Page:Heralds of God.djvu/202

HERALDS OF GOD of the deep spiritual needs and longings of those whom the great Shepherd has committed to his care. He has never heard the inarticulate crying of the hungry flock: "O refresh us, travelling through this wilderness." He is the hireling who careth not for the sheep.

What right (to put it no higher) have we to speak to the labouring and the heavy-laden, if we are not ourselves as busy as the hardest toiler amongst them? Common decency ought to tell us that to stand in a pulpit on Sunday, and presume to instruct in the things of God men and women who all the week before have been beating us in simple faithfulness to duty, is a mockery and a sham. Rudimentary as this consideration is, it nevertheless calls for emphasis and plain speaking. Beware the professional busy-ness which is but slackness in disguise! The trouble is that we may even succeed in deceiving ourselves. Our diary is crowded. Meetings, discussions, interviews, committees throng the hectic page. We are driven here, there, everywhere by the whirling machinery of good works. We become all things to all men. Laziness? The word, we protest, is not in our vocabulary. Are we not engrossed from morning till night? Do we not conspicuously spend our days under the high pressure of an exacting life? But God, who searches the heart, knows how much of our outward strenuousness is but a rationalization of a latent slackness. What does it all amount to—the whole paraphernalia of good works and religious machinery—if there is lacking the intense concentration on the message which is to deliver men's 196