they who read much and think much; by which I mean men of wide general culture and profound thought; men that will study the art of preaching both as to matter and manner, with no other motive than that they may be able to save souls. There are many reasons why this must be so. No greater compliment can be paid a man's intelligence than to say he is a thinker. But a carpenter is not always an architect, though both be thinkers. The difference is one of culture. Thinking is like fire: it needs fuel. The more fuel the greater the warmth, the brighter the light. Thinking is conditioned by the amount and the variety of material gathered into the mind's work-shop. That many work-shops are turned into mere store-houses does not count against the need of material for thinking.

The material gathered from the area of but a single life's experience may have been sufficient to produce a thinker; the thinking may even be clear and intense, but it will be too narrow to be wise or trustworthy. Thinking that shall benefit a city must be based on a clear perception of the needs of the whole city, not alone on those of the individual thinking; thinking that shall benefit the state must be from knowledge at least commensurate with the state lines; thinking that would benefit a nation must spread out the map of the whole country; thinking that would benefit the world cannot afford to despise any knowledge.

Now, this last is what we set out to do. It is for this reason that we need the broadest culture that education can give, coupled with the profoundest thought that the mind is capable of. That our thinking at present is shallow is best evidenced by the fact that we fail, sometimes ignominiously, to control matters and things in a very narrow precinct.

My next question is: What is thinking? Before I attempt an answer, let me show you the thinker at

work as compared with the mere gatherer of thought.

The first goes to nature and trusts rather his own eyes and ears than books; the second will climb to the top shelf of the library, fight his way through cobwebs quivering with busy spinners, seize hold of a dustbegrimed book on zoology-all for no other purpose than to find out how many legs a spider has! If the first be appointed to lecture, or to write an essay, he prepares the skeleton of it and takes stock of his mental material. Thus he discovers at once wherein he will need to read further or observe more accurately. But the second, if given such a task, asks immediately: Where can I find something on it? And this will be true of him, even though it be a matter in which he is supposed to be better informed than anyone else. He distrusts his own powers of observation and thought, and well he may as one who has leaned on others all his life. Other eyes have looked for him, other ears heard, other imaginations conceived, other minds composed and written, and his work has been chiefly to transfer bodily to his own mind the finished product on the printed page.

Books are the end of argument to him. "It is written" is his guide, and he applies it as well to books in general as to Holy Writ.

The thinker also uses books, but only to get the material for thought. He so far distrusts the material thus found that he will read many authors, so as to be positive of the data from which he reasons. Books are generally a lengthened tissue of inferences. For every conclusion whose premises are given, ten are baldly stated without reasons. These ten he might accept, as does his unthinking colleague, without question. Surely it would save time and mental effort. But his mind is too vigorous. Having developed a sharp set of mental teeth he cannot bring himself to feed on hash.

"What brought the author to this conclusion?" he asks. "I will call up the facts again and try them over." Often he proves these conclusions wrong, and learns thereby to distrust the generalizations of other men. And even when conclusions are found to be just, this retracing the history of a thought proves most excellent for mind discipline, and yields him pleasure second only to the original finding of thought. So, too, his mind grows in another direction; for the habit of seeking out the springs of human thought leads naturally to the searching after reasons for divine thought, as expressed in revelation. And this is the very essence of true philosophy-thinking the thoughts of God after Him.

Another distinction is to be noted between the thinker and the gatherer of thought in the habits they form. The thinker, pausing as he does to verify the important conclusions of his author, finds that he can read but few books during a year, hence he is exceedingly jealous of the company he keeps in the library. Books trashy, frivolous, illogical, re-hashed, his mind instantly detects and rejects as unwholesome. His colleague, not having this mental guage, reads everything indiscriminately, having no other rule of selection than keeping up with the latest craze. He probably reads ten books to the other's one, but the ratio of real power gained thereby is as ten to one in favor of the thinker.

It may be remarked that the difficuly in setting the thinking faculty in motion increases with years. Especially is this true where it has atrophied through non-use while adjacent faculties are highly developed. The mental energy has in such a case cut its channel, and it is exceedingly difficult to stop it long enough to make it rise above its banks and overflow the arid regions of thought. But where the stream can hardly be said to have begun flowing in any direction, as in childhood, or where it

has spread out and dried up or stagnated, as in the great mass of stolid adults that never read nor think-it can be induced by skillful management to flow as readily through the channel of thought-making as of thought-gathering. But the volume

and force of the current will depend upon how early and how assiduously this management takes place.

But thinking is a difficult process to set going under any circumstances. Talk about laziness! For every physical drone in our communities there are one hundred mental sluggards. And the reason is not far to seek. The man that feels like shirking physical labor is driven by sheer force of shame and ridicule to work the lazy microbes out of his muscles. But what of the mental shirks? There are no such weapons wielded over them. But, then, who would wield them? A smutty face needs not fear ridicule in a coal-mine. Those who might wield the weapon are so few comparatively, as to be neither heard nor heeded; besides, their time is too profitably taken with themselves. And so it happens, the slothful in mind are received with open arms by the society that disowns the slothful in body. Received by society, did I say? Bless their darling insipidities! They are society, if my drawing-room recollections serve me truly.

But why continue the parallel further between those that think and those that let others think for them? Surely it is not necessary to prove it a desirable thing to become a thinker. It will be difficult to find people of any intelligence who, according to their own estimation, do not believe themselves already so. Perhaps not half-a-dozen readers of the CONTRIBUTOR will say, this is meant for me. Well, ask yourselves: Is my course continually upward intellectually? The thinker is never truly delighted save when going up-hill-that is, bending his mind a little harder today than he did yesterday. It is the bend

ing that gives him pleasure; and as the faculty grows more vigorous by the exercise, it requires a little harder task each day to bring the accustomed delight. Hence if you would have a man's course continually upward, make him truly a thinker. Are you such a one?

Not so with the thought-gatherer. His gait will be upward and downward as the publishers lead. Perhaps in the majority of cases, the man will end by walking the dead-level grade of the newspaper, and the woman by going the down-hill grade of the sensational novel.

Then how shall an Elder in Israel set to work to get his mind into the habit of thinking? The answer will be found in any good work on logic or psychology. The technicalities and abstractnesses of these sciences do not, however, suit the purpose I have in view, which is to assist the multitude of our preachers whom, without training leading up thereto, these explanations would only confuse. Have you a little four-year old son? Bless his bright eyes, he is the book I want. His tiny mental clock was last wound up by the angels; watch its movements if you would know how they do things in heaven. Can you find an egg more full of meat than he of the finding-out spirit? It would seem that everything he eats and drinks turns into wriggling questionmarks. And they are all alive, too. Like imps they lurk in his ears, peek from his eyes, insinuate themselves among his fingers and cling to whatever his hand touches. On every breath they float outward, like motes on a sunbeam. He was a wise man that invented the interrogation point and made it a hook! Is there anything great or small to which a child will not attach one of these little harpoons?

Now, why does the Creator thus organize the child? First of all for the child's own sake, that it may rise above its environments. But is there not sometimes a sly suggestion-as

if the angels had said: "Now if this bright soul is sent there, will he not help make a stupid father think?" Be this as it may, any father that will answer all the questions of a wide-awake son will not fail to become a thinker.

Here then is the key-note of learning to think. Be as endlessly inquisitive as a child. But, unlike the child, answer your own questions, otherwise this spirit of inquiry may lead you to be merely a book-worm.

"But suppose we cannot answer them?" Alas for the can't! One of the first messages the thinking faculty sends back on being given a difficult question is: Too much for me. Now, what will you do? I ask, what did you do when your arms and back said the same thing to the question involving a shovel and a muddy ditch? Did you heed the cry of your arms? No; had you done so your children would have cried for bread. Neither heed the cry of your brain, lest thereby you lose the bread of life. I cannot emphasize this point too strongly: hang to the question, even though apparently it be like looking into black chaos. The light will break in time. The mist is behind not in front of the eye.

Neither allow your mind to slip cogs. I remember a student coming to me for the solution of a difficult problem. "No, my dear friend," said I, "I will not tell you the solution, but will ask such questions as shall enable you to discover it. Half a dozen questions were satis factorily answered; three more, and the light would break. But at the next, she exclaimed pettishly: "Oh, why don't you tell me, do you multiply or divide?" Want of attention causes the mind to slip cogs. Cultivate such concentration that a cannon fired over your head will not make you lose grip of your thought. A mosquito will do it now, no doubt.

You may have observed potatoes, in one case growing all to vines, and in another going all to seed, leaving

scarcely enough top to locate the precious crop below. Now, men are often thinkers by halves in the same way. One man is full of questions that he cannot answer; another is full of answers that he cannot call to mind. Neither one is a thinker. But put them together, and much thought will be evolved.

How many men are like the lastable to acquit themselves clearly, voluminously, and refreshingly, if some one will but work the pump handle! How grateful they are to the man that enables them to spout thus gushingly!

But these are not thinkers. The living wells only, whose waters overflow by internal force, are worthy such a name. A cow that loses the power of raising her cud fails to thrive and grows sick; something similar to this takes place with the man who, unaccustomed to commune with himself, has lost the companionship that was wont to stir his mind to activity. The "cud" must be restored in each case or disaster will follow.

The thinker must not only be able to ask himself questions far remote from his immediate thought, but must, as the thought progresses, see at every turn of word or phrase the associations and objections that a merciless critic would see. He must in fact be his own adversary, and an unrelenting adversary; and though this adversary utters no word, yet will he heed all his objections and reply to them as if they were formally made.

In my next I shall attempt to apply these principles of thinking to the development of the sermon.

N. L. Nelson.

A FEARLESS DIRECTOR. AT the time of the great Chicago fire the governor of Connecticut happened to be in that city on a visit. He was at the time the president of a prominent fire insurance company in his State whose stock and surplus

amounted to about one and one-half million dollars. He was himself a multi-millionaire. His company had taken risks in Chicago in the district that was burned amounting to one million six hundred thousand dollars, or about one hundred thousand dollars in excess of all the property of the company;

The morning after the conflagration, while viewing the debris, he learned of the losses which his company had sustained. He immediately mounted an old barrel in the burned district, and gathering around him a number of business men who had insured with his company, told them that every dollar of their loss should be paid, so far as his company had issued policies, and he would personally guarantee from his own funds. a renewal of the entire capital so that the corporation of which he was president might continue in operation.

Such courage in business, as was thus displayed, is sure to win, and it is perhaps needless to say that the course of this gentleman in this public matter was characteristic of him in all private as well as public affairs, and made him a power in every undertaking with which he was associated. If all men who accept positions in various companies, as directors or officers, were inspired with the same feeling and would be willing to risk all their personal property on the success of the enterprise with which they are connected, there would be a less number of failures in the world. Nor would there be the same opposition to corporations and large business enterprises that is now felt. Mozo.

It is better to be silent than to say unwise or unkind things.

SEE first that the design is wise and just: that ascertained, pursue it resolutely; do not for one repulse forego the purpose that you resolved to effect.