Consecrated Culture by Prof. Phelps

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 30, 1872

Consecrated Culture.

By Prof. Phelps

A preacher had better work in the dark, with nothing but mother-wit, a quickened conscience, and a Saxon Bible, to teach him what to do and how to do it, than to vault into an aerial ministry, in which only the upper classes shall know or care anything about him. Make your ministry reach the people; in the forms of purest culture, if you can, but reach the people; with elaborate doctrine, if possible, but reach the people; with classic speech, if it may be, but reach the people. The great problem of life to an educated ministry is, to make their culture a power instead of a luxury. Our temptations are all one way—our mission is all the other way.

It is not, then, less education that our clergy need. It is inconceivable to me how any educated man can see relief from our present dangers, or from any dangers in that direction. Ignorance is a remedy for nothing. So imperfection of culture is always a misfortune. But we do need consecration of culture. This is the thing which the world is blindly craving.

Above all, we need faith in the Christian ideal of culture, which measures its value by its use. This was Christ’s own ideal of culture; he respected no other; he denounced every other most fearfully. Not an act of his life, nor a word from his lips, gives any evidence that he would have tolerated the awful anomaly of clerical life, in which a man ministers placidly in a palatial church, to none but select and gilded hearers, with all the paraphernalia of elegance around him, and with culture expressed in the very fragrance of the atmosphere, while “Five Points,” and “Boweries,” and “Ann Streets,” are growing up uncared for by any labors of his, within hearing of his organ and his quartette.

Our guard against the peril here indicated, then, is spiritual, as distinct from intellectual, in its nature. The cry should be, not “Less intellect! less study! less culture!” but simply, “More heart! more prayer! more godliness! more subjection of culture to the salvation of those who have little or none.”—Prof. Phelps.