For these common people, whom “God must have loved because he made so many of them,” are the true heirs to the future.  And wealth and culture, art and learning, are to burn like torches to light their march.  Finally, my young brothers, do not be bitterly disappointed if you are not “popular preachers.”  Do not let too many people go to sleep under your preaching, even if one young man did go to sleep under one of Paul’s sermons.  But if now and then someone is angry at what you have said, do not worry too much over it.  Preach the truth in love.  If Elijah and John the Baptist, and Peter and Paul, were to preach to-day I doubt greatly whether they would be popular preachers.  I cannot find that they ever were so.  They would probably be peripatetic candidates, until someone supported them as independent evangelists.  After their death we would rear them great monuments, and then devote ourselves to railing at Timothy because he was not more like what we imagine Paul was.

Even Socrates found that he must bid farewell to what men count honors, if he would follow after truth.  You may have the same experience.  You will have to champion many an unpopular cause, and your people will not like it.  They will say you lack tact.  Now Paul was a man of infinite tact.  Witness his sermon on Mars’ Hill.  But if his letters to the church in Corinth were addressed to most modern churches, they would soon set out in search of a pastor of greater adaptability.

If you play the man, and fight the good fight of faith, I do not see how you can always avoid hitting somebody on the other side.  And he will pull you down if he can; and will probably succeed in sometimes making your life very uncomfortable.  Remember the teaching of scripture and science, that the upward path was never intended to be easy.  The scriptural passages to this effect you can find all through the gospels and epistles, and I need not quote them to you.  I will, however, tell you honestly that many are of the opinion that these passages are now obsolete, being applicable only to the first centuries, or to especially critical times in the history of the church.  I cannot share that view, but, lest I seem too old-fashioned, will merely quote the ringing words of our own Dr. Hitchcock, that “no man ever enters heaven save on his shield.”  And allow me to quote in the same connection the testimony of that prince of scientists, Professor Huxley, in his lecture on “Evolution and Ethics:” 

“If we may permit ourselves a larger hope of abatement of the essential evil of the world than was possible to those who, in the infancy of exact knowledge, faced the problem of existence more than a score of centuries ago, I deem it an essential condition of the realization of that hope that we should cast aside the notion that the escape from pain and sorrow is the proper object of life.

“We have long since emerged from the heroic childhood of our race, when good and evil could be met with the same ‘frolic welcome;’ the attempts to escape from evil, whether Indian or Greek, have ended in flight from the battle-field; it remains to us to throw aside the youthful over-confidence and the no less youthful discouragement of nonage.  We are grown men, and must play the man