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 and hard to attain, then for their own sake, if not for his, they should beware of visiting him either with silent distrust or open reproach.  He, just like them, must stand or fall according to his fidelity to the oracles of God.  Only, once more, let him and let the Church comprehend that those oracles are not summed up in any laborious expounding of verbal texts.  “The letter killeth,” unless itself enlivened through the immediate Providence.

To be true to God, the preacher must be true to his time, as the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles were to theirs.  The pulpit dies of its dignity, when it creeps into the exhausted receiver of foregone conclusions, and has nothing to say but of Adam and Pharaoh, Jew and Gentile, Palestine and Tyre so far away.  Its decorum of being inoffensive to others is suicidal for itself.  It is the sleep of death for all.  As the inductive philosopher took all knowledge for his province, it must take all life.  We have, indeed, a glorious and venerable charter of inestimable worth in our map of the religious history of mankind through centuries that are gone.  We must study the true meaning of the Bible, the book and chief collection of the records of faith, precious above all for the immortal image and photograph, in so many a shifting light and various expression, of the transcendent form of divinity through manhood in Him to be ever reverently and lovingly named, Jesus Christ.  But there is a spirit in man.  “The word of God,” says an Apostle, “is not bound”; nor can it be wholly bound up.  The Holy Spirit of God that first descended never died, and never ceased to act on the human soul.  The day of miracles is not past,—­or, if none precisely like those of Jesus are still wrought, miracles of grace, the principal workings of the supernatural, of which external prodigies are the lowest species, are performed abundantly in the living breast.  Jesus Himself, after all the sufficient and summary grandeur of His instructions, assures His followers of the Spirit that would come to lead them, beyond whatsoever He had said, into all truth.  In that dispensation of the Spirit we live.  Its sphere endures through all change, impregnable.  It is “builded far from accident.”  No progress of earthly science can threat or hurt its eternal proportions.  It is the supreme knowledge, and to whoever enters it a whisper comes whose only response is the confession of our noble hymn,—­

    “True science is to read Thy name.”