In an article with the above title in Scribner's for March, Dr. Holland writes as follows:— “Let us have a plain word about the greed for sermons, so prevalent in these latter days. We doubt whether there ever was a time in the history of the Christian church when the ministers were placed in so awkward, difficult, and unjust a position as they are to-day. Great, expensive edifices of worship are built, for which the builders are heavily in debt. That debt can only be handled, the interest on it paid, and the principal reduced, by filling it with a large and interested congregation. The congregation cannot be collected and held without brilliant preaching. Brilliant preaching is scarce, because, and only because, brilliant men are scarce, and scarcer still the brilliant men who have the gift of eloquence. So soon, therefore, as a man shows that he cannot attract a crowd, “down goes his house.” He may be a scholar, a saint, or a man whose example is the sweetest sermon that a human life ever uttered, a lowly friend, a faithful pastor, a wise spiritual adviser, and even a sermonizer of rare attainments and skill, but if he cannot draw a crowd by the attractive skill of popular eloquence, he must be sacrificed to the exigencies of finance. The church must be filled, the interest on the debt must be paid, and nothing can do this but a man who will “draw.” The whole thing is managed like a theater. If an actor cannot draw full houses the rent cannot be paid. So the actor is dismissed and a new one called in his place. There is an old-fashioned idea that a church is built for the purpose of public worship. It is not a bad idea, and that exhibition of Christianity which presents a thousand lazy people sitting bolt upright in their best clothes gorging sugar plums, is not a particularly brilliant one. It was once supposed that a Christian had something to do even as a layman, and that a pastor was a leader and a director in Christian work. There certainly was a time when the burden of a church was not laid crushingly upon the shoulders of its minister, and Christian men and women stood by the man who was true to his office and true to them. We seem to have outlived it, and a thousand American churches, particularly among the great centers of population, are groaning over discomfiture in the sad result. Instead of paying their debts like men, they lay them on the backs of their floundering ministers, and if they cannot lift them they go hunting for spinal columns that will, or for tongues that hold a charm for their dissipation. It is a wrong and a shame which ought to be abolished just as soon as sensible men have read this article. Who was primarily to blame for this condition of things we do not know, but we suspect the ministers themselves ought to bear a portion of it. Beginning in New England years ago, the sermon in America has been made too much of. The great preachers, by going into their pulpits Sunday after Sunday with their supreme intellectual efforts, have created the demand for such efforts. Metaphysics, didactics, apologetics, arrayed in robes of rhetoric, have held high converse with them. The great theological wrestlers have made the pulpit their arena of conflict. Homilies have grown into sermons, and sermons into orations. Preachers have set aside the teacher’s simple task for that of the orator. Even to-day they cannot see, or they will not admit, that they have been in the wrong. With a knowledge of the human mind which cannot but make them aware that no more than a single good sermon can be digested by a congregation in a day, and that every added word goes to the glut of intellect and feeling, and the confusion of impressions, they still go on preaching twice and thrice, and seem more averse than any others to a change of policy. It is all intellectual gormandizing and no activity, rest and no reflection. It is all cram and no conflict, and they seem just as averse to stop cramming as before they apprehended and bemoaned the poverty of its results. If the lazy, over-fed, loosely articulated dragon could only be split up into active men and women, who would shut their mouths and open their eyes and hands, we could have something different. But the sermon is the great thing; the people think so, and the preachers agree with them. We should like to know what the Master thinks about it.”