To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work

by H. C. G. Moule

"THE PULSE OF THE MACHINE."

How shall I speak of "parish-work"? It would be a boundless subject if treated in detail and in the style of a directory of methods. But such a treatment is far from my purpose. To undertake it, I should not only need to be a widely experienced Pastor, which I cannot claim to be, for my life for many years has been mainly devoted to academic teaching; I should need to be several widely experienced Pastors bound up into one living volume. So let no one expect to find here a prescription for the right plans and right practice of the many departments of the rural pastorate, or of the urban, or suburban; directions how to organize work, and how to develop it; how to deal with the Sunday School, or the Day School, or the Institute, or the Guild, or the Visitors' Meeting, or the Missionary Association. My hope is rather to get behind all these things to the pulse of the busy machinery; to offer a few hints to my younger Brethren "how to do it," from the point of view of their personal and inner preparedness for the multifold work, and to state some plain general principles which may run through all the doing.

VISITING.

I set before me then the Curate, and the Parish, with its demands for pastoral labour, and particularly for Visitation. Well do I know how immense the differences are between place and place in this same matter of visitation; how the parish of a few hundreds, or even of two or three thousand, is one thing, and the parish of ten, or eighteen, or twenty thousand is another. I know that there are parishes, in London for example, where all the efforts of a staff of devoted Clergy seem to fail to do more than touch the edges of the work of domestic visitation. Yet surely even in such cases that work must not, and will not, be quite given up as hopeless. A little, where only a little is possible, is vastly better than none; even if it be only the visitation of the sick, and of those who immediately surround them, and with whom the sick-visit gives the Clergyman an opportunity. Such efforts, where nothing more of the kind is possible, if only done in an unmistakable spirit of love and self-sacrifice, must carry good to the people. And do not forget that they must, quite as necessarily, carry good to the Clergyman. For they are a means, for which nothing else can be quite the substitute, of bringing him into contact with the people's thoughts and lives in ways which will tell usefully (as we have seen in an earlier page) upon his whole ministry, particularly upon his work in the pulpit, and at the mission-room desk, and in the open air.

But, to be as practical as possible, I will assume that the Curacy is of a more normal kind than that just supposed. The parish, whether in country or in town, is not so large as to make visitation from house to house impossible. And the Curate has had his work of this kind assigned him, and is setting out upon it. A good portion of every day (though I hope it is possible to give a part of one day each week to some sort of wisely managed holiday) is devoted to "the district"; now for a steady round of calls, door by door; now, in an irregularity not without method, for visits to special cases of sickness, or sorrow, or other need.

PREPARE FOR VISITATION WITH PRAYER.

What shall be my first suggestion? It shall point to the Throne of Grace. Preface the pastoral round with special secret prayer. Sermons are usually (I wish it were always so now) prefaced with prayer in the pulpit that the heavenly blessing may rest upon the ordinance. Is it less fitting, less necessary, to prepare for the afternoon's or evening's visitation with a secret petition in your own room that the apostolic ordinance of domestic visitation [Acts xx. 20, 21.], to be administered now by you, may have the special grace of God in it? Pray for yourself, my younger Brother.

*PRAY FOR SPIRITUAL READINESS AND SPIRITUAL FULNESS.

Ask that you may go out well furnished with the peace, and patience, and wisdom laid up for you in your Lord; that you may have "by the Holy Spirit a right judgment in all things"; that you may have "the tongue of the taught,[15] to speak a word in season to them that are weary"; whatever sort of weariness it is. Pray for that secret skill of discernment which can see the difference of spiritual states, and allot warning or comfort not at random but "in due season." Pray for that readiness for the unexpected which is best secured and best maintained in a close and conscious intimacy with your Saviour. The man "found in Him" will be found ready in spirit (and that is after all the essential in spiritual work) for the sudden question, whether anxious or captious, for the sudden rudeness of ignorance or opposition, and again for the chronic and so to speak passive difficulty of indifference. "The tongue of the taught," while the "taught" man is found in Christ, will ever be sweet, wise, and truthful, as the owner of it goes his round. But we must seek for it; "He will be enquired of for this thing." [Ezek. xxxvi. 37.]

[15] Isai. l. 4. Obviously the word "learned" in our Version is there used in its old English sense, "instructed, taught." No slight on "book-learning" is ever conveyed in the Scriptures. But the man in view here is not the highly-educated person, but the believer who has listened with the ear "of the taught" (see the end of the verse), as a disciple at the Master's feet; and so goes forth to speak with "the tongue of the taught," as a messenger who has learned sympathy, insight, holy tact and truthfulness, from the Master's heart. The whole passage is full of the blessed Messiah Himself, I know. But it has its reflected reference for all His true followers, and above all for all His true Ministers. May He give us, in His mercy, for every act of our messenger-work, both the ear and the tongue of His "taught" ones.