A NOTED AMERICAN PREACHER.
BY DUNCAN McDERMID, M. A.
It is interesting, while it is said that preaching is losing its ancient power, to find here and there a preacher whose influence is increasing instead of diminishing. One of these is the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., of the Unitarian Church.
The writer desires to call attention to the two essential conditions of this preacher’s influence and popularity. This will be instructive not only to the public, but to the clerical profession as well. One of these conditions may be found in the wide latitude of American opinion, especially as it expresses itself in New England, and particularly in the city of Boston where Mr. Savage spent many years as a preacher.
I.
In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies the secret of a man’s strength and greatness. The individual shares the endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments. Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual, and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.