THE MINISTERIAL OFFICE.

TEACHING FROM HOUSE TO HOUuse.

In a former Number, we turned the attention of our readers to the two-fold duty of a Minister, as mentioned by St. Paul, when he says to the elders of Ephesus, I taught you publicly and from house to house. We endeavoured then to urge the great importance of public instruction, to put it forward as the most pressing duty of a Minister; and we called upon all our clerical friends to prepare themselves diligently for its effective performance.

We said, at the same time, that we, by no means, meant to slight the other part of the sacred office. We felt, fully, its great importance, its crying necessity, and our language was, these things you ought to do, and not to leave the others undone. We desire, then, to offer a few remarks upon the duty of teaching from house to house; and to urge upon the Ministers of the Established Church, the obligation of not merely instructing publicly from the pulpit, those who attend the services of the Church, but of visiting, rebuking, and exhorting personally, the several families. within their cures. We wish to recommend the duty of private universal intercourse of the pastor with every individual within his parish, as far as it is practicable and we would further urge the duty and the necessity of more than pulpit instruction to those of a Minister's flock, who are in the habit of attending the public services of the Church. A Minister's public instruction must be general in its nature, suited rather for the universal wants, and the average condition of the bulk of his hearers, than directed to the particular cases of the different individuals composing his congregation. If a Minister preaches with effect, his sermons will produce enquiry and anxiety amongst his hearers; according to their different turns of mind, a state of spiritual light with different effects, will be produced. The same sermon may create alarm in one, and administer comfort to another. It is by private intercourse that the Minister will be enabled to correct any erroneous impressions, strengthen any serious convictions, and administer any needful consolations; it is by personal intercourse that he will be enabled to judge of the effects of his weekly discourses, and how far they are understood and attended to. It is thus he will learn what peculiar errors exist among his people, which he should confute; what temptations they are particularly liable to, against which he should guard them. Unless a Minister becomes personally acquainted with his congregation, he throws away all the advantage of his stated connection with a particular parish; he has no more means of preaching suitably to the wants of his hearers than any stranger that might come to them. The daily visits of a Minister are the most effectual means to win the affections of his flock, to predispose them to attention on the Sabbath, and to open their ears to all that he may deliver from the pulpit.

It is recorded of the pious Philip Henry, that he kept up a monthly conference in private from house to house, in which he met the more knowing and judicious of the parish, and they discoursed familiarly together of the things of God to their mutual edification, according to the example of the Apostles, who, though they had the liberty of public places, yet taught also from house to house. That which induced him to set up and keep up this exercise, was that by this means he came better to understand the state of his flock, and so knew the better how to preach to them, and pray for them, and they to pray one for another. If they were in doubt about any thing relating to their souls, that was an opportunity of getting satisfaction. It was likewise a means of encreasing knowledge and love and other graces; and thus it abounded to a good account.-Life of Philip Henry in Wordsworth, p. 169.

But other more important reasons weigh with us in pressing upon the Ministers of the Established Church the duty of teaching from house to house.

Wherever a Minister confines his exertions to his pulpit, or limits his weekly visits to those for whom he is interested on account of their attendance at his church, he will always leave in his parish a mass of unapproached heathenism; a large body of his people who profit nothing more by the ministry of the gospel than if they lived in an heathen country. A minister should reflect that his mission is not only to those who have some care for their souls, and some value for the ministry of the word, but to those also who are most indifferent, and therefore on that very account most in danger. It was the principle of the Saviour's mission that he came to seek and to save the lost, so should the minister of Christ's religion seek out that he may be the means of saving those who are lost. He is, as Paul said to the elders of Ephesus, to take heed to all the flock over which the Holy Ghost has made him overseer. He is bound by his promise at his ordination to use both public and private monitions and exhortations, both to the sick and to the whole within his cure, as their need shall require and occasion shall be given. Until this principle shall be fully acknowledged and firmly acted upon, it can never be said in any parish that the Gospel is preached to every creature, or that the population of the parish receive the advantages which a local Established Ministry is calculated and intended to convey. Without a conscientious and unceasing attempt thus to carry the Gospel to every soul within his cure, no Minister can have discharged the duty of his office. It is not surely by preaching with ever such fidelity and zeal only to those who are attracted to the church, that a Minister can be said to take heed to all the flock over whom the Holy Ghost has made him overseer. It is not thus that he will acquit himself of the responsibility imposed upon him by the awful words of the Lord to Ezekiel: "Son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel, therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me. When I

say unto the wicked, wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou doest not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood will I require at thine hand. Can a watchman be said to warn the wicked of his parish from their way when he leaves those who are so ungodly, so wicked that they neglect even the form of public worship, without sounding in their ears one word of reproof, one expostulation, one invitation of mercy; when he allows those within the boundaries of his parish to live and to die without hearing from him the sound of the Gospel.

Baxter, in his Reformed Pastor, says,- "that which is less understood and considered is that all the flock, even each individual member of our charge must be taken heed of, and watched over by us in our ministry. To which end it is presupposed necessary, that (unless where absolute necessity forbiddeth it through, the scarcity of pastors and the greatness of the flock,) we should know every person belonging to our charge. For how can we take heed to them if we do not know them. All the flock being thus known, must afterwards be heeded. One would think all reasonable men should be satisfied of this, and it should need no further proof. Doth not a careful shepherd look after every individual sheep and a good schoolmaster after every individual scholar, both for instruction and correction? and a good physician look after every particular patient? and good commanders look after every individual soldier?, Why, then, should not the teachers, the pastors, the physicians, the guides of the Churches of Christ, take heed to every individual member of their charge? Christ himself, the great and good shepherd, and master of the Church that hath the whole to look after, doth yet take care of every individual. "When a Minister seriously reflects upon his duty on the one hand, and the spiritual wants of his people on the other, he cannot but assent to the justness of such remarks as these which we have quoted. He must admit the principle, however defective he may be forced to own his practice. In another part of his book, Baxter thus expresses the penitent feelings of his soul for his defects in this which he so well states to be his duty. "The God of mercy pardon me, and awake me with the rest of his servants that have been sinfully negligent; I confess, to my shame, that I seldom hear the bell toll for one that is dead, but conscience asketh me, what hast thou done for the saving of that soul before it left the body? There is one more gone to judgment, what didst thou to prepare them for judgment? And yet I have been slothful and backward to help the rest that do survive. How can you chuse, when you are laying a corpse in the grave, but think with yourselves, here lieth the body, but where is the soul; and what have I done for it before it departed? It was a part of my charge, and what account can I give of it? Oh! Sirs, is it a small matter to you to answer such questions as these? It may seem so now, but the hour is coming when it will

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not seem so. If our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts, and will condemn us much more."

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Whilst none can deny this universal andindividual responsibility which attaches to a Minister of a parish, we have seldom seen a parish in which it appeared practically to have been acted upon. Unless it be especially guarded against, there is a tendency to neglect those who are inclined to neglect themselves, while there is a pleasure in offering instruction to those who value it, and seek it for themselves. A Minister is naturally led to feel complacency at the numbers that attend his Church, and not allow himself to think of the numbers that absent themselves from it; he is pleased with the sight of the many children that he is enabled to collect for instruction; but spares himself the unpleasant reflection of the many that are trained up in ignorance and vice. He calls over, perhaps with pleasure, the long list of names of those who attend his school, and notes for reproof, those who are occasionally absent: but he has, perhaps, made no roll of all the children that ought to attend; and so he overlooks, entirely, those who habitually absent themselves from his offered instruction, and are as much out of the way of deriving profit from his ministry, as if mountains or seas separated them from the land of nominal Christianity. There is no writer that appears to have seen so clearly the Minister's duty in this respect, and to have expressed it so forcibly, as Dr. Chalmers. We shall support our view of the subject, by making a large use of his judicious and enlightened remarks: Christianity," says he, (in a sermon preached in St. John's Church, Glasgow,) "proceeds upon the native indisposition of the heart to its truths and its lessons; and all its attempts for the establishment of itself in the world are made upon this principle. It never expects that men will, of their own accord, originate that movement by which they are to come in contact with the Gospel. And, therefore, instead of waiting till they shall move towards the Gospel, it has been provided from the first, that the Gospel shall move towards them!" Again, he says, "how can they believe," says St. Paul, "without a preacher, and how can they preach except they be sent ?" To make sure this process, there must be a juxta-position between him who declares the word, and them who are addressed by it: but to make good this juxta-position, the Apostle never imagines, that alienated man is, of his own accord, to move towards the preacher; and therefore, that the preacher must be sent, or must move towards him." The same excellent author, in his "Christian and Civic Economy," very forcibly demonstrates-that the great excellence of a religious establishment above all dissenting bodies, consists in the facilities it affords for thus introducing Christianity to those who are not seeking it for themselves. "It is, perhaps, the best among all our arguments for a religious establishment in a country, that the spontaneous demand of human beings for religion is far short of the actual interest which they have in it." "It is not with the aliment of the Soul, as it is with the aliment of the body; the latter will be sought after the former must be offered

to a people, whose spiritual appetite is in a state of dormancy; and with whom it is just as necessary to create a hunger, as it is to minister a positive supply. In these circumstances it were vain to wait for any original movement on the part of the receivers: it must be made on the part of the dispensers; nor does it follow, that because Government may wisely abandon to the operation of the principle of demand and supply, all those interests, where the desires of our nature, and the necessities of our nature, are adequate, the one to the other, she ought, therefore, to abandon all care of our interest, when the desire on the part of our species is but rare, and feeble, and inoperative; while the necessity is of such a deep and awful character, that there is not one of the concerns of earthliness which ought, for a moment, to be compared to it."

This we hold to be the chief ground upon which to plead for the advantage of a religious establishment. He contrasts so well the system which flows out of the circumstances of Dissenterism, with the facilities afforded by the circumstances of an Establishment, that we are tempted to express our sentiments rather in his forcible language than in more feeble terms of our own: "We have not yet heard of any Dissenting Minister in towns who assumed to himself a locality for the purpose of its moral and religious cultivation. We think that it would greatly add to the power of his ministrations, if he did so. But as the case stands, his pulpit operates on the neighbourhood, chiefly as a centre of attraction and the people move in the first instance towards him, instead of him in the first instance going forth among the people. We can see how he can form his congregation out of the free disposition for Christianity that there already is in the place; and in this way how Dissenters have in fact rendered this important service to the nation, that they have retarded the decline of its religious spirit and character. But we do not see in their system what the forces are, by which the nation can be recalled from the declension into which it has actually sunk. We do not see how it is likely that many will be recovered and brought over from the side of practical Heathenism.

The pulpit of an Established Minister may be turned into a centre of emanation. Instead of having a merely attractive influence, which can operate only where a taste for Christianity exists-there may, in the person of him who fills it, and in virtue of the peculiar advantages which we have just explained, go forth a per. vading influence, which may be made to spread itself through every portion of the space that he occupies, and be reiterated upon it at short intervals, and with successive applications. He and the auxiliaries with whom he stands associated, may keep up an incessant locomotion among the families, and they will scarcely meet with one solitary exception in the way of a cordial and universal welcome. The ideas of rest, and stillness, and stagnancy have long been associated with an Establishment. But the truth is