I say let our learned institutions push theological education to its highest excellency, preparing men for spheres which none but the cultured and scholarly are fit for, but somehow let us beat the drum and gather a battalion of lay-workers.  We have enough wise men to tell us about fishes, about birds, about rocks, about stars—­enough Leyden jars, enough telescopes, enough electric batteries; but we have not more than one man where we ought to have a hundred to tell the story of Christ and the soul.

Some cry out, “It is dangerous to have laymen take such prominent positions in the Church.”  Dangerous to what?  Our dignity, our prerogatives, our clerical rights?  It is the same old story.  If we have a mill on the stream, we do not want some one else to build a mill on the same stream.  It will take the water off our wheel.  But, blessed be God! the river of salvation is deep and strong enough to grind corn for all nations.

If a pulpit is so weak that the wave of religious zeal on the part of the laity submerges it, then let it go under.  We cannot expect all other shipping to forsake the sea lest they run down our craft.  We want more watchmen on the wall, more sentinels at the gate, more recruits for the field.  Forward the whole Christian laity!  Throw up no barrier to their advancement.  Do not hang the Church until dead by the neck with “red-tape.”

I laughed outright, though I ought to have cried, when I read in one of our papers a statement of the work of Moody and Sankey in Edinburgh, which statement closed with the luscious remark that “Probably the Lord is blessing their work.”  I never saw a word put in more awkward and forced and pitiable predicament than that word probably.  While heaven and earth and hell have recognized the stupendous work now going on in Scotland under God and through the instrumentality of these American evangelists, a correspondent thinks that probably something has happened.

Oh how hard it is to acknowledge that men are doing good if they do not work in our way and by our methods!  One’s heart must have got awfully twisted and near being damned who can look on a great outpouring of the Holy Ghost and have any use for probabilities.  The tendency is even among Christians to depreciate that which goes on independent of themselves and in a way oppugnant to their personal taste.  People do not like those who do a thing which they themselves have not been able to accomplish.

The first cry is, “The people converted are the lower population, and not the educated.”  We wonder if five hundred souls brought to Christ from the “Cowgate” and “Coalhole,” and made kings and priests unto God, and at last seated on thrones so high they will not be able to reach down with their foot to the crown of an earthly monarch, is not worth some consideration?

Then the cry is, “They will not hold out.”  Time only will show that.  They are doing all they can.  You cannot expect them to hold out ten years in six weeks.  The most faithful Christians we have ever known were brought in through revivals, and the meanest, stingiest, dullest, hardest-to-get-on-with Christians have joined when the church was dead.