"Are ye able to drink the cup that I am about to drink?...They say unto him, We are able"
(Matt. 20:22).
There is always a certain obliquity, a certain element of cross-purpose, a certain displacement of perspective and vision, between a leader and his followers. That is what makes leadership the most difficult and sometimes the most heart-breaking of tasks. To be a leader you must be ahead of others; yet not too far ahead. You must talk two languages at one and the same time, your own and theirs. You must be one of them and yet not one of them, in their world and yet out of it, sometimes entirely out of it. You must see things which they do not see and for the time being perhaps cannot see, things which, none the less, alone determine the path you want them to choose to follow. A leader has to work with his two eyes as it were out of focus, one apprehending the truth, the other the half-truth, or even the untruth, which holds the minds of his disciples in thrall. If he lacks the capacity for this, if he cannot put himself in his disciples' shoes and look out on life in some measure through their eyes, he lacks the first essential of leadership and is doomed to failure. And, of course, the more transcendentally great he is in character and vision and desire the bigger the distance between him and followers, the more he towers above his contemporaries--then the more urgently necessary, and the more impossibly difficult, will this essential quality of appreciating two worlds at once become.
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Herbert Henry Farmer was born in Highbury, London, the youngest of four sons. Herbert's early academic proclivities at Owen's School in Islington earned him a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read for the moral sciences tripos and graduated first class in 1914. Farmer chose to work at a farm at Histon, near Cambridge, rather than entering the armed services during the First World War. In 1916 he decided to pursue ministry with the Presbyterian Church of England and was chosen as the Burney Student in the Philosophy of Religion at Westminster College, Cambridge. Following the completion of his studies in 1919, he took a pastorate at Stafford and three years later moved to a parish in New Barnet where he remained until 1931.
In 1931 Farmer left parish ministry to pursue an academic career. After a four-year post with the Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut, he returned to Westminster College, Cambridge, where he succeeded his friend John Oman as Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics. In 1936 Farmer was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Glasgow, followed in 1937 by his appointment as the Stanton Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion at Cambridge.
Farmer retired from the college in 1960 and continued to preach and write into his twilight years. He died on 13 January 1981 in Birkenhead.