BEECHER ON THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF MINISTERS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 6, Issue 1648, 31 March 1884, Page 2

BEECHER ON THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF MINISTERS.

The New York Herald says that H, W. Beecher recently preached from his Plymouth Church pulpit a remarkable sermon on "the character, duties, and responsibilities of ■ministers." In the the course of his sermon he made these striking' remarks Liberty corrects its own mistakes in a little while." "Truth never enters the world as an anny—a thousand men abreast," "To subject personal liberty in the pulpit to official repression is to close the channel by which God sends light into the world." The preacher is reported to have saidA people may, by tho preaching of new truths, bo unsettled in tha old forms of belief, without being rooted in the now. I take it for granted that if I had preached thirty years ago what I preach now, it would have been the greatest mischief to you —if I had believed it, but for thirty • years I have been cautious—l havo held t back. When I think a thing to bo true and have proved it true, God has given me the courage ef explicitness, and of thunder, if need be, to enunciate it. In regard to the circumstances that havo called up this talk allow me to say that while I am in perfect sympathy with wlint is called the school' of advanced thought, while I have for twenty years had a gradual change—corroborated year after year by investigation —of opinion upon tho structure of the Old Testament, so that I have long been prepared to accept the light, •changes that have takon place over the old notion of a smaller, verbal inspiration, yet that is a truth about which every minister of the Gospel should be cautious and careful. It seems to mo that it were wiser, first, that that which the Old Testament is good for should bo so clearly set forth that everybody should see and feel that there was a ■ reason for gratitude to God for-the Old Testament; then a congregation could bear tho destruction of the hereditary notions without feeling that they were losing anything, but were rather gaining a great deal. The Old Testament has got a great deal of straw upon which the wheat grew. Don't think that we are bound to eat the straw. I must add one thing. The pulpit has no longer that absolute jurisdiction in morals and religion which it once had. A thousand books are doing that which the Church ought to have done. A thousand able men—scientific, are doing that which if the Church won't do will be done for it, Young men read Huxley and Tyndall and Spencer and the rest, If you won't help them they will help themselves, and if our Sunday schools go on printing books that are built on the plant of SUO years ago, and will not explain the truth to our young peoplp, they will grow up outside of the Church, and from tho outside light bo enabled to see that they have been uninstructed in the Church, Then they will become infidel. The greatest need in the religious instruction of the young is a wise and judicious instruction in regard to the nature of the Bible—the history of it, the value of it; and wherein the value consists—tho reverent and helpful, written by men who are in sympathy with the work of God. That is tho great need of the day,"

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A prominent criminal lawyer says that his experience in a long life of practice has convinced him that a largo majority of those convicted in the courts of crime are innocent, arid that a majority of those acquitted are guilty. General Lord Wolseloy has been offered and has accepted the Senior Wardenship of the WolseleyjLodge of Freemasons, at Manchester, which was consecrated on March 28, of last year. The lodgo is conducted on temperance principles,.