in season and out of season among his people.  He will tell you how you are to make you a new heart.  Or, if he does not and cannot do that; if he preaches about everything but that to a people who will listen to anything but that, then your soul is not in his hands but in your own.  You may not be able to choose your minister, but you can choose what books you are to buy, or borrow, and read.  And if there is not a minister within a hundred miles of you who knows his right hand from his left, then there are surely some booksellers who will advise you about the classical books of the soul till you can order them for yourselves.  And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman:  no timid friend to unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas Boston’s Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a gravestone engraven with this legend:  Here lies a man who had a brow for every good cause.  Only, if you would have that written and read on your headstone, you have no time to lose.  If I were you I would not sit another Sabbath under a minister whose preaching was not changing my nature, making my heart new, and transforming my character; no, not though the Queen herself sat in the same loft.  And I would leave the church even of my fathers, and become anything as far as churches go, if I could get a minister who held my face close and ever closer up to my own heart.  Nor would I spend a shilling or an hour that I could help on any impertinent book,—­any book that did not powerfully help me in the one remaining interest of my one remaining life:  a new nature and a new heart.  No, not I. No, not I any more.

CHAPTER X—­CLIP-PROMISE

   ’ . . . the promise made of none effect.’—­Paul

Toward the end of the thirteenth century Edward the First, the English Justinian, brought a select colony of artists from Italy to England and gave them a commission to execute their best coinage for the English Mint.  Deft and skilful as those artists were, the work they turned out was but rude and clumsy compared with some of the gold and silver and copper coins of our day.  The Florentine artists took a sheet of gold or of silver and divided the sheet up with great scissors, and then they hammered the cut-out pieces as only a Florentine hammerman could hammer them.  But, working with such tools, and working on such methods, those goldsmiths and silversmiths, with all their art, found it impossible to give an absolutely equal weight and worth to every piece of money that they turned out.  For one thing, their cut and hammered coins had no carved rims round their edges as all our gold and silver and even copper coinage now has.