1.I 04. Laboriousness of the Ministry

Laboriousness of the Ministry. The lawyer has the facts of his case made up and brought to him. He is aroused by direct antagonisms. He is striving for an end which may be gained or lost in the compass of a few hours or a few days. Every tiling is real, visible, near, and stimulating to him. But the Christian minister, from week to week, and through years, if his minis try be long in the same place, must discourse on themes high, recondite, and infinite in variety, and find his incitement either in the general affection which he has for his people, or in the special fascination of the truths which he preaches. His mind derives stimulation wholly from internal sources, and he gets but little help from externals. In the silence of his study, or in his solitary walks, he devises his own plans; and although his sermons are aimed at certain external conditions, at particular classes of men, or special wants, yet in the course of years it becomes difficult, week after week, to educate the same people in the same general direction, without repetition of one s-self, without growing formal, or falling into dull didactics. When I consider the steady pull which the pulpit makes upon the Christian minister, I marvel not that sermons are so poor, but that they are so good; and I think that neither the pulpit nor the ministry have any thing to fear from a just comparison of their results with those of any other learned profession in society. This necessity of preparing every week fresh matter becomes, to unfruitful minds, an excessive taxation, and drives men to all manner of devices; and, even at the “best, it is no small burden for a man to carry through the year his pack of sermons, born or unborn. While men are stimulated in the seminary to the higher conceptions of the duty of preaching, while newspapers are criticizing, and hungry and fastidious audiences grow more and more exacting in their demands, few there are who O consider or sympathize kindly with the necessities that are laid upon young men and upon old men, to bring forth an amount of fresh and instructive matter, such as is produced in no other profession under the sun. We do not desire to have preaching made less thorough or less instructive, but it is desirable that it should be less burdensome. Many and many a minister is a prisoner all the week to his two sermons. Into them he has poured his whole life, and when they are done there is little of him left for pastoral labours and social life. Few men there are who are up borne and carried forward by their sermons. Few men ascend, as the prophet did, in a chariot of fire. The majority of preachers are consciously harnessed, and draw heavily and long at the sermon, which tugs behind them. In every way, then, it is desirable that preaching should be made more easy, that men should learn to take advantage of their own temperament, and that they should learn the best plans and methods.