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I. THE WORLD'S NEED OF SPIRITUAL LEADERS.

1. The great majority of every generation are uninventive, unaspiring, cringing, servile, thoughtless, ignorant. They not only walk in moral darkness, but lack the desire, if not the capacity, to struggle into the light of moral principles.

2. Clearly, then, they require spiritual leaders, men who shall point out to them the way of honesty, truth, purity, and holiness, marching before them in all the stateliness of the Christly morality.

II. THE GENUINE TYPE OF SPIRITUAL LEADERS.

1. The true spiritual leader must be a man. Not an idiot, not a charlatan, not a functionary. A "man" is a person who has right convictions of moral duty, and honestly embodies them in his daily life.

2. The true spiritual leader must be a man inspired by God. No man can be a true moral leader of the people who has not within him, as the all-animating and directing force, an unutterable abhorrence of wrong and an invincible attachment to the right, whose whole nature does not beat and beam with the soul of Divine morality.

III. THE DIVINE SUCCESSION OF SPIRITUAL LEADERS. They are all in the hands of God.

1. He takes the greatest spiritual leaders away by death.

2. He raises others to supply their place. One enters into another's labours.

(Homilist.)

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KJV: Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation,

WEB: "Let Yahweh, the God of the spirits of all flesh, appoint a man over the congregation,