ell as a strong glimmer
of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with
which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and
professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason,
intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and
sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our
clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are
everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping
and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the
American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the
obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might
of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are
faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency
to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of
to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out
in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the
courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which
the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world,
have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters,
too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for
game,--for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere
with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.

Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of
the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel
inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not
make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute
veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never
depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not
deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher
and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but
never a deficiency in character,--in the word and spirit of what he
proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should
rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating
reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight,
truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions,
that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what
man really is