their delight in him arose chiefly from never quite knowing what he meant to imply, or to enforce.  Not that his hearers would have followed any counsel even if he had been so misguided as to offer it; they did not come to hear him “preach” in the full sense of the word,—­they came to hear him “say things,"- -witty observations on the particular fad of the hour—­sharp polemics on the political situation—­or what was still more charming, neat remarks in the style of Rochefoucauld or Montaigne, which covered and found excuses for vice while seemingly condemning viciousness.  There is nothing perhaps so satisfactory to persons who pride themselves on their intellectuality, as a certain kind of spurious philosophy which balances virtue and vice as it were on the point of a finger, and argues prettily on the way the two can be easily merged into each other, almost without perception.  “If without perception, then without sin,” says the sophist; “it is merely a question of balance.”  Certainly if generosity drifts into extravagance you have a virtue turned into a vice;—­but there is one thing these spurious debaters cannot do, and that is to turn a vice into a virtue.  That cannot be done, and has never been done.  A vice is a vice, and its inherent quality is to “wax fat and gross,” and to generally enlarge itself;—­whereas, a virtue being a part of the Spiritual quality and acquired with difficulty, it must be continually practised, and guarded in the practice, lest it lapse into vice.  We are always forgetting that we have been, and still are in a state of Evolution,—­out of the Beast God has made Man,—­but now He expects us, with all the wisdom, learning and experience He has given us, to evolve for ourselves from Man the Angel,—­the supreme height of His divine intention.  Weak as yet on our spiritual wings, we hark back to the Beast period only too willingly, and sometimes not all the persuasion in the world can lift us out of the mire wherein we elect to wallow.  Nevertheless, there must be and will be a serious day of reckoning for any professing priest of the Church, or so-called “servant of the Gospel”, who by the least word or covert innuendo, gives us a push back into prehistoric slime and loathliness,—­and that there are numbers who do so, no one can deny.  Abbe Vergniaud had flung many a pebble of sarcasm at the half-sinking faith of some of his hearers with the result that he had sunk it altogether.  In his way he had done as much harm as the intolerant bigot, who when he finds persons believing devoutly in Christ, but refusing to accept Church-authority, considers such persons atheists and does not hesitate to call them so.  The “Pharisees” in Christian doctrine are as haughty, hypocritical and narrow as the Pharisees whom Jesus calls “ravening wolves,” and towhom He said, “Ye shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in,” and “Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”  The last words, it may be said, will apply fittingly to more than one-half of the preachers of the Gospel at the present day!