1928

Arriving at —— today, I was put up at the luxurious home of a very charming potentate of the local pulpit. I was driven to my meeting in a big Packard car (a gift of the congregation, my host informed me) with a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. I don’t think I would have reacted so strongly against this kind of life if I hadn’t been reading Savotorelli’s Life of St. Francis on the way down and was inclined to look at the world through the little brother’s rather than my own eyes.

To object to this kind of luxury for ministers, and not voice the same objection in regard to the standards of living among laymen, may seem to involve us in a moral dualism. But I am no longer afraid of dualism. We might well have more of it. It will be long while before we can convince laymen of the spiritual implications in standards of living in a civilization which knows of no other way to give a man a sense of achievement than to let him advertise it by outward show. But ministers ought to know better.

Furthermore there is a moral peril in accepting the largess of men to whom you are trying to minister. It is not that they try to take conscious advantage of your sense of gratitude, but that such dependence upon their generosity creates a psychological hazard against honest presentation of the truth. Of course it is probably true that men who receive these excessive benefactions are usually too tame to need taming. Innocuous virtue is always more charming and more liable to prompt a generous affection than the kind which raises disquieting questions.

Then too, ministers who can preach the gospel of Jesus in our kind of civilization without making anyone uncomfortable deserve an automobile for the difficult feat. And they need one to compensate them for that lack of spiritual vitality which makes the performance of the feat possible. Most of these modern appurtenances are toys which appeal to childlike people. When we sacrifice the adventure of trying to maintain an inner moral integrity, we are bound to seek for compensating thrills and to find them in our mechanical toys.

But all this may be the voice of jealousy. I love nothing so much in the realm of physical pleasures as the sense of power which comes from “stepping on the gas” when ensconsed in a big car.