MINISTRY NOT SUITABLE FOR SCIENTIFIC MIND

The most obvious element of attractiveness in the ministry is its stability as a continuing function of society. It rests back upon fundamental and essentially unchanging elements of human experience; it has the immense initial advantage of springing from, and appealing to, one of the central instincts of the human race. For the minister is par excellence the religious leader of the community and religion is one of the most serious, the most permanent and inclusive interests of human beings. The sex hunger, the desire for food and clothing the passion to understand ourselves and the universe in which we live--these are the chief motor impulses of our race, and the third is the most inclusive of them all. Religion is not the creation of a book or priests or governments of institutions. It springs out of the heart of our human kind; it issues from the deep centres of human fears and joys, human terror and helplessness, human aspiration and insight. Its reality and authority are as veritable and undeniable as the experience which produces it is universal and intelligible. Now the minister is set to develop and guide this religious instinct, and his profession becomes, therefore, one of the permanent forms of human activity, independent of those changes in social commercial, industrial and political life by which less ancient and less essential professions are affected.

The work of the ministry in the modern world is two-fold. It is, first, a task of inspiration and instruction. Here is a great mass of speculations and faiths which the modern world inherits which have to do with the nature of the Eternal Spirit and of the heart of man; with the problems of sin and suffering and ignorance and of what is to be the end of it all. On these great questions the minister speaks. Particularly as a Christian leader he endeavors to restate in the language of the moment, and from the world view of his own time, what Jesus thought on these matters. He tries to get such a philosophy of the teaching of Jesus as will be intellectually defensible and intelligible to a twentieth-century congregation. Having thus set forth the teaching and experience of Jesus, he then endeavors to apply it to the social, economic, moral and spiritual problems of his own day. He is not content with the expressions of moral and spiritual principle in the language or to the problems of a past generation, but he applies that principle directly to the vexed questions of the hour.

But there is a second function of the minister less spectacular but no less precious than that of preaching. As a moral and spiritual leader he is also set to be the personal friend of the men and women and children in his parish, to exercise, with a sort of affectionate disinterestedness, the functions of guide and counsellor in their individual lives. It is this portion of his work which gives him so wide and inclusive a contact with his generation. And it tends to make him what all great ministers have been, a supreme humanist; a man, that is, who finds the rewards of life not in material possessions, but in the ever more wide and intelligent contact with and influence over the spirit of his generation.

Now a profession so fundamental in its nature, so exacting in its demands, and so high and imaginative in its rewards, is obviously not one to which large numbers of men, in any particular day, are likely to be drawn. There are quite enough men now in the Christian ministry in this generation, such as they are; what we want is not many men but the few and fit. And there are certain clear preliminary qualifications for the office. Practical men, for instance, who are chiefly interested in doing things, who take an objective view of life, who think of it in terms of action, will not usually make great ministers. They are better executives and business men than prophetic leaders. Scientific men, chiefly interested in knowing things, caring mostly for truth for the truth's sake, while they are not infrequently found in the profession, are not the most at home there. The type of man who will find his place in the ministry is of the expressive or artistic sort; the man who is not so much interested in practical or intellectual as literary and creative matters. Men who have a natural predisposition for the interpretation of life, who like to express themselves and to try to express the life of their generation, who want to know in order that they may relate what they know. These men have the temperamental qualification of the minister