PREFACE.

HEN I was asked by my University to deliver a course of Lectures on Pastoral Theology during the May Term of this year (1884), I saw at once how difficult it would be to give anything like completeness of form to Lectures which, from the brevity of the course, could only touch the fringe of the subject entrusted to me. And yet that the course should have some sort of completeness seemed due to my hearers; for most of them were candidates for the Ministry, hoping to be ordained before the end of the year.

In this difficulty it occurred to me that the interrogatories put to Candidates for the Priesthood in the Ordinal might serve to give a systematic arrangement to the subject.

Omitting the first and the last, the six intervening interrogatories seemed peculiarly suitable as headings for the six Lectures. For the second, third and fourth point to our work as prophets, priests and pastors; while the fifth, sixth and seventh speak of the life we must live in our study, in our family, in our parish, if God's blessing on our work is to be looked for.

The two remaining interrogatories-the first and

the last thus purposely omitted in my Lectures, receive some notice in the Introduction, which I have expanded into a separate Lecture in preparing this little volume for the press.

These vows of the Ordinal, so rich in suggestion, so capable of development, might well supply matter for many courses of Lectures, without any fear of repetition or exhaustion; while there are obvious advantages in thus using them as headings for a text-book.

To the student, looking to ordination, it cannot but be well to be thus led to dwell seriously and carefully on the solemn promises so soon to be required of him.

To the lecturer, not only may they be useful in giving method and more or less of devotional treatment to his course; but, in abler hands than mine, they might serve to show how a clergyman's work and a clergyman's life should be grounded on those theological verities in which all our deepest motives to action and resources of strength are to be found— thus making good the true definition of Pastoral Theology, as theology in its application to the cure of souls.

BRISTOL, Advent 1884.

J. P. N.

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

ASTORAL THEOLOGY" is a phrase unknown to antiquity. It is believed to be of German parentage, dating from the early part of the last century. It first appears on a title-page in Jacobi's "Introduction to Pastoral Theology" (Beiträge zur Pastoral-Theologie), published about 1760. It was made classical by the publication, in 1797, of Professor Sailer's Lectures on "Pastoral Theology," a book for which there has been a steady demand ever since, in the Roman Catholic seminaries of Germany and France.

English divines do not seem to have adopted the term until the present century. In 1836 it had obtained sufficient currency in this country to find its way into the Act of Parliament which endowed the two Divinity Professorships, founded by the Crown at Oxford in that year; one of which was named the Professorship of Pastoral Theology.

The ancient Fathers, who wrote of the duties and qualifications of the Church's ministers, give various titles to their treatises. The oration in which St. Gregory Nazianzen describes the heavy responsibility of the priestly office (excusing himself for at

first declining it), he called his "Self-defence” (Apologeticus); St. Chrysostom's six books, written under similar circumstances, are headed "On the Priesthood," St. Ambrose wrote a book "De Officiis Ministrorum;" St. Jerome's Epistle to Nepotian (LII) is entitled "De Vitâ Clericorum;" St. Augustine's well-known treatises "De doctrinâ Christiand" and "De Catechizandis Rudibus" may both be called Pastoral essays; and, most famous of all, we have St. Gregory's "Liber Regula Pastoralis."

But none of these old Fathers has treated the subject as a department of Theology, or given a scientific form to his discourse.

Bishop Burnet's admirable little book, published 1692, in the hope of raising the standard of the candidates for ordination in the diocese of Salisbury, is called a "Discourse of the Pastoral Care." Archdeacon Wilson Evans entitled his excellent essay on the same subject, "The Bishoprick of Souls." Our late Lady Margaret Professor, the Rev. J. J. Blunt, of whose delightful Lectures many elder graduates of the present generation have a grateful recollection, and who did as much perhaps as any one man of the last generation to deepen the spiritual life of the English clergy, was content to entitle his lectures "On the Duties of the Parish Priest;" and in his opening sentences disclaims all intention of doing more than give such practical counsels as might "be of use to the young man who is about to undertake the charge of a parish, and has yet his lesson to learn."

Thus, as in Patristic, so in English divinity,