of strong sympathy with an audience, self-forgetfulness and absorption in a subject. Such a speaker will speak to men true to nature, whatever be his degree of education; and if his gifts be even but ordinary, men will flock to listen to his stirring mission. He makes them feel, and this is the true test of oratory. The soul of eloquence is feeling, and eloquence can never have a substitute. Such a speaker, if he be evidently called of God, need fear no competition, no opposition. Such a speaker is the product of no system of education. Like the spirit within the wheels in the prophet's vision, his masterly pow ers are born with him. The happy constitutionality that makes a highly earnest preacher, like the powers of the poet, must be born with him. Education may modify and chasten it, but so far from chilling, it will become fuel to the fire. The absence of much education will not always prevent it from putting forth its great power. The preacher whom education alone can make is seldom worth having after he is made. The preacher whom education can spoil had not much about him to spoil. The preacher who claims to be the better off because he never had educational advantages, is either a fanatic, or else he has obtained that

ages.

very education in the absence of these advantMay God, in his mercy, give to the Church, not a Paul, not an Apollos, not a Boanerges, not a Peter, not a John alone, but a mighty host of all the classes represented by these revered names. The Church needs a diversity of gifts. But he who cannot, in some goodly degree, manifest, from constitutional sympathy, some of the earnestness or unction above named, will always find his clerical career a dull and cool one, however qualified or gifted in other respects. But the object of this chapter, more especially, is to rebuke that captiousness in our membership that underrates the minister who happens not to be conformed to their model. In the promotion of revivals this will be found of the first moment, especially when the mania seizes the Church of sending for some favorite revivalist, a policy which generally results as in the instance of John eating the little book; the bitter is very apt to follow the sweet.

CHAPTER XX.

THE PAST AND PRESENT- A CHARACTER.

"SAY not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this." This scripture teaches that there may be an erroneous retrospect, and deprecates it. A wise review of the past is, indeed, rare. To come to a correct judgment concerning it, the laws of the human mind must be well studied. We are often deceived for the want of self-knowledge. For example: the remembrance of pleasure is always fresher in the mind than the remembrance of pain. A hasty conclusion on this subject would, certainly, be contrary to the truth. The principle is announced by our Saviour, in his allusions to a mother's solicitude in the hour of her extremity, which, when over," she remembereth no more the anguish for joy." For the want of due attention to this principle, there are many who exalt the merit of the past over the present, and say that the "former days were better than

these." With them, the preachers of the present are pigmies, compared with those of the past; and the piety of the present is so diluted with pride and formalism that "there is none that doeth good; no, not one." Our churches, with steeples, are not as sacred as the former cabins of logs, which they have superseded; and cushioned pews are much harder than rude benches. Our class-meetings have all died out; our prayer-meetings will soon call for obituary notices; the Church is getting proud; the world waxing worse than ever; and it is as if Satan's chain had been loosed for a little season. "Why, we used to know every Methodist man by his dress, every Methodist woman by her bonnet, and the despised Methodists had come out from among the world. They were not of it, and were not, as now, like it. They then understood this scripture, 'Come out from among them, and be ye separate.' We got happy at every meeting. The Church was in a state of continual revival. Sinners were flocking to it by scores and hundreds, like doves to the windows. O, those were joyful days! We don't have such times nowadays; and it must be that the Church is backslidden." Here our croaking narrator heaved a sigh, and, suiting the action to

the word, he pointed toward the place where he attended meeting with a long, lank finger, compressed his thin lips over a large mouth, and threw himself forward, shrugging his shoulders as if he felt chilled to the heart with the Church's moral apostasy. After a groan or two, he resumed: "The extravagance of our preachers and their families, why, don't you think, it never used to cost us more than a quarter of a dollar for quarterage, and now they want me to pay five dollars a year for the support of the Gospel, and throw in something at a public collection every Sunday besides. Well, I wish I had died before old-fashioned Methodism was done away with ;" and here he put his hand in his pocket, and we left our brother to his censorious cogitations and went on our way, indulging a few thoughts. This brother has wholly overlooked the thousand and one little drawbacks upon that millennium of his fancy, in the past, his belief in which wholly unfits him for the present. If preachers preached so much better and abler then than now, the proof is wanting. If human nature in those days would have, or did always guard against an apostolic altercation, and keep a Judas out of the college of the evangelists, then was it holier than inspi