life and death in them--"That there should be no schism in the body; but
that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether
one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be
honored, all the members rejoice with it."

The lesson from all this is, Attend to your bodies, study their
structure, functions, and laws. This does not at all mean that you need
be an anatomist, or go deep into physiology, or the doctrines of
prevention and cure. Not only has each organism a resident doctor,
placed there by Him who can thus heal all our diseases; but this doctor,
if watched and waited on, informs any man or woman of ordinary sense
what things to do, and what things not to do. And I would have you, who,
I fear, not unfrequently sin in the same way, and all our ardent,
self-sacrificing young ministers, to reflect whether, after destroying
themselves and dying young, they have lost or gained. It is said that
God raises up others in our place. God gives you no title to say this.
Men--such men as I have in my mind--are valuable to God in proportion to
the time they are here. They are the older, the better, the riper and
richer, and more enriching. Nothing will make up for this absolute loss
of life. For there is something which every man who is a good workman is
gaining every year just because he is older, and this nothing can
replace. Let a man remain on his ground, say a country parish, during
half a century or more--let him be every year getting fuller and sweeter
in the knowledge of God and man, in utterance and in power--can the
power of that man for good over all his time, and especially towards its
close, be equalled by that of three or four young, and, it may be,
admirable men, who have been succeeding each other's untimely death,
during the same space of time? It is against all spiritual, as well as
all simple arithmetic, to say so.

You have spoken of my father's prayers. They were of two kinds; the one,
formal, careful, systematic, and almost stereotyped, remarkable for
fulness and compression of thought; sometimes too manifestly the result
of study, and sometimes not purely prayer, but more of the nature of a
devotional and even argumentative address; the other, as in the family,
short, simple, and varied. He used to tell of his master, Dr. Lawson,
reproving him, in his honest but fatherly way, as they were walking home
from the Hall. My father had in his prayer the words, "that thro