i8 77 ] THEOLOGY AND THE CHURCH 335 



active part among the technically instructed members 

 of the higher courts, is looking forward to a life-work for 

 which the first and most indispensable qualification is a 

 sound and thorough knowledge of theology. A minister 

 who is not a theologian may be a useful man in his parish 

 in the way in which an influential private Christian or a 

 good ruling elder is useful, but it is wholly impossible that 

 he can do well that work for which the Church places him 

 in ministerial office. 



The failure will be most striking and inevitable in the 

 pulpit, though perhaps it is just in the pulpit that such 

 men most readily imagine themselves strong. Many, it is 

 to be feared, go forward to the ministry with the convic 

 tion that the necessary conditions of effective pulpit 

 work are not at all theological, but consist merely in 

 personal earnestness, combined with certain powers of 

 vigorous expression and a measure of literary culture. 

 It is thought that a congregation must be interested by 

 good expression and literary grace, in order that so they 

 may be edified by sympathy with the expression of the 

 minister s faith. And so plausible does this view appear 

 to many that it is more than hinted that the ideal 

 divinity hall would be half a prayer-meeting and half a 

 school of rhetoric and style. But, in truth, rhetorical or 

 literary culture has just the same value to a minister as 

 to any other public man. Purely literary interest is 

 wholly out of place in the pulpit, when it ceases to stand in 

 direct subordination to the devotional aim of the service. 

 It is no merit in a sermon that it is attractive to those who 

 have not come together with the single motive of common 

 edification in joint worship. But the man who, when his 

 words are stripped of literary varnish, has nothing to offer 

 for the people s edification but sympathy with his own 

 faith, is not fit to be a minister. It is the Bible which is 

 the true manual of a catholic religious life ; and the Bible, 

 not interpreted by that personal experience which only 

 culls stray flowers from its pages, but set forth through 



