1.F 11. General Hints

General Hints.

After faithful and constant practice in such a place as this, you will after a very little time begin to make fewer and fewer mistakes, and you will be able to bear more and more work. You will be able to do more creative work after this preparation, and to make the most of your resources. You will also learn how to handle men and things, and you will be determined upon success in your work; in other words, it will make a man of you.

Let me tell you one secret: that a strong country church is a position of very much more influence than nineteen out of twenty city churches. City churches are more nearly like wells than anything else. They have their own little circle, and outside of that nothing. Country churches are like rivers.

They are collected from far-distant regions, and run a great way. Then again, in a city, three or four churches only are conspicuous and popular, and the rest are comparatively unknown. Keep out of the city as long as you can. Do not aspire to so-called great churches and great places. Go into rural neighbourhoods. Begin your ministry with the common people. Get seasoned with the humanity and sympathies which belong to men; mix with farmers, mechanics, and labouring men; eat with them, sleep with them; for, after all, there is the great substance of humanity. You will get it in its purest and simplest forms there. You will have time to grow and strengthen yourselves. Your bodies will grow wholesome. Your brains will grow strong. Your nervous system will get tough, so that if ever God opens the door and calls you to a more difficult sphere, you can till it, and do twice as much work with more certainty and with more success than if called to the larger place in the beginning of your ministry.