Preaching and Paganism

Albert Parker Fitch

Informations

• Publié par: sepug
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 34
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Preaching and Paganism, by Albert Parker Fitch
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Preaching and Paganism
Author: Albert Parker Fitch
Release Date: June 16, 2005 [EBook #16076]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PREACHING AND PAGANISM ***
Produced by Audrey Longhurst, William Flis, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
PREACHING AND PAGANISM
BY
ALBERT PARKER FITCH
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGION IN AMHERST COLLEGE
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE COLLEGE COURSE AND THE PREPARATION FOR LIFE
CAN THE CHURCH SURVIVE IN THE CHANGING ORDER?
PUBLISHED ON THE FOUNDATION ESTABLISHED IN MEMORY OF
JAMES WESLEY COOPER OF THE CLASS OF 1865, YALE COLLEGE
THE FORTY-SIXTH SERIES OF THE LYMAN BEECHER LECTURESHIP
ON PREACHING IN YALE UNIVERSITY
NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS MDCCCCXX
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
FIRST PUBLISHED, 1920
THE JAMES WESLEY COOPER MEMORIAL PUBLICATION
FUND
The present volume is the fourth work published by the Yale University Press
on the James Wesley Cooper Memorial Publication Fund. This Foundation
was established March 30, 1918, by a gift to Yale University from Mrs. Ellen H.
Cooper in memory of her husband, Rev. James Wesley Cooper, D.D., who died
in New York City, March 16, 1916. Dr. Cooper was a member of the Class of1865, Yale College, and for twenty-five years pastor of the South
Congregational Church of New Britain, Connecticut. For thirty years he was a
corporate member of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign
Missions and from 1885 until the time of his death was a Fellow of Yale
University, serving on the Corporation as one of the Successors of the Original
Trustees.
TO MY WIFE
[pg 11]
PREFACE
The chief, perhaps the only, commendation of these chapters is that they
pretend to no final solution of the problem which they discuss. How to assert
the eternal and objective reality of that Presence, the consciousness of Whom
is alike the beginning and the end, the motive and the reward, of the religious
experience, is not altogether clear in an age that, for over two centuries, has
more and more rejected the transcendental ideas of the human understanding.
Yet the consequences of that rejection, in the increasing individualism of
conduct which has kept pace with the growing subjectivism of thought, are now
sufficiently apparent and the present plight of our civilization is already leading
its more characteristic members, the political scientists and the economists, to
reëxamine and reappraise the concepts upon which it is founded. It is a similar
attempt to scrutinize and evaluate the significant aspects of the interdependent
thought and conduct of our day from the standpoint of religion which is here
attempted. Its sole and modest purpose is to endeavor to restore some
neglected emphases, to recall to spiritually minded men and women certain
half-forgotten values in the religious experience and to add such observations
regarding them as may, by good fortune, contribute something to that future
reconciling of the thought currents and value judgments of our day to these
central and precious facts of the religious life.
[pg 12] Many men and minds have contributed to these pages. Such sources of
suggestion and insight have been indicated wherever they could be identified.
In especial I must record my grateful sense of obligation to Professor Irving
Babbitt's Rousseau and Romanticism. The chapter on Naturalism owes much
to its brilliant and provocative discussions.
[pg 13] CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface 11
I. The Learner, the Doer and the Seer 15
II. The Children of Zion and the Sons of Greece 40
III. Eating, Drinking and Being Merry 72
IV. The Unmeasured Gulf 102
V. Grace, Knowledge, Virtue 131
VI. The Almighty and Everlasting God 157
VII. Worship as the Chief Approach to Transcendence 184VIII. Worship and the Discipline of Doctrine 209
[pg 15]
CHAPTER ONE
The Learner, the Doer and the Seer
The first difficulty which confronts the incumbent of the Lyman Beecher
Foundation, after he has accepted the appalling fact that he must hitch his
modest wagon, not merely to a star, but rather to an entire constellation, is the
delimitation of his subject. There are many inquiries, none of them without
significance, with which he might appropriately concern himself. For not only is
the profession of the Christian ministry a many-sided one, but scales of value
change and emphases shift, within the calling itself, with our changing
civilization. The mediaeval world brought forth, out of its need, the robed and
mitered ecclesiastic; a more recent world, pursuant to its genius, demanded the
ethical idealist. Drink-sodden Georgian England responded to the open-air
evangelism of Whitefield and Wesley; the next century found the Established
Church divided against itself by the learning and culture of the Oxford
Movement. Sometimes a philosopher and theologian, like Edwards, initiates
the Great Awakening; sometimes an emotional mystic like Bernard can arouse
all Europe and carry men, tens of thousands strong, over the Danube and over
the Hellespont to die for the Cross upon the burning sands of Syria; sometimes
it is the George Herberts, in a hundred rural parishes, who make grace to
[pg 16] abound through the intimate and precious ministrations of the country parson.
Let us, therefore, devote this chapter to a review of the several aspects of the
Christian ministry, in order to set in its just perspective the one which we have
chosen for these discussions and to see why it seems to stand, for the moment,
in the forefront of importance. Our immediate question is, Who, on the whole, is
the most needed figure in the ministry today? Is it the professional ecclesiastic,
backed with the authority and prestige of a venerable organization? Is it the
curate of souls, patient shepherd of the silly sheep? Is it the theologian, the
administrator, the prophet—who?
One might think profitably on that first question in these very informal days. We
are witnessing a breakdown of all external forms of authority which, while
salutary and necessary, is also perilous. Not many of us err, just now, by
overmagnifying our official status. Many of us instead are terribly at ease in
Zion and might become less assured and more significant by undertaking the
subjective task of a study in ministerial personality. "What we are," to
paraphrase Emerson, "speaks so loud that men cannot hear what we say."
Every great calling has its characteristic mental attitude, the unwritten code of
honor of the group, without a knowledge of which one could scarcely be an
efficient or honorable practitioner within it. One of the perplexing and irritating
problems of the personal life of the preacher today has to do with the collision
between the secular standards of his time, this traditional code of his class, and
the requirements of his faith. Shall he acquiesce in the smug conformities, the
externalized procedures of average society, somewhat pietized, and join that
[pg 17] large company of good and ordinary people, of whom Samuel Butler remarks,
i n The Way of All Flesh, that they would be "equally horrified at hearing the
Christian religion doubted, or at seeing it practised?" There are ministers who
do thus content themselves with being merely superrespectable. Shall he exalt
the standards of his calling, accentuate the speech and dress, the code and
manners of his group, the historic statements of his faith, at the risk of becoming
an official, a "professional"? Or does he possess the insight, and can he
acquire the courage, to follow men like Francis of Assisi or Father Damien andadopt the Christian ethic and thus join that company of the apostles and martyrs
whose blood is the seed of the church? A good deal might be said today on the
need of this sort of personal culture in the ministerial candidate. But,
provocative and significant though the question is, it is too limited in scope, too
purely subjective in nature, to suit the character and the urgency of the needs of
this moment.
Again, every profession has the prized inheritance of its own particular and
gradually perfected human skill. An interesting study, then, would be the
analysis of that rich content of human insights, the result of generations of
pastoral experience, which form the background of all great preaching. No man,
whether learned or pious, or both, is equipped for the pulpit without the addition
of that intuitive discernment, that quick and varied appreciation, that sane and
tolerant knowledge of life and the world, which is the reward given to the friends
and lovers of mankind. For the preacher deals not with the shallows but the
depths of life. Like his Master he must be a great humanist. To make real
sermons he has to look, without dismay or evasion, far into the heart's
[pg 18] impenetrable recesses. He must have had some experience with the
absolutism of both good and evil. I