It is an excellent profession; that of minister of the gospel. The ranks of none offer better men than the best types of that profession, large men, strong men, just men, not doing preaching for a business, but really wishing to counsel and aid frail humanity as it marches among the perpetual pitfalls, the perpetual hardships of human life. It is an exceedingly good religion of itself, that merely of helping your fellow-man, of saying something to soften and better him, of giving to him something of hope and courage when he is in need of them. Let us not argue whether or not a divine spirit can become mortal, whether or not Christ was divine. We know by virtue of abundant human testimony that He was a great and kindly Man, a great and adorable Human Being, the greatest of whom we know in all our human history. And that man who makes the creed of the greatest of us all his own, who lives kindly and helpfully and modestly, with no blare of trumpet, doing simply and silently that which his human hands find to do; that man nearest to the greatest Man of whom we know, the one who went closest to making human life endurable, who took humanity farthest away from the cruel creed of the jungle--that minister of the gospel, let us say then, who lives as is possible for one of his calling to live, and attains in that calling what may be attained, may be, and not infrequently is, a splendid human being. But he is worth our admiration when he is worth it; not necessarily otherwise. A minister of the gospel may not always be the central figure of that religious fervor which has come sporadically and spasmodically to men under many creeds, since man began to think aloud, to doubt and despair in public, and to pray in company. Besides, there are ministers and ministers. Some are men naturally large and are so accepted. Others, alas! bulk larger than really they are, by virtue of the fact that always they apparently have prevailed; whereas, in truth, they only have met small opposition. 'Tis a sweet fashion of life which allows us always to have our own way! Nor is it to be denied that when the preacher stands before the flock, his disordered hair falling above his brow, his eyes flashing, his breath sobbing in his emotion; when he hurls out questions to which he knows there will be no answer; when he makes one assertion after another to which he knows there is to be no contradiction; when he rules, sways, expounds, glorifies, waxing greater in stature out of the very situation in which he stands--let us not deny that he is then in the way--the simple and forgivably human way--of coming more and more into the belief that he himself is as great as the doctrines which he expounds. There are martyrs in history because of human convictions which led them to contradict the church. There are other and far more numerous martyrs, made such because they dared not contradict it.