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 E SEVENFOLD LAW OF 
 MINISTERIAL TRAINING. 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVEEBD TO THE 
 
 0f pitafotwn Allege, 
 
 At the Annual Meeting held June 29th, 1887. 
 
 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN CLIFFORD, 
 
 M.A., LL.B., B.SC. (LOND.), F.G.S., D.D. (HON.), 
 MINISTER OF WESTBOURNE PARK CHAPEL, LONDON. 
 
 E. MARLBOROUGH & CO., 51, OLD BAILEY, E.G. 
 BURT 6- SONS, 58, PORCHESTER ROAD, BAYSWATER, W. 
 
 PRICE FOURPENCE.
 
 The Sevenfold Law of Ministerial 
 Training. 
 
 I. You are "Students," "Candidates," for the work of 
 ministering the truth and power of the Lord Jesus Christ 
 to men, in and through certain Christian Churches, believed 
 to be fashioned on the principles of the New Testament 
 brotherhood, and destined to operate beneficially on our 
 fatherland and the world in the coming twentieth century. 
 
 The greater part of your work will be in the next 
 century; and though some of us may not see it, I shall 
 not talk to you helpfully if I do not attempt to fore- 
 cast its possible perils, brilliant opportunities, inevitable 
 dangers, and imperative demands. Called of God to lead 
 the thought and shape the life of the next age, your 
 present training should be so controlled as to secure the 
 maximum of qualification for so exalted a vocation. 
 
 You are to be the servants of churches that breathe the 
 bracing air of freedom, encounter the risks of indepen- 
 dence for the sake of giving strength to manhood, 
 embody a real equality of privilege, in obedience to the 
 maxim that " One is our Master, even Christ," and 
 we receive our highest dignity from the fact that 
 we are brothers of the Son of God, and, therefore, brothers 
 one of another. If your training is what it ought to be, 
 it will fit you for your place in such spiritual republics, 
 enable you to act worthily of the spirit they cherish, and 
 of the self-suppressing and man-saving ideals they for 
 ever uplift. 
 
 You are to be preachers. You have a message to 
 deliver concerning sin and the soul, conscience and God, 
 life, death, and eternity ; a message which is not your 
 own, but given of God in the unsearchable riches of 
 knowledge and power hidden in Christ ; but to be made 
 your own, so that you may speak it with the demonstration,
 
 not of human rhetoric or school logic merely, or 
 in the main, but "in the demonstration of the Spirit, 
 commending yourselves to every man's conscience in the 
 sight of God." If you leave this College without knowing 
 what you have to say to men, you had better have kept 
 out of it ; and if you do not early acquire a facility in 
 saying what you know, persuasively and conqueringly, 
 your ministry will be a perpetual irritant instead of a con- 
 tagious joy ; and your service a growing and inevitable 
 sadness, instead of an exhaustless inspiration, refreshing to 
 men as the breezes of the sea to the spirit of an invalid. 
 
 You are, therefore, " apprentices." That is your name. 
 You are placed here to apprehend, i.e., to lay hold of your 
 work as preachers and pastors, with a firm and unrelaxed 
 grip of the ideas that fill and inspire it, of the enduring 
 facts on which it is based, of the ends for which it is done, 
 of the methods that give the best guarantees of success, 
 and the motives that make the painfullest discipline 
 a pleasure and the most laborious toil an unalloyed 
 delight. You are "apprentices" to Jesus Christ, the 
 invisible but real Master and Trainer of the preachers 
 of the Word, Who still, as the ascended Ruler of His 
 church bestows gifts of men ; "some apostles, and some 
 prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and 
 teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, unto the work 
 of ministering, unto the building up of the body of Christ, 
 till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the 
 knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, 
 unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." 
 
 You are now at the beginning of your apprenticeship; 
 only at the beginning. You have to go forward ; 
 for in a very real sense the living minister's training is 
 never done. It is as severely disciplinary, strenuously 
 vigilant, and personally educational, as on the first day 
 he sat down at his college desk. It can never be a 
 short or a rapid process. The training is wide in its 
 range, long in its duration, thorough in its require- 
 ments, and though not without much that is pleasant
 
 and joy-giving, yet often fraught with real pain. The 
 true preacher is, indeed, always getting ready for some- 
 thing better. Whether he is on a " Local Preacher's 
 Plan," or admitted amongst the alumni of a theological 
 college, or has passed fifteen or twenty years at his work, 
 he is still carrying on his ministerial education, and 
 has some work in hand which does not contemplate the 
 mere supply of his daily or weekly needs, but is meant 
 to make a better preacher of him ten or twenty years 
 hence. Every Sunday he is training himself. His eye 
 glances back eagerly in search of his defects, and his 
 will is fixed for their eradication. He is grateful for the 
 criticism that will give him the chance of improvement. 
 He seeks, with sedulous and unwearied zeal, the solution 
 of all the problems that centre in the salvation and 
 renewal of men. He no more imagines that a brief 
 apprenticeship at college, and a slender stock of carefully 
 elaborated sermons, endorsed by an examining committee, 
 can make a preacher of him, than that a knowledge of 
 the goose-step is all that is essential to the army that 
 is to defeat the well-disciplined legions of Germany. 
 Preaching is the work of his life ; and every day's occu- 
 pation is a discipline and a preparation for the labour 
 of the day that is to follow. 
 
 A metropolitan preacher of high and deserved fame, and 
 of more than thirty years' experience* of the difficulties 
 and successes of ministerial work said, not long since, 
 in answer to an indirect compliment on his preaching 
 ability, " I really don't think I know how to preach yet. 
 I am trying all I can to succeed in getting a perfect 
 mastery of the divine art, and I hope I shall succeed 
 after a while; but at present I am a long way off my 
 ideal." In that statement of the grey-haired veteran, 
 voice is given to the inmost soul of every true preacher 
 of the gospel of Christ. In his convictions, in his self- 
 depreciation and in his hopes, if not in his success, he 
 represents every minister whose lofty aims and enlarging 
 conceptions of the superhuman greatness and grandeur
 
 of his task fill every day with works of self-discipline, 
 touch with transforming magic the entire field of life, 
 and rouse to unequalled industry every power of his 
 redeemed and renewed nature. Till the volume of life 
 is closed we must follow on so that we may apprehend 
 that for which we were apprehended by Jesus. 
 
 But you are at the threshold of your career. Your 
 indentures are but recently drawn out. You stand at 
 the golden door of opportunity and hope. This is your 
 formative period in a superlative degree, and on your 
 initial acts infinite issues hang. " Well begun is half 
 done." Sow bad seed to-day, and a harvest of weakness 
 and misery will meet you as the new century dawns. 
 Know your work now, and do it with the strength of 
 Christ -redeemed and Christ -called men, and your 
 reward will be exceeding great in the opening heavens 
 of futurity. 
 
 II. John Milton says, " I call a complete and generous 
 education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, 
 and magnanimously all the offices, both private and 
 public, of peace and war."* 
 
 That statement expresses the elements of an Ideal 
 Training. 
 
 (i) It fits a man to perform something. He is made to 
 do as well as know ; and to do by and through what he 
 knows. He organizes knowledge into life, embodies it 
 in befitting deeds. Learning a lesson is not education, 
 as an alphabet is not a literature, a sword a victory, or a 
 telescope astronomy. The really educated man is a doer. 
 Dr. Alex. Bain says in "Education as a Science,"^ "The 
 still higher arts of arranging the thoughts in lucid 
 expression, if known only as rules or theory, might be 
 called information ; but when embodied in habits would 
 rank as training. Hence we speak of a trained orator or 
 
 * Prose Works III. 467. Bohn's edition. 
 
 t International Scientific Series, Vol. xxv. Page 140.
 
 writer. It is in this sense that moral teaching and moral 
 training are totally distinct things " indeed, as distinct 
 as reading and knowing homiletics from preaching 
 sermons, or getting full marks in an examination in 
 pastoral theology from the actual guidance and nourish- 
 ment of a Christian Church. 
 
 (2) But the ideal education according to Milton's 
 conception involves great-minded doing, skilled work- 
 manship, a soul of justice. " A complete and generous 
 education" imparts nobility to action, elevation to conduct, 
 grace and graciousness to deed, essential righteousness to 
 behaviour. It is deliverance from meanness and intoler- 
 ance, prejudice and narrowness, and an uplifting of the 
 man to all that is dignified and great-souled. Strength 
 and beauty fill with their radiant presence the sanctuary 
 of the weL-trained man. 
 
 (3) Nor "can it lack width and compass. It fits for all 
 the offices of life, private and public, domestic and social, 
 for the work of the closet and of the state, for the delights 
 of peace, and the severities of war. It emancipates from 
 all that is one-sided, partial and ungenerous, and makes 
 the man like God's commandments, exceeding broad. 
 
 So the ideal ministerial education goes back upon our 
 conception of the ideal man, and of the ideal ministry, 
 and that roots itself in our ideas of God, as He is 
 revealed in His loving character, redeeming purposes and 
 regenerative administration in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
 III. It is not, then, a matter of surprise that discus- 
 sion of the methods of reaching that ideal has not yet 
 terminated. As we have not yet learnt how " to train 
 a child in the way he should go," but with infinite 
 blunderings are stumbling along our perilous path, often 
 to the unspeakable detriment of the child, it can hardly 
 be astonishing that we do not yet know how to educate 
 the men who are to devote their whole energies to the 
 absorbing vocation of training the inward, spiritual, and 
 active life of communities of men and women. Artists
 
 are still engaged in heated controversy as to the surest 
 way of guiding the artistic genius on the paths that 
 infallibly conduct to the goal of success. It is in no spirit 
 of wanton depreciation that I remind you that the patent 
 for making faultless legislators has not yet been taken out, 
 and that the students of the supreme business of making 
 men are not wholly free from perplexity and bewilderment 
 concerning their high calling. 
 
 It would, therefore, be strange if we did not sometimes 
 hear men say, " I went to College with very high 
 expectations, all of them to be rudely disappointed. I 
 find it no uncommon experience with men who have tried 
 to do something in this world, that College life has really 
 not helped them much."* Every lawyer is not over-laden 
 with briefs ; and who is to hinder the briefless barrister 
 from attributing the blame to those who trained him ! If 
 it pleases him; let us be content. Inside the walls of the 
 capacious guild of literature is a great company of 
 bereaved parents, weeping for their children, slain with 
 more than Herodian cruelty by the hands of a hard- 
 hearted race of editors. Of course, the editors are stone- 
 blind and stony-hearted. The lottery of statesmanship 
 has many blanks. All students of medicine do not obtain 
 the L.S.A. or M.R.C.S. Even business men are not total 
 strangers to the science of "compounding," in a way 
 different to that practised in the laboratory of the chemist ; 
 and it is not altogether unknown for such men to visit 
 with unmitigated censure the " world " that has shattered 
 their self-created illusions indeed, all this is part of 
 the great mystery of waste, the overplus of blossom, the 
 destruction of germs, eggs, infant life, that seems 
 inseparable from our present struggle for existence. 
 It belongs to our human nature. Let us not then 
 
 * Samuel Edger, B.A. Autobiographical Notes and Lectures. He also adds, 
 " It is of great value in securing leisure, contact with other minds, various 
 associations of importance. But for actual study it had little enough value 
 to me; would have had none, but for the University examinations, prepara- 
 tion for which it did, in some measure, guide." (p. 30.)
 
 indulge in foolish lamentations, as though men left 
 the risks of their humanity outside the College 
 they themselves enter, and were freed from ordinary 
 laws of training because they have chosen the highest 
 vocation open to mortals. Students are but men ; some 
 of them not quite that but labouring, let us believe, with 
 a great hope to become men. Our business is not to whine 
 over failure, but to face the inevitable with unblenched 
 courage: look at the actual conditions of our work; study 
 the laws of effective training ; set them clearly and in 
 sharpest outline before the mind, and then give them an 
 obedience that knows no stint, lacks no fervour, and 
 dares all hazard, even if need be " the death of the 
 Cross." 
 
 IV. What, then, are these laws of Ministerial Training, 
 in the keeping of which there is the best and greatest 
 reward for humanity, for the churches, and for the 
 preacher himself ? 
 
 They are seven : 
 
 (1) The law of the Soul, or of the quality and 
 
 capacity of the man ; 
 
 (2) Of his sovereign aim or goal of work ; 
 
 (3) Of his daily self-drill ; 
 
 (4) Of his message and its delivery ; 
 
 (5) Of his church or company of confederates 
 
 and co-workers ; 
 
 (6) Of his Age or Sphere of Service ; and 
 
 (7) Finally and ail-inclusively, of his entire 
 
 subjection to and perfect communion with 
 
 the Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 You cannot make an effective preacher, and faithful shep- 
 herd of souls, out of a mean, hard, little, self-conceited, 
 self-centred man. The finest training ever known would 
 as easily get blood out of a stone as make an able 
 minister of the New Testament out of the thinnest 
 " fribble " of a human biped. " Apprentices " must have 
 some manly fibre in them if the skill of tutors and
 
 governors is not to be used in vain. The " man of God " 
 must be a real man to begin with ; a whole man for 
 ' he who is most man works best for man ;" a living, 
 loving, growing man ; a man with soul in every part of 
 him ; broad and tender in his sympathies ; able to enter 
 into and live with all sorts and conditions of men ; 
 sensitive to the sorrows of the poor and the woes of 
 the wretched; able to "bear gently with the ignorant 
 and erring, for that he himself is also compassed with 
 infirmity;" with a genius for brave self-denial, and knightly 
 chivalry; sustained by overwhelming conceptions of the 
 vastness of life and the seriousness of its issues ; large 
 in faith, soaring in aspiration, strong in will, rich in 
 patience, and glowing in the love of God and souls. 
 Ordinary Christians I say it, full well knowing the 
 loftiness of the claim I make, but assured of the truth 
 of my assertion ordinary Christians are not the stuff 
 to make preachers of, any more than ordinary and 
 commonplace politicians are fitted to lead you in legis- 
 lation, or ordinary soldiers marshal your armies, or 
 ordinary painters fill your Royal Academy, or ordinary 
 letter-writers edit your newspapers. The Ministry demands 
 men with a genius for religion, i.e., for self-denial, 
 abandon, enthusiasm, severe self-discipline, exulting 
 venturesomeness, faith, self-control, joy, and God ; as 
 other men have a genius for song, or for building, or for 
 money-making. A man whose nature is incurably mean, 
 who is capable of petty prejudices and little resentments, 
 who flares into anger at trifles, should take that as the sign 
 that he assuredly is not intended to minister magnanimity, 
 love, goodness, and joy to others. These things cannot 
 get through him. He is the bog that absorbs all heaven's 
 moisture ; not the clear cut channel that distributes it. 
 He wants soul, kingly will, splendid self-sacrifice, aban- 
 donment, the championship of exalted ideals ; let him 
 stick to his yard-measure and coin-making, or a good 
 business man may be lost without a real preacher being 
 secured. He may drive an engine, he will not build up
 
 souls. He might even become a dissector or defender 
 of creeds, a classifier of opinions, a systematic theologian, 
 or he might preside at an inquisition, but a loving, heart- 
 moving preacher, never ! It is soul that lifts soul. 
 Logical as Hinton was, yet how pathos throbbed in his 
 sentences, and stirred the hearer's inmost depths. Massive 
 as was Binney's intellect, he was not less great in heart, in 
 the tender and strong humanities. Stovel's lightning eye, 
 piercing intellect, and cogent argument, were backed by a 
 sublime opulence of love. The momentum of Robertson 
 was in his soul intensity, that penetrated the listener, 
 and moved him out of himself to God, Beecher's power 
 was not mainly in his imperturbed aspect, eloquent eye, 
 royal imagination, and clear strong stream of speech, but 
 in the soul of him, so big and tender, so human and 
 Christ-like ; suffusing his eyes with tears, making his 
 compact well-knit frame to throb with emotion ; in the 
 spell of his magnetic and spiritually rich personality. 
 Brainerd was a living "flame for God," burning his way- 
 through the apathy and antagonism of men, to the very 
 centres of conscience and will. For evermore that which 
 is born of the flesh is flesh, and cannot be anything else ; 
 it is spirit that begets spirit. 
 
 Our fathers, therefore, always taught the necessity of a 
 "converted" Ministry; and we must insist more 
 decisively on this law than ever; not bating a jot 
 in the demand that the conversion shall be thorough 
 and complete ; a conversion from selfish views of life, 
 from the greed for money and for fame ; from the spirit 
 that truckles to class and position, and closes its eyes to 
 the man and character, and from self-seeking in all its 
 subtle spiritual forms. The Preacher of Regeneration 
 must himself be regenerate, Christ-filled ; dead, indeed, 
 unto all sin, and alive unto God to the whole God, in 
 the entireness of his revelation in Christ Jesus the Lord. 
 
 Christ's Apostles were not ordinary men. He spent 
 the whole night in prayer to His Father before He chose 
 them from the wider ranks of His disciples, and it was in
 
 10 
 
 the perfectest wisdom that He lifted them to the positions 
 of messengers and witnesses for Him. They were the very 
 best men that could be found in the circle of disciples ; 
 most devout in spirit, eager in expectation, fresh in 
 feeling, open-eyed in enquiry and bold in deed. " It is 
 no inattentive idlers hanging on the skirts of the group 
 that He thinks good enough to go and carry His 
 message." They had qualities that gave promise of 
 expansion, service, fidelity, leadership, patience, heroism, 
 and victory ; and therefore He chose them from the rest, 
 bade them follow Him, and devoted many months of 
 sacred companionship to make them "fishers of men ! " 
 God forgive us that we have so sorely forgotten the mean- 
 ing of that divine election, and imagined that any sort of 
 Christian would suffice to preach the unsearchable riches 
 of Christ. 
 
 Young men ! seek first, greatness of soul ! Get up 
 above and beyond all littleness ! See the dignity of your 
 work and covet earnestly magnanimity ; total freedom 
 from pettishness, vanity, conceit, subtle self-puffing, and 
 all weak and unmanly ways. Recall the image of that 
 fine and noble spirit in a poor and ignoble time, young 
 Milton, and imitate his wise choice, firm will, and patient 
 consecration. It was his calling to be the poet for God, 
 and he accepted it as Isaiah the burden of prophecy, 
 Jeremiah the mandate to rebuke Israel, and Savonarola 
 the vocation of preaching repentance to the Florentines. 
 "An inward prompting," he says, describing his call, 
 " grows daily upon me, that by labour and intent study, 
 which I take to be my portion in this life, joined with the 
 strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave some- 
 thing so written to after-times, as they should not willingly 
 let it die/' No hurry. No weak impatience. No 
 shirking of labour. No littleness of any sort. A grand 
 calm, a steadfast spirit, and a serene resolve are here. 
 One thing he does, and does it as one soul. He makes 
 himself first. Hear him : " I was confirmed in this opinion, 
 that he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write
 
 tt 
 
 well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a 
 true poem .... not presuming to sing high praises 
 of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have in himself 
 the experience and practice of all that which is praise- 
 worthy." He who would hereafter preach well in 
 Christian things ought himself to be a true sermon. Ay ! 
 that is it. There is the stamp of divinity. It is Christ's 
 own plan. Life, and then speech. Speech, the vocaliz- 
 ing of life. Truth taught, the verbal form of the truth 
 lived. Work at this moral and spiritual enlargement. 
 Train for this and in this every day of the whole round 
 year. Go as definitely for spiritual greatness, for the 
 total suppression of the animal life, and for the cultiva- 
 tion of all that is beautiful and strong in Christian 
 character, as for the mastery of the first book of Euclid. 
 Make room in your mind for diviner ideas, in your heart 
 for purer loves, in your acts for more Christ-like deeds, 
 with the same thoughtful care, precision of aim, and 
 wholeness of self-dedication, as you work to get at the 
 meaning of your Greek Testament. Watch the effect of 
 every stroke of work on character, resisting all that hurts 
 it, welcoming whatever cleanses, quickens, and perfects 
 it. It is soul-training that lies at the very basis of 
 efficiency and power. You must, so frail are we men, 
 miss much that you want in life ; but if you miss this you 
 are for ever undone as " good Ministers of Jesus Christ." 
 
 V. Akin both in character and gravity to this training 
 in greatness of soul, is the law of the student's supreme and 
 all-embracing aim ; the final goal of all his long training 
 and of all his careful work. Indeed, this is the first and 
 greatest commandment, for the man is as the aim is. 
 No index is so accurate. No force acts so reflexly on the 
 man with such over-mastering energy. According to it 
 he is great or little, and according as it grows he grows 
 swiftly or slowly, soundly or corruptly, and becomes a 
 bold and conquering Peter, or a craven and self- 
 destroyed Judas.
 
 12 
 
 And yet I speak from experience, and free contact with 
 students, when I declare this is the thing the College 
 student has the most difficulty in holding aloft and main- 
 taining in its pureness and integrity, simplicity and 
 beauty. For all of us this is the toughest task we face, 
 but at the beginning of our training it is a burden almost 
 insupportable. The very act of going through the College 
 gates is often the lowering of the soul's aim. Outside, and 
 before entrance, the instinct for souls had free course, and 
 was glorified in its victories over fear and its gift of natural- 
 ness and self-forgetfulness. The passion to save men by 
 preaching Christ and Christ crucified was the master-key 
 of every sermon and of every prayer, of all study and 
 of all work, but now attention is so absorbingly fixed 
 on grammars and lexicons, on propositions to be proved 
 and lectures to be heard and remembered, on rules for 
 the introductions and divisions and applications of 
 sermons, that the " tools" of the workers fill the vision 
 and shut out the man and the men. Every operation 
 during the ten hours of the day withdraws the student 
 from the humanity that is waiting and needing to be 
 saved, the soul that hungers for the truth of God, and 
 directs him to the books in which that truth is printed 
 or the processes by which it may be written. The 
 intellectual aspects of life are in the ascendant, and 
 " the heart is in danger of being starved to feed the 
 head/' The very atmosphere is electric with debate, 
 and so it comes to pass that the man who went 
 to College, fired with contagious enthusiasms, and 
 passionate zeal to save men, comes out after four years' 
 training, 
 
 " Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, 
 Dead perfection, no more." 
 
 Contact with "dead languages" has frozen the soul. 
 Rhetoric is perfect, logic is invincible, knowledge is 
 widened, but the irrepressible eagerness to preach the 
 gospel so as to bring men to Christ and Christ to men
 
 13 
 
 is gone ejected by the very machine that was expressly 
 constructed to secure its earlier attainment. 
 
 What does all that mean ? 
 
 That College training is a mistake ! So some say ; 
 and so it may be ; but only in the same sense that it 
 was a mistake to make man " free to stand or free to 
 fall," and place him in a garden of life and beauty and 
 temptation a mistake as a factory is a mistake, or a 
 surgery, or a Board School, or indeed any place on 
 earth you can think of except the grave. For life 
 is temptation, and the higher, more expansive and 
 exalted the life, the fiercer the temptation, and the more 
 insistent the demand for steadfast fighting. Fuller, 
 purer life than Christ's there never was, and " He was in 
 all points tempted like as we are," and even to greater 
 degrees. 
 
 What does all that mean then ? 
 
 This ; not that Colleges are blunders, but that College- 
 men must obey this law of the exclusive aim to save 
 men, and build up character with undeviatingand inflexible 
 fortitude. You must train yourselves in the habit of 
 throwing into the background the tools of the intellect, 
 remembering that the moral purpose is the first and last 
 of controlling forces. There must be no day without 
 the vision of souls. No day without a brief baptism into 
 Christ's idea of man, his infinite value ; of sin, its awful 
 progeny ; of holiness, its perennial beauty ; of eternity, 
 its awe-inspiring attractions. You are here to seek and 
 to save that which is lost. There is the alpha and 
 omega of your business. Never forget it. Hold that 
 aim aloft. Do not let it drop out of sight. Beware of 
 seeing it in a false light. Suffer no usurper to dislodge 
 it from its place in the throne of your aims. " Seekest 
 thou great things for thyself, seek them not." If you do, thev 
 will not come. If you don't seek them, they may ccrne ; and 
 if they don't come you will be able to do well enough 
 without them. Train yourself in eloquence, you need 
 it in the building of sermons, it is obligatory in the
 
 14 
 
 mastery of the best thought of the best minds, it is 
 your privilege ; but oh ! as you value your own peace, as 
 you crave the " well done " of Christ, as you wish your 
 teaching to flow with quiet strength into the whole 
 world's interests, daily feed your passion to save souls, 
 habitually nourish into all-mastering sovereignty the love 
 of men as men, and for God's sake ; till it shall be the 
 light of all your seeing and the strength of all your doing, 
 transfiguring the lowliest and most monotonous tasks 
 with its radiance, and making the severest drill welcome 
 by the revelation of its blessed, if remote, issues. 
 
 VI. Is it necessary I should say one word to you on 
 this day, and in this place, on the subject of daily, patient 
 and prolonged drill ? Did you not come here to get it ? 
 Is it not your immediate calling ? Are not colleges drill- 
 ing machines ? 
 
 That may be so. Yet for three reasons it is incumbent 
 upon me to enforce this holy and just law. First, perfect 
 drill is in itself so irksome ; next, we are naturally so idle 
 that we will not pay full price for anything, if we can get 
 it without ; and thirdly, to every ardent aspirant for the 
 work of the ministry there comes the temptation to 
 postpone altogether, or restrain within the narrowest pos- 
 sible limits, the period of painful and severe preparation, in 
 favour of an immediate entrance upon the regular work 
 of the ministry, with its thrillingexcitement, public activities, 
 and brilliant badges of reward. What connection is there, 
 he asks, between school-boy tasks and the work of saving 
 souls ? What discernible relation exists between fishing 
 for men and struggling your tedious way, with aching 
 head and desponding heart, oVer the pons asinomm, fatal to 
 so many pilgrims bound for the weird land of mathematics ? 
 Why should it be necessary for a man to grind himself 
 to death at Latin declensions and Greek conjugations, 
 the laws of light and heat, and the relations of wages and 
 labour, so that he may exhort sinners to repentance, and 
 feed men with the living bread of God's truth ? Did
 
 15 
 
 Peter go to College ? Was Philip addicted to learning ? 
 Was Matthew a political economist ? Did Thomas study 
 natural philosophy ? No ! no ! The world needs saving, 
 and saving at once. Haste to the rescue. Life is short, 
 and if we are to strike, we must strike now, or not at all ! 
 
 But indeed it is not so. Here as elsewhere the maxim 
 holds good, " Most haste, least speed." The effective 
 blow must be well aimed as well as powerfully given. 
 Shooting arrows at a venture is well enough for the blind ; 
 but men with sight and sense will prefer to shoot at a 
 target. Painful drill, tedious training, are now recognized 
 as the conditions of all really successful work. It is 
 remembered that Christ called the " twelve " to a three 
 years' "training " before He sent them out as His witnesses 
 to the ends of the earth. Ignorance is incompetence. 
 Lack of discipline is defeat. Education is everywhere 
 the victorious champion in the strife of life. Even know- 
 ledge without it is as powder without guns, or an army 
 without leaders, organization, and training. It is too late 
 in the day now to argue for the mental drill of the 
 preacher of the word. It is one of the prime conditions 
 of power. It is absolutely indispensable to his growing 
 usefulness and extended influence. If he is not to be 
 worsted in the race with the Press and with popular 
 intelligence, he must head the lists in mental contests, 
 and prove himself a victor in the war of minds. Without 
 intellectual culture, the nineteenth century preacher is 
 as much out of place in our age as the soldier of the 
 middle ages would have been in recent continental 
 conflicts without the needle-gun. 
 
 Drill saves power : makes one man into half-a-dozen, 
 and the half-dozen hundred-handed. According to the 
 old fable, the gods divided man into men at the beginning, 
 so that he might be helpful to himself: just as the hand 
 is divided into fingers the better to answer its end. 
 What the gods are fabled to have achieved by division, 
 man successfully accomplishes by drill. This is the effect 
 of real education, and the mark by which a man of
 
 i6 
 
 knowledge is separated from one who is educated. The 
 knowing man, who merely knows, may have stores 
 enough historical, scientific, doctrinal, and ecclesiastical 
 lumber enough to stock a college, and yet not have a 
 shadow of claim to rank as a man of education ; for 
 education is the acquired facility to use the tools of the 
 mind, without consciously directing the mental energies 
 to the act of handling and working those tools. For 
 example, a child takes up a pair of scissors for the first 
 time and attempts to cut a piece of calico. It fails : it 
 cuts its own fingers perchance ; holds the bows of the 
 tools with pain and feebleness; thinks of nothing else 
 whilst making the attempt, and uses all its mind-power 
 in the act of learning to cut. The painful effort is 
 renewed again and again. Repetition makes the act 
 more and more easy, till at length the child can cut with 
 ease, and without consciously directing a single fibre of 
 brain force to the task. In fact, and speaking with 
 strict physiological truth, the work of cutting is no longer 
 done by the brain, but it is delegated to the uppermost 
 part of the spine, called the medulla oblongata ; and it is 
 by it carried on in a perfectly mechanical way, and so the 
 brain is set free for other and more important acts. 
 Hence the process of drilling has actually made a positive 
 addition to the working forces of life ; it has created an 
 internal machinery, so to speak, that is capable of con- 
 tinuing its work in an automatic, self-acting way (much as 
 the lungs and heart keep to their appointed tasks whilst 
 we are asleep), and so made the thoroughly drilled man 
 the paragon of activities and results we see him. 
 
 Drilling then is not knowing, but getting the means to 
 know ; it is the acquisition of power as a means to the 
 acquisition and use of knowledge. Mental education is 
 the process by which we acquire that faculty of using the 
 tools of the mind unconsciously and mechanically, and so 
 leave the highest forces of our mental nature perfectly 
 free to do the highest work. The accumulation of 
 materials, dates of battles, names of kings, contents of
 
 I? 
 
 charters, laws of motion, creeds of Augustine and 
 Athanasius, all this is incidental and not essential to the 
 beginnings of our mental work ; it is infinitely the easier 
 part of the process of getting ready for the work of the 
 ministry ; the main duty, the supreme task, is the 
 acquisition of facility in reasoning, thinking, imagining, 
 expressing, in handling the tools of the mind, in getting 
 the faculties of our nature into fine working condition. 
 
 The preacher is a reasoner. The drill of the under- 
 standing will train his faculties to that state that he will 
 detect a fallacy by merely opening his eyes, and sweep 
 down destructively on a false conclusion by one stroke of 
 the pinions of his brain. He is a dispenser of knowledge. 
 Drill will enable him to gather it as bees do honey. All 
 sciences will minister to him. All life, all experience, all 
 histories, will offer themselves as the raw material for his 
 machine to work up into whatever he will. He is also a 
 speaker. Language is his tool. Facility in its use deter- 
 mines his usefulness. " I never have to think of words" 
 said a trained and forcible speaker to us the other day ; 
 " they come." Exactly. That is it. " They come." 
 But not because he was born with what Robert Hall 
 called "a running at the mouth." That command of 
 language, fresh, varied, strong, and always appropriate, is 
 the result of years of toil, of the study of many authors, 
 and of persistent drill. The mind needs gymnastics as 
 well as the body, and must have them if it is to be 
 healthy, spontaneously active, and always effective. 
 
 Down, then, down to the grindstone with the scythe 
 that is to cut. Hold it there till the edge is keenly set. 
 It is not pleasant. It is irksome and tedious, almost 
 beyond endurance. The yoke cuts into the shoulders, 
 does it ? Still you must bear it in youth, if you are to 
 carry the world's burdens in manhood. A shallow and 
 frivolous life is not for us. We are framed for finer issues. 
 We need more vigour, more hardihood and devotion, 
 more of the scholar's fierce asceticism. A thin, super- 
 ficial, giggling, and gabbling existence will not grow the
 
 i8 
 
 leaders and guides of men. Death to the lust of display ! 
 It will unman us. Away with the folly that thinks the 
 world cannot get on without our vanity. It needs trained 
 power, skilled workers. Say not, " I must have a place. 
 I want a ' large 'sphere : ' eager and waiting crowds. I 
 must eat the good of the land, and grow fat on pelf and 
 fame." No ; do your work, get your drill, suffer and be 
 strong, acquire power by doing, and leave God to find 
 and fix your place. He will find home, and cupboard 
 too, for those who will seek out the uttermost of toil and 
 endurance in the endeavour to do His work well. He is 
 our inspiration let us ever seek the drill. One of the 
 finest passages in modern history is our example. When 
 the first Napoleon was captured by the English, he was 
 taken on board the Bellerophon, and a file of English 
 soldiers was drawn up on deck to give him a military 
 salute. The first warrior of the continent, the hero of 
 Austerlitz and Jena, noticed that they handled their arms 
 differently from his soldiers, and, at once, putting aside the 
 guns of those nearest him, he walked up to a soldier, took 
 his gun, and himself went through the drill. The spirit 
 of that act was the spirit of his life, and the cause of his 
 immense power. The possession and use of the same 
 spirit will insure similar power. 
 
 VII. Talking recently with a barrister of eminence, 
 both as a Queen's Counsel and as a Christian, I asked 
 what he thought the chief defect of modern preaching ? 
 At once he answered : 
 
 " Preachers do not know what to say they have not a 
 message of their own. When a lawyer stands up he has a 
 ' case,' definite and concrete. His mind is fixed on that, 
 and his clear and ringing message springs out of it." 
 
 Then said I : " Suppose you were addressing a body of 
 students for the ministry, what would be your principal 
 advice ? " 
 
 "Tell them," he said, " before all things to make sure 
 of their message."
 
 In his advice, I am sure he is right. I cannot say 
 whether he is also- right in his censure. A man must 
 know what he has to say ; know it as a message, that is, 
 as something that has to be delivered from one to 
 another, from Christ the Saviour and Teacher to the 
 souls for whom He lived, and died, and rose again. If he 
 has not got his message, or has it and yet does not definitely 
 know it, he had better stay at home. If he will not, it 
 is not unlikely his hearers will soon leave him as 
 " A Sabbath dravvler of old saws, 
 Distill'd from some worm-canker'd homily." 
 
 Now to have a message from God to men we must know 
 the Word of God. The one foundation of learning is 
 the mastery of original texts.* This must come first. 
 Clear and informing exposition is dependent upon it. 
 Comment is necessary, and illustration requisite, but 
 these are only available and useful as we have accurate 
 exegesis of the text itself. Therefore, the one thing 
 needful is trained ability in reading our great text-books, 
 the Old and New Testaments. Without it all the rest is 
 vanity. These are our original authorities. Here the 
 light is "dry," unclouded, healing, life-quickening. The 
 fountain-heads of truth and power are here. No man 
 can fail of infective energy whose soul is saturated with 
 the Bible. It is full of the force of God. Read penetra- 
 tingly, man knows himself, sees what God meant him 
 to be and do, seizes the very pith of the message he has 
 to deliver, and so creates a living proof that " every 
 scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, 
 for reproof, for correction, for instruction which is in 
 righteousness : that the man of God may be complete, 
 furnished completely unto every good work." f 
 
 * Freeman. Methods of Historical Study, p. 16 36. 
 
 f Yonge's Life of Patteson, vol. II., p. 374. " Every day," he writes, 
 " convinces me more and more of the need of a different mode of teaching 
 Irom that usually adopted for imperfectly-taught people. How many of 
 your ordinary parishioners understand even the simple meaning of the 
 Prayer Book, nay of their well-known (as they think) 'Gospel Miracles and 
 Parables ? ' Who teaches in ordinary parishes the Christian use of the
 
 20 
 
 Yet we know Christ Jesus Himself, Who is our 
 Supreme Authority, and at once " the Truth " and the 
 Interpreter of the Truth, did not write a word ; and all 
 that is written must be expounded in the sunlit radiance 
 of the facts of His Incarnation and Teaching, Sacrifice 
 and Resurrection, Ascension and Reign. Like Paul, we 
 must tell men that which Christ Jesus Himself delivered 
 to us ; the truth He enables us, by His indwelling Spirit, 
 to make our own, and preach with the self-multiplying 
 energy of personal experience and conviction. We be- 
 come mighty in the Scriptures, that we may be strength- 
 ened with might in the inward man ; and strengthened 
 within, Christ's word and Christ Himself will dwell in us 
 richly and bring forth fruit. " Sayst thou this thing of thy- 
 self, or has some one else taught thee? " is the interrogation 
 silently addressed to every preacher. Have you convic- 
 tions, or are you only a vocal memory ? Is it a " paper," 
 or a message ? Is there a reciter in the pulpit, or a man 
 with fire in his bones who is weary if he forbears, and 
 cannot stay from delivering the burden of the Lord ? 
 " It's of no use to preach to me from without," says 
 Emerson, " I can do that too easily myself." Know your 
 message, then. Find it in the Scriptures, in Christ Jesus, 
 and in the life of man. Get it clearly. Fix it in the 
 mind. Speak it with the whole force of the soul, and 
 
 Psalms? Who puts simply before peasant and stone-cutter the Jew and 
 his religion, and what he and it were intended to be, and the real error and 
 sin and failure ? The true nature of prophecy, the progressive teaching 
 of the Bible, never in any age compromising truth, but never ignoring the 
 state, so often the unreceptive state, of those to whom the truth must 
 therefore be presented partially, and in a manner adapted to rude and 
 unspiritual natures ? What an amount of preparatory teaching is needed ? 
 What labour must be spent in struggling to bring forth things new and old, 
 and present things simply before the indolent, unthinking, vacant mind ! 
 How much need there is of a special training of the clergyman even now ! 
 Many men are striving nobly to do all this. But think of the rubbish that 
 most of us chuck lazily (I am afraid to soften his language) out of our 
 minds twice a week without method or order ! It is such downright hard 
 work to teach well ! Oh, how weary it makes me to try ! I feel as if I 
 were at once aware of what should be attempted, and quite unable to do it."
 
 21 
 
 you will speak as did the Nun, who, having seen the 
 
 Holy Grail, addressed the Knight, 
 
 "And as she spake 
 
 She sent the deathless passion in her eyes 
 Through him ; and made him hers and laid her mind 
 On him ; and he believed in her belief." 
 
 VIII. But it is imperative you should not forget that 
 you are in training, not only for the preaching of the 
 gospel of God, but also and especially for the guidance 
 and upbuilding of communities of men and women 
 whose Sovereign is the Lord Jesus Himself, whose rule is 
 the New Testament, and whose basis is that of brother- 
 hood and freedom, independence and equality, spirituality 
 and service. You are to be a teacher in a society of 
 teachers, some of whom have thrice your experience, 
 ten times your faith and sanctity, and a thousand times 
 your consecration. You are a worker in a band of 
 workers, who will wait your word as that of a general, 
 and accept your example as that of an authority. Above 
 all, you are the pattern-saint in the company of saints, 
 called to be the most self-sacrificing member of a body, 
 whose law is self-sacrifice, and the most devoted of the 
 host, whose ideal is one of entire consecration to God. 
 
 In our Free Churches, much more depends on the 
 character, education, and spirit of the Minister, than in 
 any other Church. I admit the difference diminishes as 
 Congregationalism takes increasing possession of all 
 Christian Societies, but at present it is operative. Our 
 funds are not, save in rare cases, supplied by endowments. 
 Our status is not upheld by the authority of Parliament, 
 or buttressed by custom and fashion. Organization is not 
 of much service. We depend on men; and largely 
 perhaps on the men in the ministry, so that it is found 
 that strong ministers make strong Churches, and weak 
 ministers weak ones. 
 
 Yet the minister is in no respect a " priest." Nothing 
 is so entirely alien to the Christianity of Christ Jesus as
 
 22 
 
 the presence of the priest, or so debases and lowers the 
 spiritual life as the superstition of the priesthood. Christ 
 gave apostles and prophets, pastors and teachers, and 
 evangelists, but not priests. You are not intended to be 
 " clergymen " in any sense. A mere ritual-grinding 
 functionary or an automatic phrase-monger cannot dis.- 
 charge your responsibilities. You are not a successor to 
 Aaron, but to Christ and Paul, and your power will 
 depend not on badges of separation, or titles of dignity, 
 and orders of precedence, but on your personal influence, 
 on what flows from you quietly and strongly into the lives 
 of men, on the quality of your thoughts and ideals, 
 motives and aims, powers and religion. 
 
 Take heed, therefore, to thyself, as well as to thy minis- 
 try ; take heed to thyself, and take heed now. Each day is 
 making character. You are now developing the qualities 
 you will use in ten or twenty years' time in the manage- 
 ment of churches.* Therefore now (i) you must conquer 
 self. He who would guide and sway others must be 
 skilled in the art of self-mastery. The violent temper 
 that wrecked a church was left uncurbed at College. 
 The over- weening vanity that made work with others 
 impossible, had free course and abundant food in the 
 student. The idleness that made removals to another 
 church an annual necessity was suffered to fix ftself as a 
 habit in the early life. (2) Eliminate all self-seeking and 
 pride. By that sin fell the angels from their first estate; and 
 many churches have fallen from the same fault. Whitfield 
 said, " I cannot buy humility at too dear a rate." Vinet 
 described the Christian ministry as " not a profession but 
 a martyrdom ;" and it is the hardest martyrdom of all ; 
 one in which you bring the faggots of personal ease, and 
 emoluments, and vanity, and set fire to them with your 
 own hand, and whilst the flames are burning around you, 
 lock your lips, lest opening them even in self-defence 
 
 * In view of the natural difficulties of this task, it would be the highest 
 wisdom, if students on leaving College were able to secure a " second 
 apprenticeship " to the Pastor of a Christian Church for one or two years.
 
 23 
 
 should bring discredit on the Name of the adorable 
 Master. Learn, I beseech you now, how to suffer for 
 His sake. Invite self-denial, if only that you may be 
 trained in bearing meekly and with cheerfulness the Cross 
 for others. (3) Maintain a strong spiritual life, for 
 fortunately you cannot get on in our churches without 
 some real religion. Not rhetoric, be it never so glowing ; 
 or learning, be it of unequalled extent ; or fervour, be it 
 most intense will suffice, if a glowing spiritual life be 
 absent. Ah ! my friends ; I know no sphere so inviting 
 to a soul that yearns for the most exalted and loving 
 service of man and God, as that of a pastor of one of our 
 free Christian Churches ! 
 
 IX. With fine penetration, Dr. Benson says, "The 
 elements of this world's life are so numerous, and so 
 infinitely are they blended in every inconceivable variety, 
 that it must seem that ere the world ends there will not 
 have been any possible combination of the atoms of trial, 
 privilege, gift or suffering, with which some one human 
 will shall not have been exercised and proved." That 
 complex, much-embracing world is the arena of your strife, 
 the sphere of your service, and you ought not to close your 
 eyes to the numberless contingences it contains, or the 
 mightily influential certainties it holds. He who would 
 do his work well in life must often look ahead ; so that he 
 may know the men he is going to talk to and work for ; 
 what forces are now making or marring him, what powers 
 are likely to close his heart to Christ, and what to open 
 it ; what will give facilities for the wider and richer 
 application of the manifold energies of Christ in all life ; 
 and what will obstruct its full and free use. We need to 
 get at the facts of the world so that we may know how 
 to commend the gospel we preach to every man's 
 conscience, whoever he is, and make it a goad to repent- 
 ance, a source of fresh ethical inspirations and of wide 
 spiritual reforms. 
 
 A student not long since asked me what work would be
 
 2A 
 
 likely to be most fruitful in preparing him for his task as 
 a Christian preacher and pastor in the year 1900. I 
 replied there are tendencies setting in or already moving 
 with great force from four different points ; first, from the 
 regions of Physical Science, next, from the Social order, 
 third, from the spheres of Critical activity, and lastly, 
 from the deep-seated cravings for a fuller baptism of 
 spiritual energy, peace, and joy. 
 
 (1) Therefore the preacher who would profitably speak 
 to what is in the minds of his audience, should be in 
 sympathy with the victorious and beneficent march of 
 Science, familiar with its methods of work, and receptive of 
 its most fruitful ideas, such as, the all-pervasive unity of life, 
 the sovereignty of law, the certainty of progress towards 
 a nobler stage, and the prophecy of a divine and 
 glorious consummation. Clerk Maxwell said, " I think 
 men of Science, as well as other men, need to learn from 
 Christ, and I think Christians whose minds are scientific 
 are bound to study Science, that their view of the glory 
 of God may be as extensive as their being is capable of." 
 A thoroughly furnished teacher and leader of men will 
 have enriched himself by the thorough study of one of 
 the Sciences and sympathy with the Scientific trend of 
 all modern thought. 
 
 (2) But it will be in the enormous social reconstructions 
 to take place within the next thirty or forty years that 
 the wisdom of the wise and the goodness of the good will 
 be most required. The century of the new Christian 
 Democracy will demand crusaders and builders; men who 
 can fight against an ever-active and aggressive evil with 
 unquenchable enthusiasm and fearless zeal, and men who 
 can aid in the safe and sure rebuilding of the social 
 structure. Preachers from Laodicea, without passion, 
 and without heat, without wrath against wrong will go 
 back to Laodicea, or to a worse place, and the sooner the 
 better. These are not times for " the graceful prancing of 
 the tourney," but " for the sending round of the fiery 
 cross," for brave, strenuous, strong work as well as for
 
 25 
 
 clear and magnetic speech. Our Churches are essentially 
 constructive, the law for each of us is " seek to excel for the 
 edifying the upbuilding of the church " of the munici- 
 pality, and of the State. Religion is to direct and control 
 everything, legislators as well as churches, peers as well as 
 peasants, trade as well as worship, social customs as well as 
 sermons; the equitable distribution of wealth as well 
 as the individual well-being, the treatment of subject and 
 suspected races as well as our own towns. 
 
 Therefore Sociology cannot be neglected by the rising 
 ministry without risk to the efficiency of their service, 
 the range of their influence, and the amount of their 
 contribution to the best life of man. 
 
 (3) It requires no prescience to see that our Old 
 Testament Scriptures are being put into the fires of 
 criticism ; and it needs no warrant but that of history 
 to assure us that like the New Testament, they will 
 come out of the furnace as gold, and therefore it is 
 obvious that he will do well who can detach himself from 
 " the frenzied current of the time " in order to qualify 
 himself to use these precious treasures of the older 
 revelation in the spiritual upbuilding of men, and so 
 create in the actual experience of men whose spiritual 
 life they have nourished and unfolded, those living 
 arguments which grow stronger and stronger in a day 
 of gainsaying and rebuke.* 
 
 (4) But to all this, let me repeat, there must be added 
 a strong, serene, and growing spiritual life ; a thorough 
 elimination of self and a vivid consciousness of God, 
 in all and through all, and then the good minister of Jesus 
 Christ may cherish the hope of doing something to serve 
 his generation according to the will of God. I welcome 
 therefore the goad in the words of Dr. Dods, when he 
 
 * Ladd's " Doctrine of Scripture." The brain of the race will never so 
 develop as to take the place of its heart ; the affections cannot possibly so 
 reign as to dispense with conscience, and as long as man lives he will need 
 a stimulus like that offered in these Scriptures for the search for purity and 
 effort to be holy as God is holy.
 
 26 
 
 says, " I am deeply persuaded that the initial hindrance 
 to effective preaching is the lack of strong religious 
 convictions, and a personality penetrated with religious 
 feeling." 
 
 X. Do you ask who is he that dare accept an Ideal of 
 Training so exacting, painful and exceeding broad, com- 
 prising body and mind, heart and conscience, will and 
 character, requiring sleepless vigilance, incessant indus- 
 try, and unflagging enthusiasm ? 
 
 I answer: only he to whom Jesus Christ is Master 
 and King. Only he who, conscious of his redemption 
 through His sacrifice, delights in offering Him a hearty 
 and unabashed enthusiasm, undismayed by a dominant 
 criticism, unchilled by the coldness and opposition of the 
 world. Only he who says in the white heat of his 
 devotion, " To me to live is Christ." Existence finds in 
 Him Centre and Goal, Inspiration and Interpretation, 
 Light and Life. Only he who says 
 
 "O Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life, 
 Through Whom we find the Father still, 
 And peace from guilty fear and strife, 
 And knowledge of His holy will ; 
 We come to Thee, the heavenly Road, 
 We learn of Thee, the Truth divine, 
 We seek from Thee the Life in God, 
 Thou art our All, and we are Thine."* 
 It is the choice of the Master that marks and makes the 
 man. Take this low one, and watch him, andyou are nothing 
 and achieve nothing. Take that high, divine, best One, and 
 He will uplift, enlarge, and fill out your magnificent 
 ideals, inspire sustained passion for toil in the face of 
 aggravated failure give tone to your speech, " fill all 
 the stops of life with tuneful breath," keep your heart 
 warm and fresh, so that, like Paul, you will exclaim after a 
 quarter of a century of unrelaxed labour, still " One thing I 
 
 *" Hymns of Christ." By Dr. Walter C. Smith,
 
 do, forgetting the things which are behind, and stretching 
 forward to the things which are before, I press on toward 
 the goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus." 
 
 Nothing else will suffice to bring every thought into 
 captivity, every power into use, every responsibility into 
 privilege, every duty into delight. Not the Church, not 
 theology, not ordinances, not worship, not work ; He, 
 Himself is the heart of all true theology, the life of the 
 Church, the key of the ordinances, the spirit of worship, 
 and power for work. 
 
 Therefore the one law of laws in all your training, is 
 that continuous faith in Christ Jesus, prolonged study of 
 His ideas and principles of work, perfect obedience to His 
 example and heart to heart fellowship with His spirit. This 
 is all in all. Lose sight of Him, and you die. Dwell 
 with Him in the heavenlies, and earth itself is paradise, 
 labour is joy, and preaching blessedness. On this hangs 
 all the law of ministerial training. 
 
 In our Kensington Gardens one parable has been given 
 of late many times. Amongst its many trees clad with 
 beauty in the leafy month of June, some here and there 
 show just a little decay at the top, only discernible by 
 those who look aloft. Near the sight of the gathering 
 crowds, leaves are plentiful, and loveliness abundant. The 
 bark is without a sign of decay, the boughs are strong, 
 and the form is stately. All is well, or seems so ; but the 
 winds rise and beat about that tree on a cold November 
 night, and it falls, broken off near the ground ; and then 
 it is seen that myriads of tiny creatures have eaten their 
 way through its substance, reduced its fibre to powder, 
 and so removed its strong core. For years it has gone 
 on, from the top downwards, and nobody knew it not 
 even the tree itself. 
 
 "Abide in Me, and I in you for as the branch cannot 
 bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can 
 ye, except ye abide in Me ; without Me ye can do nothing."
 
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