dge the quick and the dead."

That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not
be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief,
or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and
deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by
the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?

As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of
purgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to
my Jewish friends--"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise
Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal
in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill
the promise of a Messiah--and were it not well for those who proclaim
themselves God's people to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen already?'"

I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would
not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion
as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the
journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with
them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not
the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers.
Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a
single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until
he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope
of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.

It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly
and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial,
sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong
in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.

I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too
few to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not
take to ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues
of that village preacher of whom it was written that:

_Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray._

* * * * *

_A man he was to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year._

* * * * *

_His house was known to all the vagrant train,
He chid their wande