But no man will give habitual attention to the media of fellowship with the Eternal, and certainly he will find no joy in such attention, if he has not a certain aptitude for spiritual things, a receptivity to spiritual truth and ideals. All men possess a little of this aptitude, but the minister must possess it in large measure, or the formulas of the church become dry and meaningless; the tasks of the ministry, so often small in themselves, become drudgery; and the hopes of Christian faith lose their power to inspire and compel zeal and devotion. God may use, sometimes, an unspiritual man to bring spiritual things to pass, but that is not his usual way of working. God follows the general law of his universe. Every seed after its kind. Like begets like. This is the law of the spiritual world just as truly as it is the law of the physical life. Young men looking forward to the ministry, and those seeking to influence our youth for this profession, might well ponder this canon of spirituality. It may serve as the determining factor in influencing the choice, and either save the life from disappointment or lead to joyous service. God wants his people to be happy and to find satisfaction in the tasks of life. Only the joyous worker attains the highest usefulness, and the joyous worker is the man whose free spirit and service moves along the line of God given aptitudes and powers. Dr. Elijah Brown of Ram's Horn fame put the matter in Ram's Horn style when he said: "Unless a man's born with preach in him I don't believe he can ever get it there. I hold these truths to be self-evident. That God settles some things for eternity before the foundations of the world were laid, and one of them is that a man with no music in his soul can never become a Paderewski, and another is that the preacher must be born with his preach in him or no theological institution can ever put it there." It must ever be true that preachers are born of God, and not made by man. God must endow them with the powers and capacities of body, mind, and soul that destines them for his special service. Man's task is to discover these potential personalities, aid them to find themselves, and then encourage and direct them in training for the service to which they are called. Refuse profane and old wives fables. And exer- CRAPTER V THE TRAINING OF THE MINISTRY John Harvard endowed Harvard University, the first college in America, because he feared that "an illiterate ministry to the churches might arise when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." That fear has been in the minds of the leaders of the church for generations and out of it has come many of those self-sacrificing gifts that established most of our academies and colleges and all of our seminaries. Unfortunately, all members of the churches have not seen with the clear-eyed vision of these founders of our schools. Many of the fathers believed that if God called a man to preach it was his duty to preach, irrespective of training or educational equipment. In fact some of them thought that education was a hindrance, that it fettered the free movement of the Spirit. Practically applied, this sentiment resulted in forcing into the ministry many ignorant and uncouth men, men whose ignorance was so palpable and whose messages and manners were so grotesque that their audiences were repelled rather than attracted. God has used most marvellously some men who have not been trained in the schools. We have abundant reason to venerate such names as John Bunyan, Andrew Fuller and Dwight L. Moody-men who by their piety, energy, common sense and eloquence, have wrought splendidly for the truth. But the usefulness of these remarkable men does not argue against the need of other men obtaining a thorough scholastic preparation. Such men succeeded in spite of their handicaps of poor preparation, not because of them. We must also recognize the fact that the proportion of such leadership has been small, and the strength of the church has been conserved and increased largely by the trained leadership of such educated men as Paul and Augustine, Chrysostom and John Wickliffe, John Huss and Calvin, Edwards, and Beecher and Brooks and Broadus. |