"There are peculiar temptations incident to the work of any man who appears to weak minds as a demi-god on occasions, whose work makes unusual demands on his nerve forces, and who is obliged to work almost exclusively with women. There is not only the temptation to license in personal virtue coupled with opportunity in pastoral visitation; there is the tendency to conformity to feminine standards, so that the man becomes womanly and usually a poor kind of an old woman at that. "Mere preaching puts a tremendous strain on a man's moral fibre. It is the habitual statement of duties and ideals which the preacher knows he does not reach and do. It is the expression of the phrases of character, not necessarily accompanied with their expression in living and doing. It results in the mental habit of considering a duty done as soon as it is declared. It exhausts the moral impetus in phrases. It makes the man act the lie. "Intellectual dishonesty results from habitual standing as a special pleader; as the defender of ground which has not been honestly, candidly examined. The preacher seldom goes back to the evidence; he argues from the conclusions of others. He stands as an authority in that in which he frequently has made no original, unprejudicial examination. "Intellectual dishonesty comes as a result of cowardice in regard to the declaration of his own honest convictions. He is perhaps unconsciously persuaded to teach what the church teaches rather than what he would teach if he gave himself a chance to think. Creeds may be small matters, after all, but the teaching of a creed in which we do not believe is no small matter in its effects on the teacher. There are many potent reasons for fearing a heresy trial--often the thought of his children's hungry mouths and bare backs is one reason. It is a good deal easier to admire the men who went to the stake for a conviction than it is to follow them. The truth is, no minister who is honest with himself and who declares what he fully believes will have any reason to fear. The church may cast him out, but he will find a thousand voices and hearts to echo to any honest truth in his own. "Often the preacher is so dead sure that his motive is right, that he does not stop to examine sufficiently his method. He wants to save souls, and if he can do it, as it seems to him, by crooked means more quickly than by straight ones, then he takes the crooked way. He wants to build a church--if he can build it quicker by misrepresentation, by double dealing, by beating any one, he thinks only of the church, and that overweighs any other consideration.