THE POWER OF THE PULPIT.

CHAPTER I.

THE FACT ILLUSTRATED, THAT THE PULPIT HAS POWER.

Ir may not be deemed the most modest service in one who ministers at the altar, to select as the topic of somewhat discursive remark, The Power of the Christian Pulpit. "Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips." The light of the pulpit ought so to shine before men, as to need no other commendation, save its strong and steady radiance.

Yet it was not egotism in Paul, to “magnify his office." The work of the Christian Ministry is one which possesses strong peculiarities, and one which has strong claims. There is nothing that resembles it in the ordinary employments of men. While it has its full share of toil, it has solicitudes and discouragements, dependencies and disabilities, that are peculiarly its own. It has too its successes, its expectations, its honors and its rewards. It

knows its own bitterness, and "a stranger does not intermeddle with its joy."

For the purpose of presenting our subject in as practical a light as I am able, I propose to advert to the fact itself that the pulpit has power; to show what are the constituent elements which invest it with this moral influence ; to point out the duties of ministers themselves in order to make full proof of the power with which it is invested; and to specify the obligations which rest on the church of God to give it its due place and importance. It is to the first of these thoughts that we shall devote the first five chapters, the fact itself that the pulpit has power.

Our first remark, on this branch of the subject, is, that the institution of such an order as religious teachers is deeply imbedded in the common principles, and common wants of man, as fallen by his iniquity. Such is his intellectual and moral nature, that he imperatively demands religious teaching. The necessity is perfectly absolute. Teachers of religion are indispensable to the existence of religion in the world, No matter what the religion is; so long as natural conscience has a dwelling in the human bosom, there must be a class of men devoted to its services. So far as my information extends, there is no nation, nor tribe, nor any age of the world, that ever has been utterly destitute of

an order of men separated to sacred purposes. Paganism, in its more degraded, as well as its more enlightened and polished forms, down to the "Medicine man" of our own wilderness, has its shrines, its offerings, its sacrifices, and its priests. If man is not a religious, he is a superstitious being. In the most degenerate tribes, the priests have been found even divided into different and distinct orders, and distinguished by their costume, as they bave been simple soothsayers, or astrologers, or familiar with the arts of magic.

The Sacred Order constitutes one of the essential elements of the social state. Society can no more exist without it, than without some form of civil government. Men must have some religious ritual; the form must exist, where the reality is dead; and even where the reality itself is death, there must be a ritual to preserve the death-like reality. All religion is, to a certain extent, the religion of form; even that revealed from Heaven is so far a religion of form, that its spirit is expressed in outward and instituted observances. Men will not consent to occupy a place in associated communities without the recognized dispensers of these religious rites. Conscience demands them for the living and the dead. Be it but necromancy, or some strange form of "black art" conjuration; the mother demands them

war with immorality and vice, that the vicious and immoral almost uniformly shun its instruction. Such persons are rarely found in the house of God. The atmosphere is one they cannot live in; and the honest, faithful preacher of the Gospel, to his honor be it spoken, one whose presence and influence they cannot abide. Plant a pulpit in the hot-bed of crime, and the atmosphere becomes gradually more pure; the fearful activity of wickedness is restrained, and low vices and black crime skulk away, and seek a shadow under some deadly Upas, rather than regale themselves beneath the Tree of Life. Men are not, found worshipping a golden image, or a block of marble, or a crawling reptile, in lands where the Christian pulpit has a place. Those depraved passions and stupid and degraded vices, everywhere the attendants on the debasing sytems of idolatry, prevail only in lands where this divine institution is not known, or where it just begins to be recognized. If the land in which we dwell is not as debased as ancient Egypt, or Phenicia, or Babylon, or modern India, and if our sacred rites are not such as to shock every mind that is touched with the least sense of decency and virtue; it is because the pulpit guards it by purer influences. Go to lands where there are no pulpits, or to those portions of the world where they are "few and far between," and