is of vast importance. And in society a man that is all the time stopping to see whether he is doing right or not, and analyzing his thoughts and his motives and his feelings without any knowledge of how to analyze; the man that is anxious because he did not know but he may have said something to-day; he is like a man that is so anxious that he stops his watch every few minutes to see whether it is going.

A great many men have a conscience for Sunday, but none for Monday.

Oftentimes a text is like a gate which the children love to swing on, but at other times a text is that gate through which you go into the great fields beyond, and use it and pass on.

Build up such a spiritual super-structure that every little child shall feel it to be easier to live a Christian life than an unchristian one.

You must not be in a hurry or impatient. You have not lost a man because he doesn't take the truth the first time.

Do not be discouraged because after a year you look back on your ministry and see that it is a very imperfect and wretched one, and does not answer your ambition at all. That is one of the best symptoms possible for a young man to have.

A true call to the sacred ministry is the voice of God in you speaking through your highest and noblest faculties. Any other consideration than that is not a call of God, and there are very many called, but few are chosen.

The art of putting a living heart on a living heart, that is the root of preaching.

A minister ought to be the best informed man on the face of the earth. He ought to see everything and be interested in everything.

A sermon like a probe must follow the wound into all its intricate passages. Nothing is too much for

the surgeon or for the physician, nothing should be too common or too familiar for the preacher.

When you are fighting the Devil shoot him with anything.

Imagination, Emotion, Enthusiasm and Conviction, are the four foundation-stones of an effective and successful minister.

All true preaching bears the impress of the nature of the preacher.

Don't hold up any of the truths of the gospel in such a way that the man who looks at them shall say it is not possible to be sand.

Great sermons ninety-nine times in a hundred are nuisances. They are like steeples without any bells in them; things stuck up high in air, serving for ornament, attracting observation, but sheltering nobody, warming nobody, helping nobody.

A real master of men when one comes near to him, forms a judgment of the new-comer just as instinctively and as quickly as of a locomotive or a horse.

Now, when a man has a call to the ministry, he is to preach Christ and to understand Christ. He may understand a good many things out of books, he may understand a great many things out of systems, he may help himself into perplexities of experience, but, after all, the man that is the true preacher learns by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost what was the nature of that love which led Christ Jesus to empty Himself, and to go down to the bottom as it were, to the feet of the universe, that when He lifted Himself up He should carry everything with Him. It is not enough, then, that you simply have an admiration of God, and an admiration of Jesus Christ, and an approbation of Him, but you must be Christ's yourselves according to the measure of your being.

No man is fit to preach until he is fit to be sacrificed. A man that gives himself up to the work of preaching is bound to say in his ordination thought, "I will make a life-sacrifice of myself if God means it and requires it; but one thing I must do—I must be

true to my own best thoughts, my own best beliefs, whether the Church likes it or not."

To preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, to have Christ so melted and dissolved in you that when you preach your own self you preach Him as Paul did, to have every part of you living and luminous with Christ, and then to make use of everything that is in you, your analogical reasoning, your logical reasoning, your imagination, your mirthfulness, your humor, your indignation, your wrath, to take everything that is in you all steeped in Jesus Christ, and to throw yourself with all your power upon a congregation-that has been my theory of preaching the Gospel.

If a Christian man's heart is the pulpit of Christ, no sermon is needed, for there is no act of his that is not a sermon glowing with love.

The persimmon is a fruit that, while it is yet green, is bitter and puckery to the last degree, but when once it has been frosted, it is one of the sweetest of all the fruits; and there are a great many seeds—it is not until winter has dissolved in them the glue that they can open their shell and let out the root of the