speakers I always read, and I almost always find him instructive and impressive, a gentleman, if not a Christian.  He is fair, temperate, frank, bold, and independent; and, to my mind at least, he always throws light on these so perplexing questions.’  Now, if you have the intelligence and the integrity and the fair-mindedness to say something like that to a member of the opposite party you have poured oil on the waters of party; nay, you are in that a wily politician, for you have almost, just in saying that, won over your friend to your own side.  So noble is the love of truth, and so potent is the high-principled pursuit and the fearless proclamation of the truth.

A general election is a trying time to all kinds of public men, but it is perhaps most trying of all to Christian ministers.  Unless they are to disfranchise themselves and are to detach and shut themselves in from all interest in public affairs altogether, an election time is to our ministers, beyond any other class of citizens perhaps, a peculiarly trying time.  How they are to escape the Scylla of cowardice and the contempt of all free and true men on the one hand, and the Charybdis of pride and self-will and scorn of other men’s opinions and wishes on the other, is no easy dilemma to our ministers.  Some happily constituted and happily circumstanced ministers manage to get through life, and even through political life, without taking or giving a wound in all their way.  They are so wise and so watchful; they are so inoffensive, unprovoking, and conciliatory; and even where they are not always all that, they have around them sometimes a people who are so patient and tolerant and full of the old-fashioned respect for their minister that they do not attempt to interfere with him.  Then, again, some ministers preach so well, and perform all their pastoral work so well, that they make it unsafe and impossible for the most censorious and intolerant of their people to find fault with them.  But all our ministers are not like that.  And all our congregations are not like that.  And those of our ministers who are not like that must just be left to bear that which their past unwisdom or misfortune has brought upon them.  Only, if they have profited by their past mistakes or misfortunes, a means of grace, and an opportunity of better playing the man is again at their doors.  I am sure you will all join with me in the prayer that all our ministers, as well as all their people, may come well out of the approaching election.

There is yet one other class of public men, if I may call them so, many of whom come almost worse out of an election time than even our ministers, and that class is composed of those, who, to continue the language of Vanity Fair, keep the cages of the fair.  I wish I had to-night, what I have not, the ear of the conductors of our public journals.  For, what an omnipotence in God’s providence to this generation for good or evil is theirs!  If they would only