But I am thinking now rather of the every-day sort of pastoral call and conversation, in which perhaps the parishioner visited may be anything but a caviller, and anything but even a questioner; much too ready, perhaps, to take everything about Christian truths for granted, which, alas, means too often to take them as understood, to take them as believed, when there is little understanding of the matter, or even thought about it. Now it is a great thing when a pastoral visitor has the art (which needs to be considered, and to be acquired) of putting here and there into a quiet and friendly talk, best of all towards the close, some sentence which sets out a great truth clearly, strongly, and in a shape which may wake attention and help remembrance. That is the kind of didactic work which I earnestly recommend.
If possible, let no visit close without some such utterance, if only one. It may be about the very foundations of all Christian truth; about the certainty of Christian facts, the Resurrection above all; about the Person of the Lord Jesus; about His finished work of Atonement; about faith, and our acceptance as believers in Him, and our victory and deliverance in temptation by the power of the Holy Ghost through faith; about sin, its true nature, its guilt, its end. Or it may be about the holy practicalities of Christian conduct; about the Lord's call to us to break with everything that is against His will; about that deep, far-reaching truth of the Gospel that, while the sinner is saved by faith only, he is saved on purpose that he may serve, on purpose that he may "walk and please God," [1 Thess. iv. 1.] and that he may do this above all in "the duty that lies near," in the plain things of the home, the business, the handicraft, the social circle. Or it may be about the mighty claims of the Missionary cause, about the strangely forgotten fact that the Christian Church exists mainly in order to evangelize the non-Christian world. Or it may be about the principles and duties of Church membership and Christian ordinances; the true nature of worship; the sacred duty of united worship; the call to hallow the Lord's Day; the precious benefits of the Sacraments of Christ, explained with the holy reverence and equally holy simplicity and moderation of the Catechism and the Articles.