and keep up a fresh kind of preaching and build up a
congregation, delivering such discourses as Scotchmen like to hear, he
will find that he must heartily accept the _role_ of an interpreter of
Scripture, and lean on the Bible as his great support.

This is your work; the Book is put into your hands to-day, that you
may unfold its contents to your people, conveying them into their
minds by all possible avenues and applying them to all parts of their
daily life.

It is a grand task. I cannot help congratulating you on being ordained
to the ministry to-day, for this above everything, that the Bible is
henceforth to be continually in your hands; that the study of it is to
be the work of your life; that you are to be continually sinking and
bathing your mind in its truths; and that you are to have the pleasure
of bringing forth what you have discovered in it to feed the minds of
men. The ministerial profession is to be envied more for this than
anything else. I promise you that, if you be true to it, this Book
will become dearer to you every day; it will enrich every part of your
nature; you will become more and more convinced that it is the Word of
God and contains the only remedy for the woes of man.

But be true to it! The Bible will be what I have said to you only if
you go deep into it. If you keep to the surface, you will weary of it.
There are some ministers who begin their ministry with a certain
quantity of religious doctrine in their mind, and what they do all
their life afterwards is to pick out texts and make them into vessels
to hold so much of it. The vessels are of different shapes and sizes,
but they are all filled with the same thing; and oh! it is poor stuff,
however orthodox and evangelical it may seem.

To become a dearly loved friend and an endless source of intellectual
and spiritual delight, the Bible must be thoroughly studied. We must
not pour our ideas into it, but apply our minds to it and faithfully
receive the impressions which it makes on them. One learns thus to
trust the Bible as an inexhaustible resource and lean back upon it
with all one's might. It is only such preaching, enriching itself out
of the wealth of the Bible and getting from it freshness, variety and
power, that can build up a congregation and satisfy the minds of
really living Christians.

The intellectual demand on the pulpit is rapidly rising. I should like
to draw your earnest attention to a revolution which is silent