that there are learned men who are perfectly useless in the ministry; and even, what is more surprising, that there are men of broad and varied and, one would have thought, humanizing culture, who seem to be unable to turn their culture to any practical use. But it is yet to be shown that these same men, without knowledge and destitute of the culture which might have been expected to humanize them, would have been any more useful. Are there no ignorant men, no men innocent of all culture, who are unpractical and of no possible use in the ministry? The fact is that when our Lord decreed that the religion He founded should be propagated by preaching, or, to put it more broadly, when He placed it in the world with the commission to reason its way to the hearts of men, He put a premium on intellectual endowments, and laid at the basis of ministerial equipment a demand for intellectual training, which no sophistry can cloud. The minister must have good tools with which to work, and must keep these tools in good condition.
You will find nothing in the curriculum which will be offered to you in this Seminary, the mastery of which is not essential to your highest efficiency in your ministry. The intellectual training at present provided for candidates for the ministry is not above either their prospective needs or the easy possibilities of their present powers. You will be wise to give yourselves diligently to making full account of it. It would not be easy to exaggerate the intimacy of the relation between sound knowledge and sound religious feeling; and the connection between sound knowledge and success in ministerial work is equally close. “Without study,” says an experienced bishop of the Church of England, with his eye on the daily life of the minister it is true, but no less applicably to his preparation—“without study we shall not only fail to bring to our people all the blessings which God intends for them, but we shall gradually become feeble and perfunctory in our ministrations: our life may apparently be a busy one, and our time incessantly occupied, but our work will be comparatively fruitless: we shall be fighting as one that beateth the air.”
So intimate is the connection between the head and the heart and hand, indeed, that it is not unfair to say broadly that if undue intellectualism exhibits itself in those preparing for the ministry, the fault is relative, not absolute: that, in a word, there is not a too muchness in the case at all, but a too littleness somewhere else. The trouble with those whom a certain part of the world persists in speaking of as over-educated for an effective ministry is not that they are too highly trained intellectually, but
