Tabernacle Free College for Training Christian Ministers
“Would God that all the people were prophets.” — Numbers xi., 29.
HERE is great excitement in the ancient tabernacle.
Two good men, by the name of Eldad and Medad, begin to pray, and to preach, and to instruct. Not having been regularly ordained to the work, the jealousy of “the regulars” in the service is aroused, and they come to Moses, asking that these unordained men be silenced. But Moses, instead of stopping them, says he wishes that all the people would go to preaching, and praying, and exhorting. “Would God that all the people were proph¬
ets!”
“Amen!” I say, with as much emphasis as you ever heard in an old-fashioned Methodist prayer-meeting. We want men who have had opportunity of most thorough and elaborate culture in theological seminaries, and who have been set apart by the laying on of hands for special work which they, and only they, are competent to do. But until the right and the duty of all private Christian men and women to work for Christ, in any way they think they can serve him best, is acknowledged, the Church of God will fail to perform its mission, and the forces of sin will discomfit the forces of righteousness. God has promised victory to the Church of God, but not as long as out of five hundred troops four hundred and ninety-nine refuse to shoulder the musket and fill the canteen.
I suppose that every man has some controlling ideas in his life. Long ago, and before I saw any possibility of carrying them out, I had born of God in my soul these two desires: First, -the establishment of a free church with the liome-feeling maintained; and, second, the establishment of a college in which private Christian men and women might be trained for usefulness. If God will grant me to see these two things done, and well done, I think that then I would like to go up and rest with him who is more than all the universe to me. The first plan we have lived to see fully developed, and the second now starts under auspices and a patronage of talent and piety that must command the respect and confidence of the whole country. But the two ideas are one. First establish a free church in which to have the people saved, and then establish a college where they may be qualified for usefulness.
The need of such a college is felt to-day throughout the whole Christian world. We have many of the lead¬ ing men of all denominations in our professorate. If there is any thing at all in learned titles, we have the advantage of it in our college circular. The printer failed to get our circular done as soon as expected, because, as he said, he ran out of “D.’s,” and had to go to a neighboring printing-office to borrow a new supply of that let¬ ter. But what is human confirmation compared with that which comes from God through his Church, his Providence, and his Word?
Ministers can not do the worJc of the world’s evangelization. What are the few thousand ministers in this country compared to the thirty millions of the population! We are numerically too small. You might as
well have sent ten brigadier generals without any troops to conquer the Southern Confederacy. Leaving their swords at home, they would have conquered you with their penknives. Sin, with its army .of drunkenness, and lust, and crime, has not yet put out half of its strength, for it can beat us, and not half try. Who is getting the victory in our cities to-day — sobriety or intemperance? Honesty or fraud? Purity or uncleanness? Infidelity or the Gospel? Light or darkness? Heaven or hell? If you are an honest man, you confess that the latter have gained the victory. What is the matter? Are the Gospel weapons insufficient? Is the sword of the Spirit dull? Are the great howitzers of truth at too short range to throw the bombshells into the enemy’s fortress? Ho, no! The great want, and the only want, is more troojps! Instead of five or ten thousand ministers, we want two million men and women, sworn that they will neither eat nor sleep until they have slain iniquity. But how if you can not get them? Suppose, after a long war, the President should make proclamation for one hundred thousand men, and they were not to be had? But the Church has not sent a thousandth part of its strength, and the troops are encamping by the still waters of Zion, when they ought to be at the front, and would be if you gave them a chance, and made them ready for the heat and terror of the contest.
Ministers are numerically too small. They do the best they can. They are the most overworked class on earth. Many of them die of dyspepsia because they can not get the right kind of food to eat, or, getting the right kind, are so hurried that they take it down in chunks. They die from consumption, coming from early and late exposure. If a novelist or a historian publishes one book a year, he is considered industrious; but every faithful pastor must originate enough thought for three or four volumes every year. Ministers receive enough calls in a year from men who have maps, and medicines, and light¬ ning-rods, and pictures to sell, to exhaust their vitality. They are bored with agents of all sorts. They are stood in draughts at funerals, and poisoned by the unventilated rooms of invalids, and waited upon by committees who want addresses made, until life becomes a burden to hear. It is not hard study that makes ministers look pale. It is the infinity of interruptions and botherations to which they are subjected. If I die before my time, it will be at the hand of committees that want an address or a lecture. A man just called on me to give him a lecture by which he might pay the expenses of his wedding-trip. Sometimes, after I have been working for weeks from six o’clock in the morning until eleven o’clock at night, I have heard of some hypochondriac with a run-around or a hang-nail who threatened to leave the Church if I did not pay him more attention. If there were fifty hours in each day of the year, and I worked forty of them, I could not do the work of this one parish; and I am not behind most clergymen in disposition to toil.
Numerically too small. It is no more the work of the pulpit to convert and save the world than it is the work of the pew. If men go to ruin, there will be as much blood on your skirts as on mine.
Let us quit this grand farce of trying to save the world by a few clergymen, and let all hands lay hold of the work. Give us in all our churches two or three hundred aroused and qualified men and women to help.
In most churches to-day, five or ten men are compelled to do all the work. A vast majority of churches are at their wit’s end how to carry on a prayer-meeting if the minister is not there, when there ought to be enough pent-up energy and religious fire to make a meeting go on with such power th&t the minister would never be missed. The Church stands working the pumps of a few ministerial cisterns until the buckets are dry and choked, while there are thousands of fountains from which might be dipped up the waters of eternal life.
Now there may be ministers who will disapprove of this movement for qualifying lay-workers — jealous lest their official prerogatives be interfered with. But I believe the great .cry of the overtasked clergy of the American Church to-day is, “Would God that all the people were prophets!”
We need this college to make practical men and women. We, the clergy, generally go from our mothers’ apron-strings to school; from school to college; from college to theological seminary; and, graduating, we stand on the corner of the pulpit with our sermon in our hand, “shivering on the brink, and fear to launch away.” What do we know of the world? The world is on its guard in our presence, and does not appear in its true character. Before our professional look and dress, men shrink within themselves. Long ago I dropped the ministerial dress, because men seemed to feel bound to talk piously in my presence, especially if they were half drunk.
Now from this college we hope to turn upon society a company of Christian men and women who have for ten, twenty, and thirty years been down in the world, and who know all its ins and outs. Great work will be done when we send Christian merchants to carry the Gospel on ’Change, and into all the life of barter.
Religion will make headway in hat factories when you can send there, baptized by the Spirit, a Christian hatter. We want men in all the occupations, in the name of God, to throttle the sins of their own trade. Religion will never conquer the plumber’s shop, or the mason’s wall, or the carpenter’s scaffolding, or the tin¬ ner’s roof, or the printer’s type-room, until converted plumbers, and masons, and carpenters, and printers carry it there. Some men are so profound in their education they do not seem qualified for this mission. You can not send the Great Eastern up the Penobscot River. Profoundly educated men seem to “draw too much water” to get up such a stream. I have heard finely educated men in prayer-meeting talk in sentences of Mil¬ tonic affluence, yet their words fell dead upon the meet¬ ing; but when some poor, uneducated man arose, and said, “I suppose you fellers think that because I don’t know any thing I haven’t no right to speak; but Christ has converted my soul, and you know I was the miserablest chap in town; and if God will pardon me, he will pardon you. Come to Jesus! Come now!” — the prayer-meeting broke down with religious emotion. It is a grand thing to be accurate in speech; but get out with your grammar if you are going to let the lack of acquaintance therewith keep a man down when God Al¬ mighty tells him to get up!
These men do not now feel prepared for Christian work. Waking up at thirty, forty, or fifty years of age, with a desire of usefulness, they are too old to begin a regular theological course. Besides that, they have families to support. It takes them eight hours every day to earn a livelihood. What knowledge they shoot down they must take on the wing, loading the rifle while the barrel is yet hot from other discharges. In their un¬ drilled state, they rise to talk in prayer-meetings with head down and blushing cheek, as though they were talk¬ ing by sufferance, instead of remembering that they have a message from the throne of the eternal God, and that, though men howl with contempt, they must utter it. Give these Christian people twTo winters of practical instruction on how to work for Christ, and then the city of Brooklyn, from Fulton Ferry to Gowanus, and from the East Biver to the chills-and-fever marshes of South Bushwick, will feel the throb of their Christian energy. If between New York and Brooklyn, at six o’clock in the evening, there were no ferriage except by one row¬ boat, the accommodation, as compared with the demand for transportation, would not be so small as our means of getting the race to heaven is small when compared with the millions that ought to go there.
Last winter the Spottswood Hotel in Bichmond burn¬ ed. A man in the fourth story swung out of the win¬ dow and held on, waiting for the firemen to hoist the ladders. A ladder was hoisted, but it did not quite reach the man’s feet. He held on for a while, and then dropped and perished. There is splendid provision in all our churches for the salvation of men, but with the Gospel we do not quite’ reach the masses. They swing wildly for a while, and then drop off and die.
In this college we want to teach men common sense in religious matters. While a young man was standing amid rollicking companions, full of mirth and repartee, a good Christian man came and asked him, “What is the first step of wisdom?” The young man turned and said, The first step of wisdom is for every one to mind his own business!” A coarse answer; but it was a very abrupt question, considering the place in which it was put. There are religious peddlers who go around making a business of displaying their whole stock of wares in the most obtrusive manner. It is no time, while an accountant is puzzling his brain with a long line of figures, to ask him “how his account stands with God;” or stop the sportsman on the playground, while running between the hunks, and ask “whether, in a religious sense, he is running the race set before him.” We want tact and adaptation for this work. Some Christians try to catch a whale with a fly-rod of hornbeam, and fling a harpoon at a salmon.
IIow few laymen dare to grapple a sharp infidel! A wily unbeliever would take many a Christian and twist him around his little finger, or hook him to death with the horns of a dilemma, or batter his life out with the ninth chapter of Romans. Can it be that our religion is such a weak, beggarly, unreasonable, pusillanimous thing, that at the first assault it should run like the Northern troops at Big Bethel %
We want private Christians to know how they may stand their ground, or go forth with the vehemence of the Bible -dwarf when he accosted the giant, saying, “Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield; but I come to thee in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver thee
into mine hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will give the carcasses of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel.” Let me get my sling out! Three times I swing it around my head, and down thou goest, oh giant!
The Church of God has been making “masterly re¬ treats” long enough; and the Captain of our salvation cries to the armed battalions of the Church, “Forward,
THE WHOLE LINE!”
We want this institution to qualify people to work amid the wretchedness and crime of the .great cities. Is any Christian man so deluded as to think that we can overcome these evils by our present way of doing things? Where there is one church built there are ten grog-shops established. Where one sermon on purity is preached there are five houses of shame built. The Church lias not touched the great evils save with her little finger. The whole country is aroused for the trial of five or ten New York municipal scoundrels, while against the influences that make such men possible how little effort!
In this college, under the control of the most eminent philanthropists, on whose heads have come down enough blessings to make a heaven out of, the people will have an opportunity of knowing what are the desolations of our great towns; and how the hard, cold, filthy pavement, beaten by the feet of sin and woe, may be gladdened by the feet of Him who bringeth good tidings. At the ratio at which crime and sin have increased in New York in the last ten years, in one hundred years there will not be a church left, and the city will be one great Blackwell’s Island.
Before you and I have the sod pressing our eyelids, we will, under God, decide whether our children shall grow up amid the accursed surroundings of vice and shame, or come to an inheritance of righteousness. Long, loud, bitter will be the curse that scorches our grave if, hold¬ ing within the Church to-day enough men and women to save the city, we act the coward or the drone. I wish that I could put enough moral glycerine under the conventionalities and majestic stupidities of the day to blow them to atoms, and that then, with fifty thousand men and women from all the churches, knowing nothing but Christ and a desire to bring all the world to him, we might move upon the enemy’s works. For a little while, heaven would not have trumpets enough to celebrate the victory!
“We want also to qualify men for street -preaching. There are hundreds of thousands of men who will never come to church. The only kind of pulpit that will reach them is a dry-goods box or a drayman’s cart at the street corner. We want hundreds of men every Sabbath to be preaching the Gospel in our great city parks. There are, in this house to-day, two hundred men that ought to be preaching. Under the control of this college, they might get the courage and the facility. “What!” you ask, “would you let them preach without ordination?” I answer, If Conferences and Presbyteries will not put their hands upon your head, then I would have you ordained in another way. I would take you down into the haunts of suffering and crime within ten minutes’ walk of our best churches, and there have you tell the story of Christ, until men, redeemed from their cups, and women, elevated from a life of pollution, and children, whose
bare, bleeding feet are on the road to death, should be by your instrumentality saved. Then I would have these converted suffering ones put their hands of ordination on your head, setting you apart for the holy ministry in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Ah! that would be an ordination as good as the laying on of hands by Conferences and Synods — an ordination that would be most bright in the day when,
“Shriveled like a parched scroll,
The flaming heavens together roll.’’
Do you tell me Ifarlan Page had no right to preach when he stood in the Fourteenth Ward of Hew York, amid scoffs and insults, telling the passers-by what good things Christ had done for them, and bringing hundreds to God, until, on his death -pillow, he cried out, “Lord Jesus, come quickly! Why wait thy chariot wheels so long?” Had General Havelock no right to preach when, in a heathen temple in India, he placed candles in the hands of the gods around about the room, and by that light read the Hew Testament, and exhorted his troops to flee to the stronghold of the Gospel? “Go pkeach my Gospel,” God thunders in your ears to-day; and woe is unto you if you do not preach it. “Hot ready!” Then come here to this college and get ready. Ho excuse will be left you that will not seem a mockery in your death -hour, and a ghastly condemnation in the judgment.
To-day the Tabernacle Free College for training Christian men and women for practical work is launched upon the deep. My Christian friends, an opportunity is offered you grander than has ever been offered to the masses of the people at any time since Christ came or the world began.
In this college yon may be prepared to work as Bible-readers, as tract distributors, as prayer-meeting exhorters, as street-preachers, as Sabbath-school teachers, and for all the fields of Christian work. An opportunity is offered you, for the lack of which hundreds of thousands of Christians have lived uselessly, and died with their work undone. Nine hundred and ninety -nine out of the thousand Christians here to-day, many a time, have said that they wished they were qualified for usefulness. Now you have the opportunity, let every one take it.
Let the aged come in and seek new qualifications. I know it is almost sundown with many of you, but there are a few sheaves yet that may be gathered. God would have taken you home if your work had all been done. Let these middle-aged Christians, who have been gunning with old blunderbusses, come and get the rifle of a sharp¬ shooter. Ye who have been hewing away with dull axes, come here and put them on the grindstone in this col¬ lege. Sere have your questions answered, your doubts removed, your faculties developed, your heart fired. I wish that the membership of this Church and of scores of other churches would, aware of this, the rarest opportunity ever offered, march into the college in solid column.
Through the newspaper press, that stenographically take these words, I call upon this great cluster of cities, New York, Newark, Jersey City, and Brooklyn, and the surrounding villages, to send to this institution their best men and women, that they may here, under some of the first teachers of the day, get qualified for glorious use¬ fulness.
All sects of Christians, under the chief men of the different denominations, will here be taught to go shoulder to shoulder; and the Baptist will, for the time, forget his immersion, and the Episcopalian his Liturgy, and the Methodist his anxious-seat, and the Presbyterian his West¬ minster Assembly, while all together will lift the one battle-shout of “Jesus forever!” On his brow be all the garlands; at his feet cast down all the crowns; in his ear pour all the doxologies. Hallelujah! amen! Hallelujah! amen!