therefore, were probably deluded by his courtly hypocrisy; and where the influence of the monarch's example was so extensive as in the court of France, they may honestly have thought, not that any compromise of moral or religious severity, but a compliance with the complimentary style of the age might be wisely made to obtain an auxiliary so important. They may have entertained hopes of his ultimate sincere conversion; at all events they secured his countenance and support. There is, indeed, one damning passage in Massillon, speaking of the king's conduct to his wife, un époux malgré les foiblesses qui partagèrent son cœur, toujours respectueux pour la vertu de Thérèse; condamnant, pour ainsi dire, par ses égards pour elle l'injustice de ses engagements, et renouant par l'estime un lien affoibli par les passions. This is courtly lenity indeed, which nothing can justify, and the only palliation of which is that it was said of the dead, not of the living.

But, instead of selecting striking occasions, and reserving himself for subjects in themselves aweful, the English preacher is in a continued and uninterrupted course of exertion. He is either oppressed by the frequency with which the duty occurs, or is called upon so seldom as to want that experience which is only to be gained by practice. Our dignitaries (of whom, indeed, there are not many below the episcopal rank, who are not at the same time parochial ministers) commonly pass a short time only in the service of their cathedrals, and return perhaps with satisfaction to the less conspicuous scene of their standing duty-their country churches; and the residents in our universities are so rarely summoned to this duty, and then under circumstances so peculiar, as. by no means to give free scope to their exertions. The latter address a learned audience, chiefly composed of their own order. Hence they confine themselves to the discussion of points of learning, and controversial questions, on which they have always laboured, and still continue to labour, with the greatest success. There is no point in divinity, no theological question, which may not be found among our published discourses of this nature, examined with a depth, solidity and soundness of judgment which it would be vain to seek in the writings of any other church in Europe. But the ministers of a large mingled congregation, (independent of the various avocations which attend on the care of a parish, from which the preachers in Roman Catholic countries are usually exempt,) however fertile in conception and rapid in composition, must be overpowered by the necessity of providing one if not two sermons every Sunday. Thus precisely in that situation where it is most wanted, and where real zeal would be most actively stimulated by the consciousness of acting within a sphere of great utility, the difficulties are accumulated and redoubled. Instead of pour

ing himself forth in copious and unrestrained energy, he must husband his resources; he must be various, and, in order to secure that variety, he must content himself frequently with subjects less striking, and there is no question but the improvement which arises from use and experience is limited. The perpetual dwelling upon certain subjects weakens both the power of apprehending them and of representing them in their real force and grandeur. Thus the preacher is under the necessity of repeating himself; but it frequently happens that, instead of strengthening and brightening his original conception, he goes on diluting it and rendering it more obscure: habit has weakened the impression upon his own mind, and he who is not profoundly impressed himself will never produce a deep or lasting effect upon others.

The second important point of difference (we studiously refrain from other distinctions, which it might be deemed invidious to introduce) is the greater authority assumed by aud attributed to the priestly character in Roman Catholic countries. With them the church being the rule of faith, with us the Scriptures alone, the assertions of the delegated representative, as it were, of the church, are advanced with greater boldness, as they are received with more implicit awe and veneration. The English minister does not assume the character of a depositary of divine truths, but simply that of an expositor of those truths as they are found in the Bible; possessing no more light than a good education, directed to the peculiar study of the scriptures, can afford, but still fallible, and therefore by no means disclaiming the right of those whom he addresses to examine his discourses by the rules of sound logic and right reason. He does not command implicit confidence to be placed in his precepts, simply because they are uttered by an appointed and regularly ordained minister; he appeals to the reason, whether he does not deserve that confidence by his legitimate deduction of his conclusions from scripture: hence the whole of an English sermon ought to be a fair and' natural inference drawn from the text. With the French this is so much otherwise, that Maury con siders it rather a fault than an excellence-not but that the French preachers continually adduce scripture, but the quotation is in Latin, and translated, commented on, and paraphrased according to the purpose of the preacher. We once took the pains to examine a whole page of quotations in a sermon of Massillon, not above one of which, fairly and literally explained, bore upon his subject. But the high tone of the orator, speaking as the acknowledged successor of the Apostles, not less than the scriptural ignorance of the congregation, carries off all this without fear of detection or even of question. Among many of the dissenters, particularly of the lower order, this authority is assumed upon the principle of sensible inspiration.

inspiration. Each preacher, fancying or pretending to have his call, pours himself forth without hesitation or diffidence, guaranteed as it were alike from absurdity and error. The congregation, infatuated by the same notions, are under too great awe not to receive with seriousness what colder and better educated hearers might be provoked to smile at as ludicrous, or recoil from as blasphemy. But, from whatever source it proceeds, fluent and unhe sitating boldness of elocution has a powerful effect, and, whether an orator has wound up his courage by confidence in himself, well or ill founded; whether enthusiasm, or effrontery, or sincere zeal be the stimulant, the hearer is hurried away by the rapidity and fervour of his language. But, in our temperate and sober church, though no pious man denies the necessity of superior aid, and would ascribe all his success to a higher source than his own exertions, he has never the temerity to assert or the presumption to imagine himself gifted with a peculiar inspiration; he is more deliberate, cautious and argumentative, and, knowing the rigid jealousy with which orthodox opinions are watched, as well as feeling his own conscientious diffidence, he is fearful of hazarding an untenable opinion, or making an incautious admission. Thus, as he became amenable to the observation of an audience, vigilant, controversial, and frequently well acquainted with scripture, and from another cause hereafter to be noticed, the practice of reading sermons, peculiar to our own church, gradually obtained. In deference both to the importance of the subject and the acuteness of the hearer, it was assumed that the acknowledged appearance of preparation would more than counterbalance the more vivid effect of extemporaneous delivery. Unpremeditated language and argument may occasionally be betrayed into incautious assertions, or deviate into unintentional error, the rocks upon which it was considered fatal to split. Thus the oratorical form of address became obsolete, and the sermon assumed the form of a religious Nor can it be denied that there is something incongruous essay. in sudden bursts of premeditated passion, in sallies of vehemence previously composed in the closet, in studied ejaculations, and in many incidental beauties, which appear to occur to the orator as he is inflamed by his subject, but which nothing can warrant or excuse but a powerful interest already excited. It is notorious that the French preachers studied, their harangues with a nicety and precision unknown probably by any other orators. Maury describes the laborious manner in which Massillon got up, if we may use the phrase, his sermons; but still there was the appearance, the illusion of an unpremeditated address; the thoughts seemed to occur on the instant and kindle into language; he could allow himself all the liberties of extemporaneous oratory, and, though the whole was in

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the highest degree artificial, the art was entirely concealed. We are neither vindicating nor reprobating our own practice; our object is simply to show the manner in which it was formed, and how it operated upon our style of preaching.

But there is another peculiarity in our church, which has greatly affected our mode of preaching. In Catholic countries the sermon is almost a distinct service, and with the dissenters it occupies by far the largest portion of their religious ceremony. With them the congregation is fresh, and their attention has not been exhausted by the previous long service, which if, as is often the case, it devolves upon one individual in a large church, has already severely tried the physical powers of the preacher, and filled up so much of that proportion of time during which the mind can dwell without weariness or distraction on the same subject, that the sermon is necessarily contracted into a very short space. We do not speak of minds in a high state of religious excitation, nor of those welldisciplined hearts, which, after perpetual repetition, are still as warmly alive as ever to the excellence of our beautiful liturgy, but of the mass of mankind, whom the preacher addresses, the young as well as the old, the thoughtless as well as the devout, the restless, either from constitution or temper, as well as the placid; but it is evident that the ensuring and keeping awake the attention of the many, has created the necessity of compressing the discourse into narrow limits. Hence the comprehensiveness of plan, the copious examination of an extensive subject has been abandoned, and not unwisely, though with an effect by no means favourable to the advancement of perfect pulpit eloquence. For where at present a preacher exceeds the ordinary length of discourse, he in general builds on the same foundation with those who are more brief and rapid; the consequence of which is, that he only expresses in many words what may have been better said in few.

Much it is evident of what has been already advanced applies to the difference between the system of preaching among the Dissenters and our own, as well as to that of the Roman Catholic church. With regard, however, to the effect produced by the Primitive Methodists, some further considerations are requisite. That the authors of most schisms, Wesley and Whitfield especially, were men of great powers both *physical and mental, we are not inclined to question. That they fell upon an age of religious supineness

* Franklin, an authority on such a subject, took upon himself to calculate by how many people Whitfield, preaching in the open air, could be heard. By going to the farthest extremity each way which his voice reached with distinctness, and afterwards measuring the space enclosed, and allowing reasonable room for each individual, he proved that the preacher might be clearly understood by 20,000 persons. Those who know the effect of a powerful and sonorous voice in gaining the character of a fine man in the pulpit,' will not undervalue the importance of this endowment.

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and languor in all classes, and among the professors of all creeds, can scarcely be denied. Religion had been made over entirely to the safeguard of the reason, and was inculcated in a dry scholastic manner. Both in the church and without, a few, and but few exceptions can be named, who addressed, in the least degree, the feelings or the heart. They were men also of ardent zeal; and he is little acquainted either with the human heart, or the history of religious opinion, who does not know that if they are, or appear but in earnest, not only men of a superior description, but the most ignorant, the most crazy, the most wicked, invariably obtain followers. But the first and leading principle of the success of the Methodists was their itinerancy. The great difficulty in all oratory is to gain a willing attention at first. This the novelty of their appearance, and the studied dissimilarity between their manner and language, and that of the ministers whose province they invaded, invariably secured. Use weakens all impressions; the most splendid scenery from our windows becomes comparatively tame and uninteresting; and we question whether the most keen and bitter sarcasm of Brougham, or the richest and most playful wit of Canning, produce any very profound impression on the clerks of the House of Commons. It was a common every-day occurrence to hear a sermon from their own parson, or even in the church; but on a common, or from a tub, it had sufficient singularity to gather together all the idle, and of itself to strike deep into the bosoms of the thoughtless. The endurance of petty vexations from the mischief of unlucky boys, or the brief authority' of country Dogberries, was a further guarantee of their being in earnest. But when the bold assertion was added, that not merely the manner but the subject of their preaching was new, curiosity was wound up, and every one became eager to be initiated in this distinctive and peculiar doctrine. Man loves to be the depositarý of a secret and esoteric belief; and he who teaches an easy and compendious way of becoming wiser and better than our neighbours, will never want proselytes. That much real good was done, we are neither so invidious nor so illiberal as to deny ; but that the disparagement of the clergy on this account is just, or the accusation fair, that, but for their own supineness and neglect, they might have wrought the same change, we are as unwilling to admit. After all which we have allowed, as to the general lukewarmness of the age, we scruple not to assert, that many among the clergy, whose parishes Wesley or Whitfield invaded with the greatest success, and in which they established the most flourishing congregations, had the respective situations been changed, would have prevailed in the same manner over the wild eloquence of the former, and the vehemence of the latter. Had

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