But the present design is a plea for justice, not a fresh charge.  The pulpit is to teach religion in application to life.  But when we reflect what life is, how deep in the soul, how wide in the world, how complicated and delicate in its affairs and ties,—­and when, we consider what religion is, the whole truth of heaven respecting all the operations of earth,—­a kindly judgment is required for unavoidable short-comings and ministerial mistakes.  With different ages, sexes, experiences, states of mind, degrees of intelligence and impressibleness in a congregation, it is a rare felicity for a sermon to reach all its members with equal impressiveness or acceptance.  Who ever heard a uniform estimate of any discourse?  There seems almost a curse upon the preacher’s office from its very greatness, so that it is never finished, and no portion of it can be done perfectly well and secure against all objection.  If he try to unfold the deep things of the Spirit, and bring his best thoughts, which he would not throw away, before his audience, though in language clearer than many a chapter of Paul’s Epistles, some will call the topic obscure, and complain that their children cannot understand it, quoting, perhaps, the old sentence, that all truth necessary to salvation is so plain that he who runs may read, and the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot err therein, and commending superficial homilies on other tongues to censure whatever is profound from his.  But should the poor occupant of the desk venture to emulate this eulogized sonorous exhortation, exerting himself to come down to the ignorant and the young, there will be some to stigmatize that, too, as a sort of trifling and disrespect to mature minds.  He has by a senior now and then been blamed for excessive attention to the lambs of his flock, and annoyed with the menace to stay away, if they were especially to be noticed.  If a visitation of special grace or an exaltation of physical strength make the mortal incumbent happy in his exposition, so that he is listened to with edification and delight, it is, by some, not passed over to his credit at the ebb-tide of his power.  Half the time the house is not half full, as though the institution which all order to be conducted nobody but he is bound to shoulder.  If the preacher labor to express the mysterious relationship between God and Christ, the divine and human nature, he will be considered by some a sectarian, controversialist, or heretic.  If he unfold what is above all denominational disputes, he will be fortunate to escape accusations of transcendentalism, pantheism, spiritualism.  If, lucky man, he go scot-free of such indictment, a last stunning stroke, in the gantlet he runs, will be sure to fetch him up, in the vague and unanswerable imputation of being very peculiar in his views.  If he insist on the miracles as literal facts, he will be laughed at as old-fashioned in one pew; if he slight them, he will be mourned over as unsound in the next.