Where people come together voluntarily for mutual improvement, the local circle is of very great advantage, and the more local circles we can have the better, and the more you attend the local circle the better for you. Any effort you put forth to establish a local circle is worthy of praise. Again, small local circles are better than large ones. Where there are six persons who “take to” each other, who work easily together, they will do better work than a large circle. Where there are fifty members in one place it is better to have four or six circles than to have one, with a monthly general meeting. In the local circle, to repeat what has been said before on this platform, avoid all long lectures and all long essays. If you want a popular lecture, get a popular lecturer. If you want a scholarly lecture, secure a scholarly lecturer, and give all the benefit of it to those who desire it; but do not attempt to burden the ordinary local circle meetings with elaborate lectures. A local circle should encourage conversation, which is the action of many minds in expression. To have one person say it all will not benefit all as much as to have all say something. Have five-minute essays where you must have essays: conversation rather than essays where you can have conversation. This may be embarrassing to begin with, but the embarrassment is easily overcome as you awaken an interest in the subject. Let a question be thrown out; ask who can answer it. “Well,” says one, “I think I can answer it.” What a benediction to a local circle is some disputed question in the hands of members who “do not care a penny what anybody thinks,” but who “speak right out,” good grammar or bad grammar. Perfectly at home themselves, they try to make everybody else at home. When a local circle simply becomes a conversation on the appointed topic, you have the very perfection of a meeting. A Methodist class-meeting that becomes a simple, informal, spontaneous conversation on a religious subject, without any “tone” put on at all, is a profitable class-meeting. So it is profitable to have study in a class where the teacher becomes a member of the class, and guides without reins in sight, drawing out the convictions and movements of every mind and of every tongue for half an hour, illustrating something from every mind, from every tongue, until they say: “We didn’t have a recitation to-day, we had a little conversation,” and everybody spoke and thought, and out came the thought, and speech which a formal teacher would have brought about through recitation and blackboard outlines, and all that. The simple conversation, in the interest of the result, in which everybody participates, is the highest style of teaching; and to have that, you want one ruling mind; and blessed are you if you have some one to undertake and direct that conversation.