personal completeness which is the ideal of intelligent minds, and that, above all, they shall be elevated to that plane of spiritual life whereon they can go forth with freedom and authority in the midst of a critical and somewhat cynical age as the accredited ambassadors of Christ Jesus. Our great service for you is, in the atmosphere of freedom and devotion, to raise up men who by the thoroughness of their intellectual discipline, the vigor and insistence of their faith, the broad and practical acquaintance with modern methods of social service, the virility of their persons, the absolute reality of their daily fellowship with Christ shall maintain the highest standards of ministry, without which the church cannot hope to control the modern world.

Secondly, the seminary can serve the church, as we have already intimated, through the transmission and conservation of truth by means of its restatement and reapplication. This is precisely the most precious office of the Christian school of theology. The truth is indeed the same yesterday, to-day, and forever; but men's modes of expressing it vary markedly from generation to generation. One age lays the emphasis on the Atonement; another age lays it on the Incarnation; another, on the ministering and suffering servant, each age true to its own intuitive sense of need. Nothing is more striking in the history of Christendom than the extraordinary succession of such restatements and reapplications. Nothing is more astonishing than the church's perpetual but futile protests against them. Always the shifting of emphasis and the restatement of principle have been regarded by some as equivalent to the relinquishment of the truth itself. Now, it is the precious and necessary office of the seminary to guide this inevitable and desirable progression and to point out, in the words of a recent writer, that “mutation of emphasis in the truth involves no invasion of substance." We shall therefore always have to have scholars in the ministry, because no one aspect of the truth is final but each aspect of the truth is successively necessary. It is the office of the seminary to give these shifting aspects to the churches in their proper perspectives with their just limitation and their sane interpretation.

Now, in return for these great and precious services, what is the church to do for the seminary? There are two things it

needs to do to-day. It ought to have a proper pride in and give an adequate support to the spiritual leaders sent out to it from the schools of learning. It is a question of vital moment whether the church proposes to pay its ministers what for men of their equipment and their intelligence is a living wage. The young preachers who have attained a long and elaborate training by giving the better part of a decade to non-productive and idealistic preparation have a right to expect that the churches for whom they give their services shall enable them to live in dignity and in freedom from financial anxiety as well as in Spartan simplicity. There ought to be in our churches a great pride in our theologians and our preachers. It is a crying need of the Congregational churches of America that they feel the same proud and affectionate interest in their clergy as is felt, for instance, in Scotland, among the Presbyterians, where the Sustentation Fund makes it impossible for gifted and sensitive and scholarly men to live in ignoble and fettering poverty, and where congregations and communities have a personal pride in and feel responsibility for their spiritual leaders. I commend to the earnest attention of this Council that we ought to take immediate and effective steps towards securing for every Congregational minister a decent and adequate living.

Secondly, the seminary has a right to expect coöperation of ordaining councils and churches in its struggle to keep the personnel and equipment of our clergy at a high point. We are proud of our tradition of a learned ministry. There has never been a period in our history when the momentum and the sanity of learning and the grace and patience of culture were more needed in the work of our profession than now. Few of you probably realize the effort and sacrifice your seminaries are making in these days of short cuts to eminence and pseudo royal roads to learning to preserve for you a high intellectual and personal average in your coming clergy. But the churches are false to their partnership every time they admit men by side doors into ministerial standing; every time they ordain to the pastorate of souls and the proclamation of an ancient message freighted with the interpretations of the centuries men whose professional training has been limited to three weeks or six months or a year in a Bible school, from which they issue, with, indeed, an access of zeal, but not of that sort which is according

to knowledge. One of the reasons why such illy-prepared men, deficient in personality and training, are admitted to our ministry is because our churches pay such small and impoverishing salaries that better men are not to be had. Now, these things ought not so to be. Untrained, illiterate men, by virtue of enthusiasm, or a facile piety, or their youth, can often win a widespread if temporary popular allegiance. But neither they nor their parishes can progress, and they are not competent for permanent service in a great Christian church.

Finally, the seminary has a right to expect the church to furnish its human material. It is an indictment which the theological schools can bring against the churches to-day that the main reason why the number of students is so small is because the churches themselves have lost their hold upon educated youth. I am increasingly impressed, as a college preacher, that more and more the moral guidance of this nation, its ethical and spiritual inspiration, is issuing not from our churches but from our schools of learning. The surest point of contact with choice youth to-day is not through the parish, whose hold upon choice youth is slight. It is through the college pulpit and the fraternity conference. This ought to give us food for thought. If the educated youth believes that the average church is remote from vital human issues and is the protector of vested interests and the stronghold of a bourgeois aristocracy, the church ought to ask, Why? If the youth believes that intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical progress are not desired by the church, it is time for the church to ask, Is this so? There are certain grave disadvantages under which the seminaries labor because churches rather than colleges send us our material. The men came to their decision as to the ministry late in their academic career, and often their previous training has led away from the professional equipment they need if they are to be with us. If they come to us ardent with humanitarian sympathies, they must frequently come without that spiritual culture, that capacity for an insight into mystical and religious things, which is only the product of a godly home, a fireside instruction, and a long-continued allegiance to the ministries of the church. It is easy enough to tell from the deficiencies in personality in the men who come to our seminaries that their church training has been inadequate, that the accent in their religious life has been

too much on men, and too little on the mystery of God in Christ. The seminary, then, has a right to demand of the church that she gird herself for the task of holding her youth, that she cease to merely preach about our Lord, that she cease to stop short of the point where they who hear His name forget themselves and sink down in worship and allegiance before Him. That is my last word this evening. The seminary pleads with the church in the name of our great partnership in a noble cause, that the church deal with the mysteries of religion so that under her teaching men shall advance in reverence and devotion as well as in ethical stature; and that the recent impoverishment of the doctrine of the Person of Christ, the attempt to resolve the whole content of Christian truth into the ethics of Jesus, be exchanged for a teaching and preaching which shall rest back upon the human need of God, the psychological necessity of worship as a part of life, and the redemption and mediatorial office of the risen and perpetually existent Christ.

STATEMENT OF THE AMERICAN BOARD.

REV. WILLIAM E. STRONG, EDITORIAL SECRETARY.

The three years since the meeting of the National Council in Cleveland in 1907 have been in many ways a period of significant growth for the American Board.

The policy of making the organization of the board more immediately representative of the Congregational churches has been steadily pursued. Previous to 1907 almost all the members who represented district or state associations of the churches did so by assignment of the Board itself rather than upon nomination by those bodies. In 1907, 29 members were elected, 20 of them by the new method of nomination by organizations of churches. During the last three years, 290 members have been elected, 163 in accordance with this new plan, 127 being chosen "at large" by nomination of the Board itself. The ratio of "at large" members would have been much smaller in these recent elections were it not that in 1909, in the readjustments involved in adopting the new method, and as its time limit would have swept from the Board a large proportion of those who were its experienced and devoted members, the Board elected 98 members at large besides 84 upon nomination from the churches, that its governing body might not be suddenly and heavily depleted. The ratio of additions this year is 10 new members "at large" to 51 repre senting districts of churches and nominated by them.

Notwithstanding these large additions, the total number of corporate members has not grown. It is now (November 1) 396, against 409 in 1907. The figures given above thus indicate the large increase in the ratio of direct representation during the period; already the churches determine for the greater part the make-up of the Board. The new method of election has not yet resulted in steady devotion to the Board on the part of many of these newer members, so far at least as the register of the annual meeting indicates. The records for the past three years reveal the fact that the members chosen upon nomination