Many preachers in the past have been strong factors in the march of civilization, but courageous preachers have always been scarce. As a rule, they have been more conservators of the past than moulders of the future, clinging with grim tenacity to the traditions and teachings of the early fathers. Among the Church of England preachers in Virginia, while nearly all opposed separation from the mother country, there were few so militant as the famous John Peter Muhlenberg, who, from his pulpit at Woodstock, Virginia, declared: "There is a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but there is also a time to fight, and that time has now come," and suiting the action to the word, threw off his gown, disclosing a uniform beneath, and followed by three hundred men of his congregation, marched to join Washington's forces. In Colonial times in New England, the pulpit occupied a more general sphere and exerted more general influence than to-day. Ministers preached that the Hebrew Commonwealth was the model for the new Republic, and so strenuously that as an effect our government assumed that form which prevailed among the Hebrews under the judges and had the divine sanction. In the agitation of the slave question, as a class, the preachers were mostly silent. Had they roused themselves to the defence of right, they could have created a public sentiment towards the inhuman and shameless traffic which would have destroyed slavery without the necessity of a civil war in which tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed and millions of money were lost. Theodore Parker, Bishop Simpson, Albert Barnes, E. H. Chapin, Rabbis Sabato Morais and David Einhorn, and above all, Henry Ward Beecher, constituted the few conspicuous examples of the preachers who came out strongly for abolition, but the stand these great men took was effective, and once the die was cast, practically all the preachers became leaders in the movement for emancipation. The attitude of Lincoln on slavery was not determined by churchmen. Lincoln made a wide distinction between churchmen and Christians. Christianity is unselfish service born of love; churchianity is often a form without a God, a wearing of religion as a cloak and not as an armor,--it never obeys a command unless it is too feeble to resist, and in many cases, is a perfidy and treason against the law of Christ.