spiritual growth of men, helping them to love one another, and to love God.

His means to this end are, in general, the common weapons of the Church. To him the Sunday is a high day, for it is the great day of work, when he comes into close relations with men, to instruct the mind, to warn in the name of conscience, gently arousing the affections, kindling the religious emotions, and so continuing his Father's work; the meeting-house, chapel, or church, is the great place for his work, and so, like the Sunday, it is holy, to him ;-both invested with a certain sanctity, as to the pious farmer or the smith, the plough or the hammer seems a sacred thing. The Bible, the service-books, the traditions he appeals to, the sacramental ordinances he uses, all are means, but not ends, helps to whom they help, but nothing more, their sanctity derivative, not of them but of the use they serve. In our day, the press offers him its aid, and stands ready to distribute his thought among the millions of mankind. By means of that he gradually gets beyond the bounds of his parish, rural or metropolitan, and if God has so gifted him, has whole nations for his audience, and, long after his death, his word will circulate among the nations-a word of power and blessedness.

man.

The minister finds a certain respect paid to the clergyThis is not a thing that is new, but old, hallowed, and slowly fading out of the consciousness of the nations. This traditional respect gives him a certain position and influence, and enables him at once to anticipate and claim a place which is granted to other classes of men only as the result of long life and faithful work. He finds a pulpit erected for him, an audience gathered, respectful and disposed to listen and gratefully to receive whatever good he has to offer. While the priest uses this position and traditional respect to elevate himself, to take his ease in his inn-to keep men still, the minister uses it to help men forward; not to elevate himself, but them. The pulpit is his place to stand on and move the world. It is not to be denied that even now, in incredulous America, the calling of a clergyman gives a man a good opportunity for power, for a real, serious, and lasting influence, or it gives him the best chance for a sleep, silent and undisturbed, and deep and long.

Such are the general means of the minister towards his great end-means which belong to all clergymen, and vary in efficiency only with the number, the wealth, the talent, and social position of his audience. His particular and personal means are his talents, little or great; his skill, acquired by education and self-discipline; his learning, the accumulated thought which has come of his diligence, as capital is accumulated by toil and thrift; his eloquencethe power of speaking the right thing, at the right time, with the right words, in the right way; his goodness and his piety, in a word, his whole character, intellectual, moral, and religious. These are the means which belong to the man, not the clergyman; means which vary not with the number, wealth, talent, and social position of his audience, but only with the powers of the man himself. His general means are what he has as servant of the Churchhis special, what he is as a man.

Yet

Say what men will, the pulpit is still a vantage ground, an eminence; often a bad eminence, it may be, still one of the places of public power. If a man would produce an immediate effect and accomplish one particular work, let him storm awhile in Congress, if he will. But if he aims to produce a long and lasting influence, to affect men deeply, and in many ways promote the progress of mankind, he may ascend the pulpit, and thence pour forth his light and heat on youth and age, distil his early and his latter rain; he is sure to waken the tender plants at last, and sure to strengthen the tallest and most strong. for all that, say what we may of the power of that position, the man is more than the pulpit, more than the church,yes, more than all pulpits and all churches, and if he is right and they wrong, he sets them a-spinning around him as boys their tops. Yet 'tis a great mistake to suppose it is the spoken word merely that does all; it is the mind, the heart, the soul, the character, that speaks the word. Words-they are the least of what a man says. The water in some wide brook is harmless enough, loitering along its way, nothing but water; the smallest of fishes find easy shallows for their sport; careless reptiles there leave their unattended young; children wade laughing along its course, and sail their tiny ships. But raise that stream a hundred feet-its tinkle becomes thunder, and its waters strike

with force that nothing can resist. So the words of a man of no character, though comforting enough when they are echoed by passion, appetite, and old and evil habits of our own-are powerless against the might of passion, habit, appetite. What comes from nothing comes to nothing. I know IN WHOM I have believed, said the apostle-not merely WHAT.

It is the minister's business to teach men truth and religion, not directly all forms of truth-though to help so far as he may even in that-but especially truth which relates to man's spiritual growth. To do this he must be before men, superior to them in the things he teaches: we set a grown woman to take care of children, a man to teach boys. There is no other way; in mathematics and in morals the leader must go before the men he leads. To teach truth and religion the minister must not only possess them, but must know the obstacles which oppose both in other minds-must know the intellectual errors which conflict with truth, the practical errors which contend with religion, and so be able to meet and confront the falsehoods and the sins of his time. He must therefore be a reformer,-there is no help for it. He may have a mystical turn, and reform only sentiments; a philosophical turn, and reform ideas— in politics, philosophy, theology; or a practical turn, and hew away only at actual concrete sins; but a reformer must he be in one shape, or in all, otherwise he is no minister, serving, leading, inspiring, but only a priest; a poor miserable priest, not singing his own psalm out of his own throat, but grinding away at the barrel-organ of his sect -grating forth tunes which he did not make and cannot understand.

The minister is to labour for mankind, for the noblest end, in one of the highest modes of labour, and its fairest form. He does not ask to rule, but to serve; not praise, but perfection. He seeks power over men not for his sake, but theirs. He is to take the lead in all works of education, of moral and social reform. If need is, he must be willing to stand alone. The qualities which bind him to mankind for all eternity are qualities which may sever him from his class and his townsmen; yes, from his own brothers, and that for his mortal life. The distinctions amongst men must be no distinctions to him. He must

honour all men, become a brother to all-most brotherly to the neediest. He must see the man in the beggar, in the felon, in the outcast of society, and labour to separate that diamond from the rubbish that hides its light. In a great city, the lowest ranks of the public should be familiar to his thoughts and present in his prayers. He is to seek instruction from men that can give it—and impart of himself to all that need and as they need. He must keep an unbroken sympathy with man; above all, he must dwell intimate with God. It is his duty to master the greatest subjects of human thought: to know the nature of man, his wants, appetites, exposures,-his animal nature, his human nature, and his divine; man in his ideal state of wisdom, abundance, loveliness, and religion; man in his actual state of ignorance, want, deformity, and sin. He is to minister to man's highest wants; to bring high counsel to low men, and to elevate still more the aspirations of the loftiest. He must be a living rebuke to proud men and the scorner; a man so full of heart and hope that drooping souls shall take courage and thank God, cheered by his conquering valour.

To do and to be all this, he must know men, not with the half-knowledge which comes from reading books, but by seeing, feeling, doing, and being. He must know history, philosophy, poetry and life he must know by heart. He must understand the laws of God, be filled with God's thought, animated with His feeling-be filled with truth and love. Expecting much of himself he will look for much also from other men. He asks men to lend him their ears, if he have anything to teach, knowing that then he shall win their hearts; but if he has nothing to offer, he bids men go off where they can be fed, and leave the naked walls sepulchral and cold, to tell him, "Sir, you have nothing to say; you had better be done!" But he expects men that take his ideas for truth to turn his words to life. He looks for corn as proof that he sowed good seed in the field; he trusts men will become better by his wordswiser, holier, more full of faith. He hopes to see them outgrow him, till he can serve them no more, and they come no longer to his well to draw, but have found the fountain of immortal life hard by their own door;-so the good father who has watched and prayed over his children,

longs to have them set up for themselves, and live out their own manly and independent life. He does not ask honour, nor riches, nor ease-only to see good men and good works as the result of his toil. If no such result comes of a long life, then he knows either that he has mistaken his calling or failed of his duty.

We have always looked on the lot of a minister in a country town as our ideal of a happy and useful life. Not grossly poor, not idly rich, he is every man's equal, and no man's master. He is welcome everywhere, if worthy, and may have the satisfaction that he is helping men to wisdom, to virtue, to piety, to the dearest joys of this life and the next. He can easily know all of his flock, be familiar with their thoughts, and help them out of their difficulties by his superiority of nature, or cultivation, or religious growth. The great work of education-intellectual and spiritual-falls under his charge. He can give due culture to all; but the choicer and more delicate plants, that require the nicest eye and hand-these are peculiarly his care. In small societies eloquence is not to be looked for, as in the great congregations of a city, where the listening looks of hundreds or thousands would win eloquence almost out of the stones. The ocean is always sublime in its movements, but the smallest spring under the oak has beauty in its still transparence, and sends its waters to the sea. In cities the lot of the minister is far less grateful-his connections less intimate, less domestic. Here, in addition to the common subjects of the minister's discourse, everywhere the same, the great themes of society require to be discussed, and peace and war, freedom and slavery, the public policy of states, and the character of their leaders, come up to the pulpits of a great city to be looked on in the light of Christianity and so judged. With a few hearers, we see not how a man can fail to speak simply, and with persuasive speech; before many, speaking on such a theme as religion, which has provoked such wonders of art out of the sculptor, poet, painter, architect-we wonder that every man is not eloquent. Some will pass by the little spring, nor heed its unobtrusive loveliness,—all turn with wonder at the ocean's face, and feel for a moment awed by its sublimity, and lifted out of their common consciousness.