raised up as the result of a reaction against Protestant reform.

The modern pulpit really dates from the Reformation. With few exceptions the Reformers were mighty preachers, and some of them wielded an influence in this way which far surpassed all their efforts with the pen, and was felt over half Europe. In the British isles the power of the word was particularly felt. Cranmer, Latimer, and Jewel, in their several varieties of eloquence, awakened an interest in the new doctrines which nothing was able to allay. The fearless tongue of John Knox, even against princes, has been noted as fully by foes as friends. In the recorded specimens of his sermons, if we translate them out of the atrocious Scotch spelling, and the fetters of the uncouthest dialect ever pronounced, there are apparent both power and elegance. From that day to this the Presbyterians of Scotland have been, above all people, lovers of the preached word.

Some of the more prominent characteristics of the Scottish pulpit are familiarly known. It was at once expository, doctrinal, methodical, and impassioned. For ages it was without book, as it still is in a great degree; for the country parishes retain all their ancient contempt for the "paper-minister;" notwithstanding the eloquent examples of reading by such men as Chalmers, Irving, Candlish, and Hamilton. The citation of Scripture passages, and the custom of "turning up" the same in the little Bible of the hearer, have given a peculiarly textual character to Scottish sermons. The great stress laid upon strong and tender emotion at the Lord's table, the meeting of several ministers and multitudes of people on sacramental occasions, and the continuance of these services during several days, have contributed to an unction and pathos which have been extended to our own churches among the purer settlements of strict Presbyterians. The power of the pulpit has, therefore, been nowhere more manifest. No public authority has ever availed to silence this mode of popular agitation and rebuke.

In the sermons of the Scottish Church two very unlike tendencies are clearly distinguishable: one is the fondness for scholastic method and minute subdivision, derived from the dialectical turn of the people, and the familiarity of the preachers with the severe manuals of Calvinistic theology; the other is the disposition to give outlet to high religious feeling. In some portions of the kirk both have been active throughout the entire period; there have been manifest the acumen and ratiocinative precision, as well as what Buchanan calls the ingenium perfervidum Scotorum. This has been diversified by the constant practice of lecturing in the forenoon service, which has

maintained expository preaching for three hundred years, and done much to mould the religious temper of the nation. There was indeed a period in the eighteenth century, when the chill of Moderatism fell upon public discourses in a part of the church, producing the tame literary elegance of Robertson and Blair. But the same age produced the Erskines of the Secession in one school of homiletics, and Walker and Witherspoon in another. The "Ecclesiastical Characteristics" and the "Corporation of Servants" did much to stigmatise the unfaithfulness of the frigid preachers, and even to open the way for those triumphs of principle which have since resulted in the strength and fervour of the Free Church. It would carry us beyond all due limits to enlarge on the new modes of pulpit discourse which have owed their origin to the brilliant but sometimes misleading example of Chalmers and his imitators. This great preacher, admirable as he appears in his printed works, can never be fully comprehended by those who never heard him. The cool reader has time to pause over solecisms of language and excesses of amplification which were put utterly beyond the hearer's sense by the thunder of his delivery. When Dr John M. Mason, on his return from Scotland, was asked wherein lay Chalmers's great strength, he replied, "It is his blood-earnestness."

In

The free course of our remarks has led us somewhat further than we intended, and we must go back to gather up a few observations respecting the English pulpit, more, however, in the way of desultory observation than of historical detail. From the very beginning of Reformation times, the pulpit has been a potent engine of popular impression in England. deed, we suppose that at no time has preaching been more powerful in its influence on the people, than before the rise of those corruptions which rent the Anglican Church, and drew off some of its greatest minds to the side of Puritanism. When this rupture took place, it is just to say, that in many of the greatest qualities of preaching the true succession was in the line of nonconformity. But it is impossible to ignore the fact, that in some important attributes the Anglican pulpit is the greatest of which the press has given any record. As the movement party was characterised by great warmth, extemporaneous flow, and assault on the religious passions, it became at once a necessity and a fashion for Churchmen to cultivate a species of discourse which was more learned, more accurate, and more sedate. We do not mean to admit the force of the vulgar taunt, that the Puritans, as a body, were deficient in learning. The first generations of Dissenters numbered among them some of the most profound scholars in the Christian world. Yet, as the lines diverged, and the Nonconformists were ex

cluded from the great seats of learning and all the emoluments of the church, the difference in this particular became more marked; and, notwithstanding some brilliant exceptions, it must be acknowledged, that, in point of erudition and elegant letters, the dissenting ministers of England, as a body, are inferior to the established clergy. The latter, indeed, vaunted of this difference much beyond any substantial ground, and sometimes made the pulpit a place for dogmatic discussion and patristic lore, to a degree which was unseasonable and offensive. In its more favourable manifestations, the learning of the Anglican Church has been nobly brought out in defence of the truth; especially against the Freethinkers, the Unitarians, and the Papists. A body of divinity might be compiled solely from the sermons of great English divines; a library might be filled with the elaborate dissertations which they have preached.

No one could reasonably expect us, in an article of such limits and character as this, to recite the splendid roll of English preachers; but there are a few whom we would earnestly commend to the notice of every theological student. Omitting entirely the great names which occur in an earlier period, it is important to mention the four bright luminaries, Barrow, Taylor, South, and Tillotson, each so unrivalled in his way, and all so unlike. Barrow was an extraordinary man, as a traveller, a philologist, a mathematician, and a divine. He read Chrysostom at Constantinople before he was made Greek professor at Cambridge. He was predecessor of Sir Isaac Newton in the mathematical chair. Both pursuits tended to make him the eloquent reasoner. It was the age of long periodic sentences, such as appal modern lungs, and Barrow knew how to give a sonorous swell and climacteric advance to his Demosthenic passages. Many is the period in his pages which for matter might fit out the whole fifteen minutes' sermon of a dapper Oxonian of our times. He abounds in high argument, which is more inflamed by passion than coloured by decoration. His noblest passages leave us thrilling with his passion, rather than captivated by his imagination. He is sometimes too abundant, and sometimes unwieldy; but not dull, not weak, not quaint. A ponderous earnestness and a various wealth strike you in every page. With Barrow, multitude of words is never verbosity, and length of discussion is never diffuseness; it is massive strength without brevity. Hence, we do not wonder that the great Chatham should have taken him as a model, reading over some of his sermons as much as twenty times. "In his sermons," says Mr Granger, "he knew not how to leave off writing till he had exhausted his subject; and his admirable discourse on the duty and reward of bounty to the poor took

him up three hours and a half in preaching." His bust in Westminster Abbey will be fresh in the recollection of all clerical travellers.

No

How abrupt is the transition to the "Shakspeare of the pulpit!" Bishop Taylor, in his own manner, has had a few imitators, but never a competitor. If we except the great dramatist, no man can be named in any department of literature who stands more clearly alone. Never were there sermons, we suppose, which purely for intellectual pleasure have been read with such satisfaction. In every thing but the outward guise they are often the highest poetry. Imagination has no flights more lofty and adventurous than many which have been quoted again and again. He soars in a grand similitude, with a boldness of preparation and a sustaining power of wing, and then descends to the earth with a graceful undulation and gentle subsidence, which are absolutely without a parallel. The voluptuous melody of the rhythm gives a charm to his diction. Interwoven with these brilliant strands of fancy, there is often a subtle thread of argumentation which wins your assent before you are aware,-often, unfortunately, to worse than semi-Pelagian laxity; for Taylor was very remote from the orthodoxy of his day. Along with all this, there is poured out upon us a profusion of learning as from a golden horn of plenty. preacher of our day would venture to quote as much Greek, during his whole life, as Jeremy Taylor sometimes brings out in a single sermon. But the reminiscences and allusions of classic learning spin from him spontaneously in every paragraph. While his invective is sometimes of a scalding heat, he is often tender and pathetic; and there is a scholarly negligence in the style which charms while it baffles all attempts at imitation. It must now be admitted that with all these claims to our wonder, Taylor seldom makes prominent the peculiarly gracious doctrines of the evangelical system. There is a saintly calm about his ethics, which reminds us of the purer class of Romish preachers, but the ascetic directions and the exaltation of human merit belong to the blemishes of the same school. The amplitude of his comparisons, sometimes conducted with a sameness of display which runs into mannerism, did not escape the censure even of his contemporaries, and was plainly struck at by the following sentences of the austere and caustic South: "Nothing here" [namely in Paul's preaching] "of the 'fringes of the north-star; nothing of Nature's becoming unnatural;' nothing of the down of angel's wings,' or the beautiful locks of cherubims: no starched similitudes, introduced with a 'Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion, and the like.""

* Compare the famous passage from Taylor: "For so have I seen a lark rising

But a single perusal of any one of those beautiful passages, of which the above is so clever and so cruel a travesty, will instantly obliterate the criticism from the mind of any tasteful reader. Though it would end in ludicrous disaster for any one now to try to preach like Jeremy Taylor, we are persuaded that the study of his works would be an excellent regimen for young clergymen, especially for such as labour under the diseases of coldness and lethargy. It would at least stimulate them to warmer effusions, and would show them that logic and immensely fertile learning are compatible with a flow of elegance and an exuberant illustration, such as we commonly seek only in verse.

We speak of the "witty South," as familiarly as of the "judicious Hooker," and with less fear of any exception. But we despise the man, while we admire the genius. South was a veritable Vicar of Bray, trimming his sails to every gust of popular or royal favour. It is amusing to find this scourge of dissent beginning his career at Oxford, with a paper of Latin verse in eulogy of Cromwell. He afterwards had rich livings and stalls and high diplomatic places. When it was no longer profitable to truckle to the Stuarts, he took the oath of allegiance to William and Mary.

We are now fairly beyond the region of fancy, pathos, or eloquence, in its ordinary sense. South is clear, strong, saturnine, and truculent. He is a cogent reasoner, always observing an exact method, and establishing his point by the most effective reasoning. He seldom quotes, never displays his reading, and always advances with directness, brevity, and a sort of bull-dog fierceness to his purposed end. Where his terrible prejudices do not come into play, he commands our highest respect, as in some of his masterly arguments for divine predestination; but in other places he bends his tremendous powers against the other doctrines of grace. It would be difficult to find in any from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven, and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind, and his motion made irregular and inconstant, descending more at every breath of the tempest than it could recover by the libration and frequent weighing of his wings; till the little creature was forced to sit down and pant, and stay till the storm was over; and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel, as he passed sometimes through the air, about his ministeries here below: so is the prayer of a good man; when his affairs have required business, and his business was matter of discipline, and his discipline was to pass upon a sinning person, or had a design of charity, his duty met with infirmities of a man, and anger was its instrument, and the instrument became stronger than the prime agent, and raised a tempest, and overruled the man; and then his prayer was broken, and his thoughts were troubled, and his words went up towards a cloud, and his thoughts pulled them back again, and made them without intention; and the good man sighs for his infirmity, but must be content to lose the prayer, and he must recover it when his anger is removed, and his spirit is becalmed, made even as the brow of Jesus, and smooth like the heart of God; and then it ascends to heaven upon the wings of the holy dove, and dwells with God, till it returns, like the useful bee, loaded with a blessing and the dew of heaven."