I. TIMOTHY IV. 6. A GOOD MINISTER OF JESUS CHRIST. I WOULD, brethren, it had fallen to the lot of one who had indeed used the office of a deacon well to have addressed you this day, so that the great duties of our profession might have been set before you with something of that consequent boldness in the faith which this occasion so peculiarly demands. As it is, however, I can only beseech you to believe that in offering any suggestions to you on that ministry to which, in one or other of its degrees, we are now about to be ordained, I do so with a distressing consciousness of my inability adequately to fulfil the requirements of the office which has been assigned me. Of all the charges which have ever been committed to man there is not one, which can be compared in solemnity with that which is proposed to be undertaken by the candidate for the holy orders of our Church. Familiar 1 Tim. iii. 13. Acts xxvi. 18. ized from his earliest youth with the duties of the office to which he aspires, and educated specially with reference to his anticipated profession, he has had every opportunity for estimating aright the nature of the pursuits in which he offers to engage. Having arrived at an age at which a man may be fairly presumed qualified to decide on the tendencies of his moral nature, and having been urged on every side to examine himself as in the sight of GOD, he presents himself for ordination with an explicit avowal of his trust that he is inwardly moved by the HOLY GHOST to take upon himself this ministration, to serve GOD for the promotion of His glory and the edifying of His people and sets His seal to the sincerity of the declaration he has made by partaking of the sacrament of the body and blood of his master CHRIST. And if found worthy to be called to a higher ministry in the Church, he is again earnestly reminded that to be a good minister of JESUS CHRIST he must dedicate without reserve every energy of body and of mind to the great work of opening men's eyes that they may turn from darkness unto light, that henceforth he must give himself up wholly as a messenger, a watchman, a steward, of his master in heaven, to teach and to premonish, to feed and to provide for, His household on earth, and that he must never cease his labour, Col. iii. 24. Heb. ii. 10. 2 Cor. v. 20. if the responsibility of an office be the measure of its honour then is that of the Christian minister one of an exceeding dignity. He is a servant of the most honourable of masters, he is a soldier of the most glorious of captains, he is an ambassador not of men but of GOD. He has continually and principally to do not with the concerns of this life, which are but fleeting and shadowy, but with those of the 2 Cor. iv. 18. next, which are the only enduring realities. He has to be ever, and most of all, conversant not with those interests of man which spring from his relation to his fellow men, and which have their origin and their end alike on earth, |