IT There is a famous physician in London to-day who tells that when he had finished his medical course in Edinburgh he was offered an appointment for which he felt himself unfit. He called on one of the professors. " You feel youi'self unfit for it ? " said the professor ; " then you are the man for it." Paul was unfit : but " unto me was this grace given" he says, " that I should preach."
Observe, however, that there is a connection hetvjeen call and qualification. It is not enough to have the volunteer spirit. A man might volunteer to be one of a lifeboat crew, and, from incapacity, might do more harm than good, might simply be in the way of others, and would be filling a position that might otherwise have been occupied by a more capable substitute. When a prime minister is forming his Cabinet, he does not throw open the positions to the whole Houses of Parliament, and say. Who will undertake the ofiice of Chancellor of the Exchequer ? who that of Foreign Secretary ? and so on. No, he has in his mind's eye certain members whom he thinks best qualified, and he goes to them and invites them to join him. The call comes to the best qualified. When that call came to Isaiah, it seemed to be couched in general terms, and to mean, Who among mankind will go ? But remember, it was only Isaiah, and not all mankind, that heard it ; and though the question is put by God in a general sort of way, yet all that it meant was simply this, " Shall I send you ? Will you go ? "
3. Perhaps the duty seems too hard. Duty is always hard.
1. It would not be worth doing if it were not difficult to do. The mission upon which Isaiah was sent was hard enough
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for any man. The late Lord Salisbury came back from Con- stantinople, in the old days of black disaster in the East, to tell lis why he had failed to achieve a single reform. " The Turkish officials," he said, " simply have not the capacity to understand what we mean." It was just so with Isaiah's countrymen. They had lost the capacity to understand what he meant. But however hard it is to go, it is harder not to go.
Idlers all day about the market-place
They name us, and our dumb lips answer not,
Bearing the bitter while our sloth's disgrace. And our dark tasking whereof none may wot.
Oh, the fair slopes where the grape-gatherers go !
Not they the day's fierce heat and burden bear, But we who on the market-stones drop slow
Our barren tears, while all the bright hours wear.
Lord of the Vineyard, whose dear word declares Our one hour's labour as the day's shall be,
What coin divine can make our wage as theirs, Who had the l ..nikg joy of work for Thee ?
2. And there is a Promise with every Call. It is (1) a pro- mise of Pardon, so that we may go unhindered by the guilt of sin. It is (2) a promise of Purification, so that we may go unham- pered by the presence of sin. Tied to habits of evil we are as a ship fretting her sides against the wharf. She finds her true life when she has cut the cords that bind her to the wharf and is out upon the ocean with the winds over her and the waters under her. And the purification comes as we go. Ten lepers were cured by Christ. He simply spoke the word : " Go and shew yourselves unto the priests." They took Him at His word. " And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed." It is (3) a promise of Power. Few men were ever more unfit for the task laid on them than the Apostles, as they gathered in the Upper Eoom on the morning of Pentecost. But they were " endued with power." If we are willing and obedient, the power will not fail us. The going develops new powers within ourselves, possibly gifts and graces we were unconscious of possessing. In any case, as our days so shall our strength be.
For seven years Dr. Thomas Chalmers occupied a pulpit and preached with splendid eloquence before he had an experience
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126 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
in his own soul of the renewing power of God, He has left on record the sad and humiliating testimony that his preaching during those years did not have " the weight of a feather on the morals of his parishioners." But there came a day when he was laid aside by illness. In this illness he saw the King, the Lord of hosts. In that vision he saw himself, and his heart was broken with contrition. The formal gave place to the vital, the professional to the real, and the whole man was transformed. He was as new a man as Isaiah was that day when he came out of the Temple. His health returned. He went back into his pulpit, and all Scotland was shaken.
IF During the Indian Mutiny a smallJBritishJiost was encamped on the ridge outside Delhi. When the news of the Cawnpore massacres reached them, the general ordered his men to attack Delhi. The doctor inspected the invalided soldiers to ascertain liow many of them were strong enough to carry arms. He passed by a sickly youth as being too frail, when the lad cried : " For God's sake, sir, don't say I am not fit foivdut^; it's onl^a touch of %ver, and the sound of the bugle will make me welT"^