All things improve in this world very much in the same way.  The improvement originates in one man’s mind, and, being carried into effect with evident good results, it is copied by others.  We are all apt lazily to run in the groove in which we find ourselves; we are creatures of habit, and slaves of tradition.  Now and then, however, in every profession and sphere, if they are untrammelled by law, an individual appears who is discontented with the ancient methods, or sceptical of the old traditions, or both, and he invents better ways, or arrives at more rational opinions.  Other men look on and approve the improved process, or listen and imbibe the advanced belief.

Now, there appears to be a man upon Brooklyn Heights who has found out a more excellent way of conducting a church than has been previously known.  He does not waste the best hours of every day in writing sermons, but employs those hours in absorbing the knowledge and experience which should be the matter of sermons.  He does not fritter away the time of a public instructor in “pastoral visits,” and other useless visitations.  His mode of conducting a public ceremonial reaches the finish of high art, which it resembles also in its sincerity and simplicity.  He has known how to banish from his church everything that savors of cant and sanctimoniousness,—­so loathsome to honest minds.  Without formally rejecting time-honored forms and usages, he has infused into his teachings more and more of the modern spirit, drawn more and more from science and life, less and less from tradition, until he has acquired the power of preaching sermons which Edwards and Voltaire, Whitefield and Tom Paine, would heartily and equally enjoy.  Surely, there is something in all this which could be imitated.  The great talents with which he is endowed cannot be imparted, but we do not believe that his power is wholly derived from his talent.  A man of only respectable abilities, who should catch his spirit, practise some of his methods, and spend his strength in getting knowledge, and not in coining sentences, would be able anywhere to gather round him a concourse of hearers.  The great secret is, to let orthodoxy slide, as something which is neither to be maintained nor refuted,—­insisting only on the spirit of Christianity, and applying it to the life of the present day in this land.

There are some reasons for thinking that the men and the organizations that have had in charge the moral interests of the people of the United States for the last fifty years have not been quite equal to their trust.  What are we to think of such results of New England culture as Douglas, Cass, Webster, and many other men of great ability, but strangely wanting in moral power?  What are we to think of the great numbers of Southern Yankees who were, and are, the bitterest foes of all that New England represents?  What are we to think of the Rings that seem now-a-days to form themselves, as it were, spontaneously in every