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T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S you are and whose Gospel you cannot preach effectively unless the gift is yours. Seek it until you have it.”— Thomas Payne, D. D. Put On More Steam Dr. Alexander Maclaren, one of the clearest thinkers of his time, is moved to say, "There is a kind of religious teachers who are always preaching down enthusiasm and preaching up what they >call ‘sober standards of feeling’ in mat ters of religion. By which, in nine cases out of ten, they mean precisely such a tepid condition as is described in much less polite language when' the Voice from Heaven says, ‘Because thou art neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.’ I should have thought that the last piece of furniture which any Christian church in the nineteenth century needed was a refrigerator. A poker and a pair of bellows would be muCh more needful to them. Not to be all aflame is madness, if we believe our own creed.” May Their Kind Increase Dr. Jackson reminds us that whoever will go over the great names in the history of the Christian pulpit will dis cover that the p.assion to win men is the ultimate fountain of all preaching’ that is of the prophetic order. Of Ruther ford a contemporary said, “ Many a time I thought he would have flown out of the pulpit when he came to speak of Jesus Christ.” John Knox was sup ported in his old age by attendants to his place in the pulpit, but when he arose to speak, the divine passion blazed in his soul, until, one of his friends said, “ So mighty was he in his yearning that I thought he would break the pul pit into bits.” Of Joseph Alleine it was said, "Manifesting infinite and insatia ble greed for the conversion of souls, he preached with far-reaching voice, flash ing eye and a soul on fire with love.”
Selecting Texts The Rev. Thomas Spencer in answer to the question, “ How do you select your texts?” replied, “ I keep a little book in which I enter every text of Scripture which comes to my mind with power and sweetness. Were I to dream of a passage^ I should enter it in my ljook and, when I sit down to compose my sermon, I look over the book, and have never found myself at a loss for a subject.” Extreme Nervousness “ It may help some timid student,” writes a correspondent, “ to know that the first time the late Dr. Monro Gibson tried to conduct a church service, it was exactly eighteen minutes from the time he entered the pulpit and gave out the opening Psalm, until he pronounced the benediction. His chagrin at his apparent failure was such that he resolved never to enter a pulpit again. However, the wise sympathy and encouraging words of the lady with whom he boarded en abled* him to ‘try again,’ and it was not long before he overcame his extreme nervousness.” The Great Essential Perhaps no preacher, especially in his last days, did more to stir up Chris tians and ministers to realize their deep need of the baptism of the Holy Spirit to qualify them for their life ministry than did the late Dr. R. W. Dale. The following extract from one of his ser mons to preachers and missionaries will reveal this. He remarked: “ Your gen erous impulses, your strenuous and ex hausting labors, your eagerness to win men, your natural powers, your learn ing, will achieve nothing— nothing in the higher regions of human life, in which alone the enduring results of your work are to be found—-unless you have received the gift of the Holy Ghost. Seek it—seek it reverently, persistently, in the name of Christ, whose servants
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