"And thou shalt see those who
Contented are within the fire;
Because they hope to come,
When e'er it may be, to the blessed people."[1]

It is his business, also, to be the comrade of his peers, and yet
speak to them the truth in love; his task to understand the bitterness
and assuage the sorrows of old age. I suppose the greatest influence
a preacher ever exercises, and a chief source of the material and
insight of his preaching, is found in this intimate contact with
living and suffering, divided and distracted men and women. When
strong men blench with pain and exquisite grief stirs within us at
the sight and we can endure naught else but to suffer with them, when
youth is blurred with sin, and gray heads are sick with shame and we,
then, want to die and cry, O God! forgive and save them or else blot
me out of Thy book of life--for who could bear to live in a world
where such things are the end!--then, through the society of sorrow,
and the holy comradeship in shame, we begin to find the Lord and to
understand both the kindness and the justice of His world. In the
moment when sympathy takes the bitterness out of another's sorrow and
my suffering breaks the captivity of my neighbor's sin--then, when
because "together," with sinner and sufferer, we come out into the
quiet land of freedom and of peace, we perceive how the very heart of
God, upon which there we know we rest, may be found in the vicarious
suffering and sacrifice called forth by the sorrow and the evil
of mankind. Then we can preach the Gospel. Because then we dimly
understand why men have hung their God upon the Cross of Christ!

[Footnote 1: _The Divine Comedy: Hell_; canto I.]

Is it not ludicrous, then, to suppose that a man merely equipped with
professional scholarship, or contented with moral conformities, can
minister to the sorrow and the mystery, the mingled shame and glory of
a human being? This is why the average theologue, in his first parish,
is like the well-meaning but meddling engineer endeavoring with clumsy
tools and insensitive fingers to adjust the delicate and complicated
mechanism of a Genevan watch. And here is one of the real reasons why
we deprecate men entering our calling, without both the culture of
a liberal education and the learning of a graduate school. Clearly,
therefore, one real task of such schools and their lectureships is to
offer men wide and gracious training in the art of human contacts,
so that their l