Preach the West Wind

Clarence Macartney's fellow students in Princeton Seminary's Class of 1905 felt a trifle awed when Freshman Macartney began setting out on Sundays to preach in nearby churches, wearing a high hat and a black tailcoat. Many of his colleagues have stayed awed ever since. For 47 years, Presbyterian Macartney, singularly unperplexed by theological doubts, scientists' criticism, or the pendulum swing of vogues, has been filling churches by preaching the same Gospel he learned at the Seminary.

Macartney's father, a strict Scots Covenanter minister, taught his children* a firm, old-fashioned set of religious beliefs. Young Clarence learned the fine points of oratory from an equally good source. As a University of Wisconsin undergraduate, he used to go down to the elder Bob La Toilette's office in the Madison courthouse to rehearse his debating speeches. The training helped make him one of the ablest preachers in his church. In 1924, William Jennings Bryan, an orator himself, proposed him for the one-year term as Moderator of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

Orthodoxy & Battlefields. Moderator Macartney had led the fight of Presbyterian fundamentalists (he prefers the term "orthodox") to oust the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, leading theological modernist, from the pulpit of Manhattan's First Presbyterian Church. Attracted by Macartney's reputation, Pittsburgh Presbyterians asked him, in 1927, to take over the ministry of their own First Church, long one of the most influential in U.S. Presbyterianism.

The new pastor never left Pittsburgh. To two generations of churchgoers, he has preached his same steady brand of orthodoxy, with the same grave eloquence. Sunday mornings and evenings, a good half of his 2,500-member congregation make their way downtown from outlying residential districts to hear him preach. On Tuesdays, as many as 600 local businessmen drop in at the First Church for his noon meetings (a cafeteria lunch and two short sermons).

Outside of his pulpit, Bachelor Macartney spends most of his spare time in writing and historical research. A specialist on the Civil War, he has walked over almost every battlefield from Manassas to Shiloh. A good many of his 46 published books are written about historical subjects (e.g., a life of McClellan, several studies of Lincoln); the rest are sermons and devotional works.

Souls First. Not far from retirement now, Pastor Macartney, 72, is slightly less pessimistic about the state of the church in the U.S. than he once was. "Modernism," he says, "is not nearly so belligerent as it was. The barrenness of it has been demonstrated." But, to a man strong in the fundamentals of the Gospel, the kid-glove handling of the question of sin in many U.S. pulpits is still hard to take. Says Macartney: "One reason why we have so few conversions is that we don't ask people to repent."

Back at Princeton Seminary last week, the veteran preacher gave a quiet sermon to 331 of his fellow ministers assembled for the seminary's summer Institute of Theology. His subject: "The Four Winds and the Voice of God."* To an audience of professionals, his rolling periods, the long Biblical analogies, the references to the writings of the Founding Fathers were in themselves an epitome of a great but vanishing style of church preaching. His message might stand as the valedictory of a man to whom theological controversy has never been so important as the saving of souls.

Said Clarence Macartney:

"Preach all the four winds . . . Preach the North Wind of God's righteous judgments--that the way of the transgressor is hard, and the wages of sin is death. Preach the East Wind of God's affliction, that whom He loveth He chasteneth and scourgeth . . . Preach the South Wind of temptation and danger . . . But most of all, preach the West Wind . . . You're never really preaching until you're preaching the West Wind of God's mercy and pity and forgiveness."

*All four sons became ministers. The others: the Rev. J. Robertson Macartney, pastor emeritus of the Palm Springs (Calif.) Presbyterian Church; the Rev. Albert J. McCartney, pastor emeritus of Washington's National Presbyterian Church; the late Rev. Ernest McCartney of Los Angeles.

*". . . Who hath gathered the wind in His fists" (Proverbs 30:4).

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