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COMRADE SPONSOR SOCIAL MEDIATOR
LECTURES FOR 1909 ON THE GEORGE SHEPARD FOUNDATION
BANGOR THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY
BY
ALBERT JOSIAH LYMAN
Aulh. -of "Preaching in the New Age,"
"A Plain Man's Working Vienu of
Biblical Inspiration, " etc.
NEW YORK
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
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COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY
THOMAS Y, CROWELL & COMPANY
Published, November, 1909
316769
This little volume is dedicated and inscribed
in affectionate honor to my beloved people of
the South Congregational Church and Parish,
Brooklyn, whose unswerving fellowship has been
my joy and song during all the six and thirty
years of my ministry among them, and in whose
faith and patience and wonderful unity of kind-
ness I have seemed to find both clear warrant
and noble witness for that view of the Christian
Pastorate which, in tribute to them, is here lov-
ingly, though imperfectly, outlined.
October 24, 1909.
PREFATORY NOTE
President's House,
Bangor Theological Seminary,
BANGOR, MAINE.
My dear Dr. Lyman:
Dr. George Shepard, Professor of Homi-
letics in Bangor Theological Seminary from
1836 to 1868, was one of the great preachers
of his time, declining invitations to pulpits in
Boston and New York in order to do his loved
work of teaching.
Your lectures were the " George Shepard "
Lectures on Preaching and Pastoral Service,
named in his honor. You were the fifth in-
cumbent of the lectureship, following Dr.
Charles E. Jefferson, Dr. Amory H. Bradford,
Professor Hugh Black, D. D., and Professor
Edward C. Moore, D. D. These lectures came
in " Convocation Week," February 1-5, 1909,
and your associated lecturers on other Founda-
tions for the year were Dr. Hamilton W. Ma-
bie, of The Outlook, New York, and Professor
vi PREFATORY NOTE
Marian P. Beach, D. D., of Yale University.
You and your associates spoke day after day
to a great company of Students, Ministers,
Teachers, and citizens of Eastern Maine, who,
with the most eager and responsive enthusiasm
listened to the noble and inspiring addresses.
Your lectures, in addition to their high gen-
eral excellence, were enhanced in value be-
cause you had previously visited our students
at Bangor, and had privately conferred with
them about their felt personal needs, so that
the laboratory or inductive method might be
adopted throughout.
The effect of the lectures was moving and
profound. It will remain with your auditors
all their lives. It will distinctly mark for good
many pastorates.
Our Faculty rejoices to learn that you are
to give these lectures a wider circulation
through the printed page. Nothing is more
needed in our time than a renewal of power
in the pastorate. If you shall be willing to
retain the direct and personal phrasing of the
lectures, they will be, I am sure, all the more
effective because of their more intimate appeal
thereby.
Let me afresh thank you for your work in
PREFATORY NOTE
vu
the name of our Faculty and Students. Permit
me to remain, my dear Doctor Lyman,
Ever gratefully and affectionately yours,
DAVID N. BEACH.
October 23, 1909.
FOREWORD
I HAVE yielded, with no little misgiving, to
the courteous urgency of the Class of 1909 in
Bangor Theological Seminary, reinforced by
the generous consent of its President and the
Faculty, asking that the Lectures delivered
before the class during " Convocation Week "
last February, upon the " George Shepard "
Foundation, and relating to some aspects of
the Pastoral Office in our Modern Time should
be put in type.
My misgiving has to do with both the form
and the substance of these addresses. As to
form, there is none to speak of. The Lectures
are informal Talks merely, with no preten-
sion to literary finish, a handful of hints
rather than a treatise, a challenge at the gate
not intended for veterans or for experts, but
thrown out, in the manner of quick-fire con-
versation, to meet, at once and on the level,
the eager and high interrogation of a group
of young men standing at the gateway of
a great vocation. They are therefore much
x FOREWORD
more suited to the entente cordiale of the mo-
ment between speaker and hearer, than to the
cooler scrutiny of the critical reader.
As to substance, the deficiency is still
greater. Speaking under sharp limitations of
time, the effort was to bring out a single
generic conception of what might be called the
modern pastoral consciousness, rather than to
present a complete account of the Pastoral
Office. The speaker assumes much which a
more formal discussion must labor to prove.
The talks start with the professional "rein"
loose, and do not "draw rein" till the close.
This leads to many omissions and quite pos-
sibly involves an impression of incompleteness
and confusion.
One must in fairness add also the ifact
that these Lectures to call them such
deal with what is supposed to be the more
perfunctory and humdrum phase of our profes-
sional duty, as contrasted with the preaching
phase of it. Preaching and pastoral serv-
ice do indeed interplay. On the higher level
each pole of the ministerial battery is alive
with the power shot over from the other pole,
and the vital fire in both is one. And this
is truer than ever now, for the Modern Age
FOREWORD xi
blends preacher and pastor as no other age
ever has, in the figure of the one spiritual
teacher and leader.
But the sense of this, which is readily
poured into the excitement of oral address, is
not so easily imparted to the printed page,
and this little volume will at first therefore
seem to be a prosy review of the prosy half
of the minister's duty.
Still, on the other hand, to rewrite the Lec-
tures, to expand them with ampler citation and
discussion, to fill out the gaps they leave open,
or to take out from them the spontaneous and
personal note of free, spoken address would
be to substitute something else for what was
given at Bangor, and which I am so kindly
asked to reproduce.
In such a plight, I have only to make a vir-
tue of audacity, and ask the kind reader to
overlook the deficiences which the kind hearer
did not have time enough to notice, and
which, on second thought, both hearer and
reader and above all, the speaker himself
will find it hard to excuse and impossible to
explain.
A. J. L.
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK,
October, 1909.
CONTENTS
LECTURE I
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY. THE PASTORAL SPIRIT .... i
LECTURE II
THE PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR . . 25
LECTURE III
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR AND SOCIAL
MEDIATOR 65
LECTURE IV
THE PASTOR AS P.AIUSH ORGANIZER AND LEADER . 109
LECTURE V
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 143
LECTURE I
INTRODUCTORY. THE PASTORAL
SPIRIT
INTRODUCTORY. THE PASTORAL
SPIRIT
Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Faculty and
Members of the Classes:
IN one brief word may I offer you my salu-
tation, and thank you for the honor of stand-
ing here among you, less, indeed, as a lecturer
than as a fellow student, to speak with you
concerning some of the present practical as-
pects of our vocation.
It seems fitting that I should at the outset
allude for a moment to the personal aspect of
the method we shall employ in our discussion.
I owe my choice of a theme not only to the
freedom permitted under the generous terms
of the "George Shepard" Foundation upon
which I speak, but especially also to the equally
generous suggestion of the President.
He informed me that our professional field
on its side of preaching had been already cov-
ered by previous lectures upon this founda-
4 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
tion; but that the pastoral side of the minis-
ter's life had not received similar separate pres-
entation; and he encouraged me to select this
plainer and more sequestered function of the
ministry as our special subject.
Our theme, then, may take this phrasing:
THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR IN THE NEW AGE.
I emphasize the latter half of this title, be-
cause, if I do not mistake, certain features o{
pastoral service, always vital, .are thrown by
the spirit of our age into a new and noble
relief.
Indeed, we may put the point even more
strongly. Standing in his full free manhood,
in closest contact with the age itself, his " bare
feet on the bare earth " to recall Dr. Stalk-
er's phrase in his " ordination charge," the
young pastor of our time discovers that the
two ideas in human conduct which Modern
Sociology counts as of most instant value,
viz., personal comradeship and social media-
tion, are precisely the two which denote the
finest pastoral efficiency, so that we redis-
cover, as it were, the heart of the ancient Pas-
torate in listening to the characteristic demand
of the New Age.
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 5
It is the zest of such rediscovery which gives
the present speaker courage to add another
word upon this rather hackneyed subject of
Pastoral duty, and it is the notion of such a
quest which will govern the method of our
talks together.
My first business then was to learn from you
in definite particulars what you feel, and want
and need. It is the content of your mind as
a contemporary modern product that is the
thing of primary value and authority here.
The genius of this lectureship is clinical rather
than speculative, and fraternal most of all.
This method also will enable me to set these
simple talks into the position where they be-
long with reference to your Seminary Curric-
ulum. I realize that in the presence of pro-
fessors accomplished in teaching the tech-
nique both of preaching and of pastoral serv-^
ice, any formal review of the theory and duty
of the pastorate would be as needless as it
would be impertinent. I may assume your
general acquaintance with the subject. You
know the standard books, the leading authori-
ties, the established divisions and definitions.
It was, accordingly, the attempt to comply
with what I felt to be .the primary duty of this
6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
lectureship, which I arranged to spend a week
with you here last November, to meet the
members of the senior class, both as a body
and individually, desiring, by the frankest
possible conference upon the problems of in-
stant practical import -in your minds, to learn
from you what you feel to be vital in the work
of the Christian pastor, not only as to its
old genius and spirit, but as to its present
arena of action, its immediate conditions
and difficulties, and its thrilling and overmas-
tering inspirations. So I might seek, by
the analysis of your own present consciousness
concerning your vocation, to determine how
that . vocation itself should now be construed,
and how the ancient Pastoral Spirit rearticu-
lates itself in response to modern demands.
You met me frankly more than half way.
You disclosed, indeed, your misgivings. I
caught the muffled beat of that inner appre-
hension which a true man must feel, though
he does not parade it, in responding to the
tremendous challenge of this rocking age.
I looked also upon the vivid picture you
drew for me from the life, of the difficulties
existing in many of our New England par-
ishes where you had been at work. Listening
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 7
to you I felt again, as I did forty years ago,
the tremor of the young man's question and
the older man's also Who is sufficient for
these things?
But I discovered also something more,
namely, that the picture of the pastoral ideal,
which you, as young modern men are thus
carrying in your minds, is really the true de-
lineation of what the New Age is calling for
in the Christian Pastor, and I went back to my
study, vowing that I had in honor and in
truth but one single thing to do, and that was
to put into the clearest possible expression
these queryings and verdicts of your own
minds, swiftly correlating them with the per-
sonal experience of an older soldier in the
same battle.
I had then in a moment, the warrant for
my method, which was to listen to you, to
what your modern souls are asserting, not as
by intention but half unaware, and if I
could seize upon this, articulate it, and simply
arrange it in an order of progression, I should
have my lectures: So that you, and here is
the idea, you should be the teachers of your-
selves.
You are the sons of the New Age, as we
8 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
older men are not. You feel its mother-throb
in your veins. In the spontaneous mental
movement within you, in the psychological
and spiritual forces which have brought you
to these halls and which will send you forth
from them, do I find the germ and norm of all
I have to say.
The main content of this your apprehension
of your calling seemed to fall naturally under
three affirmations:
1. The Pastor is a human comrade and
counsellor.
2. The Pastor is a Spiritual sponsor and
guide.
3. The Pastor is a social mediator in a dis-
tracted age.
First, COMRADESHIP.
At the very forefront of your thought lay
the vivid conviction that the Christian Pas-
torate must be first and last and all the time
fraternal. Your words, moreover, reflected
the fact that this principle of human brother-
hood, as identifying the pastorate, is receiving,
at this very moment, a new emphasis by what
is freshest in the movement of our age. It is,
you told me, the age of the cosmopolitan fra-
ternity, and upon its unfurling banners burns
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 9
forth that very word comrade as never be-
fore.
Second, SPONSORSHIP.
Hard upon this sense of the primary place
of the fraternal spirit in a true pastorate fol-
lowed, however, something more. It is the
reverberation in your modern dialect of an
ancient and holy sentiment, as old as Sinai, as
old as religious worship itself, and in the
Christian centuries sanctified under every type
of doctrine and ritual, to the effect that the
pastoral office is not only fraternal, but is also,
in a true sense, spiritual and priestly, so that
the words sponsor and priest convey a mean-
ing which no travesty upon that meaning can
wholly discredit. .
"As Thou didst send me into the world,
even so I sent them into the world," are
words which the Fourth Gospel credibly as-
cribes to Jesus.
They cannot be elided in any Scriptural
statement of the ministry.
Not that we are shut up to the sacramen-
tarian view of the method of this divine be-
stowal, although there is an element of truth
even in that view which has attracted many of
the noblest Christian ministers, and which we
io THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
must honor and incorporate in any complete
statement of the pastoral office.
I do not care for the mere word "priest."
It is apt to be misunderstood. I have used it
for the instant so as to mark the thing I
would describe. Perhaps the better word is
Sponsor. The Pastor is a sponsor for men
an "Ambassador of Christ," whose relation
to his King on the one hand, and to men on
the other, is peculiarly intimate. " As though
God were entreating by us," is the cry of that
perfervid Paul.
All noble religions, and Christianity pre-
eminently, unite to present the Religious
Teacher as the Spokesman, in some degree for
the Unseen Eternal. The Christian pastor is
the spiritual confidant, the confessor, in the
worthy sense, of his people.
In the most personal and tremendous issues
of human life, its sins and repentance, its
calamity and despair, at its crisis of struggle
and at the hour of death, the Christian Pas-
tor stands sponsor for men, solemnly realiz-
ing and humbly declaring the attitude of the
Infinite, as revealed through Christ.
Third, MEDIATORSHIP.
I shall not be misunderstood. The Pas-
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT n
tor's mediation is no usurpation of the Media-
tion of Christ. The human Pastor is the sec-
ondary medium, through whom that great
Mediation is realized. . But as we talked to-
gether a few weeks ago, I discovered that your
sense of the majesty and delicacy of this
higher office of the Pastorate expressed itself
in the idea of the Pastor as the social mediator
among men in the midst of the confused and
warring factions of our time.
You also held to it that the process of such
secondary mediation is natural and ethical, not
sacramentarian. Christ's Mediatorial power
and grace are realized in the Pastor's char-
acter, not in his mere office. It is the beauty
of a consecrated and winnowed manhood
which becomes the agent for this secondary,
mediation.
The logic of all this, as we maintain, there-
fore, does not go to affirm that this quasi-
mediatorial function is an official exercise of
a specific, and, as it were, extra-human gift,
bestowed de facto at ordination ; but it goes to
the point of affirming a certain definite divine
assistance to the minister's own faculties in
undertaking his specific service.
The true priest is not made such by arbi-
|2 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
trary ecclesiastical enactment or any mere ex-
ternal " laying on of hands " so as to consti-
tute him a vicegerent, a formal dispenser of
celestial benedictions. These statutory and
exclusive theories of the priesthood dwindle
into palpable unreality in front of the terrible
challenge of actual pastoral experience. But
all the more because you disavow the formal-
ism of the High Church view, do you insist
upon the spiritual reality which lies behind
that view and behind every profound view of
the Christian Pastorate.
You declare, because the heart of the Chris-
tian ages, including the present age, declares
that only a mediatorial soul can exercise a
mediatorial office, but such a soul can. A
noble and consecrated manhood, whose wealth
and volume of sympathy is carried up to the
point of spiritual indentification with human
need on the one side and with divine grace on
the other, can be in a true sense priestly.
We reach, then, the conception, in which,
translating your own apprehension, I discover
the latent consciousness of our age, that the
spiritually sponsorlike and mediatorial element
in the pastorate is developed out of the Chris-
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 13
tianly fraternal. It is not a new endowment
or function, coupled on to that sense of com-
radeship, which a moment ago we called the
primary element of the Pastorate. On the
contrary, this latter, if carried high enough
and fulfilled in Christ's way, involves and
leads up into the former.
May I say that the idea of this development
is to be our keynote in these addresses?
In the process of this mental development,
and indeed from its very inception, something
does indeed flow down from Christ into the
minister's heart (so you declared your sense
of the thing) a distinct Divine help, though
availing itself of the normal psychological
channels, appearing as a deepening of motive,
a vivifying of consciousness, a facilitating of
growth, an unlocking of latent power, in a
word, the realization of an impelling force,
which fills the normal channels of mental ex-
perience and development, with a fuller vol-
ume of power, to help the pastor for and in his
specific pastoral service.
But we shall maintain that Christlike broth-
erhood opens the only psychological path along
which this higher priestly gift can be realized.
14 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Altruistic devotion in Christ's way and name
is the only gate to the exercise of true priest-
hood in His Name.
You will, of course, recognize in a mo-
ment that in thus opening our line of thought,
we are assuming, without argument, the essen-
tial truth contained in the Irenic Christian
faith in Christ as the Living Master and Di-
vine Redeemer.
If the position of the 'extreme rationalism
be adopted, if the objective reality of this
spiritual realm be discredited, if Christ's life
continues effective only in the way of noble
example and the heroes and martyrs of faith
in their vision of a living and present Christ
have been gazing only on dreams, then a por-
tion, and perhaps a main portion, of all this
working philosophy of the pastorate falls to
the ground. But not all of it fails, even in that
case, for the historical basis of Christianity,
whatever it is held to be, may be so vividly
realized by the mind as, in a sense, to live again
and forever; and thus the ideal picture of
Christ's life, shining through whatever im-
perfections are assumed to exist in the Gospel
record, continues to maintain an inspiring in-
fluence upon the mind similar to that which
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 15
Christ Himself would exert if He were still
alive.
At this point, then, the vista of our whole
theme suddenly opens before us with a kind of
thrill and wonder, and we imagine that we can
perhaps state, in some approximately compact
phrase, the proposition which is our thesis
now/ that the genius of the Christian pastorate
is the principle of the humanly fraternal de-
veloped through fellowship with the Figure of
the human Jesus and carried high enough to
become spiritually mediatorial through God's
grace as reflecting and articulating the Great
Mediation of the Divine Christ.-
And just here we again discover, with a
curious start of surprise and joy that as the
present age and era is the era of the comrade,
so it is also, and still more urgently, the era
for the social mediator. The time cries aloud,
not only for mediatorship between man and
God, but for mediatorship between man and
man, class and class, nation and nation.. We
may perhaps put this point very strongly and
assert that just now, in the midst of the up-
heaval and dissolution of traditional assump-
tions, in the midst of perilous and glorious dis-
locations and realignments in the intellectual
:i6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
and social world, in the midst of fresh and
acute shocks between opposing classes, even in
the rise and sweeping surge of a socialistic
propaganda, half mad, half prophetic, is dis-
closed as never before, both a peremptory need
of and a passionate outcry for precisely this
genuine social mediatorship.
Oh! for a battalion of ministers who shall
go forth now in Christ's name, so nobly com-
rades as to be also true mediators among men.
I see the holy and beautiful lips of the Gal-
lilean moving again as of old, saying " Blessed
are the peacemakers," the intellectual and
spiritual mediators of the new age. Chris-
tian pastors are called of the time and of
God to be such. Nobody else can be such so
well.
The minister must be a mediator now or
fail. He must explain men to themselves, and
to one another. He must explain man to man,
class to class. He must be the link of fellow-
ship between what else would fall asunder.
He must humanly mediate between men, in
order that he may articulate and reincarnate
the spirit of his Master's mediation between
man and God.
Here, then, in vital and even inevitable
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 17
succession, rise before us the main terraces of
our theme; or if the simile of steps be hack-
neyed, let us consider these divisions, which
will be taken up in the lectures to follow, as
several rooms, opening upon one central
rotunda, which we may denominate the Pas-
toral Spirit.
A word, therefore, of this Pastoral Spirit
as we close to-day.
May we not say that each of the great
professions possesses its own peculiar genius,
a sentiment characteristic of it alone, and
in a sense non-transferable?
Medicine has its distinctive enthusiasm;
the law its own. So of the journalist, the
artist, the inventor, the man of business.
Accordingly, I would lay a double initial
emphasis upon the truth that here, in this
identification of our specific pastoral spirit, is
the very crux and talisman of our calling. " In-
hoc signo vincimus."
And yet there is perhaps some reason to
fear that this is precisely the matter to the im-
portance of which we are least alive, and
which is least emphasized in many excellent
manuals upon the pastoral office.
Last summer, in the wish to meet a little less
18 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
meagrely the responsibility of this lectureship,
which I had then consented to assume, I spent
several weeks in Oxford, at work in the
Bodleian Library, endeavoring to look with
some care through the numerous volumes, both
by the more recent and the older writers on
this subject of the Christian Pastorate. Two
discoveries surprised me; First, the compara-
tively limited amount, as well as literary in-
feriority, of the material specially relating to
the pastoral function, as compared with that
devoted to preaching. And the second, and
still more surprising fact, was that in all these
forty or fifty volumes, so far as I was able to
examine them, almost the entire weight of the
discussion, both by Anglicans and by Non-
conformists, seemed to be thrown upon rather
prolix and conventional tabulations and de-
scriptions of the objective functions of parish
duty, while comparatively little effort had been
made, apparently, to render forth anything
like a vivid and thorough conception of what
the pastoral spirit itself really is; how it dif-
fers from other enthusiasms in the mind, what
constitutes its dynamic secret, how it kindles
and masters men, and how a minister may rec-
ognize it, and employ it, as he would drive
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT ip
some splendid high-bred horse, housed in his
stall.
Our simple series of talks can certainly
enter upon no ambitious attempt to present a
complete analysis of this pastoral spirit; yet
our whole effort will break down unless we
get some clear impression of its specific psy-
chological distinction, its curious aliveness, its
gentlemanliness, its leap and glow, its Christ-
like brooding and yearning, its subtlety and
vivacity of mental impulse, like the movement
of quick-silver.
Perhaps a better symbol would be the sparkle
of cold water. Indeed, the cup of pure crystal
water, conceived of as the union, strange
to say, of those two quick and imponderable
spirits of flame, oxygen and hydrogen, one de-
noting the heavens and the other the earth, is
hardly a fantastic similitude of that indefina-
ble vitality and vivacity by which the pastoral
spirit exhibits its integral union of the human
comradeship with the heavenly mediation.
But is this so? you ask. We are plain mat-
ter-of-fact men, and we challenge you. Are
you not simply " up in the air," idealizing our
vocation and drawing a fancy picture of a
subjective condition which a mystic here and
20 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
there may realize perhaps, but which is not a
necessary concomitant of most men's ministry ?
Well, that is for you to determine as our
discussion proceeds. I am certainly not ad-
vancing the theory of any abnormal or mys-
tical or extra-human faculty conferred upon
pastors ; but I do hold to this as a psycholog-
ical fact, capable of ample verification, that
the development in a man of the pastoral spirit,
the genius of comradeship, carried up to the |
level of spiritual sponsorship and social medi-
ation, which is the true priesthood in Christ's
name, is attended by the release into action and
more and more into definite consciousness of a
certain unique enthusiasm, which is under
God, the force upon the pastoral side of our
calling.
And yet this pastoral spirit rather laughs
at any attempt to analyze it, so simple is it and
manly, swiftly moving and all alive. It does
not like to sit down before a lecturer's camera.
Like Dr. Brown's high-bred Scotch collie,
" Wylie," my saint and hero among dogs, it
would rather be away on the moors tending
the sheep. But if we can catch the noble,
eager, tireless creature, and hold it long
enough for any inspection, we shall marvel at
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 21
the quiver of its life and thank God for the
privilege of making it our own.
Ah, gentlemen, I check myself at this men-
tion even of the wonderful collie, for it is the
shepherd himself whose figure emerges in
the sweet and sonorous Latin word entitling
these studies of ours, who is our most perfect
image of that which we would describe. ' The
" Pastor " is our Lord's own image of Him-
self and of His minister, a symbol repro-
duced from the noblest Old Testament
prophecy.
The Pastoral spirit is the Shepherd spirit, l
reproducing the spirit of the "Chief Shep-
herd," as St. Peter calls our Lord, and de-
veloped in the minister by his personal fellow-
ship with that Human-Divine Personality.
The image is ideally perfect. Seen dimly in
the dawn against the upland horizon, or more
clearly beneath the blaze of noonday, appear-
ing in all song and story, in the homeliest as
well as the lordliest literature and in the rural
life of the ages, the shepherd offers the finest
model which human avocations afford of per-
sonal fidelity. Tireless watchfulness, valiant
protection, tender care, sagacious, indomitable
devotion unto death, are all combined in him
22 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
" who giveth his life for the sheep/' Not the
wolf that howls in the night, not the thunder
of raging storm, not the serpent that slides
through the thick grass, not hunger or thirst
or the robber's knife can separate the shepherd
from the flock he loves.
You will pardon what you will regard as
the over-florid emphasis upon these similitudes.
Yet similitudes even such as these are, as I
understand the matter, not far-fetched, as
illustrating that specific temper which we dis-
cover in the Christian ministry. It is both an
intuition and a feeling, realized together in
one indivisible impulse, in whose peculiar
motive and particular errand appears the
blending of the two sentiments already indi-
cated, that of red-blooded human brother-
hood, and that of religious sponsorship, fused
in the thrilling sense of a special divine com-
mission.
But a little more in detail. In any attempt
to characterize such a compound mental im-
pulse, which is partly disclosed in conscious-
ness and partly not, our best way, as I sup-
pose, is to describe it in its practical action.
I shall, therefore,' single out and specify five
main features of the Pastoral Spirit in action,
by which, in their combination and interplay,
THE PASTORAL SPIRIT 23
this spirit of the Christian Pastorate is known.
They are these :
The chivalry of Christian honor for men. *-
The tenderness of Christian sympathy with
men.
The genius of rescue.
The passion of spiritual sponsorship.
The cheer of the invulnerable Christian
hope. ,
These features of the Pastoral Spirit will
come up for successive mention in the lectures
to follow; but the actual work of our calling
itself does not thus segregate and disunite
them. They are all realized together, as one
glowing impulse, pervading the pastor's serv-
ice in each of the four great roles which we
are to consider, and which are these :
First The Pastor in his primary relation
as Human Comrade and Counsellor.
Second 'The Pastor in his supreme office
as Christian Sponsor and Social Mediator in
Christ's name.
Third The Pastor, so developed, launch-
ing his personality upon his church as the
Parish Organiser and Leader.
Fourth and finally The Pastor in his pul-
pit, as Preacher and Public Religious Teacher. .
LECTURE II
THE PASTOR AS COMRADE AND
COUNSELLOR
THE PASTOR AS COMRADE AND
COUNSELLOR
ROBERT Louis STEVENSON, writing in June,
1883, to his friend W. E. Honley, concerning
the literary art, remarks:
" I beg to inform you that I, Robert Louis
Stevenson, author, etc., am merely beginning
to commence to prepare to make a first start
at trying to understand my profession."
Behind the joke is an ache. The whimsical-
ity is only the mask for a kind of self-despair.
Self-despair is the word. Said one of you to
me last November, "It is not self-distrust I
feel, it is self-despair; but I won't let men
know it." This is a mood which often falls
upon a sensitive ingenuous young mind, when
alive to the ideal of a great vocation. A gen-
tleman does not parade his faintheartedness
although he feels it so keenly. He masks it
under a quip or a jest.
No man feels this more than the young
minister ; no man save one, and that one is the
old minister, because this sense of an almost
hopeless discrepancy half whimsical, it is so
27
28 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
absolute between the loftiness of the pastoral
ideal and the meagreness of one's own per-
formance, increases rather than lessens as life
goes on.
Over against this self-despair comes in,
more and more it is true, another feeling, that
of trust in the divine help, and the conviction
also that. God often employs very poor tools
at very fine tasks ; but still the sense of incom-
petency remains so keen as to shut off all
assumption, and I cannot say a truer word at
the outset of this second lecture-talk than to
enter a demurrer against any apprehension
that the present speaker assumes a right to lay
down rules for your practice in our arduous
but fascinating calling.
You are to be yourselves. We have, it is
true, carried the legend of individuality in
pastoral practice so far as almost to shut out
clinical appositeness from lectureships on the
pastoral function. And this is a pity, for
surely the cure of souls involves principles
of spiritual therapeutics as definite and as
verified as those accepted by our brethren of
the medical profession in their healing of
men's bodies.
Still, at the heart of it, the genius of our
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 29
profession is preeminently that of the adap-
tation of individuality to individuality, as St.
Paul declares in a famous autobiographical
passage!.
The pastoral impulse when fully developed
is subtle, nimble, lightly moved. It is a con-
stant passion in an individual man for per-
sonal religious ministry. It adopts, therefore,
spontaneously, many varying types of endow-
ment as its agents, and many methods of
address as its channels.
In these talks I bring to you only a few
hints from one man's work. They are
sprinkled let us suppose with one man's
heart's blood, and are for him let us admit
the best working rules he has. But still sift
them, gentlemen, eliminate the personal equa-
tion from them. Pardon any chance note as
of dogmatism.
I seem to myself hardly more than a novice
still. Challenge, therefore, everything I say.
Test it by the Scriptures and by the witness
of other men. Fear not to trust your own
judgment in correcting it. If you find any
fragment which may serve your turn, remodel
it, so as to make it fit better upon your own
individual errands.
30 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Our special topic to-day is :
The Pastor as a Human Comrade and
Counsellor.
What is this comradeship?
How is it developed in the Pastor?
What is the demand for it, especially at the
present time?
These are the questions which suggest the
simple line we may follow.
First. As to the first question you are bear-
ing in mind the boldness of our thesis. Our
key note in these lectures is to the effect that
the pastoral spirit the pastoral soul is, as
we conceive it, the result of the humanly fra-
ternal carried so high through fellowship with
Christ as to become the spiritually mediatorial
in His Name. You will, therefore, have been
asking What sort of comradeship what
style of brotherhood must this be which can
bear the weight of such a tremendous sequel?
* We are to trace the rise and development
in the minister's mind, under psychological
law of a very unique and wonderful temper,
and the question is peremptory whether in
fixing upon a basic mental impulse so plain
and simple as human brotherhood we are pro-
viding adequate foundation for a structure so
lofty.
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 31
And yet that is precisely what we do. We
take this plain human sentiment and no other
as our psychological starting point. We can
in reason take no other. Why seek for any
broader foundation than love in building up
the Christian Pastorate? Love "never fail-
eth " while " tongues " may fail. On that floor
you stand brother to every man on earth, and
whatever edifice of sacramental ministry be
built up upon the " Great Bases " of unselfish
love shall stand fair and sure forever. This
human fellow feeling is indeed, as we shall
see, taken up into the realm of Christian faith,
and becomes irradiated with the light and life
of Jesus Christ, but yet essentially and rad-
ically it is in itself natural and human, with no
esoteric refinements or supranatural additions.
^The Pastor, indeed, need not cultivate the
extreme of boisterous bonhommie satirized by
Cowper:
" The man that hails you Tom or Jack,
And proves by thumping on your back
His sense of your great merit
Is such a friend, that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed
To pardon or to bear it."
This "hail fellow" style is not necessary,
and yet what we have in mind in .Pastoral
32 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Comradeship is after all at bottom plain
Brotherliness, of the " out and out," practical,
red-blooded kind, this, however, made Chris-
tian and surcharged after the manner of Jesus,
with democratic and spiritual fire. It is friend-
ship raised to the point of spiritual incan- *
descence, but also especially grounded in
honor honor for the human creature. K
HONOR FOR HUMANITY
Indeed, the word comrade, etymologically
speaking as well as in the light of current
usage, carries with it a note a little more
deeply respectful as well as vividly vital even
than the word friend. It is friendship,
then one hand-turn more.
"V
A friend may look a little down on you. A
comrade's glance is level. A friend comes to
aid you. A comrade stays with you. A
friend counts you in with him. A comrade
counts himself in with you. A friend can
wait till to-morrow about helping you, and yet
be comfortable. The word of comradeship
is now. Friendship affiliates. Comradeship
identifies. Friendship talks across. Com-
radeship walks abreast. There is no essential
difference between the two; but comradeship
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 33
keeps one stick more in the furnace. Friend-
ship is not cool; but comradeship is blaz-
ing flame. Comradeship to-day is friendship
raised to the highest power the fusion of
man with man in God's great blast-furnace of
the modern time.
And because in our new social era, the word
of fellowship among the rank and file of men
is comrade, therefore, the kind of Pastor
wanted and needed among men is the kind of
Pastor who makes that name good.
'Honor for humanity, as well as fellowship
with humanity, is thus the ground-tone in
that comradeship of which we are now speak-
ing as being the primary germ in the pastoral
evolution. It is the first of what we termed
the five essential features of the Pastoral
Spirit.
Honor for humanity is a familiar phrase
to-day, although for generations it was
tabooed as being inconsistent with orthodox
views of human depravity. And, possibly,
you may lift a cautious hand and tell me to
choose my words narrowly at this volcanic
point. Not so, gentlemen! Why should I
mince the matter? I am here to attest, so far
as I rationally and scripturally can, what I
34 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
believe you believe and have a right to be-
lieve, and I am sure you are right in your con-
viction that a "mystery of iniquity" in hu-
man nature is not the "total depravity" of
human nature.
A sincere but provincial interpretation of
that phrase, "total depravity," threw its dark
pall too long across the New England Hills;
so that one hardly wonders when, a century
ago, the father of Horace Bushnell, coming
out of the Episcopal church into the Congrega-
tional, in New Preston, Conn., complains of
what he calls the "rather over-total depravity
of the Sermon! "
But this interpretation of the word total
is no part of an irenic orthodoxy. In true
Christianity, pity starts with honor, and the
impulse to save springs aloft out of the sense
of radical worth in the thing to be saved.
The prodigal son was his father's child.
He was not a whelp of the desert, a pariah of
perdition. With whatever sense of the name-
less horror and woe of that infernal irration-
ality which we call moral evil, the true Pastor
carries at the bottom of his manhood the
chivalry of honor for that which he is trying
to serve. This is both a conviction and a
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 35
sentiment, having its ethical foundation in the
dual doctrine of the spiritual Fatherhood of
God and sonship of man, and its scientific
corroboration in the modern testimony con-
cerning the countless and strenuous ages
through which, under evolutional law, this
wonderful human creation, the crown of
nature, as well as its paradox and problem,
has been slowly brought to its present stage.
Out of this conviction concerning man, at
once spiritual and scientific, springs a senti-
ment which is a veritable knighthood of the
ministry, a noblesse oblige which takes its
cap off, not only in the presence of women,
but of humanity everywhere.
. This spirit is not merely courtesy. It is
elemental equity. Its gracious but tremen-
dous logic springs straight from the funda-
mental truths of man and revelation.
If the universe is old, then is humanity
great.
If God be parental, then is humanity great.
If Christ be Mary's Son, then is humanity
great.
If Calvary be worth while, then is humanity
great.
The intensest conviction of human sin is the
36 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
reflex of the sense of the greatness of that
upon which the sin has fallen. Pity and honor
always dwell together in the Pastoral soul.
The late Dr. R. W. Dale of Birmingham,
whose " Nine Lectures on Preaching," deliv-
ered thirty years ago in Yale Divinity School,
still remain nearly or quite at the head of
modern manuals upon the homiletical side of
our work, quotes George Eliot to illustrate the
difference in mental attitude between two
sorts of ministers Mrs. Poyster in "Adam
Bede," speaking of the two parsons of Hay-
slope, remarks " Mr. Irwine was like a good
meal o'victual, you were the better for him
without thinking on it; and Mr. Ryde was
like a dose o' physic, he gripped you and he
worreted you, and after all he left you much
the same."
"Mr. Ryde" represents the "judicial,"
fault-finding, condemnatory attitude toward
humanity; and it is false and bad. On the
contrary, the true Pastor sounds as his key-
note Sir Thomas Browne's sentiment, "Na-
ture is the art of God." Human nature
is, therefore, looked upon as the highest
of that art. Nor does any sense, however
poignant, of human misery and error, or even
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 37
of the black depths of that iniquity in which
humanity is engulfed, neutralize the Pastor's
underlying reverence for the human creature.
Indeed, this sense of honor for humanity
is so constant that it will not be denied, and
is not discouraged, even in front of the poorest
specimens of men, but searches steadfastly
in the poor, coarsened, peasant face, eager to
catch, and believing that it will catch there,
"some glint i' th* een," as the Scotch say,
some dash of sunlight upon cheek and brow,
which, to recall our Wordsworth, shall con-
vey the true hint of "that imperial palace
whence we came."
You observe that what I am speaking of is
not the dutifully conventional and often mourn-
fully pious assertion of the "value of the
human soul," in quotation marks. It is the
actual sense of the innate and inalienable
beauty of human personality, body and soul
together, and without any quotation marks at
all. It is a kind of shock and quiver of manly
joy at the sight of a human face, like that of
the botanist rinding a rare flower on a high
Alp. The Pastoral impulse is not merely to
save, but to honor humanity so much that sav-
ing seems inevitably worth while.
38 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Naturally also this pastoral sense of the
greatness of human life is quite irrespective
of all accidents of culture or station. It is
a note of manners and mental attitude which
never leaves the true pastor, but clothes him
like a garment, and walks with him down the
street, pervading the most casual interview,
not laboriously, as if with " deliberate premedi-
tation aforethought," to parody a judicial
phrase and never with any slightest touch of
mawkish pose, either explicit or implicit, any
more than you say " Dear Madam " to your
mother.
The labored mawkishness of pastoral man-
ner sometimes seen is the counterfeit of the
thing we are speaking of, a clever counterfeit
perhaps, enough to deceive the very elect ; but
a counterfeit for all that.
The true article is not over-serious. It is
own cousin to humor and laughter. Our
seriousness is often two-thirds vanity and
spiritual pride.
The true honor for men appears in a certain
careful and genial considerateness as to the
mood and the need of the man you meet,
an instinctive and delicate scrupulousness in
" taking the man fair/' as we say, a habit of
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 39
seeing him against his own horizon as well as ->
yours, yet giving him the benefit of the divine
landscape which you think you see, a certain
assumption of the high-bred as existing of
necessity in the very understructure of his
soul.
A Christian minister ought to be able even
to walk down the white clanking corridor of
the State's prison bearing to the wrecked and
wretched congregation assembled there to meet
him, an honor for " the man within the man "
still eloquent in his eye.
In a word, the pastoral spirit is stamped
upon its very front with a dignity of fellow-
ship with humanity which does not willingly
leave upon even the briefest interview a mem-
ory which lowers the tone of life.
, Second. But how shall this reality of
comradeship be attained? By what method
shall the young Pastor develop within him-
self this spirit of genuine comradeship with
men ? Here we reach the heart of the inquiry
before us to-day, and here we get the best
light upon the nature of pastoral comradeship
itself.
I answer the question by insisting at the
very start that we must accustom ourselves to
40 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
a more natural way of regarding people, in-
stead of the perfunctory, professional way. We
must, I imagine, go back to the very beginning
of the young preacher's ministry, and clear
away an unfortunate assumption which too
often clogs his footsteps even at the gateway
of his calling.
It is one of those unfortunate legacies of
mediaeval tradition, which are all the more
persistent and baneful because hidden and un-
noticed, that the young pastor so often enters
the arena of his profession by the wrong door,
i. e., from the side of ministerial officialism
rather than the side of human fraternalism.
He tries to begin where he ought to leave
off.
The gentlemen of the Faculty will forgive
me if I avow a fear that the curriculum of our
Theological Institutions, alive as our profes-
sors are increasingly to the practical needs of
men, is not, even yet, quite so far recon-
structed as to set the young theologue into
his work through the gate of human fellow-
ship rather than the gate of clerical assump-
tion.
For nothing is clearer in the study of the
Gospels than the fact that the psychological
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 41
development which issues at last in what is
most nobly ministerial and mediatorial in our
profession begins in simple Christlike brother-
liness.
Pentecost is to be reached via Emmaus and
the walk thither. First Gennesaret, then Cal-
vary. " That is not first which is Spiritual,
but that which is natural, then that which is
spiritual." As opposed to this, is it not true
that we have been apt to start in our ministry,
assuming to be little spokesmen for the Eter-
nal, and thus, all unaware to ourselves, stiffen
at the outset into an odd and more or less con-
ceited religious exclusiveness, only to spend
the latter half of life in trying, with difficulty,
to climb down to where people really are?
That is both an awkward and a pathetic piece
of gymnastics. We have to learn, sooner or
later, what Jane Addams of Hull House aptly
calls " the futility of the individual conscience."
I put the point extravagantly, in order that
you may omit the extravagance and put it
truly; but the point itself is worth thinking
about.
We shall maintain that the normal evolu-
tion of Christ's minister as a pastor to-day is
like that of the disciples of old, from wayside
42 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
companionship to apostolic prerogative, not
the reverse. We reassert our main proposition
that the fraternal sentiment in the pastorate,
if genuine and carried high so as to be
Christ-like, develops into the mediatorial ; and
we must disown the topsy-turvy psychology,
which, unfortunately for the credit and power
of our calling, has been allowed to reverse
this natural order. Dr. Bonar after listening
to a minister who was preaching with great
gusto said to him, " You love to preach, don't
you?" "Yes, indeed I do." "But," said j
Bonar, " do you love the men to whom you
preach ? "
To carry the criticism a little further, one
may discover reasons enough why we fall into
this mistake. That deep and altogether sacred
experience in the heart of a young man, which
he interprets as a " call " to the ministry, may
seem to him at first to segregate him some-
what from his fellows.
Then too, more and more, the pressure of
his special and non-secular studies tends to
side-track him a little, unless he is on his
guard. Add to this the amiable coddling
of that devoted group of his well-meaning and
admiring personal friends who so often keep
a little, low fire of incense burning, beautiful
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 43
and blinding, identifying the young minister
with something separate and saintly, the
acolyte of a vocation supposed to be set apart
of God. The young pastor is also se-
cluded from many average temptations; is
treated with more than the average consider-
ation ; moves in a social environment in which
sentiment takes the place of the rough and
tumble which the young man training for a
business career is apt to receive. Says Galton
in his work on " Hereditary Genius," " A
gently complaining and fatigued spirit is that
in which Evangelical Divines are apt to spend
their days."
It is easy, therefore, it is almost unavoid-
able, that before he is quite awake to the dan-
ger, a certain subtle perfunctoriness will have
spun its gray yarn over the young theologue's
mind. He takes himself very seriously. Well,
he ought, and yet, and yet, young gentlemen,
it is quite possible that he will have to spend
hard, sad years later on in edging back and
down to the plain, sane human ground floon
and in getting this incense out of his eyes.
"But, beloved, we are persuaded better
things of you, though we thus speak."
You will even now in these student years
and from now resolutely on, hold yourself to
44 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
the basal note and tone of simple, human
friendliness, as the starting point for every-
thing else in your profession. You will ab-
jure fustian and make yourself meet men on
the level and on the square; availing yourself,
deliberately and gladly, of all influences from
nature, from literature, from current life'
which make you one with your fellows.
But further and more especially, the spirit
of comradeship with men is developed in the
Pastor's mind chiefly by forming and main-
taining the habit of mental companionship
with the figure of the human Jesus, as set
forth in our Gospels. Here is truly the live
nerve of the whole matter. For Jesus first
introduced and embodied to the world the
thought of human comradeship. He discov-
ered the cosmopolitan fraternity. He first
taught the unhorizoned hospitality..
Our proposition that the true and normal
initial attitude of the pastoral mind is the
fraternal, bases itself primarily and chiefly
upon the careful study of the New Testament
record of the method by which the disciples
were developed into apostles under the tute-
lage of Jesus Christ, both before and after the
Resurrection.
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 45
He is, indeed, no longer living in material
form before us, but it is a part of that irenic
Christian faith, which these lectures assume,
and do not seek to argue, to believe that the
inspired Gospel records of Jesus' life furnish
the channel through which He Himself in
propria persona and in living power still com-
munes with men and impresses His personal-
ity upon our minds, even as He did upon His
immediate disciples of old.
A study of the effect upon them of their
companionship with the Master is, therefore,
applicable to ourselves in our mental compan-
ionship with Him through the medium of our
use of the Gospel annals.
These plain men were at first adherents,
then followers, then comrades of the Beauti-
ful Galilean, " walking with Him in the way,"
and so along that same "way" they became
"disciples" and "apostles." The earliest
germ of what was to be apostolic in their
minds and in some true sense mediatorial in
their service was in the pulse-beat of plain
brotherhood, into which they entered with
Jesus as their Friend and Teacher and
Leader.
If there were time, one would love to try
46 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
to sketch that wonderful Syrian idyl, how
" friendship grew from more to more " to
readapt Tennyson's delicate phrase as that
little band of men trudged to and fro in Pales-
tine, along the curving, crowded shore of
Gennesaret, across the flower-strewn plain of
Esdraelon, over the rugged uplands of Judea,
for those three swift, gentle years, sailing in
a boat together, camping together at night,
and resting side by side at noonday in some
green outlooking glade of the hills. The tone
was that of a steadily deepening human fellow-
ship with Jesus. They heard the Galilean in-
tonation. They saw the evenly parted flow-
ing hair. They gazed into His face. They
became familiar with the mild, strong brow,
the ineffable lit look, the comrade-compelling
eyes. They became one with Him, with the
body and soul of Him; so that it had become
natural at last for St. John to lay his older
head upon the bosom of the young Master.
But this familiarity did not breed satiety,
least of all disrespect. The better they came
to know Him, the more they came to love
Him; then love whitened into reverence, and
reverence hushed itself in a kind of wondering
homage and blessed trust, until the mental soil
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 47
had become mellowed and sifted and prepared
for the thrilling enlargements of faith and con-
secration which followed the Resurrection, in
which they took up their Master's mediatorial
commission in His name.
But this process of mental development was
from the beginning in accordance with nor-
mal psychological law, proceeding from the
palpable to the ineffable, from human contact
to spiritual ascendency.
Indeed, as I have re-read the Gospels and
the Book of the Acts carefully through in con-
nection with these simple lectures, I have
failed to discover any line as of demarcation,
any incident, any moment, any act of the
Lord at which and by which the man was, in
a moment and by enactment, made over into
an apostle. He develops into the apostle, I
do not say by his own power and law of
growth alone. I do not mean that without
the co-operation of the gift of the Lord he at-
tains the apostolic grace.
I mean that Christ's spirit worked with their
spirits .through perfectly natural, human chan-
nels, and not by the invocation of any extra-
natural mental law. No one of the disciples
ceased to be himself. His training was the
48 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
training of a hitman companion. Together
with his Master, he was occupied most of the
time in rendering simple immediate services
to sick and needy people. The environment
was human. The relations throughout were
common and natural. The culture was that
of plain friendliness.
In a word, the initial training of these men
for their subsequent pastoral office was
through intensifying and consecrating the
fraternal.
So to-day. In the mental habit of inces-
santly communing with the Figure of Jesus,
as presented in the Gospels, human though
ineffable, the minister comes in sight of the
ultimate meaning of comradeship with all
men, and so begins to apprehend a little of
what the wonderful rhythm of Christ's Divine
Style of living was, and thus enters what is al-
most a new consciousness as to the vital reach
and wealth of our religion and the beauty of
the fellow-life it may bring.
I am persuaded that here is a field of per-
sonal experience in the Pastorate, the subtle
vitality and charm of which we have not fully
realized. Many of us older men have to la-
ment our early failure in this direction, be-
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 49
cause our natural approach to the Nazarene
was checked by the presence of a vague and
oppressive theological preconception.
I have not time to enter into this fully now;
but it seems to me as though God by His
Spirit had taken certain traditional scales off
the eyes of you young men of the present age,
so that you could enter into a new, vivid, sense
of human companionship, even with the in-
comparable Personality of the Son of Mary.
A profound change is coming over the face
of the waters. One meets it among the ablest
and most earnest younger scholars and Chris-
tian workers everywhere. Its note is, in a
word, this: Realize Christ as the first dis-
ciples did, and get together in Him.
It is a new keynote in the Christian con-
sciousness of the time, and one of the most
pregnant significance.
.Third. We come then to the question as
to the present objective demand for this spirit
of comradeship in the Pastor. ^f\
I would not ask you to delay at this point
if I wished only to recite the familiar com-
monplaces concerning the universal desire of
men for blood-warm human sympathy in their
minister. You are hearing this every day.
50 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
It has always been true, and always will be
true, that "a minister must be first a man,"-
that a parish made up of homes desires in its
pastor a home-friend; but what I do ask you
to notice is that this old parish cry for bro-
therly manhood first, as the prerequisite of
priesthood, is sharpened into a fresh acuteness
of accent as the twentieth century gets fairly
under weigh. Go abroad among men and what
do we see? New forms of social organiza-
tion. Go into the Colleges and what do we
find? New chairs of social economics.
Within less than twenty years a new science
has been born, the science of Sociology. I
might almost say that a new social conscious-
ness has also been born. Socialism, which is
beyond question the most dynamic word and
movement of the hour, a movement which is
a melee of true and false, of right and wrong,
a movement half-wild and mad and big with
peril, yet not without signals of noble promise,
is at bottom not a novel social philosophy, not
a new economic scheme. At bottom it is a new
note as to what is dreamed of as possible in
human fellowship. John Spargo must be
reckoned with as well as John Calvin. We
are entering upon the era of the world-wide
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 51
fellowship. An average American Parish,
especially a New England manufacturing
town, to say nothing of our great cities, is a
parochial polyglot. You will have to learn
brotherhood in ten dialects. At first a certain
academic fastidiousness in the student may
shrink away from this pastoral democracy.
Do not shrink. Shrinking is shirking.
Socialism, in its usual overt surface propa-
ganda, is an illusion and a suicide. Its logic
would sacrifice both freedom and faith, and
ultimately ruin both the home and the state.
It does not know what to do with either
genius or sin or death or Christ and is a
grave digger rather than an emancipator of
the people.
* But socialism, in the sense of that human
ache and longing which lie in its depths like
a broken rose in a boiling cauldron, is a "bit-
ter cry " for Christianity itself under terms of
comradeship, and the pastor for to-day must
know that bitter cry and be alive to it, and
be able to say in response to it : In the Great
Comrade's Name, I am here.,
All men always want friendliness in what
stands for the Highest.
One of your own number uttered to me a
52 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
sentence which I have been remembering ever
since and which voices us all. I quote ver-
batim, v He said:
"We fellows take in here a lot of knowl-
edge; but it is and must be mainly theoretic.
How can we take it up, work it over, and then
give it out so that " (mark these words : they
are the very words of the student to me)
" so that plain people will understand by what
we say the thing we mean when we say
itf"
Ah, that is the question indeed! It cuts
right down on living nerve. Now, what I
suggest in answer is this, for substance, that
all merely intellectual effort to accomplish this
translation of the subjective into the objective
will fail.
The bridge of interpretation between your
mind and the mind of Jones the blacksmith, or
Johnson the carpenter, must be brotherhood;
Christ's sort of brotherhood not the mere
intellectual conception of brotherhood (crit-
ics and gossips may have that when they stab
their neighbors), but brotherhood itself,
friendship incandescent, a pulse-beat, a fellow-
ship-fountain as genuine and spontaneous as a
spring shot out from the granite ledges of old
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 53
Katahdin yonder (which I once climbed on
my way to the ministry).
Such human fellowship is as fraternal and
realistic as Bethany itself. Jesus was the Di-
vine Realist in such friendship.
If you do not feel it in your heart to be such
a kind of comrade with men as this, then ask
the Lord for a knock-down blow, which will
give you the sense of need for that which all
through your ministry, people will be wanting
from you every week of every year. Possibly
in answer to prayer, God will give you some
vision or love or trial even which will melt
you and recast you into the embodiment of a
live fraternalism, such as you would have
gained by beating about in Palestine for three
years with Jesus, for this is the sine qua non
of a really effective Christian pastorate to-
day.
, And, further, it is out of such a Christ-
trained comradeship that the adequate and
welcome pastoral Counsellor is evolved.
And this, too, is a necessity, for a pastor
must be a counsellor. I check myself here
against possible intrusion upon your curric-
ulum. It is the province of the technical
teaching in pastoral theology, which province
54 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
I am trying not to usurp in these lectures, to
set before you in detail the various occasions
in the parish life upon which pastoral counsel
is apt to be sought. Suffice 'it to say here,
that all parish problems revolve around homes.
People come to a true pastor, more than
you might think, with their home problems,
how yonder invalid is to be provided for, how
this son or daughter is to go to college, when
there isn't bread enough to go round, how a
neighbor who is a born mule is to be made over
into anything else. The real problem in such
a case is usually that of two mules ! The pas-
tor must have a sane wise word to say in ref-
erence to a hundred practical questions.
A young minister settled in a farming
community, gained a reputation without know-
ing it by the way he answered a question
which two farmers brought to him, thinking
to entrap him. " Shall that piece of land be
put to corn or to oats?" they asked him.
The young theologue, who had mother wit,
but no more knowledge of farming ,than of
Sanscrit, answered with solemnity, "I should
let it go to grass!" They took the reckless
bit of slang as an expert judgment, and his
fortune was made. (But, gentlemen, just one
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 55
suggestion here. Close your own inter- /
views!) -X
If a man be a mere pulpit performer, he
will interest an audience, and when they have
become familiar with his special variety of
stage show, they will gently insinuate that
Providence has other fields where, no doubt,
that particular style of performance will be
freshly appreciated, and never having touched
the home, the home will not miss him when he
goes. But the man who means to mean much
as a Christian minister will discover that the
home is the nerve of the Parish. Why should
it not be ? The child is there and the dead.
The very dwelling, as I once heard Beecher
say, is "stained through and through with
soul-color," and everything pastoral depends
upon the way in which the pastor is able to I
enter that home door.
Now what such a home needs in its minister
is a comrade who is so much a comrade that
by the sheer weight of wise love he becomes
fit counsellor. The function of counsel grows
naturally out of the fellowship of the friend.
The pastor must incarnate that combination.
No one else can do so quite so well. The posi-
tion and power of the family physician come
56 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
nearest to it, and in certain respects are
superior. But the arena for counsel is not so
wide as with the pastor, and the pastor lifts
his hand when the doctor lets his fall.
And just here it seems worth while to
say in passing cultivate special friendship
with high-toned medical men. Their way of
looking at life is apt to be saner than yours.
Your profession and theirs meet in the care
and cure of the same complex human person-
ality. The age-old instinct which has so
closely affiliated the two professional offices is
just and profound but not to the point of
confusing the two arenas, as some of our
mushy modern cults undoubtedly do.
Never usurp the physician's place; but al-
ways respect the physician's point of view.
Correct your own by it. There is no better
corrective for your own doctrinaire tendency.
All good theology can walk arm in arm with
good physics. Do not take such a " header "
into the " Emmanuel-Movement " or any other,
that you cannot stand out in honorable, manly,
humble friendship with medical men. They
know more about curing people than you or I
know, or ever will know.
But, resuming the direct course of the dis-
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 57
cussion, we here in this conception of the Pas-
tor as the family comrade-counsellor come in
sight of the second and third of the five quali-
ties which were mentioned in the introductory
lecture as vital to the pastoral spirit, viz.
sympathy with men and the genius of rescue.
May I say a word of these as we close to-
day. Not sympathy for men. Sympathy for
men is sympathy pro forma. It is sympathy
standing at a distance with its gloves on.
Sympathy with men is being " touched with
the feeling of our infirmities? " Touched with
a feeling for their infirmities?
O, no ! the great author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews saw deeper than that "touched
with the feeling of our infirmities."
Sympathy is a trait half-masculine, half-
feminine and, therefore, wholly pastoral. It
is the instant instinct to realize the other man's
point of view, the quick sense of his muscle-
strain beneath his load. Sir Walter, in his
"Lay of the Last Minstrel" hits it off well
when he calls it:
' The silver link, the silken tie
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind
In body and soul can bind."
58 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
In this sympathetic insight is the first half
of wise counsel. Pastoral counsel is both un-
derstanding counsel and fellow-feeling counsel.
' Then another point right here. Do not
merely pity pain ; respect pain.
The famous Dr. Brown, of Edinburgh,
author of "Rab," said, you may remember,
speaking of medical men, that sympathy les-
sened as a sentiment only to reappear as mo-
tive. But I think that in the instance of the
pastor, sympathy both deepens as a sentiment
and strengthens as a motive; but first of all,
it doffs its cap at the mystery of grief. I re-
member a story which John B. Gough, the
temperance lecturer of a generation ago, used
to tell with strange dramatic effect, of an in-
terview he had with a small street messenger
boy in London, who said, " O yes, Sir ! I
delivers all sorts of letters. Sometimes they
is black-edged, Sir, then I always lifts my cap,
'fore I ring, Sir! Then the laidy turns white,
when she sees the black. Then I lifts my cap
again, Sir ! " Gentlemen ! always, somewhere
or other in the Parish, there is the home where
you must lift your cap "'fore you ring,
Sir."
Pain is clairvoyant, is telepathic. It in-
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 59
stantly detects your mental attitude toward it,
and this mental attitude is the real comforter.
That keen, roused, delicate, reverential out-
reach and yearning over the personal pain,
anxious first of all to do justice to it, to under-
stand it, not to intrude upon it, to treat it with
equity, then to relieve it if possible, such
sympathy as this is all but almighty.
"What shall I say to the afflicted?" one
of you asked me. Say? Nothing, perhaps;
just a grip of the hand, and one straight look
into the sad eyes. What is eloquence?
What is consolation? What is counsel? I
tell you, the quiver of loving human fellow-
ship in such a silent instant is more eloquent,
being human, than God's singing seraph him-
self could be. Thank God that our Christ
was born of woman.
Then again, and at the opposite pole of the
psychologic balance, sometimes humor, if gen-
tle, is better than tears. A smile, with a choke
in your throat at the same time, goes far.
" Do you always pray in a sick room ? " one
of you asked me. No, I should need to be
prayed for myself if I did. Only I'm apt to
pray when a hard man lies low and doesn't
expect prayer, though the prayer is just as
60 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
likely to be made standing, in the quarter min-
ute when I grip his hand as I rise to go. God
hasn't much use for prayers that depend on
kneeling, though kneeling is well, too, in its
place.
There is a humor even which prays well be-
cause it loves much. There is a gaiety that
is born of the Resurrection. In a word, it is
the natural, the spontaneous, the fraternal that
is ever straining on in Christ's way towards
the advisory, the intercessory, the mediatorial,
that wins and masters.
Do as you would like the other man to do
by. you, if the case were turned round; yet
ever we revert to the principle, that the goal
to be reached is something so delicate and
subtle and fine, that no rule can reach it ; no
formal premeditation can compass it. Have
the Christian comrade-soul, and then trust
its spontaneous intuition and impulse. A
preacher said to McCheyne, "I have been
preaching on the doctrine of Eternal Retribu-
tion to-day." " Did you preach it tenderly? "
said McCheyne.
So finally to-day we come in sight of our
third quality in the pastoral spirit the genius
of rescue; and here again I do not mean a
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 61
mere helter-skelter rush down upon the shore
where the surf is thundering.
Mark also this, our phrase is not a genius
for rescue, only the adepts and rare experts
have that ; but there is a certain genius of res-
cue, which may dwell and ought to dwell con-
stantly in any man who is fitting himself to
be a pastor.
What I mean is the constant effort at a
large, fair grasp upon horizon conditions. It
is a quick sense of the criticalness of moments,
an alertness as to possible recombinations of
the elements of situations. It is the habit of
instant translation of sentiment into action.
It is something at once tense and tender,
rapid and practical, dwelling in the constant
mood and turn of mind. This is what I mean
by the genius of rescue.
You will realize at once that the scope of
this impulse and motive is very broad. Every
parish has its tragedy. Rescue is not a con-
ventional revival-meeting word, alone or
mainly. It means. incessant watch and inces-
sant fight for some imperilled life. Satan's
crew are on the heels of men, and they do not
know it. Young men are crowding the gay
vestibules that open back into seductive cor-
62 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
ridors that curve, away and away, into the
hells of shame.
All along the moral line the pastor rides,
runs, calls aloud, stands and pulls like a Titan
when he cannot call. No other man is sen-
tinel. No other man is messenger. No other
man cares or dares assume the role of moral
rescuer. The pastor cannot but assume it.
Practically it is the Pastor or nobody.
He always sees humanity against its tre-
mendous back-ground of moral danger, and
this vision is an integral part of the pastoral
consciousness.
Nor is this saving, rescuing impulse the
mere reflex of some problematical eschatology.
It is not a mere crude evangelistic fervor.
The rescue it seeks is both physical and moral
rehabilitation. It can carry a loaf of bread,
and then pray all the better while the man
eats. Nor is there anything mawkish or over-
done in the expression of this ardor to save.
One of the men I know in our profession
who has it most, shows it least, as you might
casually meet him.
Let me illustrate. I used to do a bit of
climbing in the High Alps. Your first-rate
guide, as I had many an occasion to know,
PASTOR AS COMRADE AND COUNSELLOR 63
will not show what there is in him, all wait-
ing and ready, until a rope snaps or a man
stumbles, and then his movement is quick as a
leopard. But the genius of rescue is all the
time alive in him. He never hesitates. He
is " all there/' as we say, on the instant, and
all ready.
So the rescuing, pastoral power in a man is
a life-line, coiled, and coiled so that it doesn't
kink in the sudden swift uncoiling.
* Such a comrade-counsellor, combining the
spirit of sympathy with the rescuing genius, is
therefore, always a man on an errand; ami
here is" his professional freedom and power.
Have your ministry charged with this burn-
ing sense of errand. For this is the note of
supreme practical efficacy, the ^identification
of a man at the full pitch of his roused power,
with an errand that matches the power.
The Pastor will have the matter of the
errand-man. He will be as' good-naturedly
but inflexibly chary of the waste of time as the
driven physician is. The street will come to
know him as a man whom you mustn't stop for
desultory chat, any more than you would stop
a physician answering a hurry call, and when
some officious saint stops you at the corner to
64 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
obtain the latest information as to the family
you have just visited, you will dare to say
with the merest flicker of a gentle smile: 'my
friend, the ministry listens, but never speaks.'
A hand-grip, a cordial word, then swiftly
on! Don't dally and be repetitious either in
the pulpit or out of it. From pious prolixity
save us, Good Lord! Let every hour mean
something. Christian comradeship is athletic*
Pastoral counsel is given on the march. It
carries an instant practical meaning which
every one can recognize.
I once preached a sermon on the Parables.
After church, at dinner, my kind host turned
to his little daughter, who had attended church
with her father, and 'said : " Well, Sadie, can
you tell now what a Parable is? " " Yes, sir,"
said the little Sadie, promptly, and without a
suspicion of incivility. "What is it, my
dear?" "It is this, papa: A parable is a
heavenly truth without any earthly meaning."
She didn't understand the burst that fol-
lowed. I did, and burnt that sermon.
Gentlemen, make your pastorate, however
high and heavenly, have earthly meaning.
LECTURE III
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPON-
SOR AND SOCIAL MEDIATOR '
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR
AND SOCIAL MEDIATOR
You have, I am sure, been alive to the
danger, which in our course of thought, up to
this point, we have incurred. In our three-
fold endeavor in these lectures, first to avoid
trenching upon the right of eminent domain
belonging to your professors ; second, to main-
tain simplicity of address, without rhetorical
embellishment, just as we talked the ground
over two months ago ; and, finally, to approach
the higher levels of the pastoral ideal from the
plain, human ground-floor of Christian experi-
ence and psychological law, rather than from
the assumptions of an ex cathedra ordination,
we have risked this serious danger that of
seeming to belittle the greatness and sacred-
ness of the pastoral office itself. That such a
charge does not lie legitimately against our
scheme of thought, considered as a whole, I
wish to-day to make clear.
I do not indeed seek to hide from anyone
what by this time is evident enough, that we
67 .
68 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
adopt on the whole what may be called the
naturalistic rather than the sacramentarian
conception of the Pastoral office, and yet the
word naturalistic does not express the whole
of it. If our friends insist upon a label we
must perhaps call it the "Broad Church,"
rather than the "High Church" view. And
we shall summon as its sponsors men like
Bushnell, Beecher, Brooks, rather than Lid-
don and Newman. But we protest against
being thus labelled. We insist indeed that
our view is not the technical Broad Church
view as such at all. We hold that the view
we are presenting, if taken in its totality, in-
cludes the vital content of the High Church
conception though not in its usual form of
statement. Possibly this will be more evident
as we proceed.
Our topic, which you will recognize in a
moment, as the center and heart of the series,
is the Pastor as Spiritual Sponsor and Social
Mediator in Christ's name.
Stating a vital and affluent truth with a
barren brevity, our apprehension is something
like this, that according to the record of the
New Testament and the witness of Chris-
tian experience, the normal development of
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 69
the pastoral spirit proceeds from the humanly
fraternal to the spiritually mediatorial; that
in the pastorate the Christian man and com-
rade becomes the Christlike v counsellor ; and
the counsellor the sponsor, and the sponsor
Christ's social mediator among men. He be-
comes the under-shepherd of souls, and in that
sense a priest of God, clothed with the dignity
and holy power of a truly sacramental func-
tion declaring Christ's great mediation be-
tween man and God, and so mediating socially
between man and man. "Stewards of the
mysteries of God" is the simple yet daring
Apostolic phrase. But in all this, as I take
pains to reiterate, he crowds nothing of him-
self into Christ's place any more than the
ambassador ursurps the throne of his King.
The ministry is " in its inmost nature, a
bearing testimony, and its most effective ope-
ration rests principally upon the giving of
a living and spirit-filled testimony," says
Theodore Christlieb. .
Nor is it meant that this mental advance or
transition from comradeship to sponsorship is
a matter of time or of mechanical division.
From the very start the two great constitu-
ent elements, the brotherly and the priestly,
70 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
are interwoven in the Pastor's life. The or-
der of development we are tracing between the
two is .(to employ again the word I am us-
ing with a wearying frequency), psychological
rather than chronological. A minister doesn't
work ten years as a comrade, then after that
go on as a divinely commissioned priest. On
the contrary, every throb of comradeship
swiftly re-appears in the earnestness of the
sponsor and the efficiency of the mediator.
I adhere to this word, mediator and media-
torship, because it describes the fine, golden
goal of our ministerial race. I trust to your
intelligence and fairness not to misunderstand
the word, because although now captured by
the ecclesiastical specialists and clothed with a
ritualistic badge and uniform, it yet remains a
broad and mighty human word, and in its
etymology and especially its new social signifi-
cance to-day, it means the very thing I mean.
But while brother and priest are ever join-
ing hands in the Pastor's mind, yet there is a
development from one into the other as the
years go on. In this lecture I am to speak of
this development. Unless I mistake it is es-
sentially the reflex of the Pastor's own deep-
ening acquaintance with Christ. Just as the
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 71
Pastor learns comradeship by fellowship with
the human Jesus, so he learns sponsorship
through fellowship with the Divine Christ.
In the depths of personal Christian experience,
the minister enters more and more into living
fellowship with his Lord, as the growing
branch roots itself more and more within the
vine, and Christ is apprehended not only
as the Beautiful Galilean Companion and
Teacher, but as Divine Mediator, Redeemer
and Master.
Henchman the minister becomes, and knight
of the Crucified. Christ's spirit breathes upon
his spirit and what follows is a real though in-
definable oneness of life between them. So
the New Testament teaches. And this moral
and spiritual sharing of life with life between
minister and Master works to winnow and
purify the man's own soul, so that it shall be-
come a little more achromatic if I may ven-
ture a pedantic word, transmitting, in juster
color and outline, something, if God will, of
the image and message of Christ. The Pas-
tor thus himself becomes a true sponsor and
after his manner a social mediator in Christ's
name among men.
. It is to three aspects of this maturing proc-
72 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
ess in the Pastor's mind and to three fields
of its objective expression that I am to ask
your attention to-day. But, my fellow
students, I confess to a feeling of shrinking
and of awe even, in endeavoring to put into
what must be poor, pale words, any hint of
this inner story of the Pastor's heart. You
remember how at this point in our talk to-
gether we swore the oath against all mawk-
ishness, and pledged our manhood to sim-
plicity, lest we should parody or profane this
deep experience.
So sternly ethical is the law of it, yet so
preciously spiritual in its sequel, with such a
mortal loneliness sometimes, yet with entranc-
ing visions of the pastoral ideal, together with
an unrelaxing clench upon first-hand human
reality, that one is daunted by any notion of
describing it; and I am fain to fall back upon
your prayers, in some such words as those of
the fervid and devoted St. Bernard, Abbot of
Clairvaux, who, at the outset of one of his ad-
dresses, thus confesses his inadequacy :
"Behind these curtains of words, I feel
that an indescribable holiness and sublimity
are veiled, which I dare not touch, save at the
command of Him who guards their mystery."
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 73
" But in His Name," St. Bernard continues, "I
pass on. It will devolve upon you mean-
while, by your prayers, that we may the more
readily meditate upon a subject which requires
attentive minds, if it may be that the humble
knocker at the door, by his humility, may per-
ceive that which the over-confident explorer
would seek in vain."
THE ETHICAL SUBSTRATUM
First, then, let us notice and weigh well
the constant ethical substratum in the Pas-
toral consciousness.-
We start where we left off in the last lec-
ture, with our feet upon the solid human
floor of character and comradeship as recog-
nized, brought into relief and trained into ac-
tion by the habit of personal fellowship with
the life of the human Jesus. Now the thing
to insist upon is that no additional or subse-
quent spiritual illumination supersedes or min-
imizes this ethical substratum.
May I assert with all the care and force
at my command that the Christian Ministry
stands or falls by its ethic.. This must be even
more than an average or conventional ethic..
It must be the common ethic of high human-
74 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
ity and it must be Christ's ethic too. The
earnest young minister, before he has gone
very far in his pastoral experience, finds him-
self within the swing of a mood, at once of
immitigable sternness and of overpowering at-
traction. He comes sharp upon the convic-
tion that he must not only be personally noble,
but noble in a way high and unique, if he
would be worth much as a pastor.
. One of your own number asked me this
question, substantially : " How can I make
my ideal of manners at once gay enough for
the young and grave enough for the old ? "
I answer, one cannot, except by rising to a
summit, a moral ridge so lofty that the vision
extends and the streams flow in both directions
at once.
Gentlemen, I am preferring to quote you
rather than quote from the books, because the
books deal chiefly in generalities; but your
questions are hot from the furnace of personal
debate and endeavor.
The pastor realizes, to the core, that his
pastorate is an offence and a farce before God
and his own soul unless it be the reflex of an
uncommon striving after all that is high and
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 75
fine in personal character. He enters thus
upon the Via Sanctissima of his life.
In the tremendous annals of early and
mediaeval asceticism, he reads the century-old
witness to this principle,, that a lofty personal
ideal is the pastor's first prerequisite..
The method of this ascetic self-discipline,
seems to him mistaken, but its spirit he must
honor ; and the very method itself, perhaps, he
half unaware invokes, to some extent, in the
intimate places of his life, where no friend
goes.
Goethe says that something of the hero lies
latent in every man. Certainly a kind of
moral heroism denotes the pastoral vocation.
This latent moral heroism flashes up within
the man. The young minister trims the lamp
of his own moral freedom, God's firelight in
his mind, and in the exhilaration of free
choice, with a strangely mingled sense of the
duty of honor and the glory of privilege, he
sets himself, in every live stitch and inch of
him, into the strain of an unrelaxing race to
read his title clear to high-terraced manhood.
" Every man that striveth in the games
exerciseth self-control in all things." "Now
76 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
they do it to receive a corruptible crown, but
we an incorruptible." "I buffet my body."
The English weakly renders the energy of the
Greek. The truer paraphrase would be, " I
strike myself beneath the eye." " I beat my-
self black and blue." So cries the warrior
Paul. " Lest by any means after that I have
preached to others I myself should be re-
jected." So the young pastor pursues his
stern and glad struggle of which no man
knows.
Alone in his room, or walking the forest
aisles, or upon the crags of the mountains, for
the pastor is a cragsman, he woos his moral
ideals, trying to make of himself God's court-
eous and courageous gentleman. If he meets
Apolyon, as he will, disguised, he detects him,
closes with him and throttles him. He be-
comes possessed with the conviction that his
pastoral instrument is his own soul and that
like unto the graver, who first tempers his tool
in the furnace, then adds the edge and the
burnish with delicate and patient care, so he
must hammer and refine himself, grind down
and temper his own mind and spirit in order
that he shall be fit (or rather let me say a little
less unfit, for we dare not use a bolder word)
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 77
to be a pastoral graving tool in his Master's
hand.
I anticipate your obvious criticism. You
are saying that in all this account of the pas-
toral morale there is nothing new. Certainly
there is not, but the relation of that morale
to the challenge of the present age is new, and
each man's task in meeting that challenge is
an experiment as new for him and almost as
exigent as was the voyage of Ulysses.
But this ethical endeavor is not the end.
The Pastor " follows on to know the Lord."
He comes more and more "to know the love
of Christ which passeth knowledge." Here
in reverence we draw near to that deeper rev-
elation of Christ within the soul as the Su-
preme Mediator and Divine Shepherd and
Master, which is the " Holy of Holies," not
less in pastoral development than in Christian
experience.
THE SPIRITUAL DISCLOSURE OF CHRIST
Second : It is not necessary to review here
what was said in the last lecture as to the Pas-
tor's initial experience of human comradeship
with Jesus. But still following on in the
analogy of the Gospels, we discover that this
78 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
wayside 1 fellowship with the Figure of the
Nazarene as perfect human Friend and Model,
deepens by imperceptible gradations into the
adoring' realization of His Divine Supremacy
and Redeeming Power.
This is no matter of theological technique,
or of orthodox limitation. In the roster of
these worshippers we find Channing and Rob-
ertson as well as Wesley and Fenelon.
The spiritual quality in the Sacrifice of
Christ appears. He is the Son of God. He
is the supreme Incarnation of the Supreme.
H6 is the Holy Mediator, the Saviour and
Lord of the renewed and transformed life, and
the growing apprehension of this spiritual
loveliness and ascendency floods the mind.
Thus the young Pastor comes to live and
work in a strange kind of wonder at the total-
ity of his Lord's human-divine personality,
upon the physical and spiritual lineaments of
which he dwells with a lover's loyal joy, so
that he literally " walks with Jesus " every day
through Palestine on his way to his own Par-
ish, and in any pastoral service seems to him-
self to be only Christ's servant.
" Slave " was Paul's quivering word. Noth-
ing else, indeed; seems to him of comparable
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 79
value, beside this effort to make himself a
creature not wholly out of key with the
mediating Divine manhood of his Lord and
with the rich privilege of being His Spokes-
man. This is his quest of the " Holy Grail "
and he pursues it with an earnestness at once
ethical and spiritual, the severity of which he
must not evade, yet the glory of which he
cannot describe.
You will pardon, gentlemen, what I fear you
are finding a somewhat unrelieved seriousness
in the tension of our discussion to-day. But
I wish to avoid fancies, and at this vital point
in the entire course of our thoughts, do jus-
tice to the glimpses, which you did me the
honor to give me in our personal talks to-
gether, into the inner longing and spiritual
purpose of your hearts.
I would not speak in the language of mysti-
cism, yet I am speaking of what words cannot
tell. While the fundamental note of the in-
ner life remains 'ethical, the young Pastor goes
not far along this holy way of manhood-cul-
ture for the pastorate before he perceives the
wondrous figure of his Lord by his side, and
it seems to him almost as if this Chief Pastor
of Souls, and his own soul, reaching him,
8o THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
turns and walks with him, to teach him the
art of the under-shepherd. The essence of
this experience is probably coincident with
that of all true Christian hearts which enter
into the spiritual fellowship of the Life of
Christ. But the special accent under which
this experience is apprehended is given by the
specific thought and purpose of the minister's
own vocation.
For in this mood the pastor swings into the
midstream of his calling. He clears that peril
of self-centered-ness and masked pride, which
dogs the heels of the zealot or the mere
ethical expert. He escapes what Lecky calls
" the melancholy of introspection." * He
realizes that he must not only be noble,
but noble in Christ's beautiful and symmetrical
and outgiving way, in order to be Christ's
pastor, because only Christ's way of living is
the helpfully mediatorial way. The moral
movement within him, is now modulated into
a finer and more thrilling key. It rises into
the light. His ethical struggle becomes a
companioned struggle, and his Companion is
not only his Model and Master but his Saviour
and Helper.
His moral ideal itself also becomes more
* Sp. cit. p. 34.
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 81
finished and illumined and adds the altruistic
touch. ' How shall I make goodness seem
beautiful?' the Pastor asks, 'blending just-
ness and gentleness?' 'What is possible for
me in taking into my heart something of the
very spirit of the Crucified and Risen One, so
that I may not fumble in being the medium of
that beauty of blessing which is the authentic
mark of His mediatorial grace?'
You will say again, all this is vague and
mystical. So in a sense it is. But the inner
pastoral experience illustrates the truth of that
maxim of Professor William James as to " the
reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to
its proper place in our mental life." * In the
field of realized motive, at all events, there is
nothing vague. *A great spiritual aspiration,
perhaps the sublimest motive that can drive a
man, takes possession of the young minister,
to become in some little, far off way, at least,
a medium between a realized Christ on the
one hand, and a realized human need on the
other.
Only character he thinks, can accomplish
this, but it must be Christ-like character blos-
soming in Christ-like service.
"What's white?" is still the pastor's stern
* As quoted by Pres. King, in " Rational Living."
82 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
cry for himself. What is sheer, naked, ethical
honor ? But what's warm as well as white in
Christ's way of living as related to others'
needs? This becomes not less the ques-
tion.
THE PASSION OF SPONSORSHIP.
Third: Thus in the depths of the pastor's
soul, almost before he knows it, is born what
I have called, in default of a better phrase, the
passion of sponsorship.
This perhaps you will remember is the third
of the five features under which in the open-
ing lecture we defined the pastoral spirit.
I wish I could describe this ardor of the
sponsor so as not to be misunderstood. The
sentiment is not an official specialty. ' Its roots
as I repeat, are in that spiritual experience
which is generic in the Christian heart. And
this surely is the reason why so many " lay
preachers" are good preachers and pastors
too. But in the pastor's mind this common
Christian experience seems to rise into the
sense as of a spiritual accrediting, a humble
and daring hope that through companionship
with Christ and struggle to be like Him, one
may share with Him under His direction and
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 83
in His behalf and Name something of His
" watch and care " for and with and over the
flock of His love.
I express the feeling poorly, but you will
perceive that while it carries much of the
spiritual content of the High Church concep-
tion of the Pastorate, it is at the opposite pole
from the pride of ecclesiastical assumption, or
the arrogance of official prerogative.
The growth of this peculiar consciousness
from its fraternal germ has been natural,
psychological, ethical. Its prevalent mood is
joyful and brave, although sane and humble.
In it is what Burns calls "Ae spark o* Na-
ture's Fire," and yet also something of the
"indwelling Spirit" of St. John.
A true Pastor's sponsorship is to him a
beautiful spiritual necessity.. It simply, as we
say in our vernacular, has to be. It is the re-
jfiex of the Pastor's own most intimate sense
/of Christ and of Men.
And I call especial attention to the further
fact that the impulse of this sponsorship is, in
a true sense, mediatorial. The Pastor does
not indeed look upon himself as the source of
pastoral efficiency, nor does he assume any
primary prerogative. He seconds Christ's
84 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
care for the flock. Yet he feels that only so
far as he is personally worthy, can he thus
represent his Master. 'The Pastor aspires to
express in human and social type and form
something of the spirit and power of the Great
Mediation of Christ. But he assumes no au-
thority as of himself. He is interpretative.
He is ambassadorial, to use St. Paul's [elo-
quent word.* He is distributive.
Do not be afraid of this human use of the
great words. Surely nothing else than this is
the New Testament idea. How does Christ
himself become the supreme Mediator?
Through His Incarnation, through the glory
of personal character carried out to its ulti-
mate loveliness and offered with love's own
self-sacrifice to effect moral restoration. In-
carnation is the true antecedent of mediation.
So the Pastor, as the under-shepherd, shares
in a true mediatorial function, but he attains
to this by virtue not of a statutory commission,
but through the medium of his own earnest-
ness and elevation of spiritual endeavor, seek-
ing to realize Christ's life within his own, and
so represent Him to his flock.
* " It is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in
me." Gal. 2 : 20.
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 85
I hear you say again that I am becoming
still more esoteric, mystical. No, my com-
rades. I am seeking to be Scriptural. I am
seeking to recall the genuine pastoral experi-
ence of the Christian ages. There is a con-
dition of the inner spirit at once fraternal and
sacramental, charged with the sense of Christ
and of His errand, which affects the man
through and through, like some quick fire or
wine of God, reaching even to the outward
bearing, and keeping the frame erect, the
movement alert, the eye clear, the hand steady
and kind, the whole man on a quick pitch of
beautiful power, eager to understand, free to
judge, ready to serve, able to save.
And how is this Pastoral sponsorship illus-
trated? It is shown in a constant temper of
gentle reference to the invisible Chief Shep-
herd. Christ is always invoked.
The Pastoral temper incessantly endeavors
to carry out the Divine shepherding of Christ.
It is full alike of power and humility, of
firmness and tenderness. It has the keen,
patient intentness of the watch. I have
called it a passion. It does grow to be such.
The Pastor would rather care for his flock at
whatever cost than do anything else.
86 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
May I allude to still another feature of this
temper? Charged with comradeship, it also
charges itself with responsibility. It would
guarantee the flock. Sponsorship desires to
take the place of that for which it cares, as in
that almost fierce apostrophe of St. Paul
(Rom. 9.3 :) "I could wish that I myself were
anathema from Christ for my brethren's sake."
He speaks to the Galatians of " travailing in
birth " for his people. The Pastor would be
true at once in both directions, towards the
very heart of Christ and towards the very
heart of man. Out go both his arms, the one
to grasp Christ, the other to grasp his brother
man; and if this figure of the extended arms
implies a kind of crucifixion, in love's ache to
save, here also he is " crucified with Christ."
He cannot minister the water of life, so he
feels, unless his very hand touches the hand
of his Lord in taking it. He is the cup-bearer.
How ? By what he conveys ? Yes, but more
by what he is.
And on the other hand he identifies himself
with the flock. He gives his bond for them.
To employ our current vernacular, he " signs "
for them. He is their sponsor. Their life is
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 87
his life. He gives himself as their hostage.
He stands voucher for them, and for their
future, and he means to make his vouching
good. In this brave yearning he summons the
picture of his flock before his mind. What
does he behold ? All abroad on the mountains
the sheep are scattered, and into the cleft of
the rock falls the lamb. Valiant and patient,
a veritable shepherd, he watches, ranges, waits,
feeds, fights, if need be. He is always keyed
to his calling. He never forgets or ignores
his flock. That flock is his, as being his
Master's. A love without a name, so fearless
is it, and gentle and strong and self-forgetting,
dwells with him night and day for that flock.
He is, before God, its representative. "We
were gentle in the midst of you," writes St.
Paul to the Thessalonians, "as when a nurse
cherisheth her own children." " Well-pleased
to impart unto you not the Gospel of God
only, but also our own souls, because ye were
become very dear to us."
While taking nothing away from their own
direct and individual responsibility, the Pas-
tor yet holds his people in his arms as he might
his own child at the Baptism. And that won-
88 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
derful word Sponsor, in the etymological es-
sence of it, in the sacramental sweep of it, en-
titles the rhythm of his life.
Then, too, the same great music of media-
torial sponsorship is heard in a multitude of
little wayside notes rippling along through the
days.
Christ's Pastor will be very thoughtfully
courteous in little things, not " touchy," not
fussy, not garrulous. " Full of mercy and
good fruits, without variance, without hypoc-
risy." He will have that finish on the edge
which marks the gentleman.
You will observe all along the interplay of
the two pastoral tones, one of which we have
called the comradelike or the fraternal and
the other the sponsorlike or the mediatorial.
The genuine pastoral spirit of which I am so
poorly speaking is the sanest thing alive, in
perfect tune with plain ordinary human life,
and yet the Pastor is ever striving to echo
and re-embody something of the mediating
energy of the Divine Personality which so
entrances him. He emulates Christ's exqui-
site balance, His spiritual symmetry, His fel-
lowship with nature and little children. Yet
at the same time he dares repeat even to the
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 89
most wretched of sinners 'his Master's solemn
adjuration, " Go and sin no more."
The Pastor will hate mawkishness as he
hates the devil. He simply cannot let any
mean mood master him. He smites at all
"blue devils" and keeps himself strung and
sunny. He has no patience with sanctified
stagnation. He will be martial and dare to
dare. O ! this Knight-note in our vocation !
And yet on the other hand and in the same
breath the same man is all alive to express the
Infinite Compassion of Calvary, and his tones
will tremble with some far-off throb of the
gentleness of Gennesaret as he grieves over
human error, and murmurs in the ear of peni-
tence, "Thy faith hath saved thee. Go in
peace."
" What is your prevalent feeling and mood
as you face your great congregation?" I
once asked Mr. Beecher. He looked at me a
moment silently, then at something beyond
me. The great eyes grew humid and the
face royal and tender. "Compassion," he
replied.
The Pastor's pulse-beat is thus ever in two
scales which yet are one. He is at once com-
rade and priest. He pushes the pace and yet
go THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
he will put into every day some Christ-like
considerateness for him who cannot push the
pace, or who even drops by the way. '.
He keeps himself sane by a pinch of those
two preserving salts of the higher life humor
and humility, and yet he keeps in touch with
the wide world through sympathy and pity.
He is enamored of the fine art of fidelity. He
is severe with himself, " downs " petulance
and jealousy, or better, bows them out of
court with a curious little smile; but towards
others he is not severe, cultivating rather that
sweet candor which springs from steadily try-
ing to be gently just.
He holds his tongue and keeps his temper:
yet Christ helps him to combine hatred of
shams with fairness to the shammer. He is
emulous of the high and incorruptible life,
and yet is spokesman for the All-forgiving and
All-renewing Love.
In a word, he mobilizes his whole energy
into the dual dialect of his vocation, both in
the direction of personal ethical nobleness and
of sacrificial Christ-like ministry to other
men. He takes other men's moral ideals as
only the scaffolding for his own, and prac-
tices the "one touch more" in service which
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR gi
only the Chief Shepherd knows, and for which
he is never paid. He seeks the beauty of the
holy, the valor of the true; but not less the
outreach of the rescuer and the might of
love's self-sacrifice.
Ah, my Brothers, my words are thin and
far away indeed from the greatness and glow
of that of which I would speak ; but if I do not
mistake, it is along some such path as this
that your own thoughts were moving as we
spoke together of the Pastor's progress into
the increasing apprehension of that sacred
and high and spiritually mediating function
which Christ commits to him in his calling.
SOCIAL MEDIATION
We come, then, in our closing division to-
day, to a moment's glance out upon the scen-
ery of that threefold field where this comrade-
like, sponsor-like spirit, so nobly ethical, yet so
finally spiritual, charged with the sense of
Christ, and, therefore, in some degree the
agent of His mediatorial grace, is to be exer-
cised.
This field comprises the individual, the
home, the community.
92 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
ist. The arena of individual conference
and confession.
2nd. The home problems of your people on
their spiritual side.
3rd. The religious life of the Parish and
the community at large.
We cannot here do more than glance at
these wide domains of pastoral duty, endeav-
oring to determine simply the Pastor's essen-
tial relation to them. As to them all you
will rigorously bear in mind our constant
proposition that the Pastor is not an official
dispenser of heavenly blessing. He mediates
through the natural agency of personal trust-
worthiness, and his mediation consists in his
Christlike service as the explainer, the inter-
preter, the harmonizer, the peacemaker, the
spiritual inspirer.
For this mediation is distinctively social.
In our scheme of thought this point is the
one chiefly emphasized. Pastoral mediation
has to do with the relations between man and
man, class and class, as determined by the
relation between man and God. The Pastor
helps everybody to understand everybody else,
and in doing so to understand Christ most
of all.
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 93
Is it a fancy to discover an element of
mediation in even the most personal and in-
dividual conference? Here the Pastor mediates
between the two men in the man before him.
He must be able to explain the man to him-
self. He applies to him the seventh chapter
of the Book of Romans. This profoundly
beautiful style of mediation appears to per-
fection in the conversations of our Lord with
individuals, which, as Nicoll observes, " make
up so large a part of the Gospels."
Here opens the confused and critical realm
of personal wrong-doing, where misfortune
and fault, heredity and perversity, ignorance
and sin, welter together. How infinite the
complexity of the individual moral problems
that are laid sorrowfully; and sometimes
savagely, almost, before the Pastor's eye.
Most people who individually will seek your
counsel will come to you under the bewilder-
ment or paralysis of some false preconception.
"My little summer parish," said one of
you to me, "has been burned over and over
with fanaticism." How often the words have
recurred to me! How the fires of false re-
ligion have burnt over and scorched our beau-
tiful New England! Well! You will deal
94 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
very patiently with these preconceptions, not
identifying the real intent of the man with
them. You will illumine the interview with
some unexpected turn or touch. Great is the
power of the unexpected, and all thorough
mediation is full of that power. Prediger re-
marks, "Get others to talk; what a man says
to you has more influence upon him than all
you can say to him."
The Pastor mediates in this dim tangle of
human wrong by explaining the evil part of
the man to the good part of him, and claim-
ing the good part as still on God's side in the
fight, not confusing, in the crude, common
way of average human judgment, the whole
of the man with his fault. The man hadn't
thought of that distinction and in your power
to present it, is your first hold upon him.
Out on the Southwestern plains the air is
so clear that the Mexicans have a proverb that
you can " see into day after to-morrow." The
Pastor must see into " day after to-morrow "
for his man ; and you will not forget to grace
the talk with " some touch of Nature's genial
glow " to quote another phrase of the great
Sir Walter.
The Pastor studies human nature, as he
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 95
studies his Bible. He is sedulous of the
" higher criticism " of men's lives, and he is
not content with mere driftwood knowledge
either. He collates his observations of human
nature, writes them down, and tries to get at
a definite group of working principles and
maxims. So he can recognize the wrong in a
man and yet keep on caring for him, not
merely as an object of pity men resent that
and ought to but as still his Father's child,
and susceptible of rescue. You can say almost
anything to a man if you make it evident that
you say it because you honor what is good
in him and that your anxiety for him is not a
professional pose. In the City of Brussels the
Socialists have erected a People's Palace. In
one of the halls, behind a screen, is frescoed
upon the wall the figure of Jesus Christ. So
in many a worldly mind screened even from
his own consciousness is the similitude of
Christian ideals. The Niagara of nineteen
Christian centuries has not for nothing poured
itself into and upon the modern mind.
But just one word here as to these personal
interviews: better be luminous than volum-
inous !
Now this sense of the moral dualism in a
g6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
man and of the duty and privilege of medi-
ation between the two selves of him gives to
the Pastor a curious spiritual daring, an in-
dependent and good-humored fearlessness in
dealing with men in the wish to explain them
to themselves and segregate the good from the
evil. 'You can't make me anything other
than your brother/ Christ's minister says to
every man; 'and I will show you why.'
Then the explanation of Christ to the man
follows naturally. The Pastor more than
preaches ; he would incarnate something of his
Master's spirit and attitude; he interprets
Christ through his own lit and tender per-
sonality, playing upon and in sympathy with
the good half of the man he is talking to.
And thus with reference to all the innum-
erable moral problems in individual lives
which the confessions and questions of his
parishioners will bring to him. The Pastoral
mood is not only intelligently responsive and
humanly sympathetic, but it is also that of a
spiritual priesthood in Christ's name. The
Pastor is Christ's own under-shepherd directly
at work, his own nature roused and playing
free, out towards his parishioner.
Robert Browning, who of all modern poets
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 97
comes closest to the Pastor, in depicting the
moral scenery of human life, has in his
" Saul " presented one of the lordliest pictures
in English literature of the truly pastoral
ministry, as the young shepherd-singer deals
with the dark despair of the great chieftain,
as he hangs "drear, and stark, blind and
dumb." That " black midtent's silence " is the
similitude of many .a human heart. And the
wonderful, varying, upward curve of the harp-
ist's melodies, ranging from rural trolls to the
sublimest religious adjuration and prophecy
is the strangely complete and eloquent pro-
totype of the Christian Pastor's many-toned
plea. Even that sinewy and sunny line, which
gives the dominant key note of the entire
poem :
"How good is man's life the mere living,"
is not unaptly paraphrased by our answering
cry : How good is the Pastor's life the mere
loving.
With his own mental windows ever open
towards Christ, he realizes the Unseen; he
realizes also the spiritual background of the
life he is trying to help. This twofold out-
look imparts a wonderful steadiness and
g8 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
blitheness to pastoral service. The Pastor is
not an idealist but a realist, only he sees the
whole of the man in Christ's way :
" He looks at all things as they are,
But through a kind of glory,"
and he is alive to the tips of his fingers with
an active, buoyant friendliness which interprets
to the man his own problem and rouses the
good in him to fight the evil.
% Then the home! Ah! the home. Hats off
again, gentlemen! 'Every home possesses for
the Christian Pastor something of the sacred-
ness which for Jesus hovered about that home
in Bethany..
In the last lecture we have^ spoken of the
pastor as the family comrade and counsellor.
Let me add a word here as to his more dis-
tinctively religious office in the home. > Here
also he must mediate, between one home and
another perhaps; or in the home itself, avoid-
ing intrusion, he must deftly mend the break
between different factors and currents in the
family life/ He is the interpreter between the
home as it is and the same home as it might
be, should it realize its own latent possibilities,
In the family interview his motto is :
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 99
" Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant." *
" All these matters of pastoral service seem
vague to me ! " said one of you to me. They
will not seem vague when you get to them,
dear brother, if you make your own soul so
nobly fraternal that it becomes, perforce,
mediatorial in the true sense. And you can
form no idea beforehand of the solemn and
gentle joy of it all.
Ah, gentlemen, let us pray God that we may
have the right mood at the threshold of
homes, delicate, reverent, with a grain of
humor and a pound of cheer, remembering
ere the door opens, the unseen shapes of joy
or sorrow which may be waiting within.
Have you a voice, a look, for the weeping
ones in the dim, chill room where the living
has just become the dead? Yes, if you are
Christ's man, you have; not otherwise. And
Christ's man, while he lingers long at Cal-
vary, does not stop there; he goes on with
Christ to the Resurrection.
Here, too, your office is to mediate, i. e., to
interpret the unseen in the terms of the seen
* Sir Walter Raleigh.
ioo THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
to 'help the sad eyes to see what Christ gives
you to see. They must often see through
your eyes if they are to see at all.
And aside from these more acute chal-
lenges, your spiritual sponsorship will be
called upon in reference to the common run of
home questions all the time. How many a
misunderstanding is to be set right! This
young fellow, caught in a business snarl, when
the case involves more folly than fault, is not
only to be helped out, but the moment is to
be seized upon instantly, tactfully and availed
of to swing the young life towards its God.
This girl is to be sent on her way to college
rejoicing, but also resolute for Christian serv-
ice!. Here an inevitable burden is to be set
a little more easily on the galled but patient
shoulders; there a rift of Christ's sunshine
sent across the invalid's room; yonder an old
saw or song made to tinkle pleasantly again
in the dulled year of age.
How can a man do it all? He cannot, ex-
cept as he is a medium for the exquisite medi-
ation of the many-toned Christ. You will be
careful also not to trench upon the field better
occupied by other advisers. Be sensible, or
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 101
else don't try to be saintly. Don't make a fool
of yourself by stealing the doctor's job or the
lawyer's, or the business man's. They can
give better counsel than we can in their own
fields.
What then is your office? It is to bring a
kind of Resurrection Morning into evening all
the time, comradeship into struggle, rescue
into failure, in a word bring Christ into the
home life. Is not all this work in some true
sense mediatorial?
Then, last of all, and following inevitably
upon the individual and the family sponsor-
ship comes the Pastor's offiee as mediator in
the Parish, and in the community at large.
Here we instantly feel the hot breath of the
new age. The age gasps for adequate medi-
ation.
What a rocking time ! " A conflict of meth-
ods," says Sabatier, " is a graver matter than
a quarrel between doctrines."
What is upon us now is a conflict of meth-
ods, each method represented by a class rather
than by a man. So furious is the current that
we have a melee of groups. I make no at-
tempt at novel or recondite analysis of these
102 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
social phenomenas, but the broad patent facts
of the situation constitute such a challenge as
never met Christian minister before.
The age is full of the detonations of class
hostility. Prejudice, jealousy are not indur-
ated, half ossified, as of old ; but are breaking
out into overt and acute (conflicts, where
" ignorant armies clash," to recall Arnold's
phrase, in the midst of the dust and smoke of
a kind of economic chaos.*
What is needed? Mediation, mediation, on
the part of some one so plainly disinterested,
so fair and fraternal and good-humoredly
brave, that men can't help liking him and
trusting him a Christian minister in short,
who, first a comrade with men, can in Christ's
spirit be mediator and peacemaker among
men.
Who else can so well explain men to men and
"keep friends" with all? This gives glory
even to "preaching in a sawmill," as one of
you told me he was privileged to do.
Here opens before us in its new and acute
phases what Professor Ely used to call the
" effort of men to live the life of men." One
of these modern issues is the "Propaganda
of Socialism" to employ the epithet of Labor
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 103
Commissioner Charles P. Neill. American
Society to-day is a vast and tumultuous sea
of social conflict, a congeries of whirlpools,
where precedent meets experiment, as when
at the Falls of St. John, the mighty downrush
of the river meets the still more mighty inrush
of the tide.
What an hour to live in, gentlemen ! Peril
and opportunity come in on the same flood. In
this very social unrest is the potency of social
regeneration. What we are awaking to is
what Dr. Stelzle terms the "economic inter-
pretation of history." Changes, realignments
vast and vital are in rapid progress. The
balance of our population and power is becom-
ing urban. Industry is everywhere organized.
Not less than One Hundred and Twenty In-,
ternational Organizations are affiliated with
the " American Federation of Labor." Twen-
ty-five Million Socialists in the civilized
world are bent upon a revolutionary propa-
ganda. There are Fifty Socialist Periodicals
in the United States alone. Again we ask,
what is needed? And again we instantly
answer, intelligent and loving mediation
more than anything else, so securing mutual
understanding and co-operation. But \vho
104 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
shall thus mediate?, .Who if not the Christian
Pastor?
The priest of God now must be a practical
expert in promoting a better harmony of
social movement in the community.
The Pastor is the one man in town who, by
virtue of the associations of his calling, and
especially by virtue of whatever pure noble-
ness of soul he possesses and the high, fine
style of his manhood, can bridge these chasms
between classes and so warrant on his own
that best epitaph on any man's grave, The
man who helped to make men one.
You ask, " Who in our profession is trying
to do this sort of thing? " Who? Why, such
men as (to mention only two of whose work
I personally know) Ozora S. Davis, late of
New Britain, Conn., now President of Chi-
cago Theological Seminary, and Charles R.
Brown, of Oakland, Cal. They not only try
to do it, but they do it.
Davis has toiled to master four languages
besides his own, in order to speak to the for-
eign-born operatives in the New Britain mills.
Brown of Oakland has gone into the La-
bor Unions and stood fearlessly forth for the
fraternity of the Church with all men, high
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 105
and low, and all men high and low, in Cali-
fornia, love and honor him for doing it.
That sentence of Leasing, though one-sided,
is suggestive: "The Christian Religion has
been tried for centuries. The Religion of
Christ remains yet to be tried."
So we may say that the Pastorate of Christ,
charged with His spiritual democracy, and
beautiful with His spiritual mediation, is yet
to be brought to bear fully upon the social
confusions of our time.
For the Pastor's function is not limited by
his Church walls. A splendid breadth of light
falls upon the modern Pastor in the sense that
he belongs to the community through his
Church. He is every man's man in the Mas-
ter's name.
So it is that the Pastor, tuned to the very
mind of his Lord, and having brought all men
nearer together, can fitly stand at the Table
of the Holy Communion, declaring the Mes-
sage of the Cross, and the assurance of the
pardoning grace of God.
One of you asked me this question, and it
hits the eye of its target, I quote verbatim:
"Which is the better, to devote one's self
to making fine sermons for the edification of
io6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
a few saints, or to get out, even at some sac-
rifice of pulpit preciseness, and try to reach
outsiders with the simple Message of Salva-
tion?"
From the pastoral standpoint, one doesn't
hesitate five seconds for an answer. Which
is better, carefully to fodder one prudent, self-
satisfied sheep, or pull ninety-nine heedless
lambs out of the ditch? And yet the alter-
native which the question proposes does not
really obtain, for that "simple Gospel mes-
sage " which you have in mind is really bet-
ter preaching, even intellectually considered,
than is your labored academic essay.
Sylvester Home's great Church in London
bears this motto, "No quest, no conquest."
The logic of the view of the pastorate pre-
sented to-day makes the Pastor a broad, live,
many-sided man. He is the Pastor, not merely
of the Church, but of the community. The
exclusive, seclusive theory of the pastorate is
the worst possible for the saints themselves.
The line that separates the Church from the
general public is partly arbitrary and illusory,
the relic of false standards. Christ's man is
for men, wherever he finds them. Some are
THE PASTOR AS SPIRITUAL SPONSOR 107
out of the Church that ought to be in; some
possibly are in that ought to be out.
My friend, Bishop Leonard of Ohio, told
me this story: He said he sent a young cu-
rate!, blazing with zeal and ready to tackle
anything, to one of the hardest, toughest,
little, side-tracked parishes n'ear the southern
border of the State. After a time, back came
the curate to report.
"Well," said Bishop Leonard, "how many
new members have you got into the Church ? "
"Bishop, not a one," was the answer; "but,
by the grace of God, I've nearly cleaned out all
the old members."
The best way to cultivate the saints is to
make them go out with you, to seek and save
the lost.
Ah, men, that is what you are for, till the
sunset gun, to get hold of men, anywhere and
everywhere, explain them to themselves, medi-
ate between them, create among them the basis
for an intelligent and lofty social fellowship,
help them to understand Christ, and so bring
them back to God to the Church, do I say?
Yes, to the Church, if it be a true Church of
God, for the Church will be, as it was at the
io8 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
beginning, the natural and necessary social
form in which this Christ-Life among men
will nucleate itself and organize itself for
action.
What some of these forms of Church action
are at the present moment, and how the Pastor
is to avail himself of them and lead them, will
be the subject of our next talk together.
LECTURE IV
THE PASTOR AS PARISH ORGAN-
IZER AND LEADER
THE PASTOR AS PARISH ORGANIZER
AND LEADER
THE field which, in rapid and informal
fashion, we shall traverse to-day, differs
widely from its predecessors in the series. Up
to this moment our keynote has been personal,
possibly even introspective. We have tried to
draw near to that wonderful inner flame of
the pastoral spirit which, like the fire of God
in the burning bush, illumines but does not
consume 1 .
We have described this peculiar fire of our
calling by its essential traits, its fundamental
note of honor for men, its sympathy with men,
its genius of rescue, its passion of sponsorship
in Christ's name. We have thus traced a
course of mental development which, though
attended at every step by the presence and
grace of the spirit of Christ, is yet normally
psychological, and by which the human com-
rade and counsellor becomes also Christ's un-
der-shepherd, the spiritual guide and minister
of his people, fulfilling the supreme offices of
a mediator in our distracting time between
iix
112 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
rival groups and classes in the community, and
so embodying and applying something of the
spirit of the Great Mediation of Christ.
In our highly complex and socialistic era,
however, such pastoral work in the commun-
ity, in order to be effective, must avail itself
of the principle, never before half so much
emphasized as now, of social organization.
Thus opens before us, in logical order, the
function . of the pastor as the parish leader.
We shall bear in mind that what we are to
discuss is not the field of parish machinery it-
self, that would require a volume but only
the pastor's relation to it.
A most notable feature of church life in
the new age is the immense expansion of the
principle of subsidiary organization in the par-
ish. This is in response to the dominance of
the new social note in the development of civ-
ilization. This new note, however, is more
than a mere rediscovery of the social idea or/
a fresh insistence upon social method. It is
the distinct emergence of a specific theory and
style of social organization, viz., that of the
subdivision of classes into groups, each of
which shall remain semi-independent and yet
be an organic unit.
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 113
What Graham Taylor calls " the irresistible
tidal movement >from individualism toward
solidarity" is to be analyzed by reference to
this further principle of subdivisions into
group independencies.
As to this heated and changeful field, gener-
alizations are easy and easily fallacious ; but it
seems reasonable to suppose that we are ap-
proaching that new conception of the higher
individuality which, to employ the language
of Prof. Shaler of Harvard, "includes lower
individualities in itself."
What seems to be coming in upon us in
Church and State is not only a new sense of
the significance of corporate social life, with
its new science of sociology and its new social
economics, but also the further discovery and
application of what might be called running
a clear risk of pedantry the ganglionic model
of social structure, as in physical organisms,
viz., the idea of organizing by classes of more
or less independent groups, these groups them-
selves being composed of more or less inde-
pendent clusters. It is the notion of the cor-
relation of a number of independent social cen-
tres of subdivision. The new energy of the
social unit thus developed, together with the
H4 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
multiplication of wondrous and novel agencies
of modern science, and our enlarged facilities
for, intercommunication, is remodeling the
face of our civilization..
To this style of remodeling the church must
conform.. In all the great convocations held
this last year, denominational and interde-
nominational, at Edinburgh, London, Philadel-
phia, this fact has been recognized. Modern-
ism is not, as the Vatican conceives it, a for-
eigner, an immigrant, a pert invader making
a descent upon the age. It is the age itself
rebuilding its fabric of faith under more ra-
tional forms. The new age is the old age,
remelted and recast. The church of the new
age is the church of the old age, readapted.
You cannot preach to an express train unless
you are on the train; and the social laws that
at any epoch operate throughout the entire
community, operate not less in the church,
which is integrated in that community. There
is also abroad everywhere a freshened and im-
mensely enlarged notion of the breadth of the
relations in which the church may legiti-
mately stand, as affecting the community,
especially in the field of child-culture, of hu-
manitarian relief, and in the work of home
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 115
and foreign missions, which is a supreme test
of the true Christian spirit.
The relation of this very briefly and crudely
stated philosophy of modern social develop-
ment to our line of thought will be evident as
we proceed. On the whole, this organizing
passion of the age (for it is almost such) is to
be welcomed in the church. The life of the
age is in it; the providence of God behind it;
it carries the energy and the prophecy of our
time.
But it is a very vital question for the minis-
ter how he shall hold himself in relation to it.
Shall he leave this field of departmental ex-
pansion to others? No. Shall he surrender
himself to its mechanism, making its technique
of foremost importance? Emphatically, no.
But if you ask me exactly how to steer be-
tween these two opposed extremes, I have only
to make that confession of inability to answer
which is good for the lecturer's soul, and
which may remind you how we are all in the
same boat with one another in this complex
and difficult matter of handling a parish to the
satisfaction of modern men as well as to the
glory of God.
Nevertheless, I may perhaps hazard a few
ii6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
hints, drawn out of my own pastoral experi-
ence, which must in every case be modified to
suit the individual pastor's own idiosyncrasy
and the circumstances of the parish in which
he labors.
The general ideal of parish administration,
and especially the pastor's relation thereto,
which I am to suggest, will be characterized
in three particulars by the controlling presence
of three sentiments:
1. Personal Considerateness.
2. Federative Independence.
3. Social Enthusiasm.
PERSONAL CONSIDERATENESS
You, gentlemen, will be able to find a better
brace of words than these by which to ^express,
in a single epithet, the entire quality which I
have in mind. It is that note of personal solic-
itude, equity, and adaptation which is im-
parted to all the organized activity of the
parish by the pastor's care for individuals,
based upon his knowledge of them, his re-
spect and love for them, and his desire for their
due and proper freedom of individual action.
What I have in mind is the opposite of the
machine tone in parish life.
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 117
Right here, on the threshold of the dis-
cussion, rises before us the truth which in
this whole field is probably the most vitally
important thing to remember, viz., that
while the pastor must in our day be an ad-
ministrative leader, he is not to shift from
his normal and constant pastoral attitude, in
order to accomplish this administrative work.
True parish economics presents the pastor as
organizing, but not the pastor turning himself
into something else for the sake of organizing. ,
President Tucker, in his Yale Lectures on
Preaching, delivered ten years ago, remarks,
with that union of rare insight and finished
expression which make his words precious,
" There is a strong, though subtle influence at
work toward the unmaking of the preacher
coming up out of the social situation." So we
may say there is a subtle influence at work
toward the unmaking of the pastor coming up
out of the administrative situation. Against
this tendency we must set our whole force.
The very key-note of wise and fine parish
direction is that the pastor shall not cease to
be a pastor in order to be a parish promoter;
but on the contrary, shall carry the rich, full,
devoted tone of the pastoral spirit into every
n8 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
fibre and filament of his administrative func-
tions. Is it not true, indeed, that the con-
trary is often assumed by young- ministers?
Does not a vague idea prevail, accepted
almost without challenge, that old-fashioned
pastoral service was one thing, with its indi-
vidualistic note of devotion, but that this new,
insistent, absorbing business of parish organ-
izing is quite another thing, more quasi-secu-
lar in character, as though the minister must
needs possess no less than three suits of pro-
fessional clothing, one to wear in pastoral
service to the sick and afflicted; another a
kind of smart spiritual " cutaway " to wear
as a man of affairs in running the parish ma-
chine ; while a third, cut, Heaven only knows
how, but different from the others is reserved
exclusively for the pulpit 1 Somewhat in this
vein is an advertisement which, as I am cred-
ibly informed, a senior seminary student in-
serted in the columns of the village paper:
" Wanted, a good strong horse to do the work
of a country pastor ! "
All this is childish and away from the
deep truth of our calling, and from the best
influence of church life upon our civilization.
Such professional segregation, as of different
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 119
roles in the ministry, is fallacious and mis-
chievous. It is also needless.
The truth is, the genius of fruitful parish
discipline is profoundly permeated by the pas-
toral spirit. The pastor first of all considers
individuals, justly and gently. He adapts the
worker to the. task and adjusts the task to the
worker. The clatter of cold cog wheels is
hateful to him. ' If nowhere else in modern
society, then all the more in the church/ he
exclaims, ' will we, by Christ's grace, realize
an organic life characterized by that spiritual
freedom and elevation which spring from a
delicate and just regard for each man's per-
sonality.' Now it is precisely this note of
fraternal sponsorship, genial, yet charged with
religious earnestness, which makes church life
different from and spiritually superior to
other forms of organization in our modern
society.
In other words, the parish machine must
not be a machine. It must have soul, and its
soul must be love. All the numberless subsid-
iary departments and agencies of the church
propaganda are to be shot through with a
peculiar temper and glow, which is distinc-
tively pastoral, which nobody but the live pas-
120 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
tor, who is never anything other than a pastor,
can introduce and maintain. In its peculiar
considerateness, its accent on fellowship, its
loving care for the remnants, fringes and fag-
ends of the social life, parish organization
should be the equivalent, in corporate and or-
ganic form, of those qualities which we have
specified as denoting the pastor's shepherding.
In a word, the parochial must be the pastoral,
in Christ's vital and humane sense of that title,
and if it is not, then, while there may be a
great deal of social stir in the parish, the finest
ends of the church life will drift out of sight,
both unrecognized and unreached.
Here, therefore, we come upon what, I can-
not help thinking, is the most valuable prac-
tical rule for our guidance as ministers, in
dealing with economic and administrative de-
tails : Decide them in the pastoral way, that is,
get into the full glow of the pastoral firelight,
and then decide them. Do not decide them in
any rattling mill of mere committee confer-
ence, or in the icehouse of an unwarmed
church study.
For example, shall we permit people, whose
hearts are warm, but who have little educa-
tion, to teach in the Sunday-school, or shall
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 121
we insist upon pedagogic accomplishments?
The pastoral spirit would answer: accept the
former class as teachers to start with, then
work toward better education as fast as you
can.
Here is another question which you will
meet. Shall we give free rein to everybody,
especially the young people, to multiply social
entertainments, bazaars, fairs, secular shows
within the church walls, all " for church pur-
poses," of course; or shall we be a trifle con-
servative in these matters? The pastoral
spirit, in the sense as we have defined it the
reembodiment of the Master's spirit would
reply: take the conservative line to start with.
But when you have run up not so high either
as to be out of sight the great flag of spiritual
fidelity, then admit beneath it all social ameni-
ties and enthusiasms possible which are not
inconsistent with it. The easy habit of dis-
regard, or even forgetfulness, in attention to
secondary enterprises, of the great, constant,
spiritual errand of the church, is a policy
fraught with a profound peril; it loses more
than it gains, and in the long run will cost
the church the loss of the deeper respect and
confidence of thinking men.
122 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
The instances are legion to which this prin-
ciple of parish judgment applies. Decide the
little local question in the light of the roused
pastoral sentiment, i. e., the sentiment at once
of comrade and sponsor. Yet do not sit up so
straight even as Pastor as to lean backward.
Keep in sympathy with your vivacious young
people, or with some possibly over-economical
business man, even when you oppose them.
Let them feel that you understand them, and
very genially and patiently explain the con-
trary ground to them. Very possibly they
may be right and you wrong.
" Would you admit dancing in the church? "
one of you asked me. Yes, if I would in the
little room upstairs at home where my mother
goes to pray. That, I think, would be the
Pastor's answer. There is a fitness in things,
and the common sense of the community, if
frankly appealed to, respects that fitness. Only
you must learn to say " No " in these matters
with a smile that means genuine kindliness,
and with a quick tactful suggestion of some-
thing else in place of the thing forbidden, that
shall be attractive and yet shall preserve the
sense of moral fitness.
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 123
Sometimes an unexpected turn helps. " May
we have a little game in the church parlor?"
was asked of a minister friend of mine, a tact-
ful man. "Certainly," he answered. "And
we'll rehearse some songs at the same time.
Then the next day we will all rally and tramp
out two miles to a poor little hospital on the
outskirts of the town and sing those songs to
the poor fellows lying there in their pain 1 "
And the scheme went through, too. But the
young folks didn't want to play that game in
the church parlor every week !
Get down to the pastoral undertone in your
parish economics. The Church is the Church,
not a trade-union, nor a business corporation,
nor a social club, primarily, though in a sec-
ondary sense it is all of these. It is a human-
rescue brotherhood, working for moral and
religious ends. Bring Christ's love-note in.
Parish economics is not mechanism. It is the
natural fulfillment of Christlike outreach for
men, appearing in modern socially organized
forms.
This very level question was asked by one
of you : " Shall a minister in our day of or-
ganized activities concentrate his effort on
124 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
his parish machinery and let domestic parish
calling go?" I answer, No. Why? Because
that wouldn't be pastoral. The home inter-
view is what will most help the minister in-
telligently and kindly to guide the committees
and interject the fine considerateness of Christ
into the methods of departments.
Still, in this matter of common " parish call-
ing" we must remember that times have
changed. New demands have multiplied and
time seems shortened. A pastor is an over-
driven toiler, preacher, teacher, leader,
watcher over his flock. He must be a stern
yet tactful economist of his moments. He has
no time for garrulous gadding about the par-
ish. A parish call is a salutation, not a con-
ference, and, as a rule, ten minutes are more
to the purpose than sixty for such salutation,
unless in connection with some definite profes-
sional errand.
We complain of parish gossip. Let us
see to it that we are not gossips ourselves,
especially in committee meetings. The. habit
of indiscreet garrulity in committee meetings
digs many pastoral graves. It is a good rule
never to talk to one person in the parish about
another, and never presume upon your ex
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 125
officio chairmanship to recite personal narra-
tives.
Gentlemen, do not let the twentieth century
turn you into that curious parochial prodigy
a universal committeeman, a polyglot chair-
man. Don't try to be Captain of everything;
and when you are captain, don't forget that
you are Christ's under-shepherd and human-
ity's servant first and all the time. Let the
deacons moderate some of the meetings. Oc-
casionally have the sprightliest deacon do it,
if you think the very term "moderator" is
invidious in that connection. And, by the
way, have some sprightly men on your Dea-
cons' Board. That is a part of the modern
era in church enterprise.
FEDERATIVE INDEPENDENCE
But we pass to the second feature of our
parish ideal, which will perhaps let us a little
further into the social philosophy of our sub-
ject. .Closely joined with the spirit of con-
siderate loving-kindness which, emanating
from the pastor himself, should pervade all
the church organizations, is another quality
the quality of freedom, a concession of inde-
ia6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
pendence to official associates and subordi-
nates, based upon trust in them. This also is
a direct emanation from the pastoral attitude
of mind.
"Ye, brethren, were called for freedom;
only use not your freedom for an occasion to
the flesh, but through love be servants one to
another." (Gal. 5, 13).
Here, in a sentence, St. Paul describes the
genius of church organization on its side of
liberty.
In order to measure the value of this prin-
ciple in, modern church life, we must more
carefully recur to that analysis of present so-
cial conditions which has already been out-
lined.
Ezekiel's ancient and dazzling vision of the
beryl wheels is fulfilled in an age such as this,
which is characterized by the impulse, not
merely to organize, but to multiply subsidiary
organizations within organizations. Perhaps
the most distinctive note in the organizing im-
pulse of to-day is that it so loves the " wheels
in the middle of a wheel." It is a very demon
of federative subdivision which is upon us; or
rather not a demon, but the little wizard of
social efficiency. Modern power is largely in
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 127
the ratio of the subdivision of semi-inde-
pendent agencies. Now the logical conse-
quence of this must be an ultimate appeal
either to a very rigid mechanical discipline, or
to a very lofty voluntary fraternity, as the
force to coordinate and harmonize these many
subdivisions; for each desires to maintain a
certain independence.
As soon as you get fairly started in prac-
tical parish development you will be at your
wits' end to keep track of your "train sec-
tions "t (or keep them on the track, for that
matter). In my own parish organization, I
have no less than fourteen presidents of things,
besides vice-presidents, and more than that
number of subordinate chairmen! I counted
them this morning; and my church is a quiet
family tea-table compared with the infinite in-
stitutionalism of some churches.
I do not deprecate this growing multiplic-
ity; I welcome it. The heart-throb of the
age insists that it should be thus. We shall
soon have an office of some sort for every man,
woman and child in the church. And the
people like it; they must have it. They work
well under it; they won't work without it;
the twentieth century forbids them. Labor it-
128 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
self is welcome, if only people can have enough
" division of labor " ; and everybody finds rea-
son for being a Dorcas, who can only be sec-
retary or something of a Dorcas society.
I intend no slant of satire ; but pay my com-
pliment to the spirit of the age. In this mi-
nute subdivision of corporate life, in this multi-
plication and distribution of official responsi-
bility, is a hidden dynamic of vast and hith-
erto undeveloped power. Thirty and more
separate presidents and chairmen in one church
implies an unlocking of human energy little
short of terrific! Indeed, right here, in this
gearing in of departments, this interplay of
groups, each group an organized unit, this free
union of .legitimate official ambition, with un-
limited organic subdivision, we hear the very
"chug chug" of the motor-car of the modern
parish race.
Under these circumstances, two theories of
parochial administration offer themselves for
your adoption: the one, the more centralized
and autocratic; the other, the more federated
and distributive. In the former, the pastor
is not only the nominal but the actual manager
and dictator of all these multiform, activities.
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 129
His word is law. He holds all the strings in
his hand. He rules tactfully, if he has the
grace but he rules. The whole parish is like
a great army, a factory, or commercial house,
with one absolute head, from which all depart-
ments and sub-departments are graded down.
The amazingly effective " Salvation Army "
organization is a supreme instance of this re-
ligious autocracy. What it lacks is freedom
for individual development.
The other parochial method is that of fed-
erated paternalism, in which, while the pastor
is at the head, each department of the parish
organization is treated and trusted as being an
entity in itself, with its own head the Sun-
day-school, Senior, Intermediate, Primary,
Kindergarten ; the Mission School ; the Wom-
an's Mission Circle; the Men's Club; the
Young People's Alliance; the Junior Guilds,
half a dozen of them, all and each regarded
somewhat as " free and sovereign states," in
a federal union. Here freedom is maintained
and the community of action is secured, not
so much by official discipline as by a common
and burning spirit of religious earnestness and
mutual faith and honor glowing at the centre
130 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
of the parish life which it is the business of
the pastor himself to cultivate and even em-
body.
Now, as between these two administrative
theories and methods, the former, the central-
ized and autocratic, is probably the more busi-
nesslike, the more army-like, the more effec-
tive for machine ends, the better agent for
mere church propagandism ; and the more re-
cent drift in what we call " up to date " parish
enterprise is, I am inclined to believe, on the
whole, tending in that direction.
But I seriously question whether the higher
ends of personal Christian culture and a fine-
toned Christian civilization are reached so
nobly as by the federation plan. To quote a
phrase of Edmund Burke, we " pardon some-
thing to the spirit of liberty."
Take what most pastors discover to be a
somewhat "burning" question, that of the
choir, for instance. There is considerable rea-
son to believe that an average church choir can
be managed best on the federation plan. Min-
isterial autocracy is usually checked at the
organ loft. One instance to the contrary is,
however, reported from a colored church
down South, where the minister, having suf-
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 131
fered many things for many days, announced
one Sunday morning, "De choir will now
sing dat beautiful piece, ' We ain't got long to
stay heah' after which dey will consider dem-
selves discha'ged and will le out quietly, one
by one. We'se gwine to hab con'gational
singin' heahaftah in dis yere chu'ch."
Nathaniel Schmidt, Professor of Semitic
literature at Cornell University, in his elo-
quent though radical book, "The Prophet of
Nazareth," published three years ago, remarks,
" A greater importance is given in the teach-
ing of Jesus to the perfecting of human soci-
ety than to the future of the individual." This
may be a rather one-sided generalization, but
there can be no question but that the exhibi-
tion of free and voluntary brotherhood, in
organized action in the church of Christ, is
now and is to be our finest socially educative
force ; but in order for this, the organic affilia-
tion must be voluntary and free. As Jesus
said, " By this shall all men know that ye are
my disciples if ye " are subservient to a cen-
tralized parish administration? No "if ye
have love one to another." 1
If Christian churches represented an ethical
and intellectual level no higher than that of
132 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
the masses of society at large, autocracy, let
us concede, might be the best method for util-
izing their energies. But the churches are
composed of Christian men and women, i. e.,
of people who, in the free exercise of educated
reason and moral purpose, have chosen Christ,
His truth as their law, His service as their
joy. Now, among such people, the federative
plan, while it has its dangers, has also its im-
mense advantages. It develops personal char-
acter and the responsibility of free initiative.
It promotes mutual respect and voluntary
courtesy. It makes Christian courtesy rather
than parish red tape the arbiter of differences
between departments. It makes the parish a
brotherhood of honor, between free groups of
coordinated workers, "stirred up with high
hopes of living to be brave men," to use a su-
perb phrase of Milton, not mere cogs in parish
wheels.
In a word, this method is morally educative
rather than mechanically coercive. It may not
"get there," as we say, quite so quick; but
we get more when we do "get there." I
throw in my vote, therefore, for the federative
ideal of parish administration.
"Tell us," said one of you to me, "when
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 133
you come, what has been your own experi-
ence? Where do you put the emphasis?"
Well! One man's experience doesn't count
for much, but it is the best he has. I may say,
therefore, perhaps without impropriety, that
in the course of my thirty-five years' pastorate
in a single church, I have had the amplest pos-
sible confirmation of the moral and spiritual
value of this freer, more voluntary, and, as it
seems to me, more finely fraternal method.
Now, where does the logic of all this couple
on with our general scheme of thought? At
this point, viz., the genius of this federative
method is preeminently pastoral, in the sense
in which we have used the word in these lec-
tures, viz., comradelike and socially media-
torial. It is full of a noble freedom, and
equally full of a noble trust. The deliberate
habit of exercising this faith in your depart-
ment leaders, daring to let others besides your-
self have their way (at all events until they
discover that your way is better) this large,
brave, free trust, I say, in your fellow Chris-
tian workers, is the direct product of, and the
constant incitement to, what we have called
the pastoral spirit at its full bloom.
Indeed, the glory of the federative idea in
134 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
parish economics is that the one indispensable
requisite for making it effective is precisely
that pervasive spiritual glow throughout the
parish which it is the first business of Christ's
pastor to maintain. In the spirit of his Mas-
ter's grace, he substitutes the appeal to love
and honor and mutual considerateness for the
mere discipline of arbitrary command.
In fact, the alternative is sharp. If you
are really comrade and mediator, in Christ's
Name, you are distinctly not autocrat. " Our-
selves as your servants for Jesus' sake," writes
the man of Tarsus, even to that little mongrel
and quarrelsome church in the dissolute Cor-
inthian capital. You persuade, not command.
You appeal to loyalty, not issue a subpcena.
You treat your parishioners as your coordi-
nates and brothers. You "go before" the
sheep, as Jesus said, rather than drive them.
Time fails to go fully into the social ethics
that lies behind all this; but I suspect that the
essential dignity and value of all Protestant
voluntaryism is in that ethic. And if the
minister adopts this as his parish method and
ideal ; if, taking the risk, he dares to trust his
parishioners as Christ trusts him and them ; if
he organizes his whole church in this spirit,
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER I3S
giving to each sub-department a certain un-
challenged freedom of action in its own
sphere, he will find that the nobler Christian
enthusiasm in himself, and in all the church,
will be deepened and purified. The splendid
spiritual fire at the center of the parish life
will keep all the departments, though free, yet
spiritually one, rather than mechanically allied.
SOCIAL ENTHUSIASM
Fellowship, Freedom, Cheer! This is the
order of the parish psychology. Besides the
qualities of considerateness and trustfulness
which characterize the true pastor's handling
of church activities is one quality more, also
distinctly pastoral, which, like the flame at the
finial, brings the others to completeness and
illumines the entire field of pastoral adminis-
tration. It is the quality of spiritual cheer.*
It is that cheer of the invulnerable and im-
mortal hope which, as you may recall, we spec-
ified in our opening lecture as the last of our
"five traits" of the pastoral spirit.
"We are saved by hope." *The Christian
pastorate is saved by hope. Buoyancy in lead-
ership is what I mean. , This is the pastor's
136 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
final contribution to organized church activity
and is almost the most precious of all.. It is
that quality which is imparted to Christian
service by the blending of reason and faith in
the sense of the attainableness of the end
sought -This end is the moral rescue and spir-
itual rehabilitation of men.^ ( That such re-
newal is practically possible is with the Chris-
tian minister a first article of his faith. .'It is
both a rational conviction and a kindling
vision ; and this cheer of the invulnerable hope,
drawn from the depths of his belief in the law
and the love of the world, he imparts to all the
working of his parish forces. - To recall
Wordsworth's line,
" A man he seemed of cheerful yesterdays
And confident to-morrows."
The significance of this quality of cheer
shines out when we remember that it is pre-
cisely the one so often lacking in the working
of our secular social machinery. For by cheer
I do not mean stir or excitement or even ar-
dor. Social mechanism in non-Christian soci-
eties may furnish all these. I mean a steady
hopefulness which is enthusiasm and some-
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 137
thing more ; a kind of certainty of result which
seems to echo the purpose of the Infinite.
" Some novel power
Sprang up forever at a fauch,
And hope could never hope too much
In watching thee from hour to hour." *
So the parish watches the pastor. This
peculiar cheer is perhaps the reverberation, in
the pastoral temper, and through the pastor
in all the church life, of the very "joy" of
Christ, which seems closely associated with
His underlying certainty that His work
would avail. "These things have I spoken
unto you, that my joy may be in you."
The modern evolutionist should be a man of
h.ope, in his sense of the reign of law, and of
the sure upward progress of life. But this in-
tellectualism, left to itself, is liable, as you
know, to fits of reaction and depression and
is even sometimes turned right around, as in
the philosophy of Schopenhauer, into a sci-
ence of pessimism. But the Christian pastor
laughs pessimism out of court. He works in
a great surge of anticipative assurance. In-
deed pessimism is the snarl of a one-eyed dog,
* Tennyson, In Memoriam.
138 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
or in more respectful phrase, it is a one-sided
judgment based upon a partial view of the
facts. You reply, Optimism also is a deduc-
tion from only half the facts. No ! The major
portion of the facts of life, as the evolutionist
and the Christian see them, crowd over upon
the brighter side. A day and a night together
make not one night but one day. Things are
not only straining, but straining upward.
But the pastoral temper, besides being thus
rationally hopeful, glows also with the specific
Christian gladness I had almost said glee-
and good reason why. It is alive with social
kindliness. Its Christmas bells ring all the
year. It palpitates with a sense of Christ
the Christ not only of Gennesaret, but of the
Resurrection Christ living and mighty and
instantly present, though unseen, in the plen-
itude of His beautiful power for moral re-
newal everywhere.
In this mood, rational assurance and spir-
itual exhilaration coalesce and produce in their
convergence pastoral cheer a kind of deep
gaiety, constant, permanent, indestructible.
This gaiety,- or buoyancy of leadership, is the
" one touch more " which church organiza-
tions need for felicitous action. Without it
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 139
they grind or clatter or are cold. Like the
firelight in a "living-room" or oil upon the
watch wheel, this buoyant temper enables the
church happily and harmoniously to perform
its duty in every department.
Let me quote again from yourselves : " My
parish vibrates between levity and lethargy,"
said one of you, speaking of his summer field.
Well ! better that vibration than no movement
at all. Get right into the middle of the vibra-
tion and inoculate it with true pastoral buoy-
ancy. A cork is a little fellow, but all Niag-
ara cannot drown it.
"How to reach the men of the parish?"
was another of your questions a very per-
emptory one, a very difficult one. I think
perhaps the best answer is suggested right at
this point, and it is this : cheerful initiative in
developing local parish organisation. This is
the way to reach men. Men nowadays like to
organize, if they can see something good and
glad and practically accessible to organize for.
They had rather serve on a committee than
listen to preaching; and who can challenge
their taste?
Then, too, this cheer, good-humored and
genial, with its hint of far-away music, and
140 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
with a touch upon it of the graceful gracious-
ness of Christ Himself, is just what is neces-
sary to help the pastor to perform, tactfully
and happily, his own administrative duty. He
practices Christ's art of the gentle justice.
Fretting business it is to be an omnipresent
chairman! You have observed that it is al-
ways at the hub where the wheel creaks and
binds. Chronic anxiety, if not irritation, is
often the synonym of administrative responsi-
bility. But clothed with cheer, as the pastor is
or may be, proud and happy, as well as vigi-
lant and brave, full of a certain self-maintained
animation, the pastor meets all the irritating
wear and tear, even of committee meetings,
with a curious blitheness. Of course, the saints
won't always agree with him, they wouldn't
be real saints if they did for he will not al-
ways be in the right and ought not always to
be agreed with. However, whether the wind
blows high or blows low, a pastor becomes a
cheerful expert in taking criticism. Unless
you can take a blow as a compliment side
with others against yourself you haven't
learned the rudiments of the Christian pas-
torate.
PASTOR AS ORGANIZER AND LEADER 141
Consider ateness, Truthfulness, Hopefulness,
these three then, in their combination, repre-
sent, as it appears to me, the pastoral spirit in
the field of parish leadership, maintaining, in
all organized activities, the warmth of per-
sonal attention, the freedom of feder-
ated independence, the immortal cheer of
social Christian enthusiasm. So we carry on
the essence of the fraternal and socially media-
torial genius of our calling. We surrender
nothing, either of the fine comradeship or of
the noble priesthood, to any supposed eco-
nomic necessity, in conducting parish adminis-
tration. On the contrary, these qualities, em-
bodied in the pastor and constantly present in
his church management, impart to these varied
activities themselves the beauty and power of
a true ecclesia of God "many members, yet
one body" a brotherhood of free men in
Christ Jesus, availing itself of every modern
facility, and organized in the full play of the
modern spirit, yet devoted to a supreme spir-
itual errand, and illustrating in the commun-
ity the social ideals of the kingdom of Christ.
Considerateness, trustfulness, and hopeful-
ness ! Why should I not adopt the shorter and
143 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
more familiar words, which better render the
immortal Greek of St. Paul love, faith, hope ;
and, gentlemen, now as ever, and in the ad-
ministrative department of the pastorate not
less than in any other, " the greatest of these
is love."
V
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER
IN the course of our rapid review of certain
aspects of the pastor's relation to his work in
our modern time, we reach to-day a closing
glance upon what is commonly regarded as the
crowning function of the ministry. Our sub-
ject is The Pastor as Preacher.
> Dr. Stalker, of Glasgow, at the outset of
his Yale Lectures of 1891, expresses the Prot-
estant consensus as to the place of preaching
in the ministerial vocation, when he exclaims,
" Preaching is the central thing in our work.".
Yet, later on in the same lectures, he remarks,
" Gentlemen, I believe that almost any
preacher, on reviewing a ministry of any con-
siderable duration, would confess that his
great mistake had been the neglect of indi-
viduals."
Are these two sentiments mutually exclu-
sive, or is there not a conception of the pastor
in the pulpit which may unite them? You,
who have done me the honor to follow the
argument of these lectures, will know how in-
145
146' THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
stant and decisive must be our answer. With
regard to this supreme function of the pastor's
life, as of every other, we are to maintain our
constant point of view and line of thought.
For another way of stating the same theme
would be : the pastoral spirit in the pulpit.
What we have to recognize and magnify is
precisely the same attitude and temper of mind
and heart in preaching which we have endeav-
ored to trace in every other department of pas-
toral duty.
Preaching may be textual, after the great
manner of Maclaren, or topical, like that of
Liddon ; it may be expository or hortatory ; its
style may be that of the quiet homily, or it
may flash with that occasional " stab of flame,"
to use Lowell's epithet, which, in such sermons
as those of Jeremy Taylor or Horace Bush-
nell, marks the inspiration of genius and de-
notes the supreme spiritual insight and appeal ;
but in any and every case, true preaching will
embody something of the essence of the pas-
toral spirit. Human comradeship and Christly
sponsorship will, in their unique, pastoral
blending, at once warm and elevate the pulpit
utterance.
Speaking thus, I suspect myself of too far-
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 147
fetched phrase, and must enter my own de-
murrer against anything which may seem
stilted or visionary in the remarks thus intro-
duced.
I have no sharper dread, in concluding
these simple addresses, than that of having
appeared to present in them some transcen-
dental or overwrought pastoral ideal, remote
from the actual pulse-throb of men in our
red-blooded time. But we have sought to be
Scriptural. It is true we have set our pro-
fessional standard high; but so also does the
New Testament. We have found our sine
qua non for the pastorate to consist in a spe-
cific and highly charged state of mind a fire
of fellowship at once with Christ and with
men; but the New Testament insists on this
also; and the mood itself, thus identified, is
not mystical or extravagant, but natural and
sane.
So in particular of the pastor in the pulpit.
The pastoral spirit, as I conceive it, does im-
part to preaching a unique and exalted tone;
but that tone is not rhapsodic, any more than
it is officially presumptuous or sanctimonious.
The pastoral spirit in the pulpit is eminently
spontaneous, simple, practical; earnest, surely,
148 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
even, to a white heat, but without loss of
human perspective. It is tender but not tame;
free because so nobly fraternal; wise because
of real knowledge of the people; spiritually
vital because charged with the peculiar ardor
of the Christly shepherding.
We make, therefore, to-day no attempt to
introduce a novel theory of preaching or to
present any remodeled picture of the preacher.
On the contrary, we are to reassert that an-
cient and constant view of the pulpit office
which is confirmed by the noblest traditions
of the Church, and expresses the deepest intui-
tion of its ministers.
Following a simple, three-fold division, we
will remind ourselves first of what Christian
preaching is; then, secondly, of its "audi-
ence " who constitute its hearers ; finally and
more specifically, in the third place, we shall
thus be prepared to ask how, preaching be-
ing what it is, and the congregation being
what it is, that particular temper which we
have described as pastoral may dominate the
situation thus presented, modulating the
preacher's message and matching it 'both with
the man who speaks and with the man who
listens?
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 149
WHAT IS PREACHING?
I am seeking no original or exhaustive defi-
nition, but will confine myself to the mention
of the three factors which always enter into
that form of religious address known as Chris-
tian preaching.
ist. The content of the message;
2nd. The personality of the preacher;
3rd. The immediate occasion and present
need of the people.
Let me make three citations from three
great pulpit masters, of different types, which
will bring out, in their order, these three chief
and constant factors of true preaching. I will
select three American ministers perhaps our
foremost names as preachers in three great
Protestant communions. They are not now
living, but were living not long ago, and they
have been, each of them, lecturers at Yale, on
the Lyman Beecher Foundation. The first is
Bishop Matthew Simpson, of the Methodist
Episcopal Church, one of the most eloquent
men in American history, concerning whose
strange, half-hypnotic spell upon his hearers
we have heard such almost incredible but un-
doubtedly authentic incidents, surpassing even
ISO THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
those attributed to Patrick Henry or to Henry
Clay.
Simpson says : " Your office, as preachers,
is not to speak as for yourselves, not to speak
words which even the wisest men have uttered,
but simply to speak the message which God
has given. This message He has put in writ-
ing. It has been printed. We have it in our
hands. You are to take these words and
utter them, whether the people bear or for-
bear."
This ; then, is the first factor, the content
of the message, which is, in a word, the re-
vealed truth of Christ.
My second quotation is from Phillips
Brooks and there is no name nobler in pul-
pit annals. He says, " Truth through person-
ality * is our description of real preaching. It
is the decay of the personal element that makes
the ministry of some old men weak." Those
of you who have heard Phillips Brooks will
imagine how he would look when he said that ;
and the fire yet seems to flicker on the pages
in which that regal and rushing mind poured
forth his sense of the importance of this per-
sonal element of the preacher's power.
* Italics ours.
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 151
My third quotation is from Henry Ward
Beecher, the Shakespeare of the modern pul-
pit. With his own unmatched vitality of ex-
pression, he fixes attention on the third factor,
viz. : the congregation, the occasion, the need,
the practical end sought. He remarks : " A
preacher is a teacher; but he is more. He
looks beyond knowledge to the character which
that knowledge is to form. It is not enough
for him that men shall know. They must be.
A preacher is an artist of the soul" *
Citations like these could be multiplied in-
definitely. They might reproduce a hundred
verdicts upon the essence of preaching by its
greatest masters, recent and ancient, and in all
of them we shall discover clearly set forth, as
in what Chrysostom calls "the lofty, large
and broad picture offered of these things in
the Holy Scriptures," these three prime fac-
tors, always to be recognized and adjusted to
one another, which make up true preaching
the Christian content of the message, the
Christian personality of the preacher, the im-
mediate condition and need of the hearer.
Now even a moment's consideration of the
nature of these factors brings sharply into the
* Italics ours.
152 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
foreground the vital relation which the pas-
toral spirit bears to them, each and all. Two
of them are distinctly personal the person-
ality of the preacher himself, and this is the
pastor's personality, and the personal need of
the hearer, and this only the preacher as pas-
tor knows. Even as to the remaining factor,
the content of the message, we must maintain
that the pastoral sense of it is the truest sense ;
for that content is, in a word, the truth of
Christ as realized in experience, and it is the
pastor's experience which effects such realiza-
tion because, as we have seen, the distinctive
pastoral consciousness is developed through
deepening acquaintance with Christ.
Then, too, we must remember that this
message of Christ which preaching reproduces,
is to be not merely in some commonplace and
conventional conception thereof, but in Christ's
own conception thereof; that is, preaching
must present Christ's truth, with something
of His perspective of emphasis, His cadence
in utterance, His aptness of personal applica-
tion. Therefore, plainly, only one who waits
long at the Master's feet, as the pastor must,
if he is really a. pastor, can realize intimately,
and so report justly this ensemble of Jesus'
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 153
teaching, the proportions, the shadings, the
spiritual rhythm of the Christian revelation.
But the case becomes infinitely stronger
when we consider the personal factors of
preaching. In preaching, the noblest of arts,
that of the orator, is carried up to a level
where the orator becomes, in a true sense, the
embodiment of his message. He incarnates it.
He incarnadines it, to use the same root word.
He is, by Christ's grace and in Christ's name,
the personal reincarnation, in human form, of
the spirit of that Gospel which he is to pro-
claim. Preaching thus differs essentially from
other forms of oratory. It is not to be treated
as a performance. The preacher stands for his
message as well as articulates it. Art in
preaching is, after all, at the bottom of it, the
art of living, making manhood beautiful and
so holding it holding the whole man, clean
body, live brain, consecrated spirit, all as one
piece, one lens, set in the white light of truth,
letting God take care of the image, if only the
crystal itself can be kept consistent and clear.
But all this is only another way of saying that
the pastoral training and attainment become
vital to the preacher and are an essential ante-
cedent to true preaching.
154 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
We are living in a day when mere declama-
tion counts for less and less in public speech.
Over-vehemence or easy glibness reacts unfa-
vorably and the impression of sincerity is im-
paired. The fluent exhorter, unaware to him-
self, lays himself open to some such shrewd
criticism, to employ a rough illustration, as
that of a New Hampshire farmer who, after
listening to a preacher of this sort, and being
asked for his opinion, remarked, "Wall, he
talks consid'abul ez I do, when I'm lyin' !"
What makes the pulpit message glorious is the
impression of supreme sincerity, an impression
illustrated in its height by the preaching of
such a man as Phillips Brooks a noble per-
sonality, completely identifying itself with a
noble message.
But this identity, this sincerity, is the direct
result of pastoral self-culture. No academic
training, no rhetorical practice or elocutionary
drill can, by itself, accomplish that culture of
character whose direct emanation is this utter
pulpit sincerity. Only the pastor can put the
soul of the ministry into speech. Only the
pastoral devotion to the Master and to the
man can create this instant identity between
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 155
the entire manhood of the speaker and every
filament of his message.
Here we see how it is that the parish edu-
cates its own preacher. "We don't pay our
debts to our stepping stones," said a sagacious
observer of life, and we ministers sadly fail
in recognizing our obligation to our people
for that feature of earnest personal sincerity
in pulpit utterance which they have educated
in their minister as pastor and which is more
than half his strength.
And this is especially true to-day, when less
than ever the mere echoes of the library suf-
fice for the pulpit, when the preacher is bound
to go forth into the highways and byways of
the time and bring back what is most fine and
vital in the actual experience of the current
age, to supplement the lore of ancient days in
providing pulpit material. Is your sermon
fresh and interesting to yourself? Not other-
wise will it touch your people. Would you
yourself take it up, once it got cold, for your
own pleasure or uplift? If not, then it is not
fit for another man. The very curl of the
crest of the new age must be in it, as well
as the inmost throb of your own convictions.
i$6 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Then it will strike the nerve of your neigh-
bor. And it is the pastor's habit of meeting
men on the instant in swift living colloquy
which opens the straight road to the attain-
ment of this fresh and practical vitality in
preaching.
THE CONGREGATION
But, secondly, true preaching, in any com-
plete or noble conception of it, not only strives
to proclaim a true message, not only to incar-
nate the truth of that message in roused per-
sonal earnestness, it also strives to adapt the
manner of its utterance so as to meet the ac-
tual needs of the people addressed. Indeed,
adaptation is too weak a word. " I am made
all things to all men, that I might by all means
gain some," cried the orator Paul. Preaching
is not soliloquy. Preaching is not telling peo-
ple what I think. That is like talking to a
fish instead of fishing for him. ' Preaching is
suiting the heart of the message to the heart
of the man, through a heart in yourself which
is in tune with both message and man.
What is the genius of the Incarnation? The
genius of the Christian Incarnation is the prin-
ciple of embodying a* higher spirit in the finest
forms of a lower but current environment, for
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 157
the sake of lifting the whole of that environ-
ment to a higher level. The genius of preach-
ing seeks such an incarnation of adaptation.
O fellow-students, is it not a thrilling thing
to preach, or even to try to preach and fail, in
the glory of such an ideal of preaching as this,
with a realized Christ behind us, so near that
He can touch us, and with the living men of
to-day. in front of us, so near that we can
touch them!
We must somehow burn in upon our own
souls the conviction that our profession is
more than a profession, more than a vocation
even, for a vocation may be a priest's profes-
sion. It is a passion, as of one who finds him-
self Christ's rescue-man. It is an affair of red
blood and white fire, demanding, employ-
ing all we have and are, a "savor" of life
unto life.
Let us look' then for a moment, directly and
intently, at that wonderful, fascinating, for-
midable creature, the congregation itself. It
is more than an audience. I am ashamed of
that thin word " audience," as applied to a
church full of worshippers and parishioners.
What is a congregation?. It is an assemblage
i representing many homes and families gath-
158 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
ered for the most august and intimate of all
purposes, the worship of the Infinite God, an
assembly constituting a spiritual fraternity,
made such in the Supreme Name, Memory,
and Power of Jesus Christ, the Crucified Re-
deemer and Risen Master, who is believed to
be spiritually present and in the vivid sense
of Whose Presence everything is said and
done. This is what we say we believe. Such
a fraternal assembly, I say, in such a presence,
is waiting to hear a certain utterance which,
in the name of this Lord, and sent through
the charged medium of His commissioned
servant, is to meet what? Some theoretic or
academic situation? No, but rather to meet
the actual shapes of moral and spiritual want,
peril, pain, need and instant, practical crisis
in the several arenas of a thousand lives.
What a spectacle! There is nothing else
like it or approaching it on the earth. Famil-
iarity with it has dulled our minds to its
unique greatness. To the seeing eye and the
feeling soul, it is dramatic to the ultimate de-
gree. Yes! it is more than dramatic; it is
critical as surgery, sacramental as Calvary.
Look more closely at these men and women.
Are they alive to all this ? Far from it. That
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 159
is the criticalness of the situation. Yet they
may be made alive.
What is the surface aspect?* That of an
eager, hurried, sensitive mass of humanity,
all in its best clothes indeed, and presum-
ably in its. best spiritual form also, and yet
appealing very deeply to sympathy, a thou-
sand souls of every, class, occupation, mental
aptitude, a throng heterogeneous enough, yet
strangely unified in the rushing torrent of our
modern life, as trees, dissimilar, bend evenly
in a gale. Here are business men, professional
men, working men, the rich and the poor,
young faces, old faces, sad faces, glad faces,
mindless faces a pathetic crowd. Here are
people trying to forget; here are comedies
without merriment, and tragedies without dig-
nity ; here are grand men and grander women,
beaten down by the flail of misfortune; here
is humanity careless of its glory and callous as
to its shame ; here is the age itself, both devout
and defiant, both believing and skeptical, vol-
canic in energy, perturbed even in repose,
seeking any distraction as a relief from week-
* This and the two following paragraphs are repro-
duced from the author's " Preaching in the New Age,"
Carew Lectures, Hartford Theological Seminary, 1900.
Revell & Co., 1902.
160 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
day strain ; volatile in sensations, lashed by am-
bitions, passionately alive, though now hushed
because it is Sunday, driven by forces, novel
and splendid, through efforts it cannot stop
to measure, .toward ends it will not lift itself
to see.
But all this is not in the average conscious-
ness. The real mental mood is quiescent, half
somnolent after the hot week. The people
bow, they stand, they sing some of them, if
the choir will give them a chance; they are
outwardly attentive. Here and there are a
few really roused, religious minds; but the
average tone is that of conventional decorum
united with a vague seriousness. It is the vas.t,
roaring week-day world arresting itself for the
moment, and trying, rather dimly, to remem-
ber that it ought to remember eternity.
Look more closely still. All this is the sur-
face aspect. But something more is present
in this strange, tremendous creature, the con-
gregation. The congregation is really two
congregations, just as every man is two men.
There is an undertone in every man in which
lies the residuum of the ancestral generations,
the rich sub-soil of Christian civilization.
Within yonder churchgoer who seems so su-
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 161
perficial, so careless, is a man of latent sensi-
bilities, and faiths, too, which, however dull
or unaware the man is at the moment, per-
petuate in him the essence of ancient creed and
choral, the fragrance of ancient sacraments,
the reverberation of old heroisms, the valor
and patience of Christian centuries. There is
a unique and solemn splendor in the fact that
each individual is a kind of flask or crucible
into which all the generations have poured
something of their best. The Lord's Prayer,
the Triune Benediction, the deep, old creed
phrases, "I believe in God, the Father Al-
mighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son,
our Lord," the " Gloria," the " Te Deum,"
the "holy invocations" at the Christening,
the Communion, the bridal, the burial, these
have recorded themselves in the very sub-
structure of the mind of the modern hearer,
in the most intimate and instinctive turns of
cerebral process and spiritual aspiration. The
invisible congregation within the visible is the
humanity which Christ Himself has touched
and is still touching in the subtlest, holiest
ways.
You say I am idealizing the congregation.
No, I am trying to tell the real, full truth
THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
about it, if we stand to the mark of what we,
as Christians, allege that we believe.
Now it is along these old spiritual channels
of mental association that the pastor mark
the word, underscore it, redden it, whiten it,
charge it with the full, nameless, pastoral vol-
ume of human fellowship and Christly media-
tion the pastor, who knows the people, loves
them and is watching for them, man by man,
is to pour the flood of his echoed ministry of
Christ to the soul.
Plainly only the pastor can do this, and
really match his people's need. Here on the
instant he is to launch the eager, careful stroke
that shall win his man. All depends upon his
pastoral knowledge of that man. He is to
concentrate his whole self, his whole sense of
Christ's truth, into some arrowshot of winged
syllables which shall go home. But he must
know his target, as only the pastor can know
it. Only the preacher, as pastor, can see and
realize at once both congregations, that one
which is outward, patent, self-conscious; and
that one which is inward, latent, subliminal, so
to speak. By the same word he must address
both the outward and the inward hearer and
make that hearer aware of his own inner self.
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 163
The pulpit mood resulting from this effort
is peculiar, winning, masterful. In its blended
tension and exhilaration, its sense of critical-
ness and concentration upon an immediate er-
rand, it is not so utterly dissimilar, though in
a far higher field, to that which Harry New-
bold so wonderfully puts into his ringing lines
about the last inning on the great cricket field,
which I cannot translate into the loftier dialect
of our own profession as it realizes the sense
of crisis in pastoral appeal, without a shiver of
the nerves.
"There's a breathless hush in the close to-night,
Ten to make and the match to win,
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
One hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish love of a season's fame;
But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote
' Play up, and play the game.' "
Now, if something like this which we have
tried to indicate is the nature of preaching,
and if something like this which we have en-
deavored to outline, is the condition and need
of the congregation, what manner of men are
we if we do not admit the pastoral spirit and
temper not only to a place but to a first place.
164 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
in the pulpit? Preach from the texts of peo-
ple's lives.
I asked four members of this senior class
whether their most effective sermon was not
one which they had been led to make as the
sequel to some personal pastoral effort, and
every one of the four answered in the affirma-
tive. I could say the same; most ministers
could, I fancy.
" Few sermons are as long as they seem,"
quaintly remarks our genial friend Dr. Crow-
thers. Nothing but the pastoral sense of er-
rand in them will make them seem as short as
they really are. Not for the " salvation of
sermons," as some one has wittily said, but for
the salvation of men does the preacher preach ;
and the men to be saved are right in front of
you, not remote abstractions. Whether you
preach extemporaneously or from carefully
written manuscript or from some " dishevelled
and dissolute spatter of ink," as my friend
Dr. Kelley, of the Methodist Review, once
called his outline "notes," you will employ
your method as only your doorway to an
instant grapple with your audience. "A
preacher is a wrestler with men," said Beecher.
And the victory which is sought is not mere
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 165
assent or admiration, nor is it limited by the
conventional ideal of a sudden conversion,
though it may include that. We seek to save
men to be men, vitally, ethically, and all up and
down the scale of practical living, so that they
shall be saved to truer thoughts, kinder service,
purer lives saved to be better neighbors and
nobler citizens saved to save others.
Now, the men who are thus to be lifted
upon some higher terrace of Christ's broad
salvation are the men at the instant pres-
ent. The pastor knows them; therefore he
can speak to them of what touches their ac-
tual need and. matches the current of their
thoughts. The pastor loves them; therefore
he can speak to them with the frank fearless-
ness of a recognized and attested friendship.
The pastor shepherds them and cares for the
little lambs in- their home folds; therefore he
can speak to them with a conceded right of
counsel, and therefore also, if he does speak
to them in this pastoral way, they will listen
to him.
Nor will the intellectual quality of the ser-
mon be at all injured thereby. On the con-
trary, the theological and literary elements of
discourse, as if they knew their master, love
i66 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
to array themselves in natural and effective
forms beneath the aegis of an errand of life
vital fellowship with men, vital fellowship with
Christ, vital effort to bring the real Christ to
the real man. So the treatment of every theme
is shaped and is modulated for its instant per-
sonal errand. Homiletics comes down from
its dusty pedestal and takes its lesson from the
wayside watch, and all the sermon is suffused
with the clear, firm, gentle, brave quality of
the shepherd's considerate care. Only if you
want to hit a man in this corner of the church,
you will be careful steadfastly to look the other
way, into the opposite corner, for the very
aroma of the pastorate is courtesy.
THE PASTOR IN THE SERVICE
The same pastoral solicitude will appear in
all the conduct of the church service both be-
fore and after the sermon. I cannot with suf-
ficient earnestness remind you, my honored
fellow-students, .that from the first instant
when you enter the pulpit and the service
opens, you are your people's pastoral man.'
Every tone, every inflection, every office of
reading, and pre-eminently of prayer, is to
be bathed in the yearning earnestness of a
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 167
brother and sponsor; and as the service pro-
ceeds, the entire scenery of the previous pas-
toral week flashes up into its pulpit bloom.
You will read the Scripture, whether the text
be narrative, lyric, didactic, as if listening to
the accompanying recitative from a hundred
homes. Your choice of hymns will be the pas-
tor's choice. You will pray, my brothers,
you will pray as though all your dumb con-
gregation found its voice in you.
". . . Hear his sighs, though mute
Unskillful with what words to pray, let me
Interpret ^for him." *
Such prayer will not be an address to the
Lord or to an audience. It will be tender and
holy a comrade's cry to the Chief Compan-
ion a sponsor's call to the Chief Shepherd.
" He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small." t
Prayer should be prayer, not prolix, not
repetitious, not garrulous, not explanatory, not
discursive, but brief, reverent, gentle, vital.
Quaint George Fuller is not so far from the
* Milton. t Coleridge.
168 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
mark when he says, " In extemporary prayer,
what men most admire God least regard-
eth."
And just here one word, by the way, as to
the week-night Prayer Meeting, the despair of
so many a pastor's heart. I know but one
great rule : Be your whole, roused, pastoral
self, then go to your chapel and let your par-
ish deal with itself through yon.
I have heard, and you have heard, with an
ache that went far deeper than criticism,
prayers full of a thin and fussy emphasis, no
dignity or reverence, no repose, no depth of
appreciation of what public prayer assumes, no
real soul in the prayer. Such prayer is not
pastoral prayer.
Then, last of all, the pastoral spirit follows
the sermon, or rather follows it up, by carry-
ing it out into the parish, making it the unob-
trusive text for a score of interviews, for
wayside allusions, for genial turns of adminis-
tration. The pastor walks into the sermon,
'and the sermon walks out with the pastor.
This gives coherence and continuity to the en-
tire ministerial life. The Sunday service is
not a weekly lectureship, but a pastor's watch-
fire on the road, along which people and pas-
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 169
tor are moving together in one common and
constant march.
CLOSING WORD
Fellow-Students. It would argue ill for our
consistency in following the canons of con-
struction adopted in the preparation of these
addresses did I allow myself to loiter at their
close, or to indulge in any vain attempt to
cover their homespun plainness and evident
deficiency by an ambitious finale.
I have tried simply to talk to you as I would
in my study to younger brothers, about our
common calling on its pastoral side, finding
the germ of all that I have said to you in what
you said to me last November, when you ex-
plained to me your own practical conception
of the Christian pastorate in our great day.
I have not sought novelties or subtleties. I
have quoted not much from books; they are
open to you. I have quoted from yourselves.
With your own faith and feeling as a guide we
have, as it were, stepped down together into
the tumult and thunder of the great modern
arena which summons you. There we have
sought to discover what kind of pastor the age
needs and demands. We have been thrilled
i;o THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
by the instant evidence that the pastor wanted
now is, as at the first launch of Christianity,
precisely the man most trained and tuned into
fellowship with men through fellowship with
Jesus Christ.
This discovery fills us with joy, even when
confronted by a task so serious and strenuous
as that which now challenges a Christian pas-
tor. All the time is alive, and in a sense all
its life is everywhere. But this is as we would
have it. We will, by Christ's grace, bring the
world-throb into the heart of our local par-
ishes.
Some good men will tell you that these are
days of menace and alarm, and so they are;
but the age is Christ's age, for all that. In
all the loud tumult of our rocking time He
still walks as of old upon the waves of Gen-
nesaret. His breath is on the air, His hand
is on the soul. That was a true word of the
Archbishop of Canterbury, who said at the
great London Conference last summer, " It is
an age in which men are seeking the spiritual,
even when they do not consciously accept
Christianity." The age, dazzled by its own
fires, is yet stumbling on to meet our Christ,
while we, on our part, carrying Christ in our
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 171
hearts, must run forth to meet the age. How
to make from this superb wealth of fresh ma-
terials a new " body of Christ," this is our
fascinating, absorbing errand.
What the age is hungering for and search-
ing after is Truth in forms of Justice, and
Right in forms of Beauty. We are to exhibit
in Christ this very union of "truth and
grace." I must think that if Christ were to
speak now, He would surprise us all by how
much in the modern world He would approve.
During these many centuries His spirit has
been at work, and He would not disavow the
results of His own working. He is " stand-
ing at this latter day upon the earth." We
must detect and interpret His smile on the
time.
No mistake is more serious than to belittle
current criticism and discussion, for surely the
spirit of God is moving through the channels
of this very discussion itself, towards what
Albrecht Ritschl calls "the moral union of
all men," in which is to be realized the true
kingdom of Christ. May we not even believe
that in the modern union of a discriminating
intellectual temper, with a warm and catholic
altruism, we are to find not only the mark of
172 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
Christ on the age, but even a kind of resurrec-
tion of Christ Himself. Doubt is not disbelief.
The soul, like the ship, may swing on its an-
chor, yet be anchored. Science, standing on
the far rim of the known, is silent in front of
the newly realized vastness of the yet un-
known, and in that silence rational faith is
reborn. The social issue of the twentieth cen-
tury is to be between a dream of human fel-
lowship without Christ, and a manifestation of
human fellowship in Christ. The errand of
the church may have heretofore seemed for-
mal; it is now vital.
You will sometimes be discouraged because
the avalanche of demand is so tremendous.
Do not be discouraged. A republic is always
an ethical and spiritual battlefield; but Christ
is the Captain of the noble democracy. So,
when you are fair tired out with conflict and
effort, then " let up," sit down for a space,
fold your hands and see things go, for they
are going up, because God lives as well as you,
and lives in His own world, and Christ is
" His power unto salvation."
Be sincere, not subjectively merely, but in
outward impression also. Insist upon things
being what they seem, especially in yourself.
THE PASTOR AS PREACHER 173
Be kind, in some fresh accent of reality. Carry
your lantern in front of your cudgel, not your
cudgel in front of your lantern. Be coura-
geous. When you plunge into the jungle of
great towns and mingle with the swarms of
men, you must still dwell in that New Jeru-
salem of the mind which every year is laying
anew its " foundations of jasper," and swing-
ing on surer hinges its gates of pearl.
Cultivate noble professional friendships.
" We four," wrote the young Neander to one
of his fellow-students, " will establish at Halle
a true * Civitas Dei,' a City of God, whose
foundation forever is friendship."
Most of all, if one may dare humbly and
reverently to express a sacred and divine thing
in a plain, human way, cultivate the sense of
companionship with Jesus, the Christ. The
alpha and omega of the pastorate is there.
God with you, comrades. Be genial toward
thoughts and toward men, but for your orders
go up only to Christ and to the higher terraces
of your own spirit, where He walks. Dare to
fling yourself out upon what seems to you, in
Christ's name, surely true. Maintain the
splendid jet of roused and -ready power, in
nerve and brain, and in the knighthood of the
174 THE CHRISTIAN PASTOR
i
loyal soul, and so be God's man, Christ's man
in the midst of the vast and tossing time. We
have, we say, but one life to live. Drop the
" but." We have one life to live.
So saying, I have done. Brothers, fare you
well. Work in love. Work to save. The
keynote to-day in our vocation is spiritual
chivalry. Make the pastorate glow. Make
that word pastor to entitle the supreme joy
as well as the supreme devotion of your life.
Christ is the Master-Truth, the Master-Power.
He sends you forth. He is with you. In Him
fare you well.
3550-5043B
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