that which has as motive one's own financial or social or political ambition. Men who selfishly abandon the ministry are ever after miserable, if they are Christians; and they become hardened sinners, if they are not. And yet the temptations to such abandonment are not few. It would be wonderful if they did not at some time present themselves to you. The ministry is not a money-making vocation. Plain living and high thinking go together in it for the most part. The prominent places and the great audiences are only for the few. Human nature in our church-members is not free from fault, nor always easy to deal with. The minister must endure all things for the elects' sakes, and for the sake of Christ, their Lord. And he must reenforce public appeals to the impenitent with what is harder: the private and reiterated reminder that Christ requires their obedience and is waiting to save them. Be faithful in your work as evangelists, and you will win both saints and sinners. Success in the winning of souls will give you a joy that will more than make up for the lack of money or fame, and will make all the arguments for a worldly life seem vapid and inconclusive. Having then a great High Priest, who hath passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession.

Hold fast to your faith. The only way to be true evangelists is to be truly evangelical. If you hold the substance of the truth, you will be apt to preach it. After having studied Christian doctrine, you ought to be possessed of principles which you cannot surrender except with your lives. There is a faith once for all delivered to the saints, and this faith has been handed

down to you. Christ has entrusted to you a stewardship, and for that stewardship you must give account. It is criminal for an apothecary to falsify a prescription, for life or death may depend upon the giving of the proper remedy. It is criminal for the preacher to declare any other gospel than that of Christ and him crucified. And yet the danger of making this mistake is great. It is easy to absorb modern skeptical literature and to neglect the Bible. You can be tossed about by every wind of doctrine, and bring only perplexity and doubt into the minds of those who hear you. Unless some things are settled in your own minds you had better never preach at all. How absurd it is to wabble and apologize and evade when Christ is the same yesterday and to-day and forever, and his truth endures to all generations! I urge you to throw doubt to the winds, and to preach a positive gospel. When Paul drew near to his dying day he congratulated himself that he had kept the faith. He besought Timothy to hold the pattern of sound words which he had heard from his apostolic lips. I have no such claim upon you as the inspired apostle had upon Timothy, but I can rightly bid you hold unwaveringly to my teachings, in so far as I have myself followed Christ.

Hold fast to your integrity. The root of right preaching and of right believing, after all, is in right living. Dante was correct when he made the sins of the intellect to be the result of sins of the heart. Wrong desires, unregulated appetites, evil affections, are at the root of unbelief. And the Christian minister, from his very sanctity of position, is exposed to subtle attacks of the adversary. If Jesus was tempted

immediately after the descent of the Spirit upon him at his baptism, much more may his ministers expect that avarice, ambition, vanity, and even sexual pleasure, will weave a delusive web around them which nothing but faith in God will enable them to break. In my day I have seen more than one minister of Christ fall like Lucifer from his high place, and do more harm to Christ's church in a day than they could make up for by long lives of service. But in every such case the fall was sudden only to the world that was looking For months and even for years evil had been cherished in the heart, and the public fall was only the outcropping and revelation of secret sin. May God preserve you all from the dreadful fate of apostate preachers of the gospel. But the evil heart is within us all. Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Minute conscientiousness in little things is needful if we are to be masters of ourselves in the great, for he that is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much.

on.

I have been urging you to hold fast to your ministry, to your faith, to your integrity. I might urge this upon the ground that your own personal salvation demands it. We have no right to think our own souls secure, if we give up our ministry, deny the faith, or sully the integrity of our lives. He that endureth to the end shall be saved, and not all who run the race receive the prize. But I am sure that a motive higher than desire for your own personal salvation animates you to-night. The thought of those whom you are to influence weighs upon your minds. Your ministry, your faith, your integrity, are to be a savor of life

unto life, or of death unto death, to those whom you instruct. You are set for the rise, and for the fall, of many in Israel. But you have the promise that if you hold fast to Christ, Christ will hold fast to you. Your ministry will be his ministry. He himself will increase your faith. You will find the panoply of his strength and righteousness about you. Continuing in these, you shall save yourselves and those who hear you.

I must end as I began, by reminding you of that last great day of which this closing day of your course is the faint symbol. We are to stand before the judgment-seat of Christ. Then our faithfulness or unfaithfulness will appear, not only to us, but to the universe of God. If we have confessed Christ before men, he will confess us before his Father and before the holy angels. If we have denied him, he will deny us. Let us look unto and hasten the coming of the day of God, for, while it will be a day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men, it will be a day of deliverance and rejoicing to the righteous. We may not all meet again on earth, but we shall meet then. May Christ our Lord grant us his grace that that day may find us faithful to our trust, and that, having been partakers of his sufferings, we may also be partakers of the glory that is to be revealed!

1911

LEADERSHIP

BRETHREN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS: You have come to the end of your preparatory training and the

most of you will immediately enter upon the work of life. Your conceptions of that work differ in minor particulars, but I believe you all aim to serve Christ in the ministry. There is one aspect of the ministry which is often ignored, though it is of vast importance -I mean its aspect of leadership; and it is "Leadership" of which I would speak to you in these closing words to-night.

The Rochester Theological Seminary cannot train all the saints of God, nor all the ministers of the Baptist denomination. Its proper work is to train leaders of thought and of activity for the churches, men who do not simply fall in with the fashions of the day in doctrine or in practice, or serve as tools for other men to manipulate, but who take Scripture as the word of God and teach others to follow it. Not original leadership, as if the preacher and pastor were himself the authority, but leadership as Christ's interpreters and representatives, with the aim of bringing the church and the world in subjection to him.

I do not need to tell you that Christ's own ministry had for its primary aim the raising up of leaders. After its first year had been spent in a vain appeal to the Jewish rulers, and its second year had been spent in a vain appeal to the Jewish people, its third and last year was devoted to instructing those who were to be his apostles, the pillars of the churches who, after Pentecost, gathered in thousands where our Lord himself had converted only tens. Even Paul trusted not so much to the immediate result of his own labors as he did to those who were to come after him, and so he ordained elders in every church and committed the