p. 198 | MINISTERS, ATTENTION

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · March 25, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 13

MINISTERS, ATTENTION.

THE following pointed remarks on an educated ministry, from the S. S. Times, are quite as applicable to Seventh-day Adventist ministers as to any others. They should be the best of soldiers; for they are called to “the most exposed and dangerous fields.” Are the best talents that we have any too good to give to the service of God in this great closing message of mercy and warning?

Whatever hostility exists toward a “learned ministry,” is not usually to be found among those Christian laborers who are most zealous and effective in religious work. The history of the Christian church shows that the men who have been most earnest and successful in reaching the ignorant have been the very ones to press most strongly the advantage religion may gain from the possession of sound learning. The great reformers and missionaries and evangelists of Christianity have not been preachers who believed they could do their best work without hard study and unremitting intellectual exercise. When the late Dr. Alexander Duff found himself at the head of the representative body of the Free Church of Scotland, he did not emphasize the need of zeal alone, in the missionary fields with which he was so familiar. He spoke still more strongly of the need of learning, as a weapon of the Christian worker. “It ought,” he said, “to be counted one of the chiefest glories of our church that, from the very outset, she resolved, with God’s blessing, to secure not only a pious, but a learned ministry. What we desiderate is, learning in inseparable combination with devoted piety.” Then he went on to show that as learning without piety freezes the soul, so does piety without learning tend to fanaticism and conceit. That was the lesson, as Dr. Duff learned it,—that the best soldiers are needed for the most exposed and dangerous fields.