Paul’s was a richly complicated nature—­firm as a rock in its will, tremulously sensitive in its sympathies; like some strongly-rooted tree with its stable stem and a green cloud of fluttering foliage that moves in the lightest air.  So his spirit rose and fell according to the reception that he met from his brethren, and the manifestation of their faith quickened and strengthened his.

And he is but one instance of a universal law.  All teachers, the more genuine they are, the more sympathetic they are, are the more sensitive of their environment.  The very oratorical temperament places a man at the mercy of surroundings.  All earnest work has ever travelling with it as its shadow seasons of deep depression; and the Christian teacher does not escape these.  I am not going to speak about myself, but this is unquestionably true, that every Elijah, after the mightiest effort of prophecy, is apt to cover his head in his mantle and to say, ’Take me away; I am not better than my fathers.’  And when a man for thirty years, amidst all the changes incident to a great city congregation in that time, has to stand up Sunday after Sunday before the same people, and mark how some of them are stolidly indifferent, and note how others are dropping away from their faithfulness, and see empty places where loving forms used to sit—­no wonder that the mood comes ever and anon, ’Then, said I, surely I have laboured in vain and spent my strength for nought.’  The hearer reacts on the speaker quite as much as the speaker does on the hearer.  If you have ice in the pews, that brings down the temperature up here.  It is hard to be fervid amidst people that are all but dead.  It is difficult to keep a fire alight when it is kindled on the top of an iceberg.  And the unbelief and low-toned religion of a congregation are always pulling down the faith and the fervour of their minister, if he be better and holier, as they expect him to be, than they are.

‘He did not many works because of their unbelief.’  Christ knew the hampering and the restrictions of His power which came from being surrounded by a chill, unsympathetic environment.  My strength and my weakness are largely due to you.  And if you want your minister to preach better, and in all ways to do his work more joyfully and faithfully, the means lie largely in your own hands.  Icy indifference, ill-natured interpretations, carping criticisms, swift forgetfulness of one’s words, all these things kill the fervour of the pulpit.

On the other hand, the true encouragement to give a man when he is trying to do God’s will, to preach Christ’s Gospel, is not to pat him on the back and say, ’What a remarkable sermon that was of yours! what a genius! what an orator!’ not to go about praising it, but to come and say, ’Thy words have led me to Christ, and from thee I have taken the gift of gifts.’