Quiet Hints, Chapter 15–"Autocracy”

Notes taken from Quiet Hints to Growing Preachers by Charles E. Jefferson, Chapter 15,"Autocracy.”

“The environment of a clergyman contains abundant nutriment for the nourishment of the papal proclivities of human nature.”

“If laymen were allowed to-day the privileges they enjoyed in the time of Jesus, and could say to ministers as they said to him right in the midst of the sermon, —’You are crazy ! What do you mean by that?’ church decorum would be badly mangled, but the minister would be saved from a temptation which like a beast now crouches at his door.”

“It is this immunity from contradiction on the Lord’s day which renders many a minister so difficult to live with through the week.”

“A church is an organism and like all organisms it refuses to be run. It will grow if carefully nourished and guided, but to run it is to wreck it.”

“Some men now in the ministry were evidently intended for engineers or managers of railroads and trusts."

“A preacher ought to prize with all diligence the men who differ from him and make use of their gifts up to the level of his opportunity.”

“It is the business of a minister to make his church roomy.”

“Even a good man is not infallible and the stars will not fall from heaven though the preacher fails to get his way.”

“The minister who in order to induce his people to throw off habits or notions which he does not like, converts himself into a cold North-Easter, filling Sunday mornings with his icy blasts, will not succeed in the thing which he aims at and may possibly blow himself out of the pulpit.”