The young Hale spent three years at a variety of jobs, teaching, reporting, and even traveling for the railroad, all the while reading divinity texts. After four years, he applied to the Dean of Harvard and the American Unitarian Society and was granted “a license to preach.” He was still fluctuating, however, between the decision to be a minister or a writer. For several years he took interim preaching positions as he strove to make up his mind. His indecisiveness was not entirely over his choice of profession, but also about the choice of congregation. He wanted a congregation close enough to Boston so that he could retain his family ties and a congregation where he could be the minister he felt called to be.
That meant he had to find a congregation which felt, as he did, that the church must minister to the community outside its walls as well as within, both pastorally and prophetically. Viewing Christianity as a religion with great potential to teach unselfishness, Edward Hale envisioned a ministry not of the status quo, but one that would challenge the status quo.
Hale’s personal faith was strong and uncomplicated. He felt at one with God, so much so that he sometimes feared the very simplicity and sureness of his faith might be a drawback. His whole creed, he said, could be summed up in the phrase “Our Father who art…Not My Father, not Your Father, but Our Father. And not Our Father who wast in some distant past but who art a living, constant Presence with us all.” The problem was that he wondered how he could prepare sermons for a lifetime propounding such a simple faith. What else could he say? He managed to preach for almost 70 years, so he must have solved the problem.
