id lately one of London's biggest D.D.'s to a
visitor from the country. "Oh, sir, I am in the ministry now," was the
somewhat exulting reply. "Ah, but, my brother," said the querist again,
"is the ministry in you?" Rather an important question that, and a
question to which, alas! many ministers would be unable to give a very
satisfactory reply. When I see a nervous, timid, feeble, hesitating,
wavering brother in the pulpit, I think of the Doctor's question as one
from which such a man would instinctively shrink.

Dr. Parker belongs to another and a rarer class. The ministry is in him
as a divine call, and not as an accidental profession. He speaks as one
having authority. In an age of negation, and mistrust, and little faith,
he is as positive as if spiritual truths had been audible to his bodily
ear and seen with the bodily eye. Amidst the perplexities of a theology
ever shifting in external phraseology, where man's wisdom has darkened
God's light as revealed in His Word, where the miasma of doubt has
repressed and stinted Christian life, he walks with a masculine tread,
and he does so not from ignorance but from knowledge, because he knows
how difficult is the way, how dark the path, how easily error comes to us
in the form of truth, how the devil himself can assume the shape and
borrow the language of an angel of light. He has got good standing
ground, but he knows how treacherous is the soil, and what pitfalls lie
open to catch the rash, and reckless, and overconfident. His is the
strength of the athlete who has become what he is by years of careful
training, protracted conflicts, and painful discipline, and in all his
words, and they are many, you can hear as it were the ring of victory and
assured success. Physically he looks and speaks like a man. What he
says he means, and what he means he believes. He is not the kind of man
to write an apology for Christianity; he would laugh to scorn the idea.
He can laugh at much, because, as Hobbes says, to do so implies
superiority, and Dr. Parker, strong in his faith in the everlasting
Gospel, has an immense feeling of superiority; and as you listen he takes
you up with him into his coign of vantage, and you laugh too. It is good
to see wit as well as logic and learning in the pulpit; to feel up in
that serene height, where the preacher has it all himself, and none may
gainsay him, there is humanity there, a flesh and blood reality, and not
a respectable acade