whose office it should be to quicken and infuse it with new life should themselves come at last to “worship the net and the drag.”  And just here you find in the history of religion in all ages the place of the prophet and the seer.  He is to pierce through the fabric of the visible structure to that soul of things for which it stands.  When, in Isaiah, the Holy Ghost commands the prophet, “Lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid:  say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!” it is not alone, you see, his voice that lie is to lift up.  No, no!  It is the vision of the unseen and divine.  “Say unto the cities of Judah, Behold your God!”

Over and over again that voice breaks in upon the slumbrous torpor of Israel and smites the dead souls of priests and people alike.  Now it is a Balaam, now it is an Elijah, a David, an Isaiah, a John the Baptist, a Paul the Apostle, a Peter the Hermit, a Savonarola, a Huss, a Whitefield, a Wesley, a Frederick Maurice, a Frederick Robertson, a Phillips Brooks.

Do not mistake me.  I do not say that there were not many others.  But these names are typical, and that for which they stand cannot easily be mistaken.  I affirm without qualification that, in that gift of vision and of exaltation for which they stand, they stand for the highest and the best,—­that one thing for which the Church of God most of all stands, and of which so long as it is the Church Militant it will most of all stand in need:  to know that the end of all its mechanisms and ministries is to impart life, and that nothing which obscures or loses sight of the eternal source of life can regenerate or quicken;—­to teach men to cry out, with St. Augustine, “Fecisti nos ad te, Domine, et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te”:  Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is unquiet until its rests in Thee,—­this however, as any one may be tempted to fence and juggle with the fact, is the truth on which all the rest depends.

Unfortunately it is a truth which there is much in the tasks and engagements of the episcopate to obscure.  A bishop is preeminently, at any rate in the popular conception of him, an administrator; and howsoever wide of the mark this popular conception may be from the essential idea of the office, it must be owned that there is much in a bishop’s work in our day to limit his activities, and therefore his influence, within such a sphere.

To recognize his prophetic office as giving expression to that mission of the Holy Ghost of which he is preeminently the representative, to illustrate it upon a wider instead of a narrower field, to recognize and seize the greater opportunities for its exercise, to be indeed “a leader and commander” to the people, not by means of the petty mechanisms of officialism, but by the strong, strenuous, and unwearied proclamation of the truth; under all conditions to make the occasion somehow a stepping-stone to that mount of vision from which men may see God and righteousness and become sensible of the nearness of both to themselves,—­this, I think you will agree with me, is no unworthy use of the loftiest calling and the loftiest gifts.