elves among his people. Some of his people will
visibly, and still more will invisibly, make corresponding progress with
their minister; while some others, alas! will fall off in interest, in
understanding, and in sympathy till at last they drop off from his
ministry altogether. That is an old law in the Church of God: 'like
people like priest,' and 'like priest like people.' And while there are
various influences at work retarding and perplexing the immediate
operation of that law, at the same time, he who has eyes to see such
things in a congregation and in a community will easily see Hosea's great
law of congregational selection in operation every day. Like people
gradually gravitate to like preachers. You will see, if you have the
eyes, congregations gradually dissolving and gradually being consolidated
again under that great law. You will see friendships and families even
breaking up and flying into pieces; and, again, new families and new
friendships being built up on that very same law. If you were to study
the session books of our city congregations in the light of that law, you
would get instruction. If you just studied who lifted their lines, and
why; and, again, what other people came and left their lines, and why,
you would get instruction. The shepherds in Israel did not need to hunt
up and herd their flocks like the shepherds in Scotland. A shepherd on
the mountains of Israel had nothing more to do than himself pass up into
the pasture lands and then begin to sing a psalm or offer a prayer, when,
in an instant, his proper sheep were all round about him. The sheep knew
their own shepherd's voice, and they fled from the voice of a stranger.
And so it is with a true preacher,--a preacher of experience, that is.
His own people know no voice like his voice. He does not need to bribe
and flatter and run after his people. He may have, he usually has, but
few people as people go in our day, and the better the preacher sometimes
the smaller the flock. It was so in our Master's case. The multitude
followed after the loaves but they fled from the feeding doctrines, till
He first tasted that dejection and that sense of defeat which so many of
His best servants are fed on in this world. Still, as our Lord did not
tune His pulpit to the taste of the loungers of Galilee, no more will a
minister worth the name do anything else but press deeper and deeper into
the depths of truth and life, till, as was the cas