Straining after Popularity.
By Dr. Plumer
THE lack of piety shows itself in our day, in straining after popularity. One is truly popular by the force of his talents, and the fervor of his piety; another, because he seeks it as a main end. Between these there is a wide difference. One is simple and solemn; the other is magniloquent and affected. The one impresses by his thoughts; the other by his manner and words. The one attracts by the solemnity and power with which he presents and applies Divine truth; the other by his newspaper notices, his quaint subjects and texts, his odd illustrations. The one wins converts to Christ; the other, admirers of himself. The one preaches boldly the doctrines of the cross; the other withholds or modifies them lest they should offend, and blunts every arrow lest it should penetrate, emulous only of the reputation of a popular preacher! How many and sad are the lessons taught us by the history of the church, as to the great evils arising from an unconverted ministry! How sadly the Jewish church suffered from false prophets! It was an unconverted apostle that betrayed the Lord of Glory! For how many ages were the boasted successors of the apostles the vilest of men? And how, even now, in Germany, the lowest infidelity is decked in the robes of the ministry; and in England, the merest worldling, because second or subsequent sons of the gentry, are promoted to church benefices; and how, in communions regarded as evangelical, an unsanctified ministry are prostituting the order and ordinances of God's house to the purposes of superstition, and to the supplanting of a spiritual by a formal and ritual religion. Piety, then, is the first great, essential element of a true minister of the Gospel. Without this, a preacher is but sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. He is a minister only in the technical sense of the word.---Dr. Plumer.