A Statement: On the Future of This Church | Page 2

of my work--and there to stand. To remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other!
But there was another consideration which held me to this impersonal relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4] much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the realization of this ideal in institutional form. This same Great War, however, had distracted my parish, absorbed the energies and attention of my people, and in spite of wellnigh unexampled forbearance, had introduced elements of misunderstanding and even alienation. The conflict, in other words, had no more left our church unchanged than the world itself. We had been shaken and distressed and tortured and driven, so that we were no longer the persons we once were. You knew me, and I knew you, as we were yesterday; but we did not know one another as we were going to be, or should want to be, tomorrow. It was necessary that we should meet not on the plane of the past, nor even of the present, but on the plane of the future, and thus find ourselves again, and discover what now, in this new world, we wanted, and would be able, to do together. Months before the War was ended, it had clearly entered into my mind to summon you to conference on our future relations as minister and people. This invitation from Chicago but precipitated suddenly what was in itself inevitable sooner or later. It introduced into a problem already existing between you and me, a third element--namely, the people of Abraham Lincoln Centre. The problem, however, in its nature, remained the same. I have work to do. I have set my hand to the plow, and I must find the field where I can best drive this plow through the furrow of my sowing.
In order to make plain the situation, as it has presented itself to my mind during the last five weeks, I must turn to the past for a moment, and bring to you therefrom some fragments of autobiography. Those of you who were present at the meeting on last Monday night, have already heard what I am about to say. I beg your undivided attention, none the less, that you may note the bearing of this recital not on a problem presented, as then, but on a decision made, as now.
I entered the Unitarian ministry in the year 1904, [5] under the influence of motives not unfamiliar. In the first place, I saw the pulpit. I went into the ministry for the same primary reason which has held me there through all these years gone by--a desire to preach. I think I can say, in no spirit of boasting, that from my earliest days I have had an intense interest in the problem of truth, and a passion to interpret and defend by the spoken word, the truth as I saw it, to other men. It is just this passion, I suppose, which makes the preacher, as distinguished from the poet or the scientist. So Phillip Brooks would seem to suggest in his famous dictum, that preaching is "Truth (conveyed) through Personality." Furthermore, the truth which I desired to expound was theological in its nature. My whole approach to the problem was along the lines of speculation in the field of religious, as distinguished from political or social, thought. God, the soul, immortality, the origin and destiny of man, sin and salvation--these were the questions that held me, even as a boy, partly, I suppose, because of native inclination, partly because of careful training in a Unitarian home and church, mostly I am convinced because I early came under the spell of that prince of liberal preachers, Dr. Minot J. Savage. To do what Dr. Savage was doing each Sunday, preaching to eager throngs the great truths of the Unitarian gospel--this became the consuming ambition of my life. I wanted to stand in a pulpit and preach. I decided to do so; and if judgment in such a question can be based on experiences of inward joy, I am ready to testify that my decision was not unwise.
I entered the church, therefore, primarily because it had a pulpit. But other reasons, not so decisive, and yet impressive, persuaded me to this same end. Thus I saw in the church not only a pulpit but an altar. Indeed,