It is
considerations such as these which make me say sometimes that the
danger in the Army is not in the direction of magnifying, but rather
of minimizing the influences that are carrying us upward and outward
in every part of the world.
But in our own estimation there is another reason which perhaps equals
all these for calculating upon a wider development of the Army's
future influence. During the last twenty years we have been pressing
forward amongst a very large number of Church and missionary efforts.
Our speakers have notoriously been amongst the most unlearned and
ungrammatical, and therefore often despised, while so many thousands
of university men were preaching and writing of Christ. But no one now
disputes the fact that the old-fashioned proclamation of the doctrine
of Jesus Christ as a Divine Saviour of the lost has largely gone out
of fashion. The influence of the priest, of the clerk in holy orders,
of the minister, has been so largely undermined that candidates for
the ministry are becoming scarce in many Churches, just while we are
seeing them arise in steadily increasing numbers from among the very
people who know the Army and its work best, and who have most
carefully observed the demands of sacrifice and labour it makes upon
its leaders.
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