The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-03-12
REQUISITES OF A PREACHER
ADDRESS, BY PRESIDENT TUCKER OF DARTMOUTH.

President Tucker of Dartmouth col lege delivered the following lecture on ''The Making and the Unmaking of the Preacher" before the students of the Divinity school Thursday afternoon at Marquand chapel. A large audience was present and the eloquent speaker was at his best.
 Gentlemen of the Seminary:
 The immediate subject through which l define my purpose in this discussion of preaching is: The Making and the Un- making of the Preacher.
 would like to begin by saying q word about the significance of sub ject in such a course of lectures as that now before us. To borrow the homely analogy of our Lord, a subject seems to me to be like ''the leaven which Wo- man took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened.'' The amount to be leavened is definitely stated. The amount of leaven required was matter of personal Judgment. Now subject represents the element of personal judgment, it shows the esti- mate or measure which one takes of the work at hand. That is obvious. Its fine distinction is that it is in itself the idea, the personal idea, which one casts into any prescribed mass of thought, and through which he seeks to work it to his purpose. My sole thought in this course of lectures, let me clearly avow it at the outset, is the thought of the permanent upbuilding of the preacher. Beyond this make no venture into the wide territory of preaching.
 will carry the suggestion of my fig ure little further. We never gain the intellectual possession of anything whick is great, or even fast, except as we are able to take some hold upon 1t from within The external possessions of some men may seem large, they may be so large as to be unmanagea- ble, but they must be disappointing to their possessors. Nothing is really in z intellectual possession which is not held by the inner grasp. How then shall we get within so great a matter as that of preaching. Where is the pint of reality. I know of no place where one may so certainly expect to find it as in the consciousness of the pl stretch the vast ranges of truth. They all contribute something to his mes-l sage. Before him is the common hu- manity. Nothing which belongs to that can be alien to him. But neither truth nor man have anything to do with preaching until they have found their rightful place in the conscious- ness of the preacher.
 Here then you have the method as well as the reason of my subject. I am intent upon finding out and taking the measure of those forces which are steadily at work toward the making or the unmaking of the preacher, because they are actually determining at any given time the value of preaching. Some men are preaching better at forty or at sixty than when they began; oth- CTS are not preaching as we'll. The un- making process is going on side by side with the making process, Some of tie forces which are acting in either dircc- ton are altogether personal; others are too general to be of much account. We say that there are preaching ages, ages which furnish at once the message and the listening ear. We say that there are ages which are lacking in stim"lu and in response. think that we make far too much of these contrasts. be- lieve that it is one part of our business to reduce these variants to a minimunn. If there is anything which should move on from generation to generation in the consistency of power, though it may be flexible and elastic as the spirit of man, it is the Christian pulpit.
 I do not propose to enter into any definitions of preaching These have their legitimate place in the class room. But having chosen a subject which lays the stress so largely upon persons ality, I cannot afford to pass by the question, Who, under present condi- tions, is the preacher? Or when does one begin to satisfy the conditions of modern preaching. I address myself to the answer to this question in this opening lecture.
 There are a great many ways in which we can discriminate the preach- CT from the men of like general aims or methods. We can say that he is like this man in the use of method, though unlike him at every other point; or that he is like that man in the object which he seeks to accomplish, though unlike him In other respects. Let us make no account of these likenesses or contrasts, but rather try to find what is necessary to enable one to meet the present conditions of preaching Whether the preacher has much or little in common with men of like eall- ings is for our purpose a matter of in- difference. How shall we name the preacher of to-day by his actual work. It may not be saying the greatest thing, but it is saying something very much to the purpose as I conceive, when I insist at the outset that the preacher of to-day is the man who is able to enlist other men in his work of persuasion. That is, he is the man who is able to make his audience preach with him and for him. Jesus alone with the woman at Jacobs well was the preacher. Paul and Silas were preachers in the jail at Phillipi. But they were not preaching under modern conditions. An essential, one is tempt ed to say, supreme condition of mod ern preaching, is an audience. Modern preaching is so far conditional in an audience that the argument for the pulpit above the press as an agent for the effective communication of truth oI,r1 this condition