In our pulpits we preach to a few hundreds or thousands of people; the newspaper addresses an audience of twenty thousand, fifty thousand, or two hundred thousand.  We preach three or four times a week; they every morning or evening of the year.  If they are right, they are gloriously right; if they are wrong, they are awfully wrong.

I find no difficulty in accounting for the world’s advance.  Four centuries ago, in Germany, in courts of justice, men fought with their fists to see who should have the decision of the court; and if the judge’s decision was unsatisfactory, then the judge fought with the counsel.  Many of the lords could not read the deeds of their own estates.  What has made the change?

“Books,” you say.

No, sir!  The vast majority of citizens do not read books.  Take this audience, or any other promiscuous assemblage, and how many histories have they read?  How many treatises on constitutional law, or political economy, or works of science?  How many elaborate poems or books of travel?  How much of Boyle, or De Tocqueville, Xenophon, or Herodotus, or Percival?  Not many!

In the United States, the people would not average one such book a year for each individual!

Whence, then, this intelligence—­this capacity to talk about all themes, secular and religious—­this acquaintance with science and art—­this power to appreciate the beautiful and grand?  Next to the Bible, the newspaper,—­swift-winged, and everywhere present, flying over the fences, shoved under the door, tossed into the counting-house, laid on the work-bench, hawked through the cars!  All read it:  white and black, German, Irishman, Swiss, Spaniard, American, old and young, good and bad, sick and well, before breakfast and after tea, Monday morning, Saturday night, Sunday and week day!

I now declare that I consider the newspaper to be the grand agency by which the Gospel is to be preached, ignorance cast out, oppression dethroned, crime extirpated, the world raised, heaven rejoiced, and God glorified.

In the clanking of the printing-press, as the sheets fly out, I hear the voice of the Lord Almighty proclaiming to all the dead nations of the earth,—­“Lazarus, come forth!” And to the retreating surges of darkness,—­“Let there be light!” In many of our city newspapers, professing no more than secular information, there have appeared during the past ten years some of the grandest appeals in behalf of religion, and some of the most effective interpretations of God’s government among the nations.

That man has a shrivelled heart who begrudges the five pennies he pays to the newsboy who brings the world to his feet.  There are to-day connected with the editorial and reportorial corps of newspaper establishments men of the highest culture and most unimpeachable morality, who are living on the most limited stipends, martyrs to the work to which they feel themselves called.  While you sleep in the