essarily come to be also a profession, a line of life, with its
routine, its commonplace, its poverty and deterioration of motive, its
coarseness of feeling. It cannot but be so. It is part of the conditions
of our mortality. Even earnest purpose, even zealous and laborious
service, cannot alone save from the lowered tone and dulness of spirit
which are our insensible but universal and inveterate enemies in all the
business of real life. And that torpor and insensibility and deadness to
what is high and great is, more than any other evil, the natural foe of
all that is characteristic and essential in the Christian ministry; for
that ministry is one of life and reality, or it is nothing."--DEAN
CHURCH.

[42] This may perhaps help to determine the age of the portion of
Zechariah to which this passage belongs. Is there any proof elsewhere
that a degradation of the prophetic office as deep as this had taken
place, or was imminent, at the period to which it is usually assigned?

LECTURE VI.

THE PREACHER AS A MAN.

Gentlemen, in the foregoing lectures I have finished, as far as time
permitted, what I had to say on the work of our office, as it is
illustrated by the example of the prophets; and to-day we turn to the
other branch of the subject--to study the modern work of the ministry
in the light cast upon it by the example of the apostles.

* * * * *

When we quit the Old Testament and open the New, we come upon another
great line of preachers to whom we must look up as patterns. The voice
of prophecy, after centuries of silence, was heard again in John the
Baptist, and his ministry of repentance will always have its value as
indicating a discipline by which the human spirit is prepared for
comprehending and appreciating Christ. I have already given the reason
why I am not at present to touch on the preaching of Christ Himself,
although the subject draws one's mind like a magnet. After Christ, the
first great Christian preacher was St. Peter; and between him and St.
Paul there are many subordinate figures, such as Stephen, Philip the
Evangelist and Apollos, beside whom it would be both pleasant and
profitable to linger. But we have agreed to take St. Paul as the
representative of apostolic preaching, and I will do so more
exclusively than I took Isaiah as the representative of the prophets.

It is, I must confess, with regret that I pass St. Peter by. There is
a peculiar intere