Excerpt from Hints to Self-Educated Ministers: Including Local Preachers, Exhorters, and Other Christians, Whose Duty It May Be to Speak More or Less in Public No man taketh this honor to himself but he that is called of God as was Aaron. The Methodist Church has from the first fully recognized the necessity of a divine, as well as a human call and appointment to the solemn office of the Christian ministry and, that the human call rests for its propriety and authority, upon the profession and proofs of the divine call, so that in her economy it is not lawful for any man to take upon himself the office of public preaching, or of the administration of the holy sacraments in the con gregations, before he is divinely called to execute the same, and that call has been recognized by the authori ties of the Church. In our ordination service, the primary importance of God's own call is most fully acknowledged, and it is made the very ground on which the Church invests her ministers with her ac crediting commission. It is therefore improper and misleading to class the holy ministry with law and medicine, and speak of it as one of the learned proies sions. It is not a peese'ion, but a vocation - not a profession in the same sense as law and medicine are professions and is a vocation in a sense in which they are not vocations. It is not a pursuit, chosen from among many equally open and equally obligatory, but one accepted upon the persuasion and conviction of a direct divine call to this sacred ofiice. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.