e ministers not give for
a descriptive report of an afternoon's house-to-house visitation by the
Apostle Paul! Now in a workshop, now at a sickbed, now with a Greek, now
with a Jew, and, in every case, not discussing politics and cursing the
weather, not living his holidays over again and hearing of all the
approaching marriages, but testifying to all men in his own incomparably
winning and commanding way repentance toward God and faith toward the
Lord Jesus Christ. We city ministers call out and complain that we have
no time to visit our people in their own houses; but that is all
subterfuge. If the whole truth were told about the busiest of us, it is
not so much want of time as want of intention; it is want of set and
indomitable purpose to do it; it is want of method and of regularity such
as all business men must have; and it is want, above all, of laying out
every hour of every day under the Great Taskmaster's eye. Many country
ministers again,--we, miserable men that we are, are never happy or well
placed,--complain continually that their people are so few, and so
scattered, and so ignorant, and so uninteresting, and so unresponsive,
that it is not worth their toil to go up and down in remote places
seeking after them. It takes a whole day among bad roads and wet bogs to
visit a shepherd's wife and children, and two or three bothies and
pauper's hovels on the way home. 'On the morrow,' so runs many an entry
in Thomas Boston's _Memoirs_, 'I visited the sick, and spent the
afternoon in visiting others, and found gross ignorance prevailing.
Nothing but stupidity prevailed; till I saw that I had enough to do among
my handful. I had another diet of catechising on Wednesday afternoon,
and the discovery I made of the ignorance of God and of themselves made
me the more satisfied with the smallness of my charge . . . Twice a year
I catechised the parish, and once a year I visited their families. My
method of visitation was this. I made a particular application of my
doctrine in the pulpit to the family, exhorted them all to lay all these
things to heart, exhorted them also to secret prayer, supposing they kept
family worship, urged their relative duties upon them,' etc. etc. And
then at his leaving Ettrick, he writes: 'Thus I parted with a people
whose hearts were knit to me and mine to them. The last three or four
years had been much blessed, and had been made very comfortable to me,
not in respect of my own hand