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

was to determine where I could best
advance the ideals to which I have given my life--where I could find
the weapons or tools best fitted to my hand for the doing 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