London has gained and Manchester has lost Dr. Parker. Already he has made himself no stranger in London. To many his “Ecce Deus” has commended itself as the work of a vigorous thinker, and all have confessed that his “Springdale Abbey” was full of very clever talk. No ordinary preacher could have written such books, that was clear. In Manchester he had become a success. How came he to be such? Partly I have explained the reason. In the first place, in an age of doubt, of negative theology, of blinding and bewildering speculation—when between the so-called Christian and the Cross in all its eternal lustre has risen up a fog of gloom—when the Gospel of unbelief and despair has come into fashion, so that when we listen for the shout of psalm or the holy exultation of prayer, we hear instead “An agony Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills All night in a waste land, where no one comes, Or hath come since the making of the world.” Dr. Parker has a living faith. And then again he has a deep sense of what the pulpit requires, and an unmitigated scorn of that kind of preaching which is too common there. “Almighty God has to tolerate more puerility in His service than any monarch on earth. If Christianity had not been Divine it would have been ruined by many of its own preachers long ere this. The wonder is, not that it has escaped the cruel hand of the infidel (it can double up a whole array of crazy atheists), but that it has survived the cruel kindness of its shallow expositors.” Whose language, you ask, is this? Why, Dr. Parker’s own. The preacher who can thus censure his fellows is bound to guard sacredly and constantly against that which he condemns, and to come to his pulpit with every feeling attuned and with every energy aroused for its gigantic work. Give to such a man the requisite brain and tongue, let him have the requisite delivery, let his lips be touched by that spirit which “Touched Isaiah’s lips with hallowed fire,”