The major task of all our theological seminaries is to prepare men for the Christian ministry. It is true that some men who go out from our seminaries will be diverted into other lines of religious service. A few become teachers; others are drawn into the cogs of ecclesiastical machinery in administrative functions for which they are peculiarly fitted. Here and there a man goes through some hard, unhappy experience in a parish and leaves the ministry altogether to become a radical free lance. But these men are in the minority.

The majority of the men who graduate from the seminary become the teachers and pastors of our churches. And whatever the inevitable disciplines and disappointments of their work, they will remain parish ministers to the end. This means that they will do their active work in the world and will make their contribution to the religious life of their time primarily through their identification with three or four successive groups of men, women, and little children to whom they minister.

In both the Old Testament and the New there is a climactic point, a passage, I mean, which so epitomizes all the teaching of that section of our Bible that we should be eager to save it were all else to be destroyed. In the Old Testament it is the Ten Commandments, which form a foundation for civil society. Society would go to pieces were not the Ten Commandments understood and usually obeyed. In the New Testament it is the Lord's Prayer, which lays foundations for the harmonious inner life as the Ten Commandments do for the outer. Here speaks the aspiring spirit to its Maker. This is the love-song of the Christian world. Few precepts of our Master, I suppose, have been more widely observed than that we are to “pray in this manner.” For most of us that day would lack something in which the Lord's Prayer had not been repeated. It fits all circumstances. It is the chant of the saint in his most exultant moments, his refuge and solace when most depressed. The poor sinner, who through walking in the ways of vice has almost lost the power of aspiration and can no longer formulate for himself his better desires, finds in these sacred phrases his appropriate utterance.

How alluring and yet how elusive is the personality of the self-effacing Diarist of the Acts! Modest to the last degree and yet dignified in his quiet assurance that he is an integral part of the most significant spiritual fellowship of his day, a hero worshiper, lost in admiration for his leader and yet singularly correct in his identification of really great events, and always unwaveringly convinced that he is observing and recording consequential affairs, he nobly deserves his place in the comradeship of the Book. The more, therefore, should we like to draw this quiet workman out of his namelessness, and set him in his true place as pioneer of those historians of the clearer insight to whom the expanding church of Jesus Christ has seemed the central fact of the world's life. Can we do him this right? I venture to hope that it may yet be possible.

Among the many anecdotes about Pope Sixtus V, a stern figure of an Italian Pope-king of the sixteenth century, there is one which tells of an old Franciscan friar who had been a close friend of the Pope when the latter in his young days was a friar himself, known by the name of Felice Peretti, living in a small convent of northern Italy. When “Fra Felice” was elected Pope, his friend thought that Sixtus would not forget him and would call him to Rome and perhaps make him an important personage in the Curia. But no call came from Rome, not even an acknowledgment of the humble letters of congratulation sent with so many hopes by the old friar to his exalted friend. So he decided to go to Rome and speak personally to the Pope. After many hours of waiting in the antechamber he was admitted to the papal presence. Sixtus looked at him with indifferent eye as if he never had known him.