No, I am not saying that.  The pulpit teaches assemblages of people twice a week nearly two hours altogether—­and does what it can in that time.  The theater teaches large audiences seven times a week—­28 or 30 hours altogether—­and the novels and newspapers plead, and argue, and illustrate, stir, move, thrill, thunder, urge, persuade, and supplicate, at the feet of millions and millions of people every single day, and all day long and far into the night; and so these vast agencies till nine-tenths of the vineyard, and the pulpit tills the other tenth.  Yet now and then some complacent blind idiot says, “You unanointed are coarse clay and useless; you are not as we, the regenerators of the world; go, bury yourselves elsewhere, for we cannot take the responsibility of recommending idlers and sinners to the yearning mercy of Heaven.”  How does a soul like that stay in a carcass without getting mixed with the secretions and sweated out through the pores?  Think of this insect condemning the whole theatrical service as a disseminator of bad morals because it has Black Crooks in it; forgetting that if that were sufficient ground people would condemn the pulpit because it had Crooks and Kallochs and Sabines in it!

No, I am not trying to rob the pulpit of any atom of its full share and credit in the work of disseminating the meat and marrow of the gospel of Christ; but I am trying to get a moment’s hearing for worthy agencies in the same work, that with overwrought modesty seldom or never claim a recognition of their great services.  I am aware that the pulpit does its excellent one-tenth (and credits itself with it now and then, though most of the time a press of business causes it to forget it); I am aware that in its honest and well-meaning way it bores the people with uninflammable truisms about doing good; bores them with correct compositions on charity; bores them, chloroforms them, stupefies them with argumentative mercy without a flaw in the grammar or an emotion which the minister could put in in the right place if he turned his back and took his finger off the manuscript.  And in doing these things the pulpit is doing its duty, and let us believe that it is likewise doing its best, and doing it in the most harmless and respectable way.  And so I have said, and shall keep on saying, let us give the pulpit its full share of credit in elevating and ennobling the people; but when a pulpit takes to itself authority to pass judgment upon the work and worth of just as legitimate an instrument of God as itself, who spent a long life preaching from the stage the selfsame gospel without the alteration of a single sentiment or a single axiom of right, it is fair and just that somebody who believes that actors were made for a high and good purpose, and that they accomplish the object of their creation and accomplish it well, should protest.  And having protested, it is also fair and just—­being driven to it, as it were—­to whisper to the Sabine pattern of clergyman, under the breath, a simple, instructive truth, and say, “Ministers are not the only servants of God upon earth, nor his most efficient ones, either, by a very, very long distance!” Sensible ministers already know this, and it may do the other kind good to find it out.