Preaching and Paganism | Page 2

its genius,
demanded the ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian England

responded to the open-air evangelism of Whitefield and Wesley; the
next century found the Established Church divided against itself by the
learning and culture of the Oxford Movement. Sometimes a
philosopher and theologian, like Edwards, initiates the Great
Awakening; sometimes an emotional mystic like Bernard can arouse all
Europe and carry men, tens of thousands strong, over the Danube and
over the Hellespont to die for the Cross upon the burning sands of Syria;
sometimes it is the George Herberts, in a hundred rural parishes, who
make grace to abound through the intimate and precious ministrations
of the country parson. Let us, therefore, devote this chapter to a review
of the several aspects of the Christian ministry, in order to set in its just
perspective the one which we have chosen for these discussions and to
see why it seems to stand, for the moment, in the forefront of
importance. Our immediate question is, Who, on the whole, is the most
needed figure in the ministry today? Is it the professional ecclesiastic,
backed with the authority and prestige of a venerable organization? Is it
the curate of souls, patient shepherd of the silly sheep? Is it the
theologian, the administrator, the prophet--who?
One might think profitably on that first question in these very informal
days. We are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms of authority
which, while salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not many of us
err, just now, by overmagnifying our official status. Many of us instead
are terribly at ease in Zion and might become less assured and more
significant by undertaking the subjective task of a study in ministerial
personality. "What we are," to paraphrase Emerson, "speaks so loud
that men cannot hear what we say." Every great calling has its
characteristic mental attitude, the unwritten code of honor of the group,
without a knowledge of which one could scarcely be an efficient or
honorable practitioner within it. One of the perplexing and irritating
problems of the personal life of the preacher today has to do with the
collision between the secular standards of his time, this traditional code
of his class, and the requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the
smug conformities, the externalized procedures of average society,
somewhat pietized, and join that large company of good and ordinary
people, of whom Samuel Butler remarks, in The Way of All Flesh, that
they would be "equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion

doubted, or at seeing it practised?" There are ministers who do thus
content themselves with being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt
the standards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the code
and manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at the risk
of becoming an official, a "professional"? Or does he possess the
insight, and can he acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis of
Assisi or Father Damien and adopt the Christian ethic and thus join that
company of the apostles and martyrs whose blood is the seed of the
church? A good deal might be said today on the need of this sort of
personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But, provocative and
significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too purely
subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of the needs
of this moment.
Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own particular
and gradually perfected human skill. An interesting study, then, would
be the analysis of that rich content of human insights, the result of
generations of pastoral experience, which form the background of all
great preaching. No man, whether learned or pious, or both, is equipped
for the pulpit without the addition of that intuitive discernment, that
quick and varied appreciation, that sane and tolerant knowledge of life
and the world, which is the reward given to the friends and lovers of
mankind. For the preacher deals not with the shallows but the depths of
life. Like his Master he must be a great humanist. To make real
sermons he has to look, without dismay or evasion, far into the heart's
impenetrable recesses. He must have had some experience with the
absolutism of both good and evil. I think preachers who regard sermons
on salvation as superfluous have not had much experience with either.
They belong to that large world of the intermediates, neither positively
good nor bad, who compose the mass of the prosperous and respectable
in our genteel civilization. Since they belong to it they cannot lead it.
And certainly they who do not know the absolutism of evil cannot very
well understand sinners. Genuine satans, as Milton knew, are not
weaklings and traitors who have declined from the standards of