and to triumphs such as no one
can forecast! The highest triumphs of these coming years are to be
spiritual. The leader is to be the one who can carry the deepest
spiritual inspiration to the hearts of his fellow-men. Do not let the
hour go by! This day of vision is the prophetic day!

But if the call be answered, if certain high-spirited and noble-minded
men ask thus to stand as spiritual ministrants to the souls of men, how
shall they be trained for the high office?

The old way will not do. Sweeping changes, in these last days, have come
over the commercial, academic, and social world. We do not go back to
the hand-loom, the hand-sickle, the hand-press. What is true of these
aspects of life is true of the spiritual training. It must be larger,
freer, grander, than before. Time was when a theologian, it was
thought, must be separated from the world--an ascetic working in the dim
half-light of the old library, or scriptorium, or hall. To-day, he must
gain much of his training from the great life of the world--learn how to
meet men and occasions, and be prepared to deal with modern forces and
energies with courage, knowledge, and decision.

We read of the earnest Thomas Goodwin: his favorite authors were such as
Augustine, Calvin, Musculus, Zanchius, Paraeus, Walaeus, Gomarus, and
Amesius. What Doctor of Theology takes the last six of these to bed with
him to-day?

Our theological courses are too dry. Look carefully over the catalogues
of thirty or forty of our own seminaries, and notice the curious, almost
monastic, impression which they make. Then realize that the men who
pursue these abstruse and mediaeval subjects are the men who go out into
churches where the chief topics of thought and conversation are crops,
stocks, politics, clothes, servants, babies! There is a grim humor in
the thing, which seems to have escaped those who have drawn up the
curriculum.

Life is not monastic. It is very lively. We scarcely get, in all our
post-collegiate life, a chance to sit and muse. We go through
sensations, experiences, and incongruities, which stir a sense of fun. A
man reads (I notice) in his seminary, St. Leo, _Ad Flaeirmum_, and makes
his first pastoral call on a woman who proudly brings out her first
baby for him to see. _Ad Flaeirmum_ indeed! What does St. Leo tell the
youth to say?

What should be breathed into a man in the seminary, is not the mere
facts of ecclesiastical history, but the warm pulsating curren