well-modulated voice, the well-fitting clothes, the wellchosen vestments, the well-balanced posture, the wellstudied manner have assumed in their eyes exaggerated importance as criteria of clerical propriety. They have not meant to be Pharisees; nevertheless, in the scrupulous tithing of their mint, their anise, and their cummin, they have neglected weightier matters, the heroic discipline of the mind, the hallowing and humbling of the spirit. It is not too much to say that this clerical materialism is first a snare, then a curse, to him who becomes its victim. Out of it have sprung sins which have made tragic episodes in the annals of the ministry. b. Clerical intellectualism, or the training of the mind at the expense of body and spirit. The character of this self-limitation is loftier than the last, yet not less sure to disqualify for power. It is the snare of the student and of the study, the intellectualism which conceals its selfishness and sin beneath the moral and mental dignity of its occupation. The lover of books is loth to realize that one may sin against one's self and one's vocation even with the Bible in hand. To him whose passion is, amidst the sequestered peace of the study, to investigate that opulent and splendid literature which surrounds the Holy Oracles, it becomes increasingly easy to sacrifice at the shrine of intellectualism the rights of the body and of the spirit. The sin of clerical intellectualism is the breach of physical law and the neglect of the devotional life. Too often the minister becomes the pallid invalid or the unkempt bookworm, not because he has sinned in loving books and

study, but because through his self-limitation in conceiving of his own personality he has neglected his body for the indulgence of his mind. He has permitted the luxury of mental exercise to usurp the rights of physical exercise, the wakeful ardor of the student to rob the man of needed sleep; the careful homage to the laws of scholarship to breed undesigned contempt of the laws of bodily sanitation and cleanness. And with clerical intellectualism the neglect of the devotional life tends to develop. The passionate objectivity of literary pursuits, the exhilarating quest of scholastic results through the domain of a prolific literature, may seduce him who has not thought comprehensively concerning the triune elements of his own personality away from the secret place of the Most High, away from the shadow of the Almighty. One may walk amidst godlike books, yet fail to walk with God. The study may cease to be the oratory. The student's lamp may eclipse the finer flame burning before the shrine.

c. Clerical asceticism, or the training of the spirit at the expense of the body and the mind. The fundamental thesis of the Manichæans, that spirit is good and matter is evil, that the one can only be nurtured at the expense and by the neglect of the other, reappears in every age, clothed in a type of piety which exalts the training of the spirit through the degradation and torture of the body and the restriction of the mind. There is a conception of the religious life dominant in some whose spirituality has risen to the height of heroic passion, which reads into the Pauline account of the

war between flesh and spirit a meaning foreign to the Apostle's mind. This specific discipline of the spirit pronounces bodily and intellectual life as of the earth, earthy, to be minimized, humbled, and subdued by processes of rigid and gloomy abstinence. The crucifixion of the flesh is attempted through the maltreatment and humiliation of the body, with its instincts and passions; the subjugation of the mind is accomplished by stern denial of access to the wealthy stores of literature, by contemptuous abandonment of purely intellectual pursuits; the elevation of the spirit is sought in devout retirement, the chastened ardor of protracted prayer, the choice of ministrations repellant to the natural sense. Far be it from us to speak with disrespect of clerical asceticism wheresoever practiced in godly sincerity; far from us to cast one shadow on that illustrious ideal of conduct wherein every passion of the body and every thought of the mind are to be brought into captivity to the spiritual man. Our objection is not laid against the motive of a sincere asceticism, but against the Manichæan hypothesis upon which it has often been supported; the hypothesis, namely, that the human spirit rises into God's favor as it insults the body and restricts the mind; that holiness is in inverse ratio to the ordinary bodily and mental interests of mankind. Against that hypothesis it is impossible for him to protest with sufficient urgency who maintains belief in the triune constitution of personality, who looks upon the bodily and mental life of every being as having been exalted and dignified in the fact of the Incarnation, and who

conceives of ministerial power not as the mutilation of the individual, but as the complete development of the individual, not as an austere distortion of manhood into something alien to the experience and awful in the sight of the average man, but as an ideal exhibition of manhood, the cosmos of personality, the triune oneness, godlike, gracious, gentle, good, of the healthy body, the vigorous mind, the sanctified and supreme spirit.

I. Physical Qualifications. With the following strong and clear words Charles Gore begins his sixth lecture on the Incarnation of the Son of God': "Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of Godhead, He is also the revelation of manhood. 'As He shows God to man,' says Irenæus, 'so He exhibits man to God.' He exhibits man to God and to himself. For over against all false and meager ideals of man's capacity and destiny, He represents the great reality; He is the Son of Man." These lofty words strike the keynote, in tune with which we shall speak of the body and its qualifications for ministry. "By the mystery of His holy Incarnation, by His holy Nativity," Christ has brought back to the world that primal conception of the dignity of the body which was lost when sin entered into the world and death by sin. In the original draft of the Nicene Creed as it appears in the Creed of the Church of Palestine occur these words of august simplicity, "Who lived amongst men.' None who believes the fact of that brotherhood of the flesh should speak

1 The Incarnation of the Son of God, p. 154.

or think irreverently of the body. Its neglect, its maltreatment, its surrender to unholy use is a sacrilege against the Incarnation, a slight offered to Him Who "for us men and for our salvation" took on Him "a true Body and a reasonable Soul." And if it were possible to investigate the causes of ministerial incapacity and failure, without doubt it would appear in the last analysis of many cases that ignorant or contemptuous or deliberate maltreatment of the body lay behind the downfall of ability. If, in our observations upon this subject, we shall appear to treat with ethical seriousness matters of physical detail commonly regarded as unimportant, our defense shall be the single word, "The Incarnation." If the supreme manifestation of God to man was corporeal, no man who devotes his life to the furtherance of that manifestation, as a preacher of Christ, can afford to undervalue corporeal qualifications. The Body, as an element in the Holy Ministry, may be considered from three points of view :

a. The Body as a Working Instrument. Whatever peculiarities in the vocation of anchorites may justify the contempt and mortification of the body, or sanctify the remorseless scourge, the prostrating fast, the nerve-destroying vigil, the renunciation of the bath, he who undertakes the Ministry of Christ in the Protestant spirit, in the present-day spirit, in the American spirit, has no such calling. To say this is not to discredit asceticism. It is merely to point out that asceticism is not the vocation of American Protestants. On the contrary, he who is engaged presently or prospectively in a ministry