The age has been one of marvelous inventions in steam, in electricity, in the machinery which has made nearly every mechanic and operative an engineer, which is driving the horse from the streets and the farms, and which enables one factory hand to produce as much as three produced a generation ago. Submarine cables keep America in close touch with Europe, and even the gossip of Paris and London is known the same day in our cities. Everybody reads, and whereas the American of a generation ago took one newspaper, his son to-day probably takes two or three, besides weekly and monthly publications. Notwithstanding all that is said about ignorant foreign immigration it is certain that the growth of newspaper circulation in the past two decades has exceeded the growth of population. Americans are a reading people, and it is for every head of a family to see that his children have the right kind of reading. * * * The clergy are not now the political monitors of the community, as when, at the time of the Revolution, the election sermon preached in Boston, and printed in pamphlet form, was spelled by the light of the pine-knot in the cabin on the Berkshire plantation, inspiring the rustic breast with holy zeal to deliver the Israel of the New World from the yoke of the English Sennacherib. The newspaper has taken the place of the pulpit as a political beacon and guide, and, as every denomination and congregation includes members of both the prominent national parties, it would be impossible for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not prone to use that freedom indiscreetly.