ON THE EDUCATION OF MINISTERS.

WHAT I am about to write is applicable to the Protestant

ministry only; and for the most part I have in mind only the Protestant ministry in this country, altho many of the facts and principles on which I shall dwell have the same significance in Europe that they have here. Let me protect myself at the start against three possible misconceptions: First, In urging the need of an ampler education for the ministry I do not mean to maintain by implication that there is no need of uneducated ministers. There may be use in the world for devout, uninterested exhorters; but clearly it is not the business of universities and theological seminaries to provide such a class of men, and an unlimited supply of such preachers would not meet in the least the need of well-trained ministers. Secondly, I am quite aware that men of genius are independent of systematic training and instituted education. They educate themselves; they are impa tient of the easy highway, and, leaping the barriers which common men find insurmountable, they rush to the goal of all training-power. But neither the ministry, nor any other learned profession, contains many geniuses: not one man in a thousand in any profession has even a spark of that divine fire. The practical question always is how are industrious and faithful men of good natural parts to be so trained and equipped as to give them intellectual and moral superiority. Thirdly, If in this paper I say nothing about the sensibility, earnestness, and piety which should characterize the minister, it is not because I do not know that these qualities are essential to the success of his work. I propose to deal only with the surroundings and mental furnishing of the minister, not with his inspiration.

My subject, thus limited, may be conveniently stated in two propositions, as follows: I. The position and environment of

the Protestant minister have changed fundamentally within a hundred years. II. To fit him for his proper place in modern society much greater changes ought to be made in his traditional education than have heretofore been attempted.

I. Not many centuries ago the clergy were the only men who could read and write; only one century ago they were a large majority of all the men who could be said to lead intellectual lives. In the ten years from 1761 to 1770 the percentage of ministers among the graduates of Harvard College was 29, of Yale 32, and of Princeton 45: In other words, one third of all the educated men were ministers. In the six years from 1871 to 1876 the percentage of ministers among the graduates of the same institutions was in Harvard 5, in Yale 7, in Princeton 17; that is, not more than one in thirteen of the graduates of these colleges became a minister. I lately published a table which exhibited the occupations of 1226 recent graduates of Harvard College. It appeared from this table that two thirds of the whole number had entered professions which may be called learned, namely, law, medicine, theology, the scientific profes sions, and teaching; but of these two thirds only one man in thirteen was a minister, and the other twelve count themselves fully his equal in intelligence and capacity. If, however, we would fully appreciate the very different competition, so to speak, to which the minister of to-day is subjected from that to which his predecessor of one hundred years ago was exposed, we must go quite beyond these statistics, and consider the undeveloped condition a century ago of the other professions called learned, and the absence of what we now call the press. No public provision was then made for systematically training men for any profession except the ministry. A youth who aspired to be a lawyer or physician could only put himself under the instruction of some established practitioner. The class of men and women who now teach in high-schools, academies, and private classical schools did not exist at all. The scientific professions were not so much as conceived of. The practice of the law related chiefly to real-estate disputes and the collection of debts by the process of imprisonment-except of course that a few eminent men, who lived in or near the maritime ports, got a better business out of shipping or politics. Medicine was an

empirical art; and altho it was practised by a few men of great natural powers, the barber-surgeon and the ignorant midwife were by no means extinct. Most important of all in this comparison, the modern newspaper, the periodical, and the cheap book did not exist. The weekly sermons and prayer-meetings were almost the sole intellectual exercises of our ancestors in the last century, except for the very few who could afford the costly luxury of books. In our time, four days' labor of one man will pay for more reading-matter than an ordinary farmer's or mechanic's family will care to read in a year: namely, a local paper, a religious paper, a magazine, and some cheap editions of current books. The minister in the quietest village, as well as in the manufacturing town and the great seaport, is in competition with this new teacher, the press, which by the regular and frequent public mails delivers its lessons in every household. It is very clear, then, that the competitors of the minister for consideration and influence have increased extraordinarily in number and power during the past hundred years.

Let us next consider how very different the condition of society is to-day from its condition when Channing was born (1780), and how deeply the great social changes which have taken place since the Revolution have affected the work of the ministry. The principle of association for purposes of business, charity, worship, instruction, or pleasure has been so extended that the extension amounts to the introduction of a new principle. There were partnerships, and in rare cases companies, for business purposes in older times, but no corporations in the modern sense. The church was upheld by the only body corporate, namely, the state. The noun "operative" was not in the dictionary at the time of our Revolution, that mode of human life not yet existing. There was no continual discussion of such social evils as intemperance, prostitution, divorce, and pauperism, and no associated action in contending against these evils. The distinction between rich and poor was far from being as wide and deep as it is now among us. Our forefathers acted as if they had received and acquiesced in the doctrine of the survival of the fittest a century in advance of its discovery; the sickly among them died, the insane languished or raged in hopeless confinement, and the poor and shiftless went hungry and

cold. No philanthropic notions confused their clear views about the judgments of God and His afflictive providences. No sanitary science disquieted them with suggestions that results which they attributed to the wrath of God might with greater probability be ascribed to the negligence of man. How profoundly changed are the beliefs and expectations of the public on all these subjects! There is no social problem to-day, however difficult, upon which the minister is not expected to have his mind made up, and to be ready for action. Yet the evils to which these problems relate are extraordinarily complicated in their origin and development, and the remedies for them are notoriously difficult to devise and apply, slowworking, and hard to follow out in practical operation. Sentiment is a very unsafe guide in these matters; and the coolest philosopher, acquainted with political economy, medicine, and the history of legislation on behalf of public morality, will be often at fault. All these difficulties which beset the minister of to-day are of recent origin; in this country they hardly antedate the present century. When our grandfathers were in their prime the sciences of chemistry, zoölogy, and geology were in a very rudimentary condition, while electricity had hardly been discovered; moreover, no natural science had been as yet popularized. The word attributed to God had not been critically compared with His works.

Thirdly, we are to observe that the temper of the public mind has undergone a wonderful change, within a century, upon several points which vitally affect the clerical profession. In the first place, the weight of all authority has greatly diminished, and the sources of recognized authority are quite different from what they were a century ago. The priest, like the secular ruler, has lost all that magical or necromantic quality which formerly inspired the multitude with awe; and the divine right of the minister is as dead among Protestants in our country as the divine right of kings. The authority of the minister is now derived from the purity and strength of his character, from the vigor of his intelligence and the depth of his learning, and from the power of his speech. Candor, knowledge, wisdom, and love can alone give him authority. His cloth, his office, and his sacerdotal quality no longer command in themselves the respect they

once did; forms, rites, and ceremonies may protect him from rude assault, but can give him no particle of power. Again, the people in these days question all things and all men, and accept nothing without examination. They have observed that discussion often elicits truth, that controversy is useful on many difficult subjects, and that in some circumstances many heads are better than one; hence they have learned to distrust all ex-cathedra teaching, and to wait for the consent of many minds before giving their adhesion to new doctrines. We hardly realize how very recently the masses have acquired these invaluable habits, or how profoundly these habits have affected the position of the minister. To the modern mind the exemption of the minister from instant. debate carries with it a loss of influence. The lawyer daily encounters his adversary, the business man his competitor, and the statesman his political opponent: but no one answers the minister; and the people think that a protected man may not be a strong man. Thirdly, political ideas have had in this century and this country a strong influence upon theological ideas. The old monarchial and military metaphors which have long been used to set forth the nature of God are less satisfying in our day than they were once; for king, prince, conqueror, and lord of hosts are less majestic titles than they used to be. The grand and beautiful image which rises before our minds at the words "our country" is seen to be an immeasurably worthier object of devotion than any human potentate, and a better symbol of the infinite God. In the brief period since the welfare of the many came to be recognized as the prime object and only legitimate aim of human governments, men's ideas have changed considerably about the government of God. When men perceive that popular governments are possible, and that such governments have been able, even in the course of the few generations during which the right ends of all government have been recognized, sensibly to improve the condition of great masses of mankind, they naturally begin to doubt if men be totally depraved, and if the main object of God's government from eternity to eternity has been the welfare of an elect few of only one species out of the many kinds of creature that joy to live upon this earth; to question the authenticity of alleged revelations which are said to contain