In this country, owing to its peculiar educational necessities, the intellectual obligations resting upon the ministry are very great. Most of the colleges and universities of the East, all of the colleges of the West, and a considerable number of its universities, are under the management of ministers. The higher teaching is becoming more and more a distinct profession, for which the ministry is becoming less and less qualified, but for one or two generations to come we may expect that the ministry will have a controlling influence in academical and collegiate education taking the country as a whole. In the training provided for the ministry this fact cannot be lost sight of. In the natural course of events a considerable number of the graduates of our seminaries will be called to collegiate work. It would be unseemly if few of them were qualified to enter upon it.

But the question chiefly concerns the practical and spiritual power of the ministry. Does the present method make good preachers and pastors? Here the contrast is drawn, by those who bring the charge of overtraining, between the English and American method. The representatives in this country of the English method are said to be more simple, more Biblical, more direct and fervid. The number of foreign preachers in the country is altogether too small for the purposes of comparison. A half dozen men drawn to leading pulpits decide nothing. According to our observation foreign preachers are interesting and effective according to their personal power. We have listened to some exceedingly uninteresting and ineffective sermons of their general method where personal power was wanting. Biblical preaching, so-called, depends like any form of Christian preaching upon the preacher's apprehension of truth and upon his sympathy with men. If there were a thousand preachers in this country trained in the English theological schools the comparison of method would be worth something. The comparison in respect to method, drawn from the success of a very few men of personal effectiveness, is worthless.

We are practically shut up in our judgment about the expediency of enlarging the range of theological education to the study of the effect of such enlargement upon the character and work of the ministry. And judging by this test we have no hesitation in saying that we believe in the moral and material effect of the wider and more thorough system. We believe in its effect upon personal character. Suppose that the college student, to whom we referred at the outset, should take the more private course of preparation for the ministry about which he made inquiry; it is evident that he would lose not a little of the moral discipline which comes from facing for one's self the questions and the problems which belong to the common thought of his time. He would be conscious of having evaded something. There is always a private, easy, irresponsible way of getting into the world, but he who takes that way does not become the master of men; he is never the master of himself.

Something is always lacking in the power of sheltered faith as of sheltered virtue. The great personal qualities, which in the long result are influential, are humility of mind, seriousness of conviction, and charity, and these qualities are developed under full exposure to the truth, and through contact with other minds in their search after the truth.

Opinions will vary as to the precise quantity and nature of the equipment for the ministry. What is a sufficient outfit for one person may be quite insufficient for another. It must be remembered that theological seminaries cover a great variety of capacity, and of mental and spiritual aptitude, as well as of practical purpose. We do not see how the courses of study could be reduced with justice to all, though we can see how the general course might be made more elastic. And it must also be considered that while the chief work of a seminary is positive and constructive, the actual furnishing of material and method, there is a subsidiary work which is critical and apologetic. Would any one really wish our seminaries to abandon this subsidiary work, to ignore the questions of Biblical and historical criticism, to put by philosophical inquiry, to refuse all attempts to adjust the church in its working ideas to the current life of the world? Let this be done, and it would be quickly seen how much this related work enters into the real equipment for the ministry.

The student who graduates from a seminary ignorant of what the Bible is, as well as of what it teaches, or of what the church is in its relation to society as well as in its duty to the individual, will find himself wanting in a most necessary preparation for his work.

We lament with our brethren, who question the present methods of ministerial training, any failure in the ministry to accomplish the full task set before it, and so far as we are concerned with the course of preparation we welcome all well considered advice, but we fail to see the remedy for any present insufficiency of result in the reversion to narrower methods, or in the reduction of the standards of a theological education.

MISSIONARY SELF-DEVOTION.

Is the Martyr Age of missions now past, and is it to be succeeded by the age of Stipendiary Missions, in which the work of preaching the gospel abroad shall be regulated as a business enterprise, evolving itself by almost mechanical methods?

Some are inclined to think that the rapid development of great civic interests, of a much deeper reach than those which were once involved, of questions affecting the inmost relations of society, is likely to draft off into civil life the strongest minds and the most heroic characters. And indeed Christendom is evidently on the dividing way of a Hercules' Choice. It will not long be allowed to remain on the narrowing ledge of semi-christianized relations which at present serves it for a resting-place, discouraging violence but allowing an urgency of private interest which

is to violence what oxidation is to combustion, corroding as effectively, without the grandeur of a flagrant destruction. It must either ascend the Christian heights whose pure air, exalting individuality, refines away from it all the grossness of greed, or else plunge into that abyss, in which the community of free brotherhood finds its infernal counterpart in the forced community of godless and all-coercing selfishness. As Dr. Roswell D. Hitchcock has said, the application of the Epistle of James, in the region of social economy, is that which alone can save our civilization, and it is that which alone can save the present fabric of our Christianity. It will, therefore, and it should, in the next generation, draw to itself much of the finest and noblest material of Christian manhood.

Nevertheless, the endeavor to realize, in every direction and in every sense, the kingdom of God at home ought not to throw into the shadow, but ought rather to evoke into wider consciousness, the endeavor to realize the kingdom of God throughout the world. The oneness of mankind, towards which all things are now working, receives its purest expression, its highest significance and the most powerful motive for its realization, in the work of the Christian missionary. We do not believe that the high wisdom which, three centuries ago, when Christendom was reeling and plunging in the shock of intestine convulsion, suffered such a spirit as Francis Xavier to wander off to India, and China, and Japan, in order to become ever since, to all the branches of our divided Christianity, a perpetual reinforcement of spiritual strength, we do not believe that this high wisdom will be withheld from the various branches of the Church of to-day.

Certainly we see thus far no lack of heroic men and heroic women Christian missionaries. Williams, and Patteson, and Hannington, and Damien, are only shining examples, which the providence of Christ has of late singled out, for more concentrated effect, of "the virgin heart of obedience," which is realized in many a hundred of the servants and the handmaids of God dispersed through all the world.

It is a good thing that the light of searching criticism, sometimes unkind enough, should be cast on every corner of every enterprise the world over. Genuineness will come out like gold; and pretense will be sloughed off. And it is as unwholesome to have it imagined that every missionary is virtute officii, holy and unworldly and self-devoted, as to have it imagined that every monk or friar is such. Besides factiousness and fractiousness, and imperiousness, and obstinate perseverance in methods barren of results, which have often been exemplified in the noblest men, the damning fault of worldly selfishness is by no means impossible. The scope of the missionary work is sublime. But of course it is not expected that every man who stands within that scope is to be sublime. In missions, as everywhere else, sincerity, sound judgment, and faithfulness, form the stock of the work. The most permanently effective missionaries, whatever sublimity of qualities may have now and then flashed out in them,

have appeared, during most of their lives, simply as faithful toilers in a most honorable, but altogether human vocation. The work of a pastor at home, so much richer in appliances, and wrought among so much more highly developed consciences and intellects, will often have a far more distinctly ideal aspect than the work of a missionary, toiling in weariness to stimulate the first instincts of regenerate life. But in reading the unpretending reports of many German and Scandinavian and Finnish missionaries, who are usually of a less highly educated class than ours, we have often been struck with their self-devotion, of which they seemed unconscious, in a monotonous and outwardly most ungrateful work. They seem also to have an instinct of finding out fields of labor, in Africa or New Guinea, from which they may be expected to be soon forced away by broken health, or soon to sink under it, yet with no more thought of making a merit of this than any other soldiers. In our British race, assuredly, there is no less of this; and the higher accomplishments, or more eminent families, of many of our missionaries, often give it more illustration, though certainly not more reality. But read the accounts of our French Protestant brethren on the Zambesi. Equal grace in a Saxon, without the unconquerable gayety of a French temperament, could hardly support him through plagues whose form varies a little, but the amount of whose privation and monotonous misery never varies, unless it be to increase. They remind us of their great countrywoman, the Mère Angélique, in her insect-haunted chamber, as she prosecuted her work of reforming the rebellious cloistresses of Maubuisson. To contend with the vices of an African king is less picturesque, but not less heroic, than to grapple with the vices of a bold bad abbess, who torments her godly friend with the help of the choicest chivalry of France. There is one spirit of self-devotion, in all lands, and in all forms of work in every land, the deeper results and apprehension of which will serve to divest the missionary work of its singularity, and to take from it the crown of imaginary exemption from human stains and frailties, but which will both deepen and widen its efficiency.

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We have been glad to note, in recent discussions of the German Parliament, that its members, most of whom have been wont to regard foreign missions with much contempt, give token that this tone of feeling is greatly changing. From all sides of the Chamber, and perhaps most emphatically of all from the Social Democrats, hostile to Christianity as they are, are heard ungrudging acknowledgments of "the ideal motives and aims" of the missionaries, of the testimony rendered by their labors " what love and patience can effect among all races of men." The imperial senators, absorbed as they are in the novel greatness of reconstituted Germany, do not imagine that it is a loss of force for Germany to send out her children to make known the gospel of God to the ends of the earth. On the contrary, they are emulously endeavoring to secure for the behoof of their own schemes of colonial empire the help of men who,

staying at home, would have been viewed by them simply as so much possible food for powder.

Considering the dazzling recency of German greatness, and the vistas of struggle opening before it and within it, certainly inferior in momentousness to none in the world, we might think that here, at least, missionary interests would be content to suffer a temporary depression of their proper force, and to become ancillary to schemes of secular aggrandizement. But we are glad to notice that the heroism and the heroes of the kingdom of God are resolute to maintain the distinctiveness of their own ends, and to stand, with prophetic dignity, against even the designs and apparent interests of their own beloved and honored fatherland, whenever these cross the essential rights of the humblest races, or the way of the Prince of Peace.

One thing is reasonably certain: men like Canon Taylor, whose natural appetency for misstatement seems to be as irresistible by himself as that of a stone for the earth, will not be apt to move the quiet toilers for the kingdom of God to follow his recommendations, and to hope for the accomplishment of great things by attitudinizing antics, and artificial austerities. The Jesuits have, once for all, shown us a better way. Francis Xavier was willing to wear what was put upon him, whether it was the dirty frock of a bonze, or the gold and velvet of a grandee; and to eat what was set before him, as the Saviour bids, whether it was a little rice, supplied out of a wooden bowl, or the sumptuous fare of a viceroy's table. In the steadfastness of his aim, and the blessedness of his faith, he had no time for posturing. The lofty austerity of Adoniram Judson's life resulted from no thought of filling out any such fantastic programme as Canon Taylor propounds, but from the intensity of his purpose. The same is seen in William Burns, in Carey, in more men and more women than any one can number up except the Captain of their salvation.

We ought not to contrast Stipendiary Missions with Martyr Missions. Peter, for himself and his family, received a stipend from the church. Paul chose rather, from special regards, to toil with his hands or to depend on precarious gifts of favorite congregations. But both fared scantly in life, and each followed his Lord in a martyr's death. "Snug gentility" is a British varnish which it is to be hoped will soon be rubbed off from the missionary work where this conceals the noble grain that is so often found beneath. And no one can disguise from himself that there is coming to be a restlessness, at home and abroad, over our inadequate, conventional, and too straitening methods. But this hardly augurs a decline of missionary heroism. It seems rather to argue a brooding sense of vaster opportunities, of more peremptory calls, and of a new venturousness of faith.