8 



The same is true of the Legal profession. At the present 

 time the rapid increase in the number of law students and 

 law practitioners, is truly alarming. But we are somewhat 

 relieved of the fear of any serious consequences when we re- 

 flect that not one in a thousand will ever make a decision that 

 will go down to posterity as the basis of law. The trouble is 

 found in the fact that there are too many limbs of the law for 

 the parent stock. 



The Sacred calling or profession furnishes no exception to 

 this rule. We have started out from the wrong premise when 

 we have acted as though we thought the morals or the salva- 

 tion of our communities depended more upon the number of 

 our religious societies and teachers, than upon their character 

 or quality. Consequently we have built more churches than 

 we can pay for, and crowded dwarfs into their pulpits who do 

 well enough in reading their little essays and in taking up the 

 usual collections, but have no conception of the nature of 

 their calling, or adaptation to the work of visiting the sick, 

 of comforting the mourner, or of instructing the people in 

 the awful science of life and death, and fail entirely in lifting 

 the soul-life Godward from the low plane of worldly thought 

 and feeling, up into the purer and holier atmosphere of the 

 Heavenly. The remark holds good, that there are many men 

 in the pulpit that ought to be in the pews, and so vice versa. 



Now it does not follow of necessity, that either of these 

 characters are intentionally out of their place, or wickedly 

 pursuing a calling for which they have no fitness ; but still the 

 fact remains, that they fail of success because they have failed 

 to find the proper orbit in which God intended they should 

 move, and on this pivot turns the failure or the success in 

 farming. The principal factor in this difficult problem is the 



