(3) Then, thirdly, to carry out this great task we must know our people one by one. Here is a great difficulty. A parish priest may have ten thousand people in his charge, but how difficult it is for him to know each one! He must do it--though, of course, partly through others. He must have a system. I do not think a parish priest ought ever to be wholly inaccessible to any part of his parish. He must have his curates working for him, but the priests who work with him must have a system by which the vicar himself will know when he is wanted. I am sure every parish priest feels that he must be ready for any emergency. It is not easy to escape from councils and committees, but he should be ready with the surgeon's knife whenever he is wanted all over his great ward. He must not leave it wholly to anyone else, so long as he is responsible. In order to know the people, he must be up to the last day of his life a visitor. I hold it to be an absolutely wrong view of the pastoral office to say: "I can sit in my cassock in the church, and the people know where I am, and they can come to me if they like." Of course, it is a very good thing to have times when we shall be in church, and when the people will know that we are there. There is (let us say) the daily service at a time which everybody knows; they can catch us after the daily service, and see us as we go away. We make it known we shall be pleased to see them after Mattins and Evensong. And we have a time before the great festivals when they can come to prepare themselves for the great services. All that is wholly to the good. It is good for the house-surgeon to have a place where his patients can come and see him. But something else is wanted. He must be ready to go out and see them when they are ill, and find out what is the matter with them. What should we think of a physician who had always the same regimen and the same medicine for everybody? It used to be a joke, I remember, at a great school at which I was, that the doctor gave us all the same physic. It was no doubt a libel on him. But certainly such a method would be a fault in the case of the spiritual surgeon; souls would die under such treatment. We have to ask ourselves: Are there any patients dying under my hand, in my ward, because I have not taken the trouble to really heal them, because I am not going down deep enough, because I am not finding out what is the matter with them, because I am not really acting the part of physician, still less that of a celestial surgeon?