first take possession of the young preacher. Then let the full power of this vital homiletical habit flow through modern rhetoric and logic. In this way swept the broad flood out of the New Testament into the Roman provinces and the world abroad, instinct with inspired matter and with the methods of minds most in communion with God. We cannot indeed equal our Lord in speech, but we can refuse to place His preaching at a distance from our own. We cannot assume His personal power, but we can so far catch the elements of His mode and style that the common people will hear us gladly.

V.-TRAINING MEN TO PREACH.

BY EX-PRESIDENT E. G. ROBINSON, D.D., NEW YORK CITY.

PREACHING in the modern acceptation of the term is the oral proclamation and enforcement of Christian truth. It consists of thought, of thought embodied in words, and of words uttered in the hearing of others. It comprises both substance and form; a substance not alone of bare truth, but of truth informed with life from the heart of the preacher, and a form, whether of language or delivery, bearing the stamp of the preacher's personality. No correct account of preaching can be given which fails to take cognizance alike of its thought and the expression of it; and no kind nor amount of training can be effectual which fails of due attention to both its substance and its form. And inasmuch as the aim of all preaching is the moral and religious quickening of the hearers, one indispensable part of the preacher's preparation is, that the truth he is to preach shall have first quickened himself. His power to convince and move others will always be gauged by the degree to which he is himself convinced and moved.

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Theological seminaries were established in this country for the purpose of preparing men for the Christian ministry. The courses of study arranged in them were professedly for the very purpose of instructing in both the substance and form of preaching. Unfortunately, however, the seminaries have been much more successful in teaching how to accumulate thought than how, when accumulated, to use it skilfully in preaching. The proportion of respectable exegetes, of fairly good historians, of even reputable theologians turned out by the seminaries is largely in excess of excellent or even acceptable preachers. Men come from them well stored with knowledge, but often with little or no power to use it. They know enough if they only had the secret of so using their knowledge as with it to sway the minds of other people. Their guns are well loaded, but they have never learned how to shoot with them. The seminaries have turned out an abundance of second-rate scholars, but few first-rate preachers.

Why so many carefully educated and scholarly graduates of the theo

logical seminaries should fail of success in the pulpit is a question that has been variously answered. Thus, undue attention given in the seminaries to the accumulation of materials in comparison with that given to practice with the materials in preaching explains it, says one; it is the kind of practice they get in the seminaries, says another; it is the spirit and atmosphere of study, rather than of practical life, which prevails in the seminaries, and a consequent inappreciation of the value of a power to attract and hold an assembly in public address, says a third; and possibly, after all, says a fourth, the chief cause of failure may be found in a lack of intelligent, patient, and persistent self-discipline on the part of theological students themselves while in course of training for their work. In each of these answers lies perhaps more or less of truth. Let us see.

The work prescribed for regular students in the seminaries during the three years allotted to it is enough, even when only tolerably well done, to tax their full strength and occupy their whole time. Of this work less than one seventh, in some instances not more than one tenth, consists of direct attention to preaching; the remaining six sevenths are given to the study of both Testaments of our Scriptures in the original languages, to ecclesiastical history, to apologetics, and to theology, biblical, systematic, and polemic. The attention of each professor is naturally absorbed by the studies of his own department, to the comparative exclusion of all thought of the homiletic use his pupils might make of what he is imparting to them. The student's desire to acquire knowledge also naturally gets a start of his desire to become an expert in the use of it in preaching, and keeps ahead of it, with an ever-widening distance between them. The end of the seminary course is reached with the predominant disposition to play the rôle of a scholar rather than of a preacher.

Various incidental causes may contribute to this result. Let one or two students of high scholarship, of fine literary taste, and superior personal character be known to be indifferent to every means of preparation for success in the pulpit, and a whole class, if not the whole seminary, may be infected with indifference. Let two or three flashy men, with no standing as scholars, and with no depth of nature, be known as specially popular preachers, and indifference will pass from being an unconscious feeling into an avowed state of mind. Let the faculty of instruction, especially the professor of homiletics, be selected, as is too often done, not for success in the pulpit, but partly for want of it, and chiefly for eminence in learning, and the theological school may produce men of learning and piety, it will not be prolific of good preachers. And it will not be impossible to find men coming from it who, with a half-concealed sneer at success in the pulpit, will complacently tell you that they do not affect to be popular preachers.

Nor can the ordinary homiletic appliances of the theological seminary prevent these results. The mere abstract study of preaching as an art never yet made a preacher. Nor can the writing and rehearsal of sermons

to a select audience of critics-that is, playing the preacher, ever make one. The moot-court may be of great service to the law student, but a moot-church service is out of the question. And yet something like what the moot-court does for the law student who would become a successful pleader at the bar, an analogous contrivance endeavors to do for the theological student who would become efficient in the pulpit. In either case, what is resorted to is only an expedient or device to fit for efficiency in real life by practising in scenes that are made as nearly as possible to resemble the real, but are in fact only imaginary. In the device of the moot-court, in which the law student seeks to prepare for the bar, there is as nearly as possible an exact forecast of what he will have to do in real life. The only thing about it strictly imaginary is the case to be tried; but in trying it, there is a real judge and a real jury to be addressed, and his brief may be in every particular precisely like that which in after life he may be required to make. Not so the student of theology, preparing to plead in the pulpit. With him all is in a sense fictitious and imaginary. The auditors for whom he writes his sermon-his fellow-students and the professor of homiletics-have little or no resemblance to the real men and women to whom sermons are ordinarily addressed. He writes it throughout with these auditors directly in mind; every sentence is conned with the vivid consciousness that it is to run the gauntlet of their criticism. The mixed assemblage of men and women to be addressed in real life lie in the dim background, so far behind the professor and fellow-students as to be spectral and unreal. To them his sermon would drop dead-born in the delivery. It either treats of a theme that has no attraction for them, or treats of it in the abstract, and so is either a disquisition or a mongrel essay, but no sermon. The more of such preaching the theological student becomes accustomed to, in his long novitiate, the less will he be likely, without further training, to win attention from the common people of every-day life.

And yet nothing has been devised or is ever likely to be devised which can do for the young preacher what an experienced professor of homiletics and fellow students can do for him. They do for him what, above all else, he most needs to have done. They trim off his excrescences; their criticisms digest for him his crudities. The professor, hatchelling the tow from his thoughts, teaches him to think clearly and connectedly; fellow-students, laughing at his foibles and conceits, rouse him to an apprehension of something better and to endeavors to attain to it. Such instruction, intelligently given and intelligently received and acted on, gives a better start toward becoming a good preacher than is otherwise or elsewhere attainable.

But this training of the seminary, unless supplemented by what the student can alone do for himself, may prove in vain or worse. Pruning only cuts off the useless. Excision without subsequent reactionary growth from within only mutilates nature without improving it. A made man,

bearing at every angle the marks of the knife, is not a pleasant spectacle ; and the one place above all others where a made man is least likely to win favor, even if he be tolerated, is in the pulpit-the place where, if anywhere on earth there should be a spontaneous energy and a symmetrical manhood. These are qualities which no mere teaching at the hands of others can ever bestow; which can alone spring from within, engendered by reflection and self-training. The only effectual training for the pulpit is that which, after due enlightenment under intelligent instruction, the preacher gives himself.

Self-training, however, to be productive of good must be both intelligent and persistent. Unintelligent training, whether at the hands of one's self or of others, is quite as likely to be productive of evil as of good. But to be intelligent, there must be distinct understanding of what is to be done. One must see himself as he really is; must know his weak points and his strong ones, if he has any; must see exactly where there should be pruning and where there should be cultivation. All is in vain without

a just estimate of the self that is to be improved. Self-conceit and vanity are fatal, but when self is well understood, the self-handling must be relentless and incessant. Fitful, casual efforts accomplish no permanent good. A radical defect yields only to a hand that will not relax its hold A prime excellence of any kind comes to full flower and fruitage only under incessant watchcare and culture.

But the self-trainer must be careful about his ideal. Some kind of an ideal he will necessarily have, and every blow he strikes will be toward a realization of it. Possibly his ideal will be a mere reflection of some one living person whom he greatly admires, and striving to become like him, the result will be a mere caricature. By a never-failing law in imitation, the defects of one's model are sure to be reproduced and exaggerated ; and the imitator is laughed at for his pains. The pupils of Basil the Great won nothing but ridicule for striving to imitate the native lisp which their master strove in vain to cure. Ludicrous and pitiful were the struggles of young Scotch preachers to express their twopenny thoughts in the high-sounding flow of tumultuous words in which Chalmers was accustomed to pour forth his large conceptions. And yet every one in constructing his ideal gathers its component parts from the real. No artist can construct his model out of the wholly unseen. The painter must have sitters; but alas for the painter who cannot out of them construct an ideal superior to each and all of them. The young preacher must have originals out of which he constructs his ideal, but the ideal to be worthy his efforts to realize it, must be superior to each and all of his originals must be his own creation-himself raised to the highest he can reasonably conceive himself capable of. His ideal may rise immeasurably above anything he can ever attain to, but it will be ever drawing him upward.

A fatal mistake, however, is here possible-a mistake illustrated by

many a pitiable example. Self may, by a diseased imagination and weak ambition, be transfigured into an artificial and deceptive ideal-an ideal so far transcending the impassable barriers of natural endowment as to preclude any perceptible approach toward a realization of it. Fascinated by stories of pulpit eloquence or by notable examples of pulpit oratory, one may become inflamed with a passion to be known as an eloquent divine or a pulpit orator. It is a blinding passion, befooling its victim, and in due time bringing him, unless released from its grasp, into contempt with all discerning people. The mistake is fatal for two reasons.

Prepensed purpose, however backed by zeal and toil, never yet brought true eloquence. It must be inborn and spontaneous, if it come at all. If a native quality, purpose and toil may greatly improve it; they never can create it. Attempts to create it produce only a counterfeit, and counterfeits are sure to be detected; and detected, to be detested. And what is true of the would-be eloquent man is equally true of the would-be orator. Among all the diversified specimens of humanity now found among the accredited heralds of the Gospel, the aspirant for the honors of pulpit oratory may not be the most contemptible, but he certainly is very far from being the most commendable. His mannerisms and affectations and exaggerations-the cheap tricks of speech that take with the vulgar-may attract the floaters of a religious community and win the applause of the groundlings; they never build up symmetrical characters nor organize promiscuous assemblies into enduring churches. The growing demand for preachers who can "fill the house" has led to a rapid increase in the number of this sort of men, or rather in the number of young men who affect this kind of preaching; but multiplication of clerical mountebanks is not one of the needs of our time. Men naturally gifted with the graces that win for them a public hearing will always be in demand, and will have abundant inducement to cultivate their gifts with diligence and patience. And yet men endowed with none of the rarer gifts, but with good sense and genuine piety, may with due self-cultivation exceed in usefulness the most gifted, if only they will be content with the spheres which God created them to fill. The ostrich is more useful in his allotted sphere than the eagle in his, but when the ostrich, as in the fable, would emulate the eagle, he simply deserves the ridicule he incurs.

Again, an ideal begotten of ambition is fatally delusive, because it beguiles into self-glorification. Attempting to realize it, one becomes so constantly and manifestly occupied with thoughts of himself as to thwart his own purpose. A self-conscious preacher, consummately trained in his art, may draw as large a crowd as a clown in the circus, and for the same reason; and he may foolishly mistake his reputation with the crowd for the repute for eloquence or oratory he so much covets; and he may also be weak enough to think himself a real preacher of the Gospel, when he is simply and plainly a vain-glorious proclaimer of himself.

The way to learn to preach, it has been often said, is to preach; and