good people
on earth. He must come, as I came, believing this place to be a
suburb of paradise, and blessed will that man be if he departs
before he changes his mind.'

"That is satire, and possibly out of place in the pulpit, but it
may be that the words could be applied without stretching the
truth to other pastorates. 'The preacher is their "hired man." He
may be brainy, but not too brainy--social, but not too
social--religious, but not too religious. He must trim his sails
to suit every breeze of the community; his mental qualities must
be acceptable to the contemporary ancestors by whom he is
surrounded, or he does not fit.' The bitterness in those words is
evident, but the truths they contain are important.

"It may be that more sermons with equal plain speaking would do
good. It may be that the conservatism, not to say the Phariseeism,
of the modern church requires a John the Baptist to pierce it to
the core, and expose its inner rottenness. The church that does
not welcome the poor man and his family with just as much
heartiness, sincerity and kindly sympathy as it does the rich man
and his family is certainly not worthy of the great Teacher who
spoke of the great difficulty the rich man has in entering the
kingdom of God."

I have delivered about two written sermons in twenty-five years. That
farewell message was one of them. I wanted to be careful, fair, just.
I could not escape the belief that at least seven of my predecessors
who had been pushed out by unfair means had left with a lie on their
lips. Pastor and people, in dissolving relationship, had always
assumed and often explicitly stated on the records that the departing
minister "had been called of God" elsewhere. If God was the author of
their methods of dismissal, He ought to be ashamed of Himself.

There was no interregnum. The Sunday following that farewell sermon I
preached my first sermon as pastor of the newly organized People's
Church of New Haven. About thirty people left the old church and
joined the new. Among them was a saintly woman, who had been a member
for half a century of Pilgrim Church. We had one man of means--Philo
Sherman Bennett, the friend of Mr. Bryan. The opening meeting was in
the Hyperion Theatre. The creed was simple, and brevity itself: "This
church is a self-governing community for the worship of God and the
service of man." A Jewish Rabbi read the Scriptures, a Universalist