which the natural affections run to and fro, and should rather be at home reading his Bible, turning over his Concordance, and writing his sermon, letting senate and dance, market and exchange, opera and theatre, fights and negotiations go to the winds, so he only comes duly with his exegesis Sunday morning to his place?  In short, is the minister’s concern and call of God only, with certain imposing formalities and prearranged dogmas, to greet in their Sunday-clothes his friends who have laid aside their pursuits and delights with the gay garments or working-dress of the week, never reminding them of what, during the six days, they have heard or where they have been?  “No!” let him say; “if this is to be a minister, no minister can I be!” For what is left of the field the Lord sends the minister into?  It is cut up and fenced off into countless divisions, to every one of which some earthly-agent or interest brings a title-deed.  The minister finds the land of the world, like some vast tract of uncivilized territory, seized by wild squatters, owned and settled by other parties, and, as a famous political-economist said in another connection, there is no cover at Nature’s table for him.  As with the soldier in the play, whose wars were over, his “occupation’s gone.”

What is the minister, then?  A ghost, or a figure like some in the shop-window, all made up of dead cloth and color into an appearance of life?  Verily, he comes almost to that.  But no such shape, no spectre from extinct animation of thousands of years ago, like the geologist’s skeletons reconstructed from lifeless strata of the earth, can answer the vital purposes of the revelation from God.  Of no pompous or abstract ritual administration did the Son of God set an example.  He had a parable for the steward living when He did; He called King Herod, then reigning, a fox, and the Scribes and Pharisees hypocrites; He declared the prerogatives of His Father beyond Caesar’s; He maintained a responsibility of human beings coextensive with the stage and inseparable from the smallest trifle of their existence.  He did not limit His marvellous tongue to antiquities and traditions.  He used the mustard-seed in the field and the leaven in the lump for His everlasting designs.  His finger was stretched out to the cruel stones of self-righteousness flying through the air, and phylacteries of dissimulation worn on the walk.  He was so political, He would have saved Jerusalem and Judea from Roman ruin, and wept because He could not, with almost the only tears mentioned of His.  Those who teach in His name should copy after His pattern.