od. Let all parish ministers take for
their text that day 2 Samuel vi. 6, 7:--And when they came to Nachon's
threshing-floor, Uzzah put forth his hand to the ark of God, and took
hold of it; for the oxen shook it. And the anger of the Lord was kindled
against Uzzah; and God smote him there for his error; and there he died
by the ark of God.

(3) There is a third lesson here, but it is a lesson for ministers, and
I shall take it home to myself.

CHAPTER XXIV--A FAST-DAY IN MANSOUL

'Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly, gather the elders and all
the inhabitants of the land into the house of the Lord your
God.'--_Joel_.

In our soft and self-indulgent day the very word 'to fast' has become an
out-of-date and an obsolete word. We never have occasion to employ that
word in the living language of the present day. The men of the next
generation will need to have it explained to them what the Fast-days of
their fathers were: when they were instituted, how they were observed,
and why they were abrogated and given up. If your son should ever ask
you just what the Fast-days of your youth were like, you will do him a
great service, and he may live to recover them, if you will answer him in
this way. Show him how to take his Cruden and how to make a picture to
his opening mind of the Fast-days of Scripture. And tell him plainly for
what things in fathers and in sons those fasts were ordained of God. And
then for the Fast-days of the Puritan period let him read aloud to you
this powerful passage in the _Holy War_. Public preaching and public
prayer entered largely into the fasting of the Prophetical and the
Puritan periods; and John Bunyan, after Joel, has told us some things
about the Fast-day preaching of his day that it will be well for us, both
preachers and people, to begin with, and to lay well to heart.

1. In the first place, the preaching of that Fast-day was 'pertinent'
and to the point. William Law, that divine writer for ministers, warns
ministers against going off upon Euroclydon and the shipwrecks of Paul
when Christ's sheep are looking up to them for their proper food. What,
he asks, is the nature, the direction, and the strength of that
Mediterranean wind to him who has come up to church under the plague of
his own heart and under the heavy hand of God? You may be sure that
Boanerges did not lecture that Fast-day forenoon in Mansoul on Acts
xxvii. 14. We would know that, even i