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erants' Club" and other organizations for ministerial study and examinations have achieved large success. In almost every Conference we discover marked improvement. One reads with delight the report of all the recent "Fall Examinations with Lectures and Discussions," in five sessions appointed and conducted by the Board of Examiners of the New York East Conference. "The Ocean Grove Summer School of Theology, Auxiliary to the Itinerant Club Movement," is the largest and strongest of the late expressions in behalf of ministerial education in the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the Saint Louis Conference the provision of "Memoranda of Examinations on the Course of Study" indicates another forward step. Chautauqua has been for twenty-three years a non-resident school of theology, with lectures-theological, philosophical, and practical-conversazioni, and other devices for the benefit of the Christian ministry. It is a meeting place of ministers representing fifteen or twenty different schools of theological thought, and its "Ministerial Conferences," especially in the department of practical theology, are always stimulating and broadening. The action of the last General Conference in providing for a "Board of Examiners" in each Annual Conference is already bearing good fruit. The writer hopes we shall continue to multiply "Clubs," "Congresses," and "Ministerial Conferences" at summer assemblies and elsewhere, through which our ministers, old and young, may be stimulated to greater diligence and be guided in their attempt to acquire more thorough scholarship. When shall we have two or three "Conference Study Sessions" in local colleges and other literary institutions under the care of the Church, to which especially our young ministers may go for personal and professional improvement? Will the time ever come when we shall have a "president, faculty, and correspondence bureau,” manned by a body of competent professors who shall prepare annual test papers, which, having been submitted by each Annual Conference to its candidates, shall again be referred for final examination to this bureau, so that when a man is announced in an Annual Conference as having reached "the grade of eight," or "eight and a half," it will mean something and everybody will know what it means? May we not provide a traveling library of books in every Conference or district for distribution, and two or three important meetings

-Conferences or Seminars-for summer work with judicious directors?

There are still greater possibilities in this non-resident feature of theological training. We know men who, lacking the advantages of formal collegiate instruction before entering the ministry, have set themselves at work systematically and persistently to turn life itself into a school. They have engaged private tutors in Greek or Hebrew, in literature, science, or theology, giving an hour a day to one of these studies. A wise young minister may so arrange his work as to make his pulpit, prayer meeting, teachers' meeting, normal class, the higher grades of the Epworth League, pastoral visitation, or casual or prearranged conversations contribute to his personal power as student, preacher, and pastor. Suppose, for example, that a man with strong will, intent upon achievement, should devote himself in one year to four great subjects, giving to these in turn two hours a day for four days in the week. In thirty weeks he will have spent on these four themes two hundred and forty hours. He prepares forty new sermons a year, giving an average of two hours a day for four days in the week for forty weeks. This adds three hundred and twenty hours a year. He gives two hours a week for forty weeks to exegetical studies adapted to the prayer meeting. These add eighty hours. Thus in biblical and theological study the active minister spends at least six hundred and forty hours a year. The devotion of this time to these subjects, with a view to public discourses, will have very much the effect of a student's work in preparation for the recitation hours. Let him add to this personal work carefully conducted conversations and debate with thoughtful men of the community-skeptics, believers, inquirers, busy people, and the "shut-in "-finding out "difficulties," "objections," "arguments," and what material must accumulate under such wisely ordered pastoral interviews for pulpit discussion! Then there is the actual work of pastoral visitation, with the constant desire and effort to learn the opinions, mental states, spiritual difficulties, social limitations, hindrances, and all the things which the pastor must know in order wisely to feed and to tend his flock. Let a man give five hours a week for forty weeks to this kind of pastoral work, and he has spent in addition to all the rest, two hundred hours a year

in the wisest kind of study. This plan may be adopted by any undergraduate, he taking as his topic the subject-matter on which he is to be examined at the next Annual Conference. Having preached or lectured on every subject in his course, he could have little anxiety about his "examination" by the Conference Board. With the thoughtful reading of current news, classic literature, topics of the day at the rate of ten hours a week for fifty weeks, the aggregate of all this prearranged and persistent study of men and books will show nearly fourteen hundred hours a year of professional study. And while it may seem impracticable for any man to order so many hours each day, it is a very easy thing for a man who has a minimum of will power to devote fourteen hundred hours a year to pastoral service, social studies, pulpit and other preparations-all of which are parts of his non-resident theological seminary. The student in the regular institution gives little more time than that.

The secret of a minister's power, however, must lie in his personal consciousness of oneness with God, and of the fact that he is a representative of the things of God and his kingdom. A minister must remember-and it must be very real to him-that in the most humble community and in the lowliest church he is the representative in that place of truth and righteousness, of progress, of reform, of all high ideals, of all that Jesus taught, of all that Jesus is; that in a sense he represents all Christian Churches and the Holy Catholic Church throughout the universe. His field may be a small one, but the realm he represents is boundless. He is a type of the best society-refined, courteous, pure in speech, a man of guarded lips, a master of the art of discreet silence-a gentleman of the class to which Jesus belonged, who was, as Thomas Dekker sang:

A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed.

The minister in the lowest sphere is the representative of the realm of spirit, of spiritual phenomena, of spiritual forces, of spiritual laws. This large consciousness must make him a student; it will inspire him, save him from littleness, impart to him personal dignity, give him large vision, kindle his imagination, strengthen his judgment, warın his sympathy, develop his

intellect, and beget within him a ceaseless, irresistible passion to know, to love, to be, and to do.

A man of this type can never find himself in a place "too small" for him. He will be, and his sermons will be the fruit of his personality. For the man is always the soul of his sermon. In the sermon his own ideals will appear, whether he purposely intends to set them forth or not. He may not often preach what are called "great sermons," but he will always be great preacher." It is one thing to preach a "great sermon;" it is entirely a different thing, a more radical and more important thing, to be a "great preacher."

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When John on Patmos saw Christ standing with the seven stars in his right hand he fell to the earth in terror; but at once he felt the pressure of that right hand of Christ upon his head. Did the stars which the Son of man held form a coronet of glory about the apostle's brow? What a symbol is this of the relation which the divinely appointed minister and the churches sustain to each other! The burden of responsibility is a crown of glory. And it is a symbol, too, of the relation which the minister sustains to Christ. The hand that rested with divine authority upon the apostle's brow held firmly the stars which adorned it. O, Thou who holdest the seven stars in thy right hand, place upon our heads thy hand, that our strength and our glory may be not ours but thine!

Johuth Vincent.

ART. III.—PREACHING THE GOSPEL FOR A WITNESS.

FROM an early date in Church history there have been two views of the future triumph of Christianity. Both comprise the final victory of Christ on the earth, but by processes radically different. A majority of Christians hold that Christ set up his kingdom at his first coming; that, not later than Pentecost, he "opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers;" that, from his throne above, he administers it through the Holy Spirit, whose dispensation is the last era of Christianity on earth; that, through human agency, the Gospel like the leaven is to assimilate all human society, and like the mustard seed is to grow till it shall overshadow all other institutions; and that, in the fullness of time, Christ will descend on his judgment throne, raise the dead, both the just and the unjust, at the same time, and sentence the two classes to changeless and eternal destinies, thus terminating the earthly history of mankind. All the great creeds, from the so-called apostolic creed down to the present time, assert that Christ will come, not to set up a visible kingdom on the earth, but "to judge the quick and the dead."

But the Millenarians, Premillenarians, or Chiliasts teach that the kingdom is to be established in the future by the King in visible human form reigning on the earth a thousand years, suddenly converting the Jews, as he did Saul of Tarsus, by the majesty of his glorious presence; and that through their preaching the Gentiles are to be discipled; that the Spirit is not intended to secure the ultimate triumph of the kingdom through preaching, which was never designed to convert the world, but is to be a witness to all nations, and is to take out of them a people for his name, a bride for the descending King. After the millennial age the prison of Satan will be opened and he will deceive the nations for a season, to be conquered at last with fire out of heaven. Then the rest of the dead will be judged-called the judgment of the wicked-and will be cast into the lake of fire.

These are the two theories. The latter, proceeding as it does on a false interpretation and impossible literalism inconsistent with the scriptural purpose and concomitants of Christ's second advent, we are constrained to reject for the following reasons: 14-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XIII.

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