Dr. Chalmers changed his mind and gave himself body and soul to preaching, that he began to stir Scotland. Of all things essential to true manhood this is behind none, namely, unity of purpose; and of all pitiable spectacles this is one of the most pitiable - a universal dilettante in the ministry. To move men in masses by the power of Christ's gospel- is not this enough to stir one man's pulses with enthusiasm? The cry about decline of the pulpit means simply this, that preachers have sometimes been ashamed of their work, and have ceased to make full proof of their ministry. Preaching has not lost its power, where men put all their power into preaching. The pulpit is a very throne for the man who will spend himself in it. I do not disparage broad studies. I say the preacher must be open to every whisper of the world, but I do say that the pulpit must be the focus of the whispering gallery where all sounds converge. The homiletical habit must be the dominant habit of the preacher's soul. In that pleading with men on behalf of the living God, all endowments and all culture may have part, and all themes in heaven and earth may be laid under tribute for argument or corroboration; but none of these endowments and none of this learning will be worth a straw to one of you, if they be not made wholly subservient to the one purpose of making you able ministers of the New Testament and good stewards of the manifold grace of God.

Be true men, then, in order that you may be true ministers, men of open mind and heart, men of will and spontaneous energy, men devoted to a single aim. But every review of this sort inevitably leads us back to the point from which we started. You cannot be true men- men of the stamp I have indicated without being true ministers. The man makes the minister, but the minister also makes the man. Only as you know Christ and love Christ and obey Christ, only as you live in him and are ruled by him, can you really be any of these things. But you know all this. This has been the staple of our teaching and talk and prayer for three years past. Only in Him who is the perfect flower and embodiment of true humanity — the head and source of a new human nature answering to the divine idea - can we find again the true manhood which was lost in the fall. But there, in the risen and glorified Jesus, it is, for us and for all.

You go forth on different errands, some to teach, some to preach,— some to carry the torch of salvation out into the heathen darkness, some to keep the lights burning at home. But your work is one, and your Lord is one. Alike you aim to bring men to the comprehension and attainment of Christian manhood. You can do this, only as you yourselves grow up into the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus, only as the minister becomes in the highest sense the man. I commend you to that perfect man who is God also, and who is able to make you like himself. I bid you depend wholly upon him. But, as my last word to you, I urge you not to satisfy yourselves with passive trust and waiting, but with open soul and vigorous resolve and unity of purpose, to "quit you like men" in this one and only life that is given you to live, and which from this moment opens before you.

1876:

WORK AND POWER.

BRETHREN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS :- With much struggle you have by God's favor pushed your way to your present stage of preparation for the gospel ministry. You have all of you in various ways commended yourselves to your instructors in this Institution, and we send you forth with the confidence that your training here will prove not to have been in vain. It tempers the sadness of our parting with you to think that you constitute our annual quota of reinforcement to the leaders of Christ's militant church. You can well understand how hope for your future should mingle with anxiety. Life is so short, eternity is so long, that which is now has in it so much of that which is to come, that I cannot let you go without reminding you again, and with the solemnity of a last appeal, of a relation most needful to be considered in these our times, I mean the relation between work and power. You have sharpened your tools; your work is before you; have you the power that will enable you to do it for God?

Of the two, power is the primary and more important. In a great machineshop a hundred men may stand at their lathes, ready with their tools for work, but a slight neglect or mistake in the engine-room may cut off the steam and render their skill of no avail. He would be a sorry miller who should devote his whole attention to setting the burr-stones and buying the wheat, while he gave no care to provide a water-supply to run his wheel. The wise manufacturer will have his reserves of power for exigencies, and will make sure of the connections between that power and the looms it is to move. Nature makes no mistakes here. She stores up nervous force in the brain like electricity in a Leyden jar,- when the critical moment comes, there is hardness to the muscle and strength to the blow. The power that moves our modern world, so far as its material progress is concerned, is derived from the coal-measures which nature made ready ages ago. And now if God and man make so much of power, shall the Christian minister forget it, when he has a work to do compared with which the mighty achievements of secular industry and the greatest movements of the natural world are but child's play?

For all power we are dependent. We are not self-moving machines. The body must be fed,— the mind must be disciplined and furnished. No man is self-made,—no man is self-sustained. Whatever of power he uses or has, he gets from outside himself. He draws upon and employs God's power. Dependence is the condition of finite being. But what is true even in the natural realm is far more profoundly, intensely true in the realm of spirit. For all spiritual life and energy we are absolutely dependent upon God. No spiritual work done without him can prosper; but that is not the whole of it severed from Him we can accomplish nothing. Shut the sluice-gate through which God's power flows into you,-the mill-race runs dry, the sound of the grinding is low, soon it ceases altogether. Cut off your base of supplies in God and the provision of his Spirit,- you are in the enemy's hands; you are captured or you starve. To learn this lesson that we have no strength of ourselves - this is the end of precept and warning, of chastise

ment and humiliation. We cannot keep our own souls alive, much less can we bring out from their graves the spiritually dead. But all is changed when God's power is given to us. Then wonders are wrought in the renewing of human hearts, fit to be compared with that marvel of the ages when the soul of God was put into the body of the dead Christ and he was raised from the tomb in life and glory.

The power exists as real, as mighty, as accessible as the forces of nature which man bends to his purposes of art and industry. How are we to obtain and use it? Just as we obtain and use any other power—by acting according to its laws. No man really compels nature to serve him, except by obeying her. We discover her methods and apply them, and then we say that we control her. So this Niagara-power of spiritual influence in God we bind to our work, only as we discover its laws and submit ourselves to them. For here is more than nature- more than blind force, such as men conceive to move the spheres. Here is a living will, a personal and present God. We use his power only as we are used by Him. We secure his help and inspiration only as we recognize him as Supreme and Sovereign, blowing where he listeth, dividing to every man severally as he will, and in that conviction turn ourselves from agents into instruments, and deem it our highest honor to be arrows in the hand of the Almighty.

That was excellent theological instruction that Christ gave for three years to his apostles, but he did not deem them fitted for their work till they had received another and a higher gift the gift of the Spirit. They had done work for him before, but it was like work done on a hand machine, where the energy was mostly spent in turning the crank. After Pentecost, they were power-machines,-- no effort now they could not but speak the things they had seen and heard. Enthusiasm -Ev de- they had this, now that they were possessed by the Spirit of God. Their faces had a strange light, their voices a strange tenderness, their very gestures a strange power, to impress and move and win men to the service of their Lord. Their faith became contagious. Doubt vanished, as it heard the story of Christ. Through the work of the Spirit, the cross of shame became the power of God.

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We have no right idea of the Christian ministry, unless we conceive of it as a prophetic office. No miracle-working, no revelation of new truth, but special direction and power of the Holy Spirit in the unfolding and application of the old truth of the Bible to men's present circumstances and needs this is the New Testament prophesying to which you are called. And what shall a prophet be without the Spirit? And how shall the Spirit be obtained or retained without prayer? The apostles "gave themselves to prayer, and to the ministry of the word." Let the ministry of to-day in like manner make prayer and preaching coördinate in rank and importance; let them give to supplication for the gifts of the Spirit the first place and the best place in their time and regard,― instead of making a be-all and end-all of direct efforts to impress strong hearts with truth which the preacher cannot feel himself; in short, let the work of the ministry be only a supplement to the continuous seeking of power from on high; and Pentecost will come again, never more to cease from the earth, until every heart of man has felt Christ's power to save.

May God put it into your hearts, my brethren, to be examples of a new

ministry of the Spirit to the century of history upon which the land is just about to enter. If the close of the two decades and a half in the life of this Seminary which is marked by this Anniversary could be signalized by the sending forth of thirteen men who believed in "the power of the Spirit only" as the means by which Christ's truth is to triumph-believed it so that they gave their lives to the practical proving and illustrating of it,-- it would be worthy fruit of all this quarter-century of theological education. Not less of knowledge or training or labor- but more of the Spirit of God to interfuse this knowledge and training and labor with an energy foreign to mere human nature -springing from the boundless depths of the divine heart and manifesting the resistless movement of the divine will! If he who was with us when the year began - your teacher in the word of God which he so humbly and implicitly believed and which he so vividly and thoroughly expounded — but who to-night in a nobler assembly celebrates a nobler festival than ours,— if he could speak to you from the midst of that uncreated light where there is no seeming, but only endless and perfect vision of the truth, would it not be to say some words like these: "Be first true men of God, possessed by God, subject to God. Seek first God's power, through prayer and obedience. Receive, through faith, the Holy Ghost, the promise of the Father. Then ponder and preach his truth, with the Spirit sent down from heaven, so that your faith and the faith of men may stand, not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God."

My brethren, there is a voice that speaks to you,- but it is a better voice than that of any sainted one. It is the voice of him whom Dr. Hackett served on earth, and whom he serves in heaven. The words come echoing down to us from the time when they were first spoken in the upper chamber from which the twelve apostles were to go forth to preach the gospel of the kingdom. They are Christ's words to you also, as you go out to do his work in the world. Listen and you shall hear him saying :-"Peace be unto you! As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. Receive ye the Holy Ghost."

1877:

COURAGE, PASSIVE AND ACTIVE.

BRETHREN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS :- You have fulfilled your course of preliminary study for the ministry. Your class is the largest ever graduated from the Seminary, yet death has not once invaded your ranks. The last labors of Hackett and Buckland have been spent upon you, and you have joined in our sorrow over their loss. Common chastisements and warnings have drawn us nearer to each other, and to Christ. We will interpret your feelings to-night by our own. Your instructors cannot see this peculiar intimacy of association come to a close without poignant regret. We sorrow that we shall see your faces no more. We have no fears for you. The place you have taken and the work you have done are guarantees under God for your future. That future will hardly be changed by anything I shall say to-night. But knowing how your work looms up before you, and how an

ingenuous mind shrinks from its untried responsibilities, I would fain speak one word in such a tone that it may echo and re-echo down the long reaches of your public career, and, whenever memory repeats it from her walls, may give you new hope and inspiration.

That one word is-- Courage. It is a large word. There is a passive courage. It is the Scripture voμový — patience, fortitude, endurance. Nothing more needed, when we have to suffer, or to stand and wait. It is the martyrspirit. It lives in you, it lives in myriads of believing hearts, though, like smouldering embers, it takes the wild wind of adversity or of persecution to strip it of its ashy crust, and reveal its steady glow. But the martyr is not only a sufferer, he is a witness. There is something positive and aggressive about him. He gives testimony. And to give testimony requires courage of another sort - active courage · that independent, whole-hearted, outspoken courage which the New Testament calls appnoia, or boldness. It is this active courage that I would commend to you. I know that if you have this, you will have the other. If the fire is only kept up, there will be coals enough for the time of need.

And now let me mention three things in which this courage will inevitably manifest itself. The first is, intelligent independence,-I exhort you to this. Not the audacity of questioning or superseding revelation; not the folly and self-sufficiency of ignoring past interpretations of revelation; but the duty of going directly to the sacred oracle to hear what God the Lord will speak. I bid you believe and preach what you find in God's word, though all the theologies of all the world are against you. Value your own opinions formed by humble and prayerful study of the Scriptures. They are as good as any other man's opinions,-- at any rate, they are the only opinions of decisive value to you. When you have found the truth, be free to express the truth. Speak it out while you feel it, and as you feel it, without too great particularity of phrase. Show your mind and your heart to men. Be so sincere and transparent and demonstrative that you are willing to blunder. Let no overbearing man, let the terror of no audience, face you down. Have a proper self-confidence. Magnify your office. Make no apologies. Let no man despise your youth. There are a great plenty of men who are run in one mould. In your first creation and in your new creation, God gave you peculiarities of mind and heart and will. He would have you lead a life, and exert an influence for him, in some respects different from that of any other servant of his that ever breathed upon this planet. Have courage then to be yourselves.

Intellectual independence - that is the first manifestation of active courage. The second is, practical force. You may be different from every other human being, yet make no mark to indicate it. Let us be thankful that our national spirit demands of every man positive achievement. Better not live at all, than to do nothing in the world. To be a mere recipient, to spend one's days in self-culture, to float through life artistically reclining upon the cushions of a gondola — this can be tolerated in the old world, but not in the It belongs to classic, not to Christian times. "What wilt thou have me to do?"—that is the keynote of the new dispensation. My brethren, God sends you out to accomplish something. You are to make yourselves felt. You are to turn the world upside down. When you take the bow, you

new.