Just what is it, I wonder, that a minister may preach without hazarding his job? It is said persistently that the trouble with the church at the present day is that the ministers no longer preach the Word of God; that if Christian Truth were again taught with the old vigor, people would hear it gladly. This is, I believe, an enormous fallacy. I know churches where strict orthodoxy has been preached uninterruptedly for years, and which have steadily declined in spite of it—or because of it. Not long ago, in a great assembly of one of the strongest denominations, when that cry for a return to the “Old Bible Truth” was raised, one minister rose and attacked the plea, declaring that he had never faltered in his devotion to ancient dogma, and yet his church was dying. And even so, many churches whose walls echo uninterruptedly an absolutely impeccable orthodoxy are failing. We shall not easily persuade Smith to forego the golf-links on Sunday morning to hear the “Old Gospel Truth” preached in out-worn, meaningless phrases. Those old coins have the gold in them, but they must be recast in new moulds if they are again to pass current.
III
The difficulties of the clergy are greatly multiplied in these days. The pulpit has lost its old authority. It no longer necessarily follows that the ministers are the men of greatest cultivation in their community. The Monday morning newspapers formerly printed, in my town, pretty full excerpts of sermons. I recall the case of one popular minister whose sermons continued to be printed long after he had removed to another city. Nowadays nothing from the pulpit that is not sensational is considered worth printing. And the parson has lost his social importance, moving back slowly toward his old place below the salt. He used to be “asked,” even if he was not sincerely “expected” at the functions given by his parishioners; but this has changed now that fewer families have any parson to invite.
A minister’s is indubitably the hardest imaginable lot. Every one criticizes him. He is abused for illiberality, or, seeking to be all things to all men, he is abused for consorting with sinners. His door-bell tinkles hourly, and he must answer the behest of people he does not know, to marry or bury people he never heard of. He is expected to preach eloquently, to augment his flock, to keep a hand on the Sunday school, to sit on platforms in the interest of all good causes, and to bear himself with discretion amid the tortuous mazes of church and secular politics. There seem to be, in churches of all kinds, ambitious pontiffs—lay popes—possessed of an ambition to hold both their fellow laymen and their meek, long-suffering minister in subjection. Why anyone should wish to be a church boss I do not know; and yet the supremacy is sometimes won after a struggle that has afforded the keenest delight to the cynical Smiths on the outside. One must view these internecine wars more in sorrow than in anger. They certainly contribute not a little to popular distrust of the church as a conservator of love and peace.
There are men in the ministry who can have had no clear vocation to the clerical life; but there are misfits and failures in all professions. Some of these, through bigotry or stupidity, do much to justify Smith’s favorite dictum that there is as much Christianity outside the church as within it. Now and then I find a Smith whose distrust of religion is based upon some disagreeable adventure with a clergyman, and I can’t deny that my own experiences with the cloth have been, on one or two occasions, disturbing. As to the more serious of these I may not speak, but I shall mention two incidents, for the reason that they are such trifles as affect Smith with joy. Once in a parish-meeting I saw a bishop grossly humiliated for having undertaken to rebuke a young minister for wearing a chasuble, or not wearing it, or for removing it in the pulpit, or the other way round,—at any rate, it was some such momentous point in ecclesiastical millinery that had loosened a frightful fury of recrimination. The very sight or suggestion of chasubles has ever since awakened in me the most unchristian resentment. While we fought over the chasuble I suppose people actually died within bow-shot of the church without knowing that “if any man sin we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.”
And speaking of bishops, I venture the interpolation that that office, believed by many to be the softest berth in Zion as it exists in the Episcopal Church, is in fact the most vexatious and thankless to which any man can aspire; nor have I in mind the laborious lives of adventurous spirits like Whipple, Hare, and Rowe, but others who carry the burdens of established dioceses, where the troubles of one minister are multiplied upon the apostolic head by the number of parishes in his jurisdiction.
Again, at a summer resort on our North Atlantic Coast once familiar to me, there stood, within reach of fierce seas, one of the most charming of churches. It was sought daily by visitors, and many women, walking the shore, used to pause there to rest, for prayer, or out of sheer curiosity. And yet it appeared that no woman might venture into this edifice hatless. The locum tenens, recalling St. Paul’s question whether it is “comely that a woman pray unto God uncovered,” was so outraged by the visits of hatless women to the church that he tacked a notice on the door setting forth in severe terms that, whereas men should enter the church bareheaded, women should not desecrate the temple by entering uncovered. I remember that when I had read that warning, duly signed with the clergyman’s name, I sat down on the rocks and looked at the ocean for a long time, marveling that a sworn servant of God, consecrated in his service by the apostles’ successors, able to spend a couple of months at one of the pleasantest summer resorts in America, should have been horror-struck at the unholy intrusion of a hatless girl in his church, when people in the hot city he had fled suffered and died, ignorant of the very name of Christ.
IV
“My church home” is an old phrase one still hears in communities whose social life is not yet wholly divorced from the church. There is something pleasant and reassuring in the sound of it; and I do not believe we shall ever have in America an adequate substitute for that tranquility and peace which are still observable in towns where the church retains its hold upon the larger part of the community, and where it exercises a degree of compulsion upon men and women who find in its life a faith and hope that have proved not the least strong of the bulwarks of democracy. In wholly strange towns I have experienced the sense of this in a way I am reluctant to think wholly sentimental. Where, on crisp winter evenings, the young people come trooping happily in from the meetings of their own auxiliary societies, where vim and energy are apparent in the gathering congregation, and where one sees with half an eye that the pastor is a true leader and shepherd of his flock—in such a picture there must be, for many of us, something that lays deep hold upon the heart. They are not concerned in such gatherings with higher criticism, but with cleanness and wholesomeness of life, and with that faith, never to be too closely scrutinized or analyzed, that “singeth low in every heart.”
One might weep to think how rare those pictures must become—one might weep if there were not the great problems now forced upon us, of chance and change, that drive home to all thinking men and women the great need of infusing the life of the spirit into our industrial and political struggles. If, in the end, our great experiment in self-government fail, it will be through the loss of those spiritual forces which from the beginning have guided and ruled us. It is only lately that we have begun to hear of Christian socialism, and a plausible phrase it is; but true democracy seems to me essentially Christian. When we shall have thoroughly christianized our democracy, and democratized our Christianity, we shall not longer yield to moods of despair, or hearken to prophets of woe.