THE TRAINING OF CURATES.
E suffer fools gladly." Is there any verse in the te y New Testament which comes nearer home than this to the church-going laity P In part, perhaps, they suffer for the sins of the laity who are not church-going. If the people who now stay away from church, or only go occasionally, were condemned to suffer fools, not only would it no longer be done gladly, it would not even be done patiently. A franker method of dealing with the clergy would grow up. Rectors would be told in so many words that their curates could not be tolerated in the pulpit, or, a more difficult and delicate task, that the oftener the curate was substituted for the rector, the better the con- gregation would be pleased. But as it is, the people who habitually listen to sermons have a bad time of it, and they are, for the most part, too well-bred or too tender- hearted even to show that they suffer. The most provoking part of the business is, that the men who are fools in the pulpit are very often not fools out of it. The clergy have, of course, a congenital share of this unfortunate quality, but they have no more than their share. .Man for man, a young curate is neither wiser nor less wise than a young officer, a young lawyer, or a young doctor. The difference between him and them lies in the greater opportunities he enjoys of displaying his want of professional knowledge. Only a very exceptional genius can speak well on subjects of which he is ignorant ; and if every young officer, or lawyer, or doctor, had every week to lecture on strategy, or conveyancing, or the medical relation of the mind, to the body, their failure would be quite as disastrous as that of any young curate. But in their case the exigencies of their service or profession demand nothing of the kind. Incompetence no doubt finds ways and means of doing mischief in all employments ; but in the case of the clergy the results are more obvious, more immediate, and more uniformly hurtful. Two main causes have contributed to bring about this state of things. In the first place, the function of the sermon has been misunderstood; in the second place, little or nothing has been done to fit the clergy for fulfilling it. Sermons have been multiplied without any proper con- sideration whether the ends for which sermons are preached will be better served by their multiplication. It has been assumed that though one bad sermon can do no good, two may do some good, and three a great deal. The demand has so increased, that the clergy have been forced to increase the supply ; indeed, they have often come to be measured, not so much by their capacity to preach as by their readiness. It would take a very strong man, or one very careless of public opinion, to have only one sermon a week preached in his church. Yet that this would often be a very much better arrangement than that which is now common, we cannot doubt. Has it ever occurred to any one to consider what is the place and office of a second sermon on the same day ? If the first sermon is what it ought to be, it has supplied quite as much matter for reflection as the ordinary hearer is likely to turn to good account in the following week. He has eaten his spiritual dinner, and he wants time to digest it. Yet if he goes to church again—and the man we have in view is pretty sure to go to church again—a second meal is heaped upon the top of the first when the digestive lye- cess has hardly begun. If we dealt with our bodily food in this way, we know but too well what the consequences would be, and why should we expect anything different to follow in the case of spiritual food? No doubt if sermons appealed only to the memory, a second might be listened to as soon as the first had, been properly mastered. It would be like a boy's morning and afternoon school. So much learnt at the one, so much more learnt at the other. But to look at sermons in this light is to miss all that gives them value. They appeal to the will and the affections rather than to the memory; and to influence the will and the affections, they re- quire a subsequent discipline of reflection. The ordinary object of the preacher should be to send people away with a few definite thoughts which they can apply to the conduct of their lives, and this object is defeated by the almost immediate. addition of other thoughts having no connection with the former. No doubt the reason or the excuse for this spiritual overfeeding is, that the congregation at one service is not identical with the congregation at another. But that difficulty might be met, so far as the hearers are concerned, by such a rearrangement of the services as should allow those who had heard a sermon already to go out of church without causing offence or surprise. It would sometimes be a good plan to repeat the morning sermon in the evening. The most sensitive preacher would not object to those who had heard or meant to hear it once, not caring to hear it twice.
Even this, however, would not remove the second cause we have mentioned,—the absence of any adequate training for the clergy. It is needless to say that this touches on more questions than preaching. The preparation of the preacher is a very important part of the preparation of the Christian minister, but it is only a part. He has other work to do, and work that may often have larger results than are achieved by anything said in the pulpit. But the training of the clergy generally and the training of preachers are very much more nearly identical than they may at first appear. For preaching differs from other forms of oratory in this, that the moral element in it is stronger than the intellectual. A man need not be either clever or fluent to preach a good sermon. It will be enough if he is well instructed and. in earnest. There are many clergymen, unfortunately, who are wanting in the latter characteristic, and then there is no more to be said. No part of their work will be done well, since even if they have the intellectual gifts that go to make a good preacher, they only serve to make the absence of the moral gifts more conspicuous. Happily, however, the clergy are as a body much more in earnest than they once were, so that the want of proper training plays a proportionately larger part among the causes of their shortcomings. As the material improves, we see more and more the waste that is involved in not turning it to the best account. An appeal has lately been put forth on behalf of a Conference on the training of candidates for Holy Orders, held at Oxford last month, which deserves the careful attention of those who wish well to the object the members of the Conference have in view. It simply asks that those who wish to see the clergy better trained should do something towards finding the means. There are several Societies which help young men to go to the Universities with the intention of taking Orders. There are funds the object of which is to help graduates of the Universities to make their preparation for Orders more thorough. There are others, again, which aim at maintaining young men at Theological Colleges. The appeal does not attempt to distinguish between these various agencies, It leaves that to those who are minded to give them money, and contents itself with saying that they may all be trusted to aid only "those candidates whose character and ability have been carefully tested, and whoseneed of assistance is real and urgent." We confess, however, to a very strong feeling that there is a real and solid distinction to be drawn between these agencies. Those of them which help young men to go to the Universities with the intention of taking Orders, belong in their origin to a time when a University degree was with most Bishops an indispensable pre- liminary to ordination. Only B.A.'s could be ordained ; consequently the natural way of helping men to ordination was to help them to get the B.A. degree. It was at all times open to the objection that a young man might wish to go to Oxford or Cambridge, and in order to get means to do this, might persuade himself that he wished to take Orders. The effect of this would be, that at the end of his University course he would, if he were honest, admit that he had no vocation, and so the money spent on him would be wasted ; or if he were dishonest, would conceal his disinclination and be ordained, and so the money spent on him would do positive mischief. Now that there are other channels to ordination than the Univer- sities, the force of this objection seems to us to have enormously increased, while the need for overriding it has disappeared. The help given to University men should, as it seems to us, be strictly confined to men whose desire to take Orders has survived their University course, and should take the form of helping them to add to that course the special preparation which Orders need. If it is desired to help men who have not been at a University, it seems to us that the best thing to do is to give them the means of getting a better general preparation for the special studies of a Theological College, either in the form of preparation outside for passing the entrance examination, or of exhi- bitions enabling them to remain three years instead of two at the College. In either of these ways—the theological training of graduates at the Universities, or the better general education of the students at Theological Colleges— there is room for the expenditure of very large sums of money, and we heartily commend either or both of them to the liberality of our readers.
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