THE work of the gospel minister, according to Paul, is to "preach the word," to "reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine." But in these days ministers are expected to preach only those things which will please and interest. A writer in the Christian Weekly compares the popular church to a boarding-house, and thus remarks:— "Some persons seem to regard the church as a gospel boarding-house, a place where they are to get their spiritual meals, and all they have to do with it is to go up, on one day in seven, to be fed. They pay their pew-rent on precisely the same principle they do any ordinary board-bill; and having done this, they think the full measure of their responsibility is met. They further claim the right to criticise the service, to grumble at anything not suited to their taste, to reject the spiritual food set before them, and even to change their spiritual boarding-place when the fare is not precisely what they like, or is not served in the style they deem best. They attend church to be suited; they pay their money for a desirable equivalent; they purchase their gospel as they would a meal of victuals; they demand what is pleasing to themselves; and they pour out their censure upon the minister who fails to comply with, and satisfy their terms. "What is this but turning the church into a gospel boarding-house and treating the services of the sanctuary as mere boarding-house fare? And in doing so it takes away all the sanctity of worship and robs the church of its beauty and its strength. No wonder that the church of to-day is so powerless for good and fails in accomplishing the high purpose of its mission. Boarders oftentimes add nothing to the home beyond the money they pay in, while they may make the house disreputable by their ill-behavior, and destroy the peace of the home with their fault-finding and censoriousness. Would that the church had more true members and fewer boarders."