reacher glad.

To attain to this understanding men must be studied in all the ways we
can devise--individually and in the mass, for, strangely enough, men in
the mass often look at things very differently from the manner in which
the individuals, of whom the mass may be composed, would look at them
when alone. In books, too, man must be studied, but more especially
face to face, in constant, earnest observation. The preacher must get
out and about. A recluse he cannot afford to be. Pale-faced piety
cultivated in the cloister may be admirably adapted for Sunday
exhibition, but is apt to prove rather ineffective when brought into
active service in week-day tasks. Wisdom waits to be gathered in every
place where men do congregate. Earnestly must the preacher listen in
those moments--and they come to all true teachers of the things of
life--when some fellow-mortal, compelled by very need, opens to him the
secret chambers of his soul. Great, also, is the knowledge the
preacher may win from self-dissection. Let him analyse his own heart
unsparingly, his own motives and desires. His doubts and fears, his
aspirations and longings are for his teaching that he may be able the
more wisely to deal with those of other men. "Commune with thine own
heart and be still." There is one man whom every preacher needs more
frequently to meet, and whose acquaintance he needs to cultivate to a
point of greater intimacy, and that one man is himself. Know him, and
so know his race, for he is kindred, bone of bone and flesh of flesh,
with all who live. He who would explain a man to himself must first
have explored the dark continent of his own soul!

And the preacher's knowledge of men must include as large a measure of
information as can be acquired concerning the conditions under which
their lives are spent, and which so greatly influence a man's
character, and account, so largely, for what he is and does. The
preacher has to be Greatheart to his hearers in relation to the
temptations they are called upon to fight, and often our temptations,
when not the immediate product of our own hearts, grow out of the
circumstances under which our lives are lived. If, again, the
temptation be not the direct result of these circumstances, it is often
aided by them in the undoing of the soul. The poverty and
wretchedness; the low bodily state of the slum dweller, have, at least,
as much to do with making him the sot he often is as his intemp