Young Preachers, Read This by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 3, 1875

Young Preachers, Read This.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

HERE is some most excellent advice to preachers, middle-aged as well as young. It is from the Examiner and Chronicle. There is no excuse for a preacher to be ignorant, to go on year after year forgetting as much as he learns, or even more. Nothing but downright laziness is the cause of such a course. Such persons start up occasionally and resolve to do great things; but, alas! it is soon over and nothing permanent is done. Perseverance is what is lacking. I mean to profit by the following article, and I hope others may be profited by it. D. M. CANRIGHT.

And of course all this applies to the pastor who has never been through college. He should by himself pursue the college studies. He may find it difficult at first, but the true grit will carry him through, and he may take his stand among scholars. Indeed, education often suffers from men's comparing the lazy college graduate with the studious pastor who has no “sheepskin.” The latter is often the man who has really done the most studying. He is the truly educated man. The educated man is the man who is educated, no matter whether he got his education in a four-story college or in a carpenter's-shop. A college course is only a means to an end—a very desirable means, indeed, but the end has often been reached without it. Therefore, a man who cannot go to college should nevertheless give himself earnestly and systematically to scholastic pursuits.

A very small fraction of time each day, sacredly devoted to literature and science, will, in the course of a long pastorate, carry a minister over a vast deal of ground. At the end of a twenty-five years' pastorate, a man who is well started in his studies at the outset ought to have control of the Hebrew and Greek—to have mastered the Latin and modern languages—to be versed in metaphysical and natural science—to be an able historical scholar and to be perfectly familiar with general literature. Does this sound large? An hour a day—half an hour a day will do the business; and if each of the twenty-four hundred sermons this man has preached has had in it what Bible study ought to go into a sermon, he will be familiar with Scripture in every nook and corner.

As to the idea that a minister “can't find time”—cannot find half an hour a day for such work—it is absurd. William C. Bryant has edited a New-York daily paper, but managed to “find time” to translate the Iliad; the Earl of Derby was Prime Minister of England, but he also could do Homer into verse; Gladstone, while Prime Minister, kept all the time publishing literary works; and the idea that the pastoral duties of Slab-Hollow are so absorbing that they will allow the incumbent to do nothing outside is absurd. Let him take the time that he spends each day in chimney-corner gossip. Let him get up a little earlier in the morning. Let him employ the half hour between supper and evening meeting, or some other odd time now wasted. Let him take the first half hour when he enters his study in the forenoon, the time he now spends in smoking his pipe and waiting for inspiration. Let him take the last half hour in the afternoon, a time when he is fagged out with sermon-writing, and a little change of work would refresh him; there is many a time which he can devote to this, without infringing in the least on his regular weekly tasks.

Indeed, he will find that in the end a regular course of literary study is a saving of time. What consumes time is the pumping of a sermon out of an empty brain. When a man's head is well stored with ideas, it takes comparatively little time to throw those ideas together in the shape of a sermon. An hour a day in study, other than sermon-writing, in the first five years of a pastorate, will save two hours a day in sermon preparation in the second five years. One can write sermons all the easier by having studied something besides his sermons. All his scientific and literary pursuits will be found in the end to be so much grist to his sermon-mill.

Again, study may save a pastor from being discarded as soon as he is a little along in years. A young man has certain peculiar elements of acceptability. His voice is clear, his manner is vivacious, his elocution is pleasing, and moreover, he gets credit not only for what he is, but for what he promises to be. Now, if, having lost these advantages of youth, he has secured no marked advantages to put in their place—if he has learned no more of the Bible, if he has gained no larger stock of general information, what wonder that he should be set aside for some man who has those advantages on the strength of which he first succeeded, but which he has now lost. To compare well with the younger man he must have that larger stock of ideas—that larger fund of general information which the young man cannot bear. In fact, a minister should never grow old. He cannot keep the years from passing by, but he can help its being said of him that he has got his growth—that he has told all he will ever have to tell. The oak that is still growing is young, though it has stood for a century. So the pastor of sixty or sixty-five, who is still studying all the while and increasing his stock of information—who can say “I will preach better ten years from now than I do to-day”—people will feel that he is still young, and they will feel the interest in him which was felt when he was just commencing his ministry.