The Modern Pulpit by Arthur T. Pierson, D. D.

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 8, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 38.

The Modern Pulpit.

By Arthur T. Pierson, D. D.

SINCE primitive times, preaching has, by gradual and almost insensible stages, changed even its type. It was informal, conversational, in the best sense popular; so simple in matter and manner, so public and free to all, so rid of the stiffness and stateliness of polite culture, as to adapt itself with equal facility to the smallest or largest assembly, to private house or temple courts, market-place or street corner, riverside or synagogue. Even Paul's more logical and systematic discourses were not seriously interrupted or run out of the ruts of a punctilious propriety by the asking of a question, the suggestion of a doubt, or the failing of a sleepy hearer out of the window. Modern sermons are largely literary essays, lectures, orations, sometimes lacking even the flavor or savor of the gospel. Framed on rhetorical models, they are more powerful to win admiration than to arouse conscience or compel action. With the abandonment of the sacerdotal idea of the ministry, we have swung to the other extreme, and a divine vocation sinks to the level of a learned profession, a lawful, laudable livelihood, to be estimated by the genius or talent displayed and to be compensated on a money basis.

The effect of such prevailing notions is to turn our churches into religious clubs, with exclusive membership and expensive privileges. Educated, cultivated people are attracted by sacred orations, and people of means can afford to pay for pulpit eloquence. But the ignorant and uncultivated, the vicious and degraded, only stare indifferently when they hear about the "agnosticism that permeates modern theological thought," about "spiritual biogenesis," or about the "inexorable necessity of differentiating certain elements," etc. They care nothing for this pretentious pulpit dilettanteism, which gently swings the hearer in a silken hammock of faultless oratory, and sprinkles him with the rose-water of fashionable fine art. Stately orations never yet drew and held the lower classes. And the poor instinctively know that superb church buildings, with costly choirs and preachers whose salaries run up into the tens of thousands, must have money for their support; and in such circumstances human nature feels that to be thoroughly welcome one must wear the insignia of wealth, or at least competency to bear his fair share of the pecuniary burden which such a system lays on somebody. We are often told that this is only the "pride of poverty," this instinctive shrinking of the poor man from our splendid church edifices; but it must be confessed that the feeling is not only natural, but by no means ignoble.

It is our solemn conviction that between Dives and Lazarus there was scarce a more impassable gulf than exists to-day, practically, between a workingman who gets his dollar and a half a day, and the minister of a metropolitan church with his $40 a day, serving a church with pews rating at from $50 to $500 a year. We have no desire to attack the existing order of things; it may be true that "the rich need churches," and that "pulpit talent has a right to all it can command;" yet it is certain that such ministers and such churches cannot, as a class, reach the ignorant and degraded poor, or the "brutalized class." If we are "going for" the masses, to use Mr. Moody's phrase, somebody else must lead the grand crusade. These "common people," who heard Christ gladly, look up to the minister whose annual income would be to them a colossal fortune, and who is separated and isolated by his elegant "society," as they would look up to an Alpine peak—too far above them to reach down a sympathetic hand to grasp that of the destitute child of want. And so, from the doors of our fashionable synagogue, the common laboring man turns away. Dare he walk over those Axminster carpets, or sit down in those damask pews? Could that elegant gentleman in black broadcloth bear to be near him in his "vile raiment," or that fine lady in her satin and velvet stand the "poor smell"?

—Arthur T. Pierson, D. D., in Christian Union.