despairing, the labourers at home and abroad--"_Life_, Lord! We need
life in our souls, life in our duties, life in our minds, life in
our families, life in our teaching and hearing, in our working and
praying, life in all and for all!"

All our clergy constantly need a revival of genuine life,--life which
no parishioner might be able to define, but which, if there, every one
would soon perceive. It would be felt in every home like the breath of
spring, experienced beside every sick-bed like a touch of healing, and
be heard in every sermon like a voice from heaven. Oh, what a
heavenly gift to himself and others would this be, and what a time of
refreshing from the Lord! And how many would share the blessing,
now hindered, perhaps, by his own unbelief and satisfaction with
indifference. For though "dead" ministers may in some rare cases have
succeeded in saving souls, we never heard of living ones who had
in every case failed. God has ordained that a living ministry--the
preaching of those who utter what they themselves _know_ from personal
experience to be true--shall be His most powerful instrumentality for
converting the world. We believe, accordingly, that every minister,
whose own soul became alive, would soon find that his life was
_contagious_, and that his living spirit would tell upon other spirits
in a way never before realised by him. That indescribable impression
made by a genuine Christian character, which never can be successfully
imitated, would exercise a marvellous influence upon all with whom he
came in contact; and if he had one sorrow for life, it would be
the remembrance of the dark and horrible time when he was a mere
formalist, dead to the eternal interests of his own soul and the souls
of others.

Again, What _parish_ does not stand in need of such a quickening? Few