"A cross-roads clergyman who runs away with his organist will get more attention than a congressman who goes off with his stenographer. The senile philanderings of a former United States senator did not get a front-page position so often as did a comparatively obscure clergyman who a few years ago failed to get gold out of sea-water, but did get it out of the purses of customers who thought they had a 'good thing.' Why? The answer throws a flood of light upon the question at issue. Because out of tens of thousands of ministers, all of them working under the obvious limitations and temptations to which the article makes reference, those who go wrong are so few that, when such instances occur, they are played up, because they are news. When a lawyer or a physician, or a bank president, or a commercial traveler is found with the broken fragments of the seventh commandment on his person, it is no news, at least relatively speaking, and it is given an inside page. This is an unconscious tribute of the sensational press to the high estimate in which the clerical profession is in general held." The theory of the religious editor might account for the notoriety given a delinquent minister, but no amount of publicity could create the fact of his delinquency. He has to run off with his organist before the yellow journal chronicles the event. And if more publicity is given him than is received by the lawyer, physician and bank president when the facts come out, the notoriety in known cases is more than offset by the secrecy preserved by the minister's congregation and friends in nine cases out of ten, so that the papers never get hold of the matter at all. But the defense based on extraordinary notoriety breaks down when we remember that the preacher who wrote the article we reproduce does not depend on the press for his knowledge of the clerical character. He has first-hand information of his own, and makes the assertion, moreover, that "it would be hard to find a man or a woman who has not at some time in life become personally acquainted with a professed exponent of religious truth and high moral ideals who has demonstrated the depths of human depravity." This may or may not be an exaggeration; it agrees, however, with the testimony of purchasers of the previous editions of this pamphlet, who generally fail to find in its pages certain cases of clerical depravity they have individually met. And we do not suppose that one act of immorality in a thousand committed by clergymen is ever known to anyone but himself. Not regarding ministers as worse than other men in this respect, we may yet reasonably conclude that they practice the customary male reserve, and therefore are no more given to relating all the incidents of their lives--the only way such incidents could become known--than members of the laity.