duties and offers many opportunities, but through all his duties and
through all his opportunities there runs this high and distinctive duty
of watching for the souls of his people. A minister may be a great
scholar, he may have taken all sacred learning for his province, he may
be a profound and a scientific theologian, he may be an able church
leader, he may be a universally consulted authority on ecclesiastical
law, he may be a skilful and successful debater in church courts, he may
even be a great pulpit orator, holding thousands entranced by his
impassioned eloquence; but a true successor of the prophets of the Old
Testament and of the apostles of the New Testament he is not, unless he
watches for the souls of men. All these endowments, and all these
occupations, right and necessary as, in their own places, they all
are,--great talents, great learning, great publicity, great
popularity,--all tend, unless they are taken great care of, to lead their
possessors away from all time for, and from all sympathy with, the
watchfulness of the New Testament minister. Watching over a flock brings
to you none of the exhilaration of authority and influence, none of the
intoxication of publicity and applause. Your experiences are the quite
opposite of all these things when you are watching over your flock. Your
work among your flock is all done in distant and lonely places, on
hillsides, among woods and thickets, and in cloudy and dark days. You
spend your strength among sick and dying and wandering sheep, among
wolves and weasels, and what not, of that verminous kind. At the same
time, all good pastors are not so obscure and forgotten as all that. Some
exceptionally able and exceptionally devoted and self-forgetful men
manage to combine both extremes of a minister's duties and opportunities
in themselves. Our own Sir Henry Moncreiff was a pattern pastor. There
was no better pastor in Edinburgh in his day than dear Sir Henry was; and
yet, at the same time, everybody knows what an incomparable
ecclesiastical casuist Sir Henry was. Mr. Moody, again, is a great
preacher, preaching to tens of thousands of hearers at a time; but, at
the same time, Mr. Moody is one of the most skilful and attentive pastors
that ever took individual souls in hand and kept them over many years in
mind. But these are completely exceptional men, and what I want to say
to commonplace and limited and everyday men like myself is this, that
watching