come in revealing experiences to the man himself. Then he cannot but prophesy. But even so it will probably not be oftener than once on the Sunday, and for the other "diet of worship" (to employ your old Scots' phrase), he will treat some other topic, and well for him if, as a wise and foresighted instructor, he have a theme to hand on which he can speak to his people informingly. Preachers may be given one or two glimpses of God and His will for men which come home to them with such cogency that they are constrained to prophesy them, and can do so repeatedly with inward satisfaction; but let a man beware lest the aspect of truth which is so congenial to him become a hobby, and instead of being rated as a prophet he be considered a bore. Prophets were never conspicuous for the comprehensiveness of their teaching, but rather for the intensity and iteration with which they dwelt on one subject. A preacher must try, so far as he can, to declare the whole counsel of God, and to interpret life in fellowship with Him in all its varied ranges to older and younger folk of many temperaments and conditions.

These lectures will treat incidentally the technique of preaching; their main object is to suggest to men standing on the threshold of the ministry the diverse elements which should enter into

pulpit instruction. If they were to have a text, it might be St. Paul's characterisation of his own ministry as "teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man mature in Christ," or our Lord's description of a Christian minister as a scribe (and it is surely worth noting that He spoke so encouragingly of a scribe, and did not bid him cease being a scribe and become Elijah or Jeremiah or John the Baptist)—a scribe who has been made a student to the kingdom of heaven and "bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old." Such a scribe, a faithful scholar and instructor, is, I submit, better qualified to guide, edify and personally befriend a congregation, and lead its corporate effort to serve its community, for a long term of years, than a temperamental prophet, undoubted gifts of God as prophets are.

The scribe was the teacher of the Law, and while it is to be hoped that we have outgrown the legalistic conception of religion, and above all no longer regard the Bible as codified law for theology or ethics or ecclesiastical organization, the Christian preacher finds his chief source of material in the Scriptures. The literature within the covers of our Bible is the standard expression of the life with God into which we are to lead our people, and the minister who would have his

congregation possess the whole of their glorious inheritance will set himself year after year to explore with them the contents of the Scripture, trying not to pass by any of it which seems to have a message for him and them. He will be first and foremost an expository preacher.

There are some who feel that the taking of a text is a mere pulpit convention, or the survival of an outworn magical conception of the words of the Bible. But however a sermon arises in a man's mind—and many of them do not originate in texts-it is always the richer and more surely Christian for being well grounded in a passage of Scripture. A man may have in his mind some attitude towards life in his hearers which he wishes to correct. For example, they may have been caught in the current mental perplexity about religion and morals. They did not wish this state of blurred vision, but they have accepted it and now rather enjoy it because it faces them with no insistent obligations and permits them to relax and take life easily. He wishes to point out the perils of this mental and moral vagueness, and show them how with Christ there is always something clearly in sight. Well, let him take such a text as "The twilight that I desired hath been turned into trembling unto me." Let him point out how the hours after sunset in

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Babylon, so prized by glare-wearied men and women, in which they enjoyed themselves on their balconies or house-tops, became in a siege the most dreaded hours of the day, when Elamites and Medes could push their assault undetected amid the shadows. There will be a distinct gain to his sermon, not only from the picturesqueness of the text, which will grip his hearers' attention; but also the details of the scene depicted by the prophet will amplify his own treatment of the modern situation, and the depth and tragedy and spiritual earnestness of the ancient Scripture will carry him further in his portrayal of the contemporary danger than he would otherwise be taken. And against that striking background of twilight he will present more effectively Christ as the Light of life.

Or he wishes to stir his people to a sense of civic obligation for the town in which they dwell. Instead of treating the subject as a topic, suppose he takes as a text the words with which the first evangelist brings Jesus back to Capernaum: "He came unto His own city." It was not the city of His birth, or of His patriotic aspiration; it was the town in which He found it most convenient to live in order to do His work-the practical motive which governs most dwellers in modern towns. That gives the sermon a begin

ning which few men would have hit on for themselves. Then the preacher studies Jesus' civic service in Capernaum:-His immediate enlistment in its organized religion in the synagogue, His willingness to help in the house where He was a lodger (an obligation frequently overlooked), His accessibility to the calls of the city's needy, His going after those neglected by the religious folk-the publican Levi and his friends. Obviously what Jesus did in ancient Capernaum does not exhaust a modern citizen's responsibilities, and the preacher will not be confined to precedents stated in the Gospel narrative, but will point out what one with the conscience of Jesus will undertake in a city today. But the text and its context will have opened up some vistas the preacher might not have seen, and, starting with the example of Jesus, he will be kept to the same exalted ethical level throughout.

Or the preacher may have in mind that relatively large class today, particularly among university students and our more intelligent older folk, who having heard that religion is an experience, and, not having passed through any emotional crises and lacking the mystic sense, conclude that they possess no first-hand touch with the living God. Such persons occasionally come to a minister, asking, as a recent graduate of