encouraging fact, that while only one man in ten may have been born to become a very great preacher, the other nine, if they love their Master and love human souls, can become great pastors.  Nothing gives a minister such heart-power as personal acquaintance and personal attention to those whom he aims to influence; especially his personal attention will be welcome in seasons of trial.  Let the pastor make himself at home in everybody’s home.  Let him go often to visit their sick rooms and kneel beside their empty cribs, and comfort their broken hearts, and pray with them.  Let him go to the business men of his congregation when they have suffered reverses, and give them a word of cheer; let him be quick to recognize the poor and the children, and he will weave a cord around the hearts of his people that will stand a prodigious pressure.  His inferior sermons (for every minister is guilty of such occasionally) will be kindly condoned, and he can launch the most pungent truths at his auditors, and they will not take offense.  He will have won their hearts to himself, and that is a great step toward drawing them to the house of God and winning their souls to the Saviour.  “A house-going minister,” said Chalmers, “makes a church-going people.”  There is still one other potent argument for close intercourse with his congregation that many ministers are in danger of ignoring or underestimating.  James Russell Lowell has somewhere said that books are, at best, but dry fodder, and that we need to be vitalized by contact with living people.  The best practical discourses often are those which a congregation help their minister to prepare.  By constant and loving intercourse with the individuals of his church he becomes acquainted with their peculiarities, and this enlarges his knowledge of human nature.  It is second only to a knowledge of God’s Word.  If a minister is a wise man (and neither God nor man has any use for fools) he will be made wiser by the lessons and suggestions which he can gain from constant and close intercourse with the immortal beings to whom he preaches.

In Dundee, Scotland, I conversed with a gray-headed member of St. Peter’s Presbyterian Church who, in his youth, listened to the sainted Robert Murray McCheyne.  He spoke of him with the deepest reverence and love; but the one thing that he remembered after forty-six years was that Mr. McCheyne, a few days before his death, met him on the street and, laying hand upon his shoulder, said to him kindly:  “Jamie, I hope it is well with your soul.  How is your sick sister?  I am going to see her again shortly.”  That sentence or two had stuck to the old Christian for over forty years.  It had grappled his pastor to him, and this little narrative gave me a fresh insight into McCheyne’s wonderful power.  His ministry was most richly successful, and largely because he kept in touch with his people, and was a great pastor as well as a great preacher.