Extracts.

QUALIFICATIONS OF THE PREACHER.

There is nothing more striking in the ministry than the way in which very opposite men do the same work.

You look at one man, and say, "There is the true type of preacher. That man can preach." And from another pulpit close at hand another voice reaches the hearts of men with the same effect. If the preacher is, as we are bound to believe, only a representative man, a representative Christian, doing in special ways and with especial routine that which all men ought to be doing for Christ and fellow-men in their ways, then there ought to be as many preachers as there are earnest Christian men. It is evident, then, that only in the largest way can the necessary qualities of the preacher be enumerated. And yet I must not dwell upon the first, the deepest of all. It is personal piety; the deep possession in one's own soul of the faith and hope and resolution which he is to offer to his fellow-men. Nothing but fire kindles fire. To know in one's whole nature what it is to live by Christ; to be His, and not our own, to be so occupied with gratitude what He has done and is doing for us, should be the sole aspiration of our lives. I would place this consideration in the very forefront, that without that force in the preacher, to preach is really an unsatisfactory and unprofitable work. To preach with that force is a perpetual privilege and joy. And, next to this, I would mention what may be called moral and spiritual unselfishness. I do not speak of the moral as of an intellectual quality. I mean that which always receives the truth with reference to its communication, always receives any spiritual blessing as a trust for other people. Both can be cultivated. Some men seemed to receive truth abstractly, and they never think of sending it abroad. They are so enwrapped in seeing what it is that they never taste what it can do. Other men think first for their fellow-men, and their first impulse is to give every truth its full range of power. These are two clear and different temperaments; the one does and the other does not make a preacher.

And when you have the right kind of a man to make a preacher of, what are the chances which he must undergo? The mere form of ordination will be nothing unless it signifies some real experiences within his own soul. He will be just like other men, unless the power of the work to which he looks forward has entered into him, and made him different from other men and different from what he was before that preparation. Now, what is the true preparation? There are special studies which fill him with their spirit. Many men can only study when they enter on the preparation for their profession. Many men begin to work at the door of a professional

school, just as the bird, wheeling in its flight hither and thither, sees at last its home in the distance, flies to it, and then is at rest. How often the thought has come to me and I say it to you—that the very transcendent motives young ministers set before them have the tendency to bewilder and confuse them. The highest motive often dazzles us before it illumines us. It is the way in which the light that is in us becomes darkness. I shall never forget my first experence at the theological school. I had never been in a prayermeeting in all my life, and the first place I was taken to was the seminary prayer-meeting. Never shall I lose my impression of the devoutness of those men as they prayed. Their whole souls seemed exalted, and as if on fire. I sat bewildered and ashamed, and went away disgraced. I went on the next day, with the same men, to the Greek recitation, and the devoutest of them had never learned their lessons. They had not got hold of the first principles of hard, faithful, conscientious study. The boiler had no connection with the engine. The devotion did not touch the work. By and by I found out where the seam did escape to. A mature-premature preaching was much in vogue. We were in haste to be in what we called "our work." We lived very feebly the life of the minister. My fellow-students, the special study of theology and what pertains to it—that is what the preacher must be doing always. In many respects an ignorant clergy, however pious it may be, is worse than no clergy at all. "The knowledge of the priest," said St. Francis de Sales, "is the eighth sacrament of the Church." The minister's preparation involves something more than knowledge. The knowledge meets in him the intent to preach and indicates a transformation. It becomes doctrine -that is, knowledge-considered with reference to its being taught. The reason why so many dislike doctrine is because they dislike the whole notion of docility which is attached to it. Just as the student in the normal school learns everything with a natural consciousness that he is going to teach that same thing in the same way in all his methods of learning it, so the student preparing for the ministry cannot learn the truth as the mere student of theology may do: he always feels that truth reaching out from him to the people to whom some day he is to carry it. There is the danger in preaching, against which every man who preaches must guard by sacrificing the habit out of which the danger springs. He must receive the truth as one who is to teach it. He must not study as if the truth were merely for his own enrichment. It must bring to him a deeper and more solemn sense of responsibility, a desire to find the human side of truth-the breadth which comes from the constant presence in the mind of the fact that truth has various aspects, and presents itself in many ways to different people, according to their needs and characters.

Let us have a true devotion to our work; preachers once and preachers always; a conception of our work so large, that everything which a true man has any right to do we may have some love to do. Lay this foundation in these preparatory days I place very great

value on this preparation, in which a man who is earnest comes to that fitness for his work which St. Paul describes in one word, "Apt to teach." It is not something to which one comes by accident or burst of fiery zeal. It is not so much a praise in the new convert that he has the power, as it is a shame to the educated preacher that he does not have it all the more richly in proportion to his education. The man who leaps suddenly into the pulpit will be lacking of the understanding which comes from the study of years. He will realise only himself preaching to other men who preach like him. The story is told of a man blind from his birth who had his sight restored to him. He could not at first see that the room in which he stood was not as large as the house, and it was only on being led from room to room that he appreciated the difference in dimensions. The new Christian experience only slowly realises that it is but one part of the universal Christian life. Only as our study carries us from room to room does the whole house grow real to us.

And again I would mention personal influence. I do not know by what better name I can call it than "gravity." Some men have serious ways of looking at life. They manifestly lack sympathy; their souls are oppressed and burdened, and they have, for the time at least, banished laughter from their faces. Mock gravity deserves al the discredit that it can get. The gravity that is assumed, that hides with solemn front all that is cheerful in life, the gravity that is pu on uniformly this is worthy of all satire and contempt. Merely solemn ministers are very empty, and deserve all that has been heaped upon them through all ages as cheats and shams. We have about come to the time when all that abuse of the merely-solemn minister is of the safe character; it belongs to all abuses which are in decay.

There is another source of power, and it is the sum of all that I have named-courage. The timid minister is as bad as the timid surgeon. Courage is not necessary everywhere: but it is here. If you are a slave to men and afraid of their opinions, go and paint pictures, go and make shoes for them; but don't keep on all your life saying not what God sent you to declare, but what men have hired you to say. It is the principle that true independence comes from. Courage is one of those qualities which cannot be easily acquired. It must come, as health comes to the body, as the result of seeking for other things. It must come from the response of man's higher nature. He who begins by despising men will often end by being their slave. A passionate desire to do men good is the safest assurance that they will not do you harm. See how it was with our Lord and His disciples. Jesus was their master, because he was their servant unto death.

One other topic I will speak of. Some of the dangers to a man's own character. The first of these dangers, beyond all doubt, is selfconceit. In a certain sense every minister begins his ministry selt-conceited. At least every man begins with extravagant expectations of what his ministry is going to result in. We come out of it by and by. A man's first wonder, when he begins

to preach, is, that people do not come to hear him. After a little while he begins to wonder that they do. It is not strange that it should be so. It is not to the young man's discredit that it should be

The study for the ministry is to a large extent comprehending the force by which he is to work; and in the resistance of that force he has not measured the power of sin, of which the world is full. The character of a man's ministry depends very largely upon the way in which he passes out of the self-conceit, and of the condition which comes afterward, when that is gone. The first way in which they are lifted out of conceit is by success. It is only in poor men of the lowest intelligence that success increases self-conceit. Any form of work is sure to bring success to even man who is worthy of it. The knowledge that you will accomplish results open to you the deepest meaning of your work. It shows you how infinite it is; makes you ashamed of all the praise that men give you, as you think of what your work might have been. The Christian minister is at times overwhelmed with the magnitude of his task, It is a great burden and he becomes almost completely paralysed. Such an end of a young man's first year's hopes, after the valour at the beginning, is terrible to see. Every power that made him strong now weakens him. There is no help except in the profounder retreat of the whole nature upon God: in such a preception of his nearness as shall take off the heavy responsibility, and make it right to fail for Him with joy as to succeed for Him, right to work as hard for Him in failure as in success. The drawing of a man back to God by failure is always a noble sight.

What is the true escape from the crudeness of the untried preacher. It is the growing devotion of his life to God, the more complete absorption of his being in the seeking of God's glory, as in his labour he comes nearer to God. As he goes on, work unfolds itself. As he looks over its increasing vastness, and on every side of it, he sees that he will never do as he hoped to do when he was a student at the seminary. It becomes clear to him that God will do it in his own time and way. His own disappointment is swallowed up and drowned in his Lords success. He is John the Baptist. He works with the energy he never did before. This is the only true refuge of the minister in the disenchantment of his earlier dreams.

Another danger is self-indulgence. It is impossible for the minister to fulfil his work without routine. There are but few tests that he has to meet as a business man meets his notes. All these things working together create in many ministers the thought that their work is not to be judged as other men's work is to be judged. We are apt to come into moods of thinking that we cannot work unless we feel like it. There is just enough of the artistic element in our work to make us feel like artists, and lay our brushes aside when the sky darkens. The first business of the preacher is absolutely to conquer the tyranny of his moods, and to be always ready for his moods, and to be always ready for his work. It must be done, and the man who is not

willing to do it has not reached the sacredness of the ministry of Jesus, which was such love for his Father and man that, driving away all thought of himself, it made him a medium through which the divine might come down to the human. In weariness, sometimes, when his work was done, he went into a mountain or upon a lake. And we can see how, one bright morning by the seaside, he was exuberant and joyous; and on another he was sad and burdened. We can almost trace differences in the kind of preaching on the different days. Yet there is no self-indulgence. No day ever went without his preaching because it found him moody and oppressed. He did no works in Nazareth "because of their unbelief," not because of his unwillingness or reluctance. This is a part of the advantage of our business. that we have men, and not machines to preach to. Any mood which makes us unfit to preach at all, or weakens our will to preach, is bad, and can and must be broken up. Then it is time for conscience to bestir itself-man to be man.

I wish it were possible for us to speak to the laity of our church as to their treatment of the clergy. The clergy are largely what the laity make them, though we look with regret for the reverence that seems to have departed since our fathers' days. It was bad that the minister should be worshipped and made an oracle; but it is still worse that the minister should be flattered and made a pet. There is such a tendency in our days. It is possible for a man to be petted into the ministry and to be petted all through it, and never to come into contact with other men, to receive one real hard knock. It is not only unnatural. but it places the minister in a wholly false position in the community. His life and comfort and freedom are everybody's care, so many people are interested, and he is often corrupted into a victim of his own self-indulgence. He separates from the ordinary standards of his race; and that makes him unsympathetic, and weak, and self-indulgent, and lies at the root of the bitterness that we often see in him. And that which ought to be the manliest of all professions has a tendency to make men unmanly. Men make appeals for sympathy that no true man ever should make. They take to themselves St. Paul's pathos without St. Paul's strength. My friends, fear its insidiousness. Insist on applying to yourselves tests which other people insist on applying to you. Learn to enjoy and to be silent in it. Learn to stir and be strong. Never appeal for sympathy, but let sympathy find you out. Count your manliness the strength of your ministry. Resist all attacks upon it, however subtly they may come.

Another danger is narrowness. We are living all our lives within successive circles-growing smaller and smaller as they come nearer to us. Do you stand firm on your one little spot, and on this you can look out with safety upon the outside world. Narrowness is to to be escaped not by deserting our special function, but by compelling that function to open to us influences beyond itself.

I have spoken of these dangers and hindrances with which the