It is only fair history to set down that in sermon preparation the pastor and his pen were not always closely acquainted with each other. No two men were more different in this respect than Albert Barnes and John Chambers. Much as they loved and admired each other, their habits were very unlike. The former spent from five o'clock until nine every morning of his life in his study searching the oracles of God in languages old and new. It was his habit to throw down his pen in the middle of a sentence, or even a word, on the clock stroke. The popular preacher made light of spending too much time in the study and urged more personal work with men. More than once Mr. Chambers passed his joke with the scholar. Yet to-day Albert Barnes is still teaching the Gospel through his commentaries, in many tongues and countries, almost "all nations", after having educated a whole generation of American ministers and Sunday School teachers. On the other hand John Chambers still preaches in the lives of his disciples, in the church edifices which they have reared, in the congregations they have gathered, and in ever expanding circles of unseen but potent influence. As a boy, when Albert Barnes, aged and venerable, almost blind through his long-continued labors which had so tried his eyes, met me on the street and asked me some question as to the place and person of the funeral of a friend mutually dear, I remember with what reverence I looked up to the great scholar and the fearless champion of spiritual freedom. I realized even then the shade of difference in feeling from that which I nourished toward my grand pastor. Nevertheless, God needs both kinds of servants. The suggestions of Socrates, as to writing both on the skins of animals and on the tablets of the human heart, are in point here. The comparison made between Albert Barnes and John Chambers is much like that in the modern story of "Verbeck of Japan" and of Samuel R. Brown, "A Maker of the New Orient", perhaps, also, as the parable of the leaven in each case. These were the days of the infidel's Bible as well as the saints' Word of God, the era of King James's Version and of the old crude theories of verbal inspiration. It was on such theories and on such alone, that such unlearned men, meretricious platform speakers, and ephemeral secularists, as Joseph Barker, Robert Ingersoll, and Charles Bradlaugh could thrive. The climates, both of popular and orthodox theology and of infidelity, were somewhat different from the cosmic influences of to-day. The arguments of unfaith were, for the most part at least, the old common, shallow, and blatant ones. The theological parasites and bacilli were as harmful, and in God's providence as useful, then as now, but I think popular orthodoxy and the average pulpit furnished much of the food for the obnoxious microbes, and even made congenial "cultures" for the peculiar varieties existing then.