there are multitudes of so-called ministers who eat the King’s bread who can neither push a proud sinner into the slough nor help a prostrate sinner out of it; no, nor point him the way when he has himself wallowed out.  And then, there are men called ministers, too, who also eat the King’s bread, whose voice you never hear in connection with such matters, unless it be to revile both the pilgrims and their helpers, and all who run with fear and trembling up the heavenly road.  But our pilgrim was happy enough to meet with a minister to whom he could look back all his remaining pilgrimage and say:  ’He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.  And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise to our God.’

Now, as might have been expected, there is a great deal said about all kinds of help in the Bible.  After the help of God, of which the Bible and especially the more experimental Psalms are full, this fine name is then applied to many Scriptural persons, and on many Scriptural occasions.  The first woman whom God Almighty made bore from her Maker to her husband this noble name.  Her Father, so to speak, gave her away under this noble name.  And of all the sweet and noble names that a woman bears, there is none so rich, so sweet, so lasting, and so fruitful as just her first Divine name of a helpmeet.  And how favoured of God is that man to be accounted whose life still continues to draw meet help out of his wife’s fulness of help, till all her and his days together he is able to say, I have of God a helpmeet indeed!  For in how many sloughs do many men lie till this daughter of Help gives them her hand, and out of how many more sloughs are they all their days by her delivered and kept!  Sweet, maidenly, and most sensible Mercy was a great help to widow Christiana at the slough, and to her and her sons all the way up to the river—­a very present help in many a need to her future mother-in-law and her pilgrim sons.  Let every young man seek his future wife of God, and let him seek her of her Divine Father under that fine, homely, divine name.  For God, who knoweth what we have need of before we ask Him, likes nothing better than to make a helpmeet for those who so ask Him, and still to bring the woman to the man under that so spouse-like name.

   ’What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
   Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
   Thy wish exactly to thy heart’s desire.’

And then when the apostle is making an enumeration of the various offices and agencies in the New Testament church of his day, after apostles and teachers and gifts of healing, he says, ’helps,’—­assistants, that is, succourers, especially of the sick and the aged and the poor.  And we do not read that either election or ordination was needed to make any given member of the apostolic church a helper.  But we do read of helpers being found by the apostle among