Excerpt from The Prophetic Ministry for Today

I feel that there is due to the readers of these lectures, if there be any, a word of explanation already given to the hearers of them, as to the conditions under which they were written.

The good ladies of a certain church society in my diocese publish annually a calendar of the church year. On the calendar is a motto or text, intended to inculcate the strict economy of time. But instead of being placed over the months and weeks and days, it has, with singular felicity, been put over the picture of the Bishop which supposedly adorns one corner of the calendar. The text is, "Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost."

There could be no watch-word more necessary or motto more applicable to a modern Bishop.

He is a man "scattered and peeled, " "troubled about many things, " distracted with various and often mutually variant occupations. He must be a man of affairs and many affairs. He is expected to fulfill many functions. He is primarily a business man, an administrator and executive. Particularly he is the "trouble man" of a large corporation. All the church quarrels gather about his devoted head. He has the responsibility for everything that goes wrong, often without the authority to set anything right. He serves as a lightning rod to carry off the accumulated wrath of the ecclesiastical heavens. He is constantly called on to act as a judge and should have a judicial temperament.

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