What Doctor of Theology takes the last six of these to bed with
him to-day?
Our theological courses are too dry. Look carefully over the catalogues
of thirty or forty of our own seminaries, and notice the curious, almost
monastic, impression which they make. Then realize that the men who
pursue these abstruse and mediaeval subjects are the men who go out into
churches where the chief topics of thought and conversation are crops,
stocks, politics, clothes, servants, babies! There is a grim humor in
the thing, which seems to have escaped those who have drawn up the
curriculum.
Life is not monastic. It is very lively. We scarcely get, in all our
post-collegiate life, a chance to sit and muse. We go through
sensations, experiences, and incongruities, which stir a sense of fun. A
man reads (I notice) in his seminary, St. Leo, _Ad Flaeirmum_, and makes
his first pastoral call on a woman who proudly brings out her first
baby for him to see. _Ad Flaeirmum_ indeed! What does St. Leo tell the
youth to say?
What should be breathed into a man in the seminary, is not the mere
facts of ecclesiastical history, but the warm pulsating currents of
human life; the profound significance of the founding and the progress
of the Church; a deep psychological understanding of human desires,
motives, joys, ambitions, griefs; the relentlessness of sin; the help
and glory of Redemption; the quickening of the Christ; the vigor and the
tenderness of faith.
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