f circumstances that influence and decide the
autograph. I have no faith in the science of chirography. I could, from a
pack of letters in one pigeon-hole, put to rout the whole theory. I have
come to the conclusion that he who judges of a man's character by his
penmanship makes a very poor guess. The boldest specimen of chirography I
ever received was from a man whose wife keeps him in perpetual tremor, he
surrendering every time she looks toward the broomstick.

Myself.--What do you think, Dominie, of the fact that laymen have begun to
preach? and what is your opinion of the work they are doing in Scotland?

For the first time in many a day the old Dominie grew sarcastic, and said:

What are we coming to? Get out your fire-engines. There is a conflagration.
What work Messrs. Moody, Sankey, Phillips, Bliss, Jacobs, Burnell, Durant
and fifty other laymen have done. Wherever they go they have large
concourses of people, and powerful revivals of religion follow. Had we not
better appoint a meeting of conference or presbytery to overhaul these men
who are saving souls without license? No! What we want is ten thousand men
just like them, coming up from among the people, with no professional garb,
and hearts hot with religious fervor, and bound by no conventionalities or
stereotyped notions about the way things ought to be done.

I have a sly suspicion that the layman who has for seven years given the
most of his time to the study of the truth is better prepared to preach the
gospel than a man who has given that length of time in theological
seminaries to the study of what other people say about the Bible. In other
words, we like water just dipped from the spring, though handed in a gourd,
rather than water that has been standing a week in a silver pitcher.

After Calvin has twisted us one way, and Arminius has twisted us another,
and we get our head full of the old Andover and New Haven theological
fights, and the difference between Ante-Nicene Trinitarianism and
Post-Nicene Trinitarianism, it is a luxury to meet some evangelist who can
tell us in our common mother-tongue of Him who came to seek and to save
that which was lost.

I say let our learned institutions push theological education to its
highest excellency, preparing men for spheres which none but the cultured
and scholarly are fit for, but somehow let us beat the drum and gather a
battalion of lay-workers. We have enough wise men to tell us about fishes,
about