'ART. X.-MINISTERIAL COURAGE

THERE is no vocation which calls for more of genuine courage than that of the Christian ministry. A cowardly pulpit is the last affliction that a patient public should be called upon to endure. On the other hand, here as elsewhere, there is much that passes for courage which does not merit so high a name. To dare to come before an intelligent congregation, for instance, without either a carefully prepared message or a justifiable excuse for its absence is not courage, but braggadocio; while the palming off upon the unsophisticated of sound for sense, rant for reason, and phraseology for fact, is the merest bullying. To bind oneself never to preach an old sermon, or never to repeat a sermon before the same congregation, is a subtle species of cowardice. It may be said that the man who never preaches an old sermon either does not preach often or does preach a good many poor ones. The public speaker who never repeats himself becomes an easier prey to the pernicious habit of repeating what other men have saidwith credit marks omitted. What a man has made is his own, and he should not blush to use it again and again as occasion calls for it. The greatest preachers have been among the greatest repeaters. And only the inferior craftsman will abuse this privilege. To refuse to be governed in a general way by the conventionalities that have grown up around one's craft or calling is often one of the clearest evidences of personal weakness, and not that sure badge of courage which so many are tempted to regard it. It requires far more strength of character to develop a genuine individuality than it does to assume some freakish method or manner of doing one's work. Mere oddity is the cheapest of all attainments, and the weakest of all modes of action. Superiority and contrast are two vastly different conceptions. Pike's Peak and Mount Washington are not mere curios among the mountains. Their glory is not that they stand out in contrast to their fellows, but that they tower above them as superior types of the same mountain grandeur. In human characters that are truly great and strong, the points of resemblance out

number the points of contrast to their fellows. It takes a strong man to acquire superiority; but any weakling can divert the public gaze toward himself, for a little while, as a striking contrast to the prevailing type. To fight with men of straw in a manner to win popular applause requires little else than the qualities of a good actor. It is a tinsel glory, for the spectator always tacitly understands that he is chiefly being entertained. A sham battle calls for no courage at all. And there is many a spectacularly assumed martyrdom, even, over which hangs no crown visible or invisible. To present the truth in such a fashion that the evil doer, if he be present, cannot fail to recognize himself therein as in a polished mirror, that is one thing-and a most commendable achievement, particularly if the message contain some inspiration to nobler action. But to preach in a way that singles out some individual either in or out of the congregation and fastens the gaze of his fellows upon him-that is distinctly another thing, and a procedure to be justified only by the rarest of circumstances. But when it comes to actually making use of the pulpit as a barricade from behind which to hurl denunciations and invectives against individual men or classes of men, that often is downright and despicable cowardice. It takes about one hundred times more courage for a minister to sit down by the side of a man in the privacy of personal conversation and expostulate with him, than it does to attack him publicly. How often and how much too widely is it true that the man who is bravest where courage counts for less is sadly lacking where that virtue is in real and imperative demand. A quarreling preacher is a scourge to Christendom. There may be times enough in his career when he must, in the right place and at the right time, stand up in the name of sheer manhood and defend himself against unquestioned injustice. He is a man; and to impress men he cannot afford to submerge his manhood even in his ministry. For this age is not to be moved by a passive, pious automaton standing in the place of a man. But on the other hand, there is nothing so supremely weak on the part of a minister as the continual airing of his personal grievances through the twofold medium of his pulpit and pastoral work. In this matter it requires a braver man to keep still than

to speak. To drag into a message born presumably of one grand motive, the edification of men-to drag into this holy thing a whole burden of petty personal pique, of revenge and retaliation -O what disloyalty to sacred trust; and what a prostitution of sacred craftsmanship! What a shepherding of the flock is that whose daily round of pastoral calls becomes a running fire of caustic criticism or of sarcastic innuendo! And, coming back to our theme, how far short of real courage such practices fall!

The fashion that all too many of us have of stalking periodically across the assumed battlefield of science and religion-laying low with our ponderous blows everything that our overwrought imaginations have first conjured up in oppositionpresents a truly ludicrous spectacle to men who think. Ludicrous, were it not so pitiable! A truer exemplification of courage in this sphere of influence consists in having our own convictions so well in hand, and our own minds so tempered to the requirements of just and equitable debate, that we could even dare to sit down with the intellectually troubled man and actually be of help to him. It would not infrequently be revealed that the troubled man knows more about science, and even about religion, on the philosophic side, than the doughty dogmatist himself. It is easier to down science in the pulpit than in the study. And it calls for a more or less courageous type of man to do some thinking on his own account; to learn from actual experience what is the awful pressure of doubt upon the philosophic mind. Having done this, and having come off more than conqueror, one is rendered for the first time capable of giving actual help to the doubter, both publicly and privately-which is an infinitely better process than the most skillful handling of Gatling guns on parapets that are kept immune from counter attacks by the polite usages of society. It is well to remember that opinions are not convictions. Opinions are handed down unquestioningly from generation to generation, from age to age; convictions are the freshly wrought products of a soul's own thinking. A man's opinions may be many; his convictions are by comparison strikingly few. Bigotry, dogmatism, and the fanatical zeal go with the declaration of opinions; toleration, emphasis, and genuine ear

nestness go with convictions. On the basis of these distinctions much that is said concerning the courage of one's convictions resolves itself into so much thin air.

The commanding need of the pulpit in our day is the courage to believe in its own supremacy. It is all too generally believed and too frequently asserted that the ministry has lost ground in matters pertaining to leadership. But the evil day has not yet come when earnest men and women have ceased to look upon the ministers of Christ as leaders of thought in all matters pertaining to spiritual life and growth. The preacher's acknowledged vocation is the lifting up of lofty ideals. The man who recognizes this, and conforms his preaching to it, is a leader still. "Lift up a standard for the people" is an ancient mandate with an eternal freshness of application. Let the humblest minister of Christ have the courage to believe that in the domain of character-making his vocation precedes all others. In holding men to vital truth, to conscience, to justice, to the dictates of humanity as reinforced by the sacred vision, let him regard his position among men as not having suffered one whit from any so-called changed order of things. Everything that has been lost of relative value has been more than compensated for by a certain increased public estimate upon what has always constituted the pulpits legitimate work, the making of men. The preacher's specialty has to do with the case of successful living. It is his to work for the purification of the springs of human action. The world is quick enough to recognize real authority. And real authority for the preacher consists never in self-assertion, but always in the self-embodiment of such forces, truths and principles as have their counterpart in the eternal needs of men. To believe this in the face of all contesting sophistries-to practice this in face of an over-wailing storm of pessimism-takes some courage. But it is a courage

that will "win out." And for such workmen the world has ever in waiting a place of command.

Fred Clare Baldwin.

ART. XI.-A WINTER DAY ON A COUNTRY CIRCUIT I AM a circuit preacher. This statement does not entitle me to any special consideration. I make it merely to make clear that I have the opportunity of seeing wonderful things. You will have to accept my unsupported testimony that I really see wonderful things. I thank God for the eyes and the opportunity to see the wonders of his out-of-doors. One Sunday afternoon in December I started on a four-mile drive to a lonely country church. I really drove four miles through the aisles and corridors of God's most wonderful temples. The afternoon air was full of a peculiar, dusky semiradiance. The sky, neither blue nor gray yet both blue and gray, was a color-tone that I can liken to nothing that I have ever seen-soft, fluffy, modestly brilliant, as if summer blue and winter gray were mingled yet not merged. And the whole was permeated by a myriad of floating, dust-like particles of a dun-like tarnished gold. Through this beautifully weird atmosphere of dusty brilliance, fire-lines and gemmy sparkles shot and glimmered and shifted as if the earth were at the center of a great opal and I could see from inside the jewel the magnificent play and change of fire and color. The sun was veiled-not hidden, not obscured, but veiled, as the face of an Eastern woman is veiled when she goes abroad-with a misty, transparent, filmy veil which heightens and enhances the rose and carnation tints of cheeks and lips, the pearly gleam of brow, the brilliance of the eye, yet conceals the grosser appearance of the countenance. There was none of the hard, diamond-like brilliance of the winter sun. That was hidden by the veil. There was none of the intolerable, piercing, eye-destroying fervor of summer. That was subdued by the gold dust in the air. There was none of the languorous glow of spring. That was invigorated into keenness by the cold. There was none of the burning, scorching ardor of autumn. That was cooled and filtered by the film of mist. It was just the sun of that day, neither summer sun, winter sun, spring sun, nor autumn sun. You have heard singers speak of a veiled voice: this was a veiled sun. His beauty, his light, his