mean coward can do to degrade the system by which the gospel has been till now most widely proclaimed, and to which, till now, we had all said it owes its choicest victories.

Yet it has seemed to us that preachers whom we should be sorry indeed to charge with duplicity have, under our own observation, wrought terrible havoc in this way. For a long period, it may be, a clergyman respected, honored, and beloved, preaches to an attached congregation what in his soul he really thinks they need to bring them nearer to God. Then, after months and years of a tranquil and successful ministry of truth, it occurs to him that he has, perhaps, been negligent in preaching "the doctrines." It does not seem to occur to him to ask why he has been negligent. Why should the Holy Spirit, whom he has invoked on his knees for help in all those years, let the "doctrines" slip by? He supposes, however, that the time has come for a drastic dose of "the doctrines." The old dogmatic books come down from the dust. The old notebooks of the seminary are consulted again. Pure and simple, bitter, sour, and hard, "the doctrines are proclaimed in their severity. Now, if this man believe them in their severity, that is one thing. Let him do fit penance for neglecting them for these years which have seemed so useful. But if he hold the old standards only "as substance of doctrine," if in his own heart he have this palliation, or that interpretation, an allowance here and a concession there, this proclamation of doctrine pure and simple, unpalliated, and unrelieved, without the allowance and without the concession, is simply the running a muck among innocent parishioners by an insane devotee. He wounds, God only knows how many tender spirits of those whom he has taught to trust him and honor him! And he wounds them with poisoned arrows. He is not telling the truth. At the bottom of his heart he ought to know this. Does he say it is, on the whole, well for "the Church" to have this proclamation made in its naked simplicity? It is not well for the Church, if it is a lie. And a lie it is, if he have kept back part of what he knew or believed.

We have no wish to make general accusations in a matter where no man can inquire as to the condition of separate consciences. But it is not we, it is the common sense of the community, which is beginning to make the accusations which the pulpit must meet. The authority and degree of inspiration of the Bible present a question which interests everybody. Without appeal to the separate consciences of forty thousand preachers, we are quite safe in saying

that the greater part of them no longer hold the notion which the Protestant Church held two centuries ago. It will be safe to say this at the very least, that, of the American ministers who pretend to any theological training, the great majority now assent to the general principles of criticism which now govern the leading theological schools of all communions. Men may not go so far as Dean Stanley goes in details, but they do start from the same principle of interpretation. To take the instance Mr. Brooks cites, they do not believe that the world was made in six literal days. Or we should be safe in saying they do not believe that the sun literally stood still upon Gibeon; or that Jonah lived three days and three nights in the stomach of a fish. We should be safe in saying that the majority of American preachers know and are fully convinced that there are inconsistencies between different parts of the Bible. They may account for these in different ways. The excuse may be as deliciously absurd as that of an eminent Hebraist, who said that the consonants only of the Hebrew text were inspired, but that the vowels were not inspired! No matter, for our purpose now, how they explain the business to themselves. They explain it. They do not hold-as their fathers did hold two centuries ago-to the consistency, the veracity, or the authority of every part of the Bible.

Now, the general community knows this, or suspects it. When, therefore, the great body of preachers go on-as to us they seem to do-citing single texts as absolute authority, speaking of any text as, of course, "the Word of God," if found in the Bible, they win for the pulpit the epithets of "cowardly," "insincere," and "infidel." Unless they explain to others the view they hold themselves; unless they proclaim from the pulpit what in their hearts they know, they degrade their office, and they do all they can to fling away the power which the pulpit seeks, and which, when a prophet of the Truth speaks from it, it commands. And the leaders of every communion where this caution shows itself must ask themselves whether here be not the reason why young men of pluck and character turn aside from the pulpit. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in his pathetic life of his son, appeals earnestly to the young men of England to come into the work which Craufurd Tait so distinguished. The men whom the Archbishop wants will not come if they think the pulpit is half-hearted, or that its utterances are reserved. Nor will any communion secure any preachers who are worth securing, unless it can weed out, to the fiber, every weed of irresolution or timidity.

The illustration of the authority of Scripture is a convenient one, because the issue is so simple. We follow it, therefore, so far as to ask gentlemen, who permit themselves to use in the pulpit commonplaces which the last century used as to the unity of the Bible, what they suppose the people before them are reading? Nobody is deceived in this business, if we can conceive the wretched thought that the pulpit wants to deceive. Let the preacher, who has dodged the hard questions on inspiration on Sunday, go into the bookstore on Monday and ask his friend the bookseller to tell him what books he has been selling in the last month. Let him find out there and at the public library what the more thoughtful and intelligent persons in the town are reading. Can it be that any preacher, with one ray of intelligence, supposes that only he and a few of his theological brethren have access to speculations and criticisms which are printed in popular editions, scattered everywhere, and so circulated that he who runs shall read?

"But how far shall we go?" This is the pathetic question of the timid preacher, whom we have described, frightened into caution by the echo of his own rashness as a boy. The answer needs no sphinx. The preacher is to go as far with his congregation as he has gone himself. He need not ask them to go where he is not sure. He need not, if he be anxious, set them on inquiry where he himself inquires. Because he doubts, he need not ask them to doubt. But, where he is sure, he is bound as a prophet of the God of truth to tell them what he is sure of. What he has found, he must share with them. What God has given him was not given him to keep, but that he might distribute it among others.

Few thoughtful American travelers pass from town to town in England, and hear, week by week, the sermons preached in the decorous pulpits of the Establishment, without saying, "These gentlemen say to these people what they would not dare say at their own dinner-tables to their guests." The position of a minister in the Establishment gives a habit, if not a right, of speaking from above to those below. It is a pity to confess it, but the sermons preached in England often give the hearer a feeling that it is supposed only common people, or poor people, or ignorant people listen to sermons. A witty traveler once described the standard of the sermons in the Establishment "to be twenty minutes in length and no depth at all." But there is something more than the lack of breadth and depth, when the preacher treats his hearer as being on a different level of intelligence from himself, and hands down to him certain

working-clothes of religion which, in his "condition of life," he will find useful, though they are not needed by his betters.

The danger for America is that the pulpit shall be degraded, even to a lower level, if the preachers do not bring and give the very best they have, know, and believe, to the people. "Preach as if you were preaching to archangels." That was an ejaculation of the late Mr. Weiss, and his obedience to his own injunction gave to his own sermons the life and the power which quicken to this day every hearer of them. Men may make other limitations to the

doctrine of human equality. But we shall all concede that one man has as good a right to the truth as another. And it ought to go without saying, that truth is truth, the same in one place as another -in one pulpit as another. There is no such thing as Dutch algebra distinguished from English algebra, nor is there any such thing as Presbyterian truth as distinguished from Universalist truth. Perhaps the machinery of written creeds deceives men. Perhaps a preacher comforts himself by saying that if a man comes into a Presbyterian church it is to hear the Presbyterian doctrine, and that the hearer takes it for granted, therefore, that that pulpit will not go further than the Presbyterian standard. This will not do. It may excuse me, in conversation, from refraining to allude to the starvation in Libby Prison, that I am talking to a reconstructed rebel offiBut when I am in the pulpit it is not etiquette which is at issue. I am there to say what is, and I must not stop short. The whole tangle of authoritative creeds is, at the best, embarrassing. They lead a man, from their nature, to try to continue in a belief which he once thought he had. They give a fossil form to what should be pliant, elastic, and alive. But, no matter what they do elsewhere, when the preacher enters the pulpit he is free or he is nothing. He is there to say what he believes, not what he wishes to believe, or thinks it would be well to believe.

cer.

It seems, now, as if the country at large were beginning to doubt whether the pulpit does make such utterance. In one quarter and another, and this in no dainty terms, it is called halfhearted. Preachers are called cowards and insincere. This charge seems rather hard, it is true, when it falls upon the liberal pulpit. For the preachers in that pulpit to be abused on one side for their own audacity, for publishing discussions which should be still regarded as tentative, and yet to be set down on the other side as sharing the timidity of their more orthodox brethren, seems a little unjust. But their shoulders are broad enough to bear this weight

also. It is for the organs of orthodoxy to consider how far they can bear to diminish the power of the pulpit. They ought to know whether its dogmatism have any such power as to make it safe to risk the contempt of those who hear. They ought to ask themselves whether men now come to church with the eagerness with which men once came, or whether the word spoken from the pulpit now commands the sort of assent it once commanded. Nor can they satisfy themselves by citing a few exceptional instances. The question is not whether an eloquent orator here, a careful and accurate metaphysician there, a prudent and wise ethical philosopher here, and a poet there, can still bring together thousands of people in church, when they speak from the pulpit. The question is, "Does the American people, on the whole, believe that the preachers say all they know?" This is a very grave question. In proportion as orthodoxy shirks it, or as it fails to amend its ways, in that proportion will the American pulpit, so far as orthodoxy controls it, cease to be the power which it once was, and which it wishes to be.

This is a matter where young men must use power as soon as they have it to use. It is as true now as it was in Harvey's day, that men who have passed five-and-forty years must not be expected to lead reforms. Well if they follow bravely. It is to the younger preachers of the Evangelical Churches-who are old enough to have ridden themselves of boyish audacity, and who are young enough to have the courage of their convictions-that we look with confidence for the courage and decision which shall avert the most serious danger of the American pulpit. For, though we have spoken of the insincerity of the pulpit-using the word which best expresses the attitude of mind into which preachers are lured unconsciously-the world's criticism will be less tender in its choice of words. If the pulpit does not tell the truth and the whole truth, the world will charge the pulpit with infidelity.

E. E. HALE.