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THE PREACHER'S INNER LIFE efficiency by going from one year's end to another without a holiday or a hobby, as though it were glorifying God to ignore the Master's word, "Come ye yourselves apart, and rest awhile." Equally mistaken is the absorption which consists in shutting oneself off from life, dwelling remote from the common interests of market, street and home, out of touch with the crowding cares and hopes and joys and agonies that mould the lives of men. The condemnation of that attitude is that it is downright inhuman and terribly unlike Jesus. But the fact remains that the servant of the evangel—more than anyone else, more than scientist, artist, composer or man of affairs—must be possessed, heart and mind and soul, by the momentous enterprise that has laid its compulsion upon him.

It would be unnecessary to emphasize this, were it not that slackness is such an insidious peril. This common sin has beggared the rich promise of many a ministry and blunted the cutting edge of its spiritual power. The very conditions of a minister's work—which put into his own hands the control of his time and the ordering of his days—impose a peculiar responsibility. If he fritters time away in idleness, if he squanders in desultory reading of the newspaper and magazine reviews those precious morning hours which ought to be rigorously safeguarded for wrestling with the Word of God, if when Sunday comes he offers to his people sermons shoddy with lack of thought, he damages his troth to Christ and dishonours his high calling. He proves himself to be culpably impercipient 195