And yet if your brethren entertain themselves with theorymaking, or deem their theories important; do not therefore separate from them; only you yourself be given to the work of saving the lost. Perhaps one of the mightiest elements of ministerial power, is the deep conviction on the soul, of the lost condition of man. It must give fervor and frequency to prayer, and tend greatly to produce a conviction in others. Your hearer may be proud and powerful in his philosophy, he may be self-complacent in his creed and ceremonies. But whisper to his soul of seasons of shame and self-reproach and fear which forebodes impending doom, and he cannot deny, he cannot argue; for he feels that he is dealing with Truth and with God. In your public addresses, deal with the conscience and you will imitate the greatest preachers. Study the sermons of Elijah to Ahab, of Nathan to David, of Peter to the thousands at Jerusalem, of Paul to Felix. There you find no flattery of human nature, no general descriptions of virtue, but guilt and condemnation described as pertaining to them all. Feel that man is lost; that guilt and condemnation and spiritual poverty belong to every child of Adam. Proclaim that, on the house-top and in the closet. Man may not have thought of it, but when you suggest it, he sees that it is truth. Give him exalted views of human dignity and worth, not as it is, but as it was and may be. Solve the strange perplexity of every man's experience; tell him what you know of former conflicts and present conquests; of noble aspirations after heaven and sordid attachments to earth; of desires to please God and determinations to please self. Speak to his love of happiness; he will understand you. And as you solve the mystery to his astonished soul, as you describe the symptoms of his spiritual malady, as you point him to the balm of Gilead, and the great Physician, life of hope may begin to infuse itself into his soul. - Again I say, your great employment is to bring the individual souls. of men to Christ. Be not diverted from this; be not satisfied short of success in this. If you must do other things, consider them collateral and subordinate to this. Your glorious commission is, to seek and save the lost. Be filled, be fired with the spirit of that commission. May you, and may the church, and all of us who announce the gospel, be more and more filled with that glorious object- the recovering to immortal spirits the lost image of God, and guiding the perishing to an almighty Saviour. May the Spirit be poured from

a new

To

on high, until the whole church sees and feels that these facts are now of chief importance - man is lost, and the Son of God is seeking him; man is lost, and the Son of God is come to save him; man is lost, and the church is commissioned to go forth in the might of faith and prayer to his salvation. save the lost! To-night we talk of it, as children talk of the affairs of empires; we see through a glass darkly; our conceptions are low and limited. To save the lost! Tell us, ye damned spirits, what it means. Tell us, Son of God, what it means; what stirred thy soul in godlike compassion to seek the lost? Tell us, ye ransomed and ye faithful spirits who never sinned · tell us, eternity-what is this mighty work of gospel missions? Tell us, O Father, tell thy churches; tell thy ministers; until every slumberer awake, every energy be aroused, and the way of life be pointed out to a perishing race!

CHRIST, A HOME MISSIONARY.

BY

REV. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS, D. D.

And he said unto them, let us go into the next towns, that I may preach there also: for therefore came I forth. - MARK 1: 38.

Ir is ever delightful to the Christian, that he can trace in the way, along which he journeys, the footsteps of his Saviour preceding him. The labors, the sorrows and the joys of his course all become hallowed, when it is seen that the Master has first partaken of them. The cup of affliction is less distasteful to the believer, because our Lord has himself drunk of its bitterness, and left on the brim a lingering fragrance. In prayer, he approaches to God with greater confidence, because he names as his intercessor, one who himself prayed while upon earth, with strong crying and tears, watched all night in supplication on the lone mountain side, and bowed to pray, beneath the olives of Gethsemane, with the bloody dews of anguish on his brow. And the preaching of the word derives its highest glory from the fact, that He who descended into the world to become its ransom, was himself a minister of that Gospel he commissioned others to preach. In the words before us we have Christ's own testimony, that the very purpose of his coming was to preach from town to town of his native land. Jesus Christ was, therefore, a Home Missionary. To this end, blessed Saviour, camest thou forth." To thy servants, who have at this time for the like purpose gathered themselves together, wilt thou not then give thy presence and favor, Head of thy Church as thou art, Master of all her assemblies, and the only effectual teacher of all her pastors and evangelists?

66

Aid me, my brethren, with your prayers, while from these words I would commend to your notice THE RESEMBLANCE

BETWEEN YOUR OWN LABORS, AND THE PERSONAL MINISTRY OF YOUR LORD AND SAVIOUR AS PERFORMED IN THE FIELD OF HOME MISSIONS; and while I urge THE CONSEQUENT DUTY OF THE CHURCH TO CONTINUE AND ABOUND

IN THE LIKE GOOD WORK.

I. The title of Missionary denotes, as you know, one sent forth, and especially belongs to one whose errand it is to propagate religion. You need not to be reminded how often Christ announced to his hostile countrymen the fact, that he was sent from God, to declare the Father, from whose bosom he came forth, whom no man had seen or could see. The title of apostles, by which he saw it meet to designate his twelve chosen disciples, is, as you are aware, but the rendering into Greek of the same idea, which, borrowing the word from the language of the Romans, we express by the term missionary; and the Saviour himself is by Paul described as the great Apostle of our profession, or in other words, the chiefest Missionary of the Church. Now the field of his labor and his missionary character may assume different aspects, according to the point of view from which our observations are made. If we look to the original Godhead of the messenger, and to the glory which he had with the Father before the foundation of the world, his mission was a distant one. To bring the glad message to our earth from the far Heavens, he emptied himself of glory, became a voluntary exile from the society of the pure and the blessed, and taking on him the nature of sinful man, became the sharer of his miseries, and the perpetual witness of his iniquities. In this sense it was to a foreign shore that he came, and to an alien race that he ministered; and thus considered, his labors more nearly resembled those of the foreign missionary. But if we confine our regard to the mere humanity of our Lord, his missionary toils assume another aspect. His personal ministry was far more limited and national in its character, than was his message. Although in his relation to our race of every kindred and of all lands, he is the second Adam, and the nature which he took upon him was that common to our whole kind, he was yet born in the land of promise, under the law given to Moses, and within the range of the covenant made with Abraham. By these bounds his personal ministry was for the most part limited.

It might have been otherwise. The same indwelling Deity, that enabled him at an early age to confound the doctors of his nation, beneath the shadow of their own proud temple, might have been displayed, had he chosen it, at a still earlier year of his life; and the holy child might have preached the gospel to that heathenish Egypt, in which his infancy sought refuge. The Being, before whose eye, in the wilderness of temptation, were brought all the kingdoms of this world, with all the glory of them, might, had he so willed it, have traversed all those kingdoms in his own personal ministry. Clothing himself, had he chosen it, with those same miraculous gifts which he reserved for his kingly ascension, then to be showered down on his Pentecostal Church, he might have visited land after land, declaring to every tribe of mankind, in their own dialect, the truths he came to reveal. He might have been the first to carry the gospel to imperial Rome, and hunting the hoary profligate and dissembler Tiberius to his guilty retreat at Capreæ, he might have reasoned before the crowned ruler of the world, of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, until he too, like an inferior ruler in after times, had trembled on his throne. He might have anticipated the labors of his servant Paul, by bearing the news of the unknown God, and the resurrection, to the philosophers of Athens. To the Roman people he might have declared himself as that great Deliverer, of whom their Virgil had already sung; and the sages of Greece might have been compelled to own in him that Heavenly Teacher for whom their Socrates had longed. And the nations of the East now intently looking for the advent of a king, whose dominion should be an universal one, might have learned from our Lord's own lips, the spiritual and eternal nature of that kingdom they justly but blindly expected. And thus having filled the whole world with the echo of his fame, as a preacher of repentance and of faith, he might have returned to Jerusalem, out of which her prophets might not perish, there to consummate the atoning sacrifice of which he had testified.

We say, Jesus Christ might thus have carried abroad the word of salvation to many nations. Instead, however, of doing this, he confined himself in his personal instructions to the bounds of Palestine, one visit to the coast of Tyre and Sidon excepted, and even of this it is most probable, that he taught in that region only the Jews there scattered. In his