While on vacation a number of years ago, I visited a church for Sunday worship but left questioning whether I had worshipped at all. I took in the full complement of announcements, shook hands with several greeters, viewed a skit, and enjoyed something of a concert. Though a rote prayer was offered, there was no congregational singing, Scripture reading, or sermon. I left puzzled, frustrated, and with a sense of loss. I felt like I had visited a restaurant but was not served a meal.

What should a church do during its time of corporate worship? Or, perhaps better asked, why do churches do what they do during worship? These questions are necessary enough, but ask them in the typical church and they will elicit puzzled looks and confused answers.

What a church is to practice during corporate worship is not a new consideration. In fact, it was a pressing concern in Reformation Europe, and its answer continues to shape the 21^st century church.

The Regulative Principle Considered

The ordering of worship for Protestant churches has followed two general patterns over the past five centuries. Martin Luther advocated what became known as the normative principle, arguing the mass—as celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church—should basically remain intact, sans the aspects of RCC worship that clearly violated Scripture. The Pandora’s box-like openness of the normative principle—that worship is free to incorporate what is not forbidden scripturally—is its most obvious and vexing liability.

The regulative principle, advocated by John Calvin and the Reformed tradition, argued the church should essentially start over, only permitting into corporate worship that which the New Testament explicitly calls for. Over time, the regulative principle became common practice in much of the Free Church tradition, including Baptist churches.

Based upon what is specifically prescribed in the New Testament, the regulative principle includes four features in public worship: Scripture reading, corporate prayer, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, and the preaching of God’s Word.

Historically, the public reading of Scripture, mandated in I Timothy 4:13, has served as a scriptural call to worship—a reminder the church has gathered to hear from God. Often the congregation stands as it is read, showing reverence, deference, submission, and a physical reminder the Bible is the Word of God.

Prescribed in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16, singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs have always marked the worship of God’s people. The psalter served as a Jewish hymnbook, and the New Testament records early church hymns.

In I Timothy 2:1, Paul instructed the church to practice corporate prayer. Whether praying for one’s nation and governmental leaders, the infirmed, the church’s ministries, the lost, or for God’s blessing on the service, every time God’s people gather their prayers are to be offered.

In II Timothy 4:2, Paul instructed Timothy to preach the Word, explaining and applying the Scriptures for God’s people. The preached Word is one of the central recoveries of the Protestant Reformation, even effecting church architecture with the pulpit becoming the central feature of the worship center and the main course of the worship service.

Additionally, observing the ordinances are always welcome when an individual is ready for baptism or the church elects to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Moreover, the regulative principle does not preclude making announcements, greeting visitors, or collecting an offering, but it does so mindful of the worship service’s flow and where such ancillary matters are best positioned.

Biblically Faithful, Practically Helpful

While the regulative principle helps ensure the worship service is biblical, it also brings many practical benefits. As a pastor, one will often be asked for special promotions, features, or emphases to be made in the worship service. Some of these are especially cringe-worthy, sure to distract from the worship service, if not downright unbiblical. If the congregation has a general awareness of why the church does what it does in the worship service, then the pastor can point to the regulative principle as an objective criterion. This depersonalizes the denial of the request and avoids the appearance of playing favorites.

Practicing these four elements brings other benefits as well, including keeping the church in the stream of believers from previous generations. It also sets the worship service on higher ground—thus avoiding worship wars—and it ensures a certain baseline quality and spiritual vitality in the service.

This doesn’t preclude a Sunday evening concert, a Bible conference, or a service exclusively for prayer; rather, it means we might best think of those events as concerts and conferences, as opposed to formal worship services. We might also more intentionally guard the integrity of corporate worship, especially when God’s people gather on Sunday morning.

Conclusion

I once frequented a restaurant that had fabulous food, but it always seemed just a bit much. The entrée, which was hard to beat on its own, always had an added sauce splattered on the top or a garnishment protruding from the steak. The chef intended the additives to complement the meal, but they wound up distracting—and detracting—from it.

Sometimes we do the same thing in public worship. Our attempts to improve Christian worship may, in fact, distract from it. Often, less actually is more. There can be a beauty in simplicity. We might do well to de-clutter our worship services.

When it comes to the regulative principle, I am not legalistic. I still facilitate an offering, greet visitors, and make announcements. But a broad recovery and commitment to these four elements might revive our services. Let’s be intentional about our worship services and privilege these four biblical aspects of worship.

This week marks an historic occasion in the life of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. We are privileged to host Dr. John MacArthur for our first Charles Spurgeon Lectures on Biblical Preaching. Dr. MacArthur will deliver lectures on preaching in chapel on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as preach a special community service on Tuesday evening.

I am grateful for the opportunity to host Dr. MacArthur as our inaugural Spurgeon lecturer, and I am praying the week will prove not only historic for our institution, but truly consequential for Christ’s church. Why is Midwestern Seminary holding the first annual Charles Spurgeon Lectures on Biblical Preaching, and why am I honored to host Dr. MacArthur as our inaugural lecturer?

Why the Charles Spurgeon Lectures?

No name is more synonymous with preaching than Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Providentially raised up by God, Spurgeon pastored the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, England, during the Victorian Era, when Great Britain spanned the globe as the world’s leading empire—thus adding to Spurgeon’s global fame and influence. Spurgeon was a gifted pastor, author, apologist, leader, visionary, and school and ministry administrator. Yet, he was first and foremost a preacher. All of Spurgeon’s auxiliary ministries flowed from his pulpit, and his weekly sermons were transcribed and dispensed around the world. Arguably, in the history of the church, there is no name more rightly-associated with preaching in the English-speaking world than Charles Spurgeon.

Spurgeon’s global influence, famed preaching ministry, pastoral legacy, and contemporary relevance all intersect in a singular way at Midwestern Seminary. We are privileged to own Spurgeon’s library, which includes more than 7,000 of his books, artifacts, pictures, letters, paintings, accouterments, and even his desk. Midwestern Seminary is an inheritor and a steward of Spurgeon’s legacy. This is a legacy we steward not only for ourselves, but for the Southern Baptist Convention and the church at large. Central to this stewardship will be an annual preaching lectureship dedicated to Spurgeon’s legacy and to strengthening pulpits around the world.

Why Biblical Preaching?

The health of a church rarely rises above the health of its pulpit, and the strength of a church’s witness rarely surpasses the strength of its pulpit. The church—and the world—needs convictional, Christ-centered, biblical preaching. Thus, though it would be appropriate to host lectures on many facets of Spurgeon’s ministry, given the urgent needs of the church—and the world—it is especially appropriate to host lectures on preaching.

Tragically, not all are convinced of the necessity of biblical preaching. Yet, the church that forsakes the pulpit will find itself forsaken of God, and the seminary that forsakes the pulpit will be so forsaken as well. Midwestern Seminary exists for the Church. At the very heart of this mission is to strengthen the church by training preachers and teachers of God’s Word. We rightly-honor Spurgeon and best serve the church by holding the Charles Spurgeon Lectures on Biblical Preaching.

Why John MacArthur?

When it comes to biblical exposition, John MacArthur might well be this generation’s gold standard. Since 1969, Dr. MacArthur has served as pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, Calif. For nearly 45 years, he has preached verse-by-verse through the Bible, most especially the New Testament. Enter the study of any evangelical pastor and you will most likely find Dr. MacArthur’s commentaries on the shelf. Like few others, Dr. MacArthur has championed biblical exposition from his own pulpit, and through his many books and commentaries, Grace to You radio ministry, and the Master’s Seminary & College.

Throughout his ministry, Dr. MacArthur has borne the mantle of the prophet. Over the decades, he has proven a prophetic witness—calling the church to hold high biblical exposition, sound ecclesiology, the Lordship of Christ, biblical complementarity, and, once again in recent days, Dr. MacArthur has called attention to the many liabilities and dangers associated with the Charismatic movement. In a very real sense, Dr. MacArthur is an Ephesians 4:15 minister, faithful to speak the truth in love.

In fact, faithful might be the best word to describe Dr. MacArthur. Throughout nearly 50 years of public ministry, he has proven himself faithful as a preacher, pastor, evangelist, husband, father, and college and seminary president. Dr. MacArthur has served for nearly a half-century in public ministry—and more than 44 of them pastoring the same church—without even a whiff of moral turpitude or ministry scandal. Faithfulness seems in short supply these days, and Dr. MacArthur is a model of faithful biblical ministry to which a young generation of ministers can look.

Conclusion

So, I invite you to celebrate a bit of history with us in Kansas City this week. While the evening service on Tuesday is already over capacity, you are welcome to attend chapel on Tuesday or Wednesday at 10 a.m. Additionally, all services will be live-streamed and available for free and simultaneous viewing at mbts.edu.

Yet, more importantly than celebrating this historic occasion at Midwestern Seminary, I beg of you to join us in celebrating the preaching of God’s Word, to renew ourselves once more to the centrality of the pulpit, and to join me in praying that God will raise up a generation of convictional, biblical preachers and teachers of God’s Word who will thunder the truth and awaken his church in revival and spiritual renewal.

On March 13, 1859, the preeminent preacher of Victorian England, Charles Spurgeon, delivered one of his most memorable sermons, “Christ Precious to Believers,” to a congregation of over 10,000. The congregation, having long since proven too large for Spurgeon’s New Park Street Church now filled London’s largest indoor auditorium, the Music Hall of the Royal Surrey Gardens.

Impressing upon his hearers the centrality of Jesus and the imperative to preach Christ from all of the Bible, Spurgeon paraphrased a recent exchange between a sage, elderly pastor and minister in training. “Don’t you know, young man, that from every town and every village and every hamlet in England, wherever it may be, there is a road to London? So from every text in Scripture there is a road toward the great metropolis, Christ. And my dear brother, your business is, when you get to a text, to say, ‘Now what is the road to Christ?’ I have never found a text that had not got a road to Christ in it, and if ever I find one . . . I will go over hedge and ditch but I would get my Master, for the sermon cannot do any good unless there is a saviour of Christ in it.”[1]

The apostolic mandate to “preach Christ and him crucified” that Spurgeon exemplified with force and animation in Victorian England is all the more urgent for the 21^st-century church. Moreover, Spurgeon’s call echoes forward to this day in homiletical classrooms across America. This call is not merely a nudge toward a more polished homiletical delivery; rather it comes with the weighty knowledge that the message of a crucified and risen Christ alone saves. Thus, it is indeed “Him we proclaim.”

Our culture finds itself at the intersection of geopolitical tumult abroad, encroaching secularism at home, and a general sense of the decay of so many markers of Christian civilization that generations past  held constant and sure. This backdrop accentuates the need and the promise of preaching. Not just any preaching will do, however. We must settle for nothing less than preaching that is muscular in biblical content, courageous in delivery, and Christ-centered in focus. Moreover, we must be about the business of producing preachers who are submissive to the authority of Scripture, under compulsion to declare the whole counsel of God, and who exult in proclaiming the riches of Christ every time they fill the pulpit.

Spurgeon’s preaching legacy lives on through the massive 63-volume collection of his pulpit ministry at both New Park Street and the Metropolitan Tabernacle. It has been noted that you can turn to the last page of any of Spurgeon’s preserved 3,563 sermons and you will find him pointing his hearers to Christ. As president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which owns Spurgeon’s 7,000-volume library and various other memorabilia from his ministry, including his writing desk, I am reminded again and again of his relentless desire to preach Jesus.

Likewise, those who are called to preach must point their congregants to Jesus, and those who train preachers must have a similar gospel emphasis. Exegesis and hermeneutics classes must show students how faithfully to interpret Christ. Systematic theology classes must point students to Jesus, the apex of the whole Bible. Evangelism classes must be designed to train students to spread the gospel of Christ most effectively and energetically. And, of course, homiletics classes must equip young preachers with the tools to preach Christ. This continuity of study bespeaks a collective intentionality to see the name of Christ known among the nations.

Declaring Christ from the entire Bible is more than a theological trend or an interpretive approach; it is a biblical mandate, a Great Commission necessity, and the primary aim of biblical preaching. Spurgeon’s goal must be our own—to preach Jesus in every sermon.

For Southern Baptists, B. H. Carroll is an iconic figure, and for Texas Baptists he is especially so. During his 28-year pastorate, the First Baptist Church of Waco, Texas became one of the state’s most preeminent congregations. Denominationally, he channeled domestic and foreign missionary efforts, advocated the establishment of the Sunday School Board, helped to consolidate the Baptist General Convention of Texas, and championed Southern Baptist causes—preaching nearly every annual meeting for 30 years.[1]

However, Carroll’s legacy is not the church he pastored, but the institution he founded—Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Sensing divine leadership, in 1908 Carroll almost singularly established Southern Baptists’ second seminary through his personal ingenuity and sheer force of personality. Like a human dynamo, Carroll propelled Southwestern Seminary’s meteoric rise. In just a few short decades after its founding, Southwestern Seminary would stand as the largest Southern Baptist seminary and, arguably, would shape the SBC in the latter decades of the 20^th century more than any other seminary.

Yet before Carroll founded Southwestern Seminary, he was a trustee of Southern Seminary. And in a strange twist of Southern Baptist history, before he established Southern Baptists’ second seminary, he nearly led them to relinquish their first.

The Whitsitt Controversy

After the death of John A. Broadus in 1895, Southern Seminary’s Board of Trustees elected William H. Whitsitt as the school’s third president. The honeymoon quickly wore off, and less than a year after his installation Whitsitt plunged the seminary into the second of its four major controversies. [2]

The controversy centered on Whitsitt’s questioning of Baptist origins, in particular his insistence that English Baptists did not baptize until 1641, thus denying Baptist succession. He also questioned Roger Williams’ baptism and argued that early English Baptists practiced affusion, or baptism by pouring. Not only were Whitsitt’s findings relatively new—Whitsitt claimed they were his discoveries—but they also ran afoul of many Southern Baptists, who believed in a continuity of baptism by immersion all the way back to the apostles. Further complicating matters, before his election as president Whitsitt published his articles on Baptist origins anonymously, prompting critics to question his courage and integrity.[3]

As conflicts often do, what began as a historical and biblical debate degenerated into concerns over Whitsitt’s character, judgment, and general fitness for the seminary’s presidency. The Whitsitt controversy grew into a full-scale denominational conflagration, consuming the attention of the convention and threatening not only the seminary but also the convention’s collaborative mission efforts.

Enter B. H. Carroll

Whitsitt’s chief protagonists were two of his own trustees: Carroll and T. T. Eaton. Eaton pastored the historic Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., while concurrently serving as editor of the influential Kentucky Baptist paper, The Western Recorder. Though Eaton was the most persistent critic, Carroll was the most influential one.

While Carroll agitated for Whitsitt’s removal, he never fully embraced the Landmark understanding of Baptist origins as championed by his younger brother J. M. Carroll.[4] Rather, Carroll fought for reasons of principle, believing trustee governance, doctrinal accountability, and the seminary’s responsibility to Southern Baptist churches were at stake. He argued that trustees bore not only a formal and fiduciary responsibility to the denomination, but also a moral one. Presciently, Carroll maintained that if trustees permitted unfettered academic freedom for historical research, the same argument might prevail in theological and biblical studies, thus leading to the seminary’s doctrinal compromise and downfall.

After a temporary relaxation in tensions that prompted Whitsitt and his supporters to believe the matter largely settled, Carroll reasserted his concerns through articles published in June 1897 in the Baptist Standard entitled, “The Whitsitt Case at Wilmington” and “Back to the Realm of Discussion.” Carroll’s pen once again put the Whitsitt controversy at the forefront of the convention’s attention.[5]

Motion to Sever the Seminary from the Convention

One of the forgotten aspects of the Whitsitt controversy involves a resolution Carroll presented to the convention when it gathered for its annual meeting in May 1898 in Norfolk, Va. There, Carroll submitted a resolution—to be voted on at the 1899 convention—to formally and legally sever the seminary from the convention. Carroll’s motives to sever ties were reasonable enough. He cited the Whitsitt controversy as hindering Southern Baptists’ collective missionary work, and the convention’s inability to hold the seminary responsible to the churches. In other words, to Carroll, the current relationship between the SBC and Southern Seminary granted the convention’s financial support and tacit endorsement, but denied it a sufficient mechanism to hold the seminary accountable.[6]

Thus, Carroll’s motion: “Resolved, that this Convention, without expressing any opinion whatever on the merits of the controversy concerning seminary matters, about which good brethren among us honestly differ, but in the interest of harmony, particularly with a view to preserve and confirm unity in mission work, does now exercise its evident right to divest itself of responsibility in the Seminary management, by dissolving the slight and remote bond of connection between this body and the Seminary; that is, that this body declines to nominate trustees for the Seminary or to entertain motions or receive reports relative thereto, leaving the Institution to stand on its own merits and be managed by its own trustees.”[7]

In response to Carroll’s motion, the convention appointed a committee to study the feasibility and prudence of separation.[8] The committee, reporting in 1899, declined to take any action, and Carroll announced his intent not to bring the motion forward for a convention vote.[9] Predicting counterfactuals is a fool’s errand, but at that time Carroll may have been the most respected and influential man at the convention. If Carroll submitted his resolution, and so argued for it, it may have passed.

A Time to Reassert Control, not Relinquish it

Carroll’s prevailing concern was holding the seminary accountable to the churches, as evidenced by his own words, and ultimately witnessed in forging Southwestern Seminary in accountability to Texas Baptists. Of Carroll, Glen Miller accurately observed, “The theme of ecclesiastical accountability is one of the consistent threads in his work as an educator and administrator.”[10]

In fact, Carroll’s resolve for the seminary to be accountable to the churches is most vividly captured in his deathbed injunction to Lee Scarborough, his successor as president of Southwestern Seminary. Carroll instructed Scarborough, “Lee, keep the Seminary lashed to the cross. If heresy ever comes in the teaching, take it to the faculty. If they will not hear you and take prompt action, take it to the trustees of the Seminary. If they will not hear you, take it to the Convention that appoints the Board of Trustees, and if they will not hear you, take it to the great common people of our churches. You will not fail to get a hearing then.” [11]

In the Whitsitt controversy, Carroll’s concerns were spot-on, but his proposed solution—to sever the seminary from the convention—would likely have brought disastrous consequences. One is hard-pressed to find any seminary that has ever been separated from its founding churches and yet maintained doctrinal faithfulness and missiological focus.

Every generation of Southern Baptists owes to their forebears and to their posterity to steward rightly the ministries and resources with which they have been entrusted. And, in this, Carroll was especially right: the stewardship is not merely legal and fiduciary—it is moral as well.

Given the historical and legal uniqueness of Southern Seminary’s founding, Carroll’s engagement in the Whitsitt controversy is not entirely transferrable to modern circumstances. As Duke McCall observed, in its early decades Southern Seminary grew up more alongside the convention than within it. Though the circumstances were unique, there is a principle that rings true in every generation—when churches perceive themselves distanced from the entities they own, they should reassert their control, not relinquish it.

Conclusion

B. H. Carroll was a Colossus figure, ranking with George W. Truett, W. A. Criswell, Lee Scarborough, Paul Pressler, and Paige Patterson as Texas Baptist luminaries. He justifiably garnered the accolades of Truett, who called him, “the greatest preacher our state has ever known,”[12] and John R. Sampey, who told him “You are now—since Broadus is gone—our natural leader in the Southern Baptist Convention.”[13]

Carroll was a decisive man who made many consequential decisions, none greater than founding Southwestern Seminary. However, I am especially grateful for one decision that, in the final analysis, he never made—to recommend Southern Baptists sever ties with their mother seminary.

For those acquainted with Southern Baptist history, the name James P. Boyce is synonymous with theological education. Boyce championed the founding of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and convincingly prescribed its academic program in his “Three Changes in Theological Institutions.” Boyce’s vision for theological education was most immediately implemented and historically captured through Southern Seminary, but his “Three Changes” continues to influence Southern Baptist theological education, and it merits renewed attention.

As previously outlined, Boyce’s “Three Changes in Theological Institutions” called for a more abundant ministry, a learned ministry, and a doctrinally sound ministry. First and foremost, Boyce argued that an inadequate supply of ministers hindered the church and undermined the Great Commission, leading him to begin “Three Changes” with an impassioned call for a more abundant ministry.

An Abundant Ministry in Boyce’s Day

While acknowledging the sovereignty of God in calling one to ministry and the local church’s responsibility to affirm that call, Boyce nonetheless argued that the principle cause for a shortage of ministers was the failure to train them.[1] According to Boyce, a new and rightly structured seminary could ameliorate the two primary factors that precipitated this shortage of ministers. First, in Boyce’s day the standard admissions requirements into theological institutions included a classical education, which disqualified many would-be students who enjoyed no such prior education.

Second, classical education encompassed proficiency in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. While this expected linguistic proficiency ensured the theological institution could base its curriculum on the original languages, it both formally and functionally precluded all potential students lacking such academic preparation. Interestingly, though seminaries and divinity schools held to the highest academic standards of admittance, Baptist churches routinely ordained men to ministry with little or no formal training, revealing a chasm between the expectations of the academy and the church.

These two factors led Boyce to conclude, “The consequences have been, that the number of those who have felt themselves called of God to the ministry, has been disproportioned to the wants of the churches; and of that number but a very small proportion have entered it with a proper preparation for even common usefulness.”[2]

Boyce’s Proposed Remedies

To supply a more abundant ministry, Boyce proposed two remedies. First, he argued a new seminary should accept applicants regardless of their previous level of academic training. Second, in order to facilitate this shift in acceptance and to train more ministers, Boyce contended the curriculum should be based on the English Bible, not Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—a revolutionary paradigm shift for theological education.

Though these students may not be able to take more advanced courses or attain advanced degrees, at least some measure of theological equipping would be theirs. Anticipating that critics would argue a move to full acceptance and to an English-based curriculum would obviate the need for theological education, Boyce rebutted, “In adopting this change, we are so far from saying that education is unnecessary, that we proclaim its absolute necessity.”[3]

An Abundant Ministry for Today

The need for a more abundant ministry still exists today. Demographics reveal an aging pastorate, with churches looking for a new generation of pastors to take the ministerial baton. Additionally, the International Mission Board has mobilized itself to take the gospel to the world’s remaining unreached people groups and the North American Mission Board aims to plant 15,000 churches over the next decade. There does not currently appear to be enough ministers in the pipeline to fill these needs.

Moreover, the seminary labors with the churches under a Romans 10 mandate to preach the gospel to all people so they may hear and believe. Therefore, we must ask, “How can the seminary serve the churches by providing a more abundant ministry today?”

First, the seminary must lend its support to the calling out of ministers. To be sure, the seminary is dependent upon the churches for the quantity and quality of students they receive; nonetheless, the seminary is more than a mere bystander. Often students arrive on campus with a generic sense of call, but with little prior shepherding as to what all that call means. They arrive with wax noses, so to speak, and the seminary must encourage them toward serving the church, especially toward the pastorate and ministries of preaching and teaching God’s Word, both domestically and internationally as missionaries.

Second, the seminary should strengthen its undergraduate program. As in Boyce’s day, many are called to ministry later in life with little or no post-high school academic preparation. The undergraduate program enables a seminary to accept virtually anyone desiring ministry training. Dual major offerings, with one degree in biblical or ministerial studies and the other degree in a secular field, are also key. In that many overseas missionaries serve from a business or professional platform and that the majority of stateside pastors are bi-vocational, offering dual majors is a significant ministry advance, and one to which a growing number of students are availing themselves.

Third, the seminary must strive to keep tuition as low as possible. Students often arrive with previously incurred indebtedness, and, more than likely, they will graduate to serve in ministry contexts where their capacity to pay back debt will be limited. Additionally, lower tuition enables students to pare back their employment responsibilities, thus permitting them to more quickly graduate and be deployed for ministerial service. Accomplishing lower tuition is largely out of the seminary’s direct control, as it is dependent on the Cooperative Program for revenue and is inescapably tethered to the escalating costs of higher education.

Fourth, when students cannot come to seminary, the seminary should do its best to go to them, especially through online education. To be sure, nothing can replace life-on-life ministry training in the context of a seminary community, but such is not accessible to all. Boyce’s vision for educating as many ministers as possible and as thoroughly as possible not only permits the use of online technologies, but demands it.

Conclusion

To attain a more abundant ministry, we need not only Boyce’s theory, but also his passion.  As we possess it, we will long for the church to be blessed and the gospel advanced through a more abundant ministry. As we see the fruits of our labors, perhaps we will exclaim as Boyce did, “Oh! Were there ever a time when we would expect that God would answer the prayers of his Churches and over flood the land and the world with a Ministry adequate to uphold his cause in every locality, it should seem to be now—when the multiplication a thousand fold of the laborers will still leave an abundant work for each; but now, alas! Now, when our Churches at home are not adequately supplied; when dark and destitute places are found in the most favored portions of our own land; when the Heathen are at our very doors, and the cry is help, help, and there is no help, because there are not laborers enough to meet the wants immediately around us.”[4]