(6) It is a great mistake to suppose that we must look mainly to professional clergymen for instruction in divine things. It is a significant fact that the most able and important books that have been published within the last decade have been written by laymen or by persons, like Emerson, who have outgrown the narrow garments of a caste profession and have laid them off. How to get along without professional ministers has been well answered by Capt. Robert C. Adams (quoted in the writer’s book, Man—Whence and Whither? pp. 218, 219). If ministers would give up the _holy-orders_ idea, cast into the sea the millstone incumbrance of pecuniary dependence, engage earnestly in some legitimate work to support themselves, they would then for the first time begin to realize what soul-freedom is, and they could then preach with an intelligence and power and with a satisfaction to themselves of which they now know nothing. Let them try it for themselves and learn a lesson. Whether the clerical order is so divine an institution that we have no right to call it into question or to abolish it altogether, is a question that must be practically considered soon. (7) There is a deep impression widely prevailing among thoughtful and sincerely religious persons that the infidelity of the pulpit is largely responsible for the prevailing skepticism of the age. The word “infidelity” is here specially used in a strict philological sense—_infidele_, not faithful, unfaithfulness to a trust—but it is also used in its more general sense of _disbelief_ in certain religious dogmas. We impeach and arraign the clergy (admitting a few honorable exceptions) on the general charge of _infidelity_ in the strictest and broadest sense of the word— 1st. In that they fail to qualify themselves to be the leaders of thought in the great, living questions affecting religion and morality. We have elsewhere said: “Not one minister in a thousand ‘discerns the signs of the times’ or is prepared for the crisis. Few pastors ever read anything beyond their own denominational literature. Their education is partial, one-sided, professional. They cling to mediaeval superstitions with the desperate grasp of drowning men. The great majority of the clergy are not men of broad minds and wide and deep research, and have not the ability to meet the vexed questions of to-day.” It is an admitted policy, especially among the orthodox clergy (so called), not to read or to listen to anything that might unsettle their faith in what they have accepted as a finality; whereas no man can intelligently _believe_ anything until he has candidly considered the reasons assigned by other men for not believing what he does. “He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbor cometh and searcheth him.”