vival, and get twenty new members in the class, they will
attend it about once or twice, and after that, if you rub the cypher out,
that will stand for the increase. That "leader" is guaranteed to lose
everybody that is in his class, except two or three dear people, and they
can keep the meeting on for an hour; and be as dreary as--well, I will
not say _all_ that is in my mind. You see, some people would say it is
no business of mine. But no man has a right to be a leader if he cannot
keep a meeting all alive. If a man can get a class of 150 to 200 people
to listen to him when he speaks, that is the man to lead. You must not
sacrifice the new-born babes. I do not know what the Committee that has
been sitting on "the class meeting" thought about it, but depend upon it,
it will have to come under the fan. I know places where a man's name is
kept on the class-book because he condescends to pay the minister for his
ticket whenever he calls, and where another man is taken off that cannot
afford it. Why, John Bunyan would have called that damnable!

The chaff is no good. You may plant chaff in the best land that ever
was, and you will not get anything. That which is of no use must go into
the fire.

The Sunday-school is on its trial. Yes! even in Lancashire. The biggest
Sunday-school system is here in this county. What is the result? What
has it to show, compared with the amount of patient, faithful work that
has been done? Do you not think that in some places the result is all
chaff? The Sunday-school is fast becoming the grandest entertainment
agency in existence, and places that were built for the teaching of God's
Word are now places for entertainment, better than any theatre, because
they cost nothing. I saw in Leeds, the other Sunday, that in a certain
Sunday-school "there will be a _sacred drama_ rendered." It was not a
Methodist School. But I know schools where they have "niggers," with
blackened faces and banjos. The "nigger troupe of such-and-such a
school!" What do you think John Wesley would say if he came to life
again? He would drive them out, as Christ drove out those men from the
Temple, "with a whip of"--well! I do not think they would be such "small
cords" either.

Now the Sunday-school, "the greatest thing of this age," the grandest
thing that the Church has seen in the last hundred years, is on its
trial: and if we do not mind it will go with the chaff into the
unquenchable fire.