Study is an oft-repeated injunction on the Christian ministry: “Meditate upon these things: give thyself wholly to them, that thy profiting may appear to all” (1 Tim. iv. 15); “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Tim. ii. 15). The reasons for this are obvious. Knowledge is everywhere power. The ministry, from their position, are the natural leaders in religious thought. To command respect, they must be men of mental grasp and activity, and must be in advance of the thinking of those around them. Besides, no other profession is so heavily tasked for brain exertion. The Senate, the Bar, and the Platform only occasionally demand the highest efforts of the intellect. But the pulpit [p. 139] requires weekly its elaborate sermons. They must have freshness, originality, force, or the pastor loses his hold on the people. And this exhaustive drain on his resources continues steadily year after year. No man can meet such demands without constant, earnest study. He must be ever growing. His mental processes must be ceaselessly active, pushing into new realms of investigation, gathering new materials for thought, increasing his discipline, and making him a broader, richer, deeper man.  
In the life of a pastor two extremes are to be avoided. On the one hand, he is not to be a mere book-worm, secluded in his study, with no practical, living contact and sympathy with life around him. Some ministers of large literary culture have been comparatively useless from want of living connection between their thinking and the real needs of the busy actual world in which they lived. On the other hand, a minister may not be a mere desultory man, a gossip from house to house, occupied with newspapers and magazines, skimming the surface of popular thinking in ephemeral books that may attract his fancy, but neglecting the severer processes of self-culture essential to mental growth. Instability in the pastoral office is often a result of this. Freshness, originality in thought and expression, is lost, and the people, weary of repetitions and empty platitudes, cease to respect and love the pulpit. The grand object to be sought, then, is to combine the student and the pastor—a mind growing in knowledge and power by habitual work in the study and growing in executive ability and social force by constant activity in the church and contact with the people. To secure this there must be a system—a system wisely formed and steadily pursued. What shall this system be? In answering this I propose to pursue two lines of suggestion—the method of study and the subjects of study.
 
[p. 140]First, the Method.
 
1. Be a student everywhere. The pastor’s business is to deal with the human mind and the actual experiences of men; he should, therefore, go through the world with his eyes and ears open, thoroughly studying men and life around him. In the street, in society, in the social meeting, the mind is to be ceaselessly at work, observing character, studying phases of experience and life, and gathering materials for mental work. Many of the best trains of thought, most interesting views of Scripture, and most effective illustrations will be suggested in conversations and in the prayer-room. No man can afford to lose these; for, springing as they do from direct contact with the people, such trains of thought are most likely to meet the wants of the congregation and deal with the questions most vital to them. The studious pastor who preserves these texts and thoughts and illustrations as they occur will be surprised to find how rapidly they accumulate, and how fresh and rich they often render his thinking and instruction.
 
2. Have a book always on hand. Every life has its spare moments, and much may be added in culture and knowledge by a right use of them. Most of the current literature of the day, and much in standard biography, history, science, poetry, and art can be read in this way, if the right book is at hand. A half, or even a quarter, of an hour each day will accomplish the reading of a large number of volumes in a year; and if these are well selected, they will greatly add to the minister’s breadth and intelligence, while they will refresh rather than exhaust his mind.
 
3. Consecrate a specific part of each day to severe systematic work in the privacy of the study. The habit of general observation and reading, before suggested, can be no [p. 141] adequate substitute for this. The time thus appointed for hard study should be sacredly devoted, and no ordinary occurrence be allowed to interrupt. The advantages of this are obvious. (1.) A habit once fixed is an ever-increasing power. The mind acts with greater rapidity and force when the habit of study at fixed, regularly recurring periods is formed. Instead of spending hours in vain attempts to fix attention and concentrate thought on the subject in hand, the mind enters at once with full energy into work. The more fixed and long continued the habit, the more easy, rapid, and powerful the mental processes. This is one secret of the immense amount of brain-work performed by some men: by fixed habits they instantly concentrate mental force, and work at white heat. (2.) If these hours are once fixed, and are fully understood by the people, they will ordinarily be free from interruption. The congregation will conform to the pastor’s plan and will respect his fidelity in preparing for their instruction on the Lord’s Day. What part of the day should be selected for the study cannot be determined by any rule; it must depend partly on the minister’s habits, and partly on the necessities of his position. Ordinarily, the morning is best. The liability to interruption is less, and it leaves the afternoons and evenings free for visitation, meetings, and social life.
 
Let me add, nothing but a high ideal of the ministry and a fixed purpose to realize it will enable a pastor to persist in such a course of study. He must believe in it as a solemn duty he owes his God, his people and himself, or he will fail. Indolence is often fostered by a false dependence on genius or on the spur of the occasion to give effectiveness and brilliancy to public utterances. Unthoughtful hearers, also, will often praise the off-hand, unstudied sermons and discourage elaborate preparation. [p. 142] Besides this, there are obstacles to study in the pastor’s work. He has cares connected with the sick, the afflicted, the erring; executive work in the organization and discipline of the church; and duties he owes society in the varied relations of life. These are often pressing, and the danger is that they crowd into the hours for study. Many a man circumscribes his own intellectual growth and pulpit power, making himself permanently a narrower and weaker man, by allowing these outside cares to destroy his processes of mental discipline and growth. Here nothing will overcome but a profound conviction that study—persistent, regular, life-long study—is the solemn, first duty of every man who ventures to stand up in the pulpit as an instructor of the people. Let other duties have their place, but the first, the most imperative duty of him who teaches others is to teach himself.
 
Second, the Subjects.
 
Let us suppose that the pastor has fixed his hours and made them sacred to severe, thorough mental labor; what shall he study? I answer: Not his sermons only. A grave mistake is often made here. The whole time is devoted to sermon preparation, leaving no room for general culture, biblical investigation, or theological studies. As the result, the mind becomes empty and barren. It lacks material for thought. The man is perpetually pouring out, but never pouring in, and the vessel becomes empty. He faithfully grinds at the mill but puts nothing into the hopper. Some conscientious, hardworking thinkers in this way fail as preachers. They have no freshness. The mind runs perpetually in the same grooves and moves always in the same narrow circle, whereas, if they were reading, investigating, looking on subjects from new standpoints [p. 143] and receiving the mental impulses which contact with other thinkers gives, the mind would be ever growing, ever enriching itself, and the sermons would be full of fresh and interesting views of truth.
 
Three objects are to be sought in the study: general culture, biblical and theological investigation, and sermon preparation.
 
I. General Culture.
 
By this I mean studies adapted to the development of the whole man. The pastor is not to be, in the narrow, technical sense, a mere theologian. He should seek to be a man of broad culture, developing his nature on every side and forming a full, symmetrical manhood. To accomplish this his studies must take a wide range, and open to him all those great realms of truth which science, philosophy, poetry, and history reveal.
 
1. The sciences. The pastor should not, indeed, turn aside from his sacred work to become a devotee to science. But in this age of scientific investigation, when the problems of science are so largely occupying public thought and so vitally touching the profoundest questions in religion, and the applications of science are so marvelously transforming our whole civilization and life, surely, at such a time, the man who stands up weekly to instruct the people, assuming to lead public thought, ought not to be ignorant of the results that science has reached, although he may not stop to pursue the processes of scientific inquiry. Astronomy, geology, botany, chemistry, each open a new world of truth, pouring light on the interpretation of God’s Word and abounding in richest illustrations of the sacred themes of the pulpit. Standard works on these and related sciences are within the reach of every pastor, and even one on each of them, [p. 144] carefully read, would greatly enrich and enlarge his thinking.
 
2. Philosophy, or the science of the mind. The preacher undoubtedly mistakes when he aspires to the character of a philosopher, and turns aside from his direct and earnest work for souls to lose himself in dialectics or the mazes of metaphysical speculation. But his work as a minister is to deal with the human soul—to influence the mind by reasoning, by persuasion, by the array of motives; and mind, therefore, in its power and the methods of influencing it, may well constitute one of his life-studies. It is here he comes in contact with the master-spirits in the world of thought—minds which have controlled the thinking of the ages—Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Bacon, Leibnitz and Locke. In the pressure of a pastor’s life all these cannot be read, but a few choice, standard works on mental science, such as Hamilton, Mansel, McCosh, and Porter, may surely be read and carefully digested.
 
3. ?sthetic Culture. God has not made us mere logical machines, but beings of taste, imagination, sensibility, to be moved by objects of beauty. Much of God’s book is in poetry addressed to the imagination, and the universe around us is crowded with endless forms of the beautiful. Where a cold, impassive logic fails, truth often comes with resistless power through the imagination and the sensibilities. The cultivation of this side of our nature is essential to the development of a full manhood and is important alike to pastoral and pulpit power. For this, one of the best means is the careful reading of the greater poets, the mig............