Ad Clerum: Advices to a Young Preacher

Mr. Washington lias, in my opinion, done well to draw your attention to the ministry, tliongh I feel that both he and you have thrown no little responsibility upon me in asking an answer to the many serious inquiries contained in your interesting letter. In accepting that responsibility (which is done with extreme reluctance) you must understand that throughout my correspondence I shall assume that you feel yourself called of God to the work of preaching the gospel, and that you are daily striving to live in the spirit of Jesus Christ. I wish to be very clear upon this point; for though I may take occasion to express myself somewhat playfully on many questions which will arise, yet I deeply feel that without a spirit of reverent and contrite humiliation before God, and a constancy of loving and trustful desire towards the Saviour no man is fit to have part or lot in the Christian ministry; when, therefore, I avail myself of satire or raillery, it will relate to the weakness or eccentricity of human usages, and never to the vital and solemn realities of the Divine vocation. Our place, as aspirants to the highest ministry, is at the cross, where alone the oppression of our own unworthiness is relieved by the completeness of Jesus Christs grace and truth. All this must be assumed; if we are wrong here, we shall be wrong everywhere; the gift of prophecy and tongues, and the understanding of all mysteries, will be only temptations and snares, and our ministry will be as a plague in the church.

You have been very frank in the statement of your difficulties, and I regard your frankness as an invitation to your confidence; I shall therefore speak with the familiarity of friendship, being assured that you will not make me” an offender for a Shall I condole with you upon your trials before the committee of the college? You complain that though you went before the committee with the simple desire to become a preacher of the gospel, one of the gentlemen horrified you by requesting that you would decline Hircus, a on the spot, and that having declined it in the only way which you knew, viz. with much bashfulness and civility, another gentleman asked you to show that if two triangles have their homologous sides proportional they are equiangular and similar. You ask me, in a somewhat impatient tone, what such pagan inquiries have to do with preaching the gospel? You also complain that you were not asked to preach to the committee, but to preach before the committee; on this point I merely say in passing that you really could not have preached to the gentlemen, because if you had addressed them as saints some of them might have been startled, and if you had spoken

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to them as sinners some of them might have been oflended. The gentlemen, you must know, were not exactly hearing for themselves, but were rather congregationalising by proxy, and giving the preacher a foretaste of the polite treatment which is in reserve for him. As to the Latin noun and the geometrical theorem, I can sympathise with your present dissatisfaction, yet I cannot but hope that growing experience will convince you that they may have some good influence upon your preparation for the ministry. You will probably forget that in an isosceles triangle the angles opposite to the equal sides are equal to one another, yet the discipline of demonstrating ifc will enable you to humiliate any rash heretic who may hereafter seek to poison your church members with the deadly doctrine of necessitarianism. You thus observe, my dear sir, that what we have in view is discipline; the strength of arm which you get by turning a grindstone may be turned to excellent account in felling a tree; and the discipline which is imposed by proving that some x’^ are some t,”s, and that other x’& are all 2/^s, will enable you to pulverize any hot-headed deacon who may hereafter attempt to prove that you had better be looking out for another pastorate. So you see we seek to whet you on hard subjects that you may the better cut easy ones, just as we whet a knife upon stone that it may the more readily cut the smoking joint. Pray therefore look upon your technical studies in the light of dlscijjUtie, say, if you please, in the light of dumb bells, which may force you to breathe though they never breathe themselves. Besides this, you must remember that it would be very awkward if you could not meet your people on their own ground, and chastise some of them with their own whips.

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Only think how embarrassing it would be if a deacons son knew more than you did about the Law of excluded Middle; bow could that young man listen with any confidence to your exhortations from the pulpit? Would not the princij)ium exclusi medii, vel tertiij on which he had broken you to pieces deafen him to your most urgent appeals? Think again if your lot should be cast among a seafaring population, how utterly quenched you would feel in dining with a captain if he discovered that you could not calculate the varying values of the semidiameters of the sun and moon; and though he might excuse your ignorance of the laws of oblique sailing, do you suppose he would ever ask you to dine again if, having given you a lunar distance, you could not find its Greenwich date? Or if there was a dentist in your congregation, do you imagine he would pay his pew-rent with any satisfaction if he knew that you could not distinguish the cusps of the chimpanzee from the incisors of the gorilla? So, my dear sir, you must regard your apparently out-of-the-way studies strictly in the light of discipline, and remember that everybody expects a minister to know everything, and for this moderate expectation they urge the conclusive reason that “he has been at college/^

I fancy your saying that this is all very well, but you want to know whether you could not have the substantial advantages of the discipline by studying subjects which are probably quite as difficult, yet more fruitful of practical results in actual preparation for the ministry. You think that instead of seeking help from the proposition that every straight line perpendicular to the directrix meets the parabola, and every diameter falls wholly within it, you might thrust your sickle into a richer field, and

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so with little loss of time become prepared for the work of preaching the gospel. The fact is I am a good deal of the same opinion, though I have a just regard not only for the parabola but for conic sections in general; still you must remember that many great and good men would very strongly disapprove of this opinion not only as weak but as positively mischievous. Those great men have a right to be heard because they have undergone the discipline, and (if the expression maybe allowed) are living monuments of its advantages. I say distinctly, of its advantages, as a hundred instances could testify. A neighbour of mine, whose face is, metaphorically speaking, written all over with the words “scholium,” and lemma,’’ was called to officiate at a wedding, and hastily snatching the marriage service appeared at the altar just in time to save his reputation for punctuality; the reverend and learned man opened his book, and to his horror found that it was a volume of Martin o’s “Elementa Sectionum Conicarum “! But you see he had the advantage of discipline, and if the blushing bridegroom had stepped into the vestry the learned minister could have shown him how to find any number of points in a parabola almost without having given either the focus or axis, and is not this infinitely better than the empty humdrum of a wedding service? Another neighbour, if I may call a man a neighbour who spends most of his time in a vain search for pure hyponitrous acid, has shown the advantages of discipline by giving a chemical turn to such expressions as “of the earth, earthy,” and representing the doctrine of the resurrection by the formula O4 H3 O, HO, which formula he distinguishes as rational in opposition to empirical. I could point to several other gentlemen equally learned, who carry with them the air of inexorable discipline; my great trouble with those men is to draw from them a sensible and straightforward answer to any question, and in this respect I have found their discipline extremely offensive. Their discipline has of course made them very exact, and their love of exactness is such that they will never positively declare what the day of the month is, or commit themselves to a distinct opinion of the time of day; they have a special horror of confounding the Noumena with the Flicenomena, and they look daggers at any unhappy man who is ignorant of the doctrine of concepts. It is amusing to watch tho signs of suspicion upon their faces when an unknown interlocutor invites them to conversation; they evidently think that the treacherous intruder intends to trip them up by an Undistributed Middle, or to cheat them by a subtle perversion of the quantified predicate, and therefore they equip themselves with the Law of Contradiction. All this, you see, comes of high discipline, and therefore you ought to take kindly to the dry and tedious studies which seem to your inexperienced mind to have no connection with the work of the Christian ministry.

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