is a sacrificial offering, much more is the pastor, who is a Christian by office.]

Let us sum up all these ideas in a few words. The pastor is nothing else than the recognised dispenser of the word of God. He is a man who consecrates himself to break to the multitude the bread of truth. He is a man who devotes himself to the work of applying and appropriating to man the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ,1 inasmuch as God has determined, by the foolishness of preaching, to save men. As Jesus Christ was sent by God, so he is sent by Jesus Christ. He comes on the part of Jesus Christ to do, from the principle of gratitude, what the Saviour himself has done from a principle of pure love.2 He reproduces all that was in Jesus Christ except his merits. He is not, so far as the obligations which are imposed upon him are concerned, either more or less than his master. He does, under the auspices of the divine mercy, all that which Jesus Christ has done under the weight of divine anger. By word, by work, by obedience, he continues the life which Jesus Christ in his own person commenced.

HYMN.

O King of glory and man of sorrows! whoever loves thee has suffered; he who loves thee consents to suffer. To him is the promise made of sharing at once thy glory and thy sorrows.

Even in their dreams do men suffer on thine account; so without knowing why, suffered the wife of the judge who delivered thee up to death. He who has some small love for thee, or who bewails thee, has only to find himself on thy path; like Simon the Cyrenian, he will be made to share the sad burden of the cross.

Such as curse those who bless thee-humanity excludes them

1 "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation," 2 Cor. v. 19.

2 "For the perfecting of the saints . . . for the edifying of the body of Christ," Eph. iv. 12.

from its universal communion; and, in that place of exile from the human family, they are doubly exiles.

All those who have loved thee have suffered; but all those who have suffered for thee have but loved thee the more. Grief unites men to thee, as joy unites them to the world.

Sorrow, as a generous wine, intoxicates those whom thou entertainest at thy mysterious banquet, and causes hymns of adoration and of love to burst forth from their broken hearts.

Happy is he who, like the Cyrenian, shall abase himself to take his share of the cross which thou bearest! Happy he who shall willingly endure in his own body that which remains, and that which shall remain to the end of the world, to be endured of thy sufferings, for the church which is thy body!

Happy is the faithful pastor, who, in his flesh, continues thy sacrifice and thy conflict! whilst he struggles and groans, I see him with the vision of my spirit, leaning upon thy bosom, as, on the day of the funeral banquet, the disciple whom thou lovedst.

He, while love carries him onward, disfigured by the dust and the blood of his conflict, from place to place and from suffering to suffering,―he, in a hallowed retreat, unobserved by the world, reposes on thy bosom, and tastes in silence the sweetness of thy words.

Happy the faithful pastor! His love multiplies his sacrifices, and his sacrifices increase his love; love which inspires his endeavours is also their exceeding great reward.

Happy the faithful pastor! That which each Christian would wish to be, he is. That cross which each one attempts to sustain in his turn, he bears unceasingly. That Jesus, from whom the world is continually endeavouring to distract our regard, that Jesus is his world, and the object of his unremitting contemplation.

Happy, thrice happy, if all his desire is to add some voices that shall swell the concert of the blest, and to remain concealed amidst the universal joy, only treasuring up in his heart the unseen approval and the eternal Well done of the Master and the Father.

§ II.-NECESSITY OF THE EVANGELICAL MINISTRY.

For those who aspire to the sacred office, it is an interesting inquiry, whether an evangelical ministry is necessary.

At the first glance this investigation may appear quite superfluous. [Facts have outstripped the proofs, our instincts have decided the question.] Nevertheless the question has been asked (and one entire Christian community, that of the Quakers,1 has answered in the negative), whether a particular class of persons, set apart for the conducting of religious worship and the teaching of religion, is necessary.

In the view of many persons, a sufficient proof of this necessity might be found in the general, and almost universal, prevalence of the institution. This, however, only supplies a very strong presumption; after so much has been admitted, the question still remains open.

We make two kinds of reply: one applicable to all offices analogous to that of the ministry, the other directly applicable to the ministry itself.

I.-1. Every important office that bears a relation to one of the chief necessities of society, to one of the essential elements of life,―requires special men exclusively devoted to that office.2

2. Every community requires and supposes the existence of chiefs of a government. This government may be composed of one kind of persons or of many, may be more or less reasonable, more or less perfect. It matters not-the principle remains: and a society without a government, a society which has rules, and yet has no one appointed to maintain or represent them, is perhaps even more inconceivable than a government with no rule to limit and direct its operations.

1 But even among the Quakers some persons, chosen from the entire company, are invested with a kind of ministerial dignity.

2 The jury forms no exception to this. It does not exclude the office of judge. It is only an exemplification of an idea (which religion reproduces in other forms) that a society delegates to special men only that which every one cannot do for himself, and that the delegation only ceases where those who delegate are sufficiently qualified to act on their own account.

II.-1. As a general principle, we may affirm that the office of a minister cannot be carried to the perfection of which it is susceptible, except through the agency of men who devote themselves exclusively to it; and there are many things which can in general be accomplished only by such men.

2. In times when religion, cultivated scientifically, has become itself a science,-when, having formed a crowd of relationships with private and public life, it has charged itself with a vast variety of details and applications, the ministry can hardly be efficiently and completely exercised except by a man who is a minister to the exclusion of other occupations.

3. There is, in the work of a minister, a limit at which each one, or the great majority, will stop, unless a positive duty compels them to go beyond it. Every one will take upon himself only that which is convenient to him, and many will even think that, in advancing thus far, they have done too much. [When a thing must be determined by one single person, that person brings his conscience entire to the work; if there are four, each one only brings the fourth part of his conscience. When a man does not regard his responsibility as entire, it is to be feared that he will do but little, or even nothing at all.] The work, then, would be done only in a superficial, irregular, and interrupted manner, if it could not reckon upon the constant attention of certain men.

Zeal for the advancement of the kingdom of God, and the belief in a universal priesthood, were doubtless not less than they now are on that day when, in Antioch, the Holy Ghost said to a collegium of prophets and teachers, who had already been separated and called by him: "Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them," Acts xiii. 2.

It may be said that, by what is now done, we cannot judge of what the faithful would do if they were unable to devolve upon the minister the burden of the ministry, which is shared by all. We believe that their first act would be to create ministers. For, if it is said that the general zeal would be greater in the absence of these specially appointed men, this zeal, even in its most flourishing condition, as it would not suffice to sup

ply all the wants which the ministry is expressly instituted to meet, would, in such circumstances, lead Christians to do what, it is supposed, indifference and indolence will make them do; that is to say, the very zeal of the faithful would prompt the creation of a special office, in order to satisfy those wants which they themselves are no longer unable to meet. The greater the zeal, the less disposition will there be to leave great interests to suffer for want of men specially appointed to attend to them.

Hüffell' regards ministers of the gospel as the depositaries and guardians of the principle of life that has been deposited in the church. Christianity is essentially a self-propagating vitality; but if men are not chosen to transmit it,2 if this transmission of life is left to the life itself, it will soon cease. Without the ministry, according to Hüffell, Christianity would not have lasted two centuries.

This assertion is perhaps too positive and absolute; but we may not say, generally, that the truth and potency of a work are called in question if its duration is made to depend upon certain means. Nothing is done without means; and when the means by which an institution is supported are created by the institution itself, when it derives them from its own resources, and selects them in accordance with its own nature, we may not say that it has a precarious existence because it makes use of means. Rather must we consider it precarious if it made no use of them. [If it employs in the ministry its choicest elements, the best part of its substance, in order to propagate itself, does it not grow?]

No one doubts that the life of the church supposes and demands a perpetual witness, an uninterrupted tradition; and it is necessary that this witness, this tradition, should be guaran

1 HUFFELL, Wesen und Beruf des Evangelisch-Christlichen Geistslichen. Vol. i., p. 28. Third Edition,

2 Vitaï Lampada. These words, which we place in a note, and which, in M. Vinet's own manuscript, are placed in parentheses in the text, refer probably to the following verse in Lucretius:

“Et, quasi cursores, vitaï lampada tradunt."

De rerum naturâ, lib. ii. v. 78.-ED.