a great deal more of the subjects included under the general name of theology than the clergyman can be expected to know of medicine.  To say, as has been said not long since, that a young divinity student is as competent to deal with the latter as an old physician is to meddle with the former, suggests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the family of the one who says it.  What a set of idiots our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after a quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any opinion about the subjects which they have been teaching, or trying to teach him, so long!

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to hearers who do not believe, or only half believe, what he preaches.  But pews without heads in them are a still more depressing spectacle.  He may convince the doubter and reform the profligate.  But he cannot produce any change on pine and mahogany by his discourses, and the more wood he sees as he looks along his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being useful.  It is natural that in times like the present changes of faith and of place of worship should be far from infrequent.  It is not less natural that there should be regrets on one side and gratification on the other, when such changes occur.  It even happens occasionally that the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, rarely from the side which receives the new accessions, less rarely from the one which is left.  It is quite conceivable that the Roman Church, which considers itself the only true one, should look on those who leave its communion as guilty of a great offence.  It is equally natural that a church which considers Pope and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true Christians, should regard any of its members who go over to Romanism as lost in fatal error.  But within the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass from one to another.

So far from such exchanges between sects being wrong, they ought to happen a great deal oftener than they do.  All the larger bodies of Christians should be constantly exchanging members.  All men are born with conservative or aggressive tendencies:  they belong naturally with the idol-worshippers or the idol-breakers.  Some wear their fathers’ old clothes, and some will have a new suit.  One class of men must have their faith hammered in like a nail, by authority; another class must have it worked in like a screw, by argument.  Members of one of these classes often find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other.  The late Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper room, where some of them got from him their first lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, in dealing with the books they hold sacred.  But after a