For the preacher like the rest of men may become enslaved to things and powers material. "Where there is no vision the people perish," and of vision, in the larger sense, the preacher may share the general poverty. After all, even he belongs to the age into which he was born, and it needs qualities that are none too common to resist the influences of the times and of environment. Beside all this, are there not personal experiences in the lives of all of us which make it hard to keep our eyes upon the stars? We think of the local preacher spending his week in the market or behind the counter, in office or mine or factory or in the field wrestling with Nature for the bread that perisheth. We think of the minister often worried, almost distracted, by "the care of the churches," by the crabbed foolishness and miserable jealousies of contentious men and women. We must remember that for many a preacher life is not a May Day festival, but a question and a struggle. Surely the wonder is _not_ that sometimes the man in the pulpit speaks in a minor key, but that, under all the conditions of his life, we hear from him so much of the higher music as we do. The memory comes to us as we write of a man who preached the Gospel for years with the cruel disease of cancer gnawing at his vitals. We can recall others who came to proclaim the golden year from domestic circles blighted by the debauchery and vice of children but too well beloved. Did these men sometimes speak falteringly, and with hesitation, the message in which they asked and promised glorious things? Did they, from the very darkness of the clouds lowering above them, see only the lower slopes of the Mountains of the Lord? Who could wonder? The preacher is but a man! Yes, the preacher is but a man, and as a man finds out something else:--That, after all, it is not out of his experiences of life, nor from the influences of his time, nor from both together that the greatest hindrance to altitude of tone in his preaching arises. As a man _is in heart and life_ so in some degree he preaches. The call of the Gospel is to perfection, and the perfect man is not yet, though many there are, even in these days, whose lives are a constant and noble struggle to reach this far-off mark. Is it strange that sometimes a preacher's own failure to gain the wished for heights should cause him to put before others possibilities, not, indeed, according to his own low level of attainment, but still far below those he is sent to declare? Living on low levels means inevitably preaching on low levels, though, as a man's preaching is derived from higher sources than are found in his own soul, his call to others ought always to be of higher things than he has, himself, attained.