[10]

The considerations brought forward exhibit the opportunities of the teacher and the high significance of the teacher’s work.

Teaching and preaching are very much alike. Phillips Brooks said very truly that preaching is the bringing of truth through personality. Some of you will prepare yourselves to preach; all of you will have to do with preachers. There is no lack of preachers but there is much lack of good preachers. The preacher has the entree to the firesides of the people. The educated preacher, like the educated teacher, realizes the profound effect that the housing of the working classes exerts upon the morals and the efficiency and the happiness of the working classes, the profound effect that surroundings exert upon life and character. The preacher will use some of the influence that issues from his superrational functions to make the homes of the people hygienically as well as morally clean, to make those homes more attractive than the resorts of vice.

Religion and the Church have, from a certain point of view, two main functions,—first to make peace between human society and assumed spiritual beings; and, second, to antagonize anti-social acts and tendencies. The first function, religion performs for a horde of man-eating savages as well as for the congregation of St. Paul’s; the second function religion performs, characteristically in a civilized society,[11] by allying itself with morality. The surprisingly low death rate of Jews wherever found is unquestionably due in large part to this alliance of religion and morality. In our English Bible we find:—

[11]

“And God spake all these words, saying,

“Honour thy father and thy mother....

“Thou shalt not kill.

“Thou shalt not commit adultery.

“Thou shalt not steal.

“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

“Though shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, ... nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.

“And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.”...

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