Professor Fisher, the champion of Yale-College orthodoxy, has recently admitted in the _North American Review_ that at least one of the causes of the decline of clerical authority and influence is the increased intelligence of the laity. If the people cannot get what they desire from the pulpit, they will seek it from the platform and the press. Truth is no longer to be concealed in cloisters and smothered in theological seminaries, but it is to be proclaimed from housetops and in language understood in every-day life. It was once said that “the lips of the priest give knowledge,” but it may now be truly said that modern scientists and philosophers among the laity are the principal teachers of mankind, and that publications like the _North American Review_ and _The Forum_, and last, but not least, the secular daily newspapers, are doing more to instruct the people in living truths than the whole brood of ecclesiastical parrots. 2d. We charge that many professional clergymen suppress things which they do believe to be true, and not unfrequently suggest things, at least by implication, which they do know to be false. Dr. Edward Everett Hale recently published an article in the _North American Review_ entitled “Insincerity in the Pulpit;” and the Rev. Dr. Phillips Brooks of Boston, who recently received episcopal honors in Massachussetts, has confirmed in the _Princeton Review_ what Dr. Hale charged in the _North American Review_ regarding clerical disingenuousness. Dr. Brooks wrote thus: “A large acquaintance with clerical life has led me to think that almost any company of clergymen, talking freely to each other, will express opinions which would greatly surprise, and at the same time greatly relieve, the congregations who ordinarily listen to these ministers.... How many men in the ministry to-day believe in the doctrine of verbal inspiration which our fathers held? and how many of us have frankly told the people that we do not believe it?... How many of us hold that the everlasting punishment of the wicked is a clear and certain truth of revelation? But how many of us who do not have ever said a word?” The same principle of prevarication and deceit was practised by the early Fathers of the Christian Church, who not only concealed the truth from the masses of the people, but did not hesitate to deceive and mislead them. Mosheim, an ecclesiastical historian of high authority, testifies that “in the fourth century it was an almost universally adopted maxim that it was an act of virtue to deceive and lie when by such means the interests of the Church might be promoted.” He further says of the fifth century, “Fraud and impudent imposture were artfully proportioned to the credulity of the vulgar.”