and in cloudy and dark days.  You spend your strength among sick and dying and wandering sheep, among wolves and weasels, and what not, of that verminous kind.  At the same time, all good pastors are not so obscure and forgotten as all that.  Some exceptionally able and exceptionally devoted and self-forgetful men manage to combine both extremes of a minister’s duties and opportunities in themselves.  Our own Sir Henry Moncreiff was a pattern pastor.  There was no better pastor in Edinburgh in his day than dear Sir Henry was; and yet, at the same time, everybody knows what an incomparable ecclesiastical casuist Sir Henry was.  Mr. Moody, again, is a great preacher, preaching to tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but, at the same time, Mr. Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive pastors that ever took individual souls in hand and kept them over many years in mind.  But these are completely exceptional men, and what I want to say to commonplace and limited and everyday men like myself is this, that watching for the souls of our people, one by one, day in and day out,—­that, above everything else, that, and nothing else,—­makes any man a pastor of the apostolic type.  An able man may know all about the history, the habitat, the various species, the breeds, the diseases, and the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing at all of a true shepherd.  And so may a minister.

2.  Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far the best way of watching for souls.  I well remember when I first began my ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed with what one of the ablest and best of our then ministers was reported to have testified on his deathbed.  Calling back to his bedside a young minister who had come to see him, the dying man said:  ’Prepare for the pulpit; above everything else you do, prepare for the pulpit.  Let me again repeat it, should it at any time stand with you between visiting a deathbed and preparing for the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.’  I was immensely impressed with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me, but I have lived,—­I do not say to put my preparation for the pulpit, such as it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week’s thoughts, but—­to put my visiting in the very front rank and beside my pulpit.  ’We never were accustomed to much visiting,’ said my elders to me in their solicitude for their young minister when he was first left alone with this whole charge; ’only appear in your own pulpit twice on Sabbath:  keep as much at home as possible:  we were never used to much visiting, and we do not look for it.’  Well, that was most kindly intended; but it was much more kind than wise.  For I have lived to learn that no congregation will continue to prosper, or, if other more consolidated and less exacting congregations, at any rate not this congregation, without constant pastoral attention.  And remember, I do not complain of that.  Far, far from that.  For I am as sure as I am of anything