The Value of the Human Soul

There is a power which lies at the centre of all success in preaching, and whose influence reaches out to the circumference, and is essential everywhere. Without its presence we cannot imagine the most brilliant talents making a preacher of the Gospel in the fullest sense. Where it is largely present, it is wonderful how many deficiencies count for nothing. It has the characteristics which belong to all the most essential powers. It is able to influence the whole life as one general and pervading motive; and it can also press on each particular action with peculiar force. Under its compulsion a man first becomes a preacher, and every sermon that he preaches is more or less consciously shaped by its pressure; as the whole round world and each round atom are shaped and held in shape by the same laws. Without this power, preaching is almost sure to become either a struggle of ambition or a burden of routine. With it, preaching is an ever fresh delight. The power is the value of the human soul, felt by the preacher, and inspiring all his work.

The power of that motive has been assumed in all that I have said to you. But it seems to me to be so supremely important; the ministry which is full of it is so rich; the ministry which lacks it is so poor, that I determined, when I undertook the duty which I complete to-day, that this last lecture should be given to a serious consideration of the importance and value of this mainspring, which lies coiled up within all the complicated machinery of the ministry, the realized value of the human soul.

As to its importance, we get our clearest impression if we look at the earthly ministry of Jesus. There are many accounts to be given of His wondrous work. People may say many ingenious things about it, and many of them are true. But we are sure that he has put his hand most certainly upon the central power of Christ’s ministry, who holds up before us the intense value which the Saviour always set upon the souls for which He lived and died. It shines in everything He says and does. It looks out from His eyes when they are happiest and when they are saddest. It trembles in the most loving consolations, and thunders in the most passionate rebukes which come from His lips. It is the inspiration at once of v. His pity and His indignation. And it has made the few persons on whom it chanced to fall, and in whose histories it found its illustrations, the men and women who represented humanity about Him in Palestine — Nicodemus, Peter, John, the Pharisees, the Magdalen, the woman of Samaria, and all the rest — luminous forever with its light. That power still continues wherever the same value of the human soul is present. If we could see how precious the human soul is as Christ saw it, our ministry would v approach the effectiveness of Christ’s. “I am not convinced by what you say. I am not sure that I cannot answer every one of your arguments,” said a man with whom a preacher had been pleading, “but one thing which I confess I cannot understand. It puzzles me, and makes me feel a power in what you say. It is why you should care enough for me to take all this trouble, and to labor with me as if you cared for my soul.” It is a power which every man must feel. It inspires the preacher; and his hearers, catching its influence, become soft and ready to receive the truth. It is strength in the arm which strikes, and tenderness in the rock which receives the blow.

The other motives of the minister’s work seem to me to stand around this great central motive as the staff officers stand around a general. He needs them. They execute his commands. He could not do his work without them. But he is not dependent upon them as they are upon him; any one of them might fall away and he could still fight the battle. The power of the battle is in him. If he falls, the cause is ruined. So stan the subordinate motives of the ministry around the commanding motive, the realized value of the human soul. They are the motives which I have had occasion to dwell on one by one in the course of these lectures. They are the pleasure of work, the mere delight in the exercise of powers which is natural to any man who is healthy both in body and mind; the love of influence, that gratification in feeling our life touch another life for some good result, which is also natural and healthy; the perception of order, that love of regulated movement, of the rhythm of righteousness in the lives and ways of men, which in its higher forms is noble, though in the lower it degenerates into routine; and lastly the pure concern for truth, the pleasure in seeing right ideas take the place of wrong ideas, which may be quite separate from any regard for the interest of the person in whom the change takes place. These are the nobler members of the staff of the great general. There are more ignoble ones who volunteer their services and wear something like his uniform and cannot always be distinguished from his true servants; such as emulation, and the love of fame, and the pride of opinion, and the enjoyment of congenial society. I will not dwell on those. These others are the real staff of the general. But when we look at their group, how the commanding motive whom they serve towers up far above them all. They get their highest dignity from serving him. For in his service each of them, which is abstract in itself, comes into actual contact with man; and no abstract principle has shown its full power or given its full pleasure until it has opened the essential relations which exist between it and human nature. It is the great privilege of the ministry that it is kept in constant necessary contact with mankind. Therein lies its healthiness. Man in his mystery and wonderfulness is more full of the suggestion of God than either abstract truth or physical nature. And so the true preacher, in spite of his imperfect opportunities for v study, in spite of his separation from the beauty of the natural world, has the chance to know more of God than the profoundest speculative philosophy or J the most exquisite scenery of earth could reveal to him.

Let me try then to point out to you what some of the effects will be in a man’s preaching from a true sense of the value of the human soul, by which I’ mean a high estimate of the capacity of the spiritual nature, a keen and constant appreciation of the attainments to which it may be brought. And first of all it helps to rescue the Gospel which we preach from a sort of unnaturalness and incongruity which is very apt to cling to it. This is, I think, very important. Consider what it is that you are to declare week after week, to the men and women who come to hear you.

The mighty truths of Incarnation and Atonement are your themes. You tell them of the birth and life and death of Jesus Christ. You picture the adorable love and the mysterious sacrifice of the Saviour. And you bind all this to their lives. You tell them that in a true sense all this was certainly for them. I do not know what you are made of, if sometimes, as you preach, there does not come into your mind a thought of incongruity. What are you, you and these people to whom you preach, that for you the central affection of the universe should have been stirred? You know your own life. You know something of the lives they live. You look into their faces as you preach to them. “Where is the end worthy of all this ministry of almighty grace which you have been describing? Is it possible that all this once took place and, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, is a perpetual power in the world, merely that these machine-lives might run a little truer, or that a series of rules might be established by which the current workings of society might move more smoothly? That, which men sometimes make the purpose of it all, is too unworthy. The engine is too coarse to have so fine a fire under it. You must see something deeper. You must discern in all these men and women some inherent preciousness for which even the marvel of the Incarnation and the agony of Calvary was not too great, or it is impossible that you should keep your faith in those stupendous truths which Bethlehem and Calvary offer to us. Some source of fire from which these dimmed sparks come, some possible renewal of the fire which is in them still, some sight of the education through which each soul is passing, and some suggestion of the special personal perfectness to which each may attain, all this must brighten before you, as you look at them; and then the truths of your theology shall not be thrown into confusion nor faded into unreality by your ministry to men. The best thing in a minister’s life is the action of his works and his faith on one another; his experience of the deeper value of the human soul making the wonders of his faith more credible, and the truths of his faith always revealing to him a deeper and deeper value in the soul.

I think that nobody can preach with the best power who is not possessed with a sense of the mysteriousness of the human life which he preaches to. It must seem to him capable of indefinite enlargement and refinement. He must see it in each new person as something original and new. This must be something which belongs to his whole conception »f man as the child of God. It must not be the mere inspiration of his whim, attributed in great richness to some lives which chance to take his fancy but ignored in others. He must see it in all men simply as men. When he undertakes to lead them he must feel the mystery and spontaneity of the lives that he takes under his teaching. He must be a careful student of the characters he trains. He cannot carry people over the route of his ministry as a ferryman carries passengers across the river, always running his boat in the same line and never even asking the v names of the people whom he carries. He must

/count himself rather like the tutor of a family of princes, who, with careful study of their several dispositions, trains the royal nature of each for the special kingdom over which he is to rule.

Here is where the preacher and the poet touch. Every true preacher must be a poet, at least in so far as to see behind all the imperfections of men a certain ideal manhood from which they have never separated, which underlies the life and lends its value to the blurred and broken character of every one. A belief in the Incarnation, in the divine Son of Man makes such poets of us all. It is interesting to see in how many ministers the hopefulness of this ideal poetic view of human life overcomes the tendencies of natural temperament, the discouragement of poverty and disease and the disenchanting influence of intercourse with men, and keeps ministers the most hopeful class of men. They are always standing where, if they will, they may listen for the bells that shall “ring in the Christ that is to be.” I have seen ministers try to crush back this noble tendency of their vocation and to assume a cynicism and a hopelessness which they did not feel, so that other men might not call them childish. And I have seen men of the world disappointed when they came to such ministers and did not find in them the childlike hope and trust that they expected, but only false and despairing thoughts of human nature like their own; as if the ice came up to the fire to warm itself, and found the fire ashamed of being warm and trying hard to make itself as cold as ice.

I might dwell, also, on this value of the human soul for its own sake, as constituting the constant reserve of pleasure in the ministry. There are other pleasures in our work, as I have recounted to you already; but they are all, to a certain extent, dependent upon circumstances. A parish uproar which ’ reveals the bad reality of life, may scatter some of them. Poverty, which deprives you of the means of culture, and takes away the power of carrying out your plans, may rob you of others. But the new pleasure of dealing with man as man, as a being valuable in himself, for this no peculiar happiness of circumstances is needed. Wherever men are, you may have it. Nobody but Robinson Crusoe is shut out from it, and even to him the Man Friday is sure to come.

And herein lies the real fellowship of the ministry. There are no fellow-workers who come so close together as fellow-workers in the ministry of the Gospel; and their companionship is closest when they most deeply know this truth of the essential value of the human soul. A preacher comes to me from Africa, or from some church of another denomination in the next street, which often seems farther off than Africa. It depends upon what the power of our preaching is, how near we come together. If we are both given to machineries, each, of us valuing only what a certain sort of people may become under the peculiar culture of the denomination which he represents, then we talk together, however pleasantly, only over our fences, and shake hands, however cordially, only through the slats. If we both really value the soul of man, we understand each other; the different methods of our work do not keep us apart but bring us together, for they are the means by which we manifest to one another the deep motive which is the power of both our lives. The fences are turned into bridges. Certainly, Christian union, whenever it comes, must come thus, not by compromise and the adjustment of various forms of government and worship, but by the development in all preachers of all kinds of that value for man in Christ which burrows far beneath the differences of forms and flies far above them. It may be given to some people in these days to take iirect steps toward organic Christian union. I bid them God speed. But if that is not our task let us know, and let us rejoice in knowing, that we are doing, perhaps, as much as they for the millenium, if, in ourselves and those who hear us, by whatever partial name we and they may be called, we are doing what we can to make strong that sense of the value of the human soul which, by its very nature, is universal, and cannot be partial. Here is where the zealous partisan, who is at the same time an earnest Christian, is often working better than he knows. He is like a jealous farmer who prays for v rain to water his field that it may be richer than his neighbor’s; but the heaven is too broad for him, and will not limit its bounty by the intention of his prayer. It will rain, but it cannot rain between 7 ’ fences; and so his selfish prayer brings refreshment ’ for the alien acres for which he does not pray.

And as this power in the ministry lies deepest, so it lasts longest. The veteran preacher, I think, keeps the enjoyment and tries to keep the practice of his work later in life than the veteran in almost any other occupation. That always seems to me a touching and convincing proof of the excellence of our calling. It shows better and better as it grows older. The delightful French artist, Millet, used to say to his pupils: “The end of the day is the proof of a picture,” “La fin du jour, c’est l’e*preuved’un tableau.” He meant that the twilight hour when there is not light enough to distinguish details is the most favorable time to judge of a picture as a whole. And so it is with the ministry. When the cross-lights of jealous emulation and the glare of constant notoriety are softening toward the darkness in which lies the pure judgment of God and the peace of being forgotten by mankind, then that which has been lying behind them all the time comes out; and the old preacher who has ceased to care whether men praise or blame him, who has attained or missed all that there is for him of success or failure here, preaches on still out of the pure sense of how precious the soul of man is, and the pure desire to serve a little more that which is so worthy of his service, before he goes.

Let me follow still farther the enumeration of the qualities which grow up in the preacher from his value for the human soul. Courage is one of its most necessary results. The truest way not to be afraid of the worse part of a man is to value and try to serve his better part. The patriot who really appreciates the valuable principles of his nation’s life, is he who most intrepidly rebukes the nation’s faults. And Christ was all the more independent of men’s whims because of His’ profound love for them and complete consecration to their needs. There come three stages in this matter; the ^firgt, a flippant superiority which despises the people and thinks of them as only made to take what the preacher chooses to give to them, and to minister to his support; the second, a servile sycophancy which watches all their fancies, and tries to blow whichever way their vane points; and the third, a deep respect which cares too earnestly for what the people are capable of being to let them anywhere fall short of it without a strong remonstrance. You have seen all three in the way in which parents treat their children. I could show you each of the three to-day in the relation of different preachers to their parishes. Believe me, the last is the only true independence, the only one that it is worth while to seek, or indeed that a man has any right to seek. An actor may encourage himself by despising or forgetting his audience, but a preacher must go elsewhere for courage. The more you prize the spiritual nature of your people, the more able you will be to oppose their whims. There must be the fountain of your independence.

And here too is the power of simplicity and absolute reality. All turgid rhetoric, all false ornament, all doctrinal fantasticalness must disappear in the presence of a supreme absorbing value for the souls of men. The conscience and the taste, when both are pure, will coincide. Every divorce which separates them is a parting of what God has joined together. The two are most essentially united in the functions of our sacred office. The man whose eye is set upon the souls of men, and whose heart burns with the desire to save them, chooses with an almost unerring instinct what figure will set the truth most clearly before their minds, what form of appeal will bring it most strongly to their sluggish wills. He takes those and rejects every other. The mere unwarlike citizen goes lounging through the Tower of London, and among the old armor there he praises that which he calls beautiful. The soldier walks through the same halls, and, with a soldier’s instinct, thinks no armor beautiful which will not kill the enemy or protect the man who wears it. That is the final principle of all right choice, the touchstone of good taste. The sermon is to be sacrificed to the soul, the system of work to the purpose of work always. It strikes at the root of all clerical fastidiousness and the tyranny of order. It is wonderful how the character of all ornament in a sermon declares itself. That which really belongs to the purpose of the sermon is always good. That which is there for its own sake every pure taste, however untrained, instantly feels to be bad. The one is like the sculpture on an old cathedral which, however rude, was meant to tell a story. The other is like the carving on our house-fronts which is meant merely to look pretty, and so fails of even that. There are some men born to positions of such dignity y that they are doomed to be either illustrious or ridiculous. And so ornament when it is applied to a serraon must either do the lofty work of making truth plain and glorious or it fails of everything. It cannot be allowed simply to amuse or please as may the ornament of an essay or a poem.

But our principle goes deeper than this. This controlling value for the human soul must save a preacher also from a narrow treatment of the souls under his care. If he values them more than any theory of his own about how souls generally are to be treated, he will be broad and try only to lead each into that entire obedience to God which results in such different experiences for us all. The ascetic theorist values self-sacrifice for its own sake and would enforce it indiscriminately. The theorist of self-indulgence says, “No, pain is a curse. Pleasure is good. Shun pain. Do what is pleasant.” The teacher who values the souls which he teaches more than any theory says something different from either. He says, “Not enjoyment and not sorrow, but the meeting of your will with the will of God, whatever it may bring, is the purpose of all discipline. Be ready for any way which God shall choose to bring your will to His.” But to this large wisdom no teacher can be brought except by a true sense of the preciousness of the soul of man.

It cannot be denied, and it must not be forgotten, that this absorbing conviction of the value of the human soul has its besetting danger. That danger is not slight nor casual. It is important and essential.

The danger is lest, in our eagerness to help the spiritual nature which we so highly value, we should be led to judge of the truth of any idea by what we think might be its influences on the soul for which we are so anxious. The tendency to estimate and treat ideas according to what appear their probable effects on human character has been, no doubt, a great besetting sin of spiritual teachers always. I suppose that it cannot be wholly separated from any vocation which is bound at once to seek for truth and to educate character. This is the way in which a great deal of half-believed doctrine comes to be clinging to and cumbering the church. Men insist on believing and on having other people believe certain doctrines, not because they are reasonably demonstrated to be true, but because, in the present state of things, it would be dangerous to give them up. This is the way in which one man clings to his idea of verbal inspiration, and another to his special theory of the divine justice, and another to his material notion of the resurrection, and yet another to his notion i of the Church’s authority and the minister’s commission. It is a very dangerous danger, because it wears the cloak of such a good motive; but it is big with. all the evil fruits of superstition. It starts with a lack of faith in the people and in truth and in God. Jesus bids us not to cast pearls before swine, but he does not bid us to feed even swine on pebbles.” God

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forbid,” says Bishop Watson, “that the search after truth should be discouraged for fear of its consequences The consequences of truth may be subversive of systems of superstition, but they can never be injurious to the rights or well-founded expectations of the human race.” There is nothing that one would wish to say more earnestly to our young and ardent ministers than this. Never sacrifice your reverence for truth to your desire for usefulness. Say nothing which you do not believe to be true because you think n it may be helpful. Keep back nothing which you know to be true because you think it may be harmful. Who are you that you should stint the children’s drinking from the cup which their Father bids you to carry to them, or mix it with error because you think they cannot bear it in its purity? We must learn in the first place to form our own judgments of what teachings are true by other tests than the consequences which we think those teachings will produce; and then, when we have formed our judgments, we must trust the truth that we believe and the God from whom it comes, and tell it freely to the people. He is saved from one of the great temptations of the ministry who goes out to his work with a clear and constant certainty that truth is always strong, no matter how weak it looks, and falsehood is always weak, no matter how strong it looks.

But if we bear this danger in our minds and are upon our guard against it, then the value for our brethren’s souls will help us to avoid many false standards. It will give interest to many people whom otherwise we should find very uninteresting. There is much in the minister’s training to make him value purely intellectual companionships. There is a tendency in many ministers, whose disposition leads them to value truth more than men, to let themselves be drawn almost exclusively into the society of those whose ways of thought are like their own. I think it is a wonder to many people who are not ministers, how one man who is the pastor of a great parish can be genuinely interested in so many people of such various characters and lives. A good many people and even some clergymen take it for granted that it is not possible, and treat the appearance of such universal interest as a pretence, necessary in. order to keep up the parish feeling, and so a very valuable accomplishment in a minister. But it is not so. No man ever did it successfully, year after v year, as a pretence. The secret of it all is simply the great sense of the value of the human soul brought home and individualized upon these human souls committed to our care, as a magistrate sees all the dignity of the law represented in the settlement of the petty quarrel that is brought before his court. The large conception of the value of humanity must v go before the special value of one’s own parishioners; otherwise the pastoral relation softens into mere personal fondness, or else hardens into a rigid and formal treatment of the people according to arbitrary classifications which lose alike their general humanity and their personal distinctness. There is a ministry which is all the more personal because of its broad humanness; a ministry which, beginning with the sacredness of man, counts all men sacred, and touches, with its own peculiar pressure upon each, the lives of strong men and little children, of women and boys and girls, of working people and people of idle lives, of saints and sinners, as the rain and dew of God which water the earth feed both the oak-tree and the violet; a ministry which makes its care for every soul dearer and more sacred to that soul be-*’ cause it is evidently no mere personal fondness, but one utterance of that Christliness which deeply feels the preciousness of the souls of all God’s children.

I have not time to dwell upon the help which a perpetual value for the souls of men must render to our own spiritual life, and so to our efficiency as preachers. Indeed, it is the great power by which our souls must grow. This is the ministry of the people to the preacher, which is often greater than any ministry that the preacher can render to the people. I assure you that the relation between the pastor and his parish is not right if the pastor thinks x the obligation to be all upon one side, if while he lives with them and when he leaves them he is not always full of gratitude for what they have done for v him. A pastor who is insensible to this cannot do the best good to his people. And the sort of help which a minister gets from his congregation whose souls he values, is a direct complement of the good which he gets from his study. He needs them both. His study furnishes him with ideas, with intellectual conceptions, and his congregation furnishes him with an atmosphere in which these ideas ripen to their best result. The minister as he grows older changes some of the opinions which he used to hold. The new opinions, it is to be hoped, are truer than the old ones were. But greater than all such changes are the deepening convictions about all spiritual things which come from the long years of dealing with men’s souls and which color every opinion whether new or old. The conviction that truth and destiny are essential and not arbitrary, that Christianity is the personal love and service of Christ, and that salvation is positive, not negative, — convictions such as these they are that fill and richen the preacher’s maturer years; and they are convictions whose clearness and strength he owes to that occupation which has both demanded and cultivated a value for the souls of men.

As to the nature of this value for the human soul, notice, I beg you, that it is something more than the mere sense of the soul’s danger. It is a deliberate estimate set upon man’s spiritual nature in view of its possibilities. The danger in which that nature stands by sin intensifies and emphasizes the value which we set upon it, but it does not create that value. I think that this is important. I think that we are sometimes apt to let our anxiety for the salvation of souls degenerate into a mere pity for the misery into which they may be brought by sin; and the result of such a low thought is that when we have been brought to believe that a soul is, as we say, “safe,” that it has been forgiven and will not be punished, we are satisfied. The thought of rescue has monopolized our religion and often crowded out the thought of culture. I think that the tone of the New Testament is different from this. I know how eminently there the truths of danger and rescue always appear. I know that Christ “came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance,” and that He was called Jesus because He should “save His people from their sins;” but all the time behind the danger lies the value of that spiritual nature which is thus in peril. It is not solely or principally the suffering which the soul must undergo; it is the loss of the soul itself, its failure to be the bright and wonderful thing which, as the soul of God’s child, it <*ught to be. That is the reason why the process of salvation cannot stop with the removal of penalties and the forgiveness of sins. It must include all the gradual perfection of the soul by faith and love and obedience and patience. This is the reason, too, why those who have taken only a half view of the complete salvation are apt to be severe on those who have seen only the other half. Half a truth is often more jealous of the other half than of an error.

This larger and deeper value for the human soul, I think, is seen in all the sermons of the greatest preachers. It is not mere pity for danger that inspires them to plead with men. That might move them to a sort of supercilious exertion, no matter how intrinsically worthless was the thing in peril, as one might start up to pluck even an insect from the candle’s flame. But it is a glowing vision of how great and beautiful the soul of man might be, of what great things it might do if it were thoroughly purified and possessed by the love of God and so opened free channels to His power.

There are special causes which make this great power of which I have been speaking, the sense of the value of the soul, more difficult to win and keep in this age of ours than it has been in many other times. There are two characteristics of our time which have their influence upon it. One is the tendency of philosophy to divert itself from man and turn towards other nature, and in its study of man to busy itself least with his spiritual nature, most with his physical history. The other is the strong philanthropic disposition which prevails about us, the desire to relieve human suffering and to promote human comfort and intelligence. The first of these tendencies would certainly make it more than usually hard to realize the spiritual value of humanity; and the second, while it makes much of man, cares mainly for his material well-being and is always disposed to treat the individual as subservient to the interests of the mass. The general result is one of which I think that there can be no doubt, a difficulty in the real, vivid, perpetual sense of the worth of man’s spiritual nature such as has very rarely beset those in other ages who have tried to serve their fellow-men. At such a time we need to hold very strongly to the constant facts of human life which lie below all such temporary changes, and to be very sure of their reappearance. We need a keen, quick-sighted faith which shall discover the first signs of what must surely come, a reaction from the partial tendencies of the time. We need a generous fairness to discover thought and feeling which is really spiritual but which has cloaked itself, even to its own confusion, in the forms and phrases of the time.

But, more than all of these, we who are preaching in such days as these need to understand these methods by which in any time we must acquire and preserve the sense of the preciousness of the human soul.

What are these methods? First of all, before a man can value the souls of other men, he must have learnt to value his own soul. And a man learns to value his own soul only as he is conscious of the solemn touches of the Spirit of the Lord upon it. Ah, my friends, here is the real reason why he who preaches to the inner life of others must himself have had any inner life. Not that he may take his own experience and narrowly make it the type to which all other experiences must conform; but that, having learnt how God loves him, having felt in many a silent hour and many a tumultuous crisis the pressure of God’s hands full of care and wisdom, he may know, as he looks from his pulpit, that behind every one of those faces into which he looks there is a soul for which God cares with the same thoughtfulness. In his closet he has first seen the light which from his closet he carries forth to illuminate the humanity of his congregation and bring out all its colors. The personal desire to be pure and holy, the personal consciousness of power to be pure and holy through Christ, reveals the possibility of other men.

Again, a preacher’s view of all theology ought to be colored with the preciousness of the human soul. It is possible for two men to hold the same doctrine and yet to differ very widely in this respect. To one of them the Christian truths reveal much of the glory and mercy of God; to the other they shine also with the value of the spiritual manhood. To this last the Incarnation reveals the essential dignity of that nature into union with which the Deity could so marvellously enter. The Redemption bears witness of the unspeakable love of God, but also of the value underneath the sin of man, which made the jewel worth cleaning. And all the methods of Sanctification, all the disciplines of the Spirit open before the watchful minister new insight into the possibilities of that being upon whom such bounty of grace is lavished. I think that we ought to distrust at least the form in which we are holding any theological idea, if it is not helping to deepen in us the sense of the preciousness of the human soul, first impressing it as a conviction and then firing it into a passion. There is not one truth which man may know of God which does not legitimately bear this fruit. I beg you more and more to test the way in which you hold the truth of God by the power which it has to fill you with honor for the spiritual life of man.

It is evident as we look at the ministry of Jesus that He was full of reverence for the nature of the men and women whom He met. There was nothing which He knew of God which did not make His Father’s children precious to Him. We see it even in His lofty and tender courtesy. How often I have *een a minister’s manners either proudly distant and conscious of his own importance, or fulsome and fawning with a feeble affectionateness that was unworthy of a man, and have thought that what he needed was that noble union of dignity and gentleness which came to Jesus from His divine insight into the value of the human soul.

One other source from which the knowledge of this value comes let me mention in a single word. It is by working for the soul that we best learn what the soul is worth. If ever in your ministry the souls of those committed to your care grow dull before you, and you doubt whether they have any such value that you should give your life for them, go out and work for them; and as you work their value shall grow clear to you. Go and try to save a soul and you will see how well it is worth saving, how capable it is of the most complete salvation. Not by pondering upon it, nor by talking of it, but by serving it you learn its preciousness. So the father learns the value of his child, and the teacher of his scholar, and the patriot of his native land. And so the Christian, living and dying for his brethren’s souls, learns the value of those souls for which Christ lived and died.

And if you ask me whether this whose theory I have been stating is indeed true in fact, whether in daily work for souls year after year a man does see in those souls glimpses of such a value as not merely justifies the little work which he does, but even makes credible the work of Christ, I answer, surely, yes. All other interest and satisfaction of the ministry completes itself in this, that year by year the minister sees more deeply how well worthy of infinitely more than he can do for it is the human soul for which he works.

I do not know how I can better close my lectures to you than with that testimony. May you find it true in your experience. May the souls of men be A always more precious to you as you come always nearer to Christ, and see them more perfectly as He does. I can ask no better blessing on your ministry than that.

And so may God our Father guide and keep you always.