and sudden revivals to discourage these hopes!  A true revival, we believe, shall ever, in God’s own time, attend such labours.  This is emphatically true regarding the work of the ministry.  We believe that the ministry is of God as much as the Bible is—­one of the most precious gifts obtained for the Church by the risen Saviour; and that now, as ever, the preaching of the Word by ministers duly prepared and regularly called and ordained by the Christian Church, is the grand means for converting sinners; that this power never grows old or loses its adaptation to the wants of man amidst the constant changes of society, any more than a lens does in transmitting the rays of the sun from age to age.

Yet, with all these admissions, and with profound veneration for the ordinary calm and methodical means of grace, we can nevertheless believe in wide-spread sudden “conversions,” and that too through other instrumentalities, and in circumstances which leave no doubt of their being caused by what has been termed an extraordinary outpouring of God’s Spirit.  For let us beware of dogmatising irreverently as to when and how that living Spirit shall operate on the souls of men, who worketh according to His own counsel of unerring and inscrutable wisdom.  “Who hath known the mind of the Lord, and who hath been his counsellor, that he should instruct him?” As a Person, He acts as “He wills,” and in every case with perfect wisdom and perfect love.  And it is in keeping with this truth, or rather a necessary consequence from it, that God’s Spirit should teach and educate individuals and churches differently, or at least in accordance with their respective and specific wants.  If His outward dispensations towards the same person constantly vary, yet all work towards one end, the soul’s good,—­even as the combinations of the elements vary day by day, yet all help on the earth’s fruitfulness,—­we might expect that His dealings with the inner life of persons should also vary, while one glorious scheme of education for heaven is carried on in all and by all.  And if so, why do we think it strange that an individual should have his times of comparative spiritual darkness and light, strength and weakness? or that churches should also experience different kinds of treatment, so to speak, from the same wise Spirit, yet all suited to advance more and more in the end, both in us and by us, that kingdom which is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost?

Then, again, as to the instrumentalities which God’s Spirit employs, these may be often exceptional to His general rule.  For it is surely a great mercy when the regular ministry, or any other ordinance of His, becomes inefficient through sinful indifference or unbelief, that He should raise up in such an emergency, and that too from the most unexpected quarters, those who will do the work which others ought to have done.  The grand end of saving lost souls, and bringing many sons and daughters unto God, cannot be sacrificed to any organisation ordained for that purpose when it fails either to seek it or accomplish it.  Thus