The Castaway Preacher
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The most immediate, and to this audience, the most impressive suggestion conveyed in this half sentence is, that a preacher of the Divine Law and Christian Gospel may be a castaway. Nay, when we remember who was the “I myself ” that wrote these lines, we perceive that even an Apostle, an inspired preacher, was not, on that account, beyond the peril. We have the still more positive confirmation of fact; for an older Apostle than Paul, one of the original twelve, called and endowed with power by Christ himself, fell by transgression from “this ministry and apostleship,” perished by suicide in the field he had purchased with the reward of iniquity, and went from Aceldama to what was, in a more fearful sense, “his own place,” a castaway.