d hard to attain, then for their own sake, if not for
his, they should beware of visiting him either with silent distrust or
open reproach. He, just like them, must stand or fall according to his
fidelity to the oracles of God. Only, once more, let him and let
the Church comprehend that those oracles are not summed up in any
laborious expounding of verbal texts. "The letter killeth," unless
itself enlivened through the immediate Providence.

To be true to God, the preacher must be true to his time, as the
Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles were to theirs. The pulpit dies of
its dignity, when it creeps into the exhausted receiver of foregone
conclusions, and has nothing to say but of Adam and Pharaoh, Jew
and Gentile, Palestine and Tyre so far away. Its decorum of being
inoffensive to others is suicidal for itself. It is the sleep of
death for all. As the inductive philosopher took all knowledge for
his province, it must take all life. We have, indeed, a glorious and
venerable charter of inestimable worth in our map of the religious
history of mankind through centuries that are gone. We must study
the true meaning of the Bible, _the book_ and chief collection of
the records of faith, precious above all for the immortal image and
photograph, in so many a shifting light and various expression, of
the transcendent form of divinity through manhood in Him to be ever
reverently and lovingly named, Jesus Christ. But there is a spirit in
man. "The word of God," says an Apostle, "is not bound"; nor can it
be wholly bound up. The Holy Spirit of God that first descended never
died, and never ceased to act on the human soul. The day of miracles
is not past,--or, if none precisely like those of Jesus are
still wrought, miracles of grace, the principal workings of the
supernatural, of which external prodigies are the lowest species, are
performed abundantly in the living breast. Jesus Himself, after all
the sufficient and summary grandeur of His instructions, assures
His followers of the Spirit that would come to lead them, beyond
whatsoever He had said, into all truth. In that dispensation of the
Spirit we live. Its sphere endures through all change, impregnable.
It is "builded far from accident." No progress of earthly science can
threat or hurt its eternal proportions. It is the supreme knowledge,
and to whoever enters it a whisper comes whose only response is the
confession of our noble hymn,--

"True science is to read Thy n