am not a gospel-maker, I am a gospel preacher; I have taken the gospel as I find it, and according to my ability and opportunity I have made it known.

Be

This is the true ministry. Ministers are not self-made. very careful how you get up and say the Lord has made you a minister. Let this coming into the ministry be a matter of irresistible pressure; a question of real pain, bringing with it a consciousness of a certain degree of momentary loss, peril, a deep sense of insufficiency, and let your life express great and solemn and reverent conviction. The Lord will find his own ministers. All we have to do is to say, Lord, thrust out labourers into thy harvest. Any men we thrust out are wrong men-they are nice, very nice; some of them very nice-looking, and so quiet, and inoffensive, and childlike, and sweet, they would not make a noise in a parlour; they would never annoy any prejudice. There never was a hoary old prejudice in the human mind that could not slumber because it knew they were not talking at it, but only talking about it; so it could keep on napping and slumbering even in the Church--that famous dormitory. The Lord will find his ministers. Some of them will be rough; rams' horns will be the only instruments they have, and they will, thanks be unto God, be destitute of theological training; but how they will talk when they come; how they will chop their way through social jungles; how they will burn and denounce on the one hand, and how tender and gentle and shepherdlike they will be on the other! Meeting proud self-righteousness, they will go mad with holy indignation; meeting the outcast and the lonely and the weary and the lost, they will say, Go, and sin no more; or they will say, Arise, the Master hath come, and calleth for thee; or they will say, Return, O wanderer, to thy home, thy Saviour calls for thee. They will not be men who have certain little patent keys which alone can open certain little patent drawers in which eternal enigmas are hidden, and which can only be read by men who have passed through a certain training. God has kept nothing for scholars. There is nothing worth knowing that requires scholarship to know in the kingdom of God. Scholarship has the smallest theatre in which to operate. It is great in mines, in electricity, in biology; great in zoology, great in many

ologies; but there is nothing in God's Cross that needs scholarship. Otherwise salvation would be of works; salvation would be a question of intellectual cultivation, capacity, agility; salvation then would depend upon the mind, whereas now it depends upon the broken heart. This is the guaranteed ministry, because it is the true ministry. God will find his men. We are far too meddlesome about this matter of trying to discover men whom we can put forward into a ministry for which they are utterly unfit. Thank God the people are the judges. We may jewel these dear little watches in five holes, but if they will not keep the time, tell the time, people will soon throw them away. Blessed be God for the people!

"Now," said Amos, gathering himself together,-"Now, therefore, hear the word of the Lord." Contrast this statement with what Amaziah had said in verse II: "For thus Amos saith." Amos says, No: I did not say it-"hear thou the word of the Lord." No man must make his own sermon. No man has any right to make a sermon. He is a trickster in the sanctuary who makes sermons. He must simply stand up and say, Lord, at thy call I am here: now thunder through me, or give me the tears that are more persuasive than tempests; I am thy instrument, discourse upon me as thou wilt.

"Thou" [continueth Amos], "Thou sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, and drop not thy word against the house of Isaac. Therefore thus saith the Lord; Thy wife shall be an harlot in the city, and thy sons and thy daughters shall fall by the sword, and thy land shall be divided by line; and thou shalt die in a polluted land: and Israel shall surely go into captivity forth of his land" (vers. 16, 17).

They were awful men, the old prophets. Would God they lived now!

PRAYER.

ALMIGHTY GOD, thou dost watch our life; there is nothing hidden from the eyes of judgment, or from the vision of love: all things are naked and open to the eyes of him with whom we have to do. Thou knowest our neglect, our shortcoming, our trespass; all the innermost thought of our mind thou lookest upon as if it were plainly spoken in the words of men. Enable us to know that the eye of the Lord our God continually searches us, and may we be prepared to meet him, not in judgment, but in penitence and selfaccusation. We thank thee for thy Word, for its great boldness, for its mystery of power and majesty, and its still greater mystery of tenderness, pity, sympathy, and redeeming love. Truly thou art wonderful; such is thy name, and such thy revelation. We have heard thee roar from Zion, and we have heard thee plead with thy wayward people as if they were little children that could only understand words of love. Speak to us as thou wilt, now in this way, now that; only take not from us thy presence, and the assurance of thine interest in our lives. May we know thee to be near, to be looking on, to be taking continual notice of us; mayhap we may be awakened to higher attention, we may turn upon thee the expectation of our heart, and in some moment, suddenly coming, but to be remembered for ever, we may cry, God, be merciful unto me a sinner! And concerning each of us the angels may say, Behold, he prayeth. Look upon us in all our activities, policies, undertakings; sanctify to us all our bereavements, losses, sorrows; make us solemnly joyous, and joyously solemn, so that whatever the air may bring, vision of light, or frown and cloud of judgment, we may know that God is near, and that the Cross of his Son uplifts itself above all the tumults of time. At that Cross we bow, before that Cross we pray; it is the only way to God, to pardon, to purity, to peace. O blessed Cross, rugged, shameful, ghastly Cross, yet to become a Tree of the Lord's right hand planting, and to gather within its hospitable shade the whole universe of men, hear us when we sing, hear us when we pray, and whilst we are confessing our sins before the Cross, may we know that the Lamb has been lifted up, and that by the grace of our dying, triumphing Saviour we have been pardoned and set at liberty. Amen.

A

Chapter viii.

"A BASKET OF SUMMER FRUIT."

"Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A basket of summer fruit" (ver. 2). MOS continued his visions notwithstanding the rude and mendacious interruption of the false priest Amaziah who sent a lie to Jeroboam. Amos confronted the false priest, as we

have just seen, boldly and destructively. You cannot reply to a thunderstorm. Anything that a man may say after a whirlwind is very feeble. We have heard the great speech of Amos, as it rolled round and round the withering Amaziah like tempest on tempest. Now Amos stands up as if nothing had happened, and in one of his quiet moods he tells us that he had a vision. A sweet familiarity distinguishes the style of the prophet as he approaches this department of his revelation. The Lord is represented as calling him by name, "Amos,-what seest thou?" In the Bible there is a wonderful familiarity of this kind; often there is a species of conversation, friendly interview, domestic talk, as if the Lord had concentrated himself upon the individual in question; as, for example, "When Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and said, Zacchæus." "The Lord said unto Moses, I know thee by name." There is always something tender when our knowledge comes to a knowledge of name, especially when that name stands up as a signal of truth, honour, love, music. When we mention some names our eyes fill with tears, because they are names that have histories in them; they recall times of darkness, desolation, long nights of loneliness, or days of harvest and festival and mutual joy. The Lord spake thus to his servant; and the familiarity never interfered with the revelation. It is the familiarity of love; it is not the familiarity of contempt or disregard or indifference. There is a way of naming a person which means that you are going to whisper some heart-secret into his ear. There is an off-hand naming of men which amounts to nothing; but there is another naming which amounts to baptism, and still fuller sacrament; a masonic sign which means that heart is going to talk to heart. This was in the tone of the Lord as he said, "Amos, what seest thou?" The Lord knows what we see, but he wants us to tell him. We need not pray in the sense of endeavouring to give God information, but he likes to hear our lisping, our broken speech, our poor grammar; he takes an interest in our stumbling and blundering; he will not answer all we say because he knows we would not say it if we really knew what it meant, but he will answer that part of it which is for the soul's health and enrichment and invigoration. "What seest thou?" What wouldst thou? What is thy desire and what is thy petition? and it shall be granted unto thee,

He knows it before we begin to make any statement; yet he likes us to talk. We are educated by speech; we startle ourselves by the sound of our own voices. There are men who could not pray aloud and retain their reverence. There are other men who have the gift of praying audibly, and the gift of understanding what a thousand hearts all want at once, and they exercise that prophetic and intercessory function to the infinite advantage of the world.

Every man has his own vision of God. The vision changes. Amos saw the incoming of the grasshoppers and the wonderful work which they did amid the grass of the land; then he saw the Lord with a plumbline in his hand.; and now he sees a basket of summer fruit: and in all this he is a fool to the worldly man. We have just seen that the insincere man never can understand sincerity; the little-minded man never can comprehend magnanimity; the worldly soul can never enter into the mystery of prayer, except by such pedantic criticism as affects to despise, or at least question its rationalism and its utility. Let every man talk in his own way. There is an insanity of wisdom; there is a transcendentalism of feeling which will make its own speech, and thus affright those who live within the speech which has been made for them. It will do us good to hear all kinds of speech, and see all manner of visions; we shall be startled out of our insularity, and be made to feel that there is nothing lonely in God's universe; that the least of the worlds is a nexus, connecting us with the infinite, the boundless, the divine.

"A basket of summer fruit" (ver. 2).

Fruit was the last sign of harvest in Palestine. When the fruit was gathered the harvest was over. What, then, is the meaning of this vision of a basket of summer fruit? The meaning is that Amos saw the end. This is the crop. A basket of summer fruit was no poetry in the estimation of Amos. It was not an ornamental selection of fruits, looking upon which men would say, How lovely, how luscious, how delightful, how appetising ! Summer fruit had a mournful suggestion about it in Palestinian lands and times. "What seest thou?"The end, the gathered harvest, the upmaking of all things, the year in its results: good or bad, there it is. Can this