PREACHERS.
‘It is neither the vote nor the laying on of hands that gives men the right to preach. One’s own heart is authority. If he cannot preach to edification, he is not authorized, though all the ministers of Christendom ordain him.’
hus writes a popular preacher of the conservative sect in theology: recognizing a spiritual fact and conviction which tempts us to analyze and define, as a subject of natural history, the function and fame of the preacher. The term by its derivation is the most generic word to indicate clerical vocation; ‘to say before,’ to proclaim, inculcate, preach; in other words, to be the herald and representative of truth, right, faith, and immortal hope,—such is the basis and logical claim of the preacher’s authority, under whatever form, creed, or character. They may be divided into the inspired, the ascetic, the jovial, the belligerent, the finical, the shrewd, and the ingenuous. The ‘oily man of God’ described by Pope, Scott’s Covenanter, and Friar Tuck, the disinterested Vicar of Fielding, Shakspeare’s good friars and ambitious cardinals, Mawworm, Mrs. Inchbald’s Dorimel, the gentle hero of the Sexton’s Daughter, Manzoni’s Prelate and Capuchin, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s Monks, are genuine and permanent types, only modified by circumstances. All that is subtle in artifice, all that is relentless in the love of power, all that is exalted in spiritual graces, all that is base in cunning, glorious in self-sacrifice, beautiful in compassion, and noble in allegiance, has been and is manifest in the priest. His great distinction is based upon the fact that ‘the church, rightly ministered, is the vestibule to an immortal life.’ He is at once the author of the worst tyranny and the grandest amenities of social life. The traveller on Alpine summits blesses the name of St. Bernard, and descends to Geneva to shudder at the bigoted ferocity of Calvin. The picture of the good pastor in the Deserted Village, and Ranke’s Lives of the Popes, give us the two extremes of the character. The spiritual heroism of Luther, the religious gloom of Cowper, and the cheerful devotion of Watts, are but varied expressions of one feeling, which, according to the frail conditions of humanity, has its healthy and its morbid phase, its authentic and its spurious exposition, and is no more to be confounded in its original essence with its imperfect development and representatives, than the pure light of heaven with the accidental mediums which colour and distort its rays.
The prestige of the clerical office is greatly diminished because many of its prerogatives are no longer exclusive. ‘When ecclesiasticism became so weak as to be unable to regulate international affairs, and was supplanted by diplomacy, in the castle the physician was more than a rival for the confessor, in the town the mayor was a greater man than the abbot.’[39] The clergy, at a former period, were the chief scholars; learning was not less their distinction than sanctity. In every intelligent community, this source of influence is now shared with men of letters; and even the once peculiar office of public instruction, is now filled by the lecturer, who takes an evening from the avocations of business or professional life, to claim intellectual sympathy or impart individual opinions. But the great agent in breaking up the monopoly of the pulpit has been the press. Written has in a great measure superseded oral thought. Half the world are readers, and the necessity of hearing no longer exists to those desirous of knowledge. The sermons of the old English divines abound with classical learning and comments on the times, such as are now sought in periodical literature. In Latimer, Andrews, and Donne, we find such hints of the prevailing manners as subsequently were revealed by The Spectator. The philosophy of antiquity and the morals of courts, the facts of distant climes, all that we now seek in popular books and the best journals, came to the minds of our ancestors through the discourses of preachers. American ministers, prior to and at the era of the Revolution, were the expositors of political as well as religious sentiments. Independent of the priestly rites, therefore, a clergyman, in past times, represented social transitions, and ministered to intellectual wants, for which we of this age have adequate provision otherwise; so that the most zealous advocate of reform, doctrine, or ethical philosophy, is no longer obliged to have recourse to the sacerdotal office, in order to reach the public mind. This apparent diminution of the privileges of the order, however, does not invalidate but rather simplifies its claims. In this as in so many other functions of the social economy, progress has the effect of reducing to its original elements the duties and the influence of the profession. Education, once their special responsibility, and popular enlightenment on the questions of the hour, being assumed by others, the preacher is free to concentrate his abilities on theology and the religious sentiment. Division of labour gives him a better opportunity to be ‘clear in his great office.’ It is reduced to its normal state. Except in isolated and newly-settled communities, there is not that incessant appeal to his benevolence and erudition: to heal the sick, reconcile litigants, argue civic questions, teach the elements of science, promote charities; in a word, to be the village orator and social oracle, are not the indispensable requisites of a clergyman’s duty which they were before the Newspaper and the Lyceum existed. He is, therefore, at liberty to imitate the apostles of Christianity and the fathers of the church, and bring all his power to awaken devotion and faith, and all his learning to the defence of sacred truth. That the time and capacity of the profession are diffused, and the sympathy of its members enlisted in behalf of other than these aims, is, indeed, true; but this is a voluntary and not an inevitable result, and only proves that the spirit of the age overlays instead of being penetrated and ruled by the priestly office.
‘Civilization,’ says Lamartine, ‘was of the sanctuary. Kings were only concerned with acts; ideas belonged to the priest.’ And, by a singular contradiction, with the general progress of society, the same class, as a whole, have proved the most antagonistic to innovation even in the form of genius, whose erratic manifestations are jealously regarded as inconsistent with professional decorum. Hence Byron, in one of his splenetic moods, exclaimed to Trelawney: ‘When did parsons patronize genius? If one of their black band dares to think for himself, he is drummed out or cast aside like Sterne and Swift.’ On the other hand, venerable physicians say that the clergy are the most efficient promoters of medical innovations; and that quackery owes its social prestige in no small degree to their countenance.
After the Reformation, this office, as such, lost its specialty; the right to exercise it was no longer peculiar; and in all societies and epochs, when a great activity of the religious sentiment, or an earnest discussion of questions of faith prevailed, men prayed, sermonized, commented on Scripture, and mingled all the duties of the clerical vocation with their own pursuits. Thus the English statesmen of Cromwell’s time were versed in divinity, exhorted, and published tracts in behalf of their creeds. Theology was a popular study; and the kingdom swarmed with lay-preachers. Sects, too, repudiated official leaders; and even among the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, ministers betrayed a jealousy of encroachments on the part of their unconsecrated brethren. Many Christians also recognized spiritual gifts as the exclusive credentials of a priesthood. Church, not less than State prerogatives were challenged by republican zeal; and the historical authority of the order being thus openly invaded, a new and more rational test was soon applied, and preachers, like kings, were made amenable to the tribunal of public opinion, and obliged to rest their claims on other than traditional or educational authority. ‘On conserva,’ says Rochambeau, writing of American society at the period of the Revolution, ‘au ministre du culte le première place dans les repas publics; il bénissoit le repas; mais ses prérogatives ne s’entendoient pas plus loin dans la société.[40] Cet exposé,’ he adds, evidently in view of priestly corruption in France, ‘doit amener naturellement des mœurs simples et pures.’[41] ‘They,’ says the historian of preachers at the time of the Revolutionary war, ‘dealt in no high-sounding phrases of liberty and equality; they went to the very foundations of society, showed what the rights of man were, and how those rights became modified when men gathered into communities. The profound thought and unanswerable arguments, found in these sermons, show that the clergy were not a whit behind the ablest statesmen of the day in their knowledge of the great science of human government. In reading them one gets at the true pulse of the people, and can trace the steady progress of the public sentiment. The rebellion in New England rested on the pulpit, received its strongest impulse, indeed its moral character, from it; the teachings of the pulpit of Lexington caused the first blow to be struck for American independence.’
The tendency of all the so-called liberal professions is to limit and pervert the development of character, by giving to knowledge a technical shape, and to thought a prescriptive action. Conformity to a specific method is unfavourable to original results, and organization often does injustice to its subjects. Only the strong men, the brave, and the highly endowed, rise above such restrictions. It is a kind of social necessity alone which reconciles the man of scientific genius to seek the passport of a medical diploma,—the logician to exert his mind exclusively before a legal tribunal, and the votary of religious truth to sign a creed and become responsible to a congregation. How constantly each breaks away from his respective sphere to expatiate in the broad kingdom of letters! Would Humboldt have written the Cosmos had his life been confined to a laboratory, or a round of medical practice? Would Burke have theorized in so comprehensive a range if chained to an attorney’s desk, or Sir Henry Vane’s martyrdom acquired a holier sanction from the mere title of priest?
At the first glance, so distinct are the phases of the office that it is difficult to realize its identity. The ideal of a village pastor like Oberlin, self-devoted, in a secluded district, to the most pure and benevolent enterprise,—the life of a Jesuit missionary in Canada or Peru, who seems to incarnate the fiery zeal of the church he represents,—the complacent bishop of the Establishment, listlessly going through a prescribed form, and his very person embodying worldly prosperity; and the inelegant but earnest Methodist swaying the multitude at a camp-meeting in the wilds of America,—consider the vast contrast of the pictures: the dark robe, lonely existence, and subtle eye of the Catholic; the simple, friendly, conscientious toil of the poor vicar; the scholarship and good dinners of the English bishop; the cathedral decked with the trophies of art, and fields lit up by watch-fires; the silence of the Quaker assembly, and the loud harangue and frantic moans of the ‘revival;’ the solemn refinement of the Episcopal, the intellectual zeal of the Unitarian, and the gorgeous rites of the Roman worship; and an uninformed spectator, to whom each was a novelty, would imagine that a totally diverse principle was at work. To the philosophic eye, the ceremonies, organization, costume, rites, and even creeds of Christian sects, are but the varied manifestations of a common instinct, more or less mingled with other human qualities, and influenced in its development by time and place. Traced back to its source, and separated from incidental association, we find a natural sentiment of religion which is represented in social economy by the preacher. Simple as was the original relation between the two, however, in the process of time it has become so complicated that it now requires no ordinary analytical power to divest the idea of the priest from history, and that of religion from the church, so as to perceive both as facts of human nature instead of parts of the machinery of civilized life. To do this, indeed, we look inward, and derive from consciousness the great idea of a religious sentiment; and then ask ourselves how far it is justly represented in the institutions of the church and the persons of her ministers. Let this process be tried by a man of high endowments, genuine aspirations, and noble sympathies, and what is the result? ‘Milton,’ says Dr. Johnson, in his life of that poet, ‘grew old without any visible worship,’ a phrase which, considering the superstition of the writer, and the exalted devotional sentiment of the subject, has, to our minds, a most pathetic significance. It tacitly admits that Milton worshipped his Maker; it brings him before us in a venerable aspect, at the time when he was blind, proscribed, and indigent; we recall his image at the organ, and seem to catch the symphonies of Paradise Lost and the Hymn on the Nativity; and yet we are told by the greatest votary of religious forms and profession among English literary men—one who was oppressed by the sense of religious truth, and a slave to church requirements, that, in his old age, the reverential bard had no ‘visible worship.’ It is an admission of great moment; it is a fact infinitely suggestive. Why did not Milton practically recognize any organized church, or publicly enact any prescribed form? Not altogether because he had tasted of persecution, and been driven, by the force of individual opinion, away from popular rites; but also, and to a far greater degree, because he had so fully experienced within himself the force and scope of the religious sentiment, and found in its prevalent representation, not an incitement, but a hindrance to its exercise.