S. Ministerial Education

Ministerial Education

Give diligence to present thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, handling aright the word of truth. 1 Timothy 2:14.

I WISH first to indicate some of the leading thoughts in this passage of Scripture, in the second chapter of second Timothy, beginning at the 14th verse. The apostle is speaking to Timothy, not only with reference to his own duty, but to the qualifications of the men who are to be selected as ministers of the gospel, and whom he must instruct. Addressing Timothy himself, he says: “ Give diligence to present thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed.” The image is obvious to all. A minister of the gospel is compared to a mechanic, a skilled workman, a man who has stood the test and is approved, and then his skill in his work is shown by the added phrase, “ a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, handling aright the word of truth.” The term means literally “ cutting straight,” as you read in the margin. Perhaps the phrase came from the idea of a carpenter cutting a straight line with his saw; possibly from Paul’s early trade. It required a very skillful workman to cut straight with scissors the rough hair cloth of which they made the Cilician tents. Whatever be its origin, the term denotes, in a general way, skillful work a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, cutting straight, handling aright the word of truth. A skilled workman is the minister. Then the apostle proceeds to indicate for Timothy himself, and for the faithful men to whom these things are to be committed that they may teach others also, the importance of knowing how to avoid seductive and ruinous errors.

He says of these, “ charge them that {hey strive not about words,” mere logomachies, “ to no profit. Shun the profane babblings.” Presently he mentions examples, Hymenseus and Philetus, who had thought that the resurrection was a mere spiritual resurrection and past already, and had overthrown the faith of some, and Timothy and the other ministers must know how to shun these hurtful errors. If they do so, they shall be like the gold or silver vessels, honored in the Master’s house. Another point about them is that they must not be given to mere babbling. “ Foolish and ignorant questionings refuse, knowing that they gender strifes.” The word is literally “fightings” or “battles,” and the Lord’s servant must not strive, must not be a fighter. In another sense, of course, we all know that the Scriptures teach that we must fight, but you see what is meant here. It is so easy for a man to be a fighting minister!

Some men are fighting ministers for the very reason that they have not what the apostle here enjoined. The Lord’s servant must not be a fighter, but must “be gentle, apt to teach, forbearing in meekness, correcting them that oppose themselves.” Many a man is a fighting preacher because he does not know how to do anything else. It requires some wisdom and some skill to teach aptly, to correct with gentleness and meekness the errors of those who oppose themselves, and try to win them to the truth; but just to fight requires no skill at all.

You see, then, this passage presents very varied qualifications for the minister of the gospel spiritual and mental qualifications combined. Of the mental qualifications, you see that it indicates some that belong to men by nature and others that come by cultivation; and as to the qualifications that come from cultivation acquired skill these come partly in the actual exercise of the duties of the minister, but they may come all the better if there be special early training for it. Take the image of the mechanic. “ The only way to learn to preach is to preach,” the fathers used to say. Certainly. The only way to learn to saw is to saw, or to learn how to make horse-shoes is to make them. At the same time, it is the experience of mankind that while some men take up these pursuits and acquire some skill merely from their practice, yet it is usually better for a man who proposes to be a mechanic, to work in his early attempts under the guidance and with the correction and encouragement of those who are far ahead of him in experience; and if men have found that so in all the mechanical arts, why should we be surprised to find it so in the great work of life of which the apostle speaks? “ A workman that needeth not to be ashamed.” Our passage, then, brings before us the great subject of the qualifications and the training of ministers of the gospel. Where do we stand to-day, my brethren, as to ministerial education? What is the duty of to-day in regard to it? As to our past, there is in it much to be thankful for, and of course much to lament. I believe, for my part, that the theory of the Baptist churches as to the ministry of the gospel is a right theory, substantially. That theory has always been that the ministry of the gospel ought not to be restricted to men who have been over a certain fixed course of mental training in order to it, but that every one should be encouraged to preach who feels moved to preach, and whom the churches are willing to hear. At the same time, it has always been the theory that every minister of the gospel should seek to be a competent and enlightened man in general, and in particular that he must be a man who has sound views of the teaching of the Scriptures, and knows how to explain them to others. Our brethren have never held that it was a good thing for a minister to be ignorant, but they have held that it was not a disqualification for a minister to be destitute of this or that particular kind of mental training, provided only that he had some power to preach, and people were willing to hear him. That theory I think is right. It is what the Scriptures enjoin. It is what was true of the early teachers of the gospel not only the inspired men, but others. It has been an absolute necessity for this new country of ours.

I have profound respect for the ministry of the Presbyterian and Episcopal brethren, for instance, but I wonder sometimes what in the world would have become of the masses of the people in America if all the religious persuasions had done as they have done with reference to the ministry. They have had for themselves a cultivated ministry, in general, and they have had all the benefit of this select and exclusive arrangement as to the ministry, and some of them all the pride of it which is natural. But if it hadn’t been for the great Methodist and great Baptist bodies, and some others like them, who have encouraged men to preach that were destitute of this artificial course of training, what in the world would have become of the masses of the people? It has been bad enough as it was; it would have been flat ruin if all denominations in our new country, where most of’ the lawyers and most of the doctors have been men without any special training, had insisted that it should be otherwise with the ministry.

I am not ashamed, therefore, of the fact that I belong to a body of Christians which has a great number of comparatively uneducated ministers. I think that in our past this has been unavoidable. I think it has been a necessary part of trying to see the gospel as it is and do our duty to the people among whom we were cast. But things are changing. Oh, how fast they change! A man who comes from my part of the world to this, finds that all his knowledge of geography has vanished. He does not know anything about the country at all.

States that were thought new when some of us can remember, are old States now, and all around me I hear people talk of “going West,” which seems strange to me. Things are changing, changing fast as to education, and we must change with them, and if our Baptist churches have not wisdom to see that the conditions which justified our past as to our ministry are changing and rapidly ceasing to justify them, then they will pay the penalty of their lack of wisdom. It may be that we have gone too far even in the past, and that some are going too far now in encouraging the entrance of men into the ministry who are unfitted for it; some unfitted by their grievous ignorance, and others still more ruinously unfitted I pray you agree with me in the statement by their lack of sense. For I can find you ignorant men who ruin the Queen’s English and yet have sense and character and have done great good; and I can find you men that can speak passable English enough, and even prate about the learned languages, but from sheer weakness and silliness have always been a disgrace to the ministry. It may be that some of us are going too fast now, in some parts of the country, towards the opposite extreme inclining too much to take up the other idea, that all ministers ought to have a certain artificially-fixed kind and grade of preparation for their work. It may be, my brethren, that in connection with institutions of learning we are somewhat prone to go from the one extreme to the other; and if that be so, we ought to look the danger in the face and guard against it.

What I wish to speak of, then, is our present duty as to ministerial education. And I have three points of remark about it. first, Ministerial education must go hand in hand with general education. It ought to keep in advance; but it cannot be, as a general thing, far in advance of the education of the people. They must go together.

Why, with our free system of choice, you cannot get the churches to prefer a well-educated man, unless they have some education themselves. A man who has been reared among intelligent people and has been well educated, and who then goes to preach among the very ignorant, is startled to find how prejudiced they are against his ideas and against him. You will pardon a very homely illustration of it, egotistical in addition.

I remember to have had the honor, twelve or fifteen years ago, to be elected pastor of a very large country church in Upper South Carolina the largest country congregation I ever saw where there were many noble people, too; but they had just been gathered in by hundreds, by good men, and never taught from the pulpit that there were any Christian duties to perform. At the end of a year of earnest attempt to preach there, with many encouraging results, I had the cheering intelligence that a good sister in the neighborhood had said, with reference to the justly beloved old man who had preceded me, that she “had rather hear dear old Uncle Toll give out one verse of a hime than to hear that ’ar Greenville preacher go through a whole sarmon.” You will pardon me, for I wanted to illustrate the fact that ignorance, like a shell-fish, secretes a coating of prejudice that hardens all around it. If you could make all your ministers educated, as long as the mass of people are comparatively uneducated, they would often not want them. So the two must go together.

Moreover, it is a thing very easy to happen, and which sometimes does happen with all our precautions against it, that a certain class of men are educated away from the people. It is not true of the highest class of men. The highest class of men, whatever they may learn, will not forget the language of the people, and will not fail to be able to bring all their highest efforts in reach of common minds. But it is true of some men of very respectable ability that, struggling themselves after what they call “ education/’ they get away from all sympathy with the common mind. They don’t know how to talk to the people. This happens with some, not from lack of intelligence of some kinds; it is from lack of imagination, from lack of intellectual sympathy with other minds, from lack of the power to comprehend the way that people in general look at things. I have known men very noble men in all their aims and aspirations, and men very wise in some respects who could not get hold of the people at all, because they didn’t know how people in general think about things, and couldn’t present things as the people have to see them. And then I suppose it must be admitted that sometimes a man who is educated away from the people thereby shows his essential lack of sense.

Here is another difficulty. Our ministers can seldom receive their boyhood education with a view to the ministry. They are usually called into that work when they have about reached young manhood; and if now they are to be educated, all the education of their boyhood must have been such as they have obtained without reference to the ministry. As long as people in general have but little of education nothing beyond elementary instruction so long will most of the young men who come into the ministry and wish to prepare for it have, for their earlier boyhood training, only what is to be had among the people at large. I speak of one of the most familiar painfully familiar phenomena to all who are called to instruct young ministers. What a common thing to see a fine young man under this disadvantage! You can see it in his eye that he is a man.

You can see it in his tones that he wants to make the best of himself. You can see how he works; but there are the disadvantages of his comparative lack of training in his boyhood, and how to overcome them is the question. Many men never can fully overcome them, and they are humiliated sometimes because they cannot spell. Only some people can spell the English language, I believe. It is a torture and an outrage upon human nature that ought not to be perpetrated many generations longer, that people should be required to spell the English language as it now stands. I say, then, that if our ministers are to have earlier education boyhood education of a valuable kind, they must obtain it without reference to the ministry, and so there must be facilities for this among the people at large. I wished to explain how it is that ministerial education ranks itself necessarily with the general -education of the people, and the experience of our churches has shown the fact. Almost every institution of learning that our Baptist people in America have founded has been founded with special reference to the ministry of the gospel; but then they have found that they must associate this with the education of others also. One of the wants of to-day is high-schools that shall be preparing our half-grown youths for whatever they are to do in the world, and then as many of them as are afterwards called into the ministry of the gospel will have the benefit of these schools; high-schools whether they are to be supported by the public at large or founded by Christian people, is a question of locality and circumstances high-schools that will forbear to call themselves colleges; that will not attempt to take upon themselves the functions of colleges; that will consent to do the humble, but so needful work of giving really thorough instruction in the elements of knowledge, and if they must add some other things for those pupils who will study there alone and will never go to college, they should still give to these mainly the thorough training in the elements of knowledge; high-schools that will teach history for I find more fault with my pupils from lack of knowledge of history than almost anything else; for how can a man know anything unless he knows history? high-schools which shall give thorough training in English composition, so that people can speak and write decently their own language; which for those who wish to study the classic languages, shall teach the elements of those languages. President Wayland used to say I am using familiar incidents for my purpose that there must be a mystery about Greek grammar.

“ For,” he said, “ a boy learns Greek grammar at the common school. Then he goes to the academy, and learns Greek grammar; then at college Greek grammar again, and then to the theological seminary, and still he must learn Greek grammar. There must be something very mysterious about Greek grammar.” If there were only high-schools in which the teachers were willing to teach Greek grammar to those who are attempting to learn it, I know a certain class of men who come a little later on in our ordinary processes of education, who would have much occasion to thank the teachers of the high-school.

This, then, is my first point of remark, that ministerial education must go hand in hand with general education; therefore people who are specially interested in the education of the ministry must be equally interested in the education of the people; and our colleges need few things so much to-day as the help of high schools that shall prepare young men to enter college with a due knowledge of the elements of education. My second point is this Ministerial education must not be cannot be the same for all. Let us not go from one extreme to the other. There are differences that are felt, and what are you going to do about them? You have no power to coerce your young men. Some of them don’t feel that they need this; how can you make them feel it. There are wide differences in circumstances.

Some men are called into the gospel ministry comparatively late in life, and we must not get away from that good idea of our fathers that this is the right thing. Some of the noblest ministers of the past have entered on the work of preaching when they were of middle age, but not a few of us are getting towards the idea that every minister must go through a certain artificial course of training, fixed exactly, and have even thought that the idea of a man’s entering the ministry at middle age must be discarded. Many enter the ministry somewhat late in life, and are so embarrassed by their domestic relations that, for an extended course, they are without the necessary means. Then there are differences in men’s natural mental structure which make it unwise that you should carry them all through the same process of education. There are men who would really be hampered by an attempt to make scholars of them. I have known far away from here, of course ministers of the gospel who really were worse for having learned Latin, because they wasted their time in attempts to do that which they never did do successfully, or they were conceited with the notion that they knew something which they really did not know, and there is an old saying, which you must pardon again, that “ there’s no fool like a fool that knows Latin.”

So, then, I insist upon it that we Baptist people, in trying to elevate our ministry, must not go from the extreme to which our churches once inclined towards the other extreme. If we do, we shall be false to all our history; we shall be false to what we conceive to be the teaching of the gospel; we shall be recreant to the demands of the approaching future. My brethren, we must not have some artificial notion of education, and allow it to be converted into a mechanical process, which is always the tendency. People talk as if educating a man was just taking him through a certain fixed machine, all men through the same machine, and coming out at the same point with the same training. That is false to all the prodigious variety in the faculties and tendencies of mankind. We must constantly guard against the tendency to make education, in all its departments and in all our institutions, a mechanical process, instead of a process of growth and the training of a living thing. Every body who knows anything about teaching knows that the main thing in all our early instruction is not knowledge, but discipline, and yet how constantly people are overlooking this! You ask the ordinary average person what children go to school for, and he will tell you that they go there to get a knowledge of certain things. That is not the main thing. The main thing is the discipline of mind, as every body who will think about it must perceive. When a young man goes out, after his course of training in a carpenter’s shop do you inquire how many tools he has, or whether he has a lot of lumber ready to make up? You inquire whether he has learned his trade and knows how to handle tools and work the material that he will get as he needs it. The analogy is not perfect, I know, because in the training of the mind that which we use in the training becomes tools and materials for the work of the future, and we have in this to combine the acquisition of materials with the discipline of our faculties and the acquirement of skill. But while we combine them we must beware of confounding them, as men are prone to do.

Come now to my third point Our institutions for ministerial education^ or, more generally, our institutions of higher education, must be greatly improved without delay. There are no men who feel that so much as the men who have been struggling on amid a thousand difficulties, and have often done very noble work, and brought about, by God’s blessing, quite good results, amid all their disadvantages. If you knew, as I could tell it, of the sore struggles through which many of our professors have passed, called to attempt three times as much in teaching as one man can possibly do to his own satisfaction, and yet how, under all these burdens, they have put forth their utmost power and have done good work I think you would find it a theme for pathetic reflection. Our institutions need more instructors, in order that the work may be divided out, in order that each man may have the opportunity to devote himself to certain things and know them thoroughly, and work at them with the intense delight that comes to a man when he feels that he is making progress in the subject he loves. The tendency of our time is to specializing knowledge, as every one knows. I have a friend, a geologist, who gained his professorship in one of our leading American institutions by the fact that he was not only a geologist, but had confined himself to the department of geology which pertains to fossils and, among fossils, to fossil botany. And so by working at fossil botany he has gained a name in Germany and a noble place at home. This illustrates the tendency of all knowledge now. Men have to work more and more within narrow limits, if they are to make progress in these times or even to keep up with the progress that others are making; and so, in order that our professors may become “specialists” in our colleges the only thing that can be satisfactory we must have more professors. This is a crying need of the present time. And they must have more time in order to be better prepared. If you expect your professor in a college to meet classes three or four hours a day like a school-master, how can he lecture? How can he come with his mind all full of one theme, and all the reserved nerve force of his body and energy of his soul gathered up and concentrated upon one burning hour, in which he will carry home his subject to the hearts of those who hear him, and kindle in them that glowing enthusiasm which is the joy of a young man, and will be the inspiration of his life? Your hard-worked professor may kill himself in the effort to do that, but he cannot do justice to himself nor to his pupils nor to his Master nor to you. And we must have professors who are better paid, so that they shall have the means of commanding comforts? without intense solicitude about it; so that they shall be able to live fitly in the better society of their community without finding it a burden; so that they may give their undivided energies to their duties.

Well, you see the absolute necessity that follows. Our institutions must be better endowed. They must be far more largely endowed. We must get hold of many of these people of ours who mean right, but who are not informed in this respect, and we must widen out their minds like the broad Mississippi Valley, to see the greatness of education, that they may give largely. Some of our brethren think that they have large notions already of what institutions of learning ought to be, but they have only begun to see, and it is our duty to hold up a high standard, and spread out a broad view of what these institutions must be made. The endowment of institutions of learning is a thing needed for the sake of the poor. There are many who fancy that somehow these colleges and universities are gotten up for the benefit of the rich; but it is not so. They are for the benefit of the poor, and I speak for the poor. As for the rich, they do not need any word from me. Here, for instance, is a man who wants education, and firstclass education. He must go to a great city to find that, if there are no endowed institutions. He could find that nowhere but in a large city. If the professors are to be supported by the tuition, that tuition must be very high, and if the student is to have three or four teachers of eminent talents, he will have to pay three or four hundred dollars in tuition. The son of a rich man can do that, but what is to become of the son of a poor man? The institutions of learning come in to open their halls free of rent. The chief support of those professors will be from the endowment, and the man who is comparatively poor can thus obtain the benefit of contact with master minds, and instruction from men of high talents, which would otherwise be for him absolutely impossible.

It is for the poor, I say, that our institutions are endowed. When you go to a rich man say, “ Do your duty as one whom God has blessed with riches, and endow an institution for the sake of the poor all around you,” and you may add, “ Maybe your own son, that goes there from the home of his wealth and with all the benefits around him of ample means, will learn to study from some of those poor young fellows, his associates, who make him work by showing him what it is for a man to work.” Last February I was a great deal in contact for some weeks with eminent men of business, and there came to me this thought about our institutions of learning, which you may have for what it is worth. When we go to a man of means and ask him to give largely for the endowment of an institution of learning, we are not begging. I protest I am no beggar. When I go to a rich man and say, “ Come help us, won’t you, in this enterprise,” I present to him a joint-stock concern, a very popular idea now-a-days, an investment which will yield him large dividends, and which will last a long time. I say, “Here are our men who have given their whole lives to the work of instruction. They have toiled early and late through long years to qualify themselves for teaching certain things, and they are willing to put their lives into this not simply a little of what they are, but all of what they are they will put into it, and the very fortunes of their families. Now, if you will put some money into it, then you and they will be in a joint-stock company, and you will be doing together what you cannot do without them, and what they cannot do without you, but together you will be doing a work that will bless humanity. They are no more dependent on you than you are on them, but you will be brothers united in a common work and receiving results in common.” I think that is the right view of the matter, and that there are great-hearted men of wealth who would rejoice in the idea that they were investing in that which would yield large dividends to them and the world and which would last through long ages. For there are no investments in the civilized world so permanent as investments in institutions of education and religion. The old universities of Italy and of France and of England have lived eight or nine centuries have lived through all changes, through all revolutions of governments, through all upheavals of society, and there they are to-day. No revolutionist has ever dared to attack them. No new government has ever done aught but wish them well and perchance help them on. A man who wants to put money which God has enabled him to gather where it will last when he is gone, doing the work that he has chosen for it in the long centuries to come, must choose a mode of investment in some institution of education or religion; and if it be combined, an institution of education and of religion, of course all the better.

Now, my brethren ministers and laymen, men and women we must take hold of such thoughts as these, which would come to any of us upon reflection, and go among our people and stir their souls with the thought of the opportunity there is for them, the many to give a little, but especially the few to give much, for it is only from the large gifts of the few that institutions of education have received ample endowment; to stir their souls to see what God gives them opportunity to do, and what God’s high providence sends down, like the sunbeams out of heaven, for a direction to them. Not all rich people are selfish or mean; not many rich people are narrow-minded or ignorant; but they are busy busy with their own affairs, burdened with their own great burdens and somebody must go and tell them of these openings for investing money, better than they can invest it anywhere else in all this world, for the highest good of man and for the highest glory of Christ.