There never was a time when in all denominations of Christians there was so much attractive sermonizing as to-day. Princeton, and Middletown, and Rochester, and New Brunswick, are sending into the ministry a large number of sharp, earnest, consecrated men. Stupidity, after being regularly ordained, is found to be no more acceptable to the people than before, and the title of Doctorate cannot any longer be substituted for brains. Perhaps, however, there may get to be a surfeit of fine discourses. Indeed, we have so many appliances for making bright and incisive preachers that we do not know but that after a while, when we want a sleepy discourse as an anodyne, we shall have to go to the ends of the earth to find one; and dull sermons may be at a premium, congregations of limited means not being able to afford them at all; and so we shall have to fall back on chloral or morphine.
Are we not, therefore, doing a humanitarian work when we give to congregations some rules by which, if they want it, they may always have poor preaching?
First. Keep your minister poor. There is nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board of trustees look over their books and see if they have erred in this direction; and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per annum. What these good men do with so much money we cannot imagine. Our ministers must be taken in. If by occasional fasting for a day our Puritan fathers in New England became so good, what might we not expect of our ministers if we kept them in perpetual fast? No doubt their spiritual capacity would enlarge in proportion to their shrinkage at the waistcoat. The average salary of ministers in the United States is about six hundred dollars. Perhaps by some spiritual pile-driver we might send it down to five hundred dollars; and then the millennium, for the lion by that time would be so hungry he would let the lamb lie down inside of him. We would suggest a very economical plan: give your spiritual adviser a smaller income, and make it up by a donation visit. When everything else fails to keep him properly humble, that succeeds. We speak from experience. Fourteen years ago we had one, and it has been a means of grace to us ever since.
Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with frequent committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's gate, and go in and tell him how to preach, and pray, and visit. Tell him all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great man his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much better his children behaved. Pastoral committees are not like the small-pox—you can have them more than once; they are more like the mumps, which you may have first on one side and then on the other. If, after a man has had the advantage of being manipulated by three church committees, he has any pride or spirit left, better give him up as incorrigible.
Thirdly. To secure poor preaching, keep the minister on the trot. Scold him when he comes to see you because he did not come before, and tell him how often you were visited by the former pastor. Oh, that blessed predecessor! Strange they did not hold on to the angel when they had him. Keep your minister going. Expect him to respond to every whistle. Have him at all the tea parties and "the raisings." Stand him in the draught of the door at the funeral—a frequent way of declaring a pulpit vacant. Keep him busy all the week in out-door miscellaneous work; and if at the end of that time he cannot preach a weak discourse, send for us, and we will show him how to do it. Of course there are exceptions to all rules; but if the plan of treatment we have proposed be carried out, we do not see that any church in city or country need long be in want of poor preaching.
CHAPTER XXIX.
SHELVES A MAN'S INDEX.
In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even a house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the house of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left, and are in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant curtains of reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to keep the sun from looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in.
The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construction such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few wood-cuts in plain frames or pinned against the wall; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle taken one day, as his family told us, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to nothing else, it is his favorite picture, though it gives him a face more than ordinarily severe and troubled.