paths of worldly business and ambition. Between these various motives, originating in defective piety, and no less defective theology on the one hand, and the grand material and mercantile developments of the age on the other, we discover some ground at least for the defective clerical supply under which the churches are now suffering.

We should not do justice, however, even to our proposed partial treatment of the subject before us, did we not advert here to some errors, theoretical and practical, which have prevailed in reference to the theological training of the ministry, and which have contributed to the production of the state of things which we lament. In the first place, there has been no such just conception in the public minds of the greatness of the ministerial work, considered intellectually, no such idea of its proper reach and grasp over the entire field of human life and action, as to occasion anything like a prevalent and adequate impression of the importance of both great native and acquired abilities in the ministry. It has been generally supposed, indeed, that they who teach goodness must themselves be good, and therefore piety has been deemed indispensable in the preacher of the Gospel. This is right. Goodness is the first and preeminent endowment of an effective ministry. Without it all else is of no account. But it has not been properly understood, how much of intellectual force and sagacity are requisite to the most successful prosecution of the ministerial work; how much of hard, severe, wearying thought is demanded of him who would meet all the varying occasions of life, and the varied wants and circumstances of his people, with the proper applications of truth. It has quite generally been thought a very easy thing for the preacher to discourse twice. or thrice a week from the word of God, in addition to other pastoral duties. And so any young man giving credible evidence of piety, has been thought fit to be educated for the ministry. And if he has been so lacking in force of character, as hardly to have given a reasonable hope of being able to get a living by the ordinary pursuits of life, the chances have often been greatly in his favor, that his unintelligent piety would be regarded as of an eminently spiritual type, and because he had not enough of individuality about him, to prevent his bowing with most unquestioning assent to creeds and catechisms, and whatever bore the stamp of orthodoxy, the good fathers and mothers in Israel have too often set him down at once as proper material for the ministry. Thus encouraged, he has, by dint of dry digging, been able perhaps to pass through college and enter the theological school. But all the while he has

The internal force

become no stronger in his own resources. within him is no greater than it was years ago. What he has is a mere dry accumulation from books, a mass of other men's thoughts, and worth but little at that. And now he sits at the feet of the Gamaliels of theology, his easy negative nature is made the mere recipient of a system of doctrine ready morticed and dove-tailed to his hand, concerning which, he finds it most conducive to his comfort to raise no doubts, and engage in no speculations of his own. The impression is made upon his mind, that to be Orthodox is everything, and to be Orthodox he has only to believe and write down the lectures which are read to him. If perchance a fellow-student thinks he sees a joint in the theological system presented to him, which is not as well fitted as it might be, or asks for the reconciliation of seemingly opposing facts, he perhaps hears him denied any adequate explanation, and told to go to his dormitory and pray over the matter. Having however passed the prescribed term at the seminary, our student now goes forth licensed, to try his hand. at preaching the Gospel, and at once proceeds to give the people the treasure of his lecture-room note-book; often, however, with the best portions left out. He is the mere echo of his teachers, and often a false echo at that. He preaches consciously from the license which men have given him, rather than from a license bestowed by God, and speaks from rusty bodies of divinity, rather than from the experiences of his own soul. His discourses are, in fact, so many lectures on the anatomy and physiology of the soul, illustrated not from the recent subject, not from the actual body of flesh and blood, but from woodcuts and copperplate.

Such has been too often the history of our ministry. Such too often had been its training. And its results are what might have been expected. God has blessed its good endeavors in the renewal of many souls. But the ministry to a large extent have not impressed men with a vivid and pervading sense of the greatness, the scope, and the surpassing importance of the Gospel demands. They have encouraged the notion that religion is a matter of time and seasons, of frames and moods. They have narrowed down the requisitions of grace to simple conversion, and religion has under their teachings come to be very much a matter of church going, the value and quality of one's piety being very generally measured by the frequency with which he is found in some place of public worship.

We have had too few men in the ministerial office, who have been able to impress their hearers generally with a proper

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sense of spiritual things, and to make them feel that they are, in all places and at all times, surrounded by the powers of the world to come. We have had too few who have been expounders of the word of God, in the proper sense of that term. Our preachers have been, too commonly, the expounders of human systems, of other men's sermons and creeds, rather than of the word of God as the Holy Ghost has given them utterance through the door of their own vital experience.

This, as we have said, has been the result of erroneous ideas and expectations in regard to the ministry on the part of the public at large, and also of the prevalent mode of training men for the ministry. Neither ministers nor their hearers have been sufficiently independent of the trammels of theological systems, or of educational routine. With the great and true ideas of great minds, we have imbibed their mistaken and pernicious ones, and have been too ready to let those who have gone before do our thinking for us. Hearers have been too ready to take the expositions and philosophies of ministers without questioning, and ministers have been too ready to go the treadmill round of some school, or system-maker in their preaching. These dispositions we think are clearly among the more prominent causes which have thrown the ministry, in a sense, behind the age. The causes lying still back of these, we have not space now to discuss, though it would not be amiss or unimportant to do so. We shall close what we have to say, by suggesting briefly some hints looking toward a better state of things.

What we want then is a higher and larger idea of religion, and the impression of this idea upon the general mind. We want a wide-spread, deeply practical conviction, that religion is not a thing of sabbaths, and sanctuaries, and prayer meetings, merely, but the great, constant, ever-pressing, topmost business of life, the great occupation of man. We want the conviction, the pervading conviction, that religion is not an insurance policy, guaranteeing one against final perdition, but that rather, as its etymology signifies, which binds a man back to God, from whom sin has sundered him, and so binds him to his true normal position now, as well as makes sure to him his future welfare. And to this end, among other influences and agencies, we want a ministry that can rise above the systems of the schools, however good and valuable in their place, and escape the constraints which they have such a strong tendency to cast about those who accept them. We want a ministry also that can come down from its cloistered study, and mingle more with the every day occupations of life, and so be pre-.

pared to adapt its teachings to them. This preaching on "the exceeding sinfulness of sin" is not what the world wants. It wants Nathans who can say thou art the man," and say it in such a way, that the truth shall show itself the sword of the Spirit. It wants men in the pulpit who can send the precepts of the divine word through all the channels of business, into the counting-room and work-shop, into the political caucus, and the gathering of the drawing-room, and make men feel that God and his truth are with them everywhere.

And we have often thought that our present system of theological education in the seminary, tends to make the ministry less practical and adapted to the actual and infinitely varied circumstances of real life than it otherwise would be, or certainly might be. As the matter now is, we take a young man who has been shut up in the academy and college seven years, and shutting him up for three years more in the class rooms of the seminary, then send him out into the world to preach the Gospel. There could hardly be a more sudden or complete change of one's condition than is thus occasioned. From an almost total seclusion from the actual world, he is cast at once into its great seething caldron of activities and passions. From the companionship of books, or a select few, whose feelings, tastes and pursuits are akin to his own, he is thrust at once into the company of those most unlike in habits and occupations. From the quiet of the school he is ushered into the din and whirl of the world's marts and mechanisms, its pleasures and its agonies, its good and its evil of every sort and of every grade. Such a transition cannot but give a shock to the whole nature of the young minister of the word. It is like throwing one suddenly into the water, who, though he may have read many treatises upon the art of swimming, and may have settled most accurately the philosophy of human floatation, has never in practice struck out a hand or a foot in the water, or ventured where he could not touch bottom. Figure aside, nothing would seem more likely than that the young man, who, on taking his parish charge, is thus confronted with sin in real life, rather than with sin in the books, and in place of cool theories of virtue and vice, of motive and conduct, meets the beating hearts of his fellow-men with the living tides of feeling and purpose coursing through them, should be appalled and disconcerted, and in his bewilderment and ignorance, should pattern his conduct after some minister who has gone before him, and drive his theology in the rut which he has made for him. The chance is that for years, such a man will be worth little to his parish, except barely to keep alive in them the comforta

ble knowledge that they have some one regularly in their pulpit, and as the phrase is, are "enjoying the means of grace." The chance, the probability, is, too, that such a person, if he ever recover himself, and is able to stand on his own feet, will carry not a few of the habits of his rawness and inexperience with him through life.

But if, instead of being thus plunged suddenly into the unknown, untried realities of life, he had been introduced to them gradually, he would very likely have met them wisely, and from the outset would have been a better minister of the Gospel. The old plan of educating candidates for the sacred office in the study of some settled pastor, instead of in a herd, crowded in the class-room of a professor, had the advantage, in this respect at least, over the arrangement now prevailing. It took the student day by day from his books to the practical work of the pastor. He rode with his teacher to visit the sick and the dying, and he practised the preaching art under the eye of the dominie, at the village school-house of an evening, or in the best room of some godly old farmer, when it was opened for. the Saturday night meeting for prayer and conference. Thus he was from the outset a kind of colleague pastor, and it was a comparatively slight transition from such a position to that of the sole charge of a parish. The thousand questions of the practical application of the Gospel to actual life and conduct, which everywhere arise, had already come up, and in some mode had been solved.

For ourselves, therefore, while we do not think our present course of instruction furnishes by any means a superfluity of doctrinal and historical equipment for the ministry, we should like to see that old parish training grafted upon it, and rather than not have it we would be willing to exchange one of the three years of the seminary course, for a year of practical instruction with some acting pastor. And we will suggest that this practical equipment might now be attained without lengthening the present term of study, by a somewhat different arrangement of it. Let the study of books as such, be confined to the eight or nine colder months of the year, and then let the student be required to spend the three or four warm months of each of his three seminary years in the company of some settled pastor. This would divide the year in the manner most congenial to the purposes of the student, and would give him relaxation, for it would be such, at the season of the year when there is least inclination for systematic appliance to books, and least profit in it, while it would occupy that season in a manner no less profitable than any other of the year. If need be too,