This class controls the Churches, as the State. Let me show the effect of that control. I am not to try men in a narrow way, by my own theological standard, but by the standard of manliness and Christianity. As a general rule, the clergy are on the side of power. All history proves this, our own most abundantly. The clergy also are unconsciously bought up, their speech paid for, or their silence. As a class, did they ever denounce a public sin? a popular sin? Perhaps they have. Do they do it now and here? Take Boston for the last ten years, and I think there has been more clerical preaching against the abolitionists than against slavery; perhaps more preaching against the temperance movement than in its favor. With the exception of disbelieving the popular theology, your evangelical alliance knows no sin but "original sin," unless indeed it be "organic sins," which no one is to blame for; no sinner but Adam and the devil; no saving righteousness but the "imputed." I know there are exceptions, and I would go far to do them honor, pious men who lift up a warning, yes, bear Christian testimony against public sins. I am speaking of the mass of the clergy. Christ said the priests of his time had made a den of thieves out of God's house of prayer. Now they conform to the public sins and apologize for popular crime. It is a good thing to forgive an offence: who does not need that favor and often? But to forgive the theory of crime, to have a theory which does that, is quite another thing. Large cities are alike the court and camp of the mercantile class, and what I have just said is more eminently true of the clergy in such towns. Let me give an example. Not long ago the Unitarian clergy published a protest against American slavery. It was moderate, but firm, and manly. Almost all the clergy in the country signed it. In the large towns few: they mainly young men and in the least considerable churches. The young men seemed not to understand their contract, for the essential part of an ecclesiastical contract is sometimes written between the lines and in sympathetic ink. Is a steamboat burned or lost on the waters, how many preach on that affliction! Yet how few preached against the war? A preacher may say he hates it as a man, no words could describe his loathing at it, but as a minister of Christ, he dares not say a word! What clergymen tell of the sins of Boston,--of intemperance, licentiousness; who of the ignorance of the people; who of them lays bare our public sin as Christ of old; who tells the causes of poverty, and thousand-handed crime; who aims to apply Christianity to business, to legislation, politics, to all the nation's life? Once the church was the bride of Christ, living by his creative, animating love; her children were apostles, prophets, men by the same spirit, variously inspired with power to heal, to help, to guide mankind. Now she seems the widow of Christ, poorly living on the dower of other times.