Three things make a divine–prayer, meditation, temptation. If you do not pray, God will probably lay you aside from your ministry as he did me, to teach you to pray. Remember Luther’s maxim, ‘To have prayed well is to have studied well.’ Get your text from God, your thoughts, your words.

Recreation to a minister must be as whetting is with the mower–that is, to be used only so far as is necessary for his work. May a physician in plague-time take any more relaxation or recreation than is necessary for his life, when so many are expecting his help in a case of life and death? Will you stand by and see sinners gasping under the pangs of death, and say: ‘God doth not require me to make myself a drudge to save them?’ Is this the voice of ministerial or Christian compassion or rather of sensual laziness and diabolical cruelty?