To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and WorkMoule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Religion
To My Younger Brethren: Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work
Moule, H. C. G. (Handley Carr Glyn)
Pastoral theology
i. First, I would entreat my younger Brother to resolve in the Lord's
name that his own use of the Prayer Book in his ministration be to him a
thing of sacred importance and personal reality. We _need_ to form such
a resolve deliberately, and to watch and pray over it. Do we not know
what strong temptations lie in the other direction? We have to use these
forms over and over again; before many years are over perhaps we could
"take" a whole service, except the appointed Scriptures, without looking
at the book: is it not too easy under such conditions to read as those
who read not, and to pray as those who pray not? And all too often the
Clergyman, younger or older, allows himself almost consciously, almost
on principle, to form an inadequate estimate of his Prayer-Book work.
Perhaps he regards the prayers as in such a sense "the voice of the
Church" that he is willing to be little more than a machine through
which the Church offers them. Or perhaps on the other hand he lets
himself forget their immense importance, under a strong, and just, sense
of the sacred importance of the Sermon. He is alive and awake in the
pulpit, and seeks his Lord's presence there, and realizes it as sought;
but in the desk--he goes by himself, and much of his precious time there
is spent in thought which wanders to the ends of the earth while his
voice does its decent but somnambulatory part alone.
*USE IT WITH LIVING REALITY.
I can only appeal with all my heart to my younger Brother not to let it
be thus with him. And the only effective recipe against the trouble is
faith, exercised in prayer and watching, with a full recollection of the
urgent importance of the matter. For indeed it _is_ all-important that
the servant of God should be "given wholly to" his work, at the reading
desk, at the lectern, at the Table, at the Font.
PRAY THE PRAYERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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