Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 April 1886 — Sensation vs. Bible Preaching. [ARTICLE]

Sensation vs. Bible Preaching.

No doubt many of the clergy would make excellent political speakers, comic lecturers, or actors on the stage, but it would be hardly fair for them to appear in the church’s livery and claim secular popularity on account of their cloth. No man can serve two masters, or act us chaplain and jester at the same time. r t is true that the stipends of the clergy are small, and, although they who preach the gospel still live by the gospel, they do not fare sumptuously, but getting food and raiment have therewith to be content. The churches pay what they can for pastors, not for secular lecturers; and if the latter be what they want they need not pay an annual stipend at all. Even the most agnostic of skeptics have admitted that the Bible has no e ;ual as an instrument of literary and philosophic cu ture. It gives employment to the highest and finest faculties of the mind. The clergyman who substitutes 1 teratare for theology, Sliakspeare and the other poets for the Bible, Typdall and Darwin for St. Paul, social science for the Sermon on the Mount, gives his congregation stones for bread, and shows clearly that he h»ade the great mistake of his life when be took upon him the pastoral office and became professedly a preacher of the everlasting gospel. Contrary to general belief, it is stated that the number of suicides in this country is fcmall in comparison with Europe. Out of the more than twenty-five thousand cases of self-de-struction which occur annually in Europe and the United States together, only about one thousand six lufnclred can be laid to our score. Among the 102,000 shareholders of the Panama Canal are 16,000 women.