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     The following letter to the New York Times is the sanest utterance of the “clerical mind” recorded in the past month:

     “I am a clegyman [sic]. I have noticed with humiliation your not infrequent allusions to the attitude and the utterances of Christian ministers in connection with the murder of President McKinley. I am humiliated because what you say is too true. It seems to me that some of the most extreme and and [sic] dangerous public utterances that have been made have come from the pulpit.
     “Another thing I have noticed. In the endeavor to account for the Providential character of the event each public speaker reads into it his own interpretation drawn from his own particular hobby. If he is an anti-imperialist, it was imperialism that did it[.] If he is a temperance reformer, it was rum that did it. If he is an anti-trust man, it was the multiplication of trusts that did it, or it was yellow journalism, etc. If God rules the world it must have been Providential. God is good and wise. What he does or allows to be done must in the end prove best; but God is inscrutable and no one can or ought to try to tell why he acts as he does.”

     We do not exactly see by what authority this clergyman judges God to be “good and wise,” since he declares that he is inscrutable and the divine motives not to be inquired into. He is right, however, in characterizing the utterances of the pulpit as “extreme and dangerous.” The clergy have made the assault of an assassin on the President the excuse for an assault upon freedom of press and of speech.