of which, having once been ministers, they always continued ornaments and pillars.

ence.

Still, it is none the less true that a surprising number of our ablest men have left the pulpit; and that, too, after having succeeded in it brilliantly; and the reason for it continues ungiven. Doubtless, this has been partly due to the fact, that the characteristic training and views of the clergy in this country, especially those of large and liberal views, have qualified them, in a marked degree, for posts requiring broad, high, and thorough culture; and thus made them specially open to such demands. You cannot make poets, historians, critics, philanthropists, political economists, statesmen, judicial reformers, out of sectarian, half-educated, bigoted, and narrow men in or out of the pulpit. A young, forming country, pressingly in want of leaders, guides, lights, and ornaments, offers enormous inducements to the few men of thorough culture it possesses to step into its vacant thrones of power, and assume sway over its largest domains of influThat alone has not only drawn from the pulpit many of its most illustrious men, but it has doubtless kept hundreds more from entering our ministry, who would have adorned it. The abler and weightier minds in America throughout the whole country, and from all religious persuasions, no longer gravitate towards the ministry, but away from it, not perhaps from feeling its attractions less, but the attractions of other professions and pursuits more. In short, the rewards, the inducements, the calls, which the material interests of this new country present, with the professional, scientific, economical, and commercial vocations under which they are more directly to be developed, now draw away into civil engineering, mining, surveying, exploring, overseeing; into banking, trading, and navigation; into the law, with its new specialties of patent and of commercial law; or into medicine, with its scientific attractions at a period when the physical sciences are so engrossing and fascinating, far the largest part of our rising young men of ability, and leave the pulpits of all denominations comparatively stripped of men of marked powers and influence.

There has been one excellent consequence of this common misfortune. The general intelligence of the American mind has, during this decline of pulpit predominance, escaped from the oppressive power of the priesthood. Nothing can be clearer than the emancipation of the laity of this country from the old thraldom of ecclesiastical discipline, either in respect of opinions, or of conventional standards of conduct. The old rules and the old creeds are not abolished, but the feeble hands that administer them are too conscious of relative weakness to seek to enforce them. The nation has thus broadened its being, intellectually, morally, and practically; and it will henceforth be impossible to keep the new wine, full of fermentation and power, in the dried and contracted skins, -the old bottles that once held it.

But other effects of this degeneracy of the pulpit have been correspondingly mischievous. When the clerical office becomes relatively weaker and lower than the other professions, then, while general intelligence and personal independence may improve, while formal and technical piety may give way to a more natural and practical goodness, while religion, instead of running deeply in the channels of professional or church pietism, may overflow the common level of life, and diffuse itself noiselessly through all the soil of human interests; yet, finally, it comes to pass that the stream of religious faith, and of the practice which is fed by faith, feels the decay of the fountains, or the weakness of those appointed to tend them, and who allow their sources to be clogged. A feeble pulpit, a ministry respected only for its office, has, again and again in history, accompanied or foreshadowed, the decline of morals, and of practical righteousness. We firmly believe in the absolute necessity of an able, faithful, and inspiring Christian pulpit, to maintain the faith of society in spiritual realities; to lift up ideal standards of character; to hold fast the tender and inestimable traditions of the Christian faith; to urge upon occupied and passion-led men the serious truths, obscured to their downcast eyes, but affecting and involving every moment's real happiness, and their whole. future; to present, with thoughtful meditation, the sublime

idea of the presence of a God, hidden to the view of those beating up and walking in the dust of their hurried pathway through present cares and level interests; to vindicate the right of Jesus Christ to reign in the heart and mind of those who bury him in a dead historical past, and know not that he lives and speaks and moves to-day in the believing hearts of his prayer-taught and spirit-led disciples; to contend against the overweening testimony of the outward senses in favor of the evidence of the inner witnesses of the soul; to plead for what is permanent and eternal in the presence of dazzling temporalities and glittering decays; to humble the proud with the vision of divine greatness, and to exalt the lowly and abased with the sense of their own spiritual dignity and lineage; to awaken the conscience drugged with the cordials of pleasure, and the opiates of habit; to stimulate the spiritual eye, which disease has covered with a blinding cataract, by the healthful tonic of heavenly light, and arouse the inward man, prostrated and enslaved by the outward man, to assert his patent of nobility, and rise against and subdue his vulgar oppressor; to contend with a larger learning, a deeper insight, and a higher logic against the fallacies of pseudoscience, or the precipitate judgments of so-called practical experience, in favor of the historical truth of the Christian religion; and, in place of apologies for faith, turn upon the infidel, the materialist, and the secularist, the weapons of his own warfare, and compel him to answer for his unbelief and his low and vulgar conceptions of God and life and human destiny!

Let those great functions of the Christian pulpit fall into feeble and timid hands, fall into any hands weaker than those that steer the ship of state, handle the law, or the sacred mysteries of the human frame, or manage the immediate interests of human industry, and of social and economic life; and while, for a time, society may continue to live and thrive upon the accumulated capital of a faith and a piety which many generations of reverence and religious fidelity have stored up, it will sooner or later come to the end of its resources; and, like a country in the second or third year of its

drought, when not only its shrubs and its grasses fail, but its very forests begin to die, and its wells of water dry up, a moral desert will drift its sands, and blow its stifling simoons through the palaces and the altars where men once ruled and prayed.

But we have not yet reached the bottom of the inquiry, why the larger minds of this country have passed by the pulpit, grand and glorious as its functions are, to enter other departments of life. It is due, essentially, to the fact, that the so-called secular interests of the world have been for our generation, moving forward on a scale of vastness, employing and developing an ability, leading on, and disclosing, as their path was followed, truths of a majesty and importance which have left the established religious creeds and usages of all churches in an incongruous and somewhat narrow and unattractive condition. Acquaintance with man's nature and capacities, with man's terrestrial residence, with the laws of society, the laws of trade, the laws of the human body, and the human mind; study of politics, of science, of medicine, of jurisprudence, of mechanics, of chemistry, of the conservation and correlation of forces, of the philosophy of history, of the · religions of the past, of geology and astronomy in their bearings on the Mosaic cosmogony, of literary criticism in its relations with the authenticity and genuineness of the scripture text, all these studies, partly theoretical and partly practical, have so far stretched the area of human thought, enlarged the field of experience and opened the horizon of speculation, that the theology which descended from the Reformation and the Puritans has, while still enjoying the formal respect of the majority of Christians, lost its hold upon their practical understanding, its place in the line of their other interests, or its agreement and congruity with their general mental attain ments and convictions. What has our popular theology to do with the statesmanship, the philanthropy, the science, the law-making, the customs and ways of our national, domestic, and social life? How much had a theological alarm for the slave's soul in another state of being to do with the anti-slavery convictions which have almost emancipated from bondage the

negro race in this country? What sort of consonance is there between the alleged and popularly assumed dogma of human depravity-total and absolute-and the practical respect paid in our day to human nature, its instincts, rights, claims to education, and proclivities to justice and truth? How does the dogma of imputed sin or imputed righteousness agree with the ethical and practical judgments upon which our criminal law and our medical jurisprudence proceed? What influence does a claim to a technical conversion possess over men's judgments respecting the integrity and trustworthiness of a man's character? How much does the assumption that Jesus Christ is God in any true and proper sense-although he is literally alleged to have made the worlds-affect the opinions of men of science, in exploring the works of the Creator, or in unfolding his laws? Now, until theology is brought up to the experience and actual state of men's convictions, attained through other and independent sources, it cannot hope to regain its old place at the head of the sciences where it belongs. Nor can its teachers (whether in the schools of divinity or the pulpit) be expected to represent the higher order of men and minds. Largeness and elevation of power are incompatible with intellectual insincerity, with mental equivocation, with verbal evasion, with the professional necessity of "paltering in a double sense." Religion and theology, to be taught with power and by powerful minds and hearts, must regain the genuine, honest, uncompromised faith and confidence of men; must move untrammelled, and with the same freedom that literature, science, law, and medicine claim and use; must lose all spectral, superstitious, and merely conventional character, and be clothed in the garments of modern conviction and positive immediate reality.

Meanwhile, let us carefully note, that the sober, respectful scepticism, not always conscious, which has come over the American mind of this era, in regard to the creed of Christendom, has not touched the respect which is felt for Christianity itself, or the desire to uphold and promote it. We venture to say, that what are called lower- that is, scholarly and honest