connected with a minister’s life, that a minister’s own soul will prosper largely in the measure that the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work.  No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle’s itself, can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation and personal intercourse.  ‘I taught you from house to house,’ says Paul himself, when he was resigning the charge of the church of Ephesus into the hands of the elders of Ephesus.  What would we ministers not give for a descriptive report of an afternoon’s house-to-house visitation by the Apostle Paul!  Now in a workshop, now at a sickbed, now with a Greek, now with a Jew, and, in every case, not discussing politics and cursing the weather, not living his holidays over again and hearing of all the approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in his own incomparably winning and commanding way repentance toward God and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ.  We city ministers call out and complain that we have no time to visit our people in their own houses; but that is all subterfuge.  If the whole truth were told about the busiest of us, it is not so much want of time as want of intention; it is want of set and indomitable purpose to do it; it is want of method and of regularity such as all business men must have; and it is want, above all, of laying out every hour of every day under the Great Taskmaster’s eye.  Many country ministers again,—­we, miserable men that we are, are never happy or well placed,—­complain continually that their people are so few, and so scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive, that it is not worth their toil to go up and down in remote places seeking after them.  It takes a whole day among bad roads and wet bogs to visit a shepherd’s wife and children, and two or three bothies and pauper’s hovels on the way home.  ‘On the morrow,’ so runs many an entry in Thomas Boston’s Memoirs, ’I visited the sick, and spent the afternoon in visiting others, and found gross ignorance prevailing.  Nothing but stupidity prevailed; till I saw that I had enough to do among my handful.  I had another diet of catechising on Wednesday afternoon, and the discovery I made of the ignorance of God and of themselves made me the more satisfied with the smallness of my charge . . .  Twice a year I catechised the parish, and once a year I visited their families.  My method of visitation was this.  I made a particular application of my doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to lay all these things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer, supposing they kept family worship, urged their relative duties upon them,’ etc. etc.  And then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes:  ’Thus I parted with a people whose hearts were knit to me and mine to them.  The last three or four years had been much blessed, and had been made very comfortable to me, not in respect of my own handful only, but others