The Case of the Ministers

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

THERE has always been to me something pathetic about clowns and jesters, but for many years I did not know why. At last I found out: it was because they were compelled to make their living by means of laughter. Now laughter is, or should be, a spontaneous, even a capricious thing. It is one of the delicious ‘extras’ of life, it comes with an enfranchisement, momentary perhaps, but real, from the pressure of sterner realities. That this gay, free thing should be put in harness, and made to serve these sterner realities, — therein lay the pathos that I had always dimly felt. From such a lot might every one I loved be delivered! Let them work hard — break stone, dig ditches, what you will — but let their laughter be unenforced!

Such is still my prayer, but it has enlarged its scope. For I now see that there are other things which should be left free. Laughter, let us say, is the gleam of sunlight over life. By all means let us not try to turn it into ‘power.’ But there are other gleams: the moonlight of poetry, the white light of religious experience, the radiance of love. And in my prayer I include all these.

It is no needless prayer. Thousands and thousands of men are suffering to-day, perhaps without knowing it, because the prayer has in their cases not been answered, because they are compelled, in the pursuit of their livelihood, to exploit some one of these.

I am thinking particularly of the clergy. They have come to seem to me even more to be pitied than the clowns. Laughter, indeed, is precious, but that which our ministers are required to put in harness is even more precious: it is the impulses and experiences of the religious life.

In all the discussion about the ministry and the church which is now so rife, no one seems to have a word of pity for the men who are being forced continually to do the impossible, the unthinkable thing, namely, to exploit their own spiritual nature in the earning of their daily bread. Some discipline is doubtless good for us. To be compelled to chop wood when one is weary, to keep books when one loathes accounts, to sit behind a desk or teach spelling when one longs to go fishing, these things may be good for one’s moral fibre, or again they may not. But to be compelled by one’s ‘job’ to ‘make a prayer’ when one does not feel prayerful, to be obliged to talk about spiritual realities which are at the moment, or perhaps usually, not felt as realities at all, — this can never be good for the moral fibre; it must be disintegrating to it. This is not discipline, but the most disastrous form of slavery. It is a slavery that demoralizes sometimes past hope of recovery, for it Strikes at the foundation of character: spiritual honesty.

There is one thing to which, even more than to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, every one has a right, and that is, the possession of his own depths of self-hood. There is in all of us a hidden life, often unacknowledged, usually unexpressed, which is sacred. With most of us it is protected from violation by all the bars of reserve. Not so with the ministry! With them the bolts are shot back at the stroke of an hour, or there are no bolts, and the latchstring is out for every passer-by to pull. Their religious life, their deepest convictions, their profoundest visions, these are, to put it most crudely, their stock in trade, their business capital. That which with most of us forms the background of life, with ministers constitutes the foreground. It is this that makes the anomaly, the preposterous anomaly, of their position. It is useless to declare that they have private rights like other men. Practically they have not. Even theoretically they scarcely have. What is the good of talking about private rights when a man is liable at any minute to such demands as these: pray with me; talk to me about God; make an emotionally satisfying address over the coffin of my dead mother.

Contrast the conditions under which men work in the other professions. The lawyer, through years of training, to which he brings some natural aptitude, makes himself master of certain branches of the law. In these he is more or less of an expert, and he earns his living by a combination of honesty, industry and skill in applying his expert knowledge. All this he can do, and still preserve that sacred something we have called selfhood.

With the physician it is the same: he has the aptitude, he equips himself with the knowledge and the skill. He offers these to society, and society gladly avails itself of them. In both professions, to be sure, the self behind the day’s work is what gives the day’s work its final value, but it is always behind the work. It is not served up as the very work itself. These men may have sympathy, inspiration, reverence, faith, love. They must have them, in some degree, but they are forces that underlie and compel.

The case of the minister may, indeed, be stated so as to make it seem parallel. He too, starting with some natural aptitude, spends years acquiring knowledge and skill. He masters ecclesiastical history, he delves in theology, he studies church government, he practices oratory. Along these lines he too becomes to some extent an expert.

This sounds well, but it will not bear scrutiny. For, whereas the expert equipment of the lawyer or the doctor is what gives him his value and ensures his measure of success, the minister’s expert equipment, except perhaps his training in oratory, and this only in a minor degree, has very little to do with his value or success. What we want in a lawyer is mastery of the law, what we want in a physician is mastery of the conditions of health, but what we want in a minister is not mastery of church history, theology, church government, or even oratory. The thing we really demand of him is the possession of a vivid religious life and the power to make ‘telling’ use of it so that it gets a real grip on the spiritual lives of others. Without this the rest of his equipment is useless. With this, the rest may be dispensed with.

That is, his sympathy, inspiration, reverence, faith, and love, instead of being the underlying forces of his nature, must be kept on top all the time, ready to pass out to people at a moment’s notice. At certain hours of the week the minister must summon from its hiding-place the spirit of prayer, he must literally exploit it for the edification of three hundred or five hundred or a thousand listeners. At certain other hours he must call forth his most solemn convictions about life and death, and exploit them in the same way. And at uncertain times, at any and every time, week in and week out, he must have his personality ready to deliver when called for.

Is this fair? Can we wonder that the weakness of the ministry is along the line of hypocrisy, of the over-facile in expression, of the cheaply ready in sympathy? that ministers sometimes develop a professional manner as marked as the professionally sympathetic manner of the undertaker ? Is it surprising that in self-defense they should build up for themselves an armor, not of obvious reserve, but of glib expressiveness which meets the same end? If they were always really turning themselves inside out, as they are nominally supposed to do, there would be nothing left of them, they would be worn to a frazzle in three months. Some there are who really do this, and these are usually indeed worn to a frazzle. Or, to use the conventional term, they ‘break down.’ Most of them do not do it, and they survive, but ideals suffer.

There is something wrong. It is the wrong of professionalizing what ought to be left free. We see this quickly enough in other cases: poetry is a lovely thing, but so soon as it becomes professionalized, it is in danger. Personal charm is an adorable thing, but when the actor makes it a daily offering to an expectant public its finer bloom is too apt to vanish. Love and friendship are the greatest things in the world, but when they are habitually exploited, they lose part if not all of their greatness. The court favorite, paid for his devotion, the lover or the mistress, paid for their favors, compelled to render them without regard to the spontaneous impulse behind them, these are in danger of falling very far short of greatness. Perhaps Tolstoï was right, and every man should have some tangible work to do, not perhaps with his hands alone, but using his whole practical equipment of skill, knowledge, and aptitude, and allowing for an overflow of energy which should follow whatever channels it found open, without being forced into pipes, to turn wheels and push pistons.

Such, indeed, was to some extent the life of the monks of old. They worked their gardens, they nursed the sick, they made medicines, they taught, they printed books; and these activities formed as large a part of their lives as their daily office, often a larger part. But back of all this, the daily round of tangible duties, lived the ardors of conviction and faith, flashing through sometimes in a radiance of inspiration, oftener perhaps smouldering unrecognized in the depths of an unchallenged and unexploited reserve.

This was a healthy life. And there are some ministers to-day whose lives are much like this. There might be more. For there is enough practical work waiting to be done to keep all the ministers busy, if they never again made a reluctant prayer or delivered an enforced sermon. There are many people who think that an institutional church and a liturgical service is the ideal for the future. But there are many also who deny this. And meanwhile, the public accepts, and demands, this living sacrifice of its ministry. It is imposing a compulsion which cannot help sapping some of the honesty, the vitality, the spontaneity, that are our most precious possessions.