296 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
be a spiritual adviser of men. All the world feels contempt for the minister of religion who is given to levity. It is a sure sign that his character is shallow, and that he is simply incapable of perceiving and feeling the moral and spiritual significance of living. But it is easy for him just through his familiarity with things regarded as peculiarly sacred to fall into the mere habit of gravity, going about with " a long face " and speaking in tones that quench the natural glad ness of life which healthy people feel. Such a manner and tone when they become merely habitual are likely to become superficial and to indicate no longer real depth and sincerity of feeling; and when thus detached from reality they are ridiculous, if not disgusting and offensive, to those who are normally constituted.
Moreover, the fact that he is " set apart " to the ministry will, if he is not careful, have a most unfortunate reaction upon his habitual bearing. What does this " setting apart " mean? Does it mean a sanctimonious isolation from the ordinary life of the people? Manifestly he is set apart from the ordinary occupations of men not in order that he may be detached from other men in sympathy, but rather for the very opposite reason that he may, while giving more time to the study of the deeper issues of life and to direct communion with God, also enter more particularly and variously into sympathy with men in all the walks of life. Not that he may be specialized into aloofness from other men, but generalized into more universal community with them this is the true meaning of his ordination to the ministry. The minister has often interpreted his " set- ing apart to the ministry " in the sense of separateness as if thereafter he was to be one apart from his fellows, dwelling in a region above them and inaccessible to them; and with this is likely to go a subconscious assumption that he is no longer subject to the same motives and passions which influence other men, is neither to be judged by the same standards nor to receive the same treatment. This sense of abnormal separateness and aloofness has from old
�� �
