taste, because this sameness would annoy us. Physicians say that a change even from the better to the good is often necessary, because it is a change. But we ask of a preacher, merely that he vary with his subject; that he watch its flowings forth, and follow them; that he wait and muse until he be borne along by the tendencies of his doctrine over all his plans and skeletons and technicalities. There is one glory of the sun, another of the moon, and one star differeth from another star in glory. There is in man an innate love of novelty, which, so far as constitutional, should be conformed to by the preacher. He need not fear; for there is a richness and abundance in theology which will answer to every cry of the soul. No chord vibrates in our bosoms, but a chord of scriptural truth may vibrate in unison or else in fitness. It is the study of this truth, then, that is to uncover the springs of eloquence, and it is the first rule of sacred rhetoric to recommend this study. A complete theologian, one who takes in the essence and the bearings, and the inspiration, and the life of theology, is the only model of pulpit eloquence. He cannot open his mouth on his favorite science, without showing that he, rather than Plato, was the man," upon whose lips the bees dropped honey as he lay in his cradle." Cicero says, that "if Jupiter should converse with men he would talk in the language of Plato," but we know, for the phenomenon has been observed, that when Jehovah converses with men, he speaks in the language of the theologian; or rather, the theologian but re-echoes the eloquent words of the Divinity.

Fifthly, theological study is essential to sacred eloquence, because it discloses the precise truths which are fitted to renovate the heart. Truth is God's; the soul is God's. One being made for the other, is adapted to it as the tenon to the mortice. A surgeon may as well overlook the distinction between a scalpel and a forceps, as a preacher overlook the distinction between doctrines, every one of which is an instrument aptly and beautifully shaped for a special purpose; and if the surgeon should use the saw, when he ought to use the lance, he would operate less harmfully than the preacher, who applies one doctrine when he ought to apply another. If God require us to use the hammer, we should not use the fire instead thereof; and if He require us to administer the oil of consolation, we should not in lieu thereof administer the wormwood of reproof. It is the truth, which the Spirit blesses; the truth as

it is; not half the truth, not the whole truth with some additions; not maimed and distorted truth, not truth which is involved in doubt and may perhaps after all be proved a lie; but clear, plain, prominent truth. This it is which, because adapted in itself to convert men, the Spirit makes effectual in converting them. This it is which, because it harmonizes with the commanding sentiments of our moral nature, is harmonized with by the Spirit in renovating that nature; for the Spirit is a God of harmony, and employs no instruments which are not congenial with the feelings of the operator, and the nature of the agent operated upon. It is this truth, and only this, which the minister is commissioned to unfold. If he would unfold it, he must study it, for save in an age of miracles, how knoweth any man letters having never learned? If he do not study it, he may speak with eloquence indeed, but can never preach with sacred eloquence; for to speak is not to preach, and it is not mere eloquence but sacred eloquence, which is adapted to secure the great effect of preaching on the heart of man.

Let the minister unfold the true doctrine of repentance, and declare that his unconverted hearers are bound to repent now, on the spot, and that they are able to do whatever they are bound to do, and let him unhesitatingly and earnestly, just as if he expected they would do it, urge them to make their election sure before they leave their seats, they will feel that if able to repent they are guilty more than unfortunate in not repenting; and if able and pressed to repent now, they will try, and their trial will show how strong is the resistance of their voluntary selfishness, which transforms the easy into the difficult; and this discovery of their obstinate sin will be at least a salutary conviction of guilt, and perhaps the first step in their progress from sin to holiness.

On the contrary, let the preacher misunderstand the first principles of moral agency, and he will exhort his hearers to repent when they go home, or to use the means of repentance, or to form the fixed resolution of repenting at some future time; and they will feel that they are not invited to repent immediately, and will be glad to enjoy for a season the sin which they are not urged to leave; and to enjoy the quiet which they drink in from their purpose of avoiding hereafter the end which they are now approaching. They verify the remark of Luther, that "the road to hell is paved with good resolves." Sometimes the preacher, while he exhorts his hearers to future

repentance, assures them that their duty even then will transcend their ability; and thus instead of profiting them with an incentive to obedience, he only amazes them at the injustice of requiring bricks without straw.

Or perhaps in the same discourse, and without such qualifi cation as the nature of the doctrine demands, he will perplex them with the farrago of figurative and literal statements, that they are able and unable, have at the same time power and no power to do as they should.

But even when the confounding of moral certainty with natural inability does not lead to a seeming paradox, which impairs the persuasive influence of the preacher, it leads him either to omit exhortation altogether, and abandon his hearers to be converted as and when God's sovereignty shall choose; or else to utter a lifeless and jejune appeal which has as much tendency to prostrate the walls of Jericho, or perform any other miracle on matter, as it has to effect a renovation of the heart. The appeal is" as good as dead." The worst that can be said of its rhetorical complexion is, that it is in keeping with the theology from which it emanates. The best that can be said of any exhortation which springs from error is, that it is useless. Ex nihilo, nihil fit. It is indeed a pleasant thought, that if the preacher have a peculiar liveliness of temperament, or warmth of piety he may shake off his speculations for an hour, and preach as a man, though he will have it that he is a machine. In the main, however, his necessarian faith will trammel his eloquence, and he will feel as under an incubus when he invites men to accomplish impossibilities. The difficulty is, he has substituted for the scriptural doctrine of repentance, a theory of his own; but this theory, as it will not bear inspection when in a cold thesis, is peculiarly awkward in a sermon; and as it is a poor thing in the study, so it is exactly the thing which ought not to be in the pulpit. The man is possessed with the feeling that his hearers are more than morally disabled; and he cannot harangue before dry bones as he would before living beings; and so he utters cold words to a cold assembly, uses sepulchral tones to grave-stones of men; and dead, dead is the whole obituary of himself and his people. His doctrine is ill-contrived for the innate susceptibilities of his hearers; and they, waiting for God's time, sleep on, till His time come, not indeed of regeneration but of sentence.

The doctrine of prayer may also be noticed, as adapted, when correctly preached, to produce the effect for which all doctrine

was designed, but operating, when preached incorrectly, as a sharp sickle operates when applied as and where it should not be. A prayer is a request offered with appropriate feeling. A request, disconnected with love and humility and faith, is no more a prayer, than the mimic representations of the stage are the living realities which are only represented. A theologian will exhort sinners to pray not to mock; to pray immediately, and not defer the service until they are better fitted for it; to pray just as they are to plough and reap, eat and drink, for the glory of God and not for their selfish advantage. Unless they pray, they are in immediate and grievous peril; and if they pretend to pray while they are impenitent, they add hypocrisy to their other sins, and as if tired of modestly profaning the outer court, press forward, with a novel boldness, to profane the holy of holies. The truth makes them see on their right hand and their left, the impassable mountains; it shows them the hosts of the avenger, crowding on from the rear; it agitates them with the conviction, that to escape sidewise from duty, is to perish like sheep on the mountains; to stand still is to be cut down; straight forward is their only course, and if Jordan is before them they must swim the flood; and it is when the sinner sees himself thus shut up to one right line, which he must pursue exactly or die, that he feels his guilty impotence, and sinks down in such despair of himself, and such a fitness to depend on the aid of another, that divine grace interposes at this precise critical point, and takes to himself the glory of the passage, which the sinner should, and therefore could long since have made. Thus honoring to God, abasing and yet stimulating to man is the suasory influence of truth as applied by the Spirit.

But when a minister misunderstands this doctrine of prayer, he bewilders the impenitent by assuring them, that they cannot repent, which, in the literal sense, they can do; and yet that they can please God by praying for repentance, which in the indulgence of their selfish spirit they cannot do; that their prayers are abomination in the sight of God, and yet should be offered to Him who says, "my soul hateth them;" that they have no right to sin, yet may commit the iniquity of bending the rebellious knee at the mercy seat, and thus avert the penalty of their less sacrilegious sins committed in less solemn positions. They are told to do that for which, if they die as soon as they have done it, they will be condemned to eternal They receive such advice as may encourage them to VOL. X. No. 27.

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say, at the judgment,-" We are punished for following in letter and in spirit the advice of our minister." When they are exhorted to pray for their conversion, they are exhorted to pray for their first right feeling; and when they pray for their first right feeling the prayer must precede this feeling, and must of course be offered with a feeling which is not right; they pray wickedly, that their wickedness even in this very prayer may give place to the piety which they at the same time hate, and are virtually exhorted to remain in sin, until they receive some gift from on high, though it may be that their spirits will be called up, following hard after their praying breath, to the God who abhorreth the smoke of strange offerings.

To exhort sinners to pray as sinners, that they may be enabled to pray as Christians, is indeed common, and in its first impression is not so unseemly; yet is in its true implications to recommend their continuance in sin, until that future period,-a period which under such treatment is slow in coming, when a celestial influence shall render wicked prayers no longer necessary, and absolve from the anomalous requirement, that a man carry his rebellion up to the altar before he can satisfy his God. It is at his peril, that a preacher allow his necessarian philosophy to inculcate such procrastination of repentance even for an instant; he overlooks the impulses of man's moral nature; and if he produce any impression on his hearers, it will be the mischievous one, that their sin is a misfortune which Omnipotence in pity must remove; that so long as they pray against their calamity, and perform so well the condition of repentance, they do all which can be expected of them; and must leave the results to him, who will not withhold the piety which his compassion loves to bestow, and who has promised to hear even the young raven when it crieth. They lull themselves with the dream that their prayer will be effectual with a prayerhearing God, and that, though not Christians, yet they have ceased to be obstinate like other sinners, and are raised to a distinct class, seekers, and are performing an intermediate kind of obedience, just what it should be in its exterior, just what it should not be in every thing essential. The men who abide, day after day, in this amphibious attitude are certainly beyond the jurisdiction of the Bible, which was written when there were only two classes of men in existence, one who served God, another who served him not; they are engaged in a course of obedience which their Master knows nothing of, for he never