urope, and his
health is set in danger.' We remember the pride with which poor John
Williams, the martyr missionary of Erromanga, viewed the introduction
of bonnets among the women of Raratonga; but it was not the greatest of
his triumphs after all. The bonnets have vanished long ago, but the
fragrant influence of John Williams abides perpetually. We sometimes
forget that our immaculate tweed trousers and our dainty skirts and
blouses are no essential part of the Christian gospel. As a matter of
fact, that gospel was first revealed to a people who knew nothing of
such trappings. We do not necessarily hasten the millennium by
introducing among untutored races a carnival of ready-made clothes.

And it is just as certain that you do not bring the soul nearer to its
highest goal by forcing on it a fashion for which it is totally
unsuited. And here I come back to Drummond. During his last illness
at Tunbridge Wells, he remarked that, at the age of twelve, he made a
conscientious study of Bonar's _God's Way of Peace_. 'I fear,' he
said, 'that the book did me more harm than good. I tried to force my
inner experience into the mould represented by that book, and it was
impossible.' In one of Moody's after-meetings in London, Drummond was
dealing with a young girl who was earnestly seeking the Saviour. At
last he startled her by exclaiming, 'You must give up reading James's
_Anxious Enquirer_.' She wondered how he had guessed that she had been
reading it; but he had detected from her conversation that she was
making his own earlier mistake. She was trying to think as John Angell
James thought, to weep as he wept, and to find her way to faith
precisely as he found his. Drummond told her to read nothing but the
New Testament, and, he said later on, 'A fortnight of that put her
right!'

There lies the whole secret. Our souls no more resemble each other
than our bodies; they are not made in a mould and turned out by the
million. No two are exactly alike. Ready-made clothes will never
exactly fit. Bonar and James, Bunyan and Law, Doddridge and Wesley,
Mueller and Spurgeon, may help me amazingly. They may help me by
showing me how they--each for himself--found their way into the
presence of the Eternal and, like Christian at the Palace Beautiful,
were robed and armed for pilgrimage. But if they lead me to suppose
that I must experience their sensations, enjoy their elations, pass
through their depressions, struggl