'I sometimes hear you,' he would say, 'ask in the desk, referring to your office, who is sufficient for these things? If you will have a candid answer, it shall be, that I conceive almost any body, well schooled, is sufficient for them. The pressing business of which you speak, as you discharge it, seems mainly to consist in repeating, week by week, a many times told tale, without so much of novelty as would be found in the natural expression of successively revived convictions of its importance. Your mind is not in energetic action, like that of others about us, who had early advantages like yours, and who are now in pursuit of objects, apparently in their own nature less exciting. You do not even subject it to very much of the culture which books afford. I do not find that you habitually feed it with much more nourishing aliment of this sort, than is to be found in occasional sermons and religious magazines. I see, in your daily engagements, no very strenuous application of your powers. You are a courted companion at rich men's feasts; and, in other circles, you are an agreeable and not imprudent circulator of the village news. your private example, you are a harmless, but a timid, unenterprising man; and if other great objects besides religion, had to be helped on by such as you, I am not sure that they would prosper better. You do not take

As to

much lead in forming public sentiment, and directing moral action, in your neighborhood. You are exceedly patient of many sorts of error, particularly if it be favored in high quarters. If it be not so, point to some impression which you have made on the impressible mass around you. Show some fruit of those labors, in a prominent sphere, which, if this description be not correct, have been employing you. Who is sufficient for the things which you do? I am almost tempted rather to ask, who is not sufficient.'

I may seem to you to have represented strongly, my hearers, impressions entertained in some quarters respecting the christian ministry. If so, I will only ask you to make from the representation such abatement as you may see cause for making, and then reply, whether views, having some similarity to what have been described, do not to some extent prevail. And now let us turn from the ministry, as, in its actual exercise, any may have supposed that they had witnessed it to be, to the ministry, as the reasons of the case demand of every conscientious man that he should make it, to see whether or not it is an office, which finds scope for the best powers, and offers attractions to the loftiest ambition.

I am at a loss how to approach my subject, in such a diversity of aspects of strong interest does it spread

itself out before me. But let us glance, first, at the action of the minister's mind on other individual minds, as seen in the speedy production of beneficent results. In his charge, there are young people. The soul of every one of them is an aggregation of those capacities and sensibilities, which working out their effects, have made up, and are to make up, all that is most blessed and most fearful in human destiny. Every one of them, should God spare him here long enough, (and if otherwise, the alternative is but of the more urgent interest,) is to be, in his degree, a happy, useful, and honored, or a worthless, despised, wretched man, according as the love of duty, or devotion to base objects shall come to reign in his heart. There are aged people. Their age will be a season of miserable vacancy, hopelessness, and discontent, or else all inward cheerfulness and peace, and their approaching departure will be a reluctant surrender of what, little as it satisfied them, was all they had learned to prize, or else a quiet return of the spirit to its father's home, according to the discipline to which their spirits are even now subjected. There are prosperous people. Their prosperity is all hollowness, it utters its loud hourly contradiction to the name by which it is called, unless the mind have had that culture, which gives to outward

advantages a title to the name. There are afflicted people. Affliction is merely torture to the undevout soul; to him who has learned of Jesus, there comes along with it a peace of God, which passeth the inexperienced understanding. There are parents. With the degree of wisdom and faithfulness, with which now they shall be prompted to execute their trust, is most intimately connected the character, both for worthiness and enjoyment, of the lives which they cherish, as they do their own. I do not go on with the enumeration. I do not undertake to name many, even of the most apparent forms, under which the varieties of human experience might be found to range themselves. But there is no man, of all the human mass around us, the record of whose inward life, if it could be written out at length, would not touch us more, with its complexities and its contrasts of joy and sorrow, than all that we have read most moving in real or fictitious history. And the one thing which is to be looked to, to determine in each case the momentous issue presented by the earthly life, is the presence or the absence of the faith of Jesus in its power. Should the blessings of this faith, then, be communicated in their fulness, through a minister's agency, to a single mind, I submit, whether, the happiness of a single human creature being a substantial

and complicated result, a great action would not have been done, a vast benefit been conferred. But there are many individuals comprehended in each of these classes, within a minister's sphere of agency, and there are many more classes than I have specified. I am not implying that whatever of this all-important direction and impulse, they find any where, is to be derived from their minister. Far from it. But still he has seriously to ask himself, whether it is not, in great part, his own fault, when, if so disposed, or if not resolutely so disposed, they do not owe something of it to his endeavors. Week by week he has the ear of all, while other cares are laid aside, to give him the better opportunity to occupy their minds. Many come to him, craving supply for the wants of their spirits; many, if he have not been greatly faulty or unfortunate, disposed by the force of personal attachment, to a favorable reception of what he may address to them; most, inclined to listen with attention and candor, from respect for the place and his office. What a singular, what a precious opportunity, for the formal exposition of principles of sentiment and conduct, which he knows to be always in season, or to have, from peculiar occasions which arise, any peculiar applicability and worth. Also, he has access to the people of his charge, such as others have not,