BY DUNCAN McDERMID, M. A.

It is interesting, while it is said that preaching is losing its ancient power, to find here and there a preacher whose influence is increasing instead of diminishing. One of these is the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., of the Unitarian Church.

The writer desires to call attention to the two essential conditions of this preacher’s influence and popularity. This will be instructive not only to the public, but to the clerical profession as well. One of these conditions may be found in the wide latitude of American opinion, especially as it expresses itself in New England, and particularly in the city of Boston where Mr. Savage spent many years as a preacher.

I.

In the community in which one lives, no less than in himself, often lies the secret of a man’s strength and greatness. The individual shares the endowment or potency of those impersonal forces which sustain and enhance public life. The spirit which animates the broader ranges of general history acts with unhindered freedom on the narrower sphere of the individual mind and often becomes the creator of its better moments. Silent influences, hidden providences, are at work in society of which the individual has no suspicion, and whose effects cannot be recorded in statistics. Below the plane of conscious recognition there are far-reaching movements of thought which transcend our powers of understanding, but which act with almost unbounded sway in controlling the thought and life of each person. The early promise is fulfilled in the ripening powers of the mind under the cumulative influences which nourish it from without. In the order which surrounds the individual, and in the movement of which he has become a part, we see, as clearly as in himself, the inevitable promise of his ultimate destiny.

In whatever pertains to liberal culture Boston is never weak or wavering. Boston impresses one as possessing innate respect and enthusiasm for intellectual supremacy, and reverence for the pure sentiments of religion as continuous forces in human life. For two and a half centuries it has been the wish and work of her most cultivated minds to give human thought and life the highest expression; and this has been done with monumental activity. In Boston, culture and religious piety have never been decadent; over and above the controversies and schisms and sectarian quarrels which from time to time have rent the churches, they have remained intact. In spite of the manifold currents of opposing tendencies, which now and then threaten to overwhelm cherished beliefs and to lift the world off its hinges, they remain essential elements in this city’s social life. They are stern present necessities, unwritten and immutable laws which she will not and cannot transgress. From the founding of the city by the “choice spirits” of the seventeenth century, they have retained their vitality and have been affirmed without doubt or debate. With the growing demands and maturity of her civilization she reiterates them as her loftiest and most sacred privileges, subject to no vicissitudes. With these primitive traits eternally vital, thought is quick, and intellectual enthusiasm spreads rapidly. Boston is always stirring with “new ideas” and with the passion for a broader ethical and religious development. The character and repute which she acquired in former days for literary taste, clerical influence, and the administration of religion are to-day influencing surrounding secularity and the hurrying concerns of daily life. They are animating every institution and ordinance, every supreme and exquisite medium of feeling, every revelation of truth and hope in the human mind. In this exhaustless tide of thought and aspiration, which we may accept as Boston’s native product, it is easy to interest the people and to unite them in any attempt for the good of mankind under the sanction of culture, benevolence, or religion.

But religion is felt to be Boston’s greatest need and glory. In this city of philosophy and poetry, art and business energy, religious faith and life have their proper place, and are invested with power and dignity. Fixed habit and traditional thought contribute, without doubt, to the need and sacredness of religion; yet its transcendent results are due to the permanent disposition of the people. They are the appropriate manifestation of a religious culture and spirit that are fitted for all time, the logic of truths born of religious intuitions working out in the most practical results. However universally certain religious beliefs are ignored, there is no disposition to put culture or philanthropy above the gospel, the school above the church, or to make the schoolmaster, the literary autocrat, or the princes of wealth take precedence of the preacher. The spirit of conventionalism reigns more or less in Boston’s religious life; yet religion makes an irresistible appeal to the understanding, the conscience, and the heart. Everything is compelled to bow to its influence and to feel its inspiration. Although our churches present various theological tendencies, from the stiffest orthodoxy to the freest rationalism and pantheism, and with creeds yet confessedly nowhere settled, reason never pronounces religion absurd; to it homage is accorded. It is still the deepest and holiest interest of man. We all have an elevated sense of its vast importance in the destiny of mankind. Its manifestations may change, but its spirit is ever the same. While edifices of towering magnificence, grand displays of musical talent, time-honored ordinances, and attractions for popular reverence are fashionable and full of beauty and significance, and, possibly, prudent means to stimulate our patronage and to save to the ranks of the churches the votaries of all that is artistic and refining and impressive, they are no sure sign that spiritual life is departing; they have their utility, they foster the higher interests of mind and heart. These symbols of religious faith are not the productions of cold, speculative reasoning, but the statement of truth wrought into the convictions of the devout and spiritually minded.

Guided by these facts we may assume that the man who distinguishes himself in Boston as a preacher is one to whom considerable interest attaches. Upon such a man, as upon all her citizens of rare attainments and peculiar personal excellence, she confers distinction.

The Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., who recently changed his residence and his ministry from Boston to New York, and whose successful work in the former city may be a prophecy of enduring honors in the latter, has thus distinguished himself and been rewarded.

When Mr. Savage came from the West to Boston, he came “as a stranger,” as I myself heard him say. For years he thought and walked and worked alone. He was unpopular, and he felt his unpopularity. All religious sects, even that of his own persuasion, were critical and sceptical. As a preacher he had fellowship nowhere. He was met as a preacher of unwelcome and unwholesome doctrines. But he came as one having a special dispensation, as the witness and repository of new truth, as the representative of no low and paltry type of the Christian ministry, but as a living testimony to the reality and power and excellency of religion and its institutions. He felt the difficulties with which he had to contend. They were manifold, subtle, and fraught with deepest peril to his ministry. Prejudices, precedents, and the theology of the schools—whose only merit seemed to be that it was smitten with a passion to reduce Christian doctrine to logical form—were arrayed in open hostility to him. He was met by the rÉgime of ecclesiastical orders, by men who preached the Gospel according to established and venerable routine, and whose credentials, not their wisdom, were their only power. But although he felt himself to be a persona non grata,—another unpopular person to suffer for his beliefs,—he girded himself for earnest uncompromising warfare. He planted against every church his strongest batteries of criticism, satire, and sarcasm. He poured forth his thoughts in words that made men’s ears tingle, till the protestations of his adversaries fell from their lips with something of a hollow sound. Half preacher, half assassin, as he was thought to be, repudiating as offensive the doctrines of the Cross, and hating with every drop of his blood the general traditions and faith of the Church, he worked and awaited the day of his triumph. It came.

Boston is slow to recognize new prophets; yet religious belief of every kind is treated with gentleness and indulgence. The preachers of the city might regard Mr. Savage as a teacher of “positive error,” but they could not object to the hospitality of Boston, a citizen and preacher of which Mr. Savage became on the footing of democratic fraternity. By the free development of reason and the spread of intelligence Boston has become temperate and tolerant. She will not enslave the understanding or deny anyone one vestige of religious freedom. With her, religion is a practical and spiritual thing rather than a theoretic and ceremonial. The latter helps to stimulate the former to the fullest discharge of duty, but does not in itself constitute religion. The one comes by internal necessity, the other belongs to the sphere of outward operation, of inventive and enterprising minds. Religion is a living mode of thought sustained by personal character, and needs not ambitious terminology or supervision. Boston trusts her instincts, as Emerson has taught her, and asks only ample scope for the imperative working of her religious sentiment and the life of the heart.

Under these favoring conditions, by which Boston, like a mother, works out her own character in the spirit and life of her gifted men, the Rev. Mr. Savage was impelled onward in his daring enterprise. With stern fidelity Boston exercised a definite and pervasive influence on Mr. Savage’s mind. Although his religious thinking came upon the public like a new birth, he was only reiterating its progressive thought and the stout emphasis it placed on thinking out religion in intelligible terms and in all the breadth of its activities. Instrumental rather than absolute, Boston’s versatile and expansive thought furnished the new preacher his coveted opportunity. Her faith failed not, nor did her courage falter. Silently she was assailing the old theology and elaborating the new, in which she has unhesitating belief, and which entered with enlightening and nourishing force into Mr. Savage’s broad and free opinions. It came to him as the expression of the abiding atmosphere in which he dwelt and with a beneficent bearing on his ministry. Favored thus by the concurrent voices of those to whom he ministered, and by the general freedom and grace of the entire community, Mr. Savage made a real and salutary advance in his religious work in Boston. And supported by the judgment of an ever widening public, conservative thinkers about him felt his influence on current religious opinion. While he indulged a liberty of speculation, he instilled religious habits of thought and the spirit of worship into many inquiring minds, and enabled them to identify themselves with the highest development of his own religious consciousness. Boston and vicinity became fully appreciative of the distinctiveness of his mission and of his apprehensions of the truth. In recognition, therefore, of the unmeasured praise and enthusiastic acceptance which he received from the public, he was honored, at the close of his ministry in Boston, with the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Harvard University. Harvard thus expressed her highest confidence in the truth and permanence of his ministry. This famous institution of classic, scientific, philosophic, and sacred learning attested the sanity of the mind and doctrines of this once obscure and despised but now noted preacher.

II.

Another condition of the Rev. Minot J. Savage’s influence and popularity as a preacher is his ethical intensity.

In the preceding section I have spoken of what has actually taken place. I have there shown the favoring conditions under which Mr. Savage labored in the city which was to him both friend and teacher, and where he has done his most efficient work as a preacher. The particular type of religious thought represented by him in the pulpit has not been brought about by his or any man’s device. For generations it has been pouring itself forth from mind to mind in philosophy, science, poetry, and religious thought. He did not initiate any distinctive movement; he only helped to popularize and make permanent doctrines which already had found favor among the people. He emphasized these and vitalized anew their application to the Christian religion. In this section I shall devote myself to a study of the ethical intensity of his ministry.

The Rev. Mr. Savage’s ministry of nearly a quarter of a century in Boston teaches some important lessons. And while he has had many critics, no one has yet displayed and made current his most emphatic qualities as a preacher. In attempting this the writer does so not from the standpoint of the theologian or the professional clergyman, but from that of a liberal thinker with mind unfettered by any prepossession.

The first thing to be noted is the candor of the man, the great sincerity which marks whatever he says and does. His theology is simple; his creed, which is neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene, nor the utterances of modern pontiffs, but in a measure his own, is readily comprehended, and betrays a sweet reasonableness which invites the subscription of anyone without fear or trembling or convulsive revolution. And while some of his fundamental beliefs impinge against current prejudices and awaken enmities, he fearlessly submits them to the judgment and common sense of mankind. What he believes he preaches, and what he does not he rejects with all the vehemence of a man of conviction. Correct modes or forms of religious thought he conceives to be necessary, and the more so the firmer will be one’s principles of duty. Yet essential and sanctifying as this is, more essential in his opinion is an honest mind,—a mind that is faithful in the pursuit of truth and true to its own convictions and inspirations. He believes that the most perfect man is he who is most diligent in duty and fervent in spirit; who incorporates the truth into his selfhood; who toils with a prompt and ardent devotion to know the truth, to maintain his opinions firmly, to diffuse and propagate them by every means consistent with a perfect character. With unselfish courage Mr. Savage resists every allurement to compromise. Never timid, never complaisant or patronizing, he exhibits some of the rarest virtues of the human mind. Oh that there were more like him in this indolent and obsequious world!

Compared with Mr. Savage’s strength of character, how contemptible are some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason, intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world, have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters, too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for game,—for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.

Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but never a deficiency in character,—in the word and spirit of what he proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight, truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions, that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion.

He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be due to some sacred calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and truth’s propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his dignified position.

The creed-test of the Andover theological school may be unwarranted at the present time. Yet while there is such a test, and the old creed comes up and insists upon being reaffirmed in its original meaning by each incumbent, we are bewildered the moment we attempt to harmonize what happened there recently with stalwart conviction and vital piety. Within a few months we have seen the Andover creed, over which there has been so much wrangling, and some of whose doctrines make the human heart to-day sink in despair, receiving unqualified indorsement. With unfaltering confidence this ancient creed was reaffirmed by a professor of that school of divinity without modifying the conditions of subscription. This surprises us. It may be that the recently inducted Professor of Sacred Rhetoric did not signify explicit allegiance to this creed, whose doctrines are so inflexibly maintained by our older theologians, but simply gave his assent, just as the clergy of the noble Church of England are giving their assent, but not their strict adherence, to the Thirty-nine Articles. And yet what is progressive orthodoxy, so boldly and ably enunciated, but a growing away from the old Andover creed?

Or is it only a question of emphasis, not of dogma? Are we to infer that the old dogma abides, while only the emphasis alters? It may be that progressive orthodoxy is not what it professes to be, that instead of giving religious thought a definite impulse and being a necessary onward step in sacred learning, religious thought is only receiving a richer and deeper volume as it lies in its old bed. Be this as it may, the verbal assent and subscription of the new incumbent gave fresh force to every dogma of the old faith. True, we could not expect him to be so recreant as to disown this venerable creed, to break the traditional thread and cease to be the heir of his sires.

Yet we should like to see progressive orthodoxy, or the New Theology, of Andover mean something; represent, without the slightest misgiving, some distinctive dogma, some fresh insight into religious truth. At present it is an unintelligible hypothesis. It does not appear to be definitely settled. A master hand has sketched it, but there are none to complete and make it triumphant. Why not go to the root of the matter? Progressive orthodoxy is yet only “in the air.” On paper it is inspiring; in practice, a paradox to the discomfiture of every friend of the revival of religious thought. It is subtle and disputatious, and predicts for itself a reforming mission, but it has not the courage of its convictions; it looks like a clever juggling of divinity. We may speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but unless we have deep convictions and feel the intensity of the principles we are attempting to promulgate, we are as sounding brass; we lower the dignity of truth and moral worth, we offend the purity of conscience. Filled with the ecstasies of an office while enacting an untruth is satanic; it is unworthy of any trained intelligence. Honest conviction is the indispensable condition of the preacher and teacher. Without it he compromises the sacred character of his particular commission, of his appointed trust.

All this is meant to throw light upon the artless simplicity, the outspoken but sensitive judgment, the indefinable strength of character, of the Rev. Mr. Savage. Beneath all he says and does we may see the calm utterance of unwavering convictions and an individuality unimpaired. He is thoroughly possessed with the sense of duty; he has his being there. There is nothing spurious in him; he disguises no hypocrisy. We see in him no secret acquiescence with what he cannot conscientiously accept. Always standing in the full light of the incomparable obligation and privilege of his work,—which is a cheerful, happy exercise, not a doleful and despondent one,—he influences the world not only as a teacher, but as a character. He proclaims the sanctity of his office not by a set of pious phrases, but by a spotless devotion to it, as the only way by which he most completely can subserve the public welfare. This perpetually invests the man and his ministry with interest and with an almost magic power.

The ethical intensity of Mr. Savage’s character unfolds itself in his preaching as a consistent result. In the sermon the convictions of the man are not sacrificed. He puts more than words into his sermons; he puts himself. He speaks the truth “bluntly,” as if it were not a hard but an easy attainment, and an element of human nature. Without pretension or self-exaltation, craving no man’s praise and envying no man’s distinction, he endeavors in an unwavering and high-spirited manner to disclose in his sermons the great verities, the substantial realities, of life.

In the broadest sense of the word Mr. Savage is not a man of scholarly attainments or tastes; not many are. He is nevertheless a highly cultivated man. Whether he addresses us through the faculties of speech or through his written compositions, we always feel the independence of his intellect, his delicate and discriminating moral sense, and his love of truth. His sermons, his public utterances, and his devout invocations exhibit a maturity of mind and a range of culture which enable him to impress other minds with whatever has possession of his own. In the pulpit, in authorship, in every mode of religious activity, we meet the cultivated, sincere, and reverent man. We feel the influence of his sympathetic mind and singular chasteness of spirit in hearty and symmetrical development. A culture like this, combined with a nature deeply religious, brings one into possession more or less completely of truths which make a direct appeal to the understanding. It has enabled Mr. Savage to enjoy a certain lordship in the realm of mind and mental life. He is an example of the dictum, that he who would think truly on spiritual things must first be spiritually minded. In both his acted and his written life he seems to comprehend and to realize the truth, to have reached the loftiest heights of fellowship with eternal wisdom. Judging from his own serene, unclouded, and practical vision of the truth, one is driven to the conclusion that he is proclaiming and formulating the ultimate gospel of mankind.

Some may sneer and scoff at his “deadly notions” and “perverted thoughts,” but in his demand for personal life, development of conscience, and attainment in righteousness, his ministry is potent; its inspiration is constant. He believes and preaches only those truths which are possible to rational belief. With that exquisite instinct which characterizes all his thinking, he places, as if he were in apostolic succession, man’s greatest need in coming to himself and in making religion inseparable from personal thought and character. Mr. Savage holds this forth as man’s paramount task, to refuse which is alone to be faithless and hopeless and unforgiven. His idea of religion consists in nothing external or formal; nothing can avail with him but the culture of the soul and the quiet discharge of duty. It is his superlative merit that he enables one to feel his own capacity of thought as a positive and independent efficacy, and to rest upon the authority of his own conscience as the hope of glory and as a coÖrdinating power with Holy Writ. He makes a broad survey of human nature, and commands men to traverse the whole range of their being and to call themselves to rigid account until the germs of moral debility are cast out of the heart. Man is not to waste his energies in grasping the immense and misty proportions of the beliefs of this or that traditionist or minute systems to which souls are often bent in unwilling conformity. The object of his ministry is to summon men to reckon with themselves every day, and to regenerate themselves by right thinking and by deeds of piety. In his opinion each person is a spiritual agency, a marvellous display of divine power and goodness, not only in the majesty of the truth which he apprehends, but in the dignity of the life which he may live. Temptation may open its alluring paths, evil may solicit us, sin may lead us astray, sorrow may drag us down; yet they need not. His public ministry is devoted to the infusion of this better sentiment,—that man is not the mere victim of circumstances, the necessary prey of temptation, or the helpless subject of wrong; that he need not contemplate life in indolent despair, but may check the dominion of sin and impurity, rise above not only intemperate indulgence, but every intemperate desire and impulse, and form dispositions of peculiar excellence, of original strength and beauty.

Mr. Savage’s ministry, then, is full of truth and power. It is strongly personal and ethical. There is no abler advocate of this important truth and master-word of the Gospel and of religion. It is a divine truth ever working in him, breaking into utterances, and giving to his beliefs and his life the highest dignity. With him it is a persistent and overwhelming duty to give to his ministry this practical content, this ethical intensity. In this he is evangelical.

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments assert or imply that without our personal agency, and without the truth in the substance and texture of our characters, there can be no spiritual elevation or final perfection. In the terms of the Scriptures the divine resources are infinite; but instead of overwhelming our personal agency or responsibility they make a stupendous demand upon us. The truth must be received with unhesitating acceptance and assimilated to our individual being.

To teach such consummate truths the Rev. Minot J. Savage, D. D., strong in every fibre of intellectual and religious faith, has devoted his talents, his strength, and his life, and for that reason he stands before the American people as one of their most noted preachers.