XXIV.

SOURCES OF SUPPLY FOR THE MINISTRY.*

I wish to call attention to the fact that the proportion of our thoroughly trained young men who enter the ministry is gradually but seriously diminishing. The deficiency of which I speak is not confined to our own denomination. A few months ago I collected the latest triennial catalogues of our leading colleges, and constructed an elaborate table of statistics, in order to discover the precise proportion of college graduates that chose the ministry as a calling in the earlier and in the later decades of their history. The result was surprising. Yale College in the first years of its history gave seventy-two per cent. of its graduates to the ministry. Fifty years ago, the proportion had already become reduced to thirty-one per cent. During the last ten years of which the triennial gives professional statistics, the proportion is only eleven per cent. Fifty years ago, Williams College gave fiftynine per cent. of its graduates to the ministry,--now it gives only fifteen ; Amherst College shows a reduction during the same half-century from sixty-one per cent. to twenty-six per cent.; Hamilton College from thirtyeight per cent. to twenty-three per cent.; Brown University from thirty-two per cent. to seventeen per cent.; and the University of Rochester, which in the first ten years of its history sent forty-six per cent. of its graduates into the ministry, during the last ten years of which we have a record, sends a proportion of only twenty-two per cent. †

It is evident that we have before us a general fact of our times which ought to interest us, not only as Baptists, but as Christians. What we see of decline in this respect cannot be due to any special defects of method or administration into which our Baptist colleges have fallen. The evil is common to all our Christian colleges. The greatness of it may be partially appreciated when we consider that the result of averaging the statistics of the six colleges mentioned is to show that, while fifty years ago forty per cent. of our college graduates entered the ministry, we have now reached a time when only seventeen per cent. of those who have received a complete college training devote themselves to the ministry of the gospel. We may

* An Address before the Rhode Island Baptist Social Union, Providence, May, 1877; printed in the Watchman, Boston, October, 1878.

+ An article by Rev. George P. Morris, of Montclair, N. J., in the Independent of January 12, 1888, brings these statistics down to the date of the present publication, and adds much of interest. The proportion of ministers among the alumni of Harvard Coljege, from 1642 to 1650, was 55 per cent.; it has regularly diminished, until from 1860 to 1870, it was 8 per cent., and from 1870 to 1876, it was 1.2 per cent. At Princeton, from 1748 to 1760, it was 49 per cent; from 1870 to 1877, it was 18 per cent. At Yale College, from 1870 to 1880, the proportion was 8 per cent.; at Williams, from 1880 to 1883, it was 12.7 per cent.; at Amherst, from 1880 to 1882, it was 13. 5 per cent. These facts demonstrate that, since the above address was written, the decline has steadily continued.

appreciate it yet more fully when we consider that while the absolute number of students in these colleges has increased fifty per cent. during the half-century, the absolute number of their graduates entering the ministry has decreased thirty-three per cent. In other words, while our population has grown immensely in numbers and culture, the supply of ministers fitted by thorough training to meet the intellectual and spiritual demands of the time has not half kept pace with our growth in other respects, and is absolutely one-third smaller than it was fifty years ago.

The instances I have cited are typical instances of our old and large institutions. Have other sources of supply been opened which might render these unnecessary? New colleges have certainly been founded, and of their graduates some have chosen preaching as their profession in life. But the new colleges have not made up for the lack of the old ones; they have had all they could do to secure a foothold; have not graduated any comparatively great number of students; above all, have not sent into the fields covered by the old colleges enough men to make any perceptible difference in the result. And in the West and South, the graduates of the younger colleges show no more inclination to devote themselves to the gospel ministry than do the graduates of those which have been longer established,— in fact, I think it will be found that the influences which have led at the East to the results I have detailed, have operated yet more powerfully at the West, so that the facts I have stated fairly exhibit the real condition of things throughout the country.

It would be some alleviation and comfort if we could believe that, as the supply has decreased in numbers, there had been a counterbalancing increase in the native and acquired ability of those who enter upon the sacred office. But I fear it cannot be argued that better quality has made up for diminished quantity. The average amount of talent in a hundred or a thousand young men is a pretty constant quantity. When you diminish the number, you diminish your chances of finding among the number men of superior ability. We have better schools, better methods, better training, than we had fifty years ago, but these do not compensate for the lack of the best sort of raw material. No amount of grinding or polishing will give a good edge to a tool of soft iron. Schools, however excellent, cannot transform secondrate men into first-rate ministers. And it seems to me that I perceive a marked and increasing disposition on the part of the ablest and most influential men in our college classes to turn away from the ministry to other pursuits, so that the proportion of talent entering the ministry is even less than the proportion of numbers.

But are there not a multitude of ministers who can find no pastoral charge? I am reminded of an anecdote of Daniel Webster. He was asked by a young man who proposed to study law, whether there was any room at the bar. "O, yes," said Mr. Webster, "plenty of room, high up!" So there might be a minister at every cross-road, and yet a thousand churches be begging in vain for pastors thoroughly fitted for their work. Of this last sort there is no overplus, but a great and constantly increasing dearth. The culture of our communities has proceeded faster than the culture of our ministry. We must provide a more advanced culture, and we must give the best brains of our sons to receive it, or the civilization of the age will run away from the church.

Let us face the problem. We have before us a phenomenon of our times a continually growing tendency among our educated young men to enter upon other vocations rather than the ministry. I wish, if possible, to assign some of the chief causes of this tendency, that we may wisely labor to counteract it. It seems to me that we shall not reach the root of the matter unless we grant that for this general phenomenon of our Christianity, which manifests itself in Germany and England as well as in the United States, we must find a subtle, potent and pervasive cause in the philosophical spirit of our time. Every generation has its philosophy. Man knows two things, body and soul, matter and mind; and according as one or the other absorbs his attention, he becomes a materialist or an idealist. But neither materialism nor idealism by itself can long content the thinker, and so the pendulum of philosophic thought swings between the two extremes. Not half a century ago the idealistic transcendentalism of Germany was the great danger against which we had to guard. But this generation of Germans has seen the lecture-rooms of the Hegelian philosophers deserted. Physical science is taught in them now. The pendulum has swung to the materialistic extreme. The current philosophy in scientific circles is a philosophy of the senses. Matter is all and in all. Or if mind and matter be distinguishable, they are both but the opposite sides or manifestations of an unknowable force, which is conceived of under physical analogies, so that the priority of spirit is practically denied.

The late lamented President Talbot used to say that he liked metaphysics, because they had to do with realities. Our age denies the very existence of those realities with which intellectual and moral philosophy has to do. A mist has risen from the low grounds of physical research, and has obscured the great spiritual facts and existences in presence of which the human spirit used to rejoice and tremble. Our literature is full of evolution and natural law, -- but the God who works miracles, and has personal dealings with the soul, is far away. The young men in our colleges get ideas from Herbert Spencer, as well as from the Sabbath sermon. They may be Christian young men, and their faith may not be absolutely destroyed, -the Christian college is the best of all places to meet the infidel reasoning, and to overcome it. Yet these young men breathe the atmosphere of their time, and it is an atmosphere of doubt and questioning. Is it a wonder that the unseen and eternal should become so dimmed to their vision, that a life devoted to teaching about these invisible things should seem hardly substantial enough to attract them?

And while the hold of spiritual realities is weakened, the material progress of the age strongly impresses the youthful mind. Commerce and invention have opened many a new world to the enthusiastic adventurer. Years ago there used to be only three learned professions — law, medicine, and theology. But there are a dozen to-day. Architecture, the fine arts, literature, journalism, chemistry, banking, mining, offer brilliant prizes to the capable and industrious—prizes compared with which the returns of the pastorate seem very meagre and precarious, and the life of the pastorate very narrow and confined. The world has shot forward along the line of industrial discovery and achievement. Railroading and manufactures require a very high order of genius and discipline to organize and conduct them, and these

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pursuits offer pecuniary compensations which the ministry cannot. The style of living in which cultivated people indulge has advanced in elaborateness and expensiveness much faster than the minister's salary has increased. All these things our young men see. To the best of the Christian students in our colleges, Satan offers, as he offered to Christ, all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, if they will but choose a secular calling rather than the ministry. I almost wonder that, in this age of materialistic thought and of physical progress, any are found to give themselves to Christ's service as preachers of His gospel. I should actually wonder, if I did not know that young hearts are not always sordid and selfish, and that the Spirit of Christ can touch them with the fire of self-sacrificing love. Let us appreciate the nature of the decision, when the spirit of the age yields to the Spirit of Christ, and our young men give up their hopes of worldly preferment to engage in a service so self-denying as that of the average ministry.

The second cause of the diminishing supply of educated men for the ministry is to be found in what I may call the secularization of our colleges. That I may not seem to use this phrase in any invidious sense, let me explain my meaning. It is a fact we need to consider, that even our Christian colleges, as distinguished from State institutions, have been more and more becoming places of secular, rather than religious, training. This is partly an incident of their general advance in methods. In early days the college was looked upon chiefly as a feeder for the ministry; it was indeed a college and a theological seminary combined. If others than incipient preachers studied in it, they were those who had in view one of the other learned professions, law or medicine. Now it is a mark of progress, upon which we ought to congratulate ourselves, that all classes of the community are coming to feel the advantages of a thorough education, and the farmer, the manufacturer and the merchant desire their sons to have a liberal training, even though they are to follow the calling of their fathers. demand, and have opened their doors to all. varied culture than they gave fifty years ago. of their curriculum to embrace the new science of the day, at the same time that they have widened the compass of their halls to take in the candidates for every conceivable human calling.

The colleges have felt this They give a broader and more They have widened the range

The results of this are easily seen. The colleges have now a smaller proportion of Christian students. Much of the instruction formerly given in Biblical studies and in Christian doctrine is given no longer. The theological seminary has sprung up to give a specifically theological training, and as the college and the seminary have become more and more differentiated, the work formerly done by the one is relegated to the other. No college that I know of has any such course of sermons on the Christian evidences and on the Christian doctrine, as Dr. Timothy Dwight preached in the chapel of Yale College a hundred years ago. The young collegian who proposes to study law has no such instruction in theology as legal fledglings had then. Then many a lawyer had tastes for Biblical and theological study awakened in college which afterwards led to theological authorship, and reacted powerfully and beneficially upon the work of his chosen profession. It would be well if the men of other professions could have some such training in theology now. Why is it that all other sciences are supposed to form a

necessary part of a liberal education, while no place can be found in a college curriculum for the most important of all, the science of God?

So the college has become more collegiate, and the theological seminary more theological. It is the old principle of the division of labor. But it has its disadvantages. With a greater proportion of students bent on secular pursuits, there has been a natural diversion of thought from religion itself. Instructors being chosen not so much for their religious spirit as for their competence in special departments of teaching, there is naturally a less regard on their part for the religious welfare of the students under their care. The days of wide-spread revival in our colleges, those days of struggle and prayer when the college world was shaken to its foundations, and universal awe was felt at the manifest presence of God, are almost things of the past. Those were the days when young men felt the claims of Christ and his ministry, and in submitting themselves to God, gave themselves also to the preaching of the gospel. Now the secular element is so dominant that a strong public sentiment in behalf of religion is difficult to arouse. The Christian element among students and professors holds its own, but it does little more. I am perfectly aware that the old curriculum and the old methods can never be restored, but I trust in God that the day will come when the old revival spirit will fall upon our colleges, and when each of them may have for its motto the old legend upon the seal of Harvard, "Christo et ecclesiæ." The studies of the colleges may be secular, but their spirit may be religious. These colleges were all founded in prayer and tears, by men of God who felt that education without religion was not only no true education, but was a curse to those who received it. I cannot believe that the spirit of the founders has spent itself and is gone. But it greatly needs to be revived, and for this every Christian should devoutly pray, for the future of the Christian cause is bound up with the religious condition of our colleges.

I wish now to speak of a third and last cause for the disinclination of our educated young men to enter the ministry, namely, a gradual change of view among the members of our churches with regard to the ministry itself as a divine calling. I do not now refer to the disappearance of that adventitious diguity of ecclesiasticism which once surrounded the minister and separated him in the popular regard from all others of human kind. We who live in this generation can hardly picture to ourselves the solemn sanctity that invested his office in old New England days. That was a time when, the moment the minister and his family left the parsonage to walk to the church on Sabbath days, every parishioner, young and old, stood still by the road-side with uncovered head until the procession passed. When the minister's family filed into the meeting-house two by two, the whole congregation rose to receive them, and remained standing until the minister had taken his seat in the pulpit, and his family had taken their seats in the pew. That old ecclesiasticism often bolstered up a miserable sloth and formality, and though it originated in real reverence for sacred things, it tended to withdraw the minister from the sympathies of his people and to hinder his real influence. Rather than have those days return, it were better that the minister should stand wholly upon his merits, and that he should have no influence but that which his personal character and his faithfulness in preaching the word of God might give him.