their time so much at their own disposal as we. I often wish we
had regular office-hours, like business men; but even that would not
remedy the evil, for every man shut up alone in a study is not
studying. Nothing can remedy it but faithfulness to duty and love of
work.

You will find it necessary to be hard at it from Tuesday morning to
Saturday night. If you lecture, as I trust you will--for it brings
one, far more than sermonising, into contact with Scripture--you will
know your subject at once, and be able to begin to read on it. The
text of the other discourse should be got by the middle of the week at
latest, and the more elaborate of the two finished on Friday. This
makes a hard week; but it has its reward. There are few moods more
splendid than a preacher's when, after a hard week's work, during
which his mind has been incessantly active on the truth of God and his
spirit exalted by communion with the Divine Spirit, he appears before
his congregation on Sabbath, knowing he has an honestly gotten message
to lavish on them; just as there can be no coward and craven more
abject than a minister with any conscience who appears in the pulpit
after an idle, dishonest week, to cheat his congregation with a diet
of fragments seasoned with counterfeit fervour.

But, besides being an interpreter of Scripture, a true minister fills
the still higher position of a prophet. This congregation has asked
you to become its spiritual overseer. But a minister is no minister
unless he come to his sphere of labour under a far higher
sanction--unless he be sent from God, with a message in his heart
which he is burning to pour forth upon men. An apostle (that is, a
messenger sent from God) and a prophet (that is, a man whose lips are
impatient to speak the Divine message which his heart is full of)
every true minister must be. I trust you have such a message, the
substance of which you could at this moment, if called upon, speak out
in very few words. There is something wrong if from a man's preaching
his hearers do not gather by degrees a scheme of doctrine--a message
which the plainest of them could give account of.

What this message should be, there exists no doubt at all in the
Church of which you have to-day been ordained a minister. It can be
nothing else than the evangelical scheme, as it has been understood
and expounded by the greatest and most godly minds in all generations
of the Church and preached with fresh power in th