science, the general education of all classes, the broad diffusion of knowledge of every kind, making what used to be the peculiar knowledge of the learned a common possession in every Christian community, a special and thorough training of the ministry in institutions distinctly devoted to the service, is an admitted necessity. For the responsibilities of the legal and medical professions a distinctive training is conceded to be essential, and high-grade professional schools are everywhere provided. In many places the State interposes to lift the training to the thoroughness demanded by the great interests involved and the general good to be secured. The Church of Christ, which, when true to itself, has always been the patron of learning, and is divinely commissioned to the high function of teaching in the range of the great truths which sum up all truth, surely needs for her teachers a training that shall place them in the front rank of the scholarly classes. The method adopted in the establishment of theological schools or faculties meets the true conception of the work. It has, in the main, answered the aims of the good and wise men who originated it. Taking young men of approved piety, after they have had their faculties disciplined into capability and power by a college or academic education, and adding the higher course of studies and discipline suited to the special and superlative work belonging to the holy ministry, it has proved to be unquestionable power for the Church.

Conceding, however, that the general method is the true one for the age in which we are acting, and, so far as we can see, likely to be the true one for the Church's future, it is nevertheless felt that we have not yet been able to operate the method so as to obtain its best results, or all that the Church's work makes desirable. The practical part falls short of the ideal.

1. One such shortcoming must be noted in the failure to maintain the full standard of thoroughness which the method contemplates. Often, neither in breadth nor in depth, has the education given equaled the ideal set forth in the adopted course of studies. It is often made too technical. Although this training is known as "professional," the ministry is one of the last places in the world in which the narrowness which professional courses often stand for ought to be permitted to appear. Dr. Van Dyke has, indeed, reminded us that the skeptical opinion of a decline of the power of the Church and the pulpit is utterly unsustained: yet it remains true, that the pulpit can maintain its right power and proper commanding influence only as it maintains a thoroughness of scholarship and culture that will compare well with the best learning in other educated callings. We need not, indeed, accept the exaggerated picture of the demand which the present age makes upon the ministry, painted by President Eliot, of Harvard, in the Princeton Review of May, 1883. That picture is drawn on the conception of the pagan priesthood. Still there is a call for advance

in the thoroughness of clerical education. It is exceedingly damaging when opposers of the Church and Christianity can, with any show of justice, allege that ministers have a training which keeps them in a narrow professional rut, while the great fields of scholarship, science and discovery lie outside of their knowledge.

We cannot, therefore, accept Dr. Curry's idea, that "the average minister of the Gospel need not possess what is properly called scholarship." It is true that he is practically a man of “ one book," and that for the substance of his preaching he does not necessarily draw from the remoter knowledge of the schools. But, if he has the true spirit, the largeness and richness of his mental stores, the vigor of his developed scholarship will not make the "one book " less to him, or diminish his power to expound it with clearness and effect; while the fact of his scholarly attainments will go far to secure respectful hearing and deter the common readiness to discount what he preaches as the truth of Christ. While a few of the theological seminaries may have kept their standard of entrance and work in pretty close agreement with their theory, it is unquestionable that in many seminaries all over the country there has been a failure to maintain the true ideal grade. In view of the pressing need of ministers, or, perhaps, from an undue desire for a large number of students, institutions are betrayed into too easy admission of candidates. Ecclesiastical bodies, too, have sometimes ordained without insisting on the standard thoroughness of training. The result has been, that in some places and some connections the "average minister" is not up to the average of scholarly authority and efficiency needed, or desirable, in those who occupy the pulpits of the Church of Christ.

2. For the same reason we cannot approve of the multiplication of special schools for the training of men whose preparatory or academic education has been inferior to that of a college course, or of such as in advanced years come to feel themselves called to the ministry. Such a school is Mr. Spurgeon's. Such Mr. Moody seeks to establish; others are set up in various relations. Not that this class of persons should be altogether debarred from the ministry. We do not dissent from the views which have been already presented in this symposium, in favor of encouraging and admitting such. Sometimes they possess special talent and fine adaptations for usefulness which enable them, without the best education, to achieve, under God's blessing, careers of high and gladdening service in this office. Some of the shining stars in the right hand of the Son of Man have been found in these the truest "angels of the churches." And there will probably always be room for the labor of all the deserving candidates of these classes.

But the suggestion of Dr. Duryea seems to us to present the right method to give these the advantage of the instruction provided in

the regular theological seminaries. It is, indeed, objected that the curriculum in these is graded so high as to be beyond the attained capacity for reception and profit on the part of such students. But this is a small difficulty to be allowed to weigh against the evil of giving them a course lowered to their alleged inferior capacity. At any rate, the objection is based on a thorough misconception of the instruction in the seminaries, and of the temper, disposition, earnestness and good sense of the instructors. It is likely that their experience and thorough scholarship-if they are fit for their places— would be as able as others to make the truth plain to this class of students. It is likely that they would be as ready to do so as the instructors in these special schools. And if, in doing so, they should drop some of the old technicalities, or put their explanations into common speech, it would not at all hurt the rest of the students, or prove a damage to the success of the instruction. And the students who have only the inferior academic preparation would have some compensation in this enjoyment of the best and full theological course, stimulated and uplifted by its high grade, and helped by their association and study with those whose advantages have made them most capable.

3. The seclusion in which our theological education is carried on not unfrequently educates away from sympathy with the common practical life of men. Most of the students enter from the college, where many of them began their studies quite young. Their life has been apart from the ways of trade and business, and the habits of thought and feeling in which the world moves. They have lived and moved in the students' world-a world by itself. If they are the successful students the theological seminaries wish, they have become fond of books, and have habituated themselves to the world of literature, science, philosophy and cultured taste-a realm apart from that in which the thoughts, tastes, interests and ambitions of men are moving. When they go forth, they are not only inexperienced, but often so removed from the life of the public as to be unqualified to deal with it sympathetically, to enter into men's ways of thinking and feeling, or appreciate their difficulties and trials enough to find the way to their hearts. It must be admitted that this is not a necessary result of the method; but it is to some degree a natural result, and too often an actual one. We speak of it as a spurious result, for which the course of study is not at all responsible, but it is still one which often appears. It suggests a defect to be guarded against and overcome. There is, indeed, no incompatibility between this thorough devotion to study and a large and loving sympathy with practical life—at least none other than the common difficulty of being deeply and earnestly interested in several things at the same time. The only way to prevent the result, it seems to

us, is by enkindling the minds of the students with interest in the practical aims of the Church. They must not be recluses, or be allowed to seek intellectual results except in constant view of the serIvice to which their attainments are to be consecrated. The heart must not be permitted to be chilled by the going of all the blood into the head.

4. As a thing akin to this, our seminaries also beget a metaphysical turn of thought, and abstract methods of expression unsuitable for effective pulpit discourse. It is certainly natural for the professor, by long study familiar with the technical terms and definitions of theology, and delighting in the exactness with which they bring out divine truth, and especially the philosophy of the truth, to deal largely in these forms in the class-room. The student's views of Christian doctrine are gradually moulded into these forms. His style of expressing Scripture truth is shaped in these dry and often antiquated formulæ not unfrequently refined into the exactness and the coldness of crystallization. These may not be "mannerisms" to be got rid of after leaving the seminary, but they are an abatement of real pulpit power unless laid aside. The preacher must be taught to interpret the truth of the Gospel in the language of the people. Too many take on this stiff style of theologic formulæ and the lecture-room, and carry it into the pulpit. Some add the further mistake of preaching as if they supposed that the power of salvation is not in the Gospel itself, but in their own fine abstract expositions of its philosophy. This is, indeed, no necessary result of thorough work in systematic theology or of the finest erudition. Dr. Duryea says: "It is high time that the question whether culture and learning do not unfit preachers for the preaching of the gospel to ordinary men and women were referred back without response to the stupidity which inspires it." We fully agree with this; and yet it cannot be denied that our methods have sometimes left a perversion or false product of this sort. The grandest and best power of learning appears in making God's truth clear to the humblest. The ripest culture passes out beyond these stereotyped technicalities into free power with the truth. But there have been enough false fruits to admonish against the danger and damage in this connection-a danger and damage under which young men of inferior mental discipline and strength are most likely to fall.

5. Unquestionably, too, our methods lack training-power for the cultivation of popular speaking. Too little attention is given to homiletical and oratorical training. We use the word oratory here in its true sense, and not as standing for the empty pretense and artificiality which take the name. We do not want the studied tricks of the declaimer in the pulpit, nor the perversions of the professional elocutionist in the seminaries. These drill-masters are often the death

to all natural and genuine oratory. But we need more attention to vocal culture, the development of vocal power and adaptation, the correction of faults, and everything that will help into easy and natural address. We make no wholesale charges against the pulpit. We believe that, as a body of educated men, they exhibit speaking abili ties equal, if not superior, to any other class. But as the very office of the ministry involves the speaking function more constantly and prominently than belongs to any other class of men, the training ought to be proportionately intense. Speaking is so emphatically the mode of the minister's work, that any deficiency here is a deficiency at a vital point. It is too much to claim that our practical training has yet overtaken the ideal excellence.

6. The same is true as to reading. The professional training of the seminaries ought to secure what is needful here. The reading of the Scriptures and of hymns-if indeed the hymns ought to be read at all in the Church services-should be made to serve as a strong illlumination of the truth, the very utterance fulfilling the office of a commentary. There might be better reading in the sanctuary than much that passes by that name. The training in our seminaries can be improved in this relation.

7. It is perhaps more needful now than ever that theological students be led to make truth their own by such examination as will fix in their minds clear reasons for its acceptance. Not only is it intellectual imbecility simply to take everything cut and dried, in a merely passive reception, but it begets no strength of conviction capable of bearing the testing processes sure to come in. after-days. They need to be led to do real thinking, bravely mastering the authority and foundations of every doctrine, making it their own by a living apprehension, and rejecting error by equally rational rejection. The process which thus puts the truth securely and victoriously in the mind makes the ready and effective defender of the faith, the safe guide and helper of believers. Let the weakness which comes from mere learning by rote be done away with. Our orthodox theology will gain power by the searching thought in which each one makes it his own. The winds of error will then be less disturbing.