come to us with cases of conscience.  A minister is not only for public preaching, but to be a known counsellor for his people’s souls as the lawyer is for their estates, and the physician is for their bodies.  And because the people are grown unacquainted with this office of the ministry, and their own necessity and duty herein, it belongeth to us to acquaint them herewith, and to press them publicly to come to us for advice concerning their souls.  We must not only be willing of the trouble, but draw it upon ourselves by inviting them hereto.  To this end it is very necessary to be acquainted with practical cases and able to assist them in trying their states.  One word of seasonable and prudent advice hath done that good that many sermons would not have done.”

4.  As he went on pounding and preparing his well-approved pill, the (at the bottom of his heart) kind old leech talked encouragingly to the mother and to her sick son, and said:  “Come, come; after all, do not he too much cast down.  Had we lived in the days of the old medicine, I would have been compounding a purge out of the blood of a goat, and the ashes of an heifer, and the juice of hyssop.  But I have a far better medicine under my hands here.  This moment I will make you a purge to the purpose.”  And then the learned man, half-doctor, half-divine, chanted again the sacred incantation as he bent over his pestle and mortar, saying:  Ex carne et sanguine Christi!  Those shrewd old eyes soon saw that, in spite of all their defences and all their denials, damage had been done to the conscience and the heart that nothing would set right but a frank admission of the evil that had been done, and a prompt submission to the regimen appointed and the medicine prepared.  And how often we ministers puddle and peddle with goat’s blood and heifer’s ashes and hyssop juice when we should instantly prescribe stern fasting and secret prayer and long spaces of repentance, and then the body and the blood of Christ.  How often our people cheat us into healing their hurt slightly!  How often they succeed in putting us off, after we are called in, with their own account of their cases, and set us out on a wild-goose chase!  I myself have more than once presented young men in their trouble with apologetic books, University sermons, and watered-down explanations of the Confession and the Catechism, when, had I known all I came afterwards to know, I would have sent them Bunyan’s Sighs from Hell.  I have sent soul-sick women also The Bruised Reed, and The Mission of the Comforter with sympathising inscriptions, and sweet scriptures written inside, when, had I had Mr. Skill’s keen eyes in my stupid head, I would have gone to them with the total abstinence pledge in my one hand, and Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Dying in my other.  “No diet but that which is wholesome!” almost in anger answered the sick man’s mother.  “I tell you,” the honest leech replied, in more anger, “this boy has been tampering with Beelzebub’s orchard.  And many have died of it!”