The Rev. Mr. Savage’s ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.
The first thing to be noted is the candor of the man, the great sincerity which marks whatever he says and does. His theology is simple; his creed, which is neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene, nor the utterances of modern pontiffs, but in a measure his own, is readily comprehended, and betrays a sweet reasonableness which invites the subscription of anyone without fear or trembling or convulsive revolution. And while some of his fundamental beliefs impinge against current prejudices and awaken enmities, he fearlessly submits them to the judgment and common sense of mankind. What he believes he preaches, and what he does not he rejects with all the vehemence of a man of conviction. Correct modes or forms of religious thought he conceives to be necessary, and the more so the firmer will be one’s principles of duty. Yet essential and sanctifying as this is, more essential in his opinion is an honest mind,—a mind that is faithful in the pursuit of truth and true to its own convictions and inspirations. He believes that the most perfect man is he who is most diligent in duty and fervent in spirit; who incorporates the truth into his selfhood; who toils with a prompt and ardent devotion to know the truth, to maintain his opinions firmly, to diffuse and propagate them by every means consistent with a perfect character. With unselfish courage Mr. Savage resists every allurement to compromise. Never timid, never complaisant or patronizing, he exhibits some of the rarest virtues of the human mind. Oh that there were more like him in this indolent and obsequious world!
Compared with Mr. Savage’s strength of character, how contemptible are some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason, intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world, have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters, too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for game,—for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.
Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but never a deficiency in character,—in the word and spirit of what he proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight, truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions, that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion.
He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be due to some sacred calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and truth’s propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his dignified position.
The creed-test of the Andover theological school may be unwarranted at the present time. Yet while there is such a test, and the old creed comes up and insists upon being reaffirmed in its original meaning by each incumbent, we are bewildered the moment we attempt to harmonize what happened there recently with stalwart conviction and vital piety. Within a few months we have seen the Andover creed, over which there has been so much wrangling, and some of whose doctrines make the human heart to-day sink in despair, receiving unqualified indorsement. With unfaltering confidence this ancient creed was reaffirmed by a professor of that school of divinity without modifying the conditions of subscription. This surprises us. It may be that the recently inducted Professor of Sacred Rhetoric did not signify explicit allegiance to this creed, whose doctrines are so inflexibly maintained by our older theologians, but simply gave his assent, just as the clergy of the noble Church of England are giving their assent, but not their strict adherence, to the Thirty-nine Articles. And yet what is progressive orthodoxy, so boldly and ably enunciated, but a growing away from the old Andover creed?
Or is it only a question of emphasis, not of dogma? Are we to infer that the old dogma abides, while only the emphasis alters? It may be that progressive orthodoxy is not what it professes to be, that instead of giving religious thought a definite impulse and being a necessary onward step in sacred learning, religious thought is only receiving a richer and deeper volume as it lies in its old bed. Be this as it may, the verbal assent and subscription of the new incumbent gave fresh force to every dogma of the old faith. True, we could not expect him to be so recreant as to disown this venerable creed, to break the traditional thread and cease to be the heir of his sires.
Yet we should like to see progressive orthodoxy, or the New Theology, of Andover mean something; represent, without the slightest misgiving, some distinctive dogma, some fresh insight into religious truth. At present it is an unintelligible hypothesis. It does not appear to be definitely settled. A master hand has sketched it, but there are none to complete and make it triumphant. Why not go to the root of the matter? Progressive orthodoxy is yet only “in the air.” On paper it is inspiring; in practice, a paradox to the discomfiture of every friend of the revival of religious thought. It is subtle and disputatious, and predicts for itself a reforming mission, but it has not the courage of its convictions; it looks like a clever juggling of divinity. We may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but unless we have deep convictions and feel the intensity of the principles we are attempting to promulgate, we are as sounding brass; we lower the dignity of truth and moral worth, we offend the purity of conscience. Filled with the ecstasies of an office while enacting an untruth is satanic; it is unworthy of any trained intelligence. Honest conviction is the indispensable condition of the preacher and teacher. Without it he compromises the sacred character of his particular commission, of his appointed trust.
All this is meant to throw light upon the artless simplicity, the outspoken but sensitive judgment, the indefinable strength of character, of the Rev. Mr. Savage. Beneath all he says and does we may see the calm utterance of unwavering convictions and an individuality unimpaired. He is thoroughly possessed with the sense of duty; he has his being there. There is nothing spurious in him; he disguises no hypocrisy. We see in him no secret acquiescence with what he cannot conscientiously accept. Always standing in the full light of the incomparable obligation and privilege of his work,—which is a cheerful, happy exercise, not a doleful and despondent one,—he influences the world not only as a teacher, but as a character. He proclaims the sanctity of his office not by a set of pious phrases, but by a spotless devotion to it, as the only way by which he most completely can subserve the public welfare. This perpetually invests the man and his ministry with interest and with an almost magic power.
The ethical intensity of Mr. Savage’s character unfolds itself in his preaching as a consistent result. In the sermon the convictions of the man are not sacrificed. He puts more than words into his sermons; he puts himself. He speaks the truth “bluntly,” as if it were not a hard but an easy attainment, and an element of human nature. Without pretension or self-exaltation, craving no man’s praise and envying no man’s distinction, he endeavors in an unwavering and high-spirited manner to disclose in his sermons the great verities, the substantial realities, of life.