HISTORICAL C ELEB RATION 
 
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 HISTORICAL CELEBRATION 
 
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 HISTORICAL CELEBRATION 
 
 In Recognition of the Eightieth Year of the Origin of the 
 
 Seminary, the Fiftieth Year of its Location in Chicago, 
 
 and the One Hundredth Year of the Birth of 
 
 CYRUS H. McCORMICK 
 
 November first and second, 
 Nineteen hundred and nine. 
 
 Chicago, Illinois 
 1910 
 
foretPorD 
 
 As the year 1909 approached, the Directors, Trustees, and 
 Faculty of McCormick Theological Seminary realized 
 the significance of this special date to the history of the institu- 
 tion. The year marked the eightieth anniversary of the ori- 
 gin of the Seminary, the fiftieth year of its location in Chicago, 
 and the one-hundredth year of the birth of Cyrus H. McCor- 
 mick, whose name it bears. 
 
 Accordingly it was decided to have an historical cele- 
 bration which should properly emphasize these three events, 
 and the following program was planned : 
 
 An opening address on the life and character of Cyrus 
 H. McCormick. 
 
 A conference concerning the future work of the- 
 ological seminaries. 
 
 A series of papers discussing the relations of theo- 
 logical seminaries to the problems of the pulpit, of the 
 pastorate, and of the mission fields. 
 
 A concluding address on some special feature of the 
 Christian ministry. 
 
 For the opening address President W. W. Moore, D.D., 
 LL.D., of Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Vir- 
 ginia, the state in which Cyrus H. McCormick began his life, 
 was selected. 
 
 With the thought of making the celebration as wide as 
 possible in its Christian fellowship, an invitation to address 
 
 5 
 
jporetoorD 
 
 the Theological Conference was sent to President Augustus 
 H. Strong, D.D., LL.D., of the Rochester (Baptist) The- 
 ological Seminary, to Professor Robert W. Rogers, D.D., 
 LL.D.; of the Drew (Methodist) Theological Seminary, and 
 to Professor Williston Walker, Ph.D., D.D., of the Yale 
 (Congregational) Divinity School. 
 
 Alumni of McCormick Seminary were asked to treat the 
 relation of theological seminaries to the problems of the 
 pulpit, of the pastorate, and of the mission fields. The prob- 
 lems of the pulpit were assigned to the Rev. J. Ross Steven- 
 son, D.D., of the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church, 
 Baltimore, Maryland, who once had held the chair of Church 
 History in McCormick Theological Seminary. The prob- 
 lems of the pastorate were assigned to the Rev. Edward Yates 
 Hill, D.D., of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia, 
 Pennsylvania, where the first Presbytery in America was 
 formed, and the first Synod, and the first General Assembly 
 were held. The problems of the mission fields were assigned 
 to the Rev. Charles L. Thompson, D.D., LL.D., of New 
 York, secretary of the Board of Home Missions, moderator 
 of the General Assembly in 1888. 
 
 President Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D., LL.D., of Princeton 
 University, was asked to make the concluding address. 
 
 Invitations to attend the historical celebration as thus 
 planned were sent to theological seminaries of the Presby- 
 terian Church and of other churches, to colleges that con- 
 tribute students to McCormick, to the alumni, and to many 
 friends. 
 
 The Celebration was held on November ist and 2d, 1909. 
 This volume embodies the papers and addresses then de- 
 
 6 
 
foretoorli 
 
 livered, together with "The Story of the Seminary," pre- 
 pared by request by the Rev. Daniel W. Fisher, D. D., 
 LL. D., vice-president of the Board of Directors. 
 
 In addition to the exercises described in this volume a 
 luncheon was given at one o'clock on November 2d, in 
 the Virginia Library, for the Representatives, Invited Guests, 
 Directors, Trustees, Alumni, and Faculty. At this luncheon 
 the blessing was asked by President Lowell M. McAfee, 
 LL. D., of Park College, and announcement was made of the 
 greetings received from the various educational institutions. 
 A stone from the foundation of the building in which the 
 Seminary was originated at Hanover, Indiana, was shown 
 and the purpose was stated to incorporate it in the wall 
 of one of the present buildings. 
 
 At five o'clock of that same day President and Mrs. 
 McClure gave a reception at the President's house to the 
 Representatives, Invited Guests, Alumni, Students, and 
 Friends. 
 
Contentji 
 
 The Story of the Seminary. 
 
 The Rev. Daniel W. Fisher, D. D., LL. D. . . . n 
 
 Prayer at the Opening Service of the Celebration. 
 
 The Rev. John Balcom Shaw, D. D. . . . , 27 
 
 Historical Address in Appreciation of the Life and Work 
 OF Cyrus H. McCormick. 
 President Walter W. Moore, D. D., LL. D. , . . 31 
 
 The Ideals of the Theological Seminary for Usefulness 
 IN THE Coming Half Century. 
 
 President A. H. Strong, D. D., LL. D 65 
 
 Professor Robert W. Rogers, D. D., LL. D. . . .81 
 Professor Williston Walker, Ph. D., D. D 97 
 
 Ministerial Leadership. 
 
 The Rev. J. Ross Stevenson, D. D. . . . . -115 
 
 The Rev. Edward Yates Hill, D. D. . . . .123 
 
 The Rev. Charles L. Thompson, D. D., LL. D. . . . 145 
 
 The Ministry and the Individual. 
 
 President Woodrow Wilson, Ph. D., LL. D. . . .163 
 
Cl^e ^tor^ of tl^e ^tminatv 
 
 BY THE REV. DANIEL W. FISHER, D. D., LL. D. 
 
 THE exact spot of ground where McCormick Theological 
 Seminary began its life and work is very familiar to 
 me. Between the southeast door of the Presbyterian church 
 in the village of Hanover, and the eastern limit of the church 
 yard, where formerly there was a gate in the fence now re- 
 moved, runs a beaten path. Over this I have walked several 
 thousand times. Not more than a half dozen steps from the 
 church door, along that path, on its north side is a slight 
 depression in the ground. Just there is the southern line of 
 the space occupied by the small log cabin where the first 
 class of theologues in this Seminary entered on their studies. 
 That occurred early in 1830. In 1827, Rev. John Finley 
 Crowe, the Pastor of the church, had started an advanced 
 private school which was at first housed in his own dwelling. 
 In 1829 this school was incorporated under the name of 
 Hanover Academy; and for its use, during the summer that 
 log cabin had been erected. Several years before, the 
 general locality had taken the name of Hanover, in honor of 
 the wife of the Rev. Mr. Searls, Pastor of the Presbyterian 
 church in Madison, who gave a part of his time to the service 
 of the church already organized out in this new settlement. 
 Mrs. Searls was from Hanover, New Hampshire, the seat of 
 Dartmouth College; and the people showed their regard for 
 her by adopting the name of her New England home as the 
 designation of this region. The entire township is still 
 
^t€otmith €l)eoIogicaI ^eminarp 
 
 called Hanover. But even in 1829, within the clearing then 
 recently made, and now constituting the incorporated limits 
 of the village of Hanover, there were only three or four dwell- 
 ings scattered about in the edges of the forest. In front of 
 the Academy, a few hundred feet away, also stood a rustic 
 looking stone church belonging to the Presbyterians, and a 
 school-house. 
 
 How did it happen that out there almost in the woods, 
 Hanover at that early period became the birthplace, first of 
 an Academy, and then of a Theological Seminary, and of a 
 College? The visitor who stands to-day on the campus of 
 the College and looks out on that wonderful view of the great 
 river and its setting amid the hills and woods and ravines 
 and fields might suppose that the scenery had much to do 
 with the planting of these schools just there; and possibly 
 it did enter as an influence. Yet, so far as we now can 
 ascertain there were other considerations that were determi- 
 native. The institution was located, not out on the point 
 where the College at present stands, but a mile away, where 
 there is nothing in the outlook specially to please the eye. 
 However, the Ohio river, then the great thoroughfare be- 
 tween the East and the West and South, was only a mile dis- 
 tant and easily accessible; the elevation and drainage safe- 
 guarded the spot from the malaria once so common in 
 Indiana; and Madison, at that era by all odds the foremost 
 town in the young State, was only a half dozen miles distant. 
 Yet this institution would not have come into existence there 
 if it had not been for the character of the people of the 
 neighborhood. They were mostly Presbyterians of a sturdy 
 type, many of whom had migrated thither by way of Ken- 
 
€l|e ^torp of rte ^cminarp 
 
 tucky, and not a few of them because they preferred to 
 build their homes in a free State. Two men stand out most 
 conspicuously, and deserve to be held in perpetual remem- 
 brance by both the College and the Seminary, one a minister 
 and the other a layman. Put Dr. Crowe and Williamson 
 Dunn down in the midst of any such a community, and some- 
 thing worth while could scarcely fail of accomplishment for 
 both Church and State. 
 
 In a general way it may be said that the Seminary was 
 born of a revival. In 1827 and 1828 a great wave of religious 
 interest and power swept over the half dozen States contiguous 
 to the Ohio river; and one of its immediate effects was to 
 set the faces of a larger number of young men than usual 
 toward the ministry. Hanover Academy participated in 
 the revival; and in the summer of 1829 it was found that out 
 of the sixteen students in attendance thirteen had decided 
 to prepare for that service. The authorities of the Academy 
 could not fail to see the need of a theological school, more 
 convenient for this region than any yet established by the 
 Presbyterian Church; and they initiated a movement which 
 in its next stage brought the project before the Synod of 
 Indiana, then covering the States of Indiana, Illinois, and 
 Missouri. The outcome in that body was the adoption of a 
 resolution to take the Hanover Academy under its control, 
 provided that it be allowed to establish in connection with it 
 a theological department. The condition was promptly 
 accepted, and the Synod elected Rev. Dr. John Matthews of 
 Shepherdstown, Virginia, to the Chair of Theology. In 
 December he arrived upon the ground, and so soon as a 
 class of theologues could be gathered, he began the work for 
 
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0it€otmith €f|eoIogxcal ^eminarp 
 
 which he had been chosen, his class room being the log cabin 
 in which the Academy was then still conducted. When in 
 January, 1833, Hanover College received its charter, though 
 the theological school continued to be closely connected, it 
 ceased to be called a department of that institution, and took 
 the name of "The Indiana Theological Seminary." 
 
 I have on one or two occasions heard some doubt hinted 
 as to the descent of McCormick Theological Seminary from 
 that nascent school; but for such doubt there is no warrant 
 in the facts. The lineage was formally recognized in the 
 Circuit Court of the United States by its decree concerning 
 the division of the assets of the New Albany Seminary. Hal- 
 sey's History leaves no room for question. The Hanover 
 period covers a total of about ten years, and during it the 
 number of Professors never exceeded two at any one time. 
 The entire list is brief: John Matthews, N. W. Cunningham, 
 George Bishop, James Wood, names which the Presbyterian 
 Church at large, and this Seminary ought never to allow to 
 sink below the horizon of their grateful memory. The cat- 
 alogue of Hanover College reports the total of theological 
 students for that period as fifty-five; while the catalogue of 
 the New Albany Theological Seminary credits it with only 
 forty-five. The explanation of this discrepancy seems to be 
 that both institutions claimed the class of 1840. Be the ex- 
 act number what it may, it remains true that in that decade 
 of its infancy this little theological school contributed a very 
 valuable addition to the ministry of the Presbyterian Church. 
 Two men constituted the first class, Robert H. Bishop, Jr. 
 and Robert C. Caldwell; and thereby they occupy the place 
 of precedence in the list of eighty-six classes which have gone 
 
 14 
 
€f^e ^totp of tt^t ^eminarp 
 
 out from this institution. Most of the Hanover period of the 
 Seminary antedates my own nativity; and yet several of those 
 early theologues by and by touched my own life so directly 
 that this must be my excuse for mentioning them rather than 
 others. The Academy at Shade Gap, Pennsylvania, where 
 I began my preparation for college, was founded by one of 
 them, J. Y. McGinnes, whose early death in the midst of 
 a work of exceptional usefulness was long lamented in all 
 that region. In the Western Theological Seminary, when 
 in my day as a student we wanted a man of ability and 
 culture to make the address at Commencement, we sent 
 for another of these men, Josiah D. Smith of Columbus, 
 Ohio. When I came to Hanover College as its President, 
 one of my chief helpers in the Board of Trustees was still 
 another, Joseph G. Monfort, whose large services to the 
 Church will long in the future continue to receive grateful 
 recognition. One of the Chairs of Hanover College, estab- 
 lished under my administration bears the name of a fourth 
 of the men who took their theological training in this early 
 school, James A. McKee, who gave the funds for its endow- 
 ment. 
 
 The second stage in the life of the Seminary specified for 
 recognition in the recent Historical Celebration is "the fif- 
 tieth year of its residence in Chicago." Between the date, 
 half a century ago, when this residence began, and the termi- 
 nation of its previous existence at Hanover, lies another 
 period of about nineteen years, of which seventeen were 
 spent by the institution at New Albany, Indiana; and during 
 two years more it was in transitu, though not in a condition 
 of '"suspended animation." Why was it removed to a 
 
 IS 
 
0it€otmitk CJjeoiogical ^eminarp 
 
 second location, only, as the crow flies, some thirty miles 
 away from Hanover, and as heretofore still on the banks of 
 the Ohio? Up to that time the institution was compara- 
 tively foot loose, for it had no buildings of its own, and no 
 endowment, and legally it was not a part of the College. 
 Considering its opportunities it had done a work for which 
 it deserved well of the Church; yet it had not grown to the 
 proportions needed for the rapidly increasing population of 
 the West and the Southwest. Chicago and the States of the 
 Northwest were still in embryo. The aspiration of the 
 institution was to provide a ministry whose field of labor 
 would embrace all that vast region drained by the rivers emp- 
 tying, on either side, into the Ohio, still a chief thoroughfare 
 for travel and commerce. There was also more or less of 
 a patriotic sentiment involved; a desire to do something 
 worth while in checking and healing the alienation, already 
 becoming threatening, between the sections. For this pur- 
 pose, what could be more promising than to bring together 
 from both the North and the South, here on the Border, for 
 close fellowship in a theological school, for several years, 
 the choicest young men of the Church; and after this ac- 
 quaintance, to send them forth to preach the gospel as the 
 message of good will in every part of the land, and of the 
 world! It ought not to be thought strange that under such 
 circumstances and with such aspirations the Seminary clung 
 to the banks of the Ohio for twenty-seven years. As to the 
 selection of New Albany rather than some other location, it 
 needs to be borne in mind that it was already a prosperous 
 little city, with large and growing business interests, and 
 with some exceptionally influential and consecrated people 
 
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CJ)e ^totp of tl)e ^eminatp 
 
 in the ministry and membership of the local churches. In 
 full sight just across the river, at the head of navigation for 
 the larger steamers also was Louisville, then already promis- 
 ing to be one of the chief cities of the South. When in addi- 
 tion to all these considerations, Mr. Ayers made an offer 
 that if the Seminary were located at New Albany he would 
 give for its endowment and equipment what for those days 
 was considered a large sum of money, on certain reasonable 
 conditions, there were only a few who questioned the wisdom 
 of the decision to accept his proposal. So, the transfer 
 from Hanover was made, the institution changed its name 
 to "The New Albany Theological Seminary"; and buildings 
 adequate for the lodging of the students and for the work of 
 instruction were soon afterwards provided. 
 
 It must be frankly conceded that in its new location the 
 institution was, though by no means a failure, yet a dis- 
 appointment to its supporters. The attendance on the 
 average was a little larger than at Hanover, but it did not 
 show any sign of considerable future increase. This was 
 largely because of conditions beyond the control of the in- 
 stitution. The building of railroads was making it far 
 easier for students of this general region to go to the older 
 and better equipped Seminaries in the East; and not a few 
 were taking advantage of the opportunity. Especially was 
 the Western Theological Seminary, located as it was at 
 Pittsburg, at the gateway to all the regions beyond the Alle- 
 ghanies, and then under the leadership of such men as Dr. 
 Plumer, rising into such size and conspicuousness as to at- 
 tract hither many students from the West and the South, who 
 but for this might have been drawn to New Albany. Nearer 
 
 17 
 
;^cContiicft Ctjeological ^eminatp 
 
 home, besides Lane at Cincinnati, another theological institu- 
 tion affiliated with the "Old School" Presbyterian Church, 
 temporarily there competed for students. At first the Semin- 
 ary at New Albany maintained its hold on its Southern constit- 
 uency; but little by little this was almost wholly lost; partly 
 for the general reason of the increasing alienation between 
 the two sections of our country, and partly because of the 
 competition of Danville Theological Seminary, and also of 
 prejudices against certain of the Faculty on account of their 
 attitude on the impending national issues. In the mean- 
 while the West and the Northwest were rapidly fiUing with 
 population, and it was becoming more and more evident 
 that in order that the Presbyterian Church might overtake 
 its work in this field, it ought to have a theological school 
 at a far better strategic point than down on the banks of the 
 Ohio, opposite Louisville. Thus, a second removal of the 
 institution became too plainly desirable to admit of question ; 
 and in 1857 it was decided by the Directors, with the assent 
 of the Faculty, that the necessary steps toward it should be 
 taken, and that the work of the institution should be tem- 
 porarily suspended. The interregnum thus created lasted 
 until the third removal, this time to Chicago, was effected. 
 It is for this reason that in the General Catalogue no class 
 is given for either 1857-58 or for 1858-59. 
 
 Even to the ministers and membership of the Presby- 
 terian Church of the present day, two generations later than 
 the men who from time to time constituted the Faculty of 
 the New Albany Seminary, their names must still be a suffi- 
 cient guaranty for the superb character of the instruction 
 given by them. James Wood, E. D. Macmaster, Thomas 
 
 18 
 
€l|e ^torp of tf^t ^eminarp 
 
 E. Thomas, Philip Lindsley! Any theological school might 
 well be proud of such great masters. The total enrollment 
 of students was one hundred and forty-seven. It may seem 
 an invidious distinction to choose among these any for men- 
 tion here. We must not forget that the work to which most 
 of the men who went out from the institution devoted their 
 lives was largely that of pioneers for the gospel; and that al- 
 though it did not bring them to the attention of the Church or 
 the world at large, there are hundreds of localities where they 
 made an impress for good, so deep and lasting that any man 
 might well covet this rather than mere reputation. More 
 than half of my life has been spent in regions so far removed 
 from the scene of the labors of these men that I am not as 
 familiar with their achievements as I could wish. To me 
 three of them loom up with special conspicuousness : Jona- 
 than Edwards, Pastor, President of Hanover College, and 
 of Washington and Jefferson College, and Theological Pro- 
 fessor; W. A. P. Martin, Missionary to China, President of 
 the Imperial College, decorated with both home and foreign 
 honors for his distinguished services; S. F. Scovel, Pastor, 
 President of Wooster University, Professor in the same 
 institution. Besides these as my eye runs hastily over the 
 classes for that period it is arrested by such others as the two 
 Crowes, Joseph F. Fenton, Samuel J. Baird, W. W. Colmery, 
 T. A. Bracken, George F. Whitworth, Fauntleroy Senour, 
 R. E. Grundy, John M. Worrall, Robert C. Matthews, 
 Claudius B. Martin, Thomas R. Welch, J. B. Garritt, 
 E. C. Sickels, E. J. Hamilton, Robert Irwin. Yet after 
 this enumeration how many I may have omitted that one 
 better informed would have included! 
 
 19 
 
;^c€ormicft Cl)eoIogical ^eminarp 
 
 The interregnum between the spring of 1857 and the 
 autumn of 1859, though a time when there were neither stud- 
 ents nor Faculty, nevertheless was one of the most crucial ac- 
 tivity in the history of the Seminary. During this period the 
 Synods of what is now known broadly as the Middle West 
 were made sharers in the management; and the ultimate 
 control was vested in the General Assembly. It was this 
 latter body that elected the new Faculty, consisting of four 
 entirely new men. As to the location it had long been fore- 
 seen by thoughtful men that Chicago was the most desirable, 
 provided that suitable provision could be had there for the 
 institution. When an offer of large and valuable tracts of 
 land within the limits of the city was made; and when Mr. 
 McCormick formally proposed that under certain reasonable 
 conditions he would give a hundred thousand dollars for 
 endowment, Chicago in the vote taken in the General Assem- 
 bly, easily won over Indianapolis, its only competitor. 
 A change of name again was a necessity; and the institution 
 now became "The Theological Seminary of the Northwest." 
 Hopeful of large prosperity as the outlook seemed to be, the 
 Seminary nevertheless immediately entered on almost a 
 quarter of a century of difficulties which all the while hin- 
 dered more or less the attendance of students who otherwise 
 might have come to it, and even jeopardized its existence 
 at certain junctures. As to these difficulties I must content 
 myself with a few rather colorless and general statements; 
 for the reason that details, if it were desirable to give them 
 here, are impracticable. We were just on the eve of our Civil 
 War, and the questions over which it was fought deeply 
 
€l^e ^totp of tl^e g^eminarp 
 
 affected the actions of men as to many other matters ecclesias- 
 tical though only indirectly involved, ecclesiastical not except- 
 ed. Antagonisms that were perhaps in any case unavoidable 
 took on additional intensity. It is easy for us now calmly 
 to read about the troubles of those days concerning this 
 Seminary, and to wonder why the parties did not quietly 
 confer together and after a comparison of views agree 
 as to the best decision possible under the circumstances. 
 To do this in the atmosphere of those times the intelligent 
 and consecrated men who took sides in these disputes must 
 have been greater sages and saints than we have a right to 
 expect in this world. One thing deserves to be distinctly 
 noted. This is that in the discussions that went forward in 
 the press and on the platform, a level high above mere per- 
 sonal animosity was almost uniformly maintained. At 
 length when the Civil War was over the difficulties of the 
 Seminary so far as they were intensified by that struggle died 
 away, like a storm whose clouds are disappearing in the 
 distance. When a little later, the union of the Old and the 
 New School Churches was consummated, some new ad- 
 justments as to the affairs of the institution became necessary; 
 and in connection with this, an effort was made by the Gen- 
 eral Assembly to heal the old sores. Progress of an important 
 kind was made, especially in the erection of additional 
 buildings on the campus, and by a considerable increase of 
 endowment, and other funds. Nevertheless, after more than 
 twenty years of residence at Chicago, the attendance of stu- 
 dents still was not at all as large as might reasonably have 
 been expected; and the general situation was so unsatis- 
 
0lt€otmith €J)e0logical J^emtnarp 
 
 factory that the Faculty all resigned in 1881 ; a new set of 
 men were chosen to fill the vacant Chairs ; and a substantial 
 reorganization of the institution was effected. 
 
 Here begins an era of large prosperity, now running over 
 well nigh thirty years. It was in 1882 that I became a 
 Director, and in this office I have ever since continued; and 
 I as to this period write as one who has the advantage of 
 direct personal observation. I have seen the vestiges of the 
 old controversies disappear so completely that it would now 
 be difficult to discover a trace of them in the working of the 
 Seminary. Some of the Faculty inaugurated at the reorgan- 
 ization still remain either in active service or on an honor 
 roll of retirement. As vacancies in the Board of Directors 
 and in the Faculty have occurred men of both the conserva- 
 tive and of the moderate liberal, not radical, type, and men 
 always loyal to the faith of the church, have been called to 
 these places for reasons of fitness and ability alone. I have 
 seen the Faculty enlarged until no less than twelve are on the 
 roll, and ten of these are in active service; and at the head of 
 this body, is a capable President, whose function it is to give 
 unity and wise guidance to the entire administration. I have 
 seen two costly and commodious buildings added to those 
 previously on the campus. When again and again during 
 this long period, our necessary expenditures have exceeded 
 our regular income, sometimes aggregating tens of thousands 
 of dollars, the family which has been in other things so un- 
 stinted in their generosity, have always lifted our burden, 
 and done this as if it were a privilege to them. I have seen 
 the endowment increased a round million dollars at one time 
 by these friends and the total assets increased to almost two 
 
€l)e ^torp of tlje ^cminarp 
 
 millions of dollars. I have seen the number of students, in 
 the era when candidates for the ministry were most abundant, 
 rise considerably above two hundred; and still holding well 
 its proportion in more recent years. I have witnessed the 
 graduation of classes falling but little below a hundred in 
 their total enrollment. I, like the Presidents of many other 
 colleges, have sent up scores of our alumni here to be still 
 further trained for great and useful lives in the ministry of 
 the gospel, and then to be scattered far and wide to their work 
 in our own country, and a praiseworthy proportion of them 
 to carry the gospel to the unevangeHzed nations. Other 
 men in the struggling days of the Seminary labored, and we 
 are entered into their labors. They went forth bearing pre- 
 cious seed which they watered with their tears, and we are 
 rejoicing over the harvest. 
 
 Two years after I became a Director of the Seminary, Cyrus 
 H. McCormick died, and my personal acquaintance with him 
 was thus abbreviated. Short as it was, it revealed to me 
 certain sides of his character which were a surprise to me. I 
 knew very well that he was one of the great inventors of modem 
 times, and as such an exceptional benefactor of the human race; 
 that he was a captain of industry seldom equalled; that he was 
 a princely giver to the Seminary and other objects of Hke de- 
 sert; and that along with this, he was a man of strong convic- 
 tions as to truth and duty, and of unswerving fidelity to them. 
 It was of another side of his character that I got a view in my 
 brief personal acquaintance. It will not, I trust, be regarded 
 as a breach of propriety for me to tell that as I sat as guest at 
 his table, I happened through long residence in Virginia, to 
 use a word somewhat local to that State and the South. 
 
 23 
 
;jW:c€otmtck €J)eoIo0tcal ^eititnarp 
 
 Turning to me as if I had brought some welcome message 
 from his old home in the "Valley of Virginia," he exclaimed 
 with unmistakable feeling "Oh how much good it does me 
 to hear you use that word!" After that I was less surprised 
 when in conversation something that was uttered touched his 
 emotions, and the tears broke from his eyes and rolled down 
 over his cheeks. He was a man with a great heart as well 
 as a master mind and will. 
 
 This Seminary would be recreant to its plainest duty if 
 it did not honor Mr. McCormick in every legitimate way at 
 its command. It was he that took it by the hand when it was 
 feeble and ready to die, brought it to its new and permanent 
 home, housed it at first plainly but eventually in its present 
 costly buildings, provided for it large endowment, and re- 
 sponded with generous gifts for all its needs; and the benefi- 
 cence which he thus inaugurated has by his family grown 
 into ever increasing magnitude. Those who have been en- 
 trusted with the management of the institution did well when 
 they began to honor this man by calling one of the Chairs 
 "The Cyrus H. McCormick Professorship of Didactic and 
 Polemic Theology"; and when later they named one of the 
 great buildings on the campus, "McCormick Hall;" and 
 when, wholly of their own impulse, they caused the name 
 of the institution to be changed to "The McCormick 
 Theological Seminary." To these marks of respect they 
 have now most commendably added this formal celebration 
 of Mr. McCormick's birth, in connection with the founding 
 of the Seminary at Hanover, and its permanent residence at 
 Chicago begun half a century ago. 
 
 24 
 
In Appreciation of the Life and Work of 
 
 CYRUS H. Mccormick 
 
 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Monday Evening, November First, 
 Nineteen Hundred and Nine, at Eight o 'Clock. 
 
 ORDER OF EXERCISES 
 
 THE REV. SAMUEL J. NICCOLLS, D. D, LL. D., 
 
 President of the Board of Directors 
 
 Presiding 
 
 Organ Prelude. 
 
 Hymn. "Ye Servants of God." 
 
 Scripture Lesson . . . . The Rev. John Timothy Stone, D. D., 
 
 Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago 
 
 Romans viii. 1-17 
 
 Solo Dr. William F. Larkin 
 
 "The Earth is the Lord's." — Lansing. 
 
 Prayer The Rev. John Bal com Shaw, D. D., 
 
 Second Presbyterian Church, Chicago 
 
 Hymn. "How Firm a Foundation." 
 
 Address President Walter W. Moore, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Union Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia 
 
 Hymn. "For All the Saints." 
 
 Benediction. . . . The Rev. Samuel J. Niccolls, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Second Presbyterian Church, St. Louis 
 
 -5 
 
o 
 
 BY THE REV. JOHN BALCOM SHAW, D. D. 
 
 GOD, the author and inspiration of all noble lives and 
 all high and true institutions, who of Thy great mercy 
 and out of Thy supreme wisdom dost ordain men and agen- 
 cies alike to serve and uplift humanity, and to enrich and 
 enlarge the Kingdom of Heaven in the earth, for the historic 
 Seminary in whose name and for whose honor we gather to- 
 night, we give Thee united and earnest thanks. We bless 
 Thee for her long and worthy history, for her gracious and 
 ever-widening service to the Church, for her reverent and 
 sane scholarship, for her devotion to the truth as it is in 
 Jesus, for her open-mindedness and yet warm- and single- 
 heartedness, for the goodly succession of able and godly 
 men who have filled her chairs of learning, and for that 
 still larger group, who, having received her touch and having 
 passed out from beneath her benediction, are extending 
 her influence and by that means magnifying Jesus Christ 
 in all parts of the world. 
 
 Renew and enlarge Thy favor unto her at this time, we 
 beseech of Thee. Give fresh ordination to her well-beloved 
 president and new consecration unto all her professors. 
 Send down upon her students now pursuing their prepara- 
 tion for the Christian ministry within her walls a double 
 portion of the spirit of understanding and love, and let there 
 come to her entire alumni, wherever stationed, a mighty 
 anointing from Thy right hand, and an inspiring impact 
 
 27 
 
0it€ntmxtk €f)eoloffical ^eminatp 
 
 from ours, as though great currents of cheer and fellowship 
 now leapt from this gathering into their hearts and lives. 
 
 Altogether, vouchsafe unto this institution larger and 
 holier success in time to come than even through the remark- 
 able years that are gone, and cause her to be an increasing 
 blessing to the world, and more and more an honor to Him 
 whom she delights to acknowledge as her divine Master 
 and Head. 
 
 More especially do we praise Thee at this time for the 
 life and labor of Thy servant, the founder of this Seminary, 
 who built her walls and buttresses so securely and so well 
 that "he being dead yet speaketh." For his strength and 
 sturdiness and steadfastness of character, for his love for 
 the Church of Christ, for his enriching service to humanity, 
 his devotion to sound doctrine and his patronage of high 
 learning, his spirit of integrity, and his fidelity to the trust 
 which God gave him to discharge, we raise to Thee our glad 
 and enthusiastic thanksgiving. 
 
 Be pleased to bless his heritage, as now they keep this 
 significant and sacred anniversary, with unwonted grace 
 and tenderness. As they revert with us to this useful life 
 may they experience more than the heartening and hallowing 
 blessing of a memory, sweet and beautiful though it be. 
 May the chrism of his spirit come upon them and, baptized 
 in some large and holy sense for their dead, may they devote 
 their lives to the ideals and aims that guided his life and be 
 accounted of Thee worthy to stand in his place and perpet- 
 uate his work. Let fall upon all of us here assembled, O 
 God, the healthful dew of Thy blessing and make this to 
 be in each life a covenanting time in which we pledge our- 
 
 28 
 
^rapa 
 
 selves, our belongings and our endowments, our zeal and 
 our service, to the work of Thy Kingdom. May we love 
 the Church because Thou didst love it so dearly as to give 
 Thy Son for its purchase. May we dedicate ourselves 
 to it because Christ lay down His life for it. May we re- 
 solve to work in it and for it and through it because it is 
 the chiefmost channel of the Spirit's activity among men. 
 
 Finally, we beseech Thee to hear us in behalf of the 
 Church Universal in all the earth; that she may have the 
 sure guidance and governance of the Holy Spirit and worth- 
 ily fulfill her appointed mission in the world. Hear us 
 also as we pray for our nation and commonwealth and city, 
 for the fallen, the impenitent and those that are out of the 
 way, and bring speedily forward, we implore of Thee, the 
 Day of our Lord's Consummation, when His gospel shall 
 have made world-wide conquest and His rule shall be set 
 up among all men. And unto Thee, eternal and ever 
 blessed God, our Father, our Saviour, our Sanctifier and 
 Comforter, shall be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus, 
 throughout all ages, world without end. Amen. 
 
J^fjStortcal atitiresijS in appteciatton of tt^t 
 life anH oaorfi of Ctrujs i^. jttcCormicfe 
 
 BY PRESIDENT WALTER W. MOORE, D. D., LL. D. 
 
 TWO events in the history of our country stand out above 
 all others in their importance and far-reaching effects. 
 One was the achievement of our national independence by 
 the thirteen colonies on the Atlantic slope, and the other was 
 the conquest of the vast territory which stretches across the 
 continent from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific 
 
 Ocean. 
 
 The Scotch-Irish Stock 
 
 In the accomplishment of both of these stupendous tasks, 
 which have made America what she is to-day, the providence 
 of God assigned the brunt of the battle to that bold and hardy 
 and God-fearing race commonly known as the Scotch-Irish, 
 who, coming to the New World to secure the religious liberty 
 denied them in the Old, pushed through the already settled 
 coast lands and took possession of the forest covered foot-hills 
 and long fertile valleys of the Appalachians. There " they took 
 root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from north to 
 south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of 
 the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness."^ These 
 were the men who before any others declared for American 
 independence, and who from the beginning to the end con- 
 stituted the backbone of the Revolution. " They gave Wash- 
 ington thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members 
 
 * Theodore Roosevelt : The Winning of the West. 
 
 31 
 
jHcCormicft €l)cologicaI J^eminarp 
 
 of his cabinet, and three out of five judges of the first Supreme 
 Court. " 
 
 These, too, were the men who led the way across the moun- 
 tains to the great interior, "the pioneers of our people in their 
 march westward, the vanguard of the army of fighting set- 
 tlers, who with axe and rifle won their way from the Allegha- 
 nies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific, "^ who by battle and by 
 bargain, overcame and displaced Indians, French, and Span- 
 iards alike, and gave to the American people the vast inland 
 empire of which your own great city is now the metropolis. 
 
 Capping the Work of the Nation-Makers 
 
 It is to the "Presbyterian Irish" then, as Mr. Roosevelt 
 calls them, to whom we are chiefly indebted for the winning 
 of the west. It was they who furnished most of the leaders 
 as well as the rank and file of that victorious army of conti- 
 nental conquest, such as James Robertson, who, with John 
 Sevier, tamed the rugged wilderness of East Tennessee, and 
 solved there the problem of self-government, giving to the 
 settlers the first written constitution ever adopted by a com- 
 munity composed of American-bom freemen; Andrew Lewis, 
 the leader of the backwoods hosts in their first great victory 
 over the Northwestern Indians; William Campbell, their 
 commander in their first great victory over the British at 
 King's Mountain;^ Andrew Jackson, who won at New Orleans 
 the most successful land battle ever fought by American arms; 
 David Crockett, hunter, humorist, and hero, who died in the 
 Alamo with his back to the wall and a semicircle of dead Mex- 
 
 'Idem. ndem, pp. 134, 135. 
 
 32 
 
J^i^tortcal 3llitite^^ 
 
 icans around him felled by his swinging rifle; and Sam Hous- 
 ton, winner of the independence of Texas and first president of 
 that republic. These, and many other leaders in our winning 
 of the west, were furnished by the Scotch-Irish, to say nothing 
 of their afterwards putting five Presidents in the White House. 
 But, while it was these robust and resolute pioneers of the 
 Scotch-Irish stock who scaled the Alleghanies, subdued the 
 wilderness, subjugated the savages, displaced the ahens, and 
 gave to English-speaking Americans this mighty domain 
 which stretches from Canada to Mexico and from the Appala- 
 chians to the Pacific, yet this wide and fair and fertile domain 
 which is now occupied by thirty-one populous and prosperous 
 commonwealths could never have been what it is to-day, at 
 least on its present prodigious scale, a region of fruitful farms 
 and thrifty towns and opulent cities, creating new wealth 
 at the rate of sixteen billions a year, a continent of fabulous 
 possessions and possibilities, the home of fifty miUions of 
 busy and happy people, the granary of a world, God's great- 
 est answer to the universal prayer, " Give us this day our daily 
 bread, " all this, I say, could not have been had it not been 
 for the genius and character and work of still another man of 
 that same Scotch-Irish strain. That man was Cyrus H. Mc- 
 Cormick. It was his invention of a machine for cutting grain 
 by horse-power which crowned all the other achievements 
 of the sterling stock from which he sprang, and without 
 which all the other exploits of those strong nation-makers, 
 splendid as they are, would have been incomplete. For it 
 was the reaper which flung open the mighty empire of the 
 northwest, by making possible its enormous crops of grain, 
 and thus stimulating the construction of thousands of miles 
 
 33 
 
;^cCDrmicft CfteoloBXcal ^eminarp 
 
 of railway, and peopling half a continent with prosperous 
 settlers. 
 
 As long ago as 1859 the great lawyer, Reverdy Johnson, 
 said: "The McCormick reaper has already contributed 
 an annual income to the whole country of fifty-five millions 
 of dollars at least, which must increase through all time." 
 And in 1861 Edwin M. Stanton showed upon a map how 
 ''McCormick's invention in Virginia had carried permanent 
 civiHzation westward more than fifty miles a year." But 
 even such statements as these, remarkable as they are, do 
 not measure the value of his invention in lessening human 
 toil, supplying mankind with cheap and abundant food, 
 increasing the world's wealth and promoting the advance of 
 material civilization. For they take account only of North 
 America, whereas the reaper has benefited in the same way 
 South America, New Zealand, AustraHa, Europe, Asia 
 and Africa. "To-day," as Herbert Casson says, "the 
 sun never sets and the season never closes for American 
 harvesters. They are reaping the fields of Argentina in 
 January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, 
 Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in 
 July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in 
 October, South Africa in November, and Burma in Decem- 
 ber. It is always harvest somewhere" and the music of the 
 reaper follows the ripple of the ripened grain all round the 
 world. The harvester has not only made America the best 
 fed nation on the globe but has enabled the whole world 
 "to take dinner at one long table." 
 
 34 
 
i^i^torical Sltitire^^ 
 
 Rank as Epoch-Maker 
 
 It has been said that for six thousand years, with the 
 exception of the rulers and their retinues, the human race 
 was hungry. To the masses of mankind Hfe was an agonized 
 struggle for food. Even within the memory of men now living 
 there were bread-riots in New York City, and starving men 
 fell on the streets of Boston and Philadelphia. But with 
 the advent of the reaper life ceased to be merely a battle for 
 bread. With the world growing wheat at the yearly rate of 
 ten bushels a family, as this marvellous invention has enabled 
 it to do, the gaunt spectre of famine has vanished forever. 
 With our eighty-five millions of Americans eating twelve 
 thousand million loaves of bread a year and yet sending a 
 thousand million dollars worth of food to other nations, the 
 pinched children of want need never again suffer the pangs 
 of hunger. By cheapening the bread of the toiling millions 
 this Virginia inventor "has moved all the civilized peoples 
 up out of the bread line" and has opened to the laborers 
 in field and forge, in mine and mill, the possibilities of a 
 higher life. "The Man with the Hoe," the stoHd drudge, 
 ''brother to the ox," has at last been freed from the all- 
 absorbing struggle for mere existence and given some op- 
 portunity for mental culture and social recreation and the 
 refining amenities of the home. 
 
 It is evident therefore even from this brief preview of 
 what he accomplished, that the man whose life and work we 
 commemorate to-night was not merely one of the world's great 
 inventors and captains of industry, but an epoch-maker of 
 the first magnitude, the creator of an economic revolution, 
 
 35 
 
0lt€otmxdi Cfjeological ^eminatp 
 
 the greatest promoter of agricultural development that ever 
 lived, and one of the supreme benefactors of the human race. 
 It would be incongruous and unseemly to use the language 
 of exaggeration v^hen speaking of a man so genuine as Mr. 
 McCormick, to whom anything fulsome was always dis- 
 tasteful, and I beg leave to say that in this estimate of the 
 value of his services to mankind I have endeavored to weigh 
 my words and to refrain from any overstatement, and that 
 after a careful study of his life I am prepared to prove that 
 the position I have claimed for him, pre-eminent as it is, is 
 fully justified by the facts of his career and the results of 
 
 his work. 
 
 The Old Home 
 
 "Rockbridge County (in Virginia) has given birth to a 
 remarkable number of distinguished men. Among them 
 have been soldiers in all the wars of the United States, 
 judges of both state and federal courts, attorneys-general of 
 Virginia and of other states, representatives in state legisla- 
 tures and in congress, celebrated ministers of the gospel, 
 and missionaries to foreign lands. This same county has 
 given a general-in-chief and president to the republic of 
 Texas, a United States minister to France, Russia, and Aus- 
 tria, governors of Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, 
 Tennessee, and West Virginia, while eight United States 
 senators were bom within a radius of six miles of Lexington 
 (the county seat). This is a record which, as Prof. Latane 
 has said, may well challenge comparison with any other 
 county in the land. But the one Rockbridge name that has 
 gone round the world, that is known to-day in every civilized 
 land, is that of Cyrus H. McCormick, the inventor of the reap- 
 
 36 
 
i$momal aititire^^ 
 
 er. In every country of Europe, in Asiatic Russia, in Persia, 
 in Australia, in South America, and in South Africa, is 
 heard the click of his reaper and the whir of his binder."* 
 Cyrus Hall McCormick was born February 15, 1809, at 
 the old homestead. Walnut Grove, midway between Lexing- 
 ton and Staunton, being the eldest of eight children, six of 
 whom lived to grow up. His parents, Robert and Mary Ann 
 Hall McCormick, held an influential position among the 
 people of the Valley, both being of high intelligence and 
 marked force of character, devout, thrifty, and well to do, and 
 they made for their children a comfortable and happy home, 
 teaching them habits of industry and self-reliance, and train- 
 ing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 
 There was no coddHng. There were even touches of Spartan 
 severity in the training of the lad whose life was destined 
 to be one of stern conflict with innumerable difficulties and 
 with active and relentless opposition. He was often roused 
 at five o'clock in the morning to work in the fields. He 
 went barefooted, as boys of his age ought to do. He sat 
 on a slab-bench in the little log school house. He learned 
 to read from the book of Genesis. His other text-books 
 were Murray's Grammar, Dilworth's Arithmetic, Webster's 
 Spelling-book, and the Shorter Catechism. On Sundays 
 he listened earnestly to strong preaching in New Providence 
 Church and sang with delight the great hymns of the ages, 
 for he was ever a lover of music and ever a deeply religious 
 nature. The words and melodies of those sweet old hymns 
 remained with him throughout life, sang in his heart during 
 
 ^Professor J. H. Latane: Bulletin of Washington and Lee University, 
 July, 1909 p. 6. 
 
 37 
 
0it€otmxth €l)eologicaI ^cminarp 
 
 all the stress of his stalwart years, and sustained and cheered 
 him even down to the end. As a result of this old-fashioned, 
 wholesome, character-making, Presbyterian training, the 
 key notes of which were industry, honesty, and religion, he 
 carried with him through life a rare capacity for work, a 
 dominating sense of duty, a clear and reverent and happy 
 faith, a quiet scorn of pretense and ostentation, and a passion- 
 ate love for justice and truth. In other ways, too, heredity 
 and environment played their usual important part in the 
 making of his character and the development of his gifts. 
 He inherited from his father his genius for invention and 
 from his mother his skill in practical affairs. 
 
 Robert McCormick was a man of unusual business acu- 
 men and enterprise and acquired a large estate, i,8oo acres 
 in all, consisting of four adjoining farms, on three of which 
 he operated successfully saw mills and on two of them flour 
 mills. But he was more than a substantial farmer and man 
 of affairs. He was a reader, being specially fond of history 
 and astronomy. He had an imagination. Naturally, there- 
 fore, he gave much attention to the mechanical side of farm 
 life and the problem of labor-saving machinery, and ac- 
 quired considerable local fame as an inventor. In the work- 
 shop on his farm he fashioned an ingenious hemp-brake, 
 operated by horse-power, a clover sheller, a blacksmith's 
 bellows, a hydraulic machine, a threshing machine, and a 
 hillside plow. The subject to which he gave most thought, 
 however, was a machine for the cutting of grain. But here 
 he missed the way entirely, and in 1831, after various ex- 
 periments extending over some twenty years, he gave up the 
 
 38 
 
i^i^torical 3ltibre^^ 
 
 project as hopeless. It was reserved for the son to succeed 
 where the father had failed. 
 
 The Young Inventor 
 
 He had already shown that he had inherited his father's 
 inventive talent. While still a lad he had one morning as- 
 tonished his teacher by bringing to school an elaborate map of 
 the world, showing the two hemispheres side by side, which he 
 had drawn upon paper in ink, and then mounted by pasting 
 the paper on linen, and hanging the whole on two varnished 
 rollers.^ Such aids in the school room are common enough 
 now, but that a mere boy should produce such a thing then 
 showed clearly that he possessed the true inventor's power 
 of striking out a path for himself. When only fifteen years 
 old he had made a grain cradle suited to his boyish strength, 
 which embodied a distinct improvement over any other form 
 of that implement, and had swung it over many a broad 
 acre of wheat, keeping pace with the full grown hands, all 
 unconscious of the fact that he was destined to release 
 miUions of his fellowmen from the severe toil of which he 
 was then having a practical experience.® At the same early 
 age he, too, had invented a hillside plow for throwing alter- 
 nate furrows on the lower side, and a little later a self- 
 sharpening, horizontal plow. When at eighteen he studied 
 the profession of surveying he made a quadrant for his own 
 use which is still preserved, and is one of many witnesses to 
 the accuracy and thoroughness of his workmanship. He had 
 
 ^ Herbert N. Casson: Everybody's Magazine, 17, p. 761. 
 ^ Memorial Volume of Cyrus H. McCormick, p. 5. 
 
 39 
 
^c€otxnxth Cfteological J^emmatp 
 
 already made an improvement on Robert McCormick's 
 machine for breaking and cleaning hemp. For years he 
 had seen his baffled father at work on the mysterious reaper; 
 and in the same year that the elder McCormick abandoned 
 the task in despair, the younger inventor, as though fired 
 to the supreme effort of his genius by the silent challenge of 
 the discredited reaper standing outside the shop door, re- 
 jected decisively his father's model, adopted an entirely 
 different principle, and in a few months, after much patient 
 brooding over his new conception and many ingenious 
 efforts at combining the various parts, he solved triumphant- 
 ly the problem of the centuries. 
 
 The First Reaper 
 
 The machine which he constructed, every part of which, 
 both in wood and iron, he fashioned with his own hands, 
 consisted of first, a reciprocating knife with a serrated edge 
 for shearing off the stalks; second, a platform to receive the 
 falling grain, flexibly affixed so as to accommodate itself 
 readily to the irregularities of the surface; third, a horizontal 
 and adjustable reel to sweep the standing grain towards the 
 blade and to deHver the severed stalks parallel upon the plat- 
 form, in a swath ready to be raked off and bound; and fourth, 
 a divider, serving to separate the grain to be cut from that 
 to be left standing. 
 
 This first machine, therefore, crude as it was in construc- 
 tion, being built by hand in a plantation shop, nevertheless 
 embodied all four of the cardinal features which all subse- 
 quent attempts have shown to be indispensable to a success- 
 ful reaper. Having created the true type, the inventor him- 
 
 40 
 
i^i^totical 3lDtite^^ 
 
 self never departed from it, and in conformity with that type 
 all other successful harvesters have since been made. " De- 
 spite all subsequent invention, and it has been lavish, no one 
 has contrived a successful substitute for McCormick's orig- 
 inal plan. From it has proceeded in unbroken succession, 
 and with remarkable adherence to the primary arrangement, 
 although subsequently enriched with many refinements in 
 details and supplemental improvements, the reaper that 
 has taken and still holds possession of the markets of the 
 world. "^ 
 
 In the summer of 1831, then, late in the season, after 
 laboring hard to complete his machine in time for the harvest 
 of that year, Cyrus H. McCormick hitched a horse to his 
 new invention and drove it clattering into a small patch of 
 wheat on his father's farm, which at his request had been 
 left standing, for the first test of its powers. The revolving 
 reel swept the yellow grain against the blade and in a moment 
 more it lay in a golden swath upon the platform, from which 
 it was raked off by a young laborer named John Cash. 
 That was the first grain ever successfully cut anywhere in 
 the world otherwise than by manual labor. 
 
 Several days later, after making certain improvements in 
 the reel and the divider, the young inventor gave a pubhc 
 exhibition of his machine at Steele's Tavern, a neighboring 
 village, where with two horses to the reaper, he cut six acres 
 of oats in a single afternoon, a feat equal to the work of 
 six laborers with scythes. He had opened a new era in the 
 history of agriculture. 
 
 The next year, 1832, he gave a public exhibition near Lex- 
 
 ' Reuben Gold Thwaites: Cyrus Hall McCormick and the Reaper. 
 
 41 
 
iHcCormicft Ctjeological ^eminarp 
 
 ington, eighteen miles to the south of his home, which was 
 witnessed by fully a hundred people. The field was hilly, 
 and the machine, not having yet found itself, at first worked 
 badly, sluing as it moved, and cutting the grain irregularly. 
 There is a story, that the owner of the field, seeing this, 
 rushed up to the inventor and shouted, "Here! this won't do. 
 Stop your horses. Your machine is rattling the heads off my 
 wheat!" and that various bystanders bluntly pronounced it 
 a humbug, one of them exclaiming, " Give me the old cradle 
 yet, boys!" It was a disheartening moment, but just at 
 this juncture one of the spectators, the Hon. William Taylor, 
 a man of commanding appearance and a citizen of note, 
 who had been watching the work with keen interest, came 
 forward and said, " Pull down the fence and cross over into 
 my field, young man. I'll give you a fair chance to try your 
 machine." This offer was promptly accepted, the reaper 
 was driven into Taylor's field, which was not so hilly, and 
 again cut six acres of grain in less than half a day. 
 
 Thus it was that at twenty-two years of age this young 
 inventor, on a secluded farm in Virginia, constructed the 
 first successful mechanical reaper. It was crude, no doubt, 
 as all inventions are at first, but it was a reaper that reaped, 
 and it included every fundamental element of all the prac- 
 tical harvesters since constructed, and laid the lines on which 
 all subsequent invention has had to move. 
 
 Manufacturing the Machines in Virginia 
 
 Though he had mastered the essential principles of a 
 reaper and embodied them in a machine that would actually 
 cut grain, he did not at once apply for a patent, but with the 
 
 42 
 
I^i^totical ^btire^^ 
 
 thoroughness characteristic of the man he "subjected his 
 machine to repeated tests during three successive harvest 
 seasons under a variety of conditions and with different 
 grain, and took out his patent (June 21, 1834) only after 
 having fully vindicated and exhibited its practical value. "® 
 
 Even then he was not ready to put his reaper on the mar- 
 ket, for as he himself afterwards said, he would not "attempt 
 sales either of machines or rights to manufacture until sat- 
 isfied that the reaper would succeed well in the great variety 
 of situations in which it was necessary to operate." "Thus 
 season by season, from 1834 to 1839, the inventor patiently 
 carried on his trials, personally manufacturing his several 
 experimental machines in the blacksmith shop at Walnut 
 Grove. This historical building can still be seen upon the 
 old farm, preserved by his widow and children as the birth- 
 place^ of the mechanical reaper." Some weeks ago I stood 
 within this quaint old shop, and noting its primitive arrange- 
 ments and appliances, wondered, as hundreds before me 
 have done, at what this youth had accomplished with the 
 limited resources at his command. 
 
 The two things he most needed were money and cheaper 
 iron. So "he decided to build a furnace and make his own 
 iron. His father and a neighbor joined him in the enter- 
 prise. They built the furnace, made the iron, and had taken 
 the first steps toward success," when the financial crash of 
 1837 wrecked the business and plunged them into an abyss 
 of debt. Cyrus McCormick gave up everything he owned 
 
 * Herbert N. Casson: Everybody's Magazine, 17, pp. 759, 760. 
 ' Reuben Gold Thwaites: Cyrus Hall McCormick and the Reaper, 
 p. 243- 
 
 43 
 
;^c€ontiicft €{)eoIogical ^cminarp 
 
 to the creditors, and he and the rest of the family ''slaved for 
 five years to save the homestead from the auctioneer." In 
 1839 he began in earnest the manufacture and sale of the 
 reaper in company with his father and his two brothers, 
 William and Leander. The problem was one of extreme 
 difiiculty. He was without capital. There were no rail- 
 roads. All the material had to be hauled overland. "The 
 sickles were made forty miles away, the blades, six feet in 
 length, being transported on horseback. In this manner 
 the work was carried on in the old blacksmith shop at Wal- 
 nut Grove, the first two machines being sold in 1840; two 
 others in 1841 (at a hundred dollars each), seven in 1842, 
 twenty-nine in 1843, and fifty in each of the years 1844 and 
 1845." The first consignment sent to the west, in 1844, 
 was taken in wagons from Walnut Grove over the mountains 
 to Scottsville, a distance of some sixty miles, then down the 
 James River canal to Richmond, thence by sea to New 
 Orleans, and then up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to 
 Cincinnati. 
 
 The Move to the West 
 
 This order from the west for seven machines revealed 
 to Mr. McCormick, who was now a stalwart man of thirty- 
 six, his great opportunity, and he was quick to seize it. In 
 the fall of the same year (1844), with $300 in his belt, he set 
 out on horseback for the west, for he saw plainly that the 
 great interior with its wide, flat and fertile prairies was the 
 natural home of the harvester. "In that vast land-ocean, 
 with few laborers and an infinity of acres, the reaper was 
 as indispensable as the plow. To reap even one of these new 
 
 44 
 
I^i^torical 3lDtite^i6f 
 
 states by hand would require the whole working population 
 of the country. "^'^ 
 
 In your own state, where he was afterwards to make his 
 permanent home, a sight awaited him which fired his zeal 
 to fever heat. " We saw hogs and cattle feeding in the autumn 
 wheat fields, which could not be reaped for lack of laborers. 
 Five million bushels of wheat had grown and ripened, enough 
 to empty the horn of plenty into every farmer's home. Men, 
 women and children toiled day and night to gather in the 
 yellow food. But the short harvest season rushed past so 
 quickly that tons of it lay rotting under the hoofs of cattle. 
 . . . The sight of the trampled wheat goaded McCormick 
 almost into a frenzy of activity. "^^ 
 
 On he rode through Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Mis- 
 souri, Ohio and New York, looking everywhere for manufac- 
 turers who would build his machines. At Brockport, New 
 York, on the Erie Canal, he found two men who appreciated 
 his invention and agreed to build a hundred machines, a 
 decision by which both of them eventually became inde- 
 pendently rich.^^ 
 
 In the first two years after leaving Virginia he sold 240 
 
 reapers. By 1847 a Cincinnati branch was turning out 
 
 machines under the superintendence of his brother Leander, 
 
 and others were being constructed in Chicago on a royalty 
 
 basis. 
 
 Establishment at Chicago 
 
 But the work was unsatisfactory. He was involved in 
 
 many troubles because of bad iron, poor workmanship and 
 
 ^° Herbert N. Casson: Everybody's Magazine, 17, p. 762. 
 " Idem. 
 " Idem. 
 
 45 
 
j^cCormicft Cfteological ^eminarp 
 
 unreliable manufacturers. So in 1847 "he cut the Gordian 
 knot by building a factory of his own at Chicago." The 
 place was then but little more than a country town built in a 
 swamp, but he clearly foresaw its future pre-eminence as the 
 connecting link between the great lakes and the great west, 
 and he saw at once that this little town of ten thousand peo- 
 ple, ugly and forlorn though it was, was the place where he 
 could best assemble the materials, — steel, iron and wood — 
 for the making of his reapers, and also the place from 
 which he could best ship the finished machines both east and 
 west, and thus it was that Chicago acquired her most illus- 
 trious citizen. 
 
 The year after his arrival his patent expired, and although 
 it was only eight years since he had put his first machine on the 
 market, and although it was acknowledged that his invention 
 had conferred incalculable benefits upon the race and enor- 
 mously increased the wealth of the nation. Congress refused 
 to grant him just and deserved protection by an extension of 
 the patent, and persisted in the refusal through a four-year 
 contest at Washington, waged by the ablest lawyers in the 
 land. Thus the basic principles of his reaper were thrown 
 open to the public, and immediately a host of competitors 
 sprang up, flooding the market with machines in which his 
 ideas had been incorporated. But Cyrus McCormick was 
 an unconquerable man. He had an indomitable will and 
 a deathless tenacity of purpose. Though smarting with a 
 sense of the injustice done him, he faced his rivals single 
 handed — Athanasius contra mundum — and determined 
 to win by the sheer superiority of his product. And win he 
 did. Perfecting his mechanism year after year, by unceasing 
 
 46 
 
i^i^totical atitite^^ 
 
 experiments and continual improvements, and giving a 
 written guarantee with every machine he sold, he kept his 
 reaper in the lead. How great his achievement was maybe 
 seen fiom the fact that of more than two hundred har- 
 vester companies that took the field only ten survive to-day. 
 From the day he set foot in your city he prospered in 
 spite of innumerable difficulties. By i860 the Chicago works 
 were producing four thousand reapers in a single year, 50,000 
 of them in all were clicking in American wheat fields, " doing 
 the work of 350,000 men, saving $4,000,000 in wages, and 
 cramming the barns with 50,000,000 bushels of grain." 
 For years he had struggled with the strength of a Titan to 
 overcome mechanical difficulties and the obstacles of nature, 
 to vanquish indifference and prejudice, and to beat down 
 unjust opposition in the courts, in Congress and in the busi- 
 ness world, and now at last he was out on the open highway 
 to boundless success. Great toils, and great trials as well 
 as great triumphs still awaited him, but the clouds had parted 
 and his path was sunlit. And along with fortune Fame had 
 come. 
 
 Introduction of the Reaper into Europe 
 
 The reaper had been brought to the attention of the 
 British public at the World's Fair in London, in 185 1. At 
 first it was the subject of some ridicule; the London Times 
 called it "a cross between an Astley (circus) chariot, a 
 wheelbarrow, and a flying machine. " But in a few weeks, 
 when it was put into a grain field and given an actual trial, 
 and when its instant success was greeted with a burst of 
 cheers from the crowd, and when the inventor was given 
 
 47 
 
jmcCoirmicft Ctjeological ^eminarp 
 
 "not only a First Prize, but a Council Medal, such as was 
 usually awarded only to Kings and Governments," "The 
 Thunderer" changed front completely and admitted that 
 the McCormick reaper was equal in value to the entire cost 
 of the exhibition. William H. Seward spoke of it as a nation- 
 al triumph, saying, " No General or Consul drawn in a char- 
 iot through the streets of Rome by order of the Senate ever 
 conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus 
 vindicated the genius of our own country at the World's 
 Exposition of Art in the MetropoHs of the British Empire. " 
 At the Paris Exposition in 1855 his reaper received the gold 
 medal of honor as " the type after which all others are made." 
 Eight years later, after a field contest at Hamburg, with 
 dozens of other manufacturers, all making machines more or 
 less like his, the United States Commissioner cabled to New 
 York, "McCormick has thrashed all nations and walked 
 off with the Gold Medal." At the Paris exposition of 1867 
 he was decorated by Napoleon the Third with the Cross 
 of the Legion of Honor. How significant the contrast, as 
 Mr. Casson notes, when the last emperor of France fastened 
 this badge of the Order of Merit upon the breast of the man 
 who " had built up a new empire of commerce that will last 
 as long as the human race shall eat bread." Other Euro- 
 pean triumphs followed, and in 1878, when he was called 
 to Paris for the third time to receive the Grand Prize of 
 the Exposition, he was elected a corresponding member 
 of the French Academy of Sciences, "as having done more 
 for the cause of agriculture than any other living man."^^ 
 
 ^^ Herbert N. Casson: Everybody's Magazine, 17, p. 764. 
 
 48 
 
i^i^torical antire^^ 
 
 Effects of the Invention 
 
 I have already referred to the beneficent effect of Mr. 
 McCormick's invention in extending the wheat growing area 
 of the world. So long as the sickle and the cradle were the 
 only means of reaping, the production of grain, which is 
 man's most important food, was subject to rigid limitations. 
 The difficulty was aggravated in America by the scarcity of 
 farm laborers in the West. Ripe wheat will not wait. The 
 harvest season is brief. The crop must be garnered within 
 a period of ten days. A man with a sickle can cut about five 
 acres a day and it is back-breaking toil. This area was con- 
 siderably enlarged of course by the introduction of the cradle. 
 But the mechanical reaper, drawn by horses, leveling the 
 grain in mighty swathes, gathering it in with giant grasp, 
 and tossing out the bound-up sheaves, has increased the 
 capacity of the human harvester to fifteen acres a day instead 
 of five, besides freeing him from the hard labor of wielding 
 the sickle or the cradle, and straightening his weary back, 
 and seating him comfortably on the machine as the driver 
 of the team. The gathering of every bushel of wheat used 
 to require three hours of a man's time. ''In seventy-six 
 years the reaper has reduced the time-price of harvesting 
 wheat to ten minutes a bushel. " To the reaper therefore we 
 are indebted for that mighty river of wheat which now flows 
 from the west, turning the wheels of 14,000 flour mills, and 
 giving to the millions good bread at low prices. 
 
 49 
 
j^cContiicfe €ljeoIagicaI ^eminarp 
 
 By-Products of the Reaper 
 
 Along that life-giving stream scores of rich cities have 
 sprung up like magic, a network of railways has criss-crossed 
 the country, huge fleets of whalebacks have covered the lakes, 
 and hundreds of gigantic factories have been established for 
 the making of all manner of farming implements, — for the 
 reaper gave a mighty stimulus to agricultural invention, and 
 in its wake there followed inevitably a multitude of other 
 labor-saving devices for the sowing and cultivation and gath- 
 ering of crops of every variety, mowers, tedders, rakes, 
 balers, self-binders for corn and rice as well as wheat, corn 
 pluckers shellers and grinders, grain-drills, harrows and 
 cultivators, involving also of course an enormously increased 
 output of wood and ore from the forests and the mines. 
 
 One of the most important of the indirect effects of Mr. 
 McCormick's invention was its contribution to the preserva- 
 tion of the Union as the outcome of the conflict between the 
 states. "During the Civil War the reaper was doing the 
 work of a million men in the grain fields of the North. " In 
 1861 Edwin M. Stanton said: "The reaper is to the North 
 what slavery is to the South. By taking the places of regi- 
 ments of young men in the western harvest fields, it releases 
 them to do battle for the Union at the front, and at the same 
 time keeps up the supply of bread for the nation and the 
 nation's armies. Thus without McCormick's invention 
 I fear the North could not win, and the Union would be dis- 
 membered. " There was an enormous draught of recruits 
 from the rural districts — Mr. Lincoln called out every third 
 man — yet the crops, instead of decreasing, increased. 
 
 50 
 
i^i^torical atilite^^ 
 
 Europeans could hardly believe it, when told that the North 
 was supporting a vast army and yet was "selling enough 
 grain to feed 35,000,000 people and sending three times as 
 much grain to England as we had ever sent before." 
 
 Patriot and Peacemaker 
 
 This contribution of the reaper to the preservation of 
 the Union was an effect of his invention which of course Mr. 
 McCormick did not foresee, though the preservation of the 
 Union was a thing which he desired with all his soul. Born 
 and reared in the South, yet living for years in the North, 
 he understood the standpoint of both and his views of se- 
 cession and slavery were those of an unsectional patriot and 
 a statesman. A northern writer has said with truth that 
 "No other man of his day either in or out of public office 
 was so free from local prejudices and so intensely national 
 in his beliefs and sympathies. " ^^ He did not want the Union 
 to be broken by secession, but on the other hand he did not 
 want the Constitution to be destroyed by federal reformers. 
 He wanted the South to be freed from the incubus of slavery 
 but he did not want it done by violence and wrong and in 
 a way that would pour upon the nation a cataract of calam- 
 ities. He had himself forged a machine that could do the 
 work of thousands of slaves and that was certain to prevent 
 the introduction of negro labor into the wheat states of the 
 west. He wanted the institution of slavery abolished but he 
 deprecated the impatience which, refusing to abide gradual 
 and peaceable emancipation, the only natural, true and 
 safe solution, plunged the country into war. Before hostili- 
 
 ^* Herbert N. Casson: The Interior, February 8, 1909. 
 
 51 
 
;^c€ormxtft Cl^eological ^eminarp 
 
 ties actually began, he strove with all his might to make the 
 wranghng partisans listen to reason, and even after the war 
 was at its height he proposed a plan, endorsed by Horace 
 Greeley, for stopping the conflict and restoring peace. But 
 the plan failed, the madness continued, and the war was 
 fought to the bitter end. 
 
 To the overpowered and impoverished South he was one 
 of the first of the magnanimous men of the North to stretch 
 out a friendly hand, but unfortunately all men in the North 
 are not magnanimous any more than all men in the South, 
 and because he gave help to prostrate institutions in his 
 native state, this great-hearted patriot who loved both North 
 and South and who had labored with giant strength to pre- 
 serve the Union in a rational way, was actually accused of 
 disloyalty to the Union. He disposed of these charges with 
 his customary vigor and conclusiveness and held steadily on 
 his lofty and beneficent course. 
 
 When politics invaded the courts of his church and her 
 chief benefactors were proscribed and men were deposed 
 from the boards of management of her institutions and others 
 put in their places on purely political and party grounds, 
 he faithfully pointed out to the church her error and recalled 
 her to the spirit of her Lord in these noble words: "When 
 are we to look for the return of brotherly love and Christian 
 fellowship, so long as those who aspire to fill the high places 
 of the church indulge in such wrath and bitterness? Now 
 that the great conflict of the Civil War is past, and its issues 
 settled, religion and patriotism alike require the exercise 
 of mutual forbearance, and the pursuit of those things which 
 tend to peace." 
 
 52 
 
i^ii^torical aiDlire^^ 
 
 Christian and Philanthropist 
 
 Amid all the exacting labors of his life Mr. McCormick, 
 like Henry Van Dyke's peace-seeker, always took time to 
 look up at the stars. And therefore great as his influence 
 was upon the material interests of mankind, his influence 
 upon the higher interests of the race was greater still. He 
 did not think more of machines than of souls. For fifty 
 years he was a consistent, earnest, fruitful member of the 
 Presbyterian Church, and from the earliest days of his 
 prosperity to the end of his honored life, he was the large- 
 hearted and open-handed friend of educational and religious 
 institutions, ever ready to help them with his sympathy, 
 his prayers, his counsel, and his means. 
 
 He never ceased to love his native state. "He never 
 grew too busy or too famous to remember with gratitude the 
 days and scenes out of which he was ushered into the world 
 of action." In his inaugural address as president of the 
 Virginia Society of Chicago, he said: "If I forget thee, O 
 Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cumning. . . . Vir- 
 ginia, " he continued, " is the scene of all our most sacred and 
 cherished memories. There stood the old home. There 
 flowed the mountain stream. There bubbled the spring 
 at which we quenched our youthful thirst. There were the 
 friends of our childhood, now widely scattered or dead." 
 
 It is easy for the public to mistake the nature of a man 
 whose life has had to be one long battle. It was perhaps not 
 unnatural for some to think of this massive and unbendable 
 Scotch-Irishman as hard-fibered and imperious and devoid 
 of sentiment. But that was only one side. We get a glimpse 
 
 53 
 
Pit€ov\mtk Cfteological ^eminarp 
 
 of the other in the earthquakes of laughter, with which at 
 times his great frame was shaken, and in the upspringing 
 of tears at sight of blue mountains, reminding him of his 
 boyhood home; and in his devotion to the memory of his 
 mother. One day in his later life when speaking of flowers 
 he said, "I love the old-fashioned pinks because they grew 
 in my mother's garden in old Virginia." There were many 
 beautiful and tender things within a man who could say that. 
 And one of those beautiful and tender things was his abiding 
 affection for his native state. Two of her venerable and 
 useful institutions held specially warm places in his heart: 
 Washington and Lee University, in his native county, and 
 Union Theological Seminary, in Richmond. It is well 
 known that he gave to the former a handsome sum for the 
 establishment of a chair of Physics, and that in 1866, when 
 our Seminary in Virginia seemed doomed because of finan- 
 cial losses by the war, he came to her rescue with a noble 
 gift for the endowment of the professorship of Old Testament 
 Interpretation. Had it not been for his timely help in those 
 dark days, Union Seminary would not have been able to do 
 for the church the great work she has been doing for the 
 last forty years in the furnishing of so large a proportion of 
 our ministers and missionaries. 
 
 McCoRMiCK Seminary 
 
 Of course his chief work on behalf of Christian education 
 and the spread of the gospel was his endowment of the great 
 school in Chicago which bears his name. His interest in 
 this institution rested on deep conviction. 
 
 As one of your own former professors has said: "He 
 
 54 
 
i^i^toricai atJtire^^ 
 
 was not only a Presbyterian, but he was also a believer in the 
 theology of the Westminster Confession of Faith; and it 
 was his wish and his hope that the seminary should be a 
 center of power for the defense of this theology, and through 
 its graduates, for its dissemination throughout the wide 
 area open to the seminary's influence. " 
 
 In the course of time, through another far-reaching bene- 
 faction, he provided what was in some measure an organ for 
 the institution. A religious newspaper called "The Interi- 
 or, " which had been started in Chicago to represent the Pres- 
 byterian Church, was thirty-six years ago about to succumb 
 to financial difficulties, when its friends and owners applied 
 to Mr. McCormick to purchase it. So in 1872 he bought the 
 paper as requested, placed it on a firm financial basis, secured 
 an editor of rare ability, the Rev. Dr. Francis L. Patton, 
 succeeded since by other accomplished editors, and thus made 
 it one of the representative religious journals of America. 
 
 Your seminary could never have been what it is but for 
 Mr. McCormick's adoption of it, so to speak, in 1859, and 
 his subsequent munificent relations to it. Before he brought 
 it to Chicago the institution had led a very precarious exist- 
 ence, having no solid basis and no assured future. It was 
 he who gave it all three of the elements which Dr. Nathan 
 L. Rice pronounced absolutely essential to a successful 
 theological seminary, a suitable location, a pecuniary basis, 
 and qualified professors who enjoy the confidence of the 
 church; and it was, therefore, he who made possible all its 
 later development, and especially its remarkable growth in 
 the last twenty-six years. 
 
 Like most of our other theological schools, this seminary 
 
 55 
 
0it€otmxth Cfteologxcal .S^eminarp 
 
 began as a mere department of a literary institution, Hanover 
 College, Indiana. Like them, too, it soon abandoned this 
 form of organization as unsatisfactory. It is an interesting 
 fact that the two leading seminaries in the northern church 
 were founded by southern men, Princeton by a Virginian, 
 Dr. Archibald Alexander, and McCormick by a North 
 Carolinian, Dr. John Matthews. Dr. Matthews began his 
 work at Hanover in 1830, and there continued it with vari- 
 ous assistants for ten years, when it became evident that in 
 order to its proper development, the theological department 
 must be detached from the college and independently or- 
 ganized. It was accordingly moved in 1840 to New Albany, 
 Indiana, where for several years it grew and prospered. 
 But the increasing sharpness of the controversy in regard to 
 slavery, in which some of the professors took a prominent 
 but disastrous part, and the estabhshment and immediate 
 success of the seminary at Danville, Ky., gave the New 
 Albany school another serious check and led eventually to 
 its removal to Chicago. The decisive consideration in 
 favor of this re-location was an offer by Mr. McCormick 
 of one hundred thousand dollars for the endowment of 
 four professorships on condition that the seminary should 
 be permanently located in this city. The gift was accepted, 
 and the institution estabhshed on what is undoubtedly one 
 of the best sites for a seminary that the continent affords. To 
 this original munificent donation Mr. McCormick added 
 frequently and largely during his Hfetime, and since his 
 death the same princely benefactions have been continued 
 by Mrs. McCormick and her children, so that now the 
 seminary owns an exceedingly valuable property and possesses 
 
 56 
 
i^i^torical gltitire^^ 
 
 an equipment for its great work that is unsurpassed perhaps 
 by any seminary in our land. 
 
 In view of this remarkable and continued liberaHty, the 
 governing bodies in 1886 changed the name of the institution 
 from "The Theological Seminary of the Northwest" to 
 "The McCormick Theological Seminary." And under 
 that honored name it will continue to send forth through all 
 the future its successive bands of soul-reapers. 
 
 It is evident, then, that great as are the results of Mr. 
 McCormick's invention in enabling men to reap the material 
 harvests of the world, still more beneficent and far-reaching 
 are the results of his consecrated wealth in fitting men to 
 reap God's spiritual harvest. The equipment of semi- 
 naries is obedience of the most practical and fruitful kind to 
 the command given by our Saviour when he said: "The 
 harvest truly is plenteous, but the laborers are few; pray 
 ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth 
 laborers into his harvest." 
 
 But it would be a mistake to infer from what I have 
 said that the seminary attained its present position without 
 arduous and protracted struggles, severe reverses, and sore 
 disappointments. And in all these trials he suffered. The 
 school was on his heart. Most of its friends appreciated 
 fully what he was doing for it and were deeply grateful, but 
 in some instances, as a minute of your faculty states, "in- 
 stead of admiration and gratitude for his sagacity and benefi- 
 cence, he was confronted with no little opposition and opprob- 
 rium. "^^ But " they that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He 
 that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall 
 
 ^5 Minute of the Faculty on the Death of Mr. McCormick, May 24, 1884. 
 
 57 
 
0lt€otmxtk €f)eoIogicaI ^eminarp 
 
 doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves 
 with him." What imagination can conceive the joys that 
 thrill his glorified spirit as one after another the hundreds 
 of ministers who went out from his seminary arrive in the 
 land of light when their work on earth is done and tell him 
 how through the training here provided by his munificence 
 they have been able to give the bread of life to their fellow- 
 men, and when the thousands of ransomed souls who have 
 been gathered into the Kingdom of God from every part of 
 the world by the men from his seminary tell him how under 
 God they owe to him their knowledge of the Gospel and their 
 deliverance from sin. Ah, yes — " He that goeth forth and 
 weepeth, bearing precious seed" — a seminary is literally a 
 seedery — '' shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bring- 
 ing his sheaves with him" — bringing his sheaves with him. 
 
 The Personality of the M.4n 
 
 Cyrus McCormick was cast in a large mould. He was 
 a massive man in body and mind. In his stalwart prime 
 with the physique of a gladiator, deep chested, broad shoul- 
 dered and ruddy, with his leonine head and thick black hair, 
 with his firm face and strong eyes, he made an extraordinary 
 impression of physical and intellectual force. And the longer 
 one knew him the more that impression of power grew. He 
 was the incarnation of decision, energy, tenacity and courage. 
 But all men of power are not great men. The question re- 
 mains as to their moral qualities — the substratum of char- 
 acter. Are they men of granite convictions that will defy 
 the waves of passing opinion? Are they men of regnant 
 conscience and stainless integrity? One of his friends who 
 
 58 
 
i^i^torical ^Dtite^^ 
 
 knew him intimately and who is here present to-night has 
 happily characterized the real secret of Mr. McCormick's 
 success as follows: "That which gave intensity to his 
 purpose, strength to his will, and nerved him with persever- 
 ance that never failed was his supreme regard for justice, 
 his worshipful reverence for the true and right. The thor- 
 oughness of his conviction that justice must be done, that 
 right must be maintained, made him insensible to reproach 
 and patient of delay. I do not wonder that his character 
 was strong, nor that his purpose was invincible, nor that 
 his plans were crowned with an ultimate and signal success, 
 for where conviction of right is the motive-power, and the 
 attainment of justice the end in view, with faith in God, 
 there is no such word as fail." 
 
 His ethical perceptions were as quick and keen as his 
 business acumen. He did not have to work his way labo- 
 riously through a moral problem; he reached his conclusion 
 in a flash, and there was no uncertainty or doubt. On a 
 business question his judgment was clear and reliable; on 
 a moral question it was almost unerring. 
 
 Cyrus H. McCormick was never disobedient to the 
 heavenly vision. What conscience commanded, he did. 
 In an age accused of complete absorption in things merely 
 material and of indifference to the means by which money 
 is made and of selfish misuse of accumulated wealth, he 
 set an example of honesty, integrity and benevolence which 
 gave him a distinction among the mass of men like a braid 
 of shining gold on a sleeve of hodden gray. His wealth 
 was honorably acquired and nobly used. His nature was 
 not dwarfed but enlarged by his devotion to business. Some 
 
 59 
 
Pit€t^tmkh. €lf)eDlogical J^eminarp 
 
 men become mere business machines; their nobler powers 
 are atrophied — their natures are narrowed and shriveled 
 by the very intensity of their devotion to business, even 
 honorable business. It was not so with him. With all 
 his sagacity and skill and success in practical affairs, with 
 all his concentration of energy upon whatever enterprise 
 he had in hand, he remained to the last an idealist, high- 
 souled, broad-minded, sympathetic, benevolent, devout, — 
 an Abou Ben Adhem, who proved his love to God by his 
 love to his fellow-men. He was no mere moralist; the core 
 of his character was his faith in God. He was no mere 
 humanitarian; the mainspring of his benevolence was his 
 gratitude and love to our Heavenly Father. 
 
 Religion to him was not a detached and occasional 
 thing — a thing merely of times and seasons. It permeated 
 and controlled his whole life. His business and his religion, 
 so far from being relegated to different compartments of 
 his life, were interwoven like warp and woof. In the most 
 crowded periods of his career "his letters," as Dr. McClure 
 has said, " were a combination of intense devotion to business 
 detail and of intense devotion to religious principle." At 
 the close of a long statement about machinery and contracts, 
 he writes to his brother: "May the Lord grant us all grace 
 to live so that we shaU have hope in our death as had our 
 dear father, and to this end may we have a well-founded 
 hope in our life. The work is thine, O Lord. Wilt thou 
 draw us unto Thee by the cords of Thy love. For of ourselves 
 we can do nothing. May we be delivered from the bondage 
 of sin and have that peace which the world cannot give or 
 
 60 
 
i^i^torical atitire^^ 
 
 take away — peace in believing, which will be as an anchor 
 to the soul, sure and steadfast. " 
 
 Such expressions were as natural to him as breathing. He 
 believed not only that there should be business in our re- 
 ligion and religion in our business, but that religion is our 
 business. "I often regret," he writes, "that my example 
 has not been better, more pious; and yet I have often felt 
 a concern that was not expressed. Business is not inconsist- 
 ent with Christianity; but the latter ought to be a help to 
 the former, giving a confidence and resignation, after using 
 all proper means, which speak peace to the soul." And 
 again, at a critical juncture in his business affairs, when he 
 was struggling with manufacturers who had broken their 
 contracts, he says," This is the point that should be aimed at, 
 the feeling that should be cherished — unconditional sub- 
 mission and resignation to the will and hand of Providence; 
 and with His smiles the most crooked ways may be made 
 straight and chastisements converted into blessings. But for 
 the fact that Providence has seemed to assist me in our 
 business, it has at times seemed that I would almost sink 
 under the weight of responsibility hanging upon me. But 
 I believe the Lord will help me out. How grateful we should 
 be! How humble on account of unworthiness ! And yet 
 how rejoicing that unworthy as we are, the Law has been 
 satisfied, and we may be saved by faith. " 
 
 That was the real life of the man. And so, during his 
 declining years, when chastened by much bodily affliction, 
 he was sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust and 
 bore his sufferings without a murmur. At last the strong 
 
 6i 
 
;f^t€tMcmxtk €l)eoio5ical ^eminarp 
 
 staff was broken and the beautiful rod. The powerful 
 constitution which had carried him victoriously through 
 so many conflicts was exhausted, and he was ready for his 
 rest. On the last Lord's Day of his life on earth, hearing 
 it said that it was Sunday and a beautiful day, he answered, 
 "Yes, sweet Sabbath." As he lay, peacefully awaiting 
 the end, he uttered tender words to each of his children and 
 his wife, taking their hands one after another, then while 
 they knelt by his bedside he led with firm voice the last 
 religious service as the head of his family, and finally sang 
 with them his favorite hymn: 
 
 "O Thou, in whose presence my soul takes delight, 
 On whom in affliction I call, 
 My comfort by day, and my song in the night, 
 My hope, my salvation, my all." 
 
 To such a man death was but a translation. On Tuesday, 
 May 13, 1884, he passed from this life to the life on high, 
 leaving behind him a record of achievement as Inventor, 
 Philanthropist and Man of God which will perpetuate his 
 fame "to the last syllable of recorded time." 
 
 62 
 
Conference 
 
 THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION 
 
 "What Should Be the Ideals of the Theological Seminary for 
 Usefulness in the Coming Half -Century ? " 
 
 The Seminary Chapel, Tuesday Morning, November Second, 
 Nineteen Hundred and Nine, at Ten o'Clock. 
 
 ORDER OF EXERCISES 
 
 PROFESSOR FINIS K. FARR, D. D., 
 
 Lebanon Theological Seminary 
 Presiding 
 
 Hymn. "Holy, Holy, Holy." 
 
 Scripture Lesson . . . . Professor D. A. Hays, Ph.D., D. D., 
 
 Garrett Biblical Institute 
 
 Psalm cxxii 
 Prayer Professor T. G. Soares, Ph. D., D. D., 
 
 Chicago University Divinity School 
 
 Address President A. H. Strong, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Rochester Theological Seminary 
 
 Hymn. " Jesus Shall Reign." 
 
 Address Professor Robert W. Rogers, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Drew Theological Seminary 
 
 Hymn. "Lord, Speak to Me." 
 
 Address Professor Williston Walker, Ph. D., D. D., 
 
 Yale Divinity School 
 
 Gloria. 
 
 Benediction. . . . President Edward D. Eaton, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 Beloit College 
 63 
 
^tminatv ^utloofi 
 
 BY PRESIDENT AUGUSTUS H. STRONG, D. D., LL.D. 
 
 MY first duty this morning is to congratulate the Mc- 
 Cormick Theological Seminary upon the completion 
 of the eightieth year of its history. Though by reason of 
 strength it has reached fourscore years, yet its strength is 
 not labor and sorrow, but a bearing of abundant fruit. 
 Prince Bismarck said, facetiously, that the first eighty years 
 of one's life are always the pleasantest. This Seminary may 
 well hold to a contrary opinion, for its old age is surrounded 
 by "honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." My own 
 Seminary at Rochester numbers only sixty years to your 
 eighty, yet I well remember how admiringly I looked up to 
 your larger equipment, when I did my first preaching on this 
 North Side of Chicago in i860 and 1861. You have far 
 more to be thankful for, to-day. You have been greatly 
 blessed in your benefactors, and the name you bear is the 
 synonym of princely generosity. Your teachers have stood 
 for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. You have 
 a past full of splendid influence and achievement. May 
 your entire century of years be rounded out with yet greater 
 success and honor! 
 
 I am to speak to you of "Seminary Outlook." To me 
 this means the present outlook in theology. The theme 
 itself implies that we live in a changeful time, and that we 
 need to define our relation to the movements of thought 
 around us. No one will deny that the ideas of development 
 
;^c€ormich Cfteological ^emmarp 
 
 and evolution have taken fast hold of the modern mind, and 
 have greatly influenced both Biblical and theological inves- 
 tigation. I am inclined to concede much to these views, 
 and to believe that, when evolution is regarded as God's 
 ordinary method of revelation, it throws valuable light upon 
 many problems that are otherwise insoluble. A theistic 
 evolution is simply the doctrine that God builds the future 
 upon the past, that later revelations are prepared for by the 
 earlier. As our Lord used water to make wine, and took 
 five loaves and two fishes as the basis of his feeding the mul- 
 titude, so natural law, as far as it will go, is respected in God's 
 communications of knowledge. Truth is gradually com- 
 municated, both to the individual and to the race. We 
 receive the divine fulness in installments, "a penny a day'' 
 and "grace for grace." God is not shut up to merely ex- 
 ternal revelation; He can reveal himself within the soul as 
 well as without — " it pleased God to reveal His Son in me, " 
 says Paul. God is not shut up to working on isolated in- 
 dividuals; He can move the heart of a whole nation as easily 
 as the heart of its chosen leaders; He makes himself known 
 in history as well as in Scripture. God is not shut up to a 
 single nation as the recipient of His enlightening influences; 
 nowhere has He left himself without a witness; the progress 
 of the race is not a merely naturahstic progress; all real 
 advance in science and philosophy is due to God's teaching. 
 The sunflower reaches upward to the sun, but it is the sun 
 that draws it upward; and it was the Sun of Righteousness, 
 the immanent Christ, who, before the incarnation as well 
 as after, was God's one and only Revealer, the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life of Men. 
 
 66 
 
J^emtnarp O^utlooft 
 
 I therefore feel free to accept all that the higher crit- 
 icism can prove with regard to the origin and development 
 of Scripture, and all that modern science can prove with 
 regard to the origin and development of man; believing 
 that this evolution is a theistic evolution, with Christ as its 
 agent and goal. The word evolution, however, has to some 
 minds a sinister sound, as if it necessarily implied a purely 
 automatic and necessary development. While I claim for 
 it a Christian use and meaning, I cannot deny that there 
 are not wanting in our day professedly Christian teachers 
 who so emphasize the element of change in the history of 
 doctrine, that all permanence is virtually denied. Because 
 we are in process of development, both in body and soul, 
 development is regarded as the law of universal being, and is 
 unhesitatingly attributed even to Him whom the Scriptures 
 declare to be without variation or shadow of turning. There 
 is no such thing as objective truth, it is said, and both ethical 
 and religious doctrine are impossible, because both are in 
 constant flux. Even Christ and Christianity are held to be 
 merely temporary phases of evolution, and both may be 
 outgrown. Views of this sort seem to me, not necessary 
 correlates, but rather needless exaggerations and inexcusable 
 perversions, of a sober theory of evolution. I maintain that 
 they have no foundation either in reason or in Scripture. 
 I can best depict the present outlook in our Seminary instruc- 
 tion, and the dangers that beset our theology, by criticizing 
 this mistaken evolutionism, and by showing, in spite of its 
 grain of truth, that it is bad metaphysics, bad ethics, and 
 bad theology. 
 
 It is bad metaphysics. It is the revival of the Heraclitic 
 
 67 
 
;pc€ormicft €{)eoIogxcaI Jjeminarp 
 
 philosophy. Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived five hundred 
 years before Christ, could see nothing in the universe but 
 constant change. He maintained that there is no such 
 thing as permanent being, — the only actuality is an ever- 
 lasting becoming. All things flow, he said. Modern phe- 
 nomenalists have adopted this philosophy, and have furnished 
 it with a score of illustrations from physical science. The 
 rainbow is no fixed entity, but an ever changing reflection 
 from successive falling water-drops. The wave of the sea 
 has no lateral movement, it is simply an alternate elevation 
 and depression of particles that make no advance with the 
 wind which impels it. The musical note has no substantive 
 existence, it is the result of a continuous series of vibrations, 
 and these vibrations are changing at every instant. The 
 flame of the lamp, the growth of the tree, but above all, 
 the continuity of the human body, are all instances of a flux 
 of particles, which makes upon us an impression of perman- 
 ence, while at the same time the so-called permanence is 
 an illusion, created by our short-sighted imaginations. 
 
 And we must grant that this philosophy is plausible, 
 so long as we confine our attention to physical nature. The 
 defect and fault of it is just here, it starts out from physical 
 nature and makes that the rule for the whole world, whereas 
 it ought to start out from the soul of man, which knows and 
 dominates physical nature. In the soul of man we find 
 something abiding. Here is a personal identity, which 
 subsists through change, and in spite of change. This 
 personal identity, and not man's changing thoughts or the 
 flux of particles in his body, should give us the key to the 
 physical universe around us. Arguing from ourselves, we 
 
 68 
 
^emtnarp (©utlooft 
 
 can see in the world of nature the operation of intelligence 
 and will, none the less personal because it is regular. The 
 regularities of nature are the activities of a personal being, 
 yes, are the habits of God, and all the changes of the world 
 have behind them the presence and power of the Unchange- 
 able One. 
 
 The Heraclitic philosophy of change is true only when 
 supplemented by the Eleatic philosophy of permanence. 
 The philosophy of becoming has its little grain of truth: 
 impersonal reality, taken by itself, has nothing in it that is 
 abiding; the plant and the brute are its models, and they 
 are mere successions of varying states. But if we stop here, 
 and confine our attention to mere physical things, we shall 
 have a materialism that is exalted to include man and to ex- 
 clude God; for there is no place in it either for man's per- 
 sonal identity or for God's free will. To save these great 
 interests, we must add, to the philosophy of becoming, 
 the philosophy of being; we must be Eleatics as well as Hera- 
 clitics. Not all reality is impersonal; noumenal and ontolog- 
 ical reality is personal; and personal reality can have varying 
 states and yet remain the same. Even the world of matter 
 needs a permanent conscious self to explain it. Unless 
 there be something abiding, there can be no becoming. The 
 very conception of change, if the change be not capricious 
 and useless, implies a law behind the phenomena, and an 
 end to which the phenomenal process leads. In order to 
 rational progress, this law must be intelligent and benev- 
 olent, as it can only be, if it is the expression of a righteous 
 Mind and Will. Nor can any becoming be observed, un- 
 less there be an abiding intelligence in the observer: only 
 
 69 
 
fi^t€ctimth €l)eolDgical J^eminarp 
 
 when I stand on the rock apart from the stream, can I see 
 the rush of the water flowing by. So, in a true metaphysics, 
 becoming is bound up with being. Development ? Yes, but 
 there must be something to develop ; there must be some law of 
 development; and there must be some end to be secured by 
 development. The two ideas, of change on the one hand, 
 and of permanence on the other, are as inseparable as the 
 inside and outside of a curve, or as the positive and the nega- 
 tive poles of a magnet. The grievous error of this modern 
 overstatement of evolutionism is that it divorces the phe- 
 nomenal from the noumenal, makes bodily change a rule for 
 the soul, makes science as vain as the cat's pursuit of its 
 own tail, turns the universe into a medley of accidents, with- 
 out law and without God. 
 
 This philosophy of becoming is bad ethics, as well as bad 
 metaphysics. It gives us the ethics of Pragmatism. It claims 
 that "the true is the expedient in the way of our thinking, 
 as the right is the expedient in the way of our behaving." 
 The conception of an object is simply the conception of its 
 future, its results, its use. There is a grain of truth here. 
 The conception of an object does include an awareness of 
 practical consequences. Truth and right have results, and 
 are proved by their results to be truth and right. But the 
 proof of a thing is not the thing itself. The error of Prag- 
 matism is that it regards truth and right as meaning only 
 what we can make by them. It holds that truth and right 
 are simply what works well. An idea is true when it carries 
 with it valuable results. An act is right which has happy 
 consequences. This is utilitarianism, taking the place in 
 ethics which belongs to objective truth and righteousness. 
 
 70 
 
^eminarp a^utloofe 
 
 It deprives us of any standard of truth or of right, except this, 
 that it makes a difference in practice whether we recognize 
 them or not. It denies that there is any intuitive perception 
 of difference between right and wrong. As the other so- 
 called intuitions are generalizations from experience, so 
 this one is merely a racial calculation of self-interest. Con- 
 duct is right because it is useful, not useful because it is 
 right. A great modern authority has told us that Sweden- 
 borgianism is materialism, with the nails clinched on the 
 inside. Modern Pragmatism seems to be a survival of such 
 Materialism. The right is whatever succeeds in asserting 
 and maintaining itself, which is much the same as saying that 
 might makes right. Conscience is only ripened expediency, 
 and altruism is only egoism perfected. This perverse evolu- 
 tionism holds that consequences not only indicate truth and 
 right, but that they constitute truth and right. It is an out- 
 growth of the sensational philosophy which holds that as the 
 world consists of sensations, so the soul consists of states of 
 consciousness, thoughts without a thinker, psychology 
 without a soul, a string of beads without any string. Nietz- 
 sche and Ibsen and Bernard Shaw profess this same phil- 
 osophy, when they say the golden rule is that there is no 
 golden rule. 
 
 Ethics of this sort is like the play of Hamlet with the 
 part of Hamlet left out. To say that right is only a becoming, 
 that it exists only in process, that it consists only in useful 
 moral results, is really to deny that there is any such thing as 
 morality. For our whole moral nature is so constituted 
 that we judge certain acts or states to be right, according 
 as they conform to some previously accepted standard. 
 
 71 
 
j^cCormicft Cl)eologicaI ^eminarp 
 
 Belief in the existence of objective right and in our obligation 
 to do the right is born with us, even though our conceptions 
 of what is right may change. The sense of duty is prior 
 to the experience of consequences: We are compelled to 
 decide what we will do in any given case, without waiting to 
 see whether our action will have good results, in fact, doing 
 the right is often required in scorn of results, as when one 
 tells the truth at cost of contumely, or witnesses for Christ 
 at risk of a martyr's death. Is it said that this too is a neces- 
 sary phase of evolution, and that the fittest survives ? I reply 
 that in moral evolution it is for each man to determine what 
 is fittest; as another has phrased it, we and our ideals are 
 factors, not products, of evolution; will explains evolution, 
 not evolution will; we determine evolution, and evolution 
 does not determine us. In other words, we are persons, 
 and not things; conscious selves, not mere streams of con- 
 sciousness; free beings, not waifs borne hither and thither 
 on the current of circumstance, as a deterministic philosophy 
 would have it. The Hindu Vivekananda indeed regards 
 all of us as mere shifting phases of the infinite, for he said to 
 his Boston audience: "There is not a person in this room: 
 we are not persons. " But we know better than this. Back 
 of the stream of consciousness, we know that there is an 
 abiding self; over that abiding self we recognize an unchang- 
 ing moral law; that unchanging moral law is an expression 
 of the nature of God. We can add to our faith virtue, 
 only because God has called us by his own glory and virtue. 
 "By their fruits ye shall know them," says Christ. But 
 that is very different from making the fruits of virtue to be 
 the only virtue, in heaven or earth. To make truth and 
 
 72 
 
J^eminarp (©utlooft 
 
 right the mere product of our changing circumstances, 
 identical with the ascertained usefulness of our thinking 
 and action, is to deny that there is any truth or right that 
 has objective and eternal validity, to deprive moral life 
 of its sanctions, and to cut up ethics by the roots. Moral 
 progress is impossible, since there is no definite end to which 
 progress can lead. Unless there is a heavenly perfection as 
 our guide and goal, our efforts after righteousness are as 
 useless as the gyrations of a squirrel in the treadmill of 
 its cage. 
 
 This philosophy of becoming is as bad theology as it is 
 bad metaphysics and bad ethics. It is a thoroughgoing 
 agnosticism, for it regards all religious ideas as simply crea- 
 tions of man, and as destined in time to be supplanted and 
 to pass away. Here, too, is a grain of truth. There is 
 progress in theology, just as there is in astronomy. But 
 that does not mean that there is change in the objective 
 truth, but only that there is change in our apprehensions of 
 the truth. Progress in astronomy is not man's creation of 
 new planets; it is man's discovery of planets that were never 
 seen before, or man's bringing to light of relations between 
 them that were never before suspected. So progress in 
 theology is only man's growing knowledge of God's un- 
 changing truth. There are no new planets, and there are 
 no new books of the Bible, but our understanding of both 
 is improving from day to day. Through this progressive 
 understanding of nature and of the Scriptures the eternal God 
 is revealing himself. There is no danger that two and two 
 will ever make five, in this or in any future world, and why ? 
 Because this mathematical intuition is the revelation of a fact 
 
 73 
 
jHcCormtch Cf^eolagical ^eminatp 
 
 in the being of God. That virtue is praiseworthy and vice 
 condeninable, that love is a duty and that selfishness is 
 wrong, these statements are not conclusions of experience or 
 of argument; they are utterances of our moral nature. Con- 
 science in men, declaring that right must be done though the 
 heavens fall, is the reflection of the unchangeable holiness 
 of God. And this is the meaning of Ecclesiastes, when it 
 tells us that "He hath set eternity in their heart." 
 
 This unchangeable element in religion the philosophy 
 of development would abolish. Man, it says, creates his 
 own gods, and his gods, like himself, must change and die. 
 Man makes God in His own image, and God himself is in 
 an endless process of becoming. It belongs to the very 
 nature of the Absolute to grow. The process is wholly in- 
 ternal to the nature of man; God is immanent, but not 
 transcendent. God never speaks, for God is only the grow- 
 ing product of man's intelligence. There is no God who 
 could possibly reveal himself to man; there is no revelation 
 of unchanging and eternal truth; there is no Messiah but 
 man's ever-advancing ideals; the Bible, like the sacred 
 books of India and Persia, represents only the temporary 
 gropings of the human spirit after an ever-flying goal. 
 Christ and Christianity, instead of being a final revelation, 
 may in some distant day be as far behind the times as Juda- 
 ism now is to us. And so, upon the altar of the merely tem- 
 poral, is sacrificed all that gives to the temporal its meaning 
 and value, and that is, the Eternal. God's reaching down 
 to man in incarnation and atonement gives place to man's 
 vain reaching upward to an impersonal and unknown spirit 
 
 74 
 
J^eminarp <©utloofe 
 
 of the universe, that ever eludes his grasp and yet ever lures 
 him on. 
 
 Though an angel from heaven should preach to us this 
 new gospel, we must call it an apostasy from the Christian 
 faith. For Christ is the same, yesterday, and to-day, and 
 forever; and while heaven and earth shall pass away, His 
 words shall not pass away. It is not only an apostasy from 
 the Christian faith, but it is a surrender of even natural re- 
 ligion. Man's intuitions are God's tuitions, and unless we 
 hold to their incontestable authority, we have no God, and 
 no certainty of any kind whatever. Truth, beauty, good- 
 ness, are meaningless, unless there is an immutable stand- 
 ard of truth, beauty, goodness, in God. Unless perfection 
 is something definite and attainable, there can be no striving 
 after it, either in knowledge or in conduct. The Scriptures 
 declare that eternal life consists in the knowledge of God; 
 and that, as we now know in part, we shall one day know as 
 we are known. The theory we combat destroys all possi- 
 biHty of such knowledge, and it renders theology as hope- 
 less as the boy's search for the pot of gold at the foot of the 
 rainbow. It destroys all beHef in personal responsibility; 
 for without a divine rule of conduct there is no responsibility. 
 It destroys all hope of personal immortality; for without a 
 divine support and goal for the individual life, no personal 
 immortality is conceivable. How different is this doctrine 
 from the teaching of our Lord: "I go to prepare a place 
 for you; because I Hve, ye shall live also. " Nay, how differ- 
 ent is it from the teachings of purely natural rehgion, for 
 that can look up to an unchanging God, and can promise 
 
 75 
 
0it€otmttk Cl^eolosical ^eminarp 
 
 rest for the weary soul in him. How sweet and solemn is 
 Edmund Spenser's ''Canto of Mutability": 
 
 "Then 'gin I think on that which nature said, 
 
 Of that same time when no more change shall be, 
 
 But steadfast rest of all things, firmly stayed 
 Upon the pillars of Eternity ; 
 
 For all that moveth doth in change delight ; 
 But henceforth all shall rest eternally 
 
 With him that is the God of Sabaoth hight; 
 
 Oh thou great Sabaoth God, grant me that Sabbath's sight!" 
 
 Where does this apostasy from the Christian faith begin, 
 and where does it end? It begins in the refusal to accept 
 Christ's word as law. Knowledge of doctrine depends upon 
 obedience to the truth already revealed. Take Jesus at His 
 word, believe that He is with you alway, pray to Him for the 
 teaching and guidance of His Holy Spirit, in other words, 
 take Christ for your Master, and you shall be led into all the 
 truth. Do the advocates of the new theology pray to Jesus ? 
 Do they pray at all, with faith in a personal God who hears 
 and answers prayer? Have they not lost the sense of sin 
 and need, which once led them to prostrate themselves at the 
 feet of that ever-living Savior who said: "Come unto me, 
 all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 
 rest ? " Have they not failed to take His yoke upon them, 
 and so have failed to learn of Him ? He would have increased 
 their faith, instead of allowing it to evaporate. He would 
 have shown them that the Christ of John's gospel, with its 
 Logos-doctrine and its propitiatory suffering of a divine 
 Saviour, is absolutely needed to make intelligible the declara- 
 tions of the Synoptics; for in the Synoptic gospels the human 
 
 76 
 
^emxnarp <©utIooft 
 
 Christ bids the whole race of man come to him and take 
 upon them His yoke, claims to be their final Judge, promises 
 His own omnipresence with His people, and, in prospect of 
 all this, gives His life as their ransom from guilt and sheds 
 His blood for the remission of their sins. 
 
 There is a theology of becoming, to which we may justly 
 hold. It is such a becoming as Jesus predicted, when He 
 declared that the Holy Spirit would lead His followers into the 
 truth which before resurrection and Pentecost they could 
 not receive. But, instead of such progress toward truth, 
 we are pointed to a backward evolution which does little 
 credit to the theory. Had God so little care for the work of 
 Christ that he suffered it to be misrepresented and perverted, 
 so soon as Jesus died ? Here is the absurdity of this exagger- 
 ated evolutionism: Forgetting that the historical Christ 
 is not the whole Christ, and that the Synoptics show us only 
 what he "began to do and to teach," it would ascertain the 
 real truth by going back from Paul and John to the three 
 gospels. Even then it must purge the narrative of all its 
 supernatural elements, so that it may present to us, not a 
 divine Saviour, but only a human teacher and example, 
 fallible and imperfect like the rest of us. The virgin-birth 
 of Christ must be denied, even at the expense of Mary's 
 purity, or of the evangelist's veracity. With the new crea- 
 tion of humanity at the birth of Jesus, there disappears all 
 faith in any new birth of the individual Christian under the 
 influence of the Holy Spirit: regeneration and conversion 
 become only names for a gradual development of the powers 
 in religious education. And if we can dispense with a per- 
 sonal God in incarnation and in regeneration, why can we 
 
 77 
 
:0it€otmitk €f)ealDgicaI J^eminarp 
 
 not dispense with a personal God in man's original creation ? 
 Neither beginning, middle, nor end shall be supernatural. 
 To this pantheistic or atheistic conclusion such philosophy 
 inevitably leads. The personal God, as was said of Auguste 
 Comte's philosophy, is conducted to the frontier, and is 
 bowed out of His universe, with thanks for His provisional 
 services. 
 
 This facilis descensus Averno is impossible to any who 
 cling to the living Christ. The abyss of scepticism to which 
 this philosophy leads should warn us against taking the 
 first steps in the path of error. The Christ of John's gospel 
 is required to vindicate the truthfubiess of the Synoptics. 
 Only Christ's deity can explain His perfect humanity. The 
 pitiful spectacle of the man who has outgrown Christ, and 
 who picks flaws in His Redeemer, ought to teach us how 
 self-exalting and self-deceiving is sin. Unbelief is progres- 
 sive and cumulative. The deity and the atonement of Christ 
 are the two towers of the Christian citadel, — you cannot 
 hold the outworks when you surrender the citadel to the foe. 
 Education which ignores these fundamentals of the gospel 
 is not Christian education. The philosophy of mere be- 
 coming gives us a false metaphysics, a false ethics, and a 
 false theology. Unless there be an abiding reality back of all 
 change, an abiding right back of all action, an abiding Deity 
 back of all our conceptions of Him, life is but a succession 
 of pictures on the screen, and faith is only the child's notion 
 that the pictures are reahty. Truth and right are possible, 
 because God is truth and right, and can make himself known 
 to His finite creatures. He has made himself known in Jesus 
 Christ. He that is of God hears Christ's words, as Christ 
 
 78 
 
^eminarp (©utlooh 
 
 utters them in Scripture. The Holy Spirit bears witness 
 to their truth, and in this testimony of the Holy Spirit, as 
 the Reformers taught, we have the final proof of inspiration. 
 These wonderful words of life are self-evidencing, and they 
 are the power of God unto salvation. By His word and His 
 Spirit, Christ is made to us wisdom and justification and 
 sanctification and redemption. And so the living, personal, 
 present Christ is the interpreter and the guarantee of God's 
 whole revelation. Many things shall be shaken, but He 
 shall abide, Immanuel, God with us. As He is Himself the 
 Rock of ages, He joins unstable men to Himself so that they 
 become a rock, upon which He can build a church against 
 which the gates of hell cannot prevail. To Him we pray 
 with the poet: 
 
 "O living Will, that shalt endure 
 
 When all that seems shall suffer shock, 
 Rise in the spiritual rock, 
 Flow through our deeds, and make them pure." 
 
 The Christ, who thus speaks to us by His Spirit in Scrip- 
 ture, claims the absolute submission of all men, not, as 
 President Eliot intimates, because He is a deified man, but 
 rather because He is the humanized God, God manifest in 
 the flesh, the atoning and redeeming Deity, the Creator, 
 Upholder, and Governor of the universe, the object of prayer, 
 the Judge of the living and the dead. No mere historic 
 fame and influence are His, but an eternal rulership and an 
 absolute supremacy. No longer becoming, as in the days 
 of His earthly life, but being, He exercises an unchangeable 
 priesthood, and no man can come to the Father but through 
 Him. He who has seen Him has seen the Father; all men 
 
 79 
 
j^cCormtch Cljeological ^emmarp 
 
 are to honor the Son as they honor the Father; whosoever 
 denieth the Son hath not the Father. Let us not crucify the 
 Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame. Espe- 
 cially let our theological seminaries, founded as they were 
 to train preachers of Christ's gospel, beware of admitting 
 to places of instruction men who are Heraclitics in meta- 
 physics, Pragmatists in ethics, and Agnostics in theology. 
 
 May the McCormick Theological Seminary guard that 
 which is commited to it, turning away from the profane 
 babbhngs and oppositions of the knowledge which is falsely 
 so called, which some professing have erred concerning the 
 faith. 
 
 80 
 
Ci^eoloQical cEDucatton 
 
 BY PROFESSOR ROBERT W. ROGERS, Ph.D. (Leipzig) 
 Litt. D., LL.D. 
 
 THE Theological Seminary is a professional school, 
 whose primary aim is to fit men for an exacting and 
 laborious but delightful profession. It belongs side by side 
 with schools of medicine, law and those graduate schools 
 of universities which purpose to prepare men for the pro- 
 fession of teaching. These are obvious statements, quite 
 platitudinous in character, and I make them at the very be- 
 ginning of my remarks simply to show that my attitude to 
 the theological seminary is quite orthodox. If I should 
 happen later on to say something which seems heretical I 
 beg you to be so kind as to remember the fundamental or- 
 thodoxy with which I began. 
 
 If now in the development of American professional 
 education any general principles governing the proper prep- 
 aration of a young man for the noble professions of med- 
 icine, law and teaching have been settled, it might seem 
 a fair inference that these would probably apply also to the 
 preparation of a young man for the ministry. Any general 
 principles, I say, not specific principles, — have any general 
 principles come out of our experience ? It is perfectly certain 
 that each of these great professions demands a preparation 
 which is in some particulars peculiar to itself. It is clear 
 enough that the student of medicine must in one way or 
 another acquire a masterful control of his hand, that mar- 
 
^t€ctmitk Ctjeologtcal ^eminatp 
 
 velous tool of constant daily use in diagnosis by the phy- 
 sician and of even more delicate use by the surgeon. The 
 lawyer needs no such hand as that. He will do well if he 
 can sign his name so that mortal men may hope to read it; 
 his typewriter will do all the rest of his writing. On the 
 other hand the lawyer might well be taught to speak skilfully 
 and acceptably if ever he is to practice in the courts. The 
 physician hardly needs much training of that kind. Unless 
 he come to the professors' chair he will have little need for 
 public speech. A little wise reticence will have far higher 
 professional value than much deftness of expression in 
 ready speech. There are many other differentiations in 
 the training demanded by the different professions, but 
 these bald and commonplace illustrations will serve — there 
 is no need to labor the point. But if these special differences 
 are indisputable, so also are some general resemblances. 
 It is plain enough that it takes time to get ready for one of 
 these professions, time spent not in general educational 
 development, but time spent in specific professional prepara- 
 tion. There is a widespread agreement that four years 
 should be spent in the study of medicine while three each 
 are usually expected in preparation for law and the higher 
 walks of the teaching profession. These things being so, 
 it ought not be deemed an improper requirement to exact 
 three years of definite scholastic preparation for the ministry. 
 This is very widely conceded in theory, but a good deal 
 whittled down in practice. In many colleges certain sub- 
 jects are more or less skilfully taught which make an excuse 
 for demanding admission to higher standing in the seminary 
 with conditions to be made up by which the clever man works 
 
 82 
 
€l|eol0gxcal €tiucation 
 
 through in two years instead of three. Where this is not 
 permitted by theological faculties too keenly alive to the 
 importance of their work, the alert theological student man- 
 ages quite easily to diminish the time actually given to his 
 studies by preaching week after week during his course, or 
 even by taking complete pastoral charge of a small religious 
 society. This scheme works nearly everywhere, and it 
 would be most interesting to compute just how much of the 
 theological course of three years is left intact by it. No 
 medical student gives up a big slice out of every week's study 
 to the practice of his future profession; the State carefully 
 protects itself against that kind of predatory attack. The 
 student of law does not practice in the courts while his studies 
 go on in the law school, the State again protecting itself 
 against him; nor does the future teacher take a school and 
 carry it on, giving so much of his time as remains to the 
 university faculty. But the theological faculties in greater 
 or less degree have everywhere made some concession to this 
 stupid and wasteful custom. The students who are per- 
 mitted to preach, or worse still to have regular pastoral 
 charges, are either scaling down their theological course, 
 or learning and practicing various schemes for making ser- 
 mons easily, or doing both of these things. In their case it 
 is idle to talk of securing adequate theological learning. 
 But worse even than that is the case for the course of study, 
 for it is always necessarily modified to suit their needs, 
 and a less demand is made of all students on their account. 
 The whole theological curriculum is also, whether consciously 
 or unconsciously, influenced by their needs. They must 
 have something that is immediately available for use. They 
 
 83 
 
jHcCotttiich €f)eoloBXcal ^eminatp 
 
 wish indeed to learn, eagerly wish it, but they have eyes 
 most keenly fastened on that which can be used next Sunday. 
 The great question which they desire to put before the exe- 
 getical departments is, ''What does this text mean? — I 
 wish to preach on it next Sunday, " and in a rough sort of 
 way they have the same problem set for every other depart- 
 ment. ''Can you give me an illustration? Can I get a hint 
 by which the beggarly rudiments of my own thinking can 
 be filled out?" In such an atmosphere as that, learning 
 does not flourish. The whole glorious field of learning is 
 prostituted to immediate practical ends. Do I speak too 
 sharply? This is a mild expression of my real feelings. 
 I am accustomed to say in the theological seminary where 
 my lot is cast, that the whole student-preaching system is 
 the curse of the place. I know perfectly well what are the 
 arguments in its favor, and I think I have considered them 
 all, and it is my profound conviction that none of them have 
 any weight. We are told that the students are too poor; 
 they must earn money or abandon their preparation. But 
 students of medicine and law are frequently poor enough, 
 but they get on without this great waste, and it is full time 
 for us to find some other way to help them to support. 
 We should be far better off with half the number of the 
 students, who were really giving all their time to serious 
 study. Here is the very beginning of reform in theological 
 education, and we shall not be able to put our work into any 
 serious comparison with that achieved by the theological 
 faculties of Germany until we have utterly wiped out this 
 whole system. 
 
 And now let me come closer to the problem that lies 
 
 84 
 
€l)eolDsical <£tiucation 
 
 nearest my heart. Time was when the minister was by far 
 the best educated of all professional men in this country. 
 It gives one a thrill to read those solemn and earnest words 
 pronounced in 1643: "After God had carried us safe to 
 New England, and wee had builded our houses, provided 
 necessaries for our livelihood, rear'd convenient places 
 for God's worship, and settled the civill government : one of 
 the next things we longed for and looked after was to advance 
 learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an 
 illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers 
 shall lie in the dust." It was the beginning of a splendid 
 effort to save the churches from the hands of the ignorant, 
 and it found its reward. But that spirit soon died out and 
 many churches gloried in an uneducated ministry, prided 
 themselves upon theological ignorance, rejoiced to think 
 that they could honor God by giving to his service less than 
 they offered to the service of men. But the land was never 
 wholly left without centers of theological learning, and in the 
 early days when a few months served to secure a degree in 
 medicine or law a much more considerable requirement 
 was made in theology. What a revolutionary change has 
 passed over us since then. The medical schools have 
 raised their demands step by step, broadening and deepening 
 their curricula. And as their opportunities for practical 
 bedside instruction were widened, even more did they extend 
 the purely scientific side. The doors were opened wide and 
 in trooped comparative anatomy, histology and embryology 
 to take their places by the old science of anatomy, and with 
 them came also comparative physiology, biological chem- 
 istry, pathology, bacteriology, neuropathology and others 
 
;i^c€omiicft €f)eoIogxcaI ^eminarp 
 
 equally or even more remote to the immediate demands of 
 everyday practical requirement. The wise and far-sighted 
 men who were building up the newer schools were not de- 
 terred by wild cries that what was needed was practical 
 instruction. They knew better things than that, and were 
 determined to force every student to lay a broad scientific 
 foundation, to study many things whose practical outcome 
 was remote. Nay, they even were able to bring it about 
 that courses preparatory to medicine were offered in many 
 colleges, and so the medical course was extended downwards 
 by one or even two years. 
 
 In the same way exactly, the law course has been ex- 
 tended over ever widening areas in which the future prac- 
 titioner is compelled to learn what law is, in its inner histor- 
 ical meaning, and a large part of his course is not practical 
 but scientific, not intended for use, but for reserve, for a 
 background of learning, real learning against that day when 
 a draught may be needed for some higher end. 
 
 To meet all these wider ends the medical and legal 
 faculties have been enormously increased in numbers. There 
 are for example at Harvard University seventeen men on the 
 law staff and fifty-six on the medical staff, and at the Uni- 
 versity of Pennsylvania there are eighteen in law and one 
 hundred and thirty-two in medicine. Compare these amaz- 
 ing figures with the faculties of five and six that prevailed in 
 medicine when I was a boy. 
 
 With all this progress in medicine and in law, theology 
 has not kept pace. The theological schools once led the 
 whole great column of professional institutions; they are 
 now far in the rear. In an academic procession at any 
 
 86 
 
€l)eoIogicaI €tiucalion 
 
 great university function the few men who compose the 
 theological faculty are lost in the thronging numbers of the 
 great professional faculties. Their curricula have indeed 
 been somewhat extended, room has indeed been found for 
 some of the new social sciences. I record the fact gladly, 
 jubilantly even, but I go on to say that these extensions 
 and improvements are small indeed when compared with 
 the overwhelming progress and extension in every other 
 professional school. 
 
 And now you ask me, "What should be the Ideals of 
 the Theological Seminary for Usefulness in the Coming Half- 
 Century?" and my answer springs instant to my lips and 
 grows full-toned out of all that I have dared to say about 
 other professional training. My answer is : More learning, 
 higher scholarship. Mark this well. I do not doubt that 
 the practical training in the theological schools might well 
 be improved and extended. The practical side has been 
 extended and improved in law and medicine, but that is 
 not the first need, as things now are. The first need is more 
 learning, higher scholarship. The whole school needs to 
 be flooded with learning, with learning for reserve and not 
 for immediate use, with learning for its own sake, aye, with 
 useless learning just because it is learning. The ideal for 
 the next fifty years must be to lift the theological seminary 
 abreast of the law and medical and graduate faculties 
 and then ahead of them once more. I speak earnestly, 
 even passionately. I wish the future minister of the 
 glorious Gospel of the Son of God to be able to look level 
 into the eyes of the best trained men in his community; to 
 be bold as a lion because he knows what has been going 
 
 87 
 
j^cCormicft Cljeological ^eminarp 
 
 on in this progressing world and what is now going on; to 
 feel confident that no doctor or lawyer or professor in his 
 parish will come to him with some matter of biblical criticism 
 or theological speculation, the implications of which he 
 cannot discern because he does not know what preceded it. 
 More learning, more learning, a higher and deeper and 
 broader scholarship, — this is my ideal for the future. 
 
 How shall we secure these things, assuming for the mo- 
 ment that you agree as to their need ? I wish to say some- 
 thing in answer, and at the very outset must declare that it 
 will be no easy task. It was not easy to lift the other fac- 
 ulties, but men, mortal men like ourselves, have accom- 
 plished it. If we mean it, if we are sure that we desire it 
 above all else we shall secure it, and not otherwise. But 
 how shall it be secured? Let me speak very briefly and 
 pointedly about some only of the factors which are sure to 
 be potent in its securing, omitting others perhaps equally 
 important, or perhaps in your opinion even more significant. 
 I pass over the vital question of a higher standard for the 
 admission of students, or perhaps I should say a more rigid 
 application of the standard that we already possess, and 
 come at once to a problem already mentioned as a sign of 
 weakness. We must seek and find some way of stopping 
 the waste of preaching and of pastoral charges. I do not 
 dispute the need of some practical experience, something to 
 take the place of clinical instruction in medicine and moot 
 courts in law, but the method now widely if not generally 
 pursued seriously diminishes the length of the course of 
 study and prevents the rise of genuine scholarship. 
 
 But far more important than these student problems is 
 
 88 
 
Cljcological €tiucation 
 
 the question of the faculty. No great progress is possible 
 but through them. Not the buildings and not the students 
 but the professors make or break the school. I have some- 
 thing to say about the theological faculty, something very 
 earnest to say, something very much on my heart these many 
 years. I begin with the simplest and least important matter 
 and go on to the higher and deeper things. The theological 
 faculty must be enlarged, greatly enlarged. The faculties 
 of medicine and law have found enlargement to meet new 
 issues, new extensions of human knowledge. There has 
 indeed been some extension here and there in theology, 
 but it has been small, in some places even grudging. But 
 the new day has new issues and the new issues demand a 
 new meeting or a new attack, and new professorships in 
 larger number are sorely needed. Religious pedagogy, 
 sociology and church economics, missions, and so on 
 through a number more ought to find fitting representation. 
 Not that every student must be taught everything in every 
 new subject, but let us find out what the individual ought 
 specially to study, after a solid foundation of general theolog- 
 ical learning has been laid, and then see that he secures that 
 and in sufficient amount to make it worth while. Special- 
 ism in something is better than everlasting smattering of 
 everything. When Philips Brooks went to Germany and 
 saw the world's theological leaders he wrote back to his 
 brother a lament that he also had not taken time to make 
 himself ''omniscient" in something, instead of always stand- 
 ing at the general and the superficial. But we need new 
 professors, and new associates and instructors for the old 
 departments that have always been in the curriculum. More 
 
 89 
 
;^c€onnicft Cl^eological 4^eminarp 
 
 courses given by different men with differing outlooks and 
 methods will develop originality in the students and freshen 
 and enliven all their future preaching. We have turned 
 out too many students all of a similar pattern, made like 
 unto some one masterful man in the faculty. Let us put by 
 that masterful man's side a young and eager and ambitious 
 instructor trained somewhere else and see how his influence 
 will quicken his chief to new effort, and the students to 
 independent thinking. It will have another valuable in- 
 fluence also, and I have a word to say about that in a moment. 
 So much then for the extension of the faculty. The ex- 
 tensive is good but the intensive is better. The faculty 
 that now is, the small and unextended faculty needs im- 
 provement, needs a better chance. We ought to have better 
 theological faculties. It is a delicate subject. It is not 
 wise for a reasonably prudent man to say anything very 
 pointed about it. I shall simply express my hearty pride 
 in many of my colleagues in many theological faculties, 
 men of international reputation for scholarship, and add, 
 " May their tribe increase. " The point to which I am com- 
 ing is that the faculties that now exist need a better chance 
 to practice learning. They are too much cramped in various 
 ways to fulfil their highest function, and they do not ade- 
 quately fulfil it. He who doubts that statement needs only 
 to compare our intellectual output with the German to be 
 convinced. Neither in the extent or the thoroughness of 
 the training which is imparted to our students do we even 
 so much as approach the German achievement. Many of 
 us were trained in Germany in whole or in part, and are 
 we not filled with repining as we compare our success with 
 
 90 
 
Cfteological oEtiucation 
 
 what we saw there week by week ? How shall we dare set 
 the examinations which we give in comparison with those we 
 had to face in Germany ? And the training itself, apart alto- 
 gether from the question of examinations. The scope of it all, 
 the thoroughness, the fearless meeting of difficulties. I have 
 just been reading Dr. Paul Wernles' brilliant Einfiihrung 
 in das theologische Studium^ and as I see what it demands of 
 the theological student, and compare it with what we demand, 
 there is no more heart in me. Of course our students are 
 different; some of them are already weary of the ascent to 
 learning, curious creatures exhausted by college, who are 
 eager to get into the active work of life; others are frankly 
 lazy; the thoroughly determined, earnest men with intellec- 
 tual enthusiasm are in the minority in most places. But 
 part of the failure to secure great results in their intellectual 
 advancement lies at our door, and whose fault is it ? Grant- 
 ing that some of the fault is ours, fully and unreservedly 
 ours, I am nevertheless persuaded that the failure is really 
 due to the conditions under which we work. We are in 
 trammels, sorely beset with enormous difficulties. Free 
 us from these and the results will speedily show in our 
 classes. 
 
 But if we fail to demand and to secure from our students 
 such a standard as do the Germans, so also do we fail to 
 reach their standard of scholarly productiveness. We 
 have indeed made progress; we are cHmbing up the steeps, 
 but they are scarcely yet within sight. Our libraries are 
 filled with the books they have written ; many of us are per- 
 force content to reproduce with more or less independent 
 criticism what they have beaten out and published. Oh, 
 
 91 
 
jHcCormicft Cljeologtcal ^cminarp 
 
 to be nearer to them; to be fellow-workers; to submit to their 
 standard and to be counted worthy to be classed with them, 
 — that were joy indeed. Some of our number have at- 
 tained it. The names of George F. Moore of Harvard and 
 of Francis Brown of Union spring instant to the lip, and 
 there are yet others. But they are all too few. Why are 
 there so few among us able to raise up disciples as they do; 
 able to turn out such scholarly productions as they do? 
 How shall we attain to their standard ? 
 
 As I see it we need three things, three things above all 
 else, and if we could secure these I verily believe we should 
 rapidly rise to a position comparable even to that held by 
 our German friends and teachers. 
 
 I. The first of these is less teaching. I freely admit 
 that in a very few seminaries the ideal may be almost reached. 
 But nearly everywhere men teach too many hours. In gen- 
 eral it may fairly be said that the smaller the number of hours 
 the more will a man really teach. If we all had but few 
 hours we should prepare more absolutely new lectures, 
 feel more frequently the thrill of enthusiasm and not the 
 weariness of fatigue, arouse more zeal among the students, 
 more perfectly represent the very latest word in our respec- 
 tive fields. But we should also have time to feel our way 
 out into new ideas and to new combinations of old ideas; 
 scholarly productiveness and the direct advance of human 
 knowledge would become more common among us. Years 
 ago I was lecturing at a summer school in Birmingham, 
 England, and one of my colleagues was Sir William Ramsay 
 of Aberdeen. One afternoon I was seated by him at a Cycle 
 Gymkhana and long and interesting was the conversation. 
 
 92 
 
€l)eolo5icaI OEtJucatian 
 
 He was talking of books then in the making, and since pub- 
 lished. I expressed wonder at his productivity, and said 
 that I felt ashamed of my very small output of books and 
 papers when I thought of his. He smiled and said that it 
 was easy to explain. He lectured at Aberdeen only six 
 months in the year, and only from two to four times a week ! 
 The remainder of the year he spent upon Asia Minor, in 
 which he is one of the foremost living authorities, if indeed 
 he is not unrivaled. Sometimes he spent the whole of his 
 vacation in the field, and the cost of his travel was met by 
 his university or by stipends voted by other Scottish insti- 
 tutions. Ramsay is indeed a man of splendid ability, and 
 would have done much even under adverse conditions. But 
 his large contributions to learning are directly traceable to 
 the liberahty with which his university has treated him. 
 Aberdeen has presented him to the world. Aberdeen has 
 in his person endowed learning, and has been richly repayed 
 in the new life that he has trained in his very few hours of 
 teaching, and in the world-wide reputation which his pub- 
 lished work has secured, for all of his renown reflects glory 
 upon his university. Aberdeen has indeed made Ramsay, 
 but Ramsay has made Aberdeen. The moral is obvious. 
 Let some of our seminaries give a real chance to rising schol- 
 ars, and watch the results with dehght. They will not indeed 
 easily discover a Ramsay; they will be almost sure of the 
 discovery of real worth everywhere, which shall make its 
 opportunity an achievement. 
 
 2. The second need is a general increase in salary. Few 
 theological professors in America receive a salary which in 
 itself enables them to live on or slightly above the comfort 
 
 93 
 
j^cCormicft Cfteological ^eminarp 
 
 line. The comfort line varies indeed in different commun- 
 ities, but it is not difficult to compute. If the salary falls 
 below that line the incumbent of the chair is irresistibly 
 impelled to earn money by some outside work, and every 
 dollar thus earned is secured at the cost of teaching or of 
 research or of both. Dr. Pritchett has recently observed 
 that "a large proportion of the teachers in American uni- 
 versities are engaged in turning the grindstone of some out- 
 side employment with one hand whilst they carry on the 
 work of the teacher with the other. "^ The figure is happily 
 chosen. It is grindstone work indeed, but the unhappy 
 professor is not sharpening his tools, he is wearying his 
 muscles, intellectual as well as physical. The institutions 
 that pay salaries below the comfort line are cheating them- 
 selves, and their students, and the world of scholarship, 
 for they are not securing the full service of their staff. A 
 salary well above the comfort line would infallibly mean 
 less outside work, more and better teaching, and more in- 
 struction of the church and the world by books and papers. 
 My friend Professor Driver of Oxford has become the teacher 
 of the whole world of theological workers by his books. 
 He is indeed a man of unusual gifts, but a part at least of 
 his great contribution to learning may justly be ascribed to 
 these two great concomitant advantages. He teaches only 
 twice or thrice a week, for twenty-one weeks or less in the 
 year, and his salary is seven thousand dollars and a 
 residence. 
 
 ^ The Financial Status of the Professor in America and in Germany : 
 Bulletin Number 2, p. cviii, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advance- 
 ment of Teaching. 
 
 94 
 
€l)cological <gDucation 
 
 3. The third necessity is a greatly changed attitude to 
 scholarship on the part of boards of trustees and administra- 
 tion, and especially on the part of the whole church. There 
 is too much sensitiveness and dread of heresy. Somebody 
 is turned out, or fails of re-election , or receives properly ac- 
 credited hints to resign, or is simply pounded because he is 
 reputed to have said or thought something inconsistent with 
 the interpretation of Bible or creed which somebody else 
 holds. Under such pressure scholarship simply cannot 
 flourish. Scholarship is not a weed that will thrive anywhere. 
 Scholarship is a delicate and exquisite flower and flourishes 
 where it is appreciated and among those who deserve it. 
 This timidity over heresy will crush it. Why should men 
 so exercise themselves about every little difference of opinion ? 
 These creeds of ours must be a poor company if they cannot 
 stand a bit of a shake now and again. Every first-class in- 
 stitution is entitled to a little heresy here and there to keep 
 it from stagnation. It will do the students not harm but 
 good. The men who are timidly trying to protect them 
 against baleful thinking need not worry, — most of them are 
 not thinking much about anything, and will not easily be 
 swept into dangerous heresy unless the whole faculty with 
 one mind and purpose cajole them into it, and it is not easy 
 to gather such a garden of heretical professors as that. 
 Freedom to learn, freedom to teach, — there is our greatest 
 need to-day. There has been a gain in these things, I gladly 
 acknowledge it, but there is a cry for more. 
 
 My story is told. I am set for the defense of learning. 
 I am eager to see it flourish and fruit among us. I appre- 
 ciate the need for practical instruction for a practical life 
 
 95 
 
;^c€ormxcfe Cfteological J^eminarp 
 
 work among sinful men. I have said it before. I am re- 
 peating it as I close, but I leave its advocacy to others. Mine 
 the joy to plead for learning and scholarship. O ye, who 
 direct these our seminaries of theological learning, in the 
 next fifty years give us these, and give them a place to 
 flourish. 
 
 96 
 
O^tolDQical CDucatfon 
 
 BY PROFESSOR WILLISTON WALKER, D. D., LL.D. 
 
 THE Psalmist, in pointing out the allotted span of man's 
 life, characterized the full limit of eighty years as 
 marked by '* labor and sorrow." True, indeed, in the ex- 
 perience of individuals, it is fortunately not true as a de- 
 scription of the attainment of such maturity by an institution. 
 It was my privilege this summer to participate in the cel- 
 ebration by an eminent foundation for the advancement of 
 learning — the University of Leipzig — of its five hundredth 
 anniversary. If immortality can be predicated of any of the 
 creations of men, it surely belongs to seminaries, colleges, 
 and universities. They renew their youth perpetually; 
 and no small share of the satisfaction which attaches to the 
 post of an instructor within their walls is the confidence 
 that he feels that he is building his life into a structure that 
 will endure, to the strength and future usefulness of which 
 he may, in his measure, contribute, by helping to augment 
 a power that will continue long after he himself has gone 
 the way of all mankind. 
 
 Compared with the life of the venerable University of 
 which I have just spoken, the eighty years of McCormick 
 Seminary seem but a span; yet what a stretch of honored 
 history they represent, what prayers offered, what hopes 
 patiently wrought into achievement, what a succession of 
 consecrated lives devoted to its upbuilding, what a sum 
 total of worthy accomplishment ! Well may this be a happy 
 
 97 
 
j^c€ormitb Cljeological ^emtnarp 
 
 day for McCormick Seminary, as it surveys its honorable 
 past and looks forward with confidence to the future. As 
 a representative of Yale University, and, in so far as I may, 
 as an unofficial representative of the Congregational Churches 
 of the United States, it is my great privilege to-day to fe- 
 licitate McCormick Seminary on its history and present at- 
 tainment, and to express the hope that the good hand of God 
 which has so blessed it in the past, may bestow upon it ever 
 greater favor in the years to come. In the words of the 
 familiar German University toast, vivat, crescat, floreat; 
 and may it live, grow, and flourish for His sake whose King- 
 dom it has served so well and which it is set to advance by 
 all the wisdom which His good Spirit may grant. 
 
 The present speaker is reminded, however, that he is 
 not here simply to express the congratulations and good 
 wishes of a sister institution of learning, and of a great and 
 sympathetic body of Christian churches. Your committee 
 in charge of this celebration has kindly asked him to discuss, 
 in company with others, "What should be the Ideals of the 
 Theological Seminary for Usefuhiess in the Coming Half- 
 Century?" In attempting to answer that question, in a 
 paper written before our gathering this morning, and in 
 ignorance of what the speakers who have preceded him may 
 have said, he is conscious that he may repeat unnecessarily 
 some thoughts that have already been called to your atten- 
 tion. He is also painfully aware of the uncertainty of all 
 attempts at prophecy. The course of history has an almost 
 ironical fashion, at times, of belying the efforts of those who 
 attempt to forecast its progress. When the separation of 
 church and state was under discussion in Massachusetts 
 
 98 
 
€l)eoIogical aEDucation 
 
 three-quarters of a century ago, an eminent judge, famed 
 for his wisdom, predicted with all confidence, that, if the 
 divorce was effected, twenty-five years would see the end of 
 organized religion in the commonwealth. Rev. Dr. Samuel 
 Spring shortly before Andover Seminary was opened, ven- 
 tured to hope that it might gather, within his Hfetime, as 
 large a company of theological students as a dozen within 
 its class rooms. The attendance the first year was thirty- 
 six, and more than fifteen hundred students were there edu- 
 cated within the next forty years. It would have been a 
 far-seeing man, indeed, who, standing at the beginning of 
 McCormick Theological Seminary, could have pictured to 
 himself its present multiplicity of courses, or conceived of 
 its existing wealth of material equipment. It is, therefore, 
 with great diffidence as to the value of any opinion now 
 expressed that the speaker ventures to suggest what may 
 be some of the ideals of this institution of learning a half- 
 century in the future. 
 
 The only basis on which such a prognostication can be 
 made is to be found in the tendencies of the recent past and 
 the present. These are likely to project themselves into the 
 future, if not for half a century, at least for the years imme- 
 diately to come. Any adjustment of work which takes into 
 view the needs of our own age and frankly endeavors to 
 enable our schools of ministerial training to meet them with 
 greater efficiency, is likely, to say the least, to be adapted 
 to the immediate future and to represent "ideals for use- 
 fulness in the coming half -century. " 
 
 Looking at the existing situation, we see that it is marked, 
 and has long been characterized, by the steady broadening 
 
 99 
 
j^cCormitfe €l)eDlogical ^eminarp 
 
 of the field of Christian service. The constant multiplica- 
 tion of agencies for doing the work of Christ in the world, 
 and the ever increasing recognition of the breadth and va- 
 riety of the work to be done, have long been outstanding 
 features of our religious life. A century ago the conception 
 of Christian service was relatively extremely simple. It 
 involved little more than the implantation and nourishment 
 of the individual Christian life by the church, through preach- 
 ing, the Word of God, prayer, and praise. The Sunday 
 school was then but beginning among us. The prayer- 
 meeting was gaining its first foothold. The Young Men's 
 Christian Association was unknown. All the multiform 
 varieties of missionary activity at home and abroad were 
 but in their infancy in our land. The urban problem, with 
 its attempts at solution by social settlements, good govern- 
 ment leagues, and outreaching philanthropic and religious 
 agencies, was then far in the future. The work of the church- 
 es was the relatively simple problem of individual salvation. 
 The question in ministerial training was how best to accom- 
 plish the comparatively easy task of providing intelligent 
 preachers and well instructed pastors. Our age witnesses 
 a wholly altered situation. The differentiation and exten- 
 sion of religious activities has come in as with a flood. Some, 
 like the Sunday school and the missionary enterprises, the 
 churches have heartily welcomed; but many more, like the 
 Young Men's Christian Association, and in even greater 
 measure, the social and philanthropic agencies to which 
 reference has been made, have been allowed to slip out of 
 the control of the church, not because of want of sympathy, 
 but because of the lack of any practical conception of how 
 
Cl^eolasical €tiutatxon 
 
 they could be brought into ajSihation with its existing insti- 
 tutions. The church has not been hostile. Its membership 
 has, in general, furnished the leadership in these outreaching 
 endeavors; but, divided as the church has been by denom- 
 inational barriers, and emphasizing the individual rather 
 than the social nature of salvation, it has not known how 
 to claim for itself a large portion of the growing religious 
 endeavors of our time. The result has been that, though 
 the activities of the church are manifoldly greater than a 
 century ago, they are not manifold enough to hold full posses- 
 sion of the field of service. The church's conception of 
 its mission has not kept pace with the development of really 
 Christian effort, its actual sphere of leadership in the work 
 of Christ in the world is therefore relatively less, and, as a 
 consequence, its influence in the life of the present is not 
 proportionately what it once was. The greatest problem 
 of the church in the age in which we live is how to extend 
 its leadership so that that influence may include the man- 
 ifold forms of Christian service. Far too often we are told 
 that this or that type of Christhke service is not the church's 
 ''sphere," as if anything that tends to make God's Kingdom 
 come on earth as it is in heaven should be outside the leader- 
 ship of Christ's organized disciples. 
 
 What is true of the church in its failure to grasp the oppor- 
 tunities which enlarging conceptions of Christian service 
 have offered, is, the speaker believes, true in even larger 
 measure of our theological seminaries. If the church has 
 not risen to the largeness of its growing ideal, the schools for 
 the training of its leaders have been even more backward. 
 They have confined their work almost exclusively to prep- 
 
0lt€otmtth €l)eoIogtcal ^eminatp 
 
 aration for the pastorate; and even here, till within a very- 
 recent period, that preparation has been of an exceedingly 
 technical character. The conception ingrained into the 
 minds of men at the Reformation age, by the great revolt 
 from Rome, and the emphasis then laid on the supremacy 
 of the Bible, that a knowledge of its original languages, 
 and a careful training in a well-buttressed theological system, 
 if supplemented by some skill in the preparation of sermons, 
 were the sufficient and adequate intellectual preparations 
 for Christian service, has dominated our seminaries in the 
 past and still to a large extent controls them. Far be it 
 from the present speaker to underestimate the value of 
 these studies in their proper place and proportion; but he 
 thinks that the chorus of criticism on the historic theological 
 curriculum is sufficiently loud to make pertinent the question, 
 whether, as a universal curriculum for all ministerial training, 
 it meets the real needs of the present or equips men ade- 
 quately for contact with the problems by which they are 
 sure to be confronted when they pass from the walls of the 
 Seminary to the great, needy world outside. 
 
 Within the last few years in almost all our theological 
 seminaries the inadequacy of the historic curriculum has 
 been recognized, and vigorous attempts have been made to 
 supplement its onesidedness. Courses in Christian Sociol- 
 ogy, in Missions, in teaching, in pastoral problems, have 
 been added and have undoubtedly done much service. But 
 a somewhat wide acquaintance with the ministry has led 
 the speaker to question whether these additions to the older 
 curriculum have, in general, been sufficiently thorough to 
 produce any considerable result, or have greatly affected 
 
€l|colo5ical €Ducation 
 
 the average habit of ministerial thought. Take, as an ex- 
 ample, a study the desirability of which would, he believes, 
 be universally admitted, that of Christian missions at home 
 and abroad; one, moreover, in which some instruction is 
 now given in practically all our schools of ministerial training. 
 If one can credit the testimony of missionary secretaries, 
 confirmed unfortunately all too fully by one's own observa- 
 tion, any really intelligent grasp of the missionary situation 
 by our average ministry, and especially by our younger 
 ministry, is rare. Those who really feel its importance are 
 a comparatively small minority, and the want of effective 
 pastoral leadership into sympathetic intelligence respecting 
 the missionary activities of our churches is one of the most 
 serious obstacles to the progress of their work. Too often 
 a group of good women in the congregation has a more vital 
 and comprehensive sense of the importance of this mighty 
 cause than the pastor who is supposedly set to lead them. 
 Has it then been a mistake to give courses on missions? 
 Not at all. The difficulty has been not that courses were 
 given, but that they have remained a slight and uninfluential 
 element in the training of the future minister. If it is an- 
 swered that this result is almost unavoidable; that, important 
 as the study of missions is, we cannot give it a larger place 
 than at present in an already overcrowded curriculum, the 
 present speaker admits the force of the objection. He has 
 cited the study of missions simply as an illustration. Where 
 half a score of new studies, each of importance in itself, are 
 superimposed on a curriculum that fifty years ago was 
 deemed, in their absence, sufficient to tax a student's full 
 strength for three years, the result can be, at best, but a 
 
 103 
 
^t€om\tth €l)eolo0xcal ^eminarp 
 
 smattering, and in a large degree a dissipation of energy 
 and attention. The endeavor to meet the present situation 
 by giving the student, in addition to the ancient group of 
 supposedly necessary studies, a little of everything new, is 
 recent, but it has been pushed in some of our seminaries 
 to great lengths. It is bound to prove unsatisfactory in the 
 end, not merely because it is at war with all thoroughness; 
 but because it is contrary to what our age is finding to be 
 the true method in all other departments of training. 
 
 If we look at the fields of medicine, of law, of engineering, 
 of business, in fact at almost any branch of human activity, 
 we find that specialization is the order of the day. The 
 training of the ministry is the conspicuous exception. There 
 multiphcation of subjects of study is the rule. Nor can it 
 well be otherwise if our seminaries confine themselves to 
 mere pastoral preparation. The position of the modem 
 pastor was not inaptly defined by the occupant of the pulpit 
 of one of the largest churches in the East, as the head of a 
 "general retail business." But are we taking a broad 
 enough view of the work of training for Christian service 
 in confining it practically to preparation for the pastorate? 
 In so doing, we are ministering to only one portion of the 
 field that is before us. We are limiting as needlessly as un- 
 wisely the leadership of our theological seminaries in meeting 
 the real religious situation that is before us to-day. With 
 all the broadening of our courses, we have really narrowed 
 our impact on the Christian life of the age, by refusing 
 to expand our work sufficiently, and to recognize that the 
 theological school ought to prepare for highly specialized 
 
 104 
 
€I)eDlo0ical €tiucation 
 
 leadership in many fields which have been neglected by it 
 through too narrow a conception of its obligations. 
 
 The speaker is aware of the limitations of a pecuniary 
 character which often hamper the work of our schools of 
 training for religious leadership. He knows well that bricks 
 cannot be made without straw, that the expansion which 
 seems to him imperative is expensive, and that theological 
 schools are among the most difficult objects, at the present 
 time, for which adequate endowment is solicited. But he 
 also realizes that they have had noble benefactors in the 
 past, one of whom we honor to-day, and he believes that 
 the very breadth of the enlargement which he advocates, 
 would raise up new friends in the present. His task, how- 
 ever, is not to show how these modifications could be fi- 
 nanced; but what, in his judgment, "should be the Ideals 
 of the Theological Seminary for Usefulness in the Coming 
 Half-century. " 
 
 First of all, he believes that the Seminary should seek an 
 enlarged vision of its own possibilities for usefulness. It 
 should broaden its conception of its duties as a school of 
 preparation not for one particular type only, but for many 
 different forms, of Christian leadership. In so doing it 
 will necessarily become an institution of many different 
 departments, or group of schools, under one management 
 and inspired by one purpose, rather than a single instru- 
 mentality for training, having only a limited service in view, 
 and presenting only one basal curriculum, however that 
 fundamental course of study may be modified by relatively 
 slight excursions into newer fields. 
 
 105 
 
0lt€ntmith €f)0ological ^eminarp 
 
 With this fundamental change in the conception of its 
 relation to the Christian leadership of the age in view, certain 
 obvious and familiar divisions of training work present them- 
 selves, a few of which have already been attempted, here 
 and there, in a partial way, but which, as a whole, have never 
 been logically and systematically carried out among us. 
 
 The Seminary of the future will not abandon its present 
 task of training for the historic pastorate. Whatever other 
 leadership our churches require, this want will continue. 
 It is that for which the Seminaries were originally called 
 into being. It is that which they now supply. In this 
 training for the average pastorate a large degree of variety 
 in the objects of study, even at the cost of relative super- 
 ficiality, must undoubtedly find a place. The ordinary 
 pastor is necessarily a man who must know something of 
 many things, for the demands upon his leadership are most 
 various. To the speaker, it would seem that the proportion 
 of studies for the pastorate might well be modified. In this 
 age of specialization, and of waning confidence in the suffi- 
 ciency of Greek and Hebrew exegesis in the modicum pos- 
 sible of attainment in a brief theological course to give to 
 the preacher the most useful working acquaintance with 
 the Scriptures, which are to be his chief object of exposition, 
 it may well be asked, in all honesty of self-searching, whether 
 the time now devoted to Hebrew and Greek is not propor- 
 tioned by the dead hand of tradition rather than by the 
 demands of the living present. Does not actual experience, 
 as witnessed by the testimony of many among us, show that 
 for the average pastor, a different apportionment of the 
 curriculum, in which newer studies, unthought of when this 
 
 1 06 
 
€&eoiogxcaI ^tiucation 
 
 Seminary was founded, but now pressing for recognition, 
 should have larger and therefore more effective place, will 
 more fully equip him for his actual work in life? But, 
 however this highly debatable question may be solved in 
 the next half- century, the training of the average student for 
 the ordinary pastorate will remain one of the prime duties 
 of the theological school. 
 
 Yet even in the training of pastors some differentiation 
 of duties is already foreshadowed. It is becoming clear 
 that the rural parish, as distinguished from the urban com- 
 munity, or even from the small village, presents peculiar 
 problems of leadership. The sociological experience, so 
 valuable in certain portions of our cities, the economic 
 grounding and the special knowledge of trades unionism 
 and the relations of labor and capital that may be highly 
 useful in a factory village, is of little service here. It may be 
 too one-sided and technical a preparation that would insist, 
 as has recently been proposed in New England, that training 
 for the rural pastorate should include at least a year of study 
 in an agricultural college, or the agricultural department 
 of a state university; but what our farming communities 
 most need, at least in the East, is a leadership that can not 
 only witness to the gospel, but can organize the forces of 
 society for moral uplift, intellectual stimulus , and even clean 
 amusement. Some essential differentiation of the ordinary 
 curriculum of our schools is desirable for the equipment of 
 those consecrated young men, not a few, to whom the claims 
 of the distinctly rural church make insistent appeal. 
 
 Or, turn to a sharply contrasted field, our teeming cities. 
 Why should not the theological school of the future train 
 
 107 
 
;^c€ormicft Cfjeological ^rminarp 
 
 workers who design the devotion of their lives to their prob- 
 lems ? Is it enough that we give to candidates for the ministry 
 some knowledge of urban conditions among a mass of other 
 subjects of study ? The work of rescue, of social uplift, and 
 of city betterment has become a distinct form of service, 
 engrossing all the strength of those who enter seriously upon 
 it. It is one of the most Christ-like of occupations, yet one 
 most in danger of sHpping from the control of Christ's organ- 
 ized disciples by reason of their failure to train men and 
 women distinctly for this labor. One of the greatest perils 
 of our time is the substitution of a philanthropy satisfied 
 with better physical and intellectual conditions for that 
 ministry to the spirit which can alone make the material 
 and mental progress of abiding worth. Why should not 
 the seminary of the future train for social service those who 
 may never have ordaining hands laid upon them, but to 
 whom the Master may say as surely as to any in our time, 
 ''Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, my 
 brethen, ye have done it unto me" ? 
 
 A further ideal of the seminary of the future is to be 
 found, I believe, in the training of leaders in religious edu- 
 cation, who may or may not, like the social workers who have 
 just been mentioned, enter what we all too technically call 
 the "ministry, " but for whom an important field in Christian 
 service is making ever louder demand. Our churches are 
 awakening to the need of the teacher of religion as never 
 before. A just dissatisfaction with the pedagogical attain- 
 ments of our Sunday Schools widely exists. Our colleges and 
 universities, even those of state foundation and professedly 
 secular aim, are developing Bible study among their students 
 
 1 08 
 
€l)eologicaI €bucation 
 
 in amazing proportions. The teacher is needed, and is all too 
 seldom now to be found. What is demanded is not a few 
 hours in the principles of pedagogy added to an already bur- 
 dened pastoral course; but a direct attempt to meet a real 
 need, by the training of those who may give their entire 
 lives to become teachers of teachers, who may organize 
 and in some cases superintend our Sunday Schools, who may 
 foster Bible classes in our cities, and systematize with learn- 
 ing and efficiency the voluntary religious instruction in our 
 schools and colleges. If it is objected that such men could 
 not now find financial support, the speaker admits the justice 
 of the criticism; but he believes, such is the need of their 
 work, that if they could come to our churches with the 
 training that a seminary might give and with the knowledge 
 and skill that special preparation would supply, the financial 
 difficulty would be overcome. 
 
 To point out the desirability of a school of missionary 
 training for work abroad and among our foreign races in 
 the home land is to call attention to a need now generally 
 recognized, and fortunately in some measure met. Much 
 more adequate provision will, however, be made for such 
 training, it may be hoped, in the seminary of the future. 
 The Christian progress of our country, as well as the spread 
 of the Kingdom of God in fields beyond the sea, now opening 
 in marvelous fashion, is largely bound up with the answer 
 which the theological school of the next few years will give 
 to this demand to go forth and possess the land. A sacrifice 
 of our possibility of leadership in training here is the aban- 
 donment of our birthright. 
 
 Scarcely less imperative is it that the seminary of the next 
 
 109 
 
iWcCormicft €l^eological ^eminarp 
 
 fifty years shall make provision for the training of leaders 
 in the work of the Young Men's Christian Association. 
 That organization is becoming a mighty factor in the re- 
 ligious life of the United States and is rapidly extending its 
 efficient usefulness beyond the seas. The training of its 
 secretaries and of its leaders is a task of the utmost signifi- 
 cance for our Christian future. Too often the attitude of 
 our theological schools has been one of aloofness, as if the 
 work of the Christian Association, being undenominational, 
 was outside the proper interest of our churches. Sometimes 
 an unworthy fear has been expressed lest the ministry of 
 those churches should be imperiled in its supply by reason of 
 attraction to the service of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
 ciation of some of our men of consecration and ability. It 
 is high time that we of the theological seminaries should 
 awaken to the obligation of furnishing to these leaders of 
 outreaching Christianity an adequate training. Why should 
 we leave their instruction to other agencies, which, however 
 warm-hearted in their type of piety, fall far short of the in- 
 tellectual ideals which should characterize such service ? 
 To do so is to neglect a most important section of our proper 
 work in training the religious leaders of the generation, and 
 it is a neglect which reacts upon us not only in the loss of 
 sympathy for our own aims on the part of a forceful element 
 in the Christian community, but by narrowing unduly our 
 helpfulness to the needs of the time. 
 
 It was questioned, in speaking of preparation for the 
 average pastorate, whether some readjustment of the his- 
 toric emphases of the curriculum might not wisely be made. 
 Whatever diminution of weight laid on older subjects, which 
 were once the well-nigh exclusive subjects of study, might 
 
€l)eolo0ical <tBtiucatiDn 
 
 then result, would be more than balanced by the opportu- 
 nities which the theological seminary ought to offer to the man 
 intent upon and fitted for scholarly research. The seminary 
 will recognize that he is the exception; but for the reasons 
 that the Christian scholarship of our country so largely 
 looks to him for advancement, and from him the instructors 
 in our schools of ministerial training must be chiefly re- 
 cruited, he is an exceptional student whom the seminaries 
 cannot afford to neglect or ignore. They have not neglected 
 him in the past; but we may believe that, in ever increasing 
 measure, our theological schools will become centers of 
 productive scholarly research. Probably the preparation 
 for this work will be largely individual or, at most, in small 
 classes, for the men capable in high degree of answering to 
 the scholar's vocation will never be very numerous, in pro- 
 portion to the whole body under training for Christ-like 
 service in its many fields. The seminary must make large 
 place for them for the sake of its own life and for the cause 
 that it is set to advance. A church without scholarship, 
 in the lofty sense of that term, is like an army without trained 
 leadership, and not the least of the ideals of the seminary 
 must be to supply this high intellectual preparation in ever 
 fuller measure. 
 
 The picture which we have set before us of the ideals for 
 usefulness which should mark the theological seminary for 
 the next half -century is one, therefore, which demands great 
 enlargement of its present equipment, and what is more 
 vital, a broadening of its sense of duty for service to the 
 churches. The vision of the seminary of our hopes must 
 be one great enough to comprehend the needs of the age. 
 That seminary must strive to train for leadership, not in 
 
;:^c€ormtcfe €I)eological ^eminarp 
 
 any narrow conception of the Christian ministry, but wher- 
 ever leadership is demanded in our Christian fellowship. 
 Thus, and thus alone, can our schools of theology, as we 
 still call them, describing them by a fragment only of their 
 work, meet efifectively the demands of the years immediately 
 to come. They must be, in the broadest sense, schools of 
 Christian leadership. They must expand in their concep- 
 tion of their work at least as rapidly as the widening vision 
 of the church sees more clearly the breadth of its mission to 
 the world. That they have not enlarged their scope with 
 sufficient promptness in the past is, as has been pointed out, 
 a main cause of the criticism to which they are subjected, 
 and a reason why their usefulness, great as it is, is less than 
 it might have become. But, as one looks at the past, one 
 cannot but be optimistic as to the future. If our theological 
 seminaries have not done all they might, they have, never- 
 theless, done much. A comparison, for instance, of the 
 McCormick Seminary which took up its abode in Chicago 
 half a century ago with the institution which we honor to- 
 day shows an immense contrast. There is among them 
 evidence of life, of growth, of enlarging vision. May we 
 not rightfully trust that, under the divine guidance, our 
 seminaries will go forward in the coming half-century to 
 furnish that broad and general training for leadership in all 
 important departments of Christian usefulness which should 
 be theirs to offer and impart? And let us, whose lot has 
 been cast in their service, strive, as God gives us light and 
 opportunity, to make this vision of larger employment in 
 the advancing Kingdom, not a vision simply but an accom- 
 plished reality, not a hope merely but an achieved result. 
 
aiumni Conference 
 
 MINISTERIAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 The Seminary Chapel, Tuesday Afternoon, November Second, 
 Nineteen Hundred and Nine, at Three o'Clock. 
 
 ORDER OF EXERCISES 
 
 THE REV. HENRY WEBB JOHNSON, D. D. 
 
 South Bend 
 Presiding 
 
 Hymn. "O Grant Us Light." 
 
 Scripture Lesson The Rev. Selby F. Vance, D.D., 
 
 Lane Theological Seminary 
 
 I Timothy iv: 6-16 
 Prayer The Rev. J. B. Garritt, Ph. D., D. D., 
 
 Hanover College 
 
 Address The Rev. J. Ross Stevenson, D. D., 
 
 Baltimore 
 
 Music Seminary Double Quartette 
 
 Address The Rev. Edward Yates Hill, D. D., 
 
 Philadelphia 
 
 Hymn. "Fling Out the Banner." 
 
 Address. . . . The Rev. Charles L. Thompson, D. D., LL. D., 
 
 New York 
 
 Gloria. 
 
 Benediction The Rev. William C. Covert, D. D., 
 
 Chicago 
 113 
 
ittintjSterfal iLealierjsi^tp O^rougl^ 
 i^reacl^ing 
 
 BY THE REV. J. ROSS STEVENSON, D. D. 
 
 LEADING ministers have been, as a rule, effective 
 preachers. The ambassador of Christ has a gospel 
 to proclaim, and his commission carries in it the specific 
 command, "Preach the Word." Christ, our great Exam- 
 ple in the ministry of reconciliation, took for His first mes- 
 sianic text, " The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He 
 anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He has 
 sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of 
 sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to 
 proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." The apostles, 
 filled with the Holy Spirit, were so jealous of their mission 
 that they refused to serve tables, or to give themselves to 
 aught else save prayer and the ministry of the word. The 
 early church won its way throughout the Empire because it 
 was led by those who ceased not to declare the whole counsel 
 of God; and ever since that time, religion has advanced or 
 declined in direct proportion to the power or weakness of 
 preaching. The dark ages came on through the eclipse 
 of the pulpit. The Reformation was a return to the apos- 
 tolic evangel. The great evangelical movements were led by 
 those who had a gospel to proclaim, and recall the names of 
 Wesley, of Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, the Tennents, 
 Nettleton, Finney and Moody. Just as the Church of the 
 living God is the pillar and ground of the truth, without 
 
 IIS 
 
jmcCormicfe €l)coIogicaI ^eminatp 
 
 which, as one of the early Fathers pointed out, society would 
 fall and disintegrate, so "speaking the truth in love" is 
 necessary for the edifying of the church, till we all attain 
 unto the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son 
 of God. Preaching, then, we would maintain, is an essen- 
 tial function in ministerial leadership, and is the chief objec- 
 tive of seminary training. Self-evident as this may seem to 
 some, it is a conception of the ministry which needs to be re- 
 asserted and steadfastly maintained in our time, for several 
 reasons. 
 
 First, because of the disfavor into which preaching has 
 come, in certain quarters at least. We may see it in the 
 demand for short sermons, in the emphasis that is placed 
 upon the service, the other parts of public worship, in the 
 increase of ritual and in the decrease of church attendance. 
 We are told that preaching does not have the place it once 
 had, when the minister was the only educated man in the 
 community. The increase of intelligence, the multiplication 
 of good books, the wide-reaching service of the press, have 
 made pulpit discourse no longer a necessary means of edi- 
 fication. It must be conceded that the office of preacher no 
 longer has the special sanctity about it that it once had, 
 and that the minister cannot command a hearing simply 
 because he had had the conventional training, has gotten 
 his orders, and knows the pulpit dialect; and yet, after all 
 qualifications have been made, the preacher who can repre- 
 sent Christ, who has a gospel to proclaim, is more in demand 
 to-day than he has ever been. When Mr. Moody was once 
 asked whether the ministry was not over-crowded, he replied: 
 " It depends upon whether the men who are in the ministry 
 
 ii6 
 
3leatier^l)ip Cljrougl) ^teacfting 
 
 have been called of God to preach Christ. If they have, 
 there are not too many of them." No earnest Christian 
 man would doubt for a minute that there is a place for the 
 God-called, God-equipped preacher of grace or truth; but 
 even the world is waiting for such men, and is ready to give 
 them a respectable hearing. Prominent churches are search- 
 ing the country over, not for scholars, nor administrators, nor 
 writers, nor even pastors, but for men who can preach; and 
 when some voice that can speak with authority is raised, a 
 Beecher, a Brooks, or a Spurgeon, or a McLaren, when a 
 Morgan or a Jowett can be heard, multitudes say, " Now are 
 we all here present before God, to hear all things that are 
 commanded thee of God. " I believe that it can be shown that 
 a larger number of people are eager to hear good preaching 
 than has been true since apostolic days; and yet even pious 
 Christians discourage their sons from entering the ministry. 
 Ministers themselves are known to advise their sons to enter 
 some other profession, and the recent decline in the number 
 of candidates for this high calling can only be interpreted as 
 a depreciation of what was once regarded as the leading pro- 
 fession. Surely there is needed a campaign of education as 
 to the wisdom of God in ordaining that by the foolishness 
 of preaching men should be saved. 
 
 Again, insistence needs to be placed upon the importance 
 of preaching because of the present unparalleled hindrances 
 to pulpit efficiency. The very complexity of modern life 
 makes it increasingly difficult for busy men and women to 
 listen to a spiritual discourse. There never was a time when 
 people were apparently so busy as they are now, and there 
 is no country in which work is the tyrant that it is in America. 
 
 117 
 
iHcCotmicfe €ljeological ^eminarp 
 
 Our dominant characteristic, as Matthew Arnold once told 
 us, is the worship of machinery. The means of speedy com- 
 munication make us touch elbows with every man, rush 
 along with the crowd, and respond to the agitating spur, 
 "step Hvely. " The sanctity of the home has been broken 
 up, and all rest of spirit taken away by an atmosphere charged 
 with interests of worldly pleasure and ambition, and re- 
 sounding with the echoes of business talk and social gossip. 
 The Sabbath morning's holy calm is invaded by a colossal 
 edition of the daily paper, serving as a dead-weight to any 
 heavenly aspirations, and as a deterrent to church attendance 
 which the short and thin religious notices cannot overcome. 
 Those who are able to rise above the deadly influences of 
 secular pursuits and find their way into the sanctuary are 
 often so be-drugged with irreligious stimulants that there is 
 no place in their system for the spiritual tonic of the sermon. 
 "One-half hour to raise the dead in" makes the issues of 
 life and of eternity to hang upon the preacher and his message. 
 The situation is made all the more difficult by the fact that 
 the minister's own life has become immeasurably complex. 
 Modern ecclesiastical architecture has made over the pastor's 
 study into an office, with an administrative staff at hand 
 awaiting his orders; with call-bells and telephones reaching 
 in all directions, and, like the New Jerusalem, with gates on 
 every side which shut not day nor night. The organized 
 activities of the church have almost exhausted the alphabet 
 for appropriate initial names, and for each society the pastor 
 must be the god-father. The Laymen's Missionary Move- 
 ment, with its wonderful possibihties for good, has caused 
 many a pastor to look up and lift up his head in the assur- 
 
 ii8 
 
Iteatier^ftip €l)tougl) ^reacljing 
 
 ance that his redemption was drawing nigh; for let the men put 
 their shoulders to the wheel, and the chariot of Israel will get 
 such a push as will enable panting clergymen to slack their 
 pull and catch breath. But just as I came to this point in the 
 preparation of this paper, I received a message from a layman 
 who is arranging for the approaching Laymen's Missionary 
 Movement Convention to be held in Baltimore, and it ran 
 something like this. "The situation is critical. Men are 
 not enrolling because the ministers are not awake. If the 
 clergy can only be aroused, they may yet lead the forces on 
 to victory." And since every new organization may mean 
 an increased burden for the ministerial leader, one can sym- 
 pathize with Joseph Cook when he said, " Only one addition- 
 al organization is necessary, and that is an organization to 
 prevent further organizations." Besides the good which 
 the busy pastor would like to do himself, there is all the good 
 which other people want him to do; and the Macedonian 
 calls are fresh every morning, repeated at noon-day, and 
 new every evening. It is no wonder then that the sermon, 
 if not two of them, is crowded up into a small comer of the 
 week, so as to emerge on Sunday morning, a homely, starved, 
 miserably clad waif, concerning which the preacher can only 
 say in the language of Touchstone when he introduced his 
 rustic bride "an ill-favored thing, but mine own." And 
 then his people reward him by saying something like this, 
 ** Our minister is a good man, or a faithful pastor, or a splen- 
 did administrator, but if the truth must be told, he is not a 
 preacher." Blessed is he that overcometh! that limits 
 his work to the one thing needful, as Dr. Pusey advised Canon 
 Liddon to do at the beginning of his ministerial career. 
 
 119 
 
j^cCormicft €l)eoIogxcal ^cminarp 
 
 For, as Lord Acton once declared, "Mastery is acquired by 
 resolved limitation," and it is pulpit mastery that congre- 
 gations most desire. They will excuse many minor deficien- 
 cies in the man who knows how to preach; but if hungry 
 sheep look up and are not fed, ministerial leadership counts 
 for little. 
 
 Still more, there needs to be a new advocacy of preaching 
 because of the noble standard to which it is to conform. 
 Though to preach well a minister must do nothing else, 
 there is a vast deal which he must be and do and have in 
 order to fulfill his calling. To dwell upon this would only 
 be repeating the substance of what we have learned in this 
 institution, what is embodied in that prize book of homilet- 
 ical leadership, "The Ideal Ministry," and has been veri- 
 fied in our own experience. In the plea which Bishop Brent 
 has made for leadership in his course of lectures at Harvard, 
 holding this up as the goal of education, he lays down a 
 number of principles which apply with pecuhar force to the 
 preacher. For example, "A leader is one who goes before, 
 who keeps in advance of the crowd, but so influencing them 
 as to attach them to his ideal of selfhood. Obviously and 
 of necessity he is a social personage who has the power of 
 enabling other people to see what he sees, to feel what he 
 feels, to desire what he desires." This accords with the 
 priestly function of the preacher, who taken from among 
 men is appointed for men in things pertaining to God, who 
 can bear gently with the ignorant and the erring, for that 
 he himself is compassed with infirmity, and by reason thereof 
 is bound as for the people, so also for himself, to offer for 
 sins. This sympathetic element in the preacher's character, 
 
%tahtt$t^ip €l)rou0f) ^reacl)ing 
 
 this knowledge of, and identification with humanity, this 
 at-one-ment with his fellow men, this vital touch with life, 
 is a most comprehensive function, and is most essential for 
 the pulpit if the minister is to be anything more than a book- 
 worm, a dry-as-dust theologian, or a homiletical scarecrow; 
 and it is what the church is trying to get from our theological 
 seminaries, by way of training, when it demands, though 
 often most unintelligibly, a more practical discipline. Bishop 
 Brent also emphasizes in "Leadership" the power of fellow- 
 ship with the Divine, along with which can be put the power 
 of a blameless life; for President Wilson is right in maintaining 
 that the only profession which consists in being something 
 and does not consist in anything else is the ministry. I have 
 been in a position to learn a great deal about the ministry 
 of John Hall, that had in it such conspicuous marks of lead- 
 ership, and William M. Evarts explained it all when he said, 
 "The man behind the sermon is the secret of John Hall's 
 power." If the preacher is to be "the friend and helper of 
 those who would live in the Spirit," if he would convince 
 men that there is possible a life fed from no earthly source, 
 but having the power of God in it and related directly to the 
 unseen and eternal, he will be not only a man, but a man of 
 God, in touch with the other world, and revealing by his 
 whole spirit that the things if which he speaks in the pulpit 
 are tremendous realities. Any pulpit to-day is occupied by 
 a spiritual leader, and on that account well occupied, which 
 has in it a man who is full of grace and truth. These were 
 the two conspicuous qualities in the character and work of 
 the Lord and Master of us all, grace and truth; and of His 
 fulness must the preacher ever receive, if he is to represent 
 
Christ and be the spiritual leader of men. Full of grace, of 
 love to God and men which goes beyond conventional limits 
 and is not satisfied with average generosity; full of truth, a 
 sincere thinker, an honest speaker, able to draw the thing as 
 he sees it for the God of things as they are, a man of reality 
 whose representations conform always to fact, whose phrase- 
 ology does not go beyond his personal experience, such an 
 one as Cowper has so beautifully described: 
 
 "Simple, grave, sincere, 
 In doctrine uncorrupt, in language plain 
 And plain in manner, decent, solemn, chaste, 
 And natural of gesture, much impressed 
 Himself, as conscious of his awful charge. 
 And anxious mainly that the flock he feeds 
 May feel it too : affectionate in look 
 And tender in address, as well becomes 
 A messenger of grace to guilty men. 
 He stablishes the strong, restores the weak. 
 Reclaims the wanderer, binds the broken heart ; 
 And, armed himself in panoply complete. 
 Of heavenly temper, furnishes with arms 
 Bright as his own, and trains by every rule 
 Of holy discipHne to glorious war 
 The sacramental host of God's elect." 
 
 There never has been a time when such leaders were more 
 in demand. They are the kind which the honored patron 
 of this institution had in mind when he gave so freely of his 
 bounty for theological education; and as it has always been 
 the aim of our beloved Alma Mater to produce such serv- 
 ants of Jesus Christ, may we who are sons of the seminary 
 show that the faithful instruction we have received here has 
 not been in vain in the Lord. 
 
PLinimtial leatierjSl^fp 
 
 BY THE REV. EDWARD YATES HILL, D. D. 
 
 MINISTERIAL leadership must have its inspiration. 
 This is found in nothing more surely than in a vision 
 of the goal toward which ministers are to work: the trans- 
 formation of the world consciousness by the power of true 
 religion. It is an aggressive world campaign. The greatness 
 and comprehensiveness of the task as a whole lends dignity, 
 meaning and enthusiasm to every local phase of the enter- 
 prise. There can be no success in the whole unless there is 
 success in the parts. Every minister occupies a strategic 
 place in the great economy of our Lord touching the evan- 
 gelization of the world. 
 
 If the minister will so lead his church as to secure from 
 it the contribution it ought to make to the extension of the 
 kingdom of God he ought to know at the outset what de- 
 mands are upon him. First of all, he must be a frank, 
 courageous, manly man, absolutely real, commanding con- 
 fidence, a man who adores the character of God revealed in 
 Christ, consecrated to the work of developing true religious 
 life and thorough-going morality in the people. Further- 
 more, he must have strong mental fiber, sound judgment and 
 self-control, wide sympathies, keen insight and quick adapt- 
 abilities, if he will be efficient. 
 
 We may take it for granted, in this paper, that he has his 
 theological equipment, that he has thoroughly studied the 
 truth of God in its historical unfolding and, in the fight of 
 opposing theories, has come to sofid personal convictions. 
 
 123 
 
j^cCormtcfe €I)colDgicaI J^cminarp 
 
 But it is not enough that he has lying back in his mind 
 and heart these rich stores of thought and conviction. What 
 he knows must be known in the terms of to-day. "The 
 substance remains, the forms change and pass." His 
 theology, in reaHty, cannot be very new if it is true; but if it 
 is true, it will be continually new to him, that is, it will be 
 always in process of revitalization in his own spirit. His 
 growing soul and the changing world will mean deeper 
 insights and more precious values. But it is precisely the 
 forms in which the mind of to-day does its thinking which 
 must be respected if the modern practical man will not rebel 
 and turn away. There need be no fear that the modern 
 man created, as all others, in the image of God, belonging to 
 this human race holding within itself the Christ, will fail 
 to grasp (if only he can be made to pay attention) the great 
 realities when they are clearly, simply, earnestly presented 
 in the thought-forms of his time. 
 
 Moreover, and this I cannot emphasize too strongly, he 
 must know the life of to-day. It is upon people that he is 
 to bring to bear all his resources. The people, weary, 
 confused, visionless and wrong, call for the application to 
 their needs of all he is and knows. The plea> therefore, is 
 primal that ministerial leadership demands the most careful 
 and sympathetic study of man as he is to-day. He lives in a 
 new world. Fifty years ago it was first being entered. It 
 is a world thrilled with a passion for knowledge, insistent 
 upon facts, seeking laws and the control of powers; a world 
 reduced to a neighborhood, with huddled aggregations, close 
 intimacies, increasing interdependencies, bewildering com- 
 plexities; a world of new, economic, industrial and social 
 
 124 
 
I^ini^tetial 3leatier^l)ip 
 
 relations, with complicated ethics, and withal so much to be 
 thought about and done that, in the very moment when 
 science would make all clear and orderly, there is distressing 
 confusion and bewilderment. Moods created by the con- 
 ditions of life are having vast reactionary effect upon religious 
 belief. Ultimate and dominant ideas of life are being 
 conceived not in the processes of ordered thought but in the 
 enforced processes of life itself. Leaders must know their 
 times, the intellectual, temperamental, and dispositional 
 moods of their generation, the spirit of the present as both a 
 product and a tendency. They must know the social 
 psychology of the hour, the laws that govern changes in the 
 ideas and ideals of the people, where and why and under 
 what regulative thoughts and conditions the people move; 
 what the present involvement means to their conceptions of 
 God, religion, morality and the human soul itself. Unless 
 the minister can see clearly the moods and mental habits, 
 the ideals, the moral and spiritual reactions, the unrest, eager 
 inquisitiveness and cautious wariness which the new social 
 forces are producing, he cannot approach the current re- 
 ligious problems with adequate sympathy and intelligence. 
 This psychologic penetration of life in both its social and 
 individual aspects never was so necessary. Never was there 
 such need, if equipment is to be thorough, to know the laws 
 of human nature. And the demand in these exacting days 
 is for something more than a mere common sense regarding 
 life; it is for a clear, definite, conscious formulation of those 
 principles which have been experimentally and scientifically 
 ascertained as governing individual and social actions and 
 reactions in the moral and religious realms. 
 
 125 
 
jmcCotmitfe €I)eoIogical ^eminarp 
 
 Speaking generally, a minister has his leadership and 
 contributes his part toward the development of the kingdom 
 of God through the relation which he holds to the people of 
 his own church and the community. His power for good he 
 sways through them. His own community is the point of 
 appHcation of all he is and knows. If he fails there, he is a 
 failure indeed. He must discover the practical methods of 
 securing from the local church the contribution it ought to 
 make to the community. Let him solemnly bear in mind 
 that the church in our day, like every other institution, is 
 being called upon to prove its right to be by showing what 
 service it can render to the betterment of man, and that this 
 applies to his local church in its own field. 
 
 His question then is. How shall his church be admin- 
 istered, organized and nurtured so as to develop the individual 
 members and with them and through them influence effect- 
 ually the immediate environment. 
 
 First of all the minister should know his field scientifically, 
 have expert knowledge of the conditions and forces at work 
 within the territory, see what ought to be accomplished, and 
 how it may be accomplished. Unless he knows his material 
 that he is to work upon, the co-operative, charitable, correc- 
 tive, and educational agencies already existent, and the proc- 
 esses to be employed, how can he be effective? He needs 
 to know, as some one has said, the whole "anatomy, physiol- 
 ogy, pathology and materia medica" of the situation. In 
 spirit, aim and method his church should become, through 
 his leadership, pastoral to the community at large. 
 
 We cannot take too seriously our local obligations. The 
 immediate community is a world in itself. Professor Hal- 
 
 126 
 
j^ini^terial 3leatier^l)ip 
 
 sey, of Lake Forest, once said to me: "A small town is an 
 epitome of society and presents a laboratory in which there 
 is every element at work constituting the whole modern 
 social problem." Moreover, the immediate community has 
 enough needs, samples of world-wide conditions, offers 
 sufficient avenues of sympathy, to stir impulses impelling 
 that church into work of world-wide character. Indeed, 
 where you find the greatest needs around a church and an 
 honest effort to answer those needs you will find the most far- 
 reaching missionary desires. 
 
 Take, for example, the downtown church in the busi- 
 ness center or among the very poor. Plainly its mission is 
 to its own field almost exclusively. And yet so intimately 
 does such a church come into contact with human need and 
 so deep and self-denying is the consecration of those who 
 serve those needs, that the old down-town church is very 
 likely to show the finest spiritual and moral enthusiasm. 
 The immediate burdens so press upon its sympathies that 
 these sympathies overflow in responsiveness to those of like 
 needs in the ends of the earth. 
 
 It is all-important that the minister shall not only know 
 for himself but shall make very clear in the consciousness of 
 his own people what are his church's local obligations. It is 
 this lack of true definition of field which makes of many of 
 our suburban and residential churches very serious problems. 
 I boldly and confidently run counter to the prevailing notion 
 when I say that the problem of our downtown churches, even 
 as in many cases they must flee or die, is not so serious as 
 that of those other churches enjoying the prosperity of 
 growing numbers and increasing wealth, located where 
 
 127 
 
Pit€ctmith Cfjeological ^eminatp 
 
 there are no pressing needs at their own doors and where 
 an inadequate ministerial leadership has failed to define the 
 real community or the local obligations in large enough 
 terms. Such a church may indeed present a large missionary 
 budget but too often untranslatable into terms of personal 
 solicitude and self-sacrifice. It is in greatest danger from 
 its own comforts, congenialities, self-complacencies, and 
 narrow horizon. The minister with a true conception of that 
 to which he has been ordained, who leads in such a church, 
 must show that the parish really includes the factory, market, 
 office forces, and the whole vast region and complicated 
 problems where these toilers live. Yes, the parish includes 
 the surging center where the living is made as well as the 
 retired precincts of respectability where the enrolled com- 
 municants are quite sure they are at home. Save the 
 churches, surrounded by cultured and comfortable American 
 homes, to the New Testament ideal of service and the down- 
 town churches will neither flee nor die, but with adequate 
 equipment and growing powers will stand the guarantee of a 
 saved nation. 
 
 The ministerial leader must, of course, give his people 
 Christ's vision of a needy world. He must make them hear 
 the cry from Macedonia. But he will not be effective in 
 securing more than a mechanical cash response to those far- 
 away calls unless he has caused them vitally to interpret 
 distant need by that which is nearest. A church best serves 
 the nation and the world when it is most faithful to the work 
 which Hes at its own doors. Remote interests get their 
 impulse from those at hand. 
 
 The man in the ministry who will lead must be both the 
 
 128 
 
^ministerial %tahtt^f^tp 
 
 informing spirit of his churches organization and the guide 
 of its developing life. For the church is an organism. If a 
 church settles down to a fixed system of reactions to its 
 environment, what will it do if the environment changes? 
 If there is no informing spirit breathing into it the wisdom 
 and power of adaptation, surely it will die of stupidity and 
 atrophy. It is an accepted principle of science that the lack 
 of the capacity of adjustment means the extinction of any 
 species. A church must not only have power of quick 
 accommodation to meet the changing conditions in the 
 modern city, but it must also be able to conceive new ideal 
 conditions and have the resolution to make those ideal 
 conditions real. 
 
 Educators to-day have much to say on the subject of 
 arrested mental development. They tell us that all normal 
 consciousness is active through and through, and that where 
 there is not the appropriate action upon the occasion of any 
 condition presented to the mind, the signs of arrested develop- 
 ment have appeared. This argues that every impression 
 should have its appropriate expression. Now, the develop- 
 ment of a church is certainly arrested the very moment when 
 it gives a fragmentary or inadequate response to the impres- 
 sions it receives; when its motor is not equal to its sensory; 
 when, with the ability to serve and the needs presented and 
 the ways open, it lacks the will. 
 
 Moreover it is the expression of impression which does 
 most to educate. The child learns most by what he does 
 himself. Truth is made real and retained by the laboratory 
 method. We arrive at being by doing. A conviction dies out 
 of the soul and removes its stamp from the character unless 
 
 129 
 
0it€t}txmth €l^eolo0ical ^cminarp 
 
 that conviction is applied. Our ideals clarify and trans- 
 figure the consciousness as we practice them. And these 
 observations are pertinent to the church. Its communion 
 with God, its knowledge of Christ, its reality of faith must 
 be given concrete expression or the church will become ob- 
 livious of its own significance. People must experience 
 something more than impression and know their principles 
 in other forms than abstractions. A minister, by personal 
 magnetism and brilliant utterance, may be able to call to- 
 gether an aggregation of congenial minds; he will have a 
 congregation and he may, indeed, be a leader of forces 
 making for the higher life; but the very manner in which his 
 congregation melts away when he is gone shows that for 
 conserved power a minister must make more than impression. 
 He must call out the activities of his people. He must select, 
 develop, and enlist leaders, and, following the law of their 
 spontaneous interests, so group his parishioners that he will 
 have a symmetrical body with every needed organ answering 
 in function to all the demands upon his church. 
 
 We cannot overemphasize the importance of the social 
 life of the church — social life organized around specific 
 motives of service. The local church itself is a social group 
 whose organizing and sovereign thought is the extension of 
 the kingdom of God. It is held together by life forces. It 
 depends for its very existence upon the actual touch of life 
 to life, upon the action and reaction of soul touching soul. 
 No other power can preserve the unity and insure the growth 
 of the church except the vigorous movements of its own life, 
 quickened and informed by the life divine. No soul is 
 self-sufficient. Comparatively few in the average church 
 
 130 
 
^ministerial JleaDer^ljip 
 
 can be held and given something more than static energy 
 by the sole power of the pulpit. Few are so free from the 
 necessary mediation of the group that they can acquire such 
 spiritual independence and personal inspiration through 
 their own study and prayers as will insure their self-initiation 
 and self-dedication. This is not a weakness, that people 
 must be supported by fellowship and common interests. It 
 is the way we are born. Indeed, at the outset of life we 
 acquire personalness through our relations to others and it is 
 by our association with others that our personalness is 
 sustained and made strong. Hence the pastor, if he will 
 maintain growing life in his church, must see that, so far as 
 possible, every soul under his care receives and exerts its 
 own special and personal ministry. Every one must have 
 his religious nature kept healthy and strong by activity 
 through association. Moreover, the various groups must 
 be so harmoniously organized together that every part will 
 feel the greatness and dignity of the whole and the whole be 
 supported and strengthened by the help of every part. Our 
 religion is ethical and by that very fact social. If it have 
 inadequate social expression, the ethical will lapse; and 
 when the ethical lapses, religion becomes a very dry root 
 in a very dry ground. 
 
 The pastor has a very personal responsibility for any one 
 until that one has found his place in the life of the church 
 and of course he will still have his duty to that one; but when 
 the individual is receiving strength and imparting strength 
 through the great interrelation then the pastor may cease to 
 be anxious. Every soul in the church must have an im- 
 mediate, nourishing, developing relation to the general life 
 
 131 
 
j^cCormicfe Ct^eological ^eminarp 
 
 of the church mediated through special group intimacies 
 and activities. From its environment the life draws its 
 food. God is the ultimate environment of the Christian; 
 but, after all, God is known principally in terms of persons. 
 
 Perhaps the most important and crucial work in which 
 the minister is to be a leader is that of child development. 
 We will never change the mind of the world if we neglect 
 the children. Evangelize adults, for they are worth saving; 
 but, from the point of view of the enlargement of the kingdom 
 of God in the world, by all means the church must get hold 
 of the children. To neglect them, especially the adolescents 
 between the ages of thirteen and twenty, is church suicide. 
 It may be said soberly, considering the present state of 
 religious thought and experience, that religious education is 
 the first business of the church in this generation and, in the 
 interests of the most fruitful evangehsm, the minister should 
 be, first of all, an educator. 
 
 Happily, to-day sound pedagogical principles are finding 
 their way more and more into the Sunday School, so that it 
 is becoming a school in the strict sense. The study of the 
 psychology of childhood and youth has transformed the 
 educational theories within the last thirty years. We know 
 more of the course of progress from infancy to maturity 
 through the different epochs, and we have discovered that 
 each epoch has its own physical, mental, and spiritual 
 characteristics and aptitudes. Some of the finest Christian 
 work being done to-day is in this art of giving the child the 
 truth which the Bible reveals in the form which the child 
 can apprehend, of leading the child through such religious 
 practices as are appropriate to his stage of development, 
 
 132 
 
jmini^terial Heatieritfljip 
 
 and of gradually bringing the child through habits formed 
 to conscious principles, so that the whole process is natural 
 from instinct through growing intelligence on to the self- 
 enthronement of the largest spiritual ideas. Now, this is 
 both religious and scientific. While the minister may never 
 superintend a Sunday School or be a teacher therein, still 
 the religious and moral education of the children is surely a 
 field in which he ought to lead. Therefore, he ought to 
 know what constitutes good teaching and how to train 
 teachers for their work. He ought to be grounded in the 
 principles of education and the best methods conducive of 
 religious and moral development. He ought to know the 
 imfolding mental processes of normal childhood and youth; 
 what captures their attention, and the lines of their interests 
 which offer least resistance to the ideas to be inculcated. 
 He ought to know what is abnormal and morbid in the re- 
 ligious experience of childhood and be able to relate the 
 abnormal to its cause. He ought to know, above all things, 
 that children are the quickest to detect and rebound from 
 unreality and sham and that, therefore, the sooner we get 
 away from every conception and procedure which is not 
 vital, valuable, full of meaning and power, will we win them 
 for Christ and find them becoming the most dynamic ele- 
 ments for righteousness in the real life of the world. If the 
 minister can secure such teaching in whatever educational 
 associations may be in his church — such teaching as is 
 ruled by ideals of Christian character and sound knowledge 
 of the mental processes of the youth, the aim of which is that 
 spirit may awaken spirit — he can lead his young people; 
 and he can also, as in no other such effective way, do that 
 
 133 
 
j^cCotmtcft €l)eological ^cminarp 
 
 which is the strategic task of to-day, bring back religion as 
 a conscious and expressed factor in the American home. 
 Yes, the minister of to-day is an educator. He must 
 educate, that is, by the help of the Divine Spirit, draw out the 
 people's own spiritual capacities and guide them into the 
 service of God and man. And the minister must remember 
 that his function is not limited by the members of his own 
 church. He has a congregation half of which is gathered 
 from the community and the world at large. How shall he 
 be an educator in this miniature world which presents 
 possibly all the elements cosmopohtan? Besides, this 
 miniature world is itself an educator of the still wider world. 
 
 Thus 
 
 ''Our echoes roll from soul to soul 
 And grow forever and forever," 
 
 and every pastor is, after all, a world pastor. 
 
 To this larger world, so far as he touches it in ministerial 
 function, he must be the mediator of a "vision splendid" 
 which, alas, is sadly lacking in this generation. Granted 
 that he himself is thoroughly grounded in apologetics, 
 informed in the various philosophies of the universe, and 
 quite settled in his own theistic and Christian faith, it 
 certainly requires only an honest and close scrutiny of the 
 people to detect that, despite large aggregations of Christians, 
 multiplied thousands including many professed Christians 
 are living in the shadows. Limitations upon ministerial 
 leadership are imposed by this narrowness or cloudiness of 
 the religious consciousness of many people. They lack 
 and want an ultimate explanation of life. Inadequate is 
 their knowledge of God and they grope to find their own 
 
 134 
 
;|^ini.3^tertal Heatier^fttp 
 
 souls. They are so confused, bewildered, and abashed by 
 the multiplicity, variety, and diversity of current ideas and 
 experiences that they can arrive at no whole, no unity, no 
 life plan. This age with its specializations, divisions of 
 labor, narrowness of fields in which so many are compelled 
 to think and work, has closed in the horizon upon many 
 lives with a result that there are seen no heavens to explain 
 their earth; they have no comprehensive thought, no world 
 idea, no ultimate ethical interpretation. Manifestly, if the 
 people have no eyes for the invisible, no sense of the unseen 
 God; if all has been resolved into naturalism, or if intellectual 
 despair has resulted in the indifference of agnosticism; if the 
 religious nature has been dulled or atrophied by inactivity 
 and the conscience, bereft of any authority from above, 
 conforms only to custom or expediency; if the whole vast 
 realm where the soul ought to be at home has been narrowed 
 down so that there is every thought for the things of the world 
 and no thought for the things beyond mere sense, then, 
 indeed, the minister must arouse the dead. His must be 
 "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." By just so 
 much as the conditions of living make life a wilderness, by 
 so much is it difficult to awaken spiritual echoes in human 
 hearts. 
 
 Yet, be it acknowledged that no soul is altogether a 
 wilderness; for the same desire for unity which characterizes 
 the scientist and the philosopher is found, though perhaps 
 unconsciously resident, in the mind of the common man. 
 And it is the business of the minister to help him find how 
 his life is related to the vast whole, else the minister has failed 
 at the vital point of his mission. This common man must 
 
 135 
 
jHt€ormicft €l^eoIogtcal J>emxnarp 
 
 find his place in the unity of the thought and loving purpose 
 of God, a unity which includes him and all his fellows, and 
 which will comfort him, inspire him, and lift him into self- 
 respect and respect for persons as such, into a life of worship 
 and ethical enthusiasm. 
 
 The people must be brought to a vivid sense that the 
 only true interpretation of the world is in terms of spiritual 
 personality, that from personality come all things and unto 
 personahty return, that the highest good is not in the external, 
 material, and sensuous but in morality, truth, and beauty of 
 life, that they are off the line of their own true possibilities 
 and away from their course as immortal spirits capable of 
 endless development when they do not relate as subsidiary 
 and contributory to successful personality all employments 
 and concerns. They must know also that personality 
 realizes itself only in worthy social relations, that it lives, 
 moves, and has its being in society for the very reason that it 
 lives in God. The call is for a rediscovery of the personal 
 soul and the personal God. It is this new " Great Awaken- 
 ing" of the people to the fundamental reality of the thing 
 worth while, the great spiritual ultimate, the fact of God, His 
 thought and purpose, the vast glorious simplicity which 
 interprets and dignifies our complexities, putting meaning 
 and character into the dull and monotonous — it is this 
 quickening of vision power which will prosper the church 
 and guarantee ministerial leadership in the future. Minis- 
 terial leaders must here and now set themselves to throwing 
 open doors, lifting veils, banishing delusions, brushing away 
 clouds, correcting the deadly notions that life is explained in 
 the meagre terms of market, office, and street, or that skill, 
 
 136 
 
0ixm^tmal 3leaDer^I)ip 
 
 efficiency, and success in the arena of the world are all. 
 The people must see that these are only functions of the 
 larger unit, the greater organism, that the final meanings and 
 ends are spiritual and that nothing has found its place and 
 bearing until it is related with consecration to religious and 
 ethical ends. This is the very essence of the "simple life.'^ 
 
 Of course, I do not mean that ministers should turn 
 their attention exclusively to apologetic discussion, much less 
 to speculative disquisitions on the meanings of life, philo- 
 sophic performances above the heads of the people; but I 
 do mean that the call to-day from multitudes is to see life 
 clearly, wholly, and resolutely. They want the atmosphere 
 cleared; and, pray, to whom shall they look but to the 
 ministers of the gospel of Christ ? The minister is to mediate. 
 He is to stand between irrational and rational living, between 
 chaotic and orderly life, between man as groping, lost, and 
 weary, and man as bound for a goal, exultant in the con- 
 sciousness of sonship to God. The gospel of Christ, yea, 
 Christ himself, is the universal scheme opened, the character 
 of God set forth, man's place in the universe disclosed, his 
 eternal dignity and worth, his privileges and obligations, his 
 true ideals and powers to realize them unveiled, and this 
 gospel has its power conditioned by the Master in ministerial 
 leadership. 
 
 Now these thoughts, while heralded from the pulpit by 
 the open eyed man of God, have another heralding which 
 after all is the great interpretation and persuasion. It is the 
 life of the church that preaches. It is by what the minister, 
 with his own soul open to God for heavenly wisdom and 
 power, with all his knowledge, skill, and love, with all his 
 
 137 
 
;|^c€otmxcft Cftcological ^eminarp 
 
 influence in home, school, shop, club and wherever his vital 
 soul touches another soul — it is what the minister is and 
 does and what he causes his church to be and do that makes 
 his largest contribution to the spiritual view of life in our 
 day. 
 
 Notice some encouragements. The minister of to-day 
 is given such an opportunity for leadership both in his 
 immediate parish and the world parish, which he ultimately 
 serves, as perhaps has been unequaled in history. Honest, 
 thorough- going, moral enthusiasm will at last crown the Christ. 
 All that is required is the educative interpreter — some one 
 to show where is the home of ethical purpose and power. 
 The open eyed student of history knows that never were 
 moral demands more strenuous than to-day. Often de- 
 feated and disappointed, the people again and again insist 
 upon cleaner politics, more honest business, and higher 
 standards in social life. True, this revival in morals has 
 been to some extent the result of reaction, outrage at gross 
 and conspicuous wrongs, the sense of injustice and the 
 determination not to be robbed. True, also, a refined 
 selfishness may be detected in the great efforts toward 
 popular decency, for they are often inspired not because 
 right is right, nor because the moral order has been outraged 
 but rather because of fear for social safety, alarm at tendencies 
 dangerous to the prosperity and success of democracy. Still, 
 here is this ethical vision growing clearer and purer in motive 
 every day. Shall a scientific age, in a field of its own en- 
 thusiastic study and endeavor, be allowed to fail of its most 
 stupendous facts? Shall the morals of our people find no 
 deeper roots than the prudentials, expediencies, and safeties ? 
 
 138 
 
I^ini^tcrial Jleatier^ljip 
 
 It depends upon the religious leadership of the ministers. It 
 belongs to the minister to relate the coveted morals to their 
 religious sources. By all that he is, says, and does as an 
 educator of the people he must make the facts of the spiritual 
 world real. A certain vagueness as to the nature and 
 importance of religion must be dispelled, so that it becomes 
 more concrete, real and vital, answering a conscious need as 
 light answers the eye and as the implicit reason in the external 
 world answers the human mind. Here is where the minister 
 is most likely to break down, lose his authority and power, 
 in his inability to make the great connection. To be able 
 to make clear that God, the universe, and all human life 
 have their meanings set forth in Christ, and that true religion 
 is the binding of the soul to Him, that only in Him is a soul 
 true to the universal constitution, that Christ's is the mind 
 of God, that we must find out His mind and fellowship with 
 Him to have either the pattern or power of true morality — 
 to make this clear is the great achievement for which there 
 comes from every quarter a pathetic , voiceless cry. 
 
 "They talk of morals, O thou bleeding Lamb! 
 The true morality is love of Thee. " 
 
 Yes, in the new moral emphasis of to-day the minister 
 has a great opportunity, for since any special right or duty 
 radiates directly from the mind of God revealed in Christ, 
 it therefore blazes a path for intelligent leadership to bring 
 the soul dedicated to duty straight to its home in God. 
 Verily, the Spirit divine is not quiescent among our people, 
 for everywhere, through ethical quickening and by various 
 indirections, he is preparing the way for such popular 
 
 139 
 
jmcCotmicfe Cljeolofficai ^eminarp 
 
 rediscovery of the underlying religious foundations of life 
 as will bring on such a revival of faith as the world has not 
 seen. 
 
 Indeed, by various indirections God's spirit is working 
 out His purposes among our people. He whose parish in- 
 cludes or whose life is in close touch with the higher schools 
 of learning, appreciates, perhaps more than others, the signs 
 of hope. The great spiritual realities will soon come to 
 their own. Much progress in sound and thorough thinking 
 must yet be made. Ministers must have the vision. Our 
 thought must be thought through again in the Hght of current 
 moods, attitudes and needs. Let more books which, with 
 absolute honesty and candor, deal with the phenomena of 
 experience be written and read. For honest science may be 
 trusted not wilfully to overlook , and faithful philosophy not 
 finally to ignore, the facts. Hence the halt in a despairing 
 naturalism is but for the moment. Its accompanying crude 
 secularism must pass. The day will come when schools of 
 scientific research and technological training will, by their 
 very insistence upon thoroughness, lead into the Holy of 
 HoHes. The day will come when the university will mother 
 her boys into the school of theology. So one is this universe, 
 such a unity indeed it is, that at last the human mind, true 
 to itself, will not stop as it follows law and energy and the 
 upward leadings of the soul itself until it comes to the 
 thought, purpose and love of the personal God who " upholds, 
 sustains and orders all." Thus may we hope for great 
 things as in full recognition of God's own persuasions we 
 trust human rationality and the native belongings of our 
 human kind. 
 
 140 
 
;^imi^terial Iteatietr^ljip 
 
 Some have said that the church is decadent. It is not. 
 It is only struggling into new adjustments. If the church's 
 vitality seems below normal it is only because, as a mother, 
 so many lusty children of helpful ministry have been born 
 to her that they have taken her strength. Standing among 
 her own children's multifarious activities she is a little be- 
 wildered. It seems quite evident that in many quarters 
 members of the church have no adequate consciousness of 
 the special meaning of the church, what the church stands 
 for, the solid convictions upon which it rests, the principles 
 which give it unity and the life which is its power. Hence 
 we find many churches too far below the ideal. I omit the 
 many specific indictments which might be brought to the 
 shame of the modern church. They are blazed before the 
 public in every paper and magazine. Many are very unjust, 
 born of misunderstandings, misconceptions, and the father 
 of lies. Nevertheless, the minister, if he will lead, must cause 
 the vital and eternal meanings of the church to walk up full 
 faced in every aisle and into every pew until there is a full 
 realization of the significance of church membership. If 
 the minister will lead through his church then the church 
 must reflect his own consciousness of the spiritual life. 
 He must to a large degree mold the mind of his church, be 
 the utterance of that mind, and the church, in turn, must 
 become the continuance and enlargement of his prophetic 
 work. He is to deepen and enrich the life of his church; 
 and the clearer and profounder and more unanimous in 
 control become the sovereign conviction and motive of his 
 church, the richer and more luminous become his own soul 
 and its expression. Thus deep answers unto deep. The 
 
 141 
 
0it€otmxtk Clieologtcal ^feeminarp 
 
 correspondence of consecrated parishioners to consecrated 
 minister gives ministerial leadership through the church. 
 
 This great end is attained by constructive work. It 
 must be vital through and through. Not by machinery or 
 ingenius clap-trap methods, not by the seductiveness of any 
 species of sensationalism, not by fussy, impulsive, busy-body 
 procedures, not by striking at every new invention of criti- 
 sism, or hurling anathemas at every peripatetic philosopher 
 disseminating new views which were born of conceit, ignor- 
 ance, and oriental dreaming — by none of these devices 
 will he lead. 
 
 He will be effective if he shows no variableness or shadow 
 of turning from a loving, sympathetic, intelligent course of 
 constructive, educational, self-sacrificing ministry; con- 
 tributing always in all his work and relations to his people's 
 sense of God, to a life not merely having religion (as though 
 in some compartment in the soul) but religious through and 
 through, to dedication to the ideal because it is God-like, 
 to morals because expressive of God's will, to fellowship with 
 Christ because through Him we have our knowledge of the 
 character of God, the revelation of God's eternal heartache 
 of love for our humanity, and our salvation unto our fullest 
 possibilities. 
 
 Thus the minister will have his Christ-imposed privilege 
 of leadership, and the kingdom will continue to come in 
 power. His leadership will be through His church. The 
 realities for which the church stands will be so manifest, so 
 human, so divine, that they will be more widely noticed, then 
 considered, then embraced. Charges of insincerity will fail 
 because the sacred will interlock with the secular and be one. 
 
 142 
 
;iWini^terial 3lcaD0r^J)ip 
 
 Industrial, political, social honor will stand in enduring 
 reason. Morality will have both its enforcement and 
 fascination. Government will find its divine right. But it 
 all depends upon the minister's ability, through fellowship 
 with Christ, to make God real. It may require long time, 
 but since God is God and man is His child, the happy con- 
 summation will be reached. 
 
 143 
 
iHtnt0te]ctal Leatierisi^tp in jHiissiionjs 
 
 BY REV. CHARLES L. THOMPSON, D. D., LL. D. 
 
 AMONG the great pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, 
 the one that moves me most is that of Napoleon's Re- 
 treat from Moscow. On his white horse he is riding before 
 his generals. They follow in a loyal line. It is called a 
 " retreat "; but leadership cannot be obscured by the fortunes 
 of war. 
 
 Look at him: the pose of perfect command and the 
 eagle eye that looks into the future and sees victories. He 
 is still the great captain ! The most unobscurable thing is 
 leadership in any realm. 
 
 Carlyle says, " Universal history is at bottom the history 
 of great men, the leaders in human affairs." Before these 
 we all bow down. It does not matter essentially what is 
 the realm in which this leadership appears. The man who 
 can take a city, or write an epic, or head a reform, or quell 
 a mob, in any sphere, high or low, the leader, him will we 
 acclaim. 
 
 Still, nothing moves the world like leadership in a cause 
 worthy of the best powers. And at last there is only one 
 such cause. To evoke, to marshal, and to lead out the 
 higher life of man, this alone is supreme leadership. 
 
 If a man can summon into being the spiritual life of men 
 and convert it into spiritual force, and marshal that force 
 for the best ends of living, for making people and society 
 and nations better and nobler, this only is the victory worthy 
 
 145 
 
jmcCormicft Cftcological ^eminarp 
 
 of supremest striving. The man who can do this on a large 
 or a small scale, that man is a leader; on a large scale, lifting 
 humanity to higher levels by the fulcrum of some great re- 
 form (we will name him Martin Luther or William Wilber- 
 force) ; on a small scale, in a shut-in community, some hum- 
 ble minister who will point to heaven and lead the way, he 
 too in the highest view is a leader of men. 
 
 Because the energies of the ministry have the sweep of 
 time and eternity it affords the finest chance for leadership. 
 It is the greatest work in the world whether you estimate 
 by its accomplishments or its ideals. Its accomplishments: 
 It has renewed the face of the earth. It has led most of the 
 great reforms and has been the indirect agent in the spread 
 of civilization. What it does in the spiritual realm we cannot 
 measure. Eternity curtains that secret. But what it has 
 done to brighten this dark world and lift it to better levels, 
 he who runs may read. 
 
 At the close of a service two years ago in which President 
 Roosevelt was a participant, he came forward in his enthu- 
 siastic way and said, " We can get on with protective tariff 
 or without it, with this theory of internal revenue or that, 
 but we cannot get on without the things for which you have 
 been pleading. " 
 
 And it is true. The message of the humblest minister 
 of Christ is the one on which the fate of ages hangs. And 
 its ideals : there is only one persistent ideal for the children 
 of men. It is the ideal of the higher life. 
 
 The cathedral in Europe that impresses me most is that 
 at Cologne. It is the one that through the toils of six cen- 
 turies was finished according to the architect's sublime con- 
 
 146 
 
3leabet^l)ip in ^Wim^ 
 
 ception. Generation after generation took up the work and 
 carried it forward under the inspiration of the one ideal. 
 
 So, the kingdom of God on earth. We have seen the 
 pattern on the mount. Age after age takes up the theme. 
 From leader to leader the thought passes on, and every hand 
 that has lifted one stone and set it toward the pinnacle is a 
 leader in a cause that, like a great cathedral, overshadows 
 every other. 
 
 I am a minister saying these things about the leadership 
 of the ministry. But my words are not without confirmation 
 from other realms of thought. Our philosophy confesses 
 that only the spiritual interests of men are worth the best 
 efforts. Our science, that once was supposed to have no 
 vision beyond its own horizon, is now pressing inquiring 
 eyes against the great curtain, and even fancies it can see 
 shadowy movements behind it. Our psychology is no longer 
 content to be time-bounded. William James moves tremu- 
 lous hands toward the shadows and thinks he has felt the 
 clasp of another hand. 
 
 The most utilitarian man of affairs sometimes hears that 
 
 " . . . . Solemn murmur in the soul 
 That tells of worlds to be, 
 As travelers hear the billows roll 
 Before they reach the sea." 
 
 By all these converging testimonies from every realm of 
 thought and action, it is true beyond all doubting that the 
 ministry has the message that gives chance for the highest 
 leadership on earth. I do not except other great spheres 
 of leadership, because they all come to their best as they 
 touch this one. 
 
 147 
 
;^cCormitft Cfjeolosicai ^eminarp 
 
 Thus education : One of our great educators has recently 
 said it finds its completion only in the spiritual interests of 
 man. 
 
 Thus the forum : One of the high officials of our govern- 
 ment said to me the other day, "We talk of morahty in 
 national affairs; there is no morality without religion." 
 
 Thus literature: Every great epic, every great drama, 
 is built on the religious base. 
 
 Not only does work for these highest interests of man 
 give a chance for leadership, it demands it. Christianity 
 is not a theory. It is essentially life, and life means action. 
 And for action the one requisite is leadership. Heaven saw 
 it when God sent forth His Son. It had been easy to en- 
 grave high doctrines on stone and hand them down, great 
 feelings to throb in human souls, but it had been all in vain. 
 If men must march to moral victory on fields of action there 
 must be a human leader to incarnate doctrine and show how 
 emotions can work. 
 
 So Jesus came. A great thinker? Yes. A great 
 teacher? Yes. A great lover of mankind? Yes. But 
 I more than sum it all up when I say, He is the Captain of 
 our salvation. How men follow him. *' A little deeper and 
 you will find the Emperor, " said the dying soldier of Napo- 
 leon's guard when the surgeon was probing above his heart 
 for the bullet. So men everywhere enshrine our Leader and 
 follow Him to death. If we were more like Him how easy 
 would be our leadership of men ! 
 
 In a sense ministerial leadership becomes more difficult. 
 The rising levels of humanity make it so. 
 
 148 
 
1teatiet.30?|)ip in ^Wion^ 
 
 Kipling in that great poem, "McAndrew's Hymn," 
 sings the power of steam thus: 
 
 " We're creepin' on wi' each new rig, less weight and larger power. 
 There'll be the loco-boiler next and thirty knots an hour; 
 Thirty and more, — what I hae seen since ocean steam began 
 Leaves me no doot for the machine, — but what aboot the man?'* 
 
 That is the final question of our civilization, that mighty 
 and complicated engine. 
 
 Indeed, every high calling these days calls for large men, 
 men not only with capacity for thought and feeling, but men 
 whose thought and feeling have been trained to service. It 
 is a truism to say, we are living in a tense key, have hold of 
 live wires. In state and church, only men who have nerve 
 enough to hold steady to their tasks amid high excitements 
 and fierce distractions will keep their place. 
 
 I am told when an engineer fails on a few successive runs 
 to bring the Twentieth Century Limited in on time, he is 
 taken off and put on a slower train, the company judging 
 that his nerves are no longer firm enough to keep the throttle 
 wide open and bear the strain. I said this to a friend re- 
 cently who had become somewhat discouraged, who replied, 
 "That is my case. I cannot bring my 'limited' in on time. 
 I ought to be retired." 
 
 This, especially for leaders in the upper realms of life 
 and action, this is the day of a great chance and a great 
 obligation. The road is smoothed to many a fine goal. 
 The signals are set for a clear track. But, ''What aboot the 
 man?" "The occasion should evoke the man," do you 
 say ? Somewhat, yes. Did the Civil War bring us Lincoln ? 
 
 149 
 
j^cCotmicb Cfjeological ^eminarp 
 
 But Lincoln did not spring out of the earth. All the way 
 from the Kentucky cabin Lincoln was marching to his final 
 chance. 
 
 A great occasion has come for ministerial leadership. 
 I note the signs of it in the world's unrest. Materialism, 
 the darling of many thinkers of a generation ago, is flung 
 to the rubbish pile. It fails at the point where the soul's 
 challenge comes in. 
 
 Intellectuality in any form has been found wanting. 
 And men are not only calling for something that will take 
 hold on their souls, grip and hold them to their dreams, to the 
 prophecies of their better selves, they are demanding an 
 incarnation. 
 
 These things must appear as Christ showed them, in 
 flesh and blood, in a voice that can thrill, in tears that can 
 fall, in a real human march. There is an awakening among 
 nations. Dry bones are stirring and bone is coming to his 
 bone. All the valleys of human life wait for a captain. 
 When he speaks the march will begin. 
 
 They are building no new heathen temples. The heathen 
 in the gateways of crumbling temples are waiting for a new 
 voice. Not of commerce, many of them have plenty of that. 
 Not of government, they are fairly satisfied with their own. 
 There is only one explanation of the unrest of nations. It 
 is veiled under many names. At bottom it is the dawning 
 consciousness of an old life that must be throttled and a new 
 life that is possible. 
 
 I am expected to say something about leadership in 
 missions. Broadly speaking there is no other ministerial 
 leadership. Missions is the only calling of the ministry. 
 
 150 
 
3leatier^l)ip in :^i^^ion^ 
 
 But in the broadening of spheres of Christian work the word 
 "missions" has a specific meaning. And it is specially 
 suggestive of leadership. A missionary is one who is sent. 
 It presumes a field of action. It suggests conquest. In 
 missionary work leadership rises to its highest value, has its 
 grandest chance. 
 
 If a young man has an ambition for scholarship, let 
 him stay under the shadow of the university. If he longs 
 for leisure for self-culture that may appear in productive 
 literature, let him be a country parson; but if he has a calling 
 to be a leader of men, let him hear and heed the Mace- 
 donian cry. And for two chief reasons. 
 
 I. Missionary work appeals to and develops the capacity 
 for leadership. It is mainly in the realm of action. It 
 is a summons to lead individuals, communities, nations, out 
 of their present life into another, off their present level to 
 another. It is a call to renunciation and surrender. 
 
 If the mission be to a pagan people who are worshiping 
 stocks and stones, it is an assertion of the claims of the in- 
 visible God and a call to desert the old ways and follow the 
 leader in paths of righteousness and peace. It calls for 
 decision and obedience. 
 
 It has in its urgency and its imperatives a military tone. 
 When Pizarro's soldiers, who were being led to the conquest 
 of Peru, were on the point of revolt on account of the hard- 
 ships before them, the great captain with a sword drew a 
 line in the sand on the shore and said, "On this side is 
 ease and pleasure and home and — disgrace; on the other 
 is toil and danger and — glory. " Then stepping across the 
 line he cried, "I choose the latter; let who is worthy follow 
 
 151 
 
Pic€ot\mtk €l)eological ^eminarp 
 
 me." And the hesitating line swung forward and began 
 the march for glory. 
 
 To some such decision the missionary leader has a chance 
 to call men, whose hesitation is often gloriously ended by 
 leadership. Fields like Korea have in recent days shown 
 what a spirit of advance will do, how magnetic and controlling 
 it becomes. 
 
 This is only saying that in a peculiar measure the best 
 missionary work is evangelistic. How many useful min- 
 isters there are in cultured home communities who think 
 their positions give them little chance for a forward march. 
 They indoctrinate intelligent audiences; they shepherd 
 peaceful and docile flocks; but Christian mihtarism is not 
 within sight. They never have a day of decision, for the 
 flocks are all sheep; there are no goats to appeal to. They 
 never organize a campaign for aggressive service, for there 
 is not an enemy in sight. So they mark time, pleasantly, 
 beautifully, but not gloriously. 
 
 How perfectly the Seventh and the Seventy-first New York 
 regiments marched down Fifth Avenue at the Hudson- 
 Fulton parade. There was stirring music too. It really 
 looked as if there might be a fight somewhere. But at the 
 Washington Arch they broke ranks and went home. Noth- 
 ing had happened. 
 
 There is a good deal of church campaigning like that 
 parade. Columns that keep step, a proper ecclesiastic 
 uniform, and music by a highly paid quartette. But nothing 
 special happens. 
 
 But this is not on the mission field. I was shown a 
 picture the other day of the last religious encampment of 
 
3leatier^l)ip in J^i^^ion^ 
 
 the Christian Sioux, two thousand strong. They had come 
 thirty, forty, fifty miles to be at the annual review, to get the 
 leader's fresh note, and then to go back, not to inaction but 
 to daily service in often hard conditions, and for missionary 
 work which for liberahty is not matched on Fifth or Mich- 
 igan Avenue. 
 
 I think as I read apostoHc history that the genius of the 
 ministry is leadership. Paul was a great theologian before 
 he was a Christian. His conversion made him a leader. 
 Thenceforth, even to Nero's block, his call was "Follow 
 me as I follow Christ." With that call from Antioch to 
 Rome he swung men into lines of service. If the young men 
 of to-day knew their opportunity they would see that mission- 
 ary service will put them closest to the footsteps of Paul, and 
 will develop, better than any other work, the capacity for 
 Christian leadership. You cannot put a man on a battle 
 field without quickening any battle-pulse there is in his 
 blood. And the mission field to-day is not only the picket 
 line, it is the critical battle field of the whole Christian 
 campaign. 
 
 I do not think the great stake is in our great capitals, or 
 our well-ordered communities. You would have thought 
 during the Civil War that Richmond was the place for the 
 decisive battle. That is where the capitol was. But no, the 
 great battle was in the wilderness. 
 
 I do not minimize the importance of the great centers 
 of people and of commerce, nor the great value of living for 
 Christ in those centers. I am thinking now of many dis- 
 tinguished men who have been leaders in metropolitan 
 pulpits. 
 
 153 
 
l^cCormicft Cfjeological ^eminarp 
 
 But I know one little captain who in the far reach of his 
 life has outstripped them all. When Sheldon Jackson, with 
 the vision of a prophet and the heart of an apostle, blazed 
 a path for Christian conquest from the Mississippi to the 
 Pacific, and from Puget Sound to Alaska, he not only dis- 
 played capacity for leadership not surpassed in recent days, 
 but headed such an army of missionary advance as has not 
 been marshaled smce apostolic times. 
 
 The best way for a young man to find out whether he 
 has in him any capacity for leadership is to go into mission 
 work. It may never dawn on him in the church on the 
 avenue, the church whose momentum carries him along. 
 He may even fancy as he rides on that current that he is 
 inspiring and directing it. He may live and die without know- 
 ing that he is the man of circumstances. 
 
 But let him go where there are no religious circumstances 
 save as he originates them, where he must make the current 
 if there is to be one, and he will discover the measure of 
 himself. 
 
 A few years ago I called one of our missionaries from 
 Puget Sound to the East to present the missionary appeal 
 to churches. After he had been speaking for some time I 
 asked him one day how he was getting on. With a face 
 that was childlike and bland he replied, "I don't know." 
 
 I asked, "Why don't you know? What I am trying to 
 find out is whether the audiences you address are interested 
 in your appeal." 
 
 Again came the same reply, "I don't know," and after 
 a moment's meditation he added, "The people down east 
 are so civilized they just sit still; out west if they do not like 
 
 154 
 
%tahtt^U9 in i^i^^ion^ 
 
 it they get up and go home. There it is easy to find out 
 whether they like it or not. " 
 
 What a post-graduate course a genuine mission field 
 affords. How soon a man will find himself, who, in some 
 privilege-sheltered nook of established ordinances might 
 have lived all his days in a fool's paradise. 
 
 If, instead of waiting for a call, our young men would 
 issue a call, whether on the Columbia, or the Amazon, or 
 the Hoang-Ho, issue a call so trumpet tongued that men must 
 hear, how the theological gewgaws would fall away and 
 the firstlies and secondlies and finallies would fly out of the 
 window, and only the man — the man, leader or failure 
 among men — would stand out alone; crowned or humil- 
 iated, but anyhow clear and final to himself and to others. 
 
 Much missionary work is just now in very responsive fields. 
 It is often said there is less response to the ministry than for- 
 merly. Church decadence is a favorite magazine topic. We 
 are even told the world has outgrown the need for the minis- 
 try. Science, philosophy and psychology take its place. 
 The Sunday paper is a strong competitor of the pulpit. 
 We are told metropolitan churches have a hard time. Crit- 
 icism now takes the place of response. The intellectual 
 level of the congregation has overflowed the pulpit platform. 
 
 I do not think these strictures are very true. The hunger 
 of the heart for God still remains. And it asserts itself. Per- 
 haps not quite in the old ways, but psychic circles, spiritual 
 manifestations, mind cure, and Christian Science are the 
 ways of a new fanaticism by which the claim of the eternal 
 finds strange expression. 
 
 But none of these strictures hold on the mission field. 
 
 155 
 
j^cCormtcft Cfjeological ^cminarp 
 
 There at least the old, old story, which in all ages has made 
 the romance of missions, keeps its charm. 
 
 You will note the signs of it in the awakening of nations. 
 As a man half-awake cannot locate himself, so these waking 
 peoples cannot utter their longing, do not even know what 
 it means. But it is the cry of the human to be led out, out 
 of their darkness and doubt, somewhither, they know not 
 where. 
 
 You can hear it in the slumberous throes of the Chinese 
 giant; in the sharp inquiries of the Japanese Yankee; in the 
 rebellious attitude of India; even in the blind gropings of 
 Africa. 
 
 You remember the story of Stanley's march through the 
 black forest of Africa, how long and dark and desperate was 
 the way. And when a shaft of light told them they were 
 coming into sunshine the natives fell down and kissed the 
 ground where the blessed daylight fell. 
 
 The nations are on their faces to kiss the shaft that tells 
 of an end to their night. And they are calling, not for a 
 church nor a cult, but a leader. 
 
 And nearer home the response is the same. Any sky 
 pilot in the West, who is such in fact, will not fail of a fol- 
 lowing. And even in the turbulence of our great popula- 
 tion, seething, swaying in moral and economic unrest and 
 protest, a real leader they will obey. 
 
 When the tidings of Lincoln's assassination brought a 
 whirlwind of half-crazed people surging down Wall Street, 
 Garfield, from the steps of the custom-house, cried out with 
 uplifted hands, "God reigns and the Government is safe." 
 Then the surging mob fell to quiet. 
 
 156 
 
Heatier^Ijip in J^i^^ton^ 
 
 I know dangers threaten where maelstroms of passion 
 whirl unthinking multitudes around, but I know also the 
 strong man with a mighty message can still control. 
 
 This, then, is the call of the hour, in our great capitals, 
 in our new communities, among alien races, at home or 
 abroad, "Give us men, God's men, with God's message, 
 and courage to march on." The distinctive gospel designa- 
 tion of Christians is "followers." That suggests move- 
 ment and a leader at the head of the column. The invis- 
 ible Leader will not fail to lead on if His deputies on earth 
 take their proper place. 
 
 All the world loves a leader, loves and will follow. This 
 is the day of a great campaign for Jesus Christ. It is the 
 opportunity for ministers who dare to lead on. 
 
 " Bring those colors back to the line, " said the officer to 
 the color-bearer who had rushed far ahead. 
 
 " Bring up the line to the colors, " was the heroic response. 
 
 The line will follow if the standard bearer dares. 
 
 157 
 
f fjStorfcal Celebmtion 1S29-1909 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, TUESDAY EVENING, 
 NOVEMBER SECOND, NINETEEN HUNDRED 
 AND NINE 
 
 ORDER OF EXERCISES 
 
 THE REV. JAMES M. BARKLEY, 
 
 Moderator of the General Assembly 
 Presiding 
 
 D. D. 
 
 Processional 
 
 Organ 
 
 Hymn 
 
 The Church's one Foundation, 
 
 Is Jesus Christ her Lord ; 
 She is His new creation 
 
 By water and the word: 
 From heaven He came and sought her 
 
 To be His holy Bride; 
 With His own blood He bought her, 
 
 And for her life He died. 
 
 Elect from every nation, 
 
 Yet one o'er all the earth. 
 Her charter of salvation 
 
 One Lord, one faith, one birth ; 
 One holy Name she blesses, 
 
 Partakes one holy food, 
 And to one hope she presses 
 
 With every grace endued. 
 159 
 
jKcCojcmtcft Ctjeologicai ^eminarp 
 
 Though with a scornful wonder 
 
 Men see her sore oppressed, 
 By schisms rent asunder, 
 
 By heresies distressed. 
 Yet saints their watch are keeping. 
 
 Their cry goes up, "How long?" 
 And soon the night of weeping 
 
 Shall be the morn of song. 
 
 'Mid toil and tribulation, 
 
 And tumult of her war, 
 She waits the consummation 
 
 Of peace for evermore ; 
 Till with the vision glorious 
 
 Her longing eyes are blest, 
 And the great Church victorious 
 
 Shall be the Church at rest. 
 
 Scripture Lesson Isaiah Ix 
 
 President James A. Kelso, Ph. D., D. D., 
 
 Western Theological Seminary 
 
 The Favorite Hymn of Cyrus H. McCormick 
 
 SEMINARY DOUBLE QUARTETTE 
 
 O Thou, in whose presence my soul takes delight. 
 
 On whom in affliction I call. 
 My comfort by day, and my song in the night. 
 
 My hope, my salvation, my all. 
 
 Where dost Thou, dear Shepherd, resort with Thy sheep. 
 
 To feed them in pastures of love ? 
 Say, why in the valley of death should I weep. 
 
 Or alone in this wilderness rove ? 
 
 O why should I wander an alien from Thee, 
 
 Or cry in the desert for bread? 
 Thy foes will rejoice when my sorrow they see, 
 
 And smile at the tears I have shed. 
 i6o 
 
J^i^totical Celefiration 
 
 He looks! and ten thousands of angels rejoice, 
 
 And myriads wait for His word ; 
 He speaks! and eternity, filled with His voice, 
 
 Re-echoes the praise of the Lord. 
 
 Prayer . . Professor Robert Dick Wilson, Ph. D., D. D., 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary 
 
 Anthem, "Sanctus" Gounod 
 
 SEMINARY DOUBLE QUARTETTE 
 
 Address. . . President Woodrow Wilson, Ph. D., LL. D. 
 
 Princeton University 
 
 "The Ministry and The Individual." 
 
 McCoRMiCK Seminary Hymn 
 
 1. We praise thee, Old McCormick fair; 
 
 Thy glorious record bright 
 Inspires our hearts and quickens hope 
 To energy and might. 
 
 Refrain 
 
 O may thy men be men of God, 
 
 With armor fitted on. 
 Ready to fight both fire and sword, 
 
 As princes heaven born. 
 
 2. Thy name is known in many lands, 
 
 Thy prestige is secure. 
 For forth from thee in years now past 
 Have gone youth brave and pure. — Ref. 
 
 3. Thy standards have been high and true, 
 
 Thy preceptors upright. 
 Thy guiding star hath been the Word 
 Illumined by The Light. — Ref. 
 
 161 
 
0it€ntmith €f)eDlogxcal J>eminarp 
 
 4. Kindled with fire that came from God, 
 
 Whose incense fills thy halls, 
 Thy sons have gone like beacons bright 
 To shine where'er He calls. — Ref. 
 
 5. Accept this tribute that we bring, 
 
 Accept, O God, our prayers. 
 And justify our largest hopes 
 
 In lifting this world's cares. — Ref. 
 
 C. L. Oglivie, '09 
 
 Benediction. . . . President Matthew B. Lowrie, D. D., 
 
 Omaha Theological Seminary 
 
 Recessional 
 
 . Organ 
 
 162 
 
Cl^e ^inimv anti ti^e 3!nti(t(tiual 
 
 BY PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON, Ph. D., LL. D. 
 
 MR. CHAIRMAN, ladies and gentlemen: I feel that 
 it is a privilege and a responsibility to bring this 
 interesting program to a close, particularly when I know 
 how simple the message I bring to you will turn out to be. 
 
 It seems singular that each generation should ask itself 
 for what purpose the gospel had come into the world, and 
 yet it is necessary, if we would understand our own purposes, 
 that we should ask ourselves in our own generation that 
 fundamental question. No doubt Christianity came into 
 the world to save the world. We are privileged to live in 
 the midst of many manifestations of the great service that 
 Christianity does to society, to the world that now is. All 
 of the finest things that have made history illustrious seem 
 to have proceeded from the spirit of Christ. All those things 
 which distinguish modern civilization are things which it 
 has derived from the spirit of the church, which, when it 
 has remembered Christ, has reminded the world of the 
 ideals according to which it should serve mankind, should 
 serve all the ends for which men live together; and in our 
 own day in particular there are a great many notable move- 
 ments afoot which are manifestly touched — at their root, 
 at any rate — with the spirit of Christ. 
 
 But Christianity did not come into the world merely to 
 save the world, merely to set crooked things straight, merely 
 to purify social motives, merely to elevate the program ac- 
 
 163 
 
0it€otmith Cfjeologxcal ^eminarp 
 
 cording to which we live, merely to put new illuminations 
 into the plans we form for the regeneration of the life we are 
 living now. The end and object of Christianity is the in- 
 dividual, and the individual is the vehicle of Christianity. 
 There can be no other vehicle; no organization is in any 
 proper sense Christian; no organization can be said itself 
 to love the person and example of Christ. No organization 
 can hold itself in that personal relationship to the Saviour 
 in which the individual must hold himself if he would be in- 
 deed one who lives according to the Christian precepts. 
 
 You know what the distinguishing characteristic of mod- 
 em society is, that it has submerged the individual as much as 
 that is possible. In economic society particularly we see men 
 organized in great societies and corporations and organic 
 groups, in which each individual member feels that his own 
 conscience is pooled and subordinated, and in co-operating 
 with which men, as you know, constantly excuse themselves 
 from the exercise of their own independent judgment in 
 matters of conscience. The great danger of our own day, 
 as it seems to me, is that men will compound their conscien- 
 tious scruples on the ground that they are not free to move 
 independently; that they are simply parts of a great whole, 
 and that they must move with that whole, whether they 
 wish to or not. For they say, " The penalty will be that we 
 shall be absolutely crushed." The organization must dic- 
 tate to us, if we be members of a corporation; if we be mem- 
 bers of a union, the union; if we be members of a society of 
 whatever kind, the program of the society must dominate 
 us. It was easy in a simpler age to apply morals to in- 
 dividual conduct, because individuals acted separately and 
 
 164 
 
€l^e pimmv ^nti tt^t ^Fntiibibual 
 
 by a private and individual choice, but we have not adjusted 
 our morals to the present organization of society; and what- 
 ever you may say in general terms with regard to the ob- 
 ligation of the individual to exercise his own conscience, 
 you will find yourself very much put to it if a friend comes 
 to you with an individual problem of conduct and asks 
 you how in the circumstances you think he ought to act. 
 
 It sometimes seems like a choice between breaking up 
 the program of the organization and subordinating your 
 own conscience. I have had men tell me who were in the 
 profession to which I was originally bred — the profession of 
 the law — that it is extremely dilEficult to thread their way 
 amidst a thousand complicated difficulties in giving advice 
 to the great bodies of men whom they are called upon to 
 advise, and to discriminate between what is legally safe and 
 what is morally justifiable. 
 
 It is in this age that the preacher must preach. The 
 preacher must find the individual and enable the individual 
 to find himself, and in order to do that he must understand 
 and thread the intricacies or modem society. 
 
 It was my privilege to speak upon a similar occasion 
 to this, not many months ago, and there to take as my theme 
 the necessity the minister is under to enable the individual 
 to find himself amid the intricacies of modem thought. This 
 is an age of obscured counsel about many fundamental 
 things, and the average individual cannot unassisted know 
 his place in the spiritual order of the universe as it is now in- 
 terpreted by multitudinous and differing voices. The min- 
 ister has the very difficult and responsible task of enabling the 
 individual to find himself amidst modem thought. This 
 
 165 
 
i^cCormxcft Cf^eological ^eminatp 
 
 evening I must call your attention to the fact that it is also 
 his business to enable the individual to find himself amid 
 modem action. There are daily choices to be made, and 
 the individual must make them at the risk of the integrity 
 of his own soul. He must understand that he cannot shift 
 the responsibility upon the organization. The minister 
 must address himself to him as his counselor and friend 
 and spiritual companion; they must take counsel together 
 how a man is to live with uplifted head and pure conscience 
 in our own complicated age, not allowing the crowd to run 
 away with or over him. 
 
 You know that the law has shirked this duty. Sooner 
 or later the duty must be faced. The law tries nowadays 
 to deal with men in groups and companies, to punish them 
 as corporate wholes. It is an idle undertaking. It never 
 will be successfully accomplished. The only responsibility 
 to which human society has ever responded or ever will 
 respond, is the responsibility of the individual. The law 
 must find the individual in the modern corporation and 
 apply its demands and its punishments to him if we are to 
 check any of the vital abuses which now trouble the world 
 of business. You may pile fines never so high in the public 
 treasury, and corporations will still continue to do things 
 that they ought not to do, unless you check them by taking 
 hold of the individuals who are ultimately responsible for 
 their policy. While the law waits to find this out, the min- 
 ister cannot wait. He must attempt and must accomplish 
 what the law declines, for men are dying every day. They 
 are going to their long reckoning. They cannot wait for 
 the law to find the way of the gospel. The minister 
 
 i66 
 
 I 
 
€1)0 piinmtv an^ t^e ^Pntiibitiual 
 
 must be present with them while they live, and comfort them 
 when they die, and reassure them of the standards of their 
 conduct. 
 
 Every great age of the world of which I have ever heard 
 was an age not characterized chiefly by co-operative effort, 
 but characterized chiefly by the initiative of the indomita- 
 ble individual. You cannot give any age distinction by 
 the things that everybody does. Each age derives its dis- 
 tinction from the things that individuals choose to be singu- 
 lar in doing of their own choice. Every turning point in 
 the history of mankind has been pivoted upon the choice 
 of an individual, when some spirit that would not be domi- 
 nated stood stiff in its independence and said: "I go this 
 way. Let any man go another way who pleases. " 
 
 We die separately. We do not die by corporations. We 
 do not die by societies. We do not withdraw into our closets 
 by companies. Every man has to live with himself privately 
 — and it is a most uncomfortable life. He has to remember 
 what he did during the day, the things that he yielded to, 
 the points that he compromised, the things that he shrugged 
 his shoulders at and let go by when he knew that he ought to 
 have uttered a protest and stood stiff in declining to co- 
 operate. And this lonely dying is the confession of our 
 consciousness that we are individually and separately and 
 personally related to the ideals which we pursue, and to the 
 persons to whom we should stand loyal. Corporations do not 
 and cannot love Christ. Some individuals that compose 
 them do, but those individuals do not love him truly who co- 
 operate in doing the things that those associated with them 
 do that are inconsistent with the law of Christ. 
 
 167 
 
i^c€ormicft €l^eolagical ^eminatp 
 
 I have heard a great deal of preaching, and I have heard 
 most of it with respect ; but I have heard a great deal of it 
 with disappointment, because I felt that it had nothing to 
 do with me. So many preachers whom I hear use the gospel 
 in order to expound some of the difficulties of modern thought, 
 but only now and again does a minister direct upon me per- 
 sonally the raking fire of examination, which consists in 
 taking out of the Scriptures individual, concrete examples 
 of men situated as I suppose myself to be situated, and search- 
 ing me with the question, " How are you individually measur- 
 ing up to the standard which in Holy Writ we know to have 
 been exacted of this man and that?" 
 
 I am one of those who remember with a great deal of 
 admiration the work of that extraordinary man, Mr. Moody. 
 He was not a learned man, as you know, and the doctrine 
 that he preached was always doctrine which seemed to have 
 inevitably something personal to do with you if you were in 
 the audience. Whenever I came into contact with Mr. 
 Moody I got the impression that he was coming separately 
 into contact with one person at a time. I remember once 
 that I was in a very plebeian place. I was in a barber shop, 
 lying in a chair, and I was presently aware that a personality 
 had entered the room. A man came quietly in upon the 
 same errand that I had come in on, and sat in the chair 
 next to me. Every word that he uttered, though it was not 
 in the least didactic, showed a personal and vital interest in 
 the man who was serving him. Before I got through with 
 what was being done to me I was aware that I had attended 
 an evangehcal service, because Mr. Moody was in the next 
 chair. I purposely lingered in the room after he left and 
 
 i68 
 
€l)e JWini^trp anli tl)e ^Fnliibitiual 
 
 noted the singular effect his visit had upon the barbers in that 
 shop. They talked in undertones. They did not know his 
 name. They did not know who had been there, but they 
 knew that something had elevated their thought. I left 
 the place as I should have left a place of worship. Mr. 
 Moody always sought and found the individual, and that 
 is the particular thing which the minister must do. 
 
 As I see the opportunity of the church, it is to assist in 
 bringing in another great age. Ministers are not going to 
 assist very much in solving the social problems of the time, 
 as such. Their attitude toward the social problems of the 
 time is always supposed to be a professional attitude, and they 
 are not of as much assistance in that matter as the average 
 serious-minded layman is. But the opportunity of the 
 church is to call in tones that cannot be mistaken to every 
 individual to think of his own place in the world and his own 
 responsibility, and to resist the temptations of his particular 
 life in such ways that if he be central to anything the whole 
 world will feel the thrill of the fact that there is one immov- 
 able thing in it, a moral principle embodied in a particular 
 man. 
 
 This is an age of conformity. It is an age when every- 
 body goes about seeking to say what everybody else is saying. 
 Winds of opinion creep through the country. Formulas 
 are repeated with all sorts of dexterity in their mere vari- 
 ation. Men have caught the gregarious habit of con- 
 science as well as of mind, and you will l&nd that nothiiig 
 heartens an audience in a modern age more than to hear an 
 individual, whether he has anything new to say or not, get 
 up and say something that he really means, singly and by 
 
 169 
 
;^c€0tmicft €ljeDlogicaI J^cmtnarp 
 
 himself, without the least care whether anybody else thinks 
 it and means it or not. A friend of mine who was of such a 
 sort was congratulated for his courage in speaking the things 
 that he really thought. He said: "Why, I am not aware of 
 any courage. It would take courage to do the other thing. 
 If I said the things I did not mean, I would say very contra- 
 dictory things at different times; I would get all tied up, and 
 I should not know how to get out. " The only way to avoid 
 that is by echoing everything else that everybody else says. 
 There was a cynical saying of Dean Swift's, "If you wish to 
 be considered a man of sense, always agree with the person 
 with whom you are conversing." That is a very modem, 
 and also, I dare say, a very ancient way of gaining a reputation 
 of being a man of sense. But it is practiced at the peril of 
 your soul, which is a consideration worth thinking of. 
 
 I have often preached in my political utterances the 
 doctrine of expediency, and I am an unabashed disciple of 
 that doctrine. What I mean to say is, you cannot carry the 
 world forward as fast as a few select individuals think. The 
 individuals who have the vigor to lead must content them- 
 selves with a slackened pace and go only so fast as they can 
 be followed. They must not be impracticable. They 
 must not be impossible. They must not insist upon getting 
 at once what they know they cannot get. But that is not 
 inconsistent with their telling the world in very plain terms 
 whither it is bound and what the ultimate and complete 
 truth of the matter, as it seems to them, is. You cannot 
 make any progress unless you know whither you are bound. 
 The question is not of pace. That is a matter of expediency, 
 not of direction; that is not a matter of principle. Where 
 
 170 
 
the individual should be indomitable is in the choice of di- 
 rection, saying: "I will not bow down to the golden calf of 
 fashion. I will not bow down to the weak habit of pursuing 
 everything that is popular, everything that belongs to the so- 
 ciety to which I belong. I will insist on telling that socie- 
 ty, if I think it so, that in certain fundamental principles it 
 is wrong; but I won't be fool enough to insist that it adopt 
 my program at once for putting it right." What I do in- 
 sist upon is, speaking the full truth to it and never letting 
 it forget the truth; speaking the truth again and again and 
 again with every variation of the theme, until men will wake 
 some morning and the theme will sound familiar, and they 
 will say, "Well, after all, is it not so?" That is what 
 I mean by the indomitable individual. Not the defiant 
 individual, not the impracticable individual, but the individ- 
 ual who does try, and cannot be ashamed, and cannot be 
 silenced; who tries to observe the fair manner of just speech 
 but who will not hold his tongue. 
 
 That is the duty of the preacher. I have noticed that 
 there is one sort of preaching in simple congregations and 
 sometimes a different sort of preaching in congregations that 
 are not simple. Now there cannot be two gospels. There 
 cannot be two ways in which individuals shall save them- 
 selves. And the minister ought to see to it that with infinite 
 gentleness, but with absolute fearlessness, every man is 
 made to conform to the standards which are set up in the 
 gospel, even though it cost him his reputation, even though 
 it cost him his friends, even though it cost him his Hfe. 
 Then will come that moral awakening which we have been 
 so long predicting, and for which we have so long waited; 
 
 171 
 
;|^c€ormicft Cfteological .^cminarp 
 
 that rejuvenation of morals which comes when morals are 
 a fresh and personal and individual thing for every man and 
 woman in every community; when the church will seem, 
 not like an organization for the propagation of doctrine, 
 but like an organization made up of individuals every one 
 of whom is vital in the processes of life. 
 
 I remember attending recently a missionary conference 
 in which we were all heartened with the plans that were 
 being formed for bringing all the denominations in the mis- 
 sionary field together in a common effort. After all the 
 speeches had been made and we had dispersed and I was 
 going home in the night, I thought: "This is a very beau- 
 tiful thing that is about to happen in the mission field. But 
 I hope that after it has happened there the people who are 
 being evangelized will not come here and see us, because I 
 should not like to have them think we could do that thing 
 away from home and could not do it at home. I should 
 not like to have them think that we are divided in our Chris- 
 tianity where we live and maintain the civilization of a Chris- 
 tian nation, and are united only among those upon whom 
 we look with a certain condescension, as if they could not 
 understand our difi'erences of doctrine, and therefore they 
 were not worthy the explanation." It is, I suppose, a high 
 intellectual plane upon which we think that we Hve, but we 
 do not live upon intellectual planes at all; we live upon 
 emotional planes; we live upon planes of resolution and not 
 upon planes of doctrine, if I may put it so. And the reason 
 that we differ so is that we hold ourselves too far above the 
 practical levels of life and are constantly forgetting that the 
 whole vitality of Christianity consists not in its texts, but in 
 
 172 
 
€1)0 0ixni^ttp anb tl^e ^fntiibiDual 
 
 their translation; not in the things that we set up as the ab- 
 stract standard, but in the actions which we originate as the 
 concrete examples. 
 
 You will see, therefore, that there is a sense in which the 
 minister is set against modern society. Modern society is 
 collectivist. It says " Unite. " The minister must say : " Not 
 so. You can unite for certain temporal purposes, but you 
 cannot merge your souls; and Christianity, come what may, 
 must be fundamentally and forever individualistic." For 
 my part, I do not see any promise of vitality either in the 
 church or in society except upon the true basis of individual- 
 ism. A nation is strong in proportion to the variety of its 
 originative strength, and that is in proportion to the vitality 
 of its individuals. It is rich in direct proportion to the 
 independence of the souls of which it is made up. And so 
 every promising scheme that unites us must still be illumi- 
 nated and checked and offset by those eternal principles 
 of individual responsibility which are repeated not only in 
 the gospel but in human nature, in physical nature. 
 
 You have loved some person very dearly. You have 
 tried to merge your individuality with that person, and you 
 have never succeeded. There is no person linked spirit- 
 ually so closely to you that you can share his individuality 
 or he can share yours. And this inexorable law, physical 
 and spiritual, is the law which must be the guiding fact for 
 the minister of the gospel. He must preach Christianity to 
 men, not to society. He must preach salvation to the indi- 
 vidual, for it is only one by one that we can love, and love is 
 the law of life. And the only person living through whom 
 we shall love is our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. 
 
 173 
 
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