as a promise that the well of ideas in his mind should
not run dry, but that God would give him such a revelation of His mind
and will as would supply him with an ample message to his age. All three
cases are full of instruction and encouragement.

[11] "After passing through the fundamental religious experiences of
forgiveness and cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable
premises of life with God, Isaiah was left to himself. No direct summons
was addressed to him, no compulsion was laid on him; but he heard the
voice of God asking generally for messengers, and he, on his own
responsibility, answered it for himself in particular. He heard from the
Divine lips of the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately
full of the mind that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart
to give himself to it. So great an example cannot be too closely studied
by candidates for the ministry in our own day. Sacrifice is not the
half-sleepy, half-reluctant submission to the force of circumstance or
opinion, in which shape it is so often travestied among us, but the
resolute self-surrender and willing resignation of a free and reasonable
soul. There are many in our day who look for an irresistible compulsion
into the ministry of the Church; sensitive as they are to the material
bias by which men roll off into other professions, they pray for
something of a similar kind to prevail with them in this direction also.
There are men who pass into the ministry by social pressure or the
opinion of the circles they belong to, and there are men who adopt the
profession simply because it is on the line of least resistance. From
which false beginnings rise the spent force, the premature stoppages,
the stagnancy, the aimlessness and heartlessness, which are the scandals
of the professional ministry and the weakness of the Christian Church in
our day. Men who drift into the ministry, as it is certain so many do,
become mere ecclesiastical flotsam and jetsam, incapable of giving
carriage to any soul across the waters of this life, uncertain of their
own arrival anywhere, and of all the waste of their generation, the most
patent and disgraceful. God will have no driftwood for His sacrifices,
no drift-men for His ministers. Self-consecration is the beginning of
His service, and a sense of our own freedom and our own responsibility
is an indispensable element in the act of self-consecration."--G.A.
SMITH: _Isaiah_.

[12] I do not