ight if the post were suddenly to
sound his horn at your side on your way home from church? I can well
believe it would not be your own minister. I have known fathers and
mothers in this congregation to send for other ministers than their own
minister when terrible trouble came upon them, and both my conscience and
my common sense absolutely approved of the step they took. Five students
were once sitting and talking together in a city in which there was to be
an execution to-morrow morning. They were talking about the murderer who
was to be executed in the morning, and about the minister he had sent for
to come to see him. And, like students, they began to put it to one
another--Suppose you were to be executed to-morrow, for what minister in
the city, or even in the whole land, would you send? And, like students
again, they said--Let each one write down on a piece of paper the name of
the minister he would choose to be beside him at the last, and we shall
see each man's last choice. They did so, when to their astonishment it
was discovered that they had all written the same minister's name! I do
not know that they all went to his church every Sabbath while they were
young and, well, and not yet under sentence of death. I do not think
they did. For when I was in his church there was only a handful of old
and decayed-looking people in it. The chief part of the congregation
seemed to me to be a charity school. And I gathered from all that a
lesson--several lessons, and this among the rest--that crowded passages
do not always wait upon the best pastors; and this also, that a waft of
death soon discovers to us a true minister from an incompetent and a
counterfeit minister.

3. Writing to one of his correspondents about his correspondent's long-
drawn-out deathbed, Samuel Rutherford said to him, "It is long-drawn-out
that you may have ample time to go over all your old letters and all your
still unsettled accounts before you take ship." Have you any such old
letters lying still unanswered? Have you any such old accounts lying
still unsettled? Have you made full reparation and restitution for all
that you and yours have done amiss? Fore-fancy that you will soon be
summoned into His presence who has said: "herefore, if thou bring thy
gift before the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught
against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way;
first be reconciled to thy brother, and