INDUCTION OF PROFESSOR DUNLOP.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 7889, 3 June 1887, Page 4

INDUCTION OF PROFESSOR DUNLOP.

Ilie induction of Professor ,'Dunlop to. the chair, of Theology of the Presbyterian College took place in First Church on Wednesday night Rev. Dr Stuart presided, and the members of the ministry who had previously attended a meeting of the presbytery were present; also a large number of the congregation. The Rev. Mr Watt preached" the induction sermon, taking his text from the second epistle or Timothy, chap, ii, verse 2 :—"And the. th;*,^ thatthou has heard of Me among many w?t nesses, the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also" He hoped that he should not be regarded'as doing a work of supererogation if he connected wfth Kp™ % plea.for «? eduo*ted ministry as the theme of his discourse that evening-a theme which was somewhat cognate to the occa* sion which had called them together, namely the mductaon ot a professor of theology There were some good Christians, though their ranks were rapidly thinnin g ,-f or he believed That the logic of events was steadily confuting theS the stars m their courses were fighting against them-who did not believe in an educatedSistry, aod who did not accept it, or if they dMd?d they ook tn^ilf f , °"c Action whfch they, took to a theological training was that it receded it. It degraded, they thought, the ministry of the gospel-the noblest of all call! mgs, that ought to be prosecuted with the fire wf t e + nt^S'asm,~turning the altar of the heart to a trade, putting it on a level withother trades by which men earned their daily bread S™ gH D Stu- di- ed in theologicalhallslooked forward to the ministry as the way by which they might make their living; they knewthey must be indebted for the means of JcoXrtable situation to the goodwill of their people •they acquainted themselves with all the tricks of their trade-the various ways of making themselves popular with their flocks; they were temnh*? to study what pleased their hearlrs, and fi they were in danger of losing that fearless manliness and independence of spirit with which the true ambassador of Christ must declare the whole counsel of God, whether men heard or forbore. Opponents of an educated ministry turther contended that young men undergoing theological training studied the Bible fronf too P»je»jonal and ir he might use the word, utilitarian a point of view-not from love for Scripture as the message of God, and not for themteresttheirown souls found it, but because they regarded as the great meal box or bread basket from which they must take hebdomadaHy for the spiritual wants of their flocks, caringless for the quality of the instruction they gave than for its quantity, anxious only to turn out ButaS" l0 V °l brfcks for the taskmaster But another objection raised by opponents of an educated ministry was that the education given at theological halls was practically useless. They said that the students were kept grinding away at old controversies about doctrinal shibboleth! so minute that one could not detect the differences between them under the strongest microscrope, hke that famous controversy beTwe °n the Homorasions and Homoransions, in which the presence or absence of a single letter m a sesquipedalian word ranged men into opposing ecclesiastical camps, f r S O m which they afforded to the world the unedifying spectacle of brethren who ought to love one another and live with one another in unity, heartily hating one another and hurling at one another mutual curses and anathemas. These controversies, we were reminded, were dead; they had nbt the remotest bearing on the life and thought of to-day. ASn if^T™ lnteresfc had deeded from them and left them stranded as high and dry as the receding deluge left the ark on the top of Mount Ararat; and the student who was poring over thesemusty controversies.and studying them mli^ 1".! H° *$f* thf rights *** the wrong™ might well be addressed with the old challenge^ a *l, seekest thou the living amongst thl dead?" Theological students, it was fffirmed were so accustomed, by the very training they received to dwell in the cemetery of the dead past and to burrow ghoul-like among its graves, that when they were called upon to minifter to the wants and weaknesses-to deal,with the sins and sorrows of living men they found themselves in a situation with which they were incompetent to deal eifectually; they could not rebuke sin they could not console sorrow hi °rS 6y proved miserable comforters-physicians of no value. 5&1 th t e. Leav-leSii COUat in the indictment which the friends whose opinions he was now stating had drawn up against The theological training was that it quenched the quickening spirit of God, and immersedl those who received such training in bondage to the letter that killeth. We had a promise, those SLS- at VaST Wrf» n :r," Thy ChUdren sha» taught of the Lord." But young men who were manufactured into preachers of the gospel in theological halls, instead of asking the promised help to unlock for them the treasure chambers of scripture, studied scripture in the light of human commentaries, and instead of sS B o # T^ the mind of the &*8 Spirit of God as declared in Scripture for himself m prayer, investigated it from the opinions of dead men. Scripture had confessedly a saactifymg power. It was a glass in which beholding the glory of the Lord*we were changed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord. Theological students stopped all the cobwebs which the ingenSty of exposition had spun over the face of Scripture • they never got a glimpse of that face itself ana never participated in that transfiguring UlumJ nation which a sight of the glory in the glassTefleoted upon him who had been privileged II how brief a moment to behold it. Suture was confessedly charged with an electric influence, giving a powerful shock to all who came mto believing contact with it, touching the conscience by its rebuke and rousing the inert will by its appeal. But man-made preachers never experienced this electric shock, for instead of penetrating to the living, rock they reposed contentedly on the stratum of the rubbish of human opinions, of enegetical debris that had been allowed to accumulate and to lie fathoms deep on the surface of the rock, through which stratum no quickening impulse, no vibrating thrill, could be communicated, owing to its nonconducting properties. Then opponents of an educated ministry urged further that when be? hevers are called upon to give reason for the hope that is ,n them.they might rely upon the promfse that the Spirit will teach on the spur of the moment what to say; they were not, therefore to premeditate, but to leave their minds si S from any pre-engagement as possible-as much a blank as possible-that the Spirit of God might make the more ready use of them as vehicles of His inspiration. But professional religious teachers would not rely upon this promise Tney must premeditate what they were to say • they must carefully arrange beforehand the line of argument they meant to pursue, expecting the Spirit of God to accompany it with His blessing, ihat was to say, instead of yielding themselves up passively to the Spirit that He may make use ot them, they aspire to the arrogance of making use of Him and of inflicting the indignity of putting Him into.harness and yoking to their car the great Being whose absolute sovereignty was well set forth by the emblem of the wind, which bloweth where it listeth He had now put the case for the opponents of an educated ministry, and he believed he had put it as strongly as it was possible for exaggeration and one-sidedness to do it. Nor would he be thought capable of denying that there was a grain of truth m what thosejriends urged No human institution was perfect. There must be disadvantages, discounting to some extent the resulting advantages. In this world of imperiection we were as a rule satisfied to start and work any institution if we found on striking a balance that the advantages counterweighed the disadvantages. He would by no means deny the charge that men who looked forward to the ministry of the gospel as their future calling were under a temptation to be influenced by sordid motives and to regard their sacred calling as a stepping-stone to selfaggrandisement The loaves and fishes formed a powerful factor in the attractions which drew men to Christ from the beginning The question was, Could we eliminate this vitiating element of selfishness and worldliness from any method of choosing candidates for the ministry ? Suppose that congregations were to choose pastors who had not received any preparatory training from among their own membership on the spur of the moment, had we any guarantee thatDiotrephes, wholoveth pre-eminence,might not be found heading the poll as the result of scheming and private oanvassing, finesse, and intrigue ? It was indeed possible, as alleged that too much study of commentaries and contessions and dogmatical systems might prevent those who prosecute them from listening to the voice of the Spirit of God in their own hearts But have not seen another extreme man who ostentatiously repudiated the use of all commentaries and confessions, glorying in their independence as they thought of all human tradition, accepting on the dictum of one of their own number—a man, of course, without any personal investigation, and repeating parrot-like preposterous explanations of Scripture, of the absurdity of which a ■little judicious study of the much-decried commentaries ought to have convinced them But he would now put the case for an educated ministry. And first he might at least create a presumption in favour of one side of this question when he pointed that the individuals who had most profoundly influenced Christ's Church in the great epochs of her career were educated men—men who had received such a mental culture and discipline of their faculties as the circumstances of their town permitted of If we were called upon to single out the man who had done most to extend the Redeemer's kingdom for the last two centuries, we should undoubtedly name John Wesley. John Wesley began his successful evangelistic career from the high vantage ground of the best education his age aud country could give. The great and good men who had the immortal honour conferred upon them of liberating a large portion of Western Christendom from the trammels of Rome—Luther,Calvin,Benza,Knox,Cranmer —were as ardent friends of education as they were of religion, for they were deeply imbued with the spirit of the Renaissance—that great revival of learning which in the proud era of God preceded and paved the way for the glorious reformation of religion of the sixteenth century, and if we ascended still higher the stream of the history of the church, we came upon men like Ambrose Augustine Chryso itow, who had built up a colossal fabric of a knowledge of scripture on the foundation of a previous training in rhetoric and philosophy. And need he remind his hearers that the Apostle of the Gentiles (a man wbo put his sta-np most deeply on the church and most powerfully influenced her doctrines) was an educated man brought up in what was substantially a university city, and evidently famihar with the best heathen literature of his

Chrifwi Ca/p1Dg' yet Wben Paul be°am* a was able to make most effective use, Though in a new direction of the stores of sacred lofe he of cS Sedh!f IWS1 WS Bch°ol- '^ ChurSh ot Christ had been often taught by fhTw rV, -V* 8 Pro^dence whicitaught the first Christians who were all of Jewish birth to admit the Gentiles into the?ChrfsTan Church on equal terms with themselves, the oanners of the Mosaic ordinances which the? w P °r U ft ß fo oU| h- t Sti U> ? edg"°«nd the church pfntnS t m AntloCh by the multitudes of trentiles who were pressing out the kingdom of God, and ,t was felt that the whole subject of the standing of Gentiles in the church needed reconsideration and readjustment. If Providence, however, taught the Christian Church any lesson it was the value and necessity for the church s work, evangelistic and pastoral, of men whose minds have been disciplined and their faculties sharpened by special training. But the ye definition of what a theological training consisted in must commend to all reasonabte minds such a training as a worthy and needful preparation for those who aspired to the gospel mimstry. One principal element of such a training was acquaintance with the manner of the operation of Divine grace in the human soul, which we derived from church history. The foundation of all religious knowledge must be laid in the personalexperience of Divine grace and in the revelation of Christ made to the soul by the Spirit. When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace to reveal His sin in me. But if a Cristian were to depend for all his knowledge of God on God s dealings with him personally he would be building his theology on too narrow a foundation. Outside our narrow personal individual experience in which God had revealed himself to us was the multiform expression of all who had been m Christ before and besides ourselves, and it behoved us to study the great collective experience of the church, if we were to have a perfect knowledge of the action of di?irie grace m the soul of niau, and oF the working of the soul under that grace. It seemed that the man who said I care nothing for how others have felt or been dealt with when subjects of divine grace, I am completely satisfied with how I feel myself, and how God dealt with me personally," was dishonouring God by rejecting a large portion of the knowledge of himself God had been pleased to give in the experience of the church, and was at the same time really impoverishing his own spiritual life. The experience of one believer ranged over but very few degrees of the whole scale of Christ's experience. The Church of Christ was an organism, a body m wnich the members were intimately mutually .interdependent, and for one member of the church to be satisfied with one narrow personal experience were as monstrous as it would fora member of the body (say the eye ) to think to seek a dissolution of partnership from all the ot*L er. members, and to cavalierly and selfsufficiently say to them '< I have no need of you » The study of church history proved a most valuable corrective against error in doctrine or S!f c' f l + WM ?°K t0° much t0 say th«t nin?tenths of the doctrinal heresis and moral aberrations >hat from time to time troubled the church Avere due to a defective knowledge of church history and consequent ignorance of the lessons and warnings of the past. The wise man remarked long ago that there was nothing new under the sun, and >c should think that the world hadlost rather than gained in originality since then. Many of the erroneous teachings m our own time, which were introduced with t^A t° f i ru. raPets ™& eagerly accepted by crowds of admiring disciples, had been really weighed in the balance and found wanting already Many short cuts to truth, which were paraded as glorious discoveries, had been already at; some time past tried and found to yield no^passage to the blind alleys, cute de sac, and doctrines like that of Universalism, which when first propounded and accepted wonderfully touched the feelings, and seemed to stir the heart to its'depth and yield a good show of blossom had been found in the past experience of the church to be utterly barren as fab as the product of any fruit of practical holiness was •oncerned. Not to know what happened before we were born was to be always children. Without a knowledge of the past history oi the church the church would be revolving in the same narrow circle, running the same treadmill round, eternally repeating the same mistakes, and yet not profiting by them. But another principal element in the theological training, which he advocated was knowledge of Scripture-of what those men who were influence of the spirit of aspiration meant m the writings they composed, and what would continue to be the handbook of the Christian church. Now in order to discover the meaning of Scripture, especially in the obscurest passages it was wise to consult the opinions of previous men who investigated the subject before us. Some spoke most scornfully of commentaries, as if in studying them we were guilty of the treason of appealing from the spirit of God to fallible men. But when we consulted commentaries we must remember that^ the men whose opinions we were gathering, whose suffrages we were collecting, were men who had the spirit, and who were mighty in the Scripture and praise, !£if V° Und^ c T-^ sb t0 them, and to the spirit of God which enlightened them, as well as monstrous arrogance on our part it we waved them contemptuously aside, and set ourselves to investigate the memory ot scripture independently of them No progress would ever have been made in science unless men had availed themselves of the discoveries of their predecessors, and made tne_goal of their predecessors the point of departure for new investigation. The modern scientist knew more than his predecessors, because he had profited by their discoveries, and stood, so. to speak, on the shoulders of all who went before him. If men in search of knowledge were to refuse to avail themselves of iortner researches, and were-each to begin on h)s own account from the beginning, scientific progress and march of knowledge would have been impossible. And yet the sapient counsel was given us to do this very thing in reference to the study of Scripture. We were not to mind the thousands who had spent years pourresults of their researches as calmly as if they existed not, and we are to investigate for ourselves. We must thankfully avail ourselves of the help of commentators. It was true we were to call no man master; we were not to accept with slavish submission any man's dictum- we were not to abdicate in any man's favour our God-given.right to prove all things and hold last that which was good. But to call all the witnessses and carefully hear the evidence and h P n^ Sf' "Pi then <*Mypaw judgment when all the facts had been before us, was! very different the.ry from that which we were recommended, which was to hear the evidence, to call for the witnesses, and in the arrogance of self-suffi-ciency and self-satisfaction to pass judgment on factswhichwe had evolved from the depth of our inner consciousness. The Presbyterian Church had always been favourably distinguished among thechurches of the Reformation by the strength laid on an educated ministry, and the intelligence he cultivated in her pulpits reacted favourably on her pews, for it had been universally acknowledged that the standard of religious intelligence was never higher than among the Scottish peasanty. Other churches relied for producing a moral effect on the taste. They beautifully decorated the walls of their places of worship with paintings, created a dim religious light paid great attention to sacred music, and did everything to make the worship aesthetically attractive. The weakness of worship conducted on such lines was that it was a religious epicureanism, a refined enjoyment, a selfish luxury; the fundamental principle of which was the direct negation of that self-denial which was the very essence of the religion of Christ. After the induction sermon Professor Dunlop made the usual declarations, and was welcomed by the members of the presbytery. Dr Stdart then said : I begin the few words whiclv it is my lot to address to you by the remark that church, school, and college had a place in the programme of the Otago plan of colonisation, and accompanied Captain Cargill fi ?£-.? Ur ns- to this country in the good ships the Philip Laing and the John Wickliffe. But though, the scheme soon broke down, through the failure of the New Zealand Company, ytt the setters stuck to its essential elemeats. In 1856 the Provincial Government undertook elementary education on lines that met with very general acceptance. In due course it established secondary schools. As early as 1866 our churcn of her own free will set aside for the endowment ot literary and scientific chairs, in a college in Dunedin, one-third of the annual proceeds of her trust funds. In 1869 the longed-for university was established, and of the three chairs with which it started in 1870 our church provided one—viz., the chair of Mental aud Moral Philosophy; and in the interval she added the chairs of English Language and Literature and of Natural Philosophy—no mean contribution to higher education in a new country. When candidates for the ministry offered, the church made the best provision in her power for their instruction and training. The Theological College, however did not assume its destined form till the Dunediri Presbytery, on the 3rd of May 1876, inducted Dr Salmond as Professor of Christian Apologetics and Systematic Divinity. When I look round I cannot help seeing the changes which the 11 years that have elapsed since his induction have brought about on the presbytery. Dr Copland, who then presided, is now one of the physicians of the city, Dr Salmond fills an important chair in the university, Rev. A. Blake ministers in a sister church, and Rev. Mr Russell labours in the Free Church of Scotland The trusted and straightforward William Johnstone and the earnest and loving Lindsay Mackie have been called to the upper sanctuary; while others whose names are still on its roll hear with ever-increasing distinctness voices from above and behind>aying," Haste ye toS the eternal shores aud the isles of the blest" lne office into which you have been inducted ia the most responsible in the gift of our church, and as its mam object is the training of her future miuistry.it involves work at once great and difficult. But in Professor Watt you will have a fellow labourer of ripe scholarship and 01 gentle manners, and a brother greatly beloved, and possessing the confidence of the brethren. You will have the hearty support and sympathy of our ministers, office-bearers, and families, and also of the ministers and members of the church of our order in the northern provinces of the colony. We expect good, yea, golden work at your hands, and we have ample grounds for doing so. You have come to us with a fair record ; our own commissioners, Professors Bruce, Duff, and Flint, and Dr Marcus

Dods, have borne the strongesttestimony feoyour ability^.character, and attainments; and this testimony has been endorsed by the presbytery of which you had been a member for 16 years, rtfir!,, 6^oll to which y°u ministered nre entin «Peri °d' by a 1&r Se meeting reS rnvsdf by S n° CCUrsin a letter addressed to myselt by Dr Bruce, the convener of our S3? i w £ specting the ■«S3S£ n 2t°s is losing the services of an able rnau^JUslt prayer that you may belong aparedto servl nob May the Lord our Christ give you health, hS pkuse.) SUCCeSS 1 Q y°Ur Professoe Dunlop said the kindly welcome he had already received in Dunedin JJhltZl been smd that uight, and the.wofk to which he had been inducted all laid upon him a heavy re sponsj, ity The kindnessfhowever" which he Sh^h- Wt\ .th °hearty welcome, and some b^^ 8 —!^ he did DOt need t0 s Peci^ supplied him with a very noble stimulus in the work upon winch he entered. -He was pleased and proud of the fact that he was a member of the Grand Presbyterian Church, which had such * i? 0?! r| Cu° rd- The branch of that church which had been established here had proved itself to be a true child of its venerable mother by the zeal it had shown with reference to matters educational It would be his business to try and imbue those who might be entrusted to his care with the conviction that the only genuine" Christ, the religion of redemption.. It would behis busmess.to present religion so as tb try and make it appear that it was the highest rationality, and that we did not need to «acrifice our sconce or any other good thing. He most sincerely and devoutly believed in the God who was, who now is, and who was to come, as the ever-livrng-God. ■H e should like to serve the fnn y£ err,F hur? h as his Predecessor had done. He had heard that he was an able, gifted earnest, and successful teacher. He could only 'S . I «■ m hls, f°otsteps,and he thought the presbytery would be amply satisfied with him if he emulated his success,