ministers are encouraged and stimulated to aim at and attain higher
measures of good, from the abounding evidences of Christian life among
their parishioners. Many more are tempted, by all they see around
them, to wax cold in love, and to lower their standard of personal
and ministerial life,--to become quite satisfied with the every-day,
stereotyped formalism of things around them, or to submit to it as if
it were a doom. The very smile of incredulity with which the account
of alleged revivals is received,--the wonder which good men express,
if told of many being awakened by the mere preaching of the Word
in some congregation or district,--only indicates how all hope has
perished of our people over becoming what the preacher _in words_
urges them to become, or of their ever being delivered from the
torpor, the indifference, the death, which _in words_ he tells them
are the preludes of coming death eternal. Is not our hope well-nigh
lost regarding many a parish; and what but the quickening and reviving
power of God's Spirit can restore it?

And is there no revival needed in _our most living congregations?_ We
may, indeed, have cause to thank God for many signs of genuine life
within them, and for such good works as indicate a living spirit in
the body. But in the most encouraging cases we have more cause to
deplore the vast extent of the ground where the seed sown has been
carried away, withered, or choked with thorns, rather than to rejoice
in the small patches which may be bringing forth fruit. Let any
minister, as he surveys his congregation, and as he visits them from
house to house, ask himself the question, How many of these really
care about Christ, and ever pray to Him, or try to serve Him? and
making every allowance for our ignorance of other men's condition,
for the life that may be hidden from the eye, yet will there not be
innumerable evidences, _forcing_ upon him the conviction, that if the