or months to settle some quarrel or correct some injustice, dealing, as Webster said, with negatives oftentimes. Great is the power of the physician. But unfortunately, in influencing his patient, his personality must first of all work upon an abnormal condition, and when the patient is restored to health and ready to receive the physician's personality, his task is done. But this advantage inheres in the ministry. It emphasizes the great positive moralities, it handles the most powerful stimulants the world has ever known-eternal truths. It plies men with divine inspirations. It deals with the greatest themes life holdsGod, Christ, conscience, reason, sin, salvation, culture, character, duty, immortal destiny. When all other arts have been secured, it teaches the art of right living. When all other sciences have been mastered, it teaches the science of conduct at home, in the market, and the forum. It puts its stamp, not into wood that will rot, not into iron that will rust, not into colors that will fade, but into the minds and hearts that are immortal. Multiply the honors and emoluments of the other occupations one hundredfold, and they need them all to compensate for the happiness and opportunity of the Christian ministry, seeking to make the church a college for the ignorant, a hospital for hurt hearts, an armory from which man may receive weapons, that opens up springs in life's desert, plants a palm in life's burning sands. Well did John Ruskin say that the issues of life and death for modern society are in the pulpit. "Precious indeed those thirty minutes by which the teacher tries to get at the separate hearts of a thousand men to convince them of all their weaknesses, to shame them for all their sin, to warn them of all their dangers, to try by this way and that to stir the hard fastenings of the doors where the Master himself has stood and knocked yet none opened, and to call at the openings of those dark streets where Wisdom herself hath stretched forth her hands and no man regarded. Thirty minutes to raise the dead in." And he who hath known the joy of encouraging some noble youth who is discouraged; the rapture that comes when one who hath been long snared and held in the cruel trap hath been freed; the joy of feeling that blind eyes have come to see things unseen and deaf ears to hear notes that once were unheard; or hath swung wide some dungeon door to lead forth some prisoner of conscience, will know that there is no profession that conceals such hidden springs, receives such hidden messages, is fed with such buoyancy and happiness as the ministry-the Christian teacher, who brings divine truth to men for God's sake and for man's sake. |