C 03 - An Intellectual Calling

INTELLECTUAL CALLING

3. The ministry has the attraction of being an intellectual calling. By the very nature and requirement of his work the minister is a scholar and student, with a trained and richly stored mind. He goes through a long course of education, passing through common school, high school, college, and theological seminary, so that he enters upon his work as a disciplined thinker with a large stock of knowledge. But his education, so far from being finished at graduation, runs on in a broadening and deepening stream through all his work and life. His primary study is the Bible, together with general religious literature, and into this unique and supreme Book he ever digs deeper, studying its languages and history and customs and teachings and assimilating its ideas and spirit. This is in itself a constant education, as the Bible is a mass of the finest and richest literature in the world.

These prophets and poets and apostles were men of religious genius who were sensitive to every breath of the Spirit, lofty mountain peaks that early caught the light of God’s face and reflected it down upon their fellow men. To live in their companionship and learn to see their visions and throb with their aspirations is a high privilege and inspiration. The most purely distilled and highly spiritualized and supremely precious heart blood of the race has been poured into these pages, and the minister by constant study and meditation absorbs it into his own soul. But the minister is a student of no single book, though that book be as profound and inexhaustible as the Bible. He is a universal student, a citizen of the whole world of knowledge. Theology, like philosophy, is a universal science, exploring all fields and rifling them of their infinitely varied treasures and making them all its own. God is in all things, and all things run up to God for their final completion and explanation; and so all things reveal something of his wisdom and will.

Every common bush is afire with God, every fact has diamond-like facets that reflect his light and glory. All things, from the center to the outmost circumference of the universe, are related and bound together in a system of perfect harmony and exquisite sympathy, so that invisible motes and mighty systems, sorrowing souls and starry constellations work together for good. Any fact in any quarter of the universe is a thread that will unravel its whole web, for it exemplifies some principle or truth that runs to its center and wraps itself around God. The minister, along with the philosopher and the poet, should be a man of insight and imagination to see this unity of all things.

He should know that “No lily-muffled hum of summer bee, But finds some coupling with the spinning stars; No pebble at your feet but proves a sphere; No chaffinch but implies the cherubim.” And lie should “See that each blade of grass Has roots that grope about eternity, And see in each drop of dew upon each blade A mirror of the inseparable All.” The minister, therefore, perhaps more than any other professional man, should send out a decree that all the world shall be taxed to furnish him with materials for his sermons.

All sciences, astronomy, geology, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, physics, and metaphysics, bring grist to his mill. No fact, however remote and unrelated it may seem, is really foreign to him, but may yield un expected confirmation and illustration to his theme. Literature and poetry and art are especially rich mines of truth for him. He stands in his watchtower and surveys the whole field of human history and learning and progress and makes it subservient to his ends. He returns from all his studies, as a bee from many flowers which it has rifled of their sweets, laden with golden treasure. All the streams of his growing knowledge pour into the reservoir of his mind from which he draws his sermons. This raw material goes into his mind as the coal and coke and ore go into the top of the blast furnace in due time to gush out at the bottom in a molten stream of metal. All that a minister reads and sees and experiences sooner or later will enter into his sermons, weaving threads into their webs or flashing out in them as jewels of illustration.

Every sermon springs out of the whole life of the man that preaches it. As every seed draws on the soil and the shower and the sun so that it takes the whole solar system to make a single grain of wheat or blade of grass, so every sermon sinks its roots down through all the years of the preacher and is the outgrowth of his total experience. Or as a river is composed of drops that have fallen out of the sky over many thousands of square miles, so a preacher’s sermon is composed of multitudinous drops that have been distilled out of his entire life. Henry Ward Beecher was right when he said it took him forty years to make a certain sermon, though he spent only a few hours on its special preparation.

Ruskin said that he would use the Devil him self, if he could catch him, for black pigment; and so the preacher can use everything, how ever unrelated and unpromising it may seem, in his sermons; for every sermon he preaches will be the precipitate of his personality, the outgrowth and harvest of his whole experience. Hence the importance to the minister of that broader culture out of which good sermons can grow. A barren soil is sure to raise poor sermons. A small man cannot preach a big sermon because he does not have the breadth and depth of experience out of which a great sermon can come. The preacher, then, must have a full mind to furnish him with abundant and varied material, and a logical mind to digest it and imagination to illuminate it. Such a mind is the secret and source of endless fertility and variety in sermons, and the only way a minister can have such a mind is to keep filling it up in constant study. A preacher should never be a mere pipe tapping other men’s reservoirs and draining off the distilled essence of their thinking, but he should have within himself an original spring of ideas ever welling up and brimming over in perennial fullness and sparkling freshness. Such a preacher will never run dry and his sermons never grow stale.

Now the acquisition of truth for its own sake is one of the highest occupations and noblest pleasures of the human mind. Truth is the natural sustenance and exhilarating wine of the mind, eliciting and developing all its faculties and interests and luring them on into ever larger fields and fuller and finer satisfactions. The pursuit of knowledge is a quest attended with ever fresh variety and picturesqueness, adventure and surprise, and wonder akin to worship. It constantly opens up new horizons and ushers us into an ever vaster world. It pays its own way at every step and is its own pure and satisfying reward. It enlarges and ennobles the soul and enormously increases its wisdom and wealth as it possesses and grows into mystic unity with the world, so that we can say: All things are ours, whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or Plato, or Shakspere, or Tennyson, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come, all are ours, and we are “owners of the sphere, the seven stars, and the solar year.

It was of such pursuit and possession that Stevenson said that “Other men pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desirable,” and James said that “It seems as if one could not afford to give that up for any bribe, however great.” The minister enjoys this privilege and pleasure of intellectual pursuit in a rare degree and it is one of the finest attractions of the ministry.