1.I 17. Professional Association

Professional Association.

Beware of an exclusive association with your kind. It is a good thing for ministers to meet together to cheer and instruct each other, but there is danger that they will fall into such exclusive professional sympathy that they will see everything from a ministerial stand-point. It would he of great value to ministers if they saw all the themes that they discuss with the eyes of common men of the wicked and the abandoned, of the weak and the strong, of the learned and the unlearned, of working-men, of meditative women, and of little children. On every theme which the preacher handles is turned the thought of ten thousand men in the community around him. It were worth his while to reap their harvest-fields as well as his own.

But, chiefly, this universal sympathy with humanity is valuable because it produces a larger sympathy and a more generous manhood, and reinvigorates those elements in the preacher which ally him to his kind, and from which he is to derive one great element of success.