cal and contradictory branch of that great tree; for while, in common parlance, we all avow our horror of sermonising, sermons are not only one of the most widely popular kinds of publication, but constitute no small part of the standard and classic illustrations of our language. There are few prose writers whom, in the interests of mere literature, we should be less inclined to part with than the great preachers of the past; yet there is scarcely a man of any intelligence in the country who has not, one time or another, denounced, with all the energy and impatience of a sufferer, the common strain of contemporary pulpit addresses. The utmost reach of eloquence is possible to this manner of intellectual exertion-and the direst dulness, and most mischiefmaking stupidity, unfortunately falls also within its wide-extending range. From the same platform, and with a common advantage of access, come voices that thrill the world, and snatch the common heart out of its daily moil to flash upon its astonished vision, once at least, if never more, a true and sudden glimpse of that God and truth in whose presence the veiled nature stands unaware; and voices that drone God's ways and works into a tale of vulgar repetitions, that argue an unquestionable truth into shreds till the unfortunate hearers turn sceptics out of mere natural antagonism, and that laboriously debase and obscure the holy text which they profess to explain. We could almost venture to say that there is nothing in spoken or printed speech which can come so low as the sermon in proper hands, as there is certainly nothing which can come higher.

We have, besides all this, a very special and universal interest in the sermon. One can avoid reading a disagreeable book-one can banish a flippant periodical or a stupid paperbut if one slights the sermon, one must take the consequences. Certainly we hear of an ethereal and elevated description of piety, which holds itself devoutly superior to churchgoing; which requires no weekly stimulation, and is independent of those Sabbath reminders which are so necessary to the common bulk of mankind. But that

belongs to so eclectic and limited a class, that it scarcely affects the more general case. All of us, not being very enlightened, go to church-or profess to go to church-or when we stay away, feel the matter somewhat on our conscience; therefore the character of those pulpit prelections which we do hear, or ought to hear, every Sunday, is of no small importance to us. But it is impossible to say that these are very satisfactory. No profession is safe against the intrusion of unfit persons; and the church has this further disadvantage, that the proper gifts for its labours are seldom developed in early life, while in early life the necessary studies must be prosecuted, and the course of life decided upon. Families where one son is inevitably provided for by the family living, are perhaps quite as safe, after all, for the production of clergymen, as are those families where a pious lad, totally unacquainted with his own capacities, dedicates devoutly a limited and commonplace understanding to the office of the ministry. From both such come those ineffable young curates who set up private confessionalsthose young Dissenters, those youthful Churchmen, who flourish their beardless logic, arbitrary and imperative, over all our hardworking middle-aged heads, and teach us what we all learnt for ourselves twenty years ago, and since have had to unlearn laboriously and with pain. By what process of trial and purgation

by what course of years and experience, those rampant young heroes settle down into the sober and steady, perhaps even dignified, clergyman, is a secret of the cloth which we do not presume to penetrate. But when we go to church out of the battle and conflict of our lives, and find one of these youthful champions before us, ready to ride over our heads in all the indiscriminating assumption of peremptory youth, perhaps the Sunday or the Sabbath service does not refresh us as it might have done. To tell the truth, it by no means follows that we are either instructed, consoled, or edified, by the one, two, or three sermons which it falls to the lot of most of us to hear weekly. A great many of us listen very patiently, and with respect, in the satisfying

consciousness of doing our own duty at least, whatever the preacher may be disposed to do; and there are others who chafe and fret and vex the religious souls of wife and mother, who are perhaps more easily satisfied. What is the cause? There never was an arrangement more simply and entirely suitable to the nature of man, than that which establishes for him not only a common service of supplication and thanksgiving, but a periodical reminder of those higher duties which are the soul and inspiration of life. It is impossible to suppose an institution more accordant with the wants and capacities of nature; and when the question recurs to us involuntarily, we repeat it alike with wonder and impatience, Why is not the pulpit far more generally, more universally influential? Why is it that we so often fail in finding there anything better than tedium? Why is it so often some man, of very moderate intellect and ordinary character, of whom we are remindedan existence not in any way particularly beneficent or improving, as we contemplate it-instead of the One holy existence and character which this is our special opportunity of studying? The question is one important to the hearers, and very important to the preachers of the present time.

The pulpit of itself, and by itself, possesses a power which it is impossible to over-estimate. All kinds and degrees of men, all classes and qualities of minds, come one time or other under the reach of its

influence; it is important to the whole community that this influence should be pure and permanent-but how is it to be done?

It is hard to answer such an inquiry. While preachers remain, however, the pulpit will always retain those peculiar temptations to selfimportance, and a pernicious kind of vanity, which does so much harm to its utterance now. While we are as we are, preachers, like other men, will always stand in jeopardy of regarding their principal duty as a periodical piece of business necessitated by the rules of their calling, and the recurrence of these inevitable Sundays, which open their mouths like the bells in their church steeple,

under the compulsion of an outward force, and not the powerful constraint of having something to say. And so, also, there will always continue to be multitudes of men who will calmly bring forth their own opinions-their quips and cranks of originality into that little hour snatched out of the world, in which we would fain be strengthened and refreshed by other companionship. In short, the pulpit wants what everything else wants-that sincere simplicity which is above genius— that primitive truthfulness, supreme, positive, and actual, which is at once the crown of all endurances and experiences, and the temper of a child. And what our preachers require is not a chance gleam of new light, to be thrown somehow upon Scripture, or an original view to be taken of this or that passage, but to realise what heavy-laboured souls stand before them in that one day's leisure, with many a dumb longing for the comfort and encouragement of Heaven, and many a sore experience of the travail of these latter days- souls devoured with the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, the agonies of a nature which has gone astray from its original meaning, and is incoherent even to itself; and that this audience, which has no leisure and no heart for the self-exhibition of a clever intellect, is liable to be moved as one man by a true appeal to its remembrances, a genuine awaking of its memory towards that gospel in which all its wants are anticipated and supplied. It might not be a bad exercise for clergymen to consider how much it is worth the while of some hundreds of people to spend the prime of that Sabbath-day which is our only legitimate sacred festival and holiday, listening perhaps to the formal, perhaps to the careless, perhaps to the original and eccentric composition which they have produced because they cannot help themselves, because to-morrow is Sunday, and our reverend friends must do their duty. Is it worth our while, do you think, most excellent preacher, after we have sung our psalms, and made our matutinal thanksgivings and supplications, to sit in decorous stillness for an hour

or a half-hour, according to your notion and habits, to learn what is your opinion upon that disputed passage, or wherein you agree with Gesenius or differ with Augustine? If you do not happen to be a genius, and have nothing to say to us, why insist upon saying it? Genius is not necessary; cleverness is not necessary. We have heard men preach who had no appreciable endowment of intellect, yet whose honest voice made the heart swell, and encouraged the soul. What we want is no play of wit, nor bloodless flash of college logic; but we have a right to claim that the man who calls himself our spiritual teacher should realise our position and circumstances, and know what he is doing, and why he does it. He is there to enter a periodical protest and appeal against our worldliness, our vanities, our self-regard; he is there to bear solemn witness that the wrongs and the injustice, the heartbreaks and the miseries of humanity, are but for a time-that, despite all the contradictions of this life, a divine purpose runs through the web, and a divine presence watches to see its grand intentions all fulfilled. It is his office to keep us in mind of those events which bind the history of the world into a whole more grand and more complete than all our lesser national chronicles of battles and kings; and above all, to keep us in remembrance of that one divine and holy Person, the Lord of our redemption, who gives coherence and consistence to the whole marvellous tale. He is the defender of the spiritual against the temporal, the public deputy and representative of that more subtle remembrancer who speaks within our own hearts. Herein lies the vocation of the preacher; it is to keep us persuaded of the reality, the certainty, the actual and positive truthfulness of those things and persons which we cannot see. This is not to be done by argument-perhaps, indeed, argument is the last thing which will or can accomplish it; and the best and most effectual manner in which to discharge this high duty must of course vary with individual capacities and characteristics; but this is distinctly and simply the great office

VOL LXXXIV.-NO. DXVIII.

of the preacher. The reflections of the thoughtful, the arguments of the controversial, and the lighter graces of natural eloquence, must all be kept subordinate to this, which is the true thread of purpose and intention necessary for their work. Our working-day tendency is to put far away from us, in an ethereal, fanciful, imaginative elevation, quite out of our life, and unconnected with it, our faith and its supreme Object. But the preacher is set in his place for the distinct purpose of defeating this tendency; and it is only when he makes his hearers aware, if but for a moment, if but with the dullest amaze of a surprised conviction, that they stand in the presence of a God whose invisibility thrills upon their souls a more subtle intuition of His presence than if their eyes saw His glory, and are enriched with the love of that realest and humanest of men who is the Lord of our life and the author of our salvation, that he actually fulfils the highest purpose of his office, which is to keep us in the clear recollection and certainty that the basis of our religion does not lie upon cold and abstract thoughts or words, but upon living persons and things-acts done, which call forth the most lively and genuine emotions of the soul-and an individual Friend, whom all the love, the reverence, and the trust of nature may embrace, and who bears a personal and distinct relation to every one who names His

name.

It is, perhaps, hardly just to Mr Caird to take his Sermons as the only immediate and tangible ground for the expression of our own sentiments upon a subject so important. However, there are very good reasons why he should lend us the occasion to break our lance (for all their goods) upon modern divines. He is a Scotsman and a celebrated preacher, but not a preacher celebrated after the usual fashion of his Church and country. The popular voice has echoed loudly that private verdict of royalty which thrust the modest preacher into print some year or two ago; but it is not with any popular watchword in his mouth, or on the top of any wave of philanthropical or ecclesiastical agitation, that he again

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presents himself before a wider public than his common Sunday audience. His sermons are Sermons distinctly, and without equivoque; and no subject extraneous to his text introduces itself, its digressions and side-influences, into the discourses by which he makes his reasonable and calm address to a world which, whatever clever people choose to say, is very willing to be preached to when any one has the gift. Scotch preaching, it is not to be denied, is the preaching which has most attracted that same world for some time-a result natural enough in Scotland, but on the other side of the Tweed more remarkable. Perhaps, however, this last, independent of the great gifts which are its primary origin, may be partially attributed to the piquant position (in England) of the Scotch divine, who is neither a Churchman nor a Dissenter, and whose sympathies are pretty equally divided between the two. But the fiery and vehement eloquence of Chalmers, of Irving, of Guthrie, and of other champions whom we need not name, is very distinct from the style and manner of our present author. Mr Caird is not an orator rapid and breathless, as has been the wont of his compatriots. He is more reticent, more self-controlled than they; less ready to take tribute of everything in earth and heaven, and swell the natural current of his thoughts by allusions and digressions beyond his immediate theme. He is not, indeed, an orator at all, in the common acceptation of the word. His fervour is subdued-his pace is less than flying his strength is calm. His language has not the lyrical swell, the frequent climax, the hurry and the throng of impassioned words -by which peculiarity of his genius he doubtless loses something, but as certainly also gains much. Accordingly, the Sermons of Mr Caird, to which we invite the attention of the reader, are not orations, but truly sermons in the full sense of the word. Conscientious, grave, and full of a certain equable dignity, there is no attempt in these productions to deprecate the fear of dulness, or let down the solemnity of the pulpit. The desperate flights of illustration

which we have all heard in our day -the curious knowledge of Syrian botany, and ancient Oriental costume and custom, with which it has become common to heighten the course of Scripture exposition-do not appear in these pages. They are not essays arbitrarily tacked to a text which has little or no connec tion with them; neither do they tear to pieces a simple statement of Scripture, diluting into feebleness the diction and the significance of Holy Writ. They are well-advised and well-considered productions, full of a real and personal apprehension-the individual grasp of a clear intellect upon the truth. This confers upon them a something which it would be wrong to call originality-originality in the treatment of sacred subjects is rather a doubtful advantage in most cases-but a certain vividness and freshness, more attractive and safer by far than novel views. Though Mr Caird selects just such subjects as are selected in the pulpit addresses of half his clerical brethren throughout the whole country every Sabbath-day, it is apparent, and beyond doubt, that each of them has entered fully, and at first hand, into his own mind, and taken form and shape there, not according to a conventional pattern, but according to the character and tendencies of his own understanding; so that it is not the utterance of a class or school, but one honest individual voice, clear in the truth which has grown and brightened upon its own thoughts, which here addresses us— a fact which is our best defence against the arrogance of the pulpit. There is, accordingly, little of that solemn self-importance in the Sermons of Mr Caird. They are merely addresses, without presumption and without vehemence - neither selfconscious (a most important virtue), nor conscious of being printed-a pastor's serious and thoughtful addresses to the congregation over which he habitually presides. These sermons are consequently much better models for, and examples of, preaching, than if they had been chance outbursts of mere splendid oratory, and it is as such that we desire to regard them.