a minister is really making progress himself in the life of religion that progress must come out, and ought to come out, both in his preaching and in his prayers.  And, then, two results of all that will immediately begin to manifest themselves among his people.  Some of his people will visibly, and still more will invisibly, make corresponding progress with their minister; while some others, alas! will fall off in interest, in understanding, and in sympathy till at last they drop off from his ministry altogether.  That is an old law in the Church of God:  ’like people like priest,’ and ‘like priest like people.’  And while there are various influences at work retarding and perplexing the immediate operation of that law, at the same time, he who has eyes to see such things in a congregation and in a community will easily see Hosea’s great law of congregational selection in operation every day.  Like people gradually gravitate to like preachers.  You will see, if you have the eyes, congregations gradually dissolving and gradually being consolidated again under that great law.  You will see friendships and families even breaking up and flying into pieces; and, again, new families and new friendships being built up on that very same law.  If you were to study the session books of our city congregations in the light of that law, you would get instruction.  If you just studied who lifted their lines, and why; and, again, what other people came and left their lines, and why, you would get instruction.  The shepherds in Israel did not need to hunt up and herd their flocks like the shepherds in Scotland.  A shepherd on the mountains of Israel had nothing more to do than himself pass up into the pasture lands and then begin to sing a psalm or offer a prayer, when, in an instant, his proper sheep were all round about him.  The sheep knew their own shepherd’s voice, and they fled from the voice of a stranger.  And so it is with a true preacher,—­a preacher of experience, that is.  His own people know no voice like his voice.  He does not need to bribe and flatter and run after his people.  He may have, he usually has, but few people as people go in our day, and the better the preacher sometimes the smaller the flock.  It was so in our Master’s case.  The multitude followed after the loaves but they fled from the feeding doctrines, till He first tasted that dejection and that sense of defeat which so many of His best servants are fed on in this world.  Still, as our Lord did not tune His pulpit to the taste of the loungers of Galilee, no more will a minister worth the name do anything else but press deeper and deeper into the depths of truth and life, till, as was the case with his Master, his followers, though few, will be all the more worth having.  The Delectable Mountains are wide and roomy.  They roll far away both before and behind.  Immanuel’s Land is a large place, and there are many other shepherds among those hills and valleys besides Knowledge and Experience