Furthermore, the teacher will find the Britannica a valuable biographical dictionary. This he will already have realized, if he has looked up the biographical articles mentioned in connection with the history of education. The following is a brief outline course in psychological biography:

CHAPTER XXIV
FOR MINISTERS

The Great Preachers

The minister or candidate for the ministry will find a valuable course of reading laid out for him in this Guide under the heading Bible Study, and it might be said with little exaggeration that any systematic course of reading in the Encyclopaedia Britannica should add to the efficiency and power of one who would be an ideal pastor. If the schools of the Middle Ages could truly call all the arts and sciences hand-maids and helpers to Theology, much more truly, in the present age, should the minister, in order that he may minister truly, know not merely the history of the Bible and of the Church, the results of modern criticism, and of comparative religion and folk-lore, but, almost as fully, general history, literature, philosophy, psychology, education, something of the fine arts, much of law and political science, and still more of social science and economics. In a period of specialization he cannot afford to be a specialist—or, it might be nearer the truth to say that, like every other true specialist, he must make all knowledge, all the circle of the sciences, tributary to his specialty, which is the knowledge and the improvement of the human soul. The suggestions that follow must necessarily be fragmentary, and should be considered as including merely a few topics not covered in the chapter on Bible Study nor in the other courses which, as has just been suggested, a minister might profitably pursue.

The article Sermon (Vol. 24, p. 673) is by Edmund Gosse, librarian of the House of Lords, biographer of John Donne, Jeremy Taylor and Dr. Thomas Browne. The writer is especially conversant with the English literature of the 17th century, in the middle of which, to quote his article, “the sermon became one of the most highly-cultivated forms of intellectual entertainment in Great Britain, and when the theatres were closed at the Commonwealth it grew to be the only public form of eloquence.”

Each name on the following list of great preachers is accompanied by volume and page reference to the biographical sketch in the Britannica, containing criticism of the preacher and a bibliography of his works and of works about him, so that the articles supply the basis for a study of the world’s great preachers.

These lists could easily be made longer and fuller, but the articles mentioned give such a view of the great preachers of the world as cannot fail to stimulate any minister. Supplementing what has been said above about the necessity of the minister’s being a well-rounded man, it may be worth while to notice that Donne and Keble and, in a less degree, Doane and Muhlenberg, were poets as well as preachers; that Cudworth was known as the founder of the Cambridge Platonists, and Jowett as the translator of Plato, Barrow as a mathematician, second, in his day, only to Isaac Newton, Edward Everett Hale as an essayist and writer of short stories, and McCook as a great naturalist.