- It is a great mistake to suppose that we must look mainly to professional clergymen for instruction in divine things. It is a significant fact that the most able and important books that have been published within the last decade have been written by laymen or by persons, like Emerson, who have outgrown the narrow garments of a caste profession and have laid them off. How to get along without professional ministers has been well answered by Capt. Robert C. Adams (quoted in the writer’s book, Man—Whence and Whither? pp. 218, 219).
If ministers would give up the holy-orders idea, cast into the sea the millstone incumbrance of pecuniary dependence, engage earnestly in some legitimate work to support themselves, they would then for the first time begin to realize what soul-freedom is, and they could then preach with an intelligence and power and with a satisfaction to themselves of which they now know nothing. Let them try it for themselves and learn a lesson. Whether the clerical order is so divine an institution that we have no right to call it into question or to abolish it altogether, is a question that must be practically considered soon.
- There is a deep impression widely prevailing among thoughtful and sincerely religious persons that the infidelity of the pulpit is largely responsible for the prevailing skepticism of the age. The word “infidelity” is here specially used in a strict philological sense—infidele, not faithful, unfaithfulness to a trust—but it is also used in its more general sense of disbelief in certain religious dogmas.
We impeach and arraign the clergy (admitting a few honorable exceptions) on the general charge of infidelity in the strictest and broadest sense of the word—
1st. In that they fail to qualify themselves to be the leaders of thought in the great, living questions affecting religion and morality. We have elsewhere said: “Not one minister in a thousand ‘discerns the signs of the times’ or is prepared for the crisis. Few pastors ever read anything beyond their own denominational literature. Their education is partial, one-sided, professional. They cling to mediaeval superstitions with the desperate grasp of drowning men. The great majority of the clergy are not men of broad minds and wide and deep research, and have not the ability to meet the vexed questions of to-day.”
It is an admitted policy, especially among the orthodox clergy (so called), not to read or to listen to anything that might unsettle their faith in what they have accepted as a finality; whereas no man can intelligently believe anything until he has candidly considered the reasons assigned by other men for not believing what he does. “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him.”
Professor Fisher, the champion of Yale-College orthodoxy, has recently admitted in the North American Review that at least one of the causes of the decline of clerical authority and influence is the increased intelligence of the laity. If the people cannot get what they desire from the pulpit, they will seek it from the platform and the press. Truth is no longer to be concealed in cloisters and smothered in theological seminaries, but it is to be proclaimed from housetops and in language understood in every-day life.
It was once said that “the lips of the priest give knowledge,” but it may now be truly said that modern scientists and philosophers among the laity are the principal teachers of mankind, and that publications like the North American Review and The Forum, and last, but not least, the secular daily newspapers, are doing more to instruct the people in living truths than the whole brood of ecclesiastical parrots.
2d. We charge that many professional clergymen suppress things which they do believe to be true, and not unfrequently suggest things, at least by implication, which they do know to be false.
Dr. Edward Everett Hale recently published an article in the North American Review entitled “Insincerity in the Pulpit;” and the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks of Boston, who recently received episcopal honors in Massachussetts, has confirmed in the Princeton Review what Dr. Hale charged in the North American Review regarding clerical disingenuousness. Dr. Brooks wrote thus: