AND PAST STUDENTS

OF RIDLEY HALL, CAMBRIDGE,

THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.

H.C.G.M.

"_Give those who teach pure hearts and wise,
Faith, hope, and love, all warm'd by prayer;
Themselves first training for the skies
They best will raise their people there._"

ARMSTRONG.

PREFACE.

The following pages do not appear to need any extended preface; their
topic is set forth in the first lines of the first chapter. With what
success it has been handled is another matter.

But as a writer reviews his own words, it is inevitable that some sort
of _envoi_ should present itself to his mind. In this case the _envoi_
seems to me to be the vital necessity of personal holiness in the
Christian Minister, in order to the right working of the Christian
Ministry; a personal holiness which shall be no mere form moulded from
without but a life developed into manifestation and action from within.

Never did the Church of Christ more need to remember this than at the
present day. The strongest surface currents of the age are against it;
alike that of unregulated, hurrying, indiscriminate enterprize, and that
of an exaggerated ecclesiasticism. In the one case the worker's
communion with God tends to be sacrificed to the work, the fountain
choked for the sake of the stream. In the other case there is a serious
risk that "the Church" may come to be regarded as an almost substitute
for the Lord in matters affecting the life and growth of the Christian
man, and of course of the Christian Minister. Sacred are the claims of
order and cohesion, but more sacred and more vital still is the call to
the individual constituent of the community to come to the living
Personal Christ, "nothing between," and to abide in innermost
intercourse with Him, and to draw every hour by faith on His great
grace.

If these simple pages may at all, in His most merciful hands, promote
the holy cause of such a hidden life and its fruitful issues, it will
indeed be happiness to the writer. In these days of stifling
materialism in philosophy, and withering naturalism in theology, but in
which also the Holy Spirit, far and wide, is breathing upon us in
special mercy from above, there is no duty more pressing on the
Christian than to seek, in the world of work, after that life which is
"lived in the flesh by faith in the Son of God," and which is manifested
in the strong and patie