Coffin was insistent on keeping his sentences picturesque, so that the ear was turned into an eye. The simpler the vocabulary, in his view, the better. Sentences should be short, and the nouns and verbs should be strong enough to carry the thought. Adjectives and adverbs should be used sparingly. "Preaching to boys and girls is the best training for speaking to children of riper years who remain children in their thinking," he said.

He achieved his position of leadership in the Church primarily as a parish minister and theological educator; the last nineteen years of his active ministry were spent as president of Union Theological Seminary. When he retired from that position in 1945, a book of essays by his colleagues and friends was presented to the public, entitled This Ministry, the contribution of Henry Sloane Coffin. It reveals the many-faceted nature of his leadership as parish minister, preacher, leader of worship, theological educator, exponent of social Christianity, religious leader in colleges, and theologian and church statesman.

He played a decisive role in the major developments in the nation, education, and the Christian church during the first half of this century. His ministry was marked by great breadth and consistency. He brought rich and poor into the fellowship of his congregation and insisted that the office bearers should represent all the people. In his sermon as Moderator delivered to the Presbyterian General Assembly in 1944, he said that "American Protestant Christianity has stressed sociability at the expense of comprehensiveness. We are generally a one-class church."

In his Beecher Lectures, Coffin reminded his hearers of the four shepherds with the significant names Knowledge, Experience, Watchful, and Sincere, who in The Pilgrim's Progress stood for the essential qualities of Bunyan's ideal pastor, whom Christian and Hopeful met on the Delectable Mountains, who "looked very lovingly upon them," and "had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and gave them their glass to look" at the Celestial City.

Such a pastor was Henry Sloane Coffin. He was a man of conspicuous gifts and graces which made him an outstanding preacher. There was always a firmness in the movement of his thought and an untroubled serenity which reassured his hearers. But what made him a preacher of such power was, as his biographer says, "the transparent reality of his own spiritual life, the vigorous honesty of his approach to the intellectual problems of religion, and the social passion with which he brought his religious convictions to bear upon the perplexities of the changing society in which his hearers were involved."10

1. Morgan Phelps Noyes, Henry Sloane Coffin, p. 1.

2. Joseph Fort Newton, Rivers of Years, p. 222.

3. Union Seminary Quarterly Review, January 1955, p. 5.

4. op. lit., p. 155.

5. Communion Through Preaching, p. 29.

6. op. cit., p. 100.

7. op. cit., pp. 104-105.

8. Noyes, op. cit., p. 209.

9. Communion Through Preaching, p. 111.

10. Noyes, op. cit., p. 122.