in with the proper spirit; and, as to its danger, as often and as far as failure is the actual result, it is dangerous in the ministry, as it is dangerous in other walks of important action, or rather of any action. If it have come to pass not through our negligence, but our unhappiness, and the uncontrollable force of adverse circumstances, God knows that it did so, and he does not hold us accountable for it, as if it had been our sin. If failure in the endeavors, which in every sphere of action, and according to the proportion of our capacities, we owe, and cannot help owing, to the great cause of God and man, have resulted through our unfaithfulness, we must not expect to escape the divine displeasure and its consequences, because our chosen sphere was not the christian ministry. The powers and privileges with which our Creator has been pleased to endow us, and not the place in which we may have employed them, make the measure of our duty to the world, and our accountableness to him; and, on the great day of sentence, the lawyer, and the farmer, and the merchant, and the mechanic, and the mother, wife and daughter, will all have to shew, as much as the minister, that they meant well in their several places, and according to their several capacities and opportunities, did well. Paul indeed asks, looking over the extraordinarily

wide range of his allotted labors, who is sufficient for these things? But he did not mean, who, laboring in the best use of his own powers, and with those aids of God's grace which he has promised to his servants, is sufficient to acquit himself of his task so as to secure God's approbation. He meant to ask, who is able to do all, which it is desirable to see done, of so vast and critical a work. And this is a question, which Christ's ministers now have constant occasion to consider. But here appears a reason, not why any, competently disposed and qualified, should withhold themselves from the work, but why many more should take it up. Competently disposed and qualified, I say; for I am not arguing, contrary to all truth, that a man is not responsible for his choice of a place in life, as well as for his action in it. In choosing a place in life, we are to have regard to our personal adaptation to the kind of service it imposes. Among such as desire God's glory and men's good, the christian ministry demands the self-consecration of those, whose minds have a capacity, from original structure and from discipline, of acting on the minds of others. Such are the fit agents for its work; and such are not to be discouraged from it by the thought, that to do the whole of what its work contemplates, is something to which no man and no men are com

petent. Sufficiency, indeed, is not for men. Partial failure, in any great work, every man will look for, who is wise; for we are not almighty, nor allknowing, and complete results are for God, who is So. But partial failure is also partial success; and though we are by no means to be content with imperfect successes, so as not constantly to labor to render them less imperfect, yet, on the other hand, he who should avoid a place of duty, till he was satisfied of his sufficiency to do all the service he could find there to be done, would, if he had any just notion of the claims which duty makes, be long in finding his fit place of duty in God's world.

But if there be inexactness and exaggeration in statements of this character, which we sometimes hear, it must be owned that erroneous views on the subject, of an opposite tenor, are more common. Is it not true, that the expression of the idea, that the ministry is a work of that magnitude that a man may question his sufficiency to undertake it, is apt to be received with a degree of incredulity, as it would not be received, for instance, if one were speaking of the tasks of magistracy? Would it be stating the case too strongly, to assert the prevalence, to no small extent, of an impression, that the christian ministry is a place where inactivity and dulness may be more safely dis

posed of, than in many other places? Should I be unauthorized to say, that many a parent thinks, if he has sent the most unenterprising and incapable of his educated sons, into the ministry, that he has found for him his most appropriate post? I fear that these statements respecting a sentiment actually prevailing, would not be too strong; and I fear more, that for its degree of currency, the clergy themselves are not free from responsibility. Partly, among other causes, from utterly false notions of official prerogative and consequence, leading to a lax sense of the indispensableness of personal endeavor to the maintainance of a reputable standing, and partly from a not altogether unnatural, however blameable, presuming upon the deference which the religious mind inclines to pay to the expounders of its faith, the clergy, especially where they have belonged to an establishment, have too often, I suppose, indulged themselves in an inefficiency, which has helped to give this character to their office. To speak of the case as it has existed among ourselves, the Congregational ministry, till a recent period, were essentially, as respects the purpose of these remarks, a kind of establishment here; and I apprehend it must be owned, that, after the first century of peculiar excitement, they began to give evidence of the danger, to which I have referred as

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affecting their situation. In this declining state other circumstances found them, of a nature to divert their minds' chief attention from their proper business, and speed the already growing evil; so that, at least through the half century, from the beginning of the political agitations which led to our revolutionary contest, down to the time when a so far most beneficent controversy began to stir the stagnant pool, I suppose it must be granted, that, with highly honorable exceptions, of which we have cause to thank God that some yet survive among us, the Congregational clergy were, considering their obligations and advantages, an exceedingly imbecile class of men. From the sectaries, whom the demand for more zeal had raised up in the midst of them, they were in the habit of distinguishing themselves, as the learned clergy; but this was rather a traditional than a well-founded actual distinction, nor was it by any means so clear, that they excelled the sectaries in learning, as that the latter excelled them in devotion to the practical labors of a minister's proper work, and in the successful study of arts to address the mind; so that finally there grew up a state of feeling in respect to them, not yet departed, which, had it expressed itself frankly, would have often led the observing layman to address his pastor in some such terms, as these.