That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?
As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of purgatory: “You may go further and fare worse, my lord,” so may I say to my Jewish friends—“Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah—and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God’s people to pause and ask, ‘Has He not arisen already?’”
I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.
It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.
I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too few to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not take to ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues of that village preacher of whom it was written that:
Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray.
A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain;
The long-remembered beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud,
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,
Sate by the fire, and talked the night away;
Wept o’er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,
Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won.
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow,
And quite forgot their vices in their woe;
Careless their merits or their faults to scan,
His pity gave ere charity began.