The Fear of Having an Over-Educated Ministry

With those who are afraid of over education, we have no sympathy. We never saw, the world has never seen, an over-educated minister. A man who uses words as long as his finger, whose discourses are so refined and obscure that he is only fit to address hair-splitting mystics, is not, in the proper sense of the word, an educated person. Tuition and study can rise no higher than to teach students to think clearly and speak plainly. True refinement is not at the antipodes of good old Saxon phraseology. Deep thought, profound theology, and consecutive logic are not above the capabilities of our mother tongue, nor the capacities and apprehension of the masses. Perhaps we never had a finer specimen of sound divinity, logical accuracy, and plain English, than Robert Hall; and yet the housemaids, the mill boys, and the farm labourers could follow him from the beginning to the end of his sermous. One of his biographers has said, that he seemed to proceed to the utmost verge of the region of truth which it is possible for human thought to tread, and yet he never puzzled his audience, although he carried them along with him, whether they were clowns or philosophers. Here then was no surface man, no spiritual driveller, who was afraid to look at a great thing, lest it should make his own head swim; nor afraid to say a great thing, lest he might bewilder his hearers.

We may lay it down as an axiom in ministerial scholarship, that all uninteresting preachers are badly educated men. Their English is a kind of learned gibberish, a sort of literary patois, a home-spun jargon, which their native language repudiates. It is only a truism to say a man who cannot speak his mother tongue, so as to be understood by all plain-spoken Englishmen and Englishwomen, is only half educated. And to give diplomas to these literary mystics, and call them refined and intellectual, is a monstrous mistake. Intellectual thinking is clear transparent thinking, and we need not add that he who thinks clearly, however deep he goes, or high he soars, can always speak distinctly. A turbid fountain sends forth a muddy stream, and so in like manner, obscure thinkers, whether they descend into the depths, or rise to the heights of science, always carry their own mists with them, and cast an awful shade and darkness on everything they approach; and as a consequence, their speech is more like the muttering of the necromancer than the clear articulation and elocution of the disciple of wisdom. Truth is a transparent river, clear as crystal, and never has, and never can, send forth a turbid stream; and therefore, when the draught presented to you is polluted, you may depend upon it the vessel from which it has been poured was unclean. No small part of what has gone by the name of scholarship has consisted in putting coloured glasses on the eyes of the disciples, so that to them the sun is dark, the rose is blue, and the whitest lily, purple. But then, as we have said before, it is an abuse of language to call such obscurations of the intellect, profound thought or over-much, education.--Anon