it was burdened with such tropic growth of pine? Friend, you know the mountain never guessed it wore a burden. It was mountain. The art of being a mountain, then, is the large achievement. Burdens become it as light becomes the sun. I think we must all be impressed with the ineffable sea. It never tries to hold hulks of ships, nor swim white squadrons, nor toss gray sea-going craft on wave crests as if they were bubbles born of the sea. It is a sea, and it does all this as a painter might paint in his sleep and not know it. It is no effort for the sea to lift waves in spray and thunder music up against the ashen clouds. It is the ocean. To such as are oceanic, oceanic moods are natural and effortless.

In preaching we always assume that the man is called of God and of man to his unapproachable office. And to such a man the question of a sermon will be the question of the man. Every soul comes to his effort under limitations, gropingly, as Samson came to Dagon's temple pillars. But stature of soul is not a fixed fact. It is a fact depending on him whose soul it is. To be bigger than we were is always a possibility. And so it comes to pass that a given sermon is the preacher to date. The sermon is an act, and to this act the preacher brings himself; all of himself; the acquisition of his years. As Grant brought to bear on his campaigns, which are so great as to have passed into the pride of all Americans, the maturity of his life, so the preacher does. The sermon is the man finding exposition for his soul. When the sea tides crowd shoreward they fill the river beds and bays and crystal creeks and crowded harbors; marshes where the glistering grasses wave funereal pennants drive far inland, where men may never have looked upon the sea; the sea-tides do such fathomless things because they are the sea at tide. The preacher floods the souls of men. and women and floods dry channels of the heart, brings wonder and reason to the brain, unseals the fount of tears, wakens drugged conscience from its stupor sleep, hammers against the brazen doors of obdurate wills; the preacher does this because he is a sea-tide from God's great sea. But in the proportion of him who is the channel of the rising of the tides of God do the tides drive in. A growing thought could not have said yesterday all it says to-day, for the palpable reason that it was not yesterday what it is to-day.

One thinks it might have given a man a lightning stroke to have seen Webster, the thunder-bearer. Even his printed words give a sense of a vast personality giving way to itself. We feel the man. The might of him makes room. His words are not so much studied up as they are let out. I feel the same with Wesley. His soul ran streams as the mountain does, and for like reason: he was mountainous. Heaven swept his uplands and his mountains with its sea winds. He had grown great with God, and his writings are not manufactured, therefore, but outflowings. They were channels for his overflow of soul. A sermon is not a piece of carpentry, but a piece of life-a spacious heart, a spacious brain, a spacious sympathy talking out loud. A great preacher like Paul fashioned himself, not his speech, and then, so great did he become, he sat down and extemporized the thirteenth chapter of Corinthians to an amanuensis; extemporized the sweetest poem ever written save the Shepherd Psalm. So he did with the Resurrection Chapter, which wings away in serene ether where eagles with their tawny wings could not attempt to soar. But on Paul's forehead was no drop of sweat: he had grown the wings, and it was fun to fly. A palace lit up by night glows with many lights because it is manywindowed. A hovel would have shone with but a single light because it was but single-windowed. A palace-souled preacher will blaze with lights, only not with stellar but with solar lights. A great life telling a great truth-this ought to be a definition of a preacher delivering his message. Prior to knowledge we would be morally certain that God would so arrange that his messengers would be endued with the preacher gift by as much as they were endued with his spirit. An appeal to experience will show this view to be bootless, very bootless. God apparently will not allow a possible perversion of his spirit. He will not let his enduement take the place of possible industry on the part of man. A preacher is God-endowed, but he is also self-endowed; and a preacher-man's business is to amass a life of cubic dimensions to the end that he may evoke the great power and utter the great word. Does not this version make being a preacher a sublime business? "Preacher, what are you doing? Are you getting up a sermon?" And his answer, "Rather, by God's grace, I am constructing a man."

Working on your sermon, brother?" "No, working on the preacher." Power can be put to almost any use. Steam can lift rocks, plow fields, dredge harbors, generate electricity, cross continents or seas, build ships or locomotives. Preachers are power which can be put to similar divergent uses. Power is the thing. Be big, and we can do.

What, then, in the light of this is a preacher's task? Plainly this: the amassing of a great self so as to have something worth while to give. To donate an empty purse is little worth the trouble; nor is there any beneficence. The preacher's business is not to amass a fortune, but to amass a self and then distribute that self. The sermon is the preacher up to date. All his life flowers in what he is saying at a given time. No man can say bigger than he is. He can borrow big phrases and tell them, but their vastness is not his. When a planet swims into the sky it grips other planets solely in proportion to its bulk. Gravitation works directly as the mass. So does the preacher. He must have bulk. He must have greatness. And the preacher in amassing himself engulfs earth and history and beauty, and chemistry and theology and nature, and astronomy and science, and the age and the ages, and the Book and books, and man and God. He is not engulfed by them, but engulfs them. He is hard at work making a soul with large intent to utter a great truth. To have heard Isaac Newton talk would have been like wrestling stars down and making them reveal their secrets. His wonder was his intellectual bulk. He did not struggle to utter high thoughts, he had them in solution in his blood. For Coleridge to sweep out wide and far as a comet in his shining career was natural as the falling of a yellow leaf. What was in him spoke. This engulfing power is the preacher power. He must be like the sky, which contains constellations, milky ways, ether, air, humanity, all physical things. Spaciousness is the word. Nor is this amassing self and engulfing such tremendous territories as I have named a skyey performance, futile as sweeping sea waves back. To let the universe sweep into his soul, this is a preacher's business. He will not master all. That is not his function. He is to be open to all. He is to be as one who rejoices in sunsets; who watches for them all. He does not understand them,

he looks at them. He who looks at the sunset with an attractive gaze will get out at least a part of their wistful wonder. Shakespeare was all eyes. Nothing whipped past his window that he did not see it and mark it. No man can read much. No man can think much. No man can deal much with science. No man can wear astronomies other than on his breast. No man can compass history. No man can get at much more than the coastline of the vasty continents. But he can be hospitable to all of them. He may be on speaking terms with all of them. He may hug them against his breast with a tenderness like a mother with her babe. He may stand at the soul's doorway and invite the universe, "Come in and stay." "Make wide my life, O God!" is his clamant call, which never fails to catch the attention of the God of souls. He is at home with poets and imaginations, with statues and gardens, with children and men, with women and love, with struggle and passion, with the flax all but quenched and with the high resolve that concludes obstructions to be but blowing dust through which mankind may wade unobstructed. He is at home with the light of dawns and stars and moons, with stars and poetry of human souls, and wastes of sea waves and winds and brute force of the storm, and the more brutal force of temptations which attempt to slay the soul. He knows the symptoms of things. He walks with the throng and loves the throng he walks with. The afterglow hangs in his sky all the night through. The glow is always in his heart. The ages walk past his door, which is never shut. In his days and in his dreams he sees angels and has talk with God. He is not a novice, but a master. He feels like wrestling with the great sea and thinks he could wrestle it down. The age, he engulfs that, but is more concerned in the ages. This is where we miss. We talk as if the spirit of the age were the superior quest. It is not. The spirit of the ages is a Niagara, fleet, tremendous, unhinderable, unthinkable. In it are God and man. The spirit of the age is a hand print; the spirit of the ages is a nail print.

Man and God, these the preacher has by heart. What a blessed luggage they are the folks for whom God died and the God who died for folks! The wideness of the world of ground and sky is on such a man. He walks in radiancies like a perpetual dawn.

He talks with God, and God talks with him. And when this preacher comes to a Sunday in his journey through the week people ask him, "Preacher-man, where were you and what saw you while the workdays were sweating at their toil?" And then of this preacher we may say reverently, "He opened his mouth and taught them, saying," and there will be another, though lesser, Sermon on the Mount. And the auditors sit and sob, and shout under their breath, and say with their helped hearts, "Preacher, saw you and heard you that? You were well employed. Go out and listen and look another week; but be very sure to come back and tell us what you heard and saw." That will be preaching. Such a man will be big enough to get to places he cannot see. And that is the thing needed. Almost anybody can get to ports visible, but the ports that lie across the world and under it, that lie below the edges of the sky washed by an unknown sea, those are the ports which are difficult and dangerous, and in voyaging to which is shipwreck. The invisible ports-the preacher will know the way to them. This summer I was in the tall mountains and making` journey toward a snowy peak, and in my goings I lost sight of the summit for which I made my quest. I was in the swirl of the mountains, as I have had around my boat on boiling seas the swirling of the tortured waters. I had no compass. I was guideless and alone. I had no knowledge of this region, never having touched that mountain range before. But I knew that the mountain stream knew what its source was, and where. Its plunge of murmuring waters, clear as air and cold, as not long run from deep drifts of snow, seemed to say, "We are from the snow crest you saw." And I trusted to the stream. I climbed along its windings mile on mile, amidst grim rocks, along smooth ledges, under the shag of incense-making pines, over frightful bowlders, in dark and narrow canyons, up slippery rocks tilted toward the patine of blue sky-so I toiled, trusting to the stream, hunting for the mountain's snow-white top. And need I say I found the white snow crest? The stream knew the way to its hidden source. So the preacher must know the way to the Hidden Source. He must trail tendencies. He must keep to the main stream and the rivulets he must pass, only giving them a glance, but the stream he must