He was a man of a great
understanding and a great memory and great industry who said that he had
taken all knowledge for his province. But he was a far wiser man who
said that knowledge is not our proper happiness. Our province, he went
on to say, is virtue and religion, life and manners: the science of
improving the temper and making the heart better. This is the field
assigned us to cultivate: how much it has lain neglected is indeed
astonishing.
Now, my brethren, two dangers, two simply terrible dangers, arise to
every one of you out of all this matter of your ministers and their
knowledge. 1. The first danger is,--to be frank with you on this
subject,--that you are yourselves so ignorant on all the matters that a
minister has to do with, that you do not know one minister from another,
a good minister from one who is really no minister at all. Now, I will
put it to you, on what principle and for what reason did you choose your
present minister, if, indeed, you did choose him? Was it because you
were assured by people you could trust that he was a minister of
knowledge and knew his own business? Or was it that when you went to
worship with him for yourself you have not been able ever since to tear
yourself away from him, nor has any one else been able to tear you away,
though some have tried? When you first came to the city, did you give,
can you remember, some real anxiety, rising sometimes into prayer, as to
who your minister among so many ministers was to be? Or did you choose
him and your present seat in his church because of some real or supposed
worldly interest of yours you thought you could further by taking your
letter of introduction to him? Had you heard while yet at home, had your
father and mother talked of such things to you, that rich men, and men of
place and power, political men and men high in society, sat in that
church and took notice of who attended it and who did not? Do you, down
to this day, know one church from another so far as spiritual and soul-
saving knowledge is concerned? Do you know that two big buildings,
called churches, may stand in the same street, and have men, called
ministers, carrying on certain services in them from week to week, and
yet, for all the purposes for which Christ came and died and rose again
and gave ministers to His church, these two churches and their ministers
are farther asunder than the two poles? Do you understand what I am
saying? Do you understand what I have been saying all night, or are you
one of those of whom the prophet speaks in blame and in pity as being
destroyed for lack of knowledge? Well, that is your first danger, that
you are so ignorant, and as a consequence, so careless, as not to know
one minister from another.
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