ays find him instructive and
impressive, a gentleman, if not a Christian. He is fair, temperate,
frank, bold, and independent; and, to my mind at least, he always throws
light on these so perplexing questions.' Now, if you have the
intelligence and the integrity and the fair-mindedness to say something
like that to a member of the opposite party you have poured oil on the
waters of party; nay, you are in that a wily politician, for you have
almost, just in saying that, won over your friend to your own side. So
noble is the love of truth, and so potent is the high-principled pursuit
and the fearless proclamation of the truth.

A general election is a trying time to all kinds of public men, but it is
perhaps most trying of all to Christian ministers. Unless they are to
disfranchise themselves and are to detach and shut themselves in from all
interest in public affairs altogether, an election time is to our
ministers, beyond any other class of citizens perhaps, a peculiarly
trying time. How they are to escape the Scylla of cowardice and the
contempt of all free and true men on the one hand, and the Charybdis of
pride and self-will and scorn of other men's opinions and wishes on the
other, is no easy dilemma to our ministers. Some happily constituted and
happily circumstanced ministers manage to get through life, and even
through political life, without taking or giving a wound in all their
way. They are so wise and so watchful; they are so inoffensive,
unprovoking, and conciliatory; and even where they are not always all
that, they have around them sometimes a people who are so patient and
tolerant and full of the old-fashioned respect for their minister that
they do not attempt to interfere with him. Then, again, some ministers
preach so well, and perform all their pastoral work so well, that they
make it unsafe and impossible for the most censorious and intolerant of
their people to find fault with them. But all our ministers are not like
that. And all our congregations are not like that. And those of our
ministers who are not like that must just be left to bear that which
their past unwisdom or misfortune has brought upon them. Only, if they
have profited by their past mistakes or misfortunes, a means of grace,
and an opportunity of better playing the man is again at their doors. I
am sure you will all join with me in the prayer that all our ministers,
as well as all their people, may come well out of the ap