Part 8 (2/2)
We wish all our friends a merry Christmas. Let them hang up their stockings; and if Santa Claus has any room for us in his sleigh, we will get in and ride down their chimney, upsetting all over the hearth a thousand good wishes.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
POOR PREACHING.
There never was a time when in all denominations of Christians there was so much attractive sermonizing as to-day. Princeton, and Middletown, and Rochester, and New Brunswick, are sending into the ministry a large number of sharp, earnest, consecrated men. Stupidity, after being regularly ordained, is found to be no more acceptable to the people than before, and the t.i.tle of Doctorate cannot any longer be subst.i.tuted for brains.
Perhaps, however, there may get to be a surfeit of fine discourses. Indeed, we have so many appliances for making bright and incisive preachers that we do not know but that after a while, when we want a sleepy discourse as an anodyne, we shall have to go to the ends of the earth to find one; and dull sermons may be at a premium, congregations of limited means not being able to afford them at all; and so we shall have to fall back on chloral or morphine.
Are we not, therefore, doing a humanitarian work when we give to congregations some rules by which, if they want it, they may always have poor preaching?
First. Keep your minister poor. There is nothing more ruinous than to pay a pastor too much salary. Let every board of trustees look over their books and see if they have erred in this direction; and if so, let them cut down the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight hundred dollars per annum. What these good men do with so much money we cannot imagine. Our ministers must be taken in. If by occasional fasting for a day our Puritan fathers in New England became so good, what might we not expect of our ministers if we kept them in perpetual fast? No doubt their spiritual capacity would enlarge in proportion to their shrinkage at the waistcoat. The average salary of ministers in the United States is about six hundred dollars. Perhaps by some spiritual pile-driver we might send it down to five hundred dollars; and then the millennium, for the lion by that time would be so hungry he would let the lamb lie down inside of him. We would suggest a very economical plan: give your spiritual adviser a smaller income, and make it up by a donation visit. When everything else fails to keep him properly humble, that succeeds. We speak from experience.
Fourteen years ago we had one, and it has been a means of grace to us ever since.
Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with frequent committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's gate, and go in and tell him how to preach, and pray, and visit. Tell him all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great man his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much better his children behaved. Pastoral committees are not like the small-pox--you can have them more than once; they are more like the mumps, which you may have first on one side and then on the other. If, after a man has had the advantage of being manipulated by three church committees, he has any pride or spirit left, better give him up as incorrigible.
Thirdly. To secure poor preaching, keep the minister on the trot. Scold him when he comes to see you because he did not come before, and tell him how often you were visited by the former pastor. Oh, that blessed predecessor!
Strange they did not hold on to the angel when they had him. Keep your minister going. Expect him to respond to every whistle. Have him at all the tea parties and ”the raisings.” Stand him in the draught of the door at the funeral--a frequent way of declaring a pulpit vacant. Keep him busy all the week in out-door miscellaneous work; and if at the end of that time he cannot preach a weak discourse, send for us, and we will show him how to do it. Of course there are exceptions to all rules; but if the plan of treatment we have proposed be carried out, we do not see that any church in city or country need long be in want of poor preaching.
CHAPTER XXIX.
SHELVES A MAN'S INDEX.
In Chelsea, a suburb of London, and on a narrow street, with not even a house in front, but, instead thereof, a long range of brick wall, is the house of Thomas Carlyle. You go through a narrow hall and turn to the left, and are in the literary workshop where some of the strongest thunderbolts of the world have been forged. The two front windows have on them scant curtains of reddish calico, hung at the top of the lower sash, so as not to keep the sun from looking down, but to hinder the street from looking in.
The room has a lounge covered with the same material, and of construction such as you would find in the plainest house among the mountains. It looks as if it had been made by an author not accustomed to saw or hammer, and in the interstices of mental work. On the wall are a few wood-cuts in plain frames or pinned against the wall; also a photograph of Mr. Carlyle taken one day, as his family told us, when he had a violent toothache and could attend to nothing else, it is his favorite picture, though it gives him a face more than ordinarily severe and troubled.
In long shelves, unpainted and unsheltered by gla.s.s or door, is the library of the world-renowned thinker. The books are worn, as though he had bought them to read. Many of them are uncommon books, the t.i.tles of which we never saw before. American literature is almost ignored, while Germany monopolizes many of the s.p.a.ces. We noticed the absence of theological works, save those of Thomas Chalmers, whose name and genius he well-nigh wors.h.i.+ped. The carpets are old and worn and faded--not because he cannot afford better, but because he would have his home a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It is a place not calculated to give inspiration to a writer. No easy chairs, no soft divans, no wealth of upholstery, but simply a place to work and stay. Never having heard a word about it, it was nevertheless just such a place as we expected.
We had there confirmed our former theory of a man's study as only a part of himself, or a piece of tight-fitting clothing. It is the sh.e.l.l of the tortoise, just made to fit the tortoise's back. Thomas Carlyle could have no other kind of a workshop. What would he do with a damask-covered table, or a gilded inkstand, or an upholstered window? Starting with the idea that the intellect is all and the body naught but an adjunct or appendage, he will show that the former can live and thrive without any approval of the latter. He will give the intellect all costly stimulus, and send the body supperless to bed. Thomas Carlyle taken as a premise, this shabby room is the inevitable conclusion. Behold the principle.
We have a poetic friend. The backs of his books are scrolled and transfigured. A vase of j.a.ponicas, even in mid-winter, adorns his writing desk. The hot-house is as important to him as the air. There are soft engravings on the wall. This study-chair was made out of the twisted roots of a banyan. A dog, sleek-skinned, lies on the mat, and gets up as you come in. There stand in vermilion all the poets from Homer to Tennyson. Here and there are chamois heads and pressed seaweed. He writes on gilt-edged paper with a gold pen and handle twisted with a serpent. His inkstand is a mystery of beauty which unskilled hands dare not touch, lest the ink spring at him from some of the open mouths, or sprinkle on him from the bronze wings, or with some unexpected squirt dash into his eyes the blackness of darkness.
We have a very precise friend. Everything is in severe order. Finding his door-k.n.o.b in the dark, you could reason out the position of stove, and chair, and table; and placing an arrow at the back of the book on one end of the shelf, it would fly to the other end, equally grazing all the bindings. It is ten years since John Milton, or Robert Southey, or Sir William Hamilton have been out of their places, and that was when an ignoramus broke into the study. The volumes of the encyclopedias never change places. Ma.n.u.scripts unblotted, and free from interlineation, and labeled. The spittoon knows its place in the corner, as if treated by tobacco chewers with oft indignity. You could go into that study with your eyes shut, turn around, and without feeling for the chair throw yourself back with perfect confidence that the furniture would catch you. No better does a hat fit his head, or shoe his foot, or the glove his hand, than the study fits his whole nature.
We have a facetious friend. You pick off the corner of his writing table ”Noctes Ambrosianae” or the London ”Punch.” His chair is wide, so that he can easily roll off on the floor when he wants a good time at laughing. His inkstand is a monkey, with the variations. His study-cap would upset a judge's risibilities. Sc.r.a.p books with droll caricatures and facetiae. An odd stove, exciting your wonder as to where the coal is put in or the poker thrust for a shaking. All the works of Dougla.s.s Jerrold, and Sydney Smith, and Sterne, the scalawag ecclesiastic. India-rubber faces capable of being squashed into anything. Puzzles that you cannot untangle. The four walls covered with cuts and engravings sheared from weekly pictorials and recklessly taken from parlor table books. Prints that put men and women into hopeless satire.
We have a friend of many peculiarities. Entering his house, you find nothing in the place where you expected it. ”Don Quixote,” with, all its windmills mixed up with ”Dr. d.i.c.k on the Sacraments,” Mark Twain's ”Jumping Frog,” and ”Charnock on the Attributes.” Pa.s.sing across the room, you stumble against the ma.n.u.script of his last lecture, or put your foot in a piece of pie that has fallen off the end of the writing table. You mistake his essay on the ”Copernican System” for blotting paper. Many of his books are bereft of the binding; and in attempting to replace the covers, Hudibras gets the cover which belongs to ”Barnes on the Acts of the Apostles.” An earthquake in the room would be more apt to improve than to unsettle. There are marks where the inkstand became unstable and made a handwriting on the wall that even Daniel could not have interpreted. If, some fatal day, the wife or housekeeper come in, while the occupant is absent, to ”clear up,” a damage is done that requires weeks to repair. For many days the question is, ”Where is my pen? Who has the concordance? What on earth has become of the dictionary? Where is the paper cutter?” Work is impeded, patience lost, engagements are broken, because it was not understood that the study is a part of the student's life, and that you might as well try to change the knuckles to the inside of the hand, or to set the eyes in the middle of the forehead, as to make the man of whom we speak keep his pen on the rack, or his books off the floor, or the blotting paper straight in the portfolio.
The study is a part of the mental development. Don't blame a man for the style of his literary apartments any more than you would for the color of his hair or the shape of his nose. If Hobbes carries his study with him, and his pen and his inkstand in the top of his cane, so let him carry them.
If Lamartine can best compose while walking his park, paper and pencil in hand, so let him ramble. If Robert Hall thinks easiest when lying flat on his back, let him be prostrate. If Lamasius writes best surrounded by children, let loose on him the whole nursery. Don't criticise Charles d.i.c.kens because he threw all his study windows wide open and the shades up.
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