e and interesting people lived
long ago or that, at any rate, if any are now alive, they live many
miles away from their vicinity. They believe that there were
remarkable people in the first or the ninth century, but by no means
in the nineteenth; they believe that there are interesting people in
Paris or London or New York; but they have never discovered anything
wonderful in those living in their own village or in their own street.
Many who consider themselves enlightened will tell you that their
neighbours are a poor lot. They fancy that, if they were living
somewhere else, fifty or a hundred miles away, they would find company
worthy of themselves; though it is ten to one that, if they made the
change, their new neighbours would be a poor lot also.

If a minister allows himself to harbour sentiments of this sort, he is
lost.[45] No one will ever win men who does not believe in them. The
true minister must be able to see in the meanest man and woman a
revelation of the whole of human nature; and in the peasant in the
field, and even the infant in the cradle, connections which reach
forth high as heaven and far as eternity. All that is greatest in king
or kaiser exists in the poorest of his subjects; and the elements out
of which the most delicate and even saintly womanhood is made exist in
the commonest woman who walks the streets. The harp of human nature is
there with all its strings complete; and it will not refuse its music
to him who has the courage to take it up and boldly strike the
strings. The great preacher is he who, wherever he is speaking, among
high or low, goes straight for those elements which are common to all
men, and casts himself with confidence on men's intelligence and
experience, believing that the just suggestions of reason and the
terrors of conscience, the sense of the nobility of goodness and the
pathos of love and pity are common to them all.[46]

Let me close this lecture with a few words on a great subject, to
which a whole lecture might have been profitably devoted.

No safer piece of advice could be tendered you than to let the
beginning of your ministry be marked by care for the young. This is
work which more than any other will encourage yourselves, and it is
more likely than any other to establish you in the affections of a
congregation.

To work successfully among children you must know their life and have
the _entree_ of their little world of interests, excitements, prizes
an