the gospel cannot cope. There are not wanting pulpits which can give the best of all proofs that their power is equal to the occasion. Be it ours to increase the number.

We are conscious that no set of rules can be laid down upon this subject that will apply equally to all cases. What will lay hold of one man may prove altogether powerless upon another. A certain course of reason or appeal brought to bear upon a mind in a special condition will, under God, arrest that mind and lead it to the Saviour. In the same pew or in the same family another will remain as unimpressed as if no effort had been made to reach him; he is differently constituted mentally and morally, he occupies a different position, and though you try a whole lifetime to impress him as you impressed the other, you will fail; that path does not lead to him, and you will never reach him by it. All men do not lie on the north of Calvary, nor all on the south, nor all on the cast, nor all on the west,-every side is peopled by them. One brother may be very successful in preaching Jesus eastward, for the Master has sent him in that direction, but if you adopt his method maybe you will find yourself holding the cross, not before but behind those among whom you labour, for they are lying westward. Another has to deal principally with those who are northward, another with those who are southward, and in every congregation some will be found who shift to all points of the compass like the wind, and with as much uncertainty. No one can say to another therefore "Do so and so, and you will find that plan at all times successful." While recognising this fact, however, we believe there are some things which will do much to help us in this work.

First, endeavour if possible to ascertain the cause of their indifference. Depend upon it there is a root to the matter somewhere. They were not always in that state. All men are naturally depraved, but special hardness is circumstantial, it has come upon them in the course of life. Get acquainted with them, and by degrees you will discover through what avenue it entered. You will doubtless stand astonished at the various ways by which the malady gains access to human hearts; let that astonishment only increase your diligence. One thing which makes the physician worthy of his title is his aptitude to trace an evil to its source. Quacks and bunglers slash only at the result, and wound and kill instead of healing: the physician enquires, examines, and stops not till he has ascertained the primary cause. Do likewise. Be a physician in the field; your work is too important for bungling. The case before you is a bad one, a bad one of long standing, and one perhaps which has been rendered worse through improper treatment. Good but unskilful souls have applied external remedies, they have shaken the head at him from a distance and driven the disease in, whereas what he wanted was some one to go down to him Samaritanlike to listen to his story. Many a man has been left down there as if he were an associate of thieves, when in truth he was their victim. That young man away there in the gallery whom nothing seems to touch; get acquainted with his history, and you will find that from early childhood his own parents robbed him of the proper treatment. There is one who has been hardened by companions. There is another who is dead set against religion because of the sour, unattractive manner in

which some about him have displayed the gospel. This one gave himself to pleasure, and this one to getting gold; probably every case has some peculiarity which distinguishes it from every other, and to reach that case you must find out that peculiarity.

That done, strike at once at the root. Take the wanderer back to the point where he went astray, and show him wherein and how he was misled. Let him know that you have discovered his secret. The most careless will hardly remain indifferent to that. The very fact that you have traced his indifference to its source will in nine cases out of ten arouse curiosity; he will become curious to know how you reached the truth, or if he can give a shrewd guess he will feel a personal interest in listening to what you have to say upon the subject, and in such moments you will have a good opportunity to make some of those home thrusts which have so often proved successful. Take back his thoughts to that bend in the river of his life where he suffered himself to diverge from what would have led him on to safety, and show him the unreasonableness of his career from that standpoint. With such a man that style of address will sometimes prove far more arousing than anything that can be said to him as from the cross. He has never been to the cross; but he has been there, and he will realize a sort of home feeling in listening to the voice which hails him in that direction. Let it not be supposed that we do not believe in calling men "across country" to the Saviour; we can and do glory in the fact that such a call has proved among the most successful which we have given; but we are dealing now with those who have shut their ears to that, and who must therefore be approached in some other way. What we want is to see them thoughtful and impressible. This they were to some degree at one time, and if we can get them back to that we shall begin to have hope of leading them to salvation.

Do not

Having found and pointed out the evil, act the part of a wise physician, and apply the main remedy at once. Preach salvation to them forthwith, full, free, immediate, and through Jesus only. hastily conclude that all this is known already. Circumstances are frequently happening, even among those who listen to your voice, which prove that this is not so completely realized as you sometimes think. Many such hearers know far less of the plan of salvation than is supposed, and those among them who are versed in the theory are not accustomed to make a personal application of it. Go and do for them what they will not do for themselves; show the adaptation of the Saviour, and press him home upon them as their only hope. What if some Athenian hearers happen to charge you with repetition. The physician does not wince at that. Does he not glory in it. "That only testifies to the value of my prescription," says he. "Evidently I have hit the proper remedy; and I prescribe it again because experience tells me that nought else has power to cure." So in the case of these careless ones, we are not like men in doubt. Proofs positive and negative rise around us everywhere that this and nothing else can rectify. For eighteen centuries experimentalists have crowded the moral surgery, but with what result let embalmed corpses and bleached skeletons testify. They have beautified the face of death, but only with rouge, which has caked and crumbled beneath their touch, while

all along others have gone forth with the words of Jesus, and seen multitudes raised to life through the preaching of the cross. Whitefield dispensed no other medicine; Wesley used no other balm; all the mightiest reapers in every age who have severed the careless from their deep-rooted indifference and laid them in penitence before the cross, have reaped with that sickle only. Sharpen it, modernize the shape, do anything to facilitate its application, but first, last, everywhere put that to the front. Bound to succeed it is, for the Master says so, and he who applies it rightly and falters not shall see the careless fall before it yet.

Use common sense in applying it. Because the draught is good do not say it does not matter how it is administered. It does matter, and if you do not look to it you will find some cases in which it will matter a great deal. Patients are not all alike. Some do not mind how the thing is given, but offer it to others in the same way and they will become so annoyed by your manner that they will reject it forthwith. You may think them fussy, fastidious, foolish, but you will gain nothing by that; suppose they are fussy, your medical man thinks the same of some of his patients, but see how he acts when he finds them in danger. If you watch him by the sick man's chair you will probably think him the most fussy of the two. "I am afraid that man will die," says he, "I must take care that nothing is done to put him out ;" and he suits his address and everything else to the man's condition. Paul says, "I am made all things to all men that I might by all means save some." Judging from his Epistles there was not much about his style that need offend even the most fastidious, but he had too much common sense to say, "Suit or not suit, it is all one to me." If by suspending his own style for awhile, and taking up what was practicable in theirs he could reach them, he would do it, because he was a man of common sense. You may think your style a good one, it probably is; but some of those whom you wish to reach think more of theirs than of yours. Suppose you vary the thing occasionally by adopting what you can in theirs, it may happen that, like Paul in that way, you will be the means of saving some of them.

Preach rationally. Some men have become hardened against religion through a mistaken idea as to what religion is; they grew up in an atmosphere which hung like a fog over everything human, as if all that was human was to be thought of with a sort of November shudder. Those who had the moulding of their earliest thoughts about eternal realities were good people, no doubt, but they were afflicted with the propensity of viewing everything outside their creed through the hazy spectacle of narrow-mindedness. until their manner made those about them hate the very name of religion. "They have been taught," says Timothy Tidcombe, "that human life is a humbug; that everything which delights man as man is vain and sinful; that their great business is to be saved, and that they are to be saved only through learning to despise everything earthly, and this they feel to be irrational." This is all too true. Everywhere you will meet with men who have been driven to carelessness by that very process. Counteract the evil, roll back the prejudices which have thus shut out the truth; preach Jesus to them as the Man as well as the Maker; take them to

the marriage feast in Cana of Galilee, and to those happy gatherings in the open meadows, where with a joyous heart the Saviour distributed to the multitudes the bread which perisheth; picture religion as he pictured it, as opposed only to what is mean and sinful, and as embracing all that is joyous and real. If the man has been brought up in a fog, the letting in of the true light may startle and perhaps savingly

arouse him.

Lay hold on current events. You have to deal with those who swim with the stream; fish for them in their own waters, attach a saving power to that which in itself is only secular. There are many instances on record of careless ones who have been caught with guile; all unconsciously they have swallowed the gospel bait, while to their thinking they were being merely fascinated by some striking scene in the panorama of social life. If we had nothing else to justify such a course, that itself would be argument sufficient, but we have apostolic authority for so doing. The Twelve were so thoroughly alive to this that they frequently made it their text-book. Peter stood up and preached one of his most powerful sermons, taking for his text the accusation that he and his fellow disciples were drunk, and as soon as he had finished about three thousand of the most careless that ever lived came and asked what they must do to be saved. Paul went to Mars' Hill and saw men bowing before an altar "to the unknown god," and forthwith he took up their theme and preached Jesus through it. Christ was always doing this sort of thing. The fallen tower of Siloam was not lost sight of by the Saviour. He pressed it into his service, and preached about it in such a way that men could not think of it again without thinking of what he had said about it. These things are the food of the careless: mix up the gospel with them. When startling events occur such hearers throw wide the door of their attention, and if we are wise we shall try to pass in with the crowd. Such preaching will, of course, be called sensational; be that our glory. Read the Bible, and find if you can the chapter which speaks highly of the preaching which produces no sensation.

Vary the time and character of your appeals so as to come upon them unexpectedly. Do not always preach to saints in the morning and to sinners at night. No doubt the Lord's people should begin the day with a feast, but if they are of the right sort it will be just as much joy to them to hear what is called a gospel sermon as to hear one preached from Isaiah xl. 1. And if they belong to the queer sort who do not like gospel sermons, and who stop away in the evening that they may not hear them, you are bound for the good of their souls to give them a turn now and then when they least expect it. If the hardened know just at what time in the day he may expect you, the chances are that he will add an extra bolt to his indifference about that time. A sermon arranged under two heads, to be preached, firstly, to the saint, and secondly, to the sinner, may, under certain circumstances, be the very best way of putting it; but he who should adhere to that always would soon find it labour in vain to preach the second part. Many among even the most careless will listen attentively enough till they think it is coming home to them, then gradually they will subside into that listlessness which turns off all appeals. Do as nature does in

April, send down a shower sometimes in the midst of the sunshine; take a short cut to the man with your hands full of the joys of the ransomed, and amid the trees which are "planted by the rivers of water; "let the cry be heard, "The ungodly are not so." Let the first word sometimes be a warning, or an entreaty. Few subjects will fail to offer opportunity for this, and in treating some of them thus you may take the sinner by surprise.

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So far as it is practicable make personal appeals: seed sown by the wayside frequently brings forth a better harvest than that which is sown among the pews. A word spoken privately will perhaps succeed where a thousand sermons have failed. "Dr. Wisner asked a drink of water at a farm house one day; a young lady brought it to him: while holding it in his hand he spoke to her about the 'Living Water.' Many years after the two met again. I have cause to bless God,' said the lady, for those words which you spoke to me then, they led me to the Saviour." Harlan Page, coming early to a prayer-meeting, found a stranger sitting there, and politely spoke to him. The conversation went on until the man who had said, "Christians had always kept him at arm's length" was melted into penitence. "On the last day of the year '67," says Dr. Cuyler, "I met a man of fifty in the street and I said to him, Hadn't you and I better begin the new year with a new life;' that single remark resulted in his conversion." A careless hearer being told of a certain professor who spent his evenings at the public house, excused his own worldliness by saying, "I am no worse than he, you see." The minister heard of it; meeting him on the road soon after he said, "Do you think there is any truth in the saying, 'Every tub must stand on its own bottom '?" " No question about that, sir." "Well then, my friend, what becomes of that excuse of yours which you built on the inconsistencies of Mr. So-and-so?" The truth went home, and shattered the false refuge there and then. All cannot do this with the same ease and readiness, nor is it at all times practicable. Whenever it is, try it. You are naturally diffident perhaps, but, brother, God can make use of your very diffidence; men will see that it costs you something to do it, and, it may be, will value it all the more.

Exercise caution in such approaches. As a rule private conversation with such hearers should be strictly private. Few people like to be singled out before a whole roomful, and taken to task while others sit by and listen; especially do they dislike this in the presence of relatives. Of course, if you can never catch them alone you have no alternative but to get at them in the presence of others; do that rather than do nothing, but if possible get them by themselves. In all times of sorrow, and sickness, and bereavement, let them see that you have a delicacy of feeling which makes you susceptible to the claims of their position, and yet that you have a yearning for their safety which no delicacy can destroy-a yearning so deep that it makes you watch anxiously for the first opportunity that alone in the sight of God you may beseech them to be reconciled. The arrow speeds none the worse, nor is it less likely to take effect, through being held upon the string till the proper moment. With this, be in downright earnest. Lukewarmness never aroused a careless sinner, and it never will. It is of no use to try moral homeopathy on such souls as theirs; like will not cure like in their case. You