Compared with Mr. Savage's strength of character, how contemptible are some of the clerical and theological enigmas of our day. Waning and waxing periods are not uncommon in our pulpits and our schools of divinity. Now and then they diffuse a feeble as well as a strong glimmer of religious virtue, and too often become the presages of things with which we have no patience. It is painful to see preachers and professors, like chartered buffoons, suppressing the light of reason, intruding into places and folds to which they do not belong, and sanctioning what in their hearts they do not accept. Among our clergymen, where intelligence, character, and earnestness are everything, we witness a conspicuous lack of sovereign motives shaping and harmonizing life and doctrine. Nothing is more marked to-day in the American pulpit than theological insincerity and indifference to the obligation to preach only what is believed. Instead of feeling the might of conscientious will and the higher aspirations of the age, they are faint and muffled echoes of that moral force which has given efficiency to the Christian ministry. We still hear the boast that the ministry of to-day has outgrown the old Puritan austerity and the lines marked out in earlier and more rigorous periods. May we not admit also that the courage, the righteousness, and the heroic discharge of duty, by which the Puritan has attracted the attention and the admiration of the world, have lost something of their former greatness and power? Like hunters, too many preachers are on the scent, not for the truth, but for game,--for gain and earthly glory. To speak the truth might interfere with their vocation; it might throw out of market their stock in trade.