as I look back on my own tremendous mistakes in the management of my own personal and ministerial life, as well as sometimes see some signs of the same mistakes in some other ministers.  In my dream for the Church of the future I see the programme of lectures in the Experimental Class and the accompanying examinations.  I see the class library, and I envy the students.  I am present at the weekly book-day, and at the periodical addresses delivered to the class by those town and country ministers who have been most skilful in their pastorate and most successful in the conversion and in the character of their people.  And, unless I wholly deceive myself, I see, not all the class—­that will never be till the millennium—­but here and there twos and threes, and more men than that, who will throw their whole hearts into the work of such a class till they come out of the hall in experimental religion like Sir Proteus in the play: 

   Their years but young, but their experience old,
   Their heads unmellowed, but their judgment ripe.

It is quite true, that, as my old minister shrewdly said to me, even the Holy Ghost cannot inspire an experience.  No.  But a class of genuine experimental divinity would surely help to foster and develop an experience.  And, till the class is established, any student who has the heart for it may lay in the best of the class library for a few shillings.  Mr. Thin will tell you that there is no literature that is such a drug in the market as the best books of Experimental Divinity.  No wonder, then, that we make such slow and short way in the skilfulness, success, and acceptance of our preaching and our pastorate.

3.  But, at the same time, my brethren, all your ministers’ experience of personal religion will be lost upon you unless you are yourselves attending the same school.  The salvation of the soul, you must understand, is not offered to ministers only.  Ministers are not the only men who are, to begin with, dead in trespasses and sins.  The Son of God did not die for ministers only.  The Holy Ghost is not offered to ministers only.  A clean, humble, holy heart is not to be the pursuit of ministers only.  It is not to His ministers only that our Lord says, Take up My yoke and learn of Me.  The daily cross is not the opportunity of ministers only.  It is not to ministers only that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.  It was to all who had obtained like precious faith with their ministers that Peter issued this exhortation that they were to give all diligence to add to their faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience,—­and so on.  Now, my brethren, unless all that is on foot in yourselves, as well as in your ministers, then their progress in Christian experience will only every new Sabbath-day separate you and your ministers further and further away from one another.  When