Answering the Call to Christian Ministry

Sydney Smith said he had only one illusion left — the Archbishop of Canterbury. I am not so entirely stripped of illusion as that; but if by illusion you mean a sort of mysterious interest attaching to a man or an institution, I can truly say, and in no irreverent spirit, that my strongest and most lasting illusion is the Christian ministry. A Congregational minister is an object of curious interest to me because he has been through an intensely interesting experience — the experience of the call to the ministry. For me it is the call — not the ordination, not even the induction by a Moderator— which invests the minister (I say it deliberately) with something of a priestlike apartness: for as I understand the call to the Congregational ministry it is a call, before everything else, to administer the sacrament of preaching.