of the countryside also.’  Jonathan Edwards called Thomas Boston ‘that truly great divine.’  I am not such a judge of divinity as Jonathan Edwards was, but I always call Boston to myself that truly great pastor.  But my lazy and deceitful heart says to me:  No praise to Boston, for he lived and did his work in the quiet Forest of Ettrick.  True, so he did.  Well, then, look at the populous and busy town of Kidderminster.  And let me keep continually before my abashed conscience that hard-working corpse Richard Baxter.  Absolutely on the same page on which that dying man enters diseases and medicines enough to fill a doctor’s diary after a whole day in an incurable hospital, that noble soul goes on to say:  ’I preached before the wars twice each Lord’s Day, but after the wars but once, and once every Thursday, besides occasional sermons.  Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most desirous, and had opportunity, met at my house.  Two days every week my assistant and I myself took fourteen families between us for private catechising and conference; he going through the parish, and the town coming to me.  I first heard them recite the words of the Catechism, and then examined them about the sense, and lastly urged them, with all possible engaging reason and vehemency, to answerable affection and practice.  If any of them were stalled through ignorance or bashfulness, I forbore to press them, but made them hearers, and turned all into instruction and exhortation.  I spent about an hour with a family, and admitted no others to be present, lest bashfulness should make it burdensome, or any should talk of the weakness of others.’  And then he tells how his people’s necessity made him practise physic among them, till he would have twenty at his door at once.  ’All these my employments were but my recreations, and, as it were, the work of my spare hours.  For my writings were my chiefest daily labour.  And blessed be the God of mercies that brought me from the grave and gave me, after wars and sickness, fourteen years’ liberty in such sweet employment!’ Let all ministers who would sit at home over a pipe and a newspaper with a quiet conscience keep Boston’s Memoirs and Baxter’s Reliquiae at arm’s-length.

3.  Our young communicants’ classes, and still more, those private interviews that precede and finish up our young communicants’ classes, are by far our best opportunities as pastors.  I remember Dr. Moody Stuart telling me long ago that he had found his young communicants’ classes to be the most fruitful opportunities of all his ministry; as, also, next to them, times of baptism in families.  And every minister who tries to be a minister at all after Dr. Moody Stuart’s pattern, will tell you something of the same thing.  They get at the opening history of their young people’s hearts before their first communion.  They make shorthand entries and secret memoranda at such a season like this:  ’A. a rebuke to me.  He