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 price of a drink by pleading mournfully that all his family had died of thirst; a jest which took easily with the crowd, and might be trusted to raise a sympathetic laugh to-day. It is plain that these gentlemen felt without saying what Henry Adams said without feeling, that "morality is a private and costly luxury," and so forbore to urge it upon a bankrupt world.

The paradox of our own time is that clergymen, whose business it is to preach, are listened to impatiently, while laymen, whose business it is to instruct or to amuse, are encouraged to preach. I open two magazines, and am confronted by prophetic papers on "The Vanishing Sermon," and "Will Preaching Become Obsolete?" I exchange them for two others, and find lengthy articles entitled "Can We Control Our Own Morals?" and "Spiritual Possibilities of Business Life." Now, if a disquisition on "Spiritual Possi-