festival, but a
question and a struggle. Surely the wonder is _not_ that sometimes the
man in the pulpit speaks in a minor key, but that, under all the
conditions of his life, we hear from him so much of the higher music as
we do. The memory comes to us as we write of a man who preached the
Gospel for years with the cruel disease of cancer gnawing at his
vitals. We can recall others who came to proclaim the golden year from
domestic circles blighted by the debauchery and vice of children but
too well beloved. Did these men sometimes speak falteringly, and with
hesitation, the message in which they asked and promised glorious
things? Did they, from the very darkness of the clouds lowering above
them, see only the lower slopes of the Mountains of the Lord? Who
could wonder? The preacher is but a man!

Yes, the preacher is but a man, and as a man finds out something
else:--That, after all, it is not out of his experiences of life, nor
from the influences of his time, nor from both together that the
greatest hindrance to altitude of tone in his preaching arises. As a
man _is in heart and life_ so in some degree he preaches. The call of
the Gospel is to perfection, and the perfect man is not yet, though
many there are, even in these days, whose lives are a constant and
noble struggle to reach this far-off mark. Is it strange that
sometimes a preacher's own failure to gain the wished for heights
should cause him to put before others possibilities, not, indeed,
according to his own low level of attainment, but still far below those
he is sent to declare? Living on low levels means inevitably preaching
on low levels, though, as a man's preaching is derived from higher
sources than are found in his own soul, his call to others ought always
to be of higher things than he has, himself, attained.

Here, then, are some of the reasons why it often happens that our
preaching lacks the elevation of high idealism. This idealism is none
the less needed that there are reasons for its absence. Along these
lines lies one of the great struggles of the preacher's life, which is
so triumphantly to resist the influences of his day and the depression
of his personal experiences, so to live his own life that he shall
always be able to act as a joyful guide to the Alps of God.

And what are these higher heights to which he has to point his fellows?
We ask the question first as concerning the individual and then as
concerning the na