remark as I address myself to the task immediately before me—of attempting to outline in a practical way some account of how your spiritual training may be advanced during your stay in the Seminary. This remark takes a negative form and amounts to saying with some emphasis that your spiritual growth will not be advanced by the neglect of the very work for which you resort to the Seminary. Such a remark may seem to some of you out of place: it is perhaps not so entirely unnecessary as it may appear. There is a valuable bit from his own personal experience given us by the late Phillips Brooks in his Yale Lectures,[1] which I shall repeat here for our admonition also. He is impressing on his readers the important truth that the first and most evident element in a true preparation for the ministry consists in a mastery of the professional studies leading up to it. He writes as follows:
- “Most men begin really to study when they enter on the preparation for their professions. Men whose college life, with its general culture, has been very idle, begin to work when at the door of the professional school the work of their life comes into sight before them. It is the way in which a bird who has been; wheeling vaguely hither and thither sees at last its home in the distance and flies toward it like an arrow. But shall I say to you how often I have thought that the very transcendent motives of the young minister’s study have a certain tendency to bewilder him and make his study less faithful than that of men seeking other professions from lower motives? The highest motive often dazzles before it illuminates. It is one of the ways in which the light within us becomes darkness. I never shall forget my first experience of a divinity school. I had come from a college where men studied hard but said nothing about faith. I had never been at a prayer-meeting in my life. The first place I was taken to at the Seminary was the prayer-meeting; and never shall I lose the impression of the devoutness with which those men prayed and exhorted one another. Their whole souls seemed exalted and their natures were on fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed and went away depressed. On the next day I met some of these same men at a Greek recitation. It would be little to say of some of the devoutest of them that they had not learnt their lesson. Their whole way showed that they had never learnt their lessons; that they had not got hold of the first principles of hard, faithful, conscientious study. The boiler had no connection with the engine. The devotion did not touch the work which then and there was the work, and the only work, for them to do. By and by I found something of where the steam did escape to. A sort of amateur, premature preaching was much in vogue among us. We were in haste to be at what we called ‘our work!’ A feeble twilight of the coming ministry we lived in. The people in the neighborhood dubbed us ‘parsonettes.’ Oh, my fellow-students, the special study of theology and all that appertains to it, that is what the preacher must be doing always; but he can never do it afterward as he can in the blessed days of quiet in Arabia, after Christ has called him, and before the apostles lay their hands upon him. In many respects an ignorant clergy, however pious it may be, is worse than none at all. The more the empty head glows and burns, the more hollow and thin and dry it grows. ‘The knowledge of the priest,’ said St. Francis de Sales ‘is the eighth sacrament of the Church.’”
- ↑ P. 43.
