Congregations sometimes mourn over dull preaching when themselves are to blame.  Give your minister more beefsteak and he will have more fire.  Next to the divine unction, the minister needs blood; and he cannot make that out of tough leather.  One reason why the apostles preached so powerfully was that they had healthy food.  Fish was cheap along Galilee, and this, with unbolted bread, gave them plenty of phosphorus for brain food.  These early ministers were never invited out to late suppers, with chicken salad and doughnuts.  Nobody ever embroidered slippers for the big foot of Simon Peter, the fisherman preacher.  Tea parties, with hot waffles, at ten o’clock at night, make namby-pamby ministers; but good hours and substantial diet, that furnish nitrates for the muscles, and phosphates for the brain, and carbonates for the whole frame, prepare a man for effective work.  When the water is low, the mill-wheel goes slow; but a full race, and how fast the grists are ground!  In a man the arteries are the mill-race and the brain the wheel, and the practical work of life is the grist ground.  The reason our soldiers failed in some of the battles was because their stomachs had for several days been innocent of everything but “hard tack.”  See that your minister has a full haversack.  Feed him on gruel during the week and on Sunday he will give you gruel.  What is called the “parson’s nose” in a turkey or fowl is an allegory setting forth that in many communities the minister comes out behind.

Eight hundred or a thousand dollars for a minister is only a slow way of killing him, and is the worst style of homicide.  Why do not the trustees and elders take a mallet or an axe, and with one blow put him out of his misery?  The damage begins in the college boarding house.  The theological student has generally small means, and he must go to a cheap boarding house.  A frail piece of sausage trying to swim across a river of gravy on the breakfast plate, but drowned at last, “the linked sweetness long drawn out” of flies in the molasses cup, the gristle of a tough ox, and measly biscuit, and buckwheat cakes tough as the cook’s apron, and old peas in which the bugs lost their life before they had time to escape from the saucepan, and stale cucumbers cut up into small slices of cholera morbus,—­are the provender out of which we are trying at Princeton and Yale and New Brunswick to make sons of thunder.  Sons of mush!  From such depletion we step gasping into the pulpit, and look so heavenly pale that the mothers in Israel are afraid we will evaporate before we get through our first sermon.

Many of our best young men in preparation for the ministry are going through this martyrdom.  The strongest mind in our theological class perished, the doctors said afterward from lack of food.  The only time he could afford a doctor was for his post-mortem examination.

I give the financial condition of many of our young theological students when I say: