WITH the recurrence of the graduation season there is an annual revival of anxiety on the part of the religious press over the prospects of the new crop of young clergymen. There are too many pastors without flocks, we are told, and too many flocks without pastors, because the right man cannot be found for one place or the right place for another man. Some of the commentators ascribe the trouble to the growing unpopularity of the ministry as a calling, and point to the shrinkage in the rolls of some of the well-known theological seminaries. They say that the more gifted of the college graduates prefer the law or medicine, trade or finance, because of its larger pecuniary rewards, or, in the case of young men of independent means, its greater scope and opportunity for influence. The lament is almost universal that the male contingent is dropping out of the congregations, and that the hold of the church upon its women is precariously maintained through appeals to the emotions; and much earnest argument has been put forth to show that a young man of force and spirit would rather cast his life-work where it will bring him into closer relations with his own sex.

Here and there an effort has been made to check the defection by various devices. Sensational preaching from startling texts or with pictorial and other visible illustrations; lectures in costume; odd uses of music; advertising novelties, which would put the patent-medicine men to the blush: these are familiar to all dwellers in cities. We

have seen, too, the institutional church and the family club, with their classes in cookery and music, their gymnasiums and libraries, their billiard-tables and bowling-alleys, their private theatres, their dancing-halls and their supper-rooms. The idea behind these was to do away with the old recognition of a religious quality inherent in one thing and a secular quality in another, by sanctifying all the common occupations and amusements of ordinary life. But the scent of immemorial distinctions still clings to the new establishment; and, though the modern expression of practical Christianity may be a vast improvement upon the ancient worship of the fetish Doctrine, it does not seem quite to have accomplished what it set out to do.

Call it an institution, or a club, or whatever else you will, the centre of activity remains a church; a church presupposes a pastor; and the pastor is assumed to supply the human inspiration and direction of the movement. It is he who must put all these media of ecclesiastical energy to some beneficial use; keep the interest of the young stirred; counsel with the elders; make things move, and move in lines helpful to the moral and spiritual uplifting of the community. If the new mechanism fails, the failure is pretty sure to be attributed to the inefficiency of the engineer. Well, what is the matter with him? It would be hard, in most cases, to say. The farewell words of the English bishop to the rector who was about to remove to another diocese come

often to the mind: 'I am sorry to see you leave, for I have never heard anything against you in all the years you have been here.'

There are so many good, earnest, unselfish men in the ministry who work hard, yet fail to make more than this negative impression, that one is moved to inquire whether the fault, since obviously it lies not in their disposition or conduct, is not due to their training. The journals, both religious and secular, which deal with ecclesiastical questions, evidently regard this as probable, for from time to time we read their plaints that something is out of joint in the prevailing system of education for the ministry; but their criticisms are for the most part general and non-constructive, and hence are unsatisfying to those who are seeking, not reasons to cavil, but a remedy.

Doubtless, if we go deep enough into the core of the question, we shall find that the diminished influence of the man in the pulpit over the men who ought to be in the pews is due to more than one cause, but that all causes radiate from the fact that there is no point of sympathetic contact between the two parties. We are beginning to real ize a corresponding lack in some other domains. In a Boston newspaper the other day my eye was arrested by the title of a report of an address by Dr. David Snedden: 'Learner from Active Life That Is What Man Must Be Who Teaches Those Who Are to Go Out Into the World.' The reference was to the college instructor. Is there not here a hint for the clerical profession as well?

Let us see how a young man comes to take up the ministry. Nearly every lad who can spare the four years required for a college course is expected, while still an undergraduate, inexperienced and immature, to select his vocation. If he decides to be a manufac

turer, and has a sound adviser at his elbow, he goes first into the shops and studies the rudiments of the work done there. He may not become an expert weaver or a skilled wielder of the sledge, but from intimate association with the men at the loom or in the boiler-pit he learns what they are doing and the difficulties with which they have to cope every day; and when the time arrives for him to mount a seat of authority he is prepared to pass something better than an outsider's judgment on the questions brought before him.

If he turns to the law or medicine the same principle holds good. As clerk in an attorney's office, he digs out the material for his employer's briefs, prepares simple pleadings and deeds, goes to court and acquires a certain familiarity with the processes of litigation, meets and matches wits with both clients and adversaries. In short, he absorbs a pretty fair knowledge of the tools and the men he must handle later in life, and, in nine cases out of ten, does this before he has laid hold of the theory of the law as set forth in the standard texts. The young man who wishes to be a physician has the clinic and the hospital in which to cultivate a real acquaintance with his materia humana while he is still conning his materia medica.

But your budding theologian has no such advantages. Even his choice of a church affiliation is probably governed by tradition rather than by a judicial comparison of the several creeds and systems of discipline. His father may be a Presbyterian or his mother a Methodist, or he may have himself been baptized and confirmed as a member of one of the apostolic communions. In the absence of some such influence at home, it may be that a religious revival sweeping over his college has caught him in its current. It is always possible, more

over, that it is the pulpit rather than the parish which has attracted him to the ministerial office, especially if he has already won some applause in literary composition and elocution.

His transfer from college to theological seminary is not an entry into the larger world, but a passage from the academic atmosphere to the closer one of the cloister. The years he spends at the seminary are apt to be given largely to closet study and devotional exercise; and when he emerges to take his place, not as a learner of men but as a teacher of them, he is about as well fitted for his task as a high-school graduate in book-keeping would be if suddenly placed in charge of a bank. Only then begins the education which is to be of any substantial value to him; and the procedure involves as much of razing of old ideals as of upbuilding on new foundations. When he tries to fraternize with the men of his parish, he finds his efforts handicapped by his ignorance of their sphere of thought and their ignorance of his. It is almost as if he were unable to speak their language. The most he can do in appealing to their moral instincts is to follow the lines laid down in his books or in the oral lectures to which he has listened in the class-room; in the great school of life he has never matriculated, whereas they have had its lessons so hammered into them that his shafts of eloquence strike only a hardened surface and drop off instead of lodging anywhere.

The hours he passes in his library now are not likely to be spent as the follower of a profane calling spends his, in preparing to reach and influence the men of his own generation; but we need not disparage his reading of 'good' books in order to suggest the practical wisdom of mixing with these a few which are distinctly worldly, if only for their stimulating effect

upon his treatment of the topics of the day. If we glance over the short but distinguished roster of public teachers who have left their mark on the records of their time, we are struck with the fact that they drew their lessons, not from antique or hypothetical sources, but from history then in the making under the very eyes of their followers.

The distinctive phraseology of the pulpit, the professional dress and manner, also, are too commonly impediments to the progress of the minister in the affectionate regard of the men of his flock. The military officer wears his uniform only on occasions of ceremony. The soldier of the cross' who, in mingling with the male members of his congregation, is anxious to penetrate their armor of reserve only for the sake of finding his way into their hearts, surely has no use for formality in this intercourse. Why, then, should he not be simply a man among men, discarding both the air and the vocabulary exclusively associated with his profession, just as the lawyer in the drawing-room avoids technical verbiage and the physician wears to dinner a coat free from the odor of drugs?

It may be asked how we are to change the training of our clergy so as to bring the church into more genial relations with the world. One way would be to establish a probationary period, in which the test of the candidate should be not his handling of a pulpit theme or his success in raising a missionary fund, but his broader adaptability. And why should not this ordeal precede, rather than follow, most of his seminary course? Let him, for example, be assigned to a small parish as assistant to the settled minister. There let him enter some ordinary calling, and pursue it through the whole term of his novitiate. It matters little what it may be, so that it brings him into touching elbows, either as partner or as compe