for the souls of our people, one by one, day in and day
out,--that, above everything else, that, and nothing else,--makes any man
a pastor of the apostolic type. An able man may know all about the
history, the habitat, the various species, the breeds, the diseases, and
the prices of sheep, and yet be nothing at all of a true shepherd. And
so may a minister.

2. Pastoral visitation, combined with personal dealing, is by far the
best way of watching for souls. I well remember when I first began my
ministry in this congregation, how much I was impressed with what one of
the ablest and best of our then ministers was reported to have testified
on his deathbed. Calling back to his bedside a young minister who had
come to see him, the dying man said: 'Prepare for the pulpit; above
everything else you do, prepare for the pulpit. Let me again repeat it,
should it at any time stand with you between visiting a deathbed and
preparing for the pulpit, prepare for the pulpit.' I was immensely
impressed with that dying injunction when it was repeated to me, but I
have lived,--I do not say to put my preparation for the pulpit, such as
it is, second to my more pastoral work in my week's thoughts, but--to put
my visiting in the very front rank and beside my pulpit. 'We never were
accustomed to much visiting,' said my elders to me in their solicitude
for their young minister when he was first left alone with this whole
charge; 'only appear in your own pulpit twice on Sabbath: keep as much at
home as possible: we were never used to much visiting, and we do not look
for it.' Well, that was most kindly intended; but it was much more kind
than wise. For I have lived to learn that no congregation will continue
to prosper, or, if other more consolidated and less exacting
congregations, at any rate not this congregation, without constant
pastoral attention. And remember, I do not complain of that. Far, far
from that. For I am as sure as I am of anything connected with a
minister's life, that a minister's own soul will prosper largely in the
measure that the souls of his people prosper through his pastoral work.
No preaching, even if it were as good preaching as the apostle's itself,
can be left to make up for the neglect of pastoral visitation and
personal intercourse. 'I taught you from house to house,' says Paul
himself, when he was resigning the charge of the church of Ephesus into
the hands of the elders of Ephesus. What would w