Yet ought not the preacher to stick to his text? So great an advocate of the truth should speak the truth and practise it. He should feel inspired with a strong and awful prepossession in its favor. He need not make pretension to infallibility, but we expect of him the absolute veracity of his sacred calling and learning. His living should never depend upon sustaining an error or an untruth. If it does, he does not deserve the name he bears, and is not in the strictest sense a teacher and leader of thought. We will excuse a deficiency of knowledge, but never a deficiency in character,--in the word and spirit of what he proclaims as the truth. Every truly devout minister of the Gospel should rise and erase this stigma from his profession. It is a humiliating reproach that any of this class of teachers lack true insight, truthfulness, and faithful service; that they mask their convictions, that they will not act out their opinions. This is a perversion of what man really is. It makes him a vanishing spirit destitute of true sentiment, character, and practical rectitude. Forms of worship and of religion may be temporary and change, but love of truth and conviction should always be an active power, uniform, eternal. Even in our theological schools, where the human spirit is supposed to be exorcised into worlds of graver and graver realities, we are just now learning some valuable lessons in the flexibility of theological opinion. He who stands in a conspicuous place in any community will always be looked at. What he says and does will be judged by everybody. His person and life and character, his joys and sorrows, are things of public gossip and interest. And if the uniqueness of his position in society be due to some sacred calling, such as a teacher of religious truth, he evokes the highest esteem and expectations. All truth is sacred; and truth's propagator is expected to be, not only a truth-seeker, but a teacher of it in the interests of the public weal. The responsibility of this is distributed among all men, but nowhere is it so great as with the professed preacher and teacher of religious truth. He cannot absolve himself from it. It is the price he pays for his exalted privilege, his dignified position.