d furnished with weapons
keen of temper and sharp of edge, is bearing down upon them in compact
phalanx.

We know what it is to have sat for many years under ministers who,
possessed of great popular talent and high powers of original thought,
gave much time and labour to pulpit preparation. We know how great a
privilege it is to have to look forward to the ministrations of the
Sabbath,--not as wearinesses, which, simply as a matter of duty, were
to be endured; but as exquisite feasts, spiritual and intellectual,
which were to be greatly relished and enjoyed. And when hearing it
sometimes regretted, with reference to at least one remarkable man,
that he did not visit his flock quite so often as was desirable--many
of the complainants' sole idea of a ministerial visit, meanwhile,
being simply that it was a long exordium of agreeable gossip, with a
short tail-piece of prayer stuck to its hinder end--we have strongly
felt how immensely better it was that the assembled congregation
should enjoy each year fifty-two Sabbaths of their minister at his
best, than that the tone of his pulpit services should be lowered, in
order that each individual among them might enjoy a yearly half-hour
of him apart. And yet such, very nearly, was the true statement of the
case. We fully recognise the importance, in its own subordinate place,
of ministerial visitation, especially when conducted--a circumstance,
however, which sometimes lowers its popularity--as it ought to be. But
it must not be assigned that prominent place denied to it by our
standards, and which the word of God utterly fails to sanction.

It is, though an important, still a minor duty; and the Free Church
must not be sacrificed to the ungrounded idea that it occupies a level
as high, or even nearly as high, as 'the preaching of the word.' To
that peculiar scheme of visitation advocated by Chalmers as a first
process in his work of excavation, we of course do not refer. In those
special cases to which he so vigorously directed himself, visitation
was an inevitable preliminary, without which the appliances of the
pulpit could not be brought to bear. Philip had to open the Scriptures
_tete-a-tete_ to the Ethiopian eunuch, for the Ethiopian eunuch never
came to church.

But even were his scheme identical with that to which we particularly
refer, we would say to the young preacher who sheltered under his
authority, 'Well, prepare for the pulpit as Dr. Chalmers did, even
when