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of man, his every thought and action, and thus to rule without obstruction or conflict in his mind and heart. The ministry are put by the science and the reform of the day under new responsibilities, and can only lead forward the Lord's hosts as they reconnoitre afresh, and choose every position of advantage and power. When the enemy have a commanding point, we should lose no time in shifting our in secking anew the elevations that should now belong

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But that on which most of all the influence of the pulpit must depend is the moral force with which its truths are held, the love and sympathy which they call out toward men. The pulpit is for the many, not for the few. Its purpose is not so much to pioneer the paths of progress, as it is to gather men in them, and urge on those who loiter by the way. No erudition can atone for any want of popular sympathy, of compassion, of Christlike love that goes in search of the lost. Christianity is at the utmost remove from the artistic, esoteric spirit of refinement, from the haughty exclusion, or quiet forgetfulness even, of literary culture. It must strike downward with long and searching and multiplied roots among the sorrowing masses, gather its material from dark places, and, absorbing on every side, lift all that it touches into the sunlight and beauty of its own towering growth. This working downward by love is even more than working upward by faith, or outward by comprehension. As fountains catch the descending water in successive basins, and gather it all in the last reservoir, so the gifts of Christianity are most abundant, its graces in largest volume, as it returns from each upward impulse to fill, beautify, and overflow its lowest receptacles in the rational world. The fulfilment of faith is in love. We look upward to God, only that we may look downward with him as his eye is bent in compassion on the children of men.

It is chiefly needful that the minister should be able to encounter the best thought of his day; that, commanding respect and influence, he may use these not in controversy,

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but in the guidance and encouragement of men. necessary that Christ should be able to withstand the Pharisees, but chiefly that, holding these at bay, he might have access to the popular mind. While there is some theoretical infidelity in the world, there is much more practical infidelity — an infidelity of the heart, rather than the head, and which must be displaced more by love than by argument. A clear intuition of truth, a fearless, forcible enunciation of it, overawe adversaries, and make way for Christianity; but Christianity itself, the purifying, converting power of love, have yet their entire work to do.

The clergy now rest, more than ever before, on a purely commercial basis in the performance of their labor. While many advantages belong to this form of connection, vantages which increased intelligence will serve to enlarge,

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it in part removes the manifest evidence of Christian love which attaches to missionary labor. Nothing can be more destructive to the true influence of the ministry than a strictly commercial spirit; since this is one whose law is pre-eminently self-love. The minister must know how to penetrate the commercial form which life is constantly assuming with the disinterestedness of the Christian temper. The apostle Paul, following the example of our Saviour, met the suspicious, distrustful spirit of his time by refusing compensation, and making all his labors a gratuity. This, in our altered times, would be to ruin the sense of justice and the rightful estimate of labor in those large bodies of Christians who are the chief recipients of ministerial instruction. Most unfortunate will it be, if both church and minister are led thereby, in large measure, to overlook the gratuitous element of love that must always enter into Christianity, and constitute, for the masses of men, its convincing, persuasive power. Churches that grow into wealth, and therefore come under its liabilities, are most effectually cut off from that demonstration of the Spirit which, opening up in the daily life the love of Christ, proclaims it with a persuasion which men cannot resist.

The elegance and wealth of our churches are

the proclamation of a practical infidelity to the gospel of Christ, which cannot but result, in the ranks of those who feel themselves overlooked and deserted, in the stolid unbelief of an aggrieved and censorious heart. For these reasons it is that the power of love-real, undeniable, Christian love is always sure to outstrip, in practical work, superior cultivation and large intellectual insight. The foundations are more than the superstructure, the heart more than veins or arteries. He preaches Christ best who shows most of his spirit, in whom love has actually wrought the largest salvation. He is able to reach down to the bottom of society, deeper than its thought; to go beyond the cold convictions of men, further than its thought; to mount up, by the secret forces of faith in the soul to God, higher than its thought. We may in many ways get ready for victory; but we conquer, as Christ upon the cross, by love.

These three methods of increasing influence- that of uniting the mind closely in belief to the supernatural, that of widening the supernatural in theory and in practice so that it shall find affiliation everywhere with the natural, and that of permeating our thought and heart with Christian love are yet one in the intimacy of their interdependence and the manner of their acquisition. We may, indeed, give to one element a relative preponderance; but we are sure thereby in the end to weaken even its hold on the mind, and, by destroying the balance of movement, to give it a wayward, hesitating, and unsafe character. The supernatural acquires orderly and sufficient development, exerts a healthy and invigorating influence on the mind, only as it is closely joined with the natural, and ever issues in it. It is in connection with known, proportionate, constant forces that man can labor and thrive intellectually and spiritually. On the other hand, there is no such dreary waste of thought as the natural alone, separated from a supernatural origin and end, from a ministration to supernatural purposes and a providential management under them. There is in it a concatenation of causes, but no chain; a prolongation, not a continuation; a

motion, yet one that is the mere spinning of a wheel on its axis, giving no progress to the hopes and aspirations. There is need throughout of the same union that we meet with of the human and divine in the person of Christ. Without divinity, we lose even goodness and greatness, and have fanaticism, a strange inebriety of the excited, unsober reason. Without true humanity, we have mere illusive, evanescent. unsubstantial appearance. The God of nature is before the God of revelation, and the God of revelation brings but new distinctness and interpretation to the God of nature. Moreover, both the natural and supernatural will lose their power over the soul, except as they are brought into immediate ministration to a life of Christian love, and are made to yield the conditions of spiritual growth. We understand the work of God, and we work with him, only as we seek in all things the conditions of social progress. Science, even, owes much of its advancement to the care with which it submits its labors to the uses of men.

The ministry also have a united, as well as a separate, influence. While it is desirable that each should be able to meet, in a more or less independent way, the wants of the time it will inevitably happen that to one will fall one branch of effort, and to another another branch. All may not be able successfully to encounter the various forms of scientific and critical unbelief. It suffices if the ministry furnishes among its numbers those who can wisely confront, attack, and guide thought in each direction; for the household of faith is one, and its defence, enlargement, and nourishment are one interest. Each enters into the labors of every other, and sees his own services at once lightened. thereby and made more valuable. The ministry, with all its feebleness and blind work, will meet with justification so long as the kingdom of God is working its way onward by means of it, and finds in it the best, broadest, safest hold of spiritual truth.

ARTICLE VII.

THE THREE FUNDAMENTAL METHODS OF PREACHING — PREACHING EXTEMPORE.

BY EDWARDS A. PARK.

(Continued from p. 383).

IV. REASONS FOR PREACHING EXTEMPORE.

IF a military commander conduct a battle without previously forming a plan of it, or if he form an exact and inflexible plan, extending to all the minutiae of the battle, he may have reason to fear a defeat. If, on the contrary, he devise a general scheme of operations, and hold himself ready to change it in order to meet the unexpected details of the conflict, he may have good reason to anticipate a victory. So if an extemporizer begin his discourse without any preceding arrangement of his subject-matter, or if he make a definite and unalterable arrangement of even its minutest details, he may not be justified in anticipating success. But if he make a general schedule of his thoughts, and leave it to be filled out and modified as the incidents of the delivery suggest, he may reasonably hope to speak well. For the sake of convenience the method of preaching without any antecedent plan of thought is called the unpremeditated; the method of preaching with a merely general, but flexible plan, is called the premeditated; the method of preaching with a definite, fixed, unbending plan, which includes the minutest details, is called the predetermined. Having already considered the rules for extemporaneous discourse, we are prepared to consider the reasons for it. Of course these reasons apply to the second of the above-named modes of preaching extempore; not to the first, which, however, may be commended when there is no time for the second; nor to the third, which corresponds to the "exact" mode of preparing

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