years' theological course as the normal. It would appear that the time is almost at hand when to the course must be prefaced a preliminary year in which shall be placed those studies which may fairly be regarded as preparatory to the efficient pursuit of theological science. At the present time it is altogether possible for a student to present himself as a suitable candidate for the study of theology, who knows neither Hebrew nor Greek; who has no such command of any living language as to enable him to read anything but an English book of theology; who has never studied philosophy or its history, with the exception perhaps of the rudiments of experimental psychology. And there are those who protest that in three years or even less the seminary should train such to be Chrysostoms or Origens. It may seem that the case has been stated extravagantly. Yet the letterfiles of any theological school would justify it to the last detail. The situation is simply this. Men come to the seminaries less and less well fitted for theological studies, and on the other hand the requirements of theological studies grow wider and wider with the expansion of the science. It would seem to be practical, thoroughly in accord with the methods of other professional schools, and well-nigh imperative that some such action should be taken.

THE PLACE OF THEOLOGY IN PREACHING.*

In departing from your usual custom of assigning the address of this evening to distinguished scholars or ecclesiastical leaders, and designating instead a speaker from a busy pastorate quite apart from the atmosphere of the scholastic centers, the aim is, I assume, to get the look of the minister's work from the standpoint of a toiler on the actual field. And there is inevitably a difference of viewpoint between the vantage ground of the biblical scholar and that of the preacher. The work of the minister has not quite the same look when viewed from the academic watch tower as from the beaten highway where it is geared and put on the road. The theory and the concrete reality do not exactly match as the face in the glass.

Theological training is far more sane and practical now than in some of the decades of the old century, but in those rather distant sixties our theological armor needed some careful readjustment, and when put to the test brought us some mortifying disillusionments. But since then many things have happened. Much water has been running under the theological bridge; and some of it never to return. It has not been an easy thing to teach theology, or to preach the gospel for the past third of a century. It has not been a favorable time for dogmatism or for ex cathedra dialectics. All our beliefs have been in the melting pot. Many ecclesiastical heirlooms have been rather roughly handled and some of them have been sent to the lumber lofts. We have been revising our creeds at a great rate. We have been fighting shy of the theological zone. We have been releasing our fury upon dogma. We have been actually trying to get on with a creedless Christianity. We have been smitten with the love of indefiniteness and have more than half persuaded ourselves that the age of theological formulas has gone by. The

An address delivered at the Graduation Exercises at Hartford Theological Seminary, May 30, 1906.

French Director's hysteria has been shared by many, who thought in his panic over the collapse of theology that by throwing overboard miracles and retaining a couple of doctrines, Christianity might manage to survive. To which we will not wholly disagree if he will allow us to choose our two doctrines with their ramifications and interrelations. This has been an age of euphuisms. The dove, it has been suggested, has been "getting into the eagle's nest "* and has been doing some finely cadenced cooing. It has been a great age for gospels that do not offend; an age of pocket creeds which, while not wounding the sensitive decrier of dogma, have been impotent before the gigantic evils of the world. We have been minimizing sin and confronting it with an impotent Christ who has been described as having been "born of poesy, suffered under philosophy and raised again in the minds of those possessed with the desire of doing good." Of course I do not speak for the theological school where your teachers have been building the good ship staunch and strong with every article of its multifarious furnishings riveted down with clamps and screws of steel. But out there where we pastors come from many have not been dealing with the compacted positives of faith. And I assure you it has been a hard time to teach a reasoned and assured theology or to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to people who decry dogma and want smooth things preached to them.

I do not want to alarm these young preachers, but I say deliberately that there is no man so tempted to unfaithfulness to truth; no man in such exigent danger of losing his soul, as the minister of Jesus Christ. The temptation is enormous to be cowardly, to be treacherous to his commission; to modify his message, to shade it down to the conventional standard, to let other people especially of the undogmatic temperament dictate the kind of gospel they want dealt out to them. The temptation is real. De Maistre said that in early life he had the intention of being a preacher but happening to become a religious man, he gave it up. We have been passing through a zone of this thing ourselves, when the temptation to believe nothing has been very great; when the temptation to hack and hew at the

*Principal Forsyth.

great redemptive purpose of God, to comb it to a thread or a hair, has been pressing and insistent. This age has been the happy hunting ground of semireligious fads and half true fantasies foisted by the cheap charlatans and the wily martinets who will tell you to think the world of sin out of existence, put yourself in tune with the infinite, and remand all redemptive measures to the rubbish heaps.

And yet after all this revolt against creeds and dogmathis talk about the tyranny of the dead hand and the fatuity of living on "cut straw five hundred years old"; after all our frantic effort to dispense with theology, and our mortifying failures to coin a vacuum into good working forces; all signs fail if there is not rising the demand for the authoritative voice of the old days. It is the confident belief of many who have an understanding of the times that the age of the theologian is at hand, and as a consequence the age of the great and authoritative preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We believe the time of the great preacher and of the great theologian has come and come insistently, and they come in company.

It goes without saying that great preaching only breaks out of the deep rich soil of a great theology. The age of great preachers has always been the age of great religious beliefs. Preaching to be robust, trenchant, down reaching, soul searching, will compelling, life moulding, must be theological, dogmatic, authoritative. The great preaching has always and only been done by the theological athletes, by men who believed something, by men who were saturated and steeped with the spiritual certitudes. By men who could think God's thoughts after him and thread their way through that ordered plan by which God saves the world to the glory of his grace. We notice, if we have read any history, that the notable spiritual world movements and upheavals have all been inspired by great convictions of truth. From the Apostolic age to the Augustinian; from the Reformation to the Puritan, they have been theological ages. The great epochs have been theological; the great revivals have been doctrinal; the notable revolutions have been driven under the lash of great moral and doctrinal convictions.

It is a fatal mistake to suppose that a minister or church can get on without a theology. An individual, it has been said, may get on with religion, but "a church must have dogma." Its vitality will ebb if you devitalize its creed; or cut it down to the vanishing point. The world with its great heart hunger, with its corroding misery, is not going to make large place for the clerical invertebrate who goes to his work mumbling his half-beliefs and disseminating his unreasoned opinions; throwing out his theological conjectures like half spans that rest on no solid piers in mid stream and reach no further shores of assured certitude. This doctrinal timidity that brings truth to its lowest terms and combs the gospel to a thread produces no thoroughbreds for the pulpit, I notice. No moral inspirations are going to come out of pulpits hesitant and apologetic whose occupants are sure of nothing and wallow perpetually in a sea of negations.

It may be true that men were called by the Master in the beginning who were without a definite and reasoned theology, but we notice that those rudimentary beliefs, hazy and indefinite, did not remain in their rudimentary stages. They were not long in snapping their girdles and finding new and larger measures; they quickly expanded into a comprehensive system of correlated doctrines, into whose depths one of the primitive teachers tells us the angels desire to look. These men would not have spread Christianity over Western Asia and Europe had they preached some new ethical ideals, a trifle better than the prevailing Stoicism, or had they told some pretty legends about a brilliant young Syrian who subdued his will and died at the place of the skull a victim to his nation's prejudice. The church did not go to these Mediterranean peoples with a batch of moral maxims touched with emotion, as Matthew Arnold suggests; but with a reasoned system of beliefs that bore down in discomfiture and defeat the proud philosophies and religious cults which had for centuries held the European mind in thrall.

Of course there is place made for the creedless, even in the Biblical revelation. There is good succulent pasture for those who eschew doctrine and go into panic at the suggestion of dogma. There is always the undogmatic epistle of James, where they can