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poetic fervor; indeed, it is this very fervor which conveys to his voice an affected modulation, and to his reading an exaggerated strain. His congregation sing with a will—not one, but all. A precentor leads, and straight there ascends a sound as if Israel were again shouting for the downfall of city walls. Yet, perhaps, it would be as well, were they reminded that modern church music is a means intended for the upbuilding of Zion, and not for the dismantling of Jericho. The chapter of the day is read, and still no evidence of Mr. Chapin's strength has appeared. The prayer is finished, and the hearer has listened to the preacher's first mental essay of the morning. Now, if a substratum of breadth and solidity underlies the acquirements and accomplishments which should, and which generally do, ornament a capacious intellect, its existence is sure to be disclosed in the exercise of prayer. Neither temporal stimulus incites, nor scenic effects sustain, the communion of man with his God. The very petition by him, withdraws its subject-his infirmities-from between the soul and its Author; and the spirit wrestles, naked, for the boon that is prayed. As high thoughts swelled in solemn cadence to the Great Unseen, I felt that their language was messenger worthy of credit at Heaven's high chancery. The mind of the preacher discursed through regions more elevated than his habitable sphere; and while the majesty of his progress affirmed the power of his flight, a regret attended his close, that he should be again restored to earth. I had witnessed his most purely intellectual performance; though not the one the most popular, nor perhaps, the one the most attractive. His text is announced, and he is now to enter the arena of the human heart. One by one, he carefully presents his propositions, and intimates their consequences. His diction is nervous and terse-sometimes even elegant. His manner, now, is impressive rather than powerful, but his action is painfully restricted to the horizon of his note-book. His audience have attentively followed him, and it is clear that he is thoroughly understood. But the revealing light of a key-thought discloses to him a vista opening down into the future of man; suddenly sermon and text are nowhere, and darting to the side of his pulpit, with gleaming eye and laboring body, he pours out a molten flood of humanizing and ennobling thought. The benevolent and the pure are elevated; the sensuous and the ignoble are pursued to their miserable retreats. Now a general shudder attends his denunciations; and now a genial smile attests the quality of his raillery. The fitful inspiration

subsides; but the eagerness of his people is evidently awaiting its return. He, who has borne the trials of a beleaguered place, has gazed upon the slow approach, through the dim air, of the black and hostile shell, armed with deadly missiles, has watched its portentous fate, and witnessed the flight from its devastating explosion-so sit the audience noting the accelerating impetus of the moving ball above them. Eyes protrude, and ears incline to catch the earliest intimation of the direction of its next descent; the votary shies upon the sister at his side a sharp significance, and, with his elbow, plants in her side a palpable opinion that ""Tis coming now"; and even the nodding philosopher of the Tribune shakes off his latest babyism with his nap, and, in the corner of a pew into which his body has jammed itself, looks up from behind prodigious binnacles, in expectation that "tis coming now" and sure enough, it is coming. His gyrations have ceased, and, with a fearful power, the speaker plants himself right over the bosoms of his congregation. Now commences a singular display of mind, exasperated by muscular action. Dislocated words and disjointed sentences are ejected with a velocity that defies pursuit. Fuming with an afflatus, seemingly prophetic, corresponding contortions labor for the delivery of his thoughts. Arms strike out in the fervency of zeal, and the whole man seems to be spread over with brain. The catastrophe is at hand. Summoning the whole of his great physical strength, he drives himself bodily into the hearts of his hearers, and there, with the sputtering, and the wrenching, and the tugging of the torpedo, he suddenly explodes truths that tear out the conventional walls erected for the concealment of thought, and opens to the gaze of each the yawning, palpitating chasm of his bosom-sins. Such is Mr. Chapin. His congregation are modelled upon him; are driven onward by him. All within his presence partake of his energy. The music ascends by high-pressure; the very clock, that marks the hour, feels that there is no time to lose; and the people, when dismissed, move off at a house-a-fire pace. Such a minister can not but invigorate his hearers; and such a congregation, weekly charged with so tremendous a galvanism, can not but electrify and reform the minds which they encounter.

But it can not be said that Mr. Chapin is a great man; indeed, it is doubtful if he possesses even a great mind. His greatest achievements are to be attributed to mental intensity. Discursiveness he has none. It is not his, with the wand of genius, to evoke from their recesses the powers that ministered at the

travail of nature; which preside at the springs of human thought; and which meander with life through all its devious currents, and subjecting them, in order due, to the discipline of an imperial mind, to educe from them a law of the universe. Rather does he explore the heart, and tread the highway of its passions, burdened with the secret yearnings and aspirations, the joys and the griefs of that sad prison-house. It is not for him to penetrate the veil which envelopes the mystic, or to surmount the barriers which interpose between the actual and the ideal. An honest, downright mind, hissing and bubbling over the fires of a capacious heart, pleasantly gliding, or foaming in paroxysms, as sympathy soothes or passion inflames a susceptible nature-is the mind of E. H. Chapin. A good proportion of its strength reposes in the strong nervous system, the bellows which inspires and supports it. A good deal of its character is derived from the physical structure which sways itenergetic, direct, positive, unpolished, unrefined. The mind of Blaize Pascal in such a body would have revolutionized man; the mind of E. H. Chapin in the body of Blaize Pascal could not revolutionize itself. The critical hearer is painfully impressed with the evidence of defective acquirements. The preacher, it is clear, has not studied diligently the Fathers and the Prophets. The dogmas of the schools he ranks with the lumber of divinity, not because he has pursued either, but because his heart has rejected both. As a dialectician he is without pretensions; but this, which unfits him for cogent argument, is, in truth, one of the causes of his popular appreciation. Grammatical construction does not prevail in his extemporary speech, and prosody shrieks when improvisation is upon him. He is of the nineteenth century, utilitarian, with a dash of progression into the twentieth. Indeed, Utilitarianism is his peculiar characteristic. In the woods, he would chop down trees; in the city, he builds up men; among savages, his yell would be the most terrific to enemies; in New-York, his voice is the most grateful to friends. His energies are irrepressible; should the world stop he'd set up a planet on his own account; as it is, he is content with stalking across its path. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Mr. Chapin is the idol of his congregation. He is more deservedly an idol than fifty other idols of fifty other congregations. He is idolized by the thought which he has made an antiseptic to mental putrefaction. The others are idolized by the imbecility resulting from the mental stagnation they have produced.

It is but a sorry spectacle which our New-York Zion pre

sents. Its worship has sadly degenerated from the purity of the primitive days. Then, churches were the tabernacles of Christians, whose Lord dwelt in a temple not made with hands, and the tabernacles themselves were dedicated, through the baptism of one of his apostles, to the service of the living God. Now, the pastor pushes the apostle from his seat in the affections and in the congregation of the people. Saint Peter and Saint Paul were long since served with notice to quit, and the churches that once were theirs, now are the Reverend Doctor Cronicroker's Church, and the Reverend Doctor Perfumalpet's Church. A new element has been sought out, and applied to the character of the Evangelist; not only must his doctrine be sound, but his word also. Robust lungs arouse a modern audience to a sense of duty more speedily than a healthy brain; and a "Blower" is quite as attractive in the pulpit as is Gabriel's horn in the Park; and I am not sure that it is not quite as well that it is so. I once experimentally attended the givingsout of a preacher, in diligent search for a particle of sense. Six months inspired suspicions that he was incapable of the offense, and nine satisfied me of his entire innocence. Of course he was idolized by his congregation, who, when I left, good simple bodies, were still busily spreading their souls out to dry on Brother Boodle's brains.

No inconsiderable quantity of the man-worship which frequents our churches is conducted by pious old ladies and susceptible young ones. Devotional as is woman, the unfortunate education of her mind renders it so unequal to continuous effort that her ingenuity is constantly employed in seeking, and her affections in magnifying the oracles when found, whose responses constitute the faith which, from the point where her reason halts, is to conduct her to heaven. Hence the Conscience-keepers, the Spiritual guides, the Religious friends, who swarm our church pulpits, and employ their time mainly in looking after feminine salvation, and in issuing doctrinal mandates for female souls.

This relation is mutually baneful. The proverbial pride of a priesthood tumefies by undiscriminating adulation; and the man sets himself above human responsibility, who is impressed that he is above human attainment. Enmeshed in spiritual endearments, he comes to believe that the carnal shell of so blessed a soul is a vessel set apart for inscrutable purposes; and straight he inaugurates a system of neighborhood donations, of creature comforts, and of personal coddlings, that finds the Reverend gentleman, with little Sancho at least,

making much of himself." And all the while the process is going on, mental action pauses; the pampered body closes its greasy folds about the inert mind, and sacerdotal authority is, at the latest, all that can be found to sustain the opinions of the priest. On the other hand, the association is equally demoralizing. The surrender of her conscience to her spiritual pastor subjects woman to a degradation hardly less than that of the confessional. The belief which she derives from his instructions gradually encroaches upon the originally limited sphere of her understanding, and the feeble conflict at length ends in the ascendency of a blind faith. The frequency of her applications to the Shepherd for manna, occasions a distaste for other provisions; and the idol and the devotee thence travel Jordan road in a spiritual partnership, the capital of which is furnished by the former. Thus it happens that we see our churches thronged with those who kneel at the pulpit as at a heaven-halfway-house, who accept its oracles as the voice of a God, and who retire to their closets to confound the beauty of holiness with that of the precious Doctor Blankman. Nor is this class composed exclusively of women. Men there are, either whose superstition has survived their judgment, or from whose brains nature originally withheld a sensorium, who rest their eternal hopes upon the belief that the clergyman, to whose salary they have generously contributed, will preach them into heaven; but who, if there, would be indignant at not finding Doctor Littany's church upon an eligible site, and themselves sitting in its most luxurious pew. These men consider religion a thing that is paid for, to be taken out an airing o' Sundays, on the soft seats of aristocratic carriages, and to be locked up with my lady's prayer-book on intervening days of Forestalling and 'Change; and if during their sojourn in this vale the carriage falls into no rut, and the sermon is respectful to their feelings, and considerate of their endurance, they thank their pastor and God that they are not, as other men, vulgar sinners, but are laid in lavender for eternal glory. These swell the chorus of priestly praise, and men and women unite in hoisting the miseable humanity whose skirts they have appropriated. Because these things are true, it is required that they should be looked to, and well it were could they be corrected. Not to the pulpit, however, are we to look for reform. Alas! they who should have withstood these abuses are their greatest part. surpliced priest passed from his species when the apostolic unction oozed upon his head, from the magnetic fingers of the lineal successor of Saint Peter; and the ancient order asserts

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