The history of the Christian pulpit furnishes countless parallels to this variety in God's calls. There is no fixed age or condition for God's use. While the special demands of the modern pulpit call for youth and long training, God has always called his special messengers in ways men have little thought. Many a preacher like Paul has not been taught his message of man.

Men like Basil, Chrysostom, Ambrose; Bossuet, Bourdaloue; Barrow, Jeremy Taylor, Liddon; Brooks,—had the advantage of wealth and social position, the most famous schools and teachers; while Bunyan and Spurgeon, Parker and Moody, rose like Lincoln from the undistinguished mass, not by favor of birth or school, but by the irresistible force of their own nature and vision. Spurgeon, Parker, Maclaren were preachers while still in their teens. Chrysostom began at 39, and Augustine at 36. A man may begin his prophetic work at any age. But a test of his call is his desire to make good his deficiencies. John Knox began the study of Greek at 42, and then turned to Hebrew at 49.

I think the experiences of the prophets often come as personal and practical lessons to the modern preacher. The Apostles had

the extraordinary work of establishing the infant Church, of putting the fact and truths of Christ in imperishable form. In a certain sense that peculiar work can never be repeated. But the work of the prophets is ever going on. They were identified with their people. They felt the social oneness of the community. They came from the people; they spoke to them, and their fate was involved in the fate of the nation. The prophetic office was to their age what the pulpit is to this. They spoke for God. They were the moral and religious teachers of their age. They sustained personal religion. Like a rock in the desert, to use the striking and beautiful figure of Isaiah, they kept men from being overwhelmed by the silt of the desert sands, by the drift of the evil times. Under their influence fruitful lives sprang up, and their words of hope were the shadow of a rock in a weary land. "The Lord hath given me the tongue of a disciple that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary.'

The prophets were the greatest force in the higher life of the nation. Principal George Adam Smith suggestively says, in "The Prophets as Preachers to their own Times" "Almost everywhere the prophets

began to speak to the new generations; from the time of the Reformation to our own, there never has been a city of Protestant Europe which has been stirred to higher ideals of justice and purity, without the reawaking of those ancient voices which declared to Jacob his sin and to Israel his transgression. The fidelity which sought to discover what the prophets actually meant to the men of their own time was rewarded by the inspiration of their message to the men of all times."

The calls of the prophets, from their far-away tone, may seem to us exceptional and unusual. But look through the wrappings of circumstance and I am sure we shall find the truth common to all men. The truths that made Isaiah a prophet may be the very same that call us into our work and sustain us in it. And I cannot think of an efficient pulpit living under less heavenly motives and sanctions. The called man has a vision of God, a vision of human need, and a vision of opportunity.

Some vision of God is the first element of a man's call. Isaiah was twenty years old when he had the vision of God. He was a native of Jerusalem, probably of royal birth. He knew the court and the social life of the

city. He saw the outer prosperity and devotion to religious form, but he saw also the inner corruption, the avarice and cruelty and lust of the leaders, the moral dulness and brutality of the multitude.

His

Uzziah, the great king, had been smitten by Jehovah. He lay at last dead in his palace. The young nobleman Isaiah passed with others into the chamber of death. imagination was oppressed by the stillness of the palace. This, then, was the end of greatness. The glory of man was only for the dust. He passes from the palace to the temple. He goes into the place where the Invisible and Eternal is worshipped. The forms of human pride and splendour vanish; even the ways by which man would express his sense of the Infinite pass from sight, and God alone remains. He fills the temple in majesty and glory. God is the high and holy one.

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above his head stood the seraphim; each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly, and one cried unto another and said, Holy, Holy, Holy is the

Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6: 1–3).

The glory of God, the high and holy one, the transcendent God, - that was the first message to Isaiah. That his whole life is controlled by the vision is seen by his prophecy. As all knowledge is vision to Paul, from his great experience on the Damascus road, so Isaiah is ever trying vainly to express the conception of the Eternal One. "As high as the heavens are above the earth, so are his thoughts above our thoughts."

The majesty and holiness of God are the first message. But the nearness of God is also taught. There is some slight foretaste of the graciousness of Christ's revelation, not to overwhelm the finite spirit, but to draw it to the higher. "The earth is full of his glory." And that the further message of God's nearness was learned by the prophet is shown by his words. Where else before Christ is there such expression of the particular and personal interest of God in all that concerns his creatures? "O Lord, thou art my God; I will exalt thee, I will praise thy name. Thou hast been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the