Preaching and Paganism | Page 4

real reasons
why we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of
a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly,
therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to offer
men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts, so that
their lives may be lifted above Pharisaism and moral self-consciousness,
made acquainted with the higher and comprehensive interpretations of

the heart and mind of our race. For only thus can they approach life
reverently and humbly. Only thus will they revere the integrity of the
human spirit; only thus can they regard it with a magnanimous and
catholic understanding and measure it not by the standards of
temperamental or sectarian convictions, but by what is best and highest,
deepest and holiest in the race. No one needs more than the young
preacher to be drawn out of the range of narrow judgments, of
exclusive standards and ecclesiastical traditions and to be flung out
among free and sensitive spirits, that he may watch their workings,
master their perceptions, catch their scale of values.
A discussion, then, dealing with this aspect of our problem, would raise
many and genuine questions for us. There is the more room for it in this
time of increasing emphasis upon machinery when even ministers are
being measured in the terms of power, speed and utility. These are not
real ends of life; real ends are unity, repose, the imaginative and
spiritual values which make for the release of self, with its by-product
of happiness. In such days, then, when the old-time pastor-preacher is
becoming as rare as the former general practitioner; when the lines of
division between speaker, educator, expert in social hygiene, are being
sharply drawn--as though new methods insured of themselves fresh
inspiration, and technical knowledge was identical with spiritual
understanding--it would be worth while to dwell upon the culture of the
pastoral office and to show that ingenuity is not yet synonymous with
insight, and that, in our profession at least, card-catalogues cannot take
the place of the personal study of the human heart. But many
discussions on this Foundation, and recently those of Dr. Jowett, have
already dealt with this sort of analysis. Besides, today, when not merely
the preacher, but the very view of the world that produced him, is being
threatened with temporary extinction, such a theme, poetic and
rewarding though it is, becomes irrelevant and parochial.
Or we might turn to the problem of technique, that professional
equipment for his task as a sermonizer and public speaker which is
partly a native endowment and partly a laborious acquisition on the
preacher's part. Such was President Tucker's course on The Making and
Unmaking of the Preacher. Certainly observations on professional

technique, especially if they should include, like his, acute discussion
of the speaker's obligation to honesty of thinking, no less than integrity
of conduct; of the immorality of the pragmatic standard of mere
effectiveness or immediate efficiency in the selection of material; of the
aesthetic folly and ethical dubiety of simulated extempore speaking and
genuinely impromptu prayers, would not be superfluous. But, on the
other hand, we may hope to accomplish much of this indirectly today.
Because there is no way of handling specifically either the content of
the Christian message or the problem of the immediate needs and
temper of those to whom it is to be addressed, without reference to the
kind of personality, and the nature of the tools at his disposal, which is
best suited to commend the one and to interpret the other.
Hence such a discussion as this ought, by its very scale of values--by
the motives that inform it and the ends that determine it--to condemn
thereby the insincere and artificial speaker, or that pseudo-sermon
which is neither as exposition, an argument nor a meditation but a
mosaic, a compilation of other men's thoughts, eked out by impossibly
impressive or piously sentimental anecdotes, the whole glued together
by platitudes of the Martin Tupper or Samuel Smiles variety. It is
certainly an obvious but greatly neglected truth that simplicity and
candor in public speaking, largeness of mental movement, what
Phillips Brooks called direct utterance of comprehensive truths, are
indispensable prerequisites for any significant ethical or spiritual
leadership. But, taken as a main theme, this third topic, like the others,
seems to me insufficiently inclusive to meet our present exigencies. It
deals more with the externals than with the heart of our subject.
Again we might address ourselves to the ethical and practical aspects of
preaching and the ministry. Taking largely for granted our
understanding of the Gospel, we might concern ourselves with its
relations to society, the detailed implications for the moral and
economic problems of our social and industrial order. Dean Brown, in
The