To-day the man who is ever ready to mislead, to confuse, and to inflame, the minds of ignorant people, encounters no check, no critical scrutiny of his pronouncements, for his listeners are hardly able to understand correctly the simplest words he uses. The temptation, therefore, to use language loosely and even unscrupulously is as powerful as it is repeatedly unresisted. The huge and flatulent press, that has grown up within the last fifty years, cares as little for accuracy of expression, or for sober precision in language, as it cares for any other ideal which formerly seemed worth striving after. The power of the press is enormous. It guides opinion, it influences the hearts of the people, it has the united effort of nations under its direction; and yet where does it show any signs of being chastened by the awful duties which, it is true, it may never deliberately have intended to shoulder at the outset of its career? The traditions of the Middle Ages, at least, included certain principles which led to the protection of the poorer and more ignorant classes; the Church of the Middle [p135] Ages also protected the poor and the ignorant according to its lights. It may be questioned, however, whether this new force, the press, has as yet even considered the function of protecting the ignorant as among its most sacred privileges. And by this protection there is no intention here to imply a conspiracy to withhold truth from the uncultivated, or to distort facts for their digestion; what is meant is that necessary vigilance and caution which, if observed by all editors and publishers of journals and periodical literature, would induce them to regard as a public crime, as an unsocial act, the inculcation upon those who are ill-equipped for self-guidance, of any notions, sentiments, or points of view concerning life and human relationships that were not sound, proper, or healthy--not to mention noble. Unlike that other force, the Church, the press was ushered in with scant ceremony, almost imperceptibly. It grew to omnipotence with but a fraction of the solemnity and pomp which attended the development of the Church; hence, too, it has come to ripeness, to the zenith of its power, without any of that centralised organisation, without any of that self-conscious administration of its enormous powers for good and evil, and assuredly without any of that insight into the immensely sacred responsibility of its functions, which characterised the Church from the beginning.