necessary as sowing; that is to say, the land must be stirred and prepared for the seed.  In heavenly husbandry there are some well-meaning folk who would dispense with the plough, and preach faith without repentance, but only to find that the birds of the air get most of the seed!  If there is to be an abiding work there must be conviction of sin, and knowledge of guilt, and for this end there is nothing better than a plough, made of Sinai steel and wood grown on Calvary.

There are some directions given in the Old Book which it will pay our ploughmen to study.  One is as to the choice of the team.  Don’t yoke an ass with an ox (see Deut. xxii, 10).  In your motive power see to it there is no mixture of vanity with duty.  You will not succeed in concealing the fact.  A donkey is one of the worst of animals to hide.  It will talk!

Let there be no stopping at home because the wind is in the east.  “The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold.”  If the ploughman means to succeed he must count on suffering; and if the devil cannot find anyone on his side to oppose, he will raise up some imbecile Christian to

do so, who by some sneer or cold criticism, will try to keep the plough idle.  Instead of looking which way the wind blows, get to work.

There must be no looking back.  Mark the Master’s words in Luke ix, 62.  Keep your eye on the mark, just as the ploughman looks at the staff he has fixed as his guide.  Keep looking unto Jesus.  Many a preacher, who could make hell tremble for its own, has, by looking back, become respectably commonplace.  So the fine promise of his youth dies ignobly, and is laid in the grave of Demas!  Whether it be a bag of gold, or a fair face, or a pillow of down, thou art called to look back upon, do as the Master did—set thy “face toward Jerusalem.”

Keep a good heart on it.  “He that ploweth should plow in hope.”  What is called success does not mean reaping only.  The plough is as honourable as the sickle, though they may not make a feast, or dress thy team with flowers!  Whistle at the plough, and in time thou shalt be bidden to the harvest supper.  John Baptist was a ploughman, and that was all; yet there are some reapers who would gladly exchange places with him, badly paid as he was.  In these days too often the honour is paid to the successful evangelist, and those who ploughed and sowed are forgotten; but the time is coming when the promise shall be fulfilled—

“The ploughman shall overtake the reaper.”

IV.  A SHORT HOME MISSION SERMON.

“The Iron did swim.”—2nd Kings, vi, 6.

Did It?  Then Sunken Things May Rise.

The axe had fallen into the river, to the great sorrow of the man who had used it.  He was an honest man, for he mourned over the fact that it was borrowed.  “It has sunk to rise no more;” and yet it swam!  Why lose hope of the fallen and degraded?  They are no lower down than the axe head was when at the bottom of the Jordan.  “The iron did swim.”  How? for

SUNKEN THINGS DO NOT RAISE THEMSELVES.

If the axe had been let alone, it might have been at the bottom of the river now.  The man who felt its loss called on a higher power than his own.  He told his sorrow to one who had sympathy for him.  Do we cry unto God about those who have sunk out of our reach?  The lapsed masses, as we call them, were not all born so.  Many of them have been Sunday scholars, and some of them church members.  How do we feel about them?  Does the thought of their degradation ever bring an “alas!” from our hearts?  Elisha’s God is nearer to us than the prophet was to the man who lost the axe.  “Call on Him while He is near.”

“The iron did swim.”  How was it done?

Somebody showed it the way.

An example was put before it.  A stick was thrown in, and the iron imitated it.  O, the power of a godly example! 

Let us who work among the ungodly show them the way to live.  Let the churches move over the places where the degraded lie.  We shall never lift them while we remain in our beautiful churches and chapels.  Only this week we saw the iron made to swim, by the personal contact of ministers and well-dressed people taking hold of the street folk, and cheerily inviting them into God’s house.  A man may be only “a stick” when in the pulpit; but in hearty personal dealing with the degraded, he may be one who can make the iron to swim.

* * * * *

“LIVE IT.”

A good man, the other day, was advising Ministers to preach more on the doctrine of “Entire Sanctification.”  One of them replied,

“Let us live it, that is the best way to preach it.”

Perhaps both were right; one thing is certain, that the way to make the doctrine more popular is, to have more of those who believe it to “live it.”  We might greatly increase the number of preachers, for every Christian might preach.  Women as well as men, we might preach every day, for every duty would be a pulpit, and every trial an oration.  No one would complain the sermons were too long; for all people are willing that you should never cease to do them good.  What say you reader!  Will you enter the ranks of this Ministry?

V.  THE BATTLE OF THE BEANFIELD.
2 Samuel, xxiii, 11, 12.

What a picture is here!  A field of ripe beans, just ready for the harvest, and then the leaves and pods all blood-stained or trampled down!  Those Philistines liked to fight rather than to work, preferring plunder to ploughing, so they would cross the border and carry away the results of the farmer’s toil.  But they made a mistake in coming where Shammah lived!

He Stood!

Have not many of us to complain that the enemies of God’s people still like to plunder our harvest fields?  How Satan grasps at our elder scholars!  He is not content with gutter-children.  He likes to take our young men and women, and so we hear drunken men quote scripture, and bloated women hum psalm tunes!

What shall we do?  We read, “The people fled from the Philistines.”  Shall we leave the results of our Sunday school work in the hands of the enemy?  Is it not time that we made a stand?  The thing is becoming monotonous, so much so, that in some places it is thought not worth being grieved about, that the young men and women, who have passed through our schools, never attend the chapel, and are lost to us for years, if not for ever!

“Soldiers of Christ arise!”

If a lad enlists, and is sent to Aldershot, we soon put the chaplain on his track, and shall we not do something for those

who are carried away by those sons of Anak which we call the theatre and racecourse?  Would it not pay us to have a holy band of men and women to hunt up our lapsed scholars, and to fight for the harvest we sowed and have waited for so long, only to see it carried away by the Philistines?

In all our large towns there are neighbourhoods where the enemy of God and man is strongly entrenched.  And yet