professional parasite drawing
a salary and having a good time, and in the thought of many is cast aside
as of but little consequence.

To meet such conditions as mentioned above, there must be increased
efficiency in the ministry, the demand to meet which is greater to-day
than ever before. I am finding no fault with the efficient men we now have
at work. Many are doing valiant service. They are heroes on the home field
in the same sense that Carey, Judson, Livingstone, Pitkin, Lott Carey and
others were heroes on the foreign field. Some of these men are laying
their lives down in the great work to which they have been called. All
honor to these men! But their numbers are too few. The disproportion is
too great in our professional schools. For example, when a medical school
can boast of four hundred young men preparing to care for the physical
life of the people and the theological school in the same institution can
report barely one hundred men preparing to care for the moral and
spiritual life of the same people, it is time to stop and consider whither
are we tending. Then at a closer glance we see something else which is
worse still. With all due respect to the men in the theological school, it
is an alarming fact that the men in the medical school, in most cases,
have a higher average in scholarship and natural force than the men in the
theological school. Why is this? It is because the training in our
colleges, the teaching from the platform, and the training in most of our
homes is such that our boys to-day are led to believe that the route to
greatest success is along the material highway. It is a current saying now
that the quickest way for a colored man of ability, at this time, to get
out of the reach of immediate want, materially, is to study medicine.
There may not be too many men entering medicine, but certainly not enough
are entering the ministry. In some cases well-meaning men have been
disgusted with certain types of ministers which they have met and have
cast the whole profession aside, giving it no respectful consideration,
and have felt that they could better themselves, socially as well as
materially, by entering some profession other than the ministry. I am well
acquainted with not a few men who entered college with the express purpose
of preparing themselves to enter the ministry, who turned aside to some
other calling for the reason mentioned. Sad to say, very few of the most
capable men in our co