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WATCH AND PRAY.

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Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness; and great grace was upon all.

As supreme above all the examples we have adduced, we may mention Him who went out into a mountain to pray and continued all night in prayer to God.

We have need to engage frequently and fervently in the exercise of prayer, and we have many encouragements to incite us to this holy duty. Encouragements drawn from the Authority who commanded His disciples to watch and pray. Encouragements drawn from the invitations and promises of the Bible, and from the numerous examples of those who found God to be a very present help in times of trouble.

The command of the Lord is to watch and pray. Watching without prayer is atheism. Prayer without watching is presumption. The two exercises must be blended together. We must pray while we watch, and watch while we pray. If we watch aright we shall see our need of prayer. If we pray aright we shall see our need of watching. In watching we become sensible of our dangers; in praying we shall obtain that succour which will enable us to overcome them.

Prayer purifies the soul, spiritualises the affections, and lifts our thoughts to heaven.

"Prayer makes the darkened cloud withdraw,
Prayer climbs the ladder Jacob saw,

Gives exercise to faith and love,

Brings every blessing from above.

Restraining prayer we cease to fight.

Prayer makes the Christian's armour bright;
And Satan trembles when he sees

The weakest saint upon his knees."

We are exhorted to pray without ceasing at all times-under all circumstances. In adversity and prosperity, in health and in sickness, in life and in death. Prayer brings solace for the trials of time, and is a preparation for the joys of eternity.

"Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air;

His watchword at the gates of death;
He enters heaven with prayer.

O Thou by whom we come to God,
The Life, the Truth, the Way!

The path of prayer Thyself hast trod!
Lord, teach us how to pray!"

GILES HESTER.

TEACHING.

FEW teachers realise what an opportunity they have directly after the school is over to reach the hearts of their pupils. A single kind word, spoken just as one is going out, when the scholar is off his guard, will often prove to be more effective than all that has been taught in the lesson. Each Sunday, let some scholar go away feeling a warm pressure of the hand, and carrying with him some affectionate words of warning, of exhortation, of sympathy, or of counsel -National Sunday School Teacher.

What is Successful Preaching ?*

THAT preaching of the gospel is partially successful in any and every age which brings sinful men into living trust in the Lord Jesus, and to the conscious enjoyment of His pardon; and that preaching is totally successful which fills men with Christ's mind, moulds their thought after His, inspires them to construct their character according to the pattern He has given, and energetically constrains them to a life-long and whole-hearted endeavour to repeat His self-sacrificing and beneficent deeds.

The conversion of men is the initial success of preaching: that, and no more. It is the safe planting of a living seed, the effective teaching of the alphabet of a useful language, the sure laying of the foundations of a building of possible beauty and grace. The second and larger success, is the full growth and abundant fruit-bearing of Christian men; and is to the former, as gathered and garnered grain to the seed sown, as clear and articulate speech in connected and flowing sentences to the A, B, C, of the hesitating child, as the finished habitation of God to the laying of the first stone. When farmers are content with the seedsowing of spring, and sing pæans of praise over corn that is well sown but never comes up, then may the preachers of the Word find complete satisfaction in the conversion of the ungodly, and cease from patient and wise effort to train and discipline believers up to the FULL STATURE OF MEN IN CHRIST JESUS.

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Such successes ought to be anticipated. It is treason to Christ to despair of them; it is paralysis to our powers to question their possibility. With so stupendous a provision for the salvation of men as the spotless sacrifice of the Son of God; with such an ever-present and ever-operative energy for conviction, conversion, and regeneration, as the Eternal Spirit; with truths so uniquely adapted to the deepest needs and highest aspirations of the human heart as those contained in the gospel; with a method so obviously suited to sway men's passions and wills as that of preaching salvation by men already saved, and with so magnificent a history of success as the work of Christ in these nineteen centuries reveals,—it would be an atrocious insult to reason and history, the gospel and God, to cherish any other mood than that of

*These extracts are from the introduction to my article in a Symposium on "What method of preaching is most calculated to render Divine Truth effective in this age of Popular Indifference and Philosophical Scepticism?" which appears in the July number of the Homiletical Quarterly, and which is contributed by Canon Perowne, D.D., Prof. Blackie, D.D., Prof. Reynolds, D.D., Prof. Murphy, Dr. E. de Pressensé, and Rev. E. E. Jenkins, M.A.

The July number will contain besides the above

Exposition of Book of Judges, by Rev. A. R. Fausset, M.A.
Homiletic Sketches on Hebrews, by Rev. W. Watkinson.

Science Articles: Sheep, by Rev. R. Connell, M.A.

Homiletical Use of Natural Science, by Rev. J. Clifford, M.A.

Exegetical Commentary on St. James, by Rev. R. Roberts.

The Parables of our Lord: (No. 3) The Pearl and the Treasure, by Prof. A. B. Bruce, D.D. The Exodus from an Eastern Point of View (No. 1), by Prof. Porter, D.D.

The Man at the Pool of Bethsaida (No. 2), by Prof. W. Milligan, D.D.

The Vision of Dry Bones, by Rev. M. Cheyne Edgar, M.A.

Everlasting Fire, by Rev. R. Winterbotham, M.A.

The Treasury of the Gospel.

Sermonic Outlines.

The Preacher's Note Book.

The Incidental Work of the Pastor:-Children's Service.

Reviews.

Price 28. R. Dickinson, Farringdon Street, London, E.C.

WHAT IS SUCCESSFUL PREACHING?

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exultant expectation that God's gospel in us, and through us, will prove itself to be His power at work in the salvation of every one that believeth. Far more rational would it be to forecast an utter failure of grain in all the granaries of the world after the present store has been sown, than to expect Christ-sent and Christ-saved men to preach Christ's own gospel without souls being saved from sin to holiness, and from the power of Satan to God. Business men do not expect to work without profits; scholars do not toil in anticipation of thickening ignorance; wise and unselfish statesmen do not labour for the degradation of their country; nor ought we to be content with a preaching that does not rouse the sluggish conscience, illumine and direct the misguided intelligence, break the withes of bad habit, heal and reinforce the diseased will, give grace and beauty to the character, and usefulness and holiness to the lives of men. The man who can work at the ministry, as a sole vocation, without seeing these results, or fair and reasonable grounds for believing in their existence, has either wofully misconceived the gospel, or is ignorant of the conditions of effective preaching, or has thrust himself into a position for which God has not destined him, and now lacks the courage to heed the Divine voice calling him out of the ministry to some other work. No preaching will be effective that is not inspired by living faith in the unique adaptation of the gospel to the man-redeeming and man-building work for which it is given, and a bright and inextinguishable hope that it will surely do that work.

The capital conditions of effective preaching are substantially the same from age to age. Though the spirit of one time may force into prominence and make specially urgent one condition, and another period may give greater distinctness and emphasis to a different requirement, yet in essential character the conditions are the same in the age of Paul and in that of Chrysostom, for Augustine at Hippo and Carthage and for Bernard in Clairvaux, for Luther in Wittemberg and Savonarola in Florence. In all ages alike, the preacher's sufficiency is not of himself, but of God; and it is only as he is filled and permeated with His Spirit, as well as with His truth, that the slightest success is secured: Christ in you" is now, as of old, the secret of Christianising power-the spring of saving energy, of man-building force. In all ages alike, Christ, in the glory of His exalted rank as a person, in the sufficiency of His sacrifice for sin, in the sway of His love, in the perpetuity of His life, is the substance of effective teaching, whether the audience be barbarians of Lystra or savages of the Society Islands, philosophers in Athens and Corinth or doubters in London and Edinburgh. In all ages alike, preaching must be heard if it is to be understood; and it must be interesting if it is to be heard long; and it must be really earnest and throbbing with life if it is to be impressive.

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Still, each generation has a distinct individuality. God does not make two leaves alike, nor two men, nor two ages. Therefore the preacher who makes his work the absorbing passion of his life, and consecrates to it the ever-perfecting energies of his nature-not treating it as a mere appendix to an engrossing occupation, but working himself, if need be, to the bone rather than fail at his task, makes his own age his special study, notes its shifting currents of thought and feeling,

registers the ebb and flow of its tides of passion, and qualifies himself for his work quite as much by his sedulous attention to the ground he has to till, as to the seed he has to sow and the tools he has to use. No perfunctory passing through his work contents him. A sermon in his esteem is not a treadmill operation to which he is sentenced for thirtyfive minutes every Sunday; nor yet an artistic entertainment provided for an elect few who can afford to pay for such a luxury: it is to him a tool for doing a certain specific and prodigious work upon a certain and specific material, known as human nature; and his supreme solicitude is to manufacture the precise tool fitted in all points for the work waiting to be done. A can of dynamite is the best in a granite quarry, a stout pick-axe will suffice in a gravel bed, a wood shovel is the implement for a pit of loose and shifting sand; the wheel of the lapidary must be used for polishing the agate. For each work there is the particularly adapted tool; and sense is given for nothing if we do not use it to discriminate in the choice of the machinery with which we do our work.

But for what purpose must the preacher study his age? To yield to its whims, defer to its caprice, submit to its dictation, and soothe its irritated conceit. Do you fix the dynamite so that it may yield to the granite? No! you let it meet the granite so that it may by one explosive blow split the rock into blocks which shall be shaped into graceful obelisks and memorial columns. The preacher studies the age to master the men of the age for Christ. He meets sceptics on their own ground, not to surrender what is true, and reduce Christianity to such a thin and intangible "rudiment" that it cannot be detected with a microscope, but to lead men along the lines of admitted fact and verified conclusions to the claims of Christ upon the love, the reverence, and worship of mankind. He studies the nineteenth-century "Athenian,' to know how best to declare to him the glories of the Unknown Christ.

As a matter of fact, the successful preaching of this age is being done by men who are intimately conversant with its spirit, who prove themselves God's prophets, God's "seers," anointed to lift the mists from the valleys of life, and to point the pained vision of men to the sunlit peaks beyond, by the splendid way in which they meet, and use as well as meet, the spiritual cravings of the men of their own day. All living and growing preachers-and the growing preachers are the only permanently and largely successful ones-have their hearts astir with the life-pulses of the age. People who hear them feel they are not listening to world-forgetting recluses who have buried themselves in tomes of dry theology, and just come forth for an hour to announce that they are still alive; but to men who have been with them all the week, sorrowing with them over their defeats, shouting over their victories, and looking with their eyes on that incomprehensible but always profoundly interesting phenomenon, human society. Such preachers feel the pulse of the age, accurately diagnose its condition, and out of the Divine store-house of medicines bring forth those leaves which are for the healing of all the nations. In such men will be found an adequate solution of our problem. If we can only make a careful analysis of their work, separate from it all that is purely accidental, and gaze upon their bare and naked elements of force, we shall infallibly

HOW TO DEAL WITH THE ANXIOUS.

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discover the method of preaching most calculated to render Divine truth effective in this age of popular indifference and philosophical scepticism.

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Putting together, then, the various types and patterns of successful preaching afforded in the closing years of this nineteenth century; examining men, some of whom are as famous as Peter and John, and others as inconspicuous as Philip the deacon and Ananias of Damascus ; some grandly gifted as St. Paul, and others strong only in one or two qualities, like Barnabas, the son of consolation, and James, the master of ethic; some notably and widely successful, and others quietly, but not less really, winning many a victory: and winnowing from these men and their surroundings all the chaff of circumstance, and getting at the real grain, the essential elements of power, we find (in addition to those qualities named above, as the property of the victorious preachers of all ages) amongst the arresting characteristics of their work, in its relation to the needs of the period, that it rings with the accent of faith with unmistakeable clearness and resonance, but without being hard, harsh, and metallic; is lit up with the various lights of personal feeling, without the ghastly flare of egotism and bombastic conceit; abounds in perennial joy and hope, without being frothy and sinking into mere gush;" is logical, strong, and four-square in argument, and yet not frigid as ice, and funereal as the grave; rhetorical and brilliant, without being tawdry; full of points, and still not "scrappy;" bold and fearless in enunciation, and yet considerate and courteous; rich in historical allusion, without the obtrusion of learning; grandly selfforgetting, and yet splendidly self-controlled; as strong, manly, and robust as though it were the echo of Samson in his prime, and yet withal as glowing in spiritual sympathy and tenderly pathetic, as if moved by the heart of Christ in His agony. JOHN CLIFFORD.

How to Deal with the Anxious.*

It is a good sign of the times that Christians have begun to recognise the duty of personal "dealing" with the souls of men. To a great extent that old theory is exploded which regarded preaching as a firing off a succession of Scripture truths, which were to find their own way, hit or miss, into the hearts of those who listened; and further, that when impressions were produced, these were to be left to deepen or not into conviction and conversion. Now, it is usually conceded that the more personal and direct the preacher can make his address the better, and that when anxiety about spiritual things is aroused, it is the privilege as well as the duty of the Christian teacher or friend to seek to carry on the work to the point of decision for, and surrender to, Christ.

Our subject is not now how best to awaken the careless or soften the impenitent heart; but how best to lead those who feel sin to be a burden to Him who alone can take that burden off.

Any system of dealing with man's spiritual nature on God's behalf, in order to be successful from His point of view, must, it will be allowed,

* A Paper read at the Southern Conference, held at Hitchin May 26th.

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