e solution of the problem than the kind of
men who fill the office of the ministry. We must have men of more
power, more concentration on the aims of the ministry, more wisdom,
but, above all, more willingness to sacrifice their lives to their
vocation. We have too tame and conventional a way of thinking about
our career. Men are not even ambitious of doing more than settling in
a comfortable position and getting through its duties in a respectable
way. We need to have men penetrated with the problem as a whole, and
labouring with the new developments which the times require. The
prizes of the ministry ought to be its posts of greatest difficulty.
When a student or young minister proves to have the genuine gift, his
natural goal should not be a highly paid place in a West End church,
but a position where he would be in the forefront of the battle with
sin and misery. Nowhere else are the great lines of Chapman more
applicable than in our calling:--

Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sailyards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship runs on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.

I am well aware that men of this stamp cannot be made to order. They
must, as I have suggested already, have a spark of nature's fire, and,
besides that, the Spirit of God must descend on them. Yet I have
thought that it might be helpful towards this end to go back to the
origins of preaching, and to study those in whom its primitive spirit
was embodied. Perhaps that which we are desiderating could not be
better expressed than by saying that we need a ministry prophetic and
apostolic. And I am going to invite you to study the prophets and
apostles as our models.

Though we may not believe in apostolic succession in the churchly
sense, we are the successors of the apostles in this sense, that the
apostles filled the office which we hold, or hope to hold, and
illustrated the manner in which its duties should be discharged in
such a way as to be an example and an inspiration to all its
subsequent occupants. The air they breathed was still charged with the
spirit poured into it by Christ; they were made great by the
influence of His teaching and companionship; the power of the Holy
Ghost, freshly descended, burned on their hearts; and they went forth
on their mission with a force of conviction and a mastery of their
task