names are seen at frequent intervals. As an intellectual and moral force, the minister has now but a rudiment of the power he once exercised. The tendency to specialize all art and all knowledge has to a degree shorn him of his strength. And to such an extent is this true, that within forty years it has passed into a common proverb that the sons of clergymen are rascals, whereas in Colonial days the highest recommendation a youth could carry was that he was the son of a minister.
The Reverend John Hancock, grandfather of John Hancock the patriot, was for more than half a century the minister of Lexington, Massachusetts. I say "the minister," because there was only one: the keen competition of sect that establishes half a dozen preachers in a small community is a very modern innovation.
John Hancock, "Bishop of Lexington," was a man of pronounced personality, as is plainly seen in his portrait in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. They say he ruled the town with a rod of iron; and when the young men, who adorned the front steps of the meetinghouse during service, grew disorderly, he stopped in his prayer, and going outside soundly cuffed the ears of the first delinquent he could lay hands upon. In his clay there was a dash of facetiousness that saved him from excess, supplying a useful check to his zeal—for zeal uncurbed is very bad. He was a wise and beneficent dictator; and government under such a one can not be improved upon. His manner was gracious, frank and open, and such was the specific gravity of his nature that his words carried weight, and his wish was sufficient.
The house where this fine old autocrat lived and reigned is standing in Lexington now. When you walk out through Cambridge and Arlington on your way to Concord, following the road the British took on their way out to Concord, you will pass by it. It is a good place to stop and rest. You will know the place by the tablet in front, on which is the legend: "Here John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sleeping on the night of the Eighteenth of April, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, when aroused by Paul Revere."
The Reverend Jonas Clark owned the house after the Reverend John Hancock, and the ministries of those two men, and their occupancy of the house, cover one hundred years and five years more. Here the thirteen children of Jonas Clark were born, and all lived to be old men and women. When you call there I hope you will be treated with the same gentle courtesy that I met. If you delay not your visit too long, you will see a fine, motherly woman, with white "sausage curls" and a high back-comb, wearing a check dress and felt slippers, and she will tell you that she is over eighty, and that when her mother was a little girl she once sat on Governor Hancock's knee and he showed her the works in his watch.