y people you could trust that he was a minister of
knowledge and knew his own business? Or was it that when you went to
worship with him for yourself you have not been able ever since to tear
yourself away from him, nor has any one else been able to tear you away,
though some have tried? When you first came to the city, did you give,
can you remember, some real anxiety, rising sometimes into prayer, as to
who your minister among so many ministers was to be? Or did you choose
him and your present seat in his church because of some real or supposed
worldly interest of yours you thought you could further by taking your
letter of introduction to him? Had you heard while yet at home, had your
father and mother talked of such things to you, that rich men, and men of
place and power, political men and men high in society, sat in that
church and took notice of who attended it and who did not? Do you, down
to this day, know one church from another so far as spiritual and soul-
saving knowledge is concerned? Do you know that two big buildings,
called churches, may stand in the same street, and have men, called
ministers, carrying on certain services in them from week to week, and
yet, for all the purposes for which Christ came and died and rose again
and gave ministers to His church, these two churches and their ministers
are farther asunder than the two poles? Do you understand what I am
saying? Do you understand what I have been saying all night, or are you
one of those of whom the prophet speaks in blame and in pity as being
destroyed for lack of knowledge? Well, that is your first danger, that
you are so ignorant, and as a consequence, so careless, as not to know
one minister from another.

2. And your second danger in connection with your minister is, that you
have, and may have long had, a good minister, but that you still remain
yourself a bad man. My brethren, be you all sure of it, there is a
special and a fearful danger in having a specially good minister. Think
twice, and make up your mind well, before you call a specially good
minister, or become a communicant, or even an adherent under a specially
good minister. If two bad men go down together to the pit, and the one
has had a good minister, as, God have mercy on us, sometimes happens, and
the other has only had one who had the name of a minister, the
evangelised reprobate will lie in a deeper bed in hell, and will spend a
more remorseful eternity on it t