st and from that full
surrender which such knowledge at once brings to pass. Love has caught
the preacher in the way and led him to Calvary, where his heart has
been set on fire. He does but preach because he must, the Lord having
done for him such mighty things. As the memory of that divine arrest
on the road to Damascus abode with Paul, and so sustained a sense of
the mercy of his Lord that he could not help but preach the gospel, so
the recollection of the preacher will ever linger around the glad hour
when the Master met him in the path, having come down from heaven to
seek and to save even him. In these remembrances has the passion of
the preacher its origin and its reinforcement. It is the first fruit
of a melted heart. The true preacher is--the word is not a pleasant
one, but it is the only form of expression that, at the moment,
occurs--the devotee. He is the slave of love to Christ.

And without this whole-souled devotion--we say again--there can be no
great moving and saving preaching. Eloquence there may be,
intellectualism, sublimity of conception and description, pathos--all
the qualities which are needed in high public address, but something
will be lacking. None can speak of a maiden as can her lover, though
others may describe her with a choicer diction than he. None can speak
of a child as can his mother, to whom the little life is more precious
than her own and every childish way of significance and beauty.
"_Lovest_ thou _Me_?" said the Lord to Simon Peter on that grey morning
on the sea-shore. "Lovest thou Me?" He asked again, and yet again.
"Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee," cried the disciple, his
soul aflame with a living passion never more to be extinguished or
bedimmed, "Thou knowest that I love Thee." Then said the Saviour,
"Feed My sheep," "Feed My lambs." Peter's preaching hour was come now
that this fire had been kindled in his soul. In that confession rang
the promise of all the after years, of the ministry in Jerusalem, of
his declaration of the Christ in many a heathen city, of the death he
was to die in Rome. Lack this flame of affection and preaching will be
a task, a penance, a weary iteration and reiteration of things so often
spoken as to render them threadbare and hackneyed to the speaker.
Possess this all-consuming love and preaching will be as "a song of the
Well-Beloved!"

But the passion of preaching has in it another ingredient--if in this
way the matt