It is to be wished that some alteration could be made in the mode of remunerating the clergy. At present, they have usually small salaries and large presents. Nothing is more natural than that grateful individuals or flocks should like to testify their respect for their pastor by adding to his comforts and luxuries: but, if all the consequences were considered, I think the practice would be forborne, and the salary increased instead. In the present state of morals, it happens that instances are rare where one person can give pecuniary benefit to another without injury to one or both. Sympathy, help, may be given, with great mutual profit; but rarely money or money's worth.[34] This arises from the false associations which have been gathered round wealth, and have implicated it too extensively with mental and moral independence. Any one may answer for himself the question whether it is often possible to regard a person to whom he is under pecuniary obligation with precisely the same freedom, from first to last, which would otherwise exist. If among people of similar views, objects, and interests, this is felt as a difficulty, it is aggravated into a great moral danger when spiritual influences are to be dispensed by the aided and obliged party. I see no safety in anything short of a strict rule on the part of an honourable pastor to accept of no gift whatever. This would require some self-denial on the part of his friends; but they ought to be aware that giving gifts is the coarsest and lowest method of testifying respect and affection. Many ways are open to them: first by taking care that their pastor has such a fixed annual provision made for him as will secure him from the too heavy pressure of family cares; and then by yielding him that honest friendship, and plain-spoken sympathy, (without any religious peculiarity,) which may animate him in his studies and in his ministrations.
The American clergy being absolved from the common clerical vices of ambition and cupidity, it remains to be seen whether they are free also from that of the idolatry of opinion. They enter upon their office generally with pious and benevolent views. Do they retain their moral independence in it?—I cannot answer favourably.
The vices of any class are never to be imputed with the full force of disgraces to individuals. The vices of a class must evidently, from their extent, arise from some overpowering influences, under whose operation individuals should be respectfully compassionated, while the morbid influences are condemned. The American clergy are the most backward and timid class in the society in which they live; self-exiled from the great moral questions of the time; the least informed with true knowledge; the least efficient in virtuous action; the least conscious of that christian and republican freedom which, as the native atmosphere of piety and holiness, it is their prime duty to cherish and diffuse. The proximate causes of their degeneracy in this respect are easily recognised.
It is not merely that the living of the clergy depends on the opinion of those whom they serve. To all but the far and clear-sighted it appears that the usefulness of their function does so. Ordinary men may be excused for a willingness to seize on the precept about following after the things that make for peace, without too close an inquiry into the nature of that peace. Such a tendency may be excused, but not praised, in ordinary men. It must be blamed in all pastors who believe that they have grasped purer than ordinary principles of gospel freedom.
The first great mischief which arises from the disinclination of the clergy to bring what may be disturbing questions before their people, is that they themselves inevitably undergo a perversion of views about the nature of their pastoral office. To take the most striking instance now presented in the United States. The clergy have not yet begun to stir upon the Anti-Slavery question. A very few Presbyterian clergymen have nobly risked everything for it; some being members of Abolition societies; and some professors in the Oberlin Institute and its branches, where all prejudice of colour is discountenanced. But the bulk of the Presbyterian clergy are as fierce as the slave-holders against the abolitionists. I believe they would not object to have Mr. Breckinridge considered a sample of their body. The episcopalian clergy are generally silent on the subject of Human Rights, or give their influence against the Abolitionists. Not to go over the whole list of denominations, it is sufficient to mention that the ministers generally are understood to be opposed to abolition, from the circumstances of their silence in the pulpit, their conversation in society, and the conduct of those who are most under their influence. I pass on to the Unitarians, the religious body with which I am best acquainted, from my being a Unitarian myself. The Unitarians believe that they are not liable to many superstitions which cramp the minds and actions of other religionists. They profess a religion of greater freedom; and declare that Christianity, as they see it, has an affinity with all that is free, genial, intrepid, and true in the human mind; and that it is meant to be carried out into every social arrangement, every speculation of thought, every act of the life. Clergymen who preach this live in a crisis when a tremendous conflict of principles is taking place. On one side is the oppressor, struggling to keep his power for the sake of his gold; and with him the mercenary, the faithlessly timid, the ambitious, and the weak. On the other side are the friends of the slave; and with them those who, without possibility of recompense, are sacrificing their reputations, their fortunes, their quiet, and risking their lives, for the principle of freedom. What are the Unitarian clergy doing amidst this war which admits of neither peace nor truce, but which must end in the subjugation of the principle of freedom, or of oppression?
I believe Mr. May had the honour of being the first Unitarian pastor who sided with the right. Whether he has sacrificed to his intrepidity one christian grace; whether he has lost one charm of his piety, gentleness, and charity, amidst the trials of insult which he has had to undergo, I dare appeal to his worst enemy. Instead of this, his devotion to a most difficult duty has called forth in him a force of character, a strength of reason, of which his best friends were before unaware. It filled me with shame for the weakness of men, in their noblest offices, to hear the insolent compassion with which some of his priestly brethren spoke of a man whom they have not light and courage enough to follow through the thickets and deserts of duty, and upon whom they therefore bestow their scornful pity from out of their shady bowers of complacency.—Dr. Follen came next: and there is nothing in his power that he has not done and sacrificed in identifying himself with the cause of emancipation. I heard him, in a perilous time, pray in church for the "miserable, degraded, insulted slave; in chains of iron, and chains of gold." This is not the place in which to exhibit what his sacrifices have really been.—Dr. Channing's later services are well known. I know of two more of the Unitarian clergy who have made an open and dangerous avowal of the right: and of one or two who have in private resisted wrong in the cause. But this is all. As a body they must, though disapproving slavery, be ranked as the enemies of the abolitionists. Some have pleaded to me that it is a distasteful subject. Some think it sufficient that they can see faults in individual abolitionists. Some say that their pulpits are the property of their people, who are not therefore to have their minds disturbed by what they hear thence. Some say that the question is no business of theirs. Some urge that they should be turned out of their pulpits before the next Sunday, if they touched upon Human Rights. Some think the subject not spiritual enough. The greater number excuse themselves on the ground of a doctrine which, I cannot but think, has grown out of the circumstances; that the duty of the clergy is to decide on how much truth the people can bear, and to administer it accordingly.—So, while society is going through the greatest of moral revolutions, casting out its most vicious anomaly, and bringing its Christianity into its politics and its social conduct, the clergy, even the Unitarian clergy, are some pitying and some ridiculing the apostles of the revolution; preaching spiritualism, learning, speculation; advocating third and fourth-rate objects of human exertion and amelioration, and leaving it to the laity to carry out the first and pressing moral reform of the age. They are blind to their noble mission of enlightening and guiding the moral sentiment of society in its greatest crisis. They not only decline aiding the cause in weekdays by deed or pen, or spoken words; but they agree in private to avoid the subject of Human Rights in the pulpit till the crisis be past. No one asks them to harrow the feelings of their hearers by sermons on slavery: but they avoid offering those christian principles of faith and liberty with which slavery cannot co-exist.
Seeing what I have seen, I can come to no other conclusion than that the most guilty class of the community in regard to the slavery question at present is, not the slave-holding, nor even the mercantile, but the clerical: the most guilty, because not only are they not blinded by life-long custom and prejudice, nor by pecuniary interest, but they profess to spend their lives in the study of moral relations, and have pledged themselves to declare the whole counsel of God.—Whenever the day comes for the right principle to be established, let them not dare to glory in the glory of their country. Now, in its martyr-age, they shrink from being confessors. It will not be for them to march in to the triumph with the "glorious army." Yet, if the clergy of America follow the example of other rear-guards of society, they will be the first to glory in the reformation which they have done their utmost to retard.
The fearful and disgraceful mistake about the true nature of the clerical office,—the supposition that it consists in adapting the truth to the minds of the hearers,—is already producing its effect in thinning the churches, and impelling the people to find an administration of religion better suited to their need. The want of faith in other men and in principles, and the superabundant faith in themselves, shown in this notion of pastoral duty, (which has been actually preached, as well as pleaded in private,) are so conspicuous, as to need no further exposure. The history of priesthoods may be referred to as an exhibition of its consequences. I was struck at first with an advocacy of Ordinances among some of the Unitarian clergy, which I was confident must go beyond their own belief. I was told that a great point was made of them, (not as observances but as ordinances,) because the public mind required them. I saw a minister using vehement and unaccustomed action, (of course wholly inappropriate,) in a pulpit not his own; and was told that that set of people required plenty of action to be assured the preacher was in earnest. I was told that when prejudices and interests have gathered round any point of morals, truth ceases to be truth, and it becomes a minister's duty to avoid the topic altogether. The consequences may be anticipated.—"What do you think, sir, the people will do, as they discover the backwardness of their clergy?" I heard a minister of one sect say to a minister of another.—"I think, sir, they will soon require a better clergy," was the reply. The people are requiring a better clergy. Even in Boston, so far behind the country as that city is, a notable change has already taken place. A strong man, full of enlarged sympathies, has not only discerned the wants of the time, but set himself to do what one man may to supply them. He invites to worship those who think and feel with him, as to what their communion with the Father must be, to sustain their principles and their cheer in this trying time. A multitude flocks round him; the earnest spirits of the city and the day, whose full hearts and worn spirits can find little ease and refreshment amidst the abstract and inappropriate services of ministers who give them truth as they judge they can receive it. Nothing but the whole truth will satisfy those who are living and dying for it. The rising up of this new church in Boston is an eloquent sign of the times.[35]
An extraordinary revelation of the state of the case between the clergy and the people was made to me, most unconsciously, by a minister who, by the way, acknowledges that he avoids, on principle, preaching on the subjects which interest him most: he thinks he serves his people best, by carrying into the pulpit subjects of secondary interest to himself. This gentleman, shocked with the tidings of some social tyranny on the anti-slavery question, exclaimed, "Such a revelation of the state of people's minds as this, is enough to make one leave one's pulpit, and set to work to mend society." What a volume do these few words disclose, as to the relation of the clergy to the people and the time!
What the effect would be of the clergy carrying religion into what is most practically important, and therefore most interesting, is shown as often as opportunity occurs; which is all too seldom. When Dr. Channing dropped, in a sermon last winter, that legislatures as well as individuals were bound to do the will of God, every head in the church was raised or turned; every eye waited upon him. When another minister preached on being 'alone,' and showed how the noblest benefactors of the race, the truest servants of God, must, in striking out into new regions of thought and action, pass beyond the circle of common human sympathies, and suffer accordingly, many a stout heart melted into tears; many a rigid face crimsoned with emotion; and the sermon was repeated and referred to, far and near, under the name of "the Garrison sermon;" a name given to it, not by the preacher, but by the consciences of some and the sympathies of others. Contrast with such an effect as this the influence of preaching, irrelevant to minds and seasons. If such sayings are admired or admitted at the moment, they are soon forgotten, or remembered only in the general. "Don't you think," said a gentleman to me, "that sermons are sadly useless things for the most part? admonitions strung like bird's eggs on a string; so that they tell pretty much the same, backwards or forwards, one way or another."