l, and is as accountable
as any one for what he says. He ought justly and tenderly to remember
the diverse tenets represented among his auditors, to side with
no sect as such, to give no individual by his indorsement a mean
advantage over any other, nor any one a handle of private persecution
by his open anathema. Moreover, he should abstain from that
particularity in secular themes which so easily wanders from all
sight of spiritual law amid regions of uncertainty and speculative
conjecture. He should shun explorations less fit for prophets than for
experts. He should lay his finger on no details in which questions of
right and wrong are not plainly involved. He must be public-spirited;
he cannot be more concerned for his country and his race, that
righteousness and liberty and love may prevail, than divine seers have
ever been, as their books of record show; but, if he becomes a mere
diplomatist, financier, secretary-of-state, or military general, in
his counsels or his tone, he evacuates his own position, flees as
a craven from his post, and assumes that of other men. Yet it is an
extreme still worse for him to resort to lifeless generalities of
doctrine and duty, producing as little effect as comes from electric
batteries or telegraphic wires when no magnetic current is established
and no object reached. What section, of the world should evade or defy
the law of God?

O preachers, beware of your sentimental descant on the worth of
goodness, the goodness of being good, and the sinfulness of sin,
without specifying either! It is a blank cartridge, or one of
treacherous sand instead of powder, or a spiked gun, only whose
priming explodes without noise or execution. Let nobody dodge the sure
direction of that better than lead or iron shot with which from you
the conscience is pierced and iniquity slain. Suffer not the statesman
to withdraw his policy, nor the broker his funds, nor the captain the
cause he fights for, from the sentence of divine truth on the good or
evil in all the acts of men.

The preacher, however, as he pronounces or reports that sentence, must
never forget the bond he is under in his own temper to the spirit of
impartial love. Whatever is vindictive vitiates his announcement all
the more that he cannot be rebuked for it, as he ought to be, on the
spot. Only let not the hearers mistake earnestness for vindictiveness.
If kindly and with intense serenity he communicates what he has
struggled long an