us deliver to men, and then how He would have us work for Him in His vineyard. We are told by the Evangelist Mark (iii. 14) that when Jesus appointed His twelve apostles, it was first that they might be with Him, and then that He might send them forth to preach. And surely we may believe that we who are the successors of the apostles as the evangelizers of the world have been called like them first of all to be with Jesus and only then to go forth to preach. It may not be without significance that out of the fourteen or fifteen qualifications which, according to the Apostle Paul, must unite in order to fit a man to be a bishop, only one requires an intellectual preparation. The bishop must be “apt to teach.” But aptness to teach is only the beginning of his fitting. All the other requirements are rooted in his moral or spiritual fitness.
I am not going to lose myself in a vain—perhaps worse than vain—inquiry as to which of the three lines of preparation I have hinted at is the most essential. Why raise a question between three lines of training, each of which is essential both in itself and to the proper prosecution of the others? If intellectual acuteness will not of itself make a man an acceptable minister of Christ, neither will facility and energy in practical affairs by themselves, nor yet piety and devotion alone. The three must be twisted together into a single three-ply cord. We are not to ask whether we will cultivate the one or the other; or whether we will give our chief attention to the one or the other. We must simultaneously push our forces over all three lines of approach, if we are to capture the stronghold of a successful ministry at all. Doing so, they will interact, as we have suggested, each to secure the others. Do we wish to grow in grace? It is the knowledge of God’s truth that sanctifies the heart. Do we desire a key to the depths of God’s truth? It is the Spirit-led man who discerns all things. Are our souls in travail for the dying thousands about us? How eager, then, will be our search in the fountain of life for the waters of healing? Is the way weary? Do we not know whence alone can be derived our strength for the journey of life? There is no way so surely to stimulate the appetite for knowledge as to quicken the sense of the need of it in the wants of our own spiritual life or in the calls of practical work for others. There is no way so potent for awakening a craving for personal holiness or for arousing a love of souls in our hearts, as to fill the mind with a knowledge of God’s love to man as revealed in His Holy Book.
The reciprocal relation in which the several lines of preparation for the ministry stand to one another, supplies me with my first
