the platitudinous quite as much in books, newspapers, law courts, Parliamentary debates, and magazines as in sermons. Sermons would be just as bad if you turned out all the clergy to-morrow and put twenty thousand of their most disdainful and self-satisfied critics in their place. The clergy possess no monopoly of dulness or patent of unprofitableness. If very few of us are great, or wise, or clever, we at least stand intellectually on a level with the mass of our hearers. To most men God does not give ten talents, but only one; and that only in an earthen vessel. It is impossible to expect an endless succession of "thoughts that breathe and words that burn" from a preacher whose powers at the best are but ordinary; who may be suffering at any moment from sickness of body or depression of spirits; who is, in very many instances, involved in endless work and unceasing worry; whose heart may be aching with anxiety, and whose life may be burdened by poverty and all the sordid cares which it inevitably brings. And when we remember that most clergymen, in the midst of heavy parochial burdens, have to produce-not rare and splendid conférences at Advent or Easter like some of the great French preachers-but two sermons, or more, regularly every week, besides various addresses, we shall, I think, be struck with the general excellence of sermons; at any rate we shall be less impatient of their many defects.

"The worst speak something good; if all want sense,
God takes a text, and preacheth patience."

There are, I frankly admit, some sermons which are simply detestable. When the preacher is conceited, affected, and manifestly unreal; when he betrays his ignorance while he is pretending to a knowledge and authority which he does not possess; when he is insinuating some disputed and paltry party dogma, instead of pressing home the great, broad, simple truths of the Gospel; when he is indulging in "loud-lunged anti-Babylonianisms" instead of "preaching simple Christ to simple men"; when he is abusing the coward's castle of his pulpit to slander his betters, and to teach the sham science of castes and the sham theology of cliques, or to air the cut and dried snippings of the formula with which he has been assiduously crammed at his party training place; when he is doing anything but

"Preach as never sure to preach again,
And as a dying man to dying men

all hearers are free to turn their thoughts to something else with such charity for the preacher as they may. But so long as he is evidently and transparently sincere; so long as he confines himself to preaching the plain eternal truths of the Gospel of Christ; so long as he insists on the fundamental and primary truth that " what that supreme and sacred Majesty requires of us is Innocence alone," I think that the most critical of hearers. ought to bear with his limitations of power, or his ineradicable defects of manner and style. After all, the lowest claim which any sermon could put forward would be a claim to rhetorical skill, or literary finish. If a sermon attempts to charm the ear or the mind, it should only be as a means of moving the heart. Moral and spiritual edification is the humble yet lofty aim of every true Christian pulpit. It is as St. Augustine said, docere, flectere, movere, -to arrest the careless, to strengthen the weak, to lift up the fallen, to bring the wanderer home.

This is the deeper aspect of preaching, and a clergyman must indeed have been indifferent or unfortunate if, during his ministry, abundant proofs have not come to him that even the ministrations which he himself, as well as many of his hearers, regarded as so feeble and imperfect have yet fallen as with dews of blessing on many souls.

But I must turn to questions of voice and gesture.

1: Most Englishmen have a just horror of the word "elocution,” because they think that it means something histrionic and artificial, which in the pulpit is more offensive than any other fault. For if a preacher gives himself any airs and graces, or indulges in theatrical tones or studied gesticulations, if he thinks of himself at all, and so ceases to be his own natural and manly self, he at once becomes as insufferable as Cowper's Sir Smug or Thackeray's Mr. Honeyman. But confining the word "elocution" to the right management of the voice and the correction of awkward mannerisms, it has been a great misfortune to the majority of living clergymen that they have entered, as I did, upon the important task of addressing their fellow men without one hour of training. In this respect

the Americans are much more wise than we are. At all their schools and colleges they have rhetoric and elocution classes. The teachers study the mechanism of the vocal organs, and teach their pupils how to articulate clearly, and how to bring out their voices so as to make themselves heard. Boys and youths, by going through five or six years of this training, are effectually cured of distressing nervous peculiarities, and are taught to express themselves in public with force and ease. Good speaking, so far as these qualities are concerned, is far more common in America than in England.

2. As for "action," it comes naturally to the Greek, the Italian, and the Irishman, but to very few men of our cold English temperament. It is, indeed, said of Whitefield that when he slowly uplifted his arms in pronouncing the words, "If I take the wings of the morning, and fly to the uttermost parts of the sea," a lady who was present declared that nothing would have surprised her less than to see him soar bodily to Heaven. Demosthenes said that the three requisites of the orator were "Action, Action, Action"; but there is scarcely one of our own great orators or preachers who has used much action. I do not think that action can be taught, though we might be taught to avoid actions which are ungraceful and distressing.

3. What shall we say of humour? Is it admissible in the pulpit ? I should say very rarely, and only if it be a natural gift. Some eminent modern preachers, among whom I may mention Mr. Spurgeon and Mr. Ward Beecher, and, in the English Church, Archbishop Magee and the Bishop of Derry, have made humour the instrument of the most searching insight, and (in the latter instances) of the most refined beauty. The medieval preachers made free use of humour in their sermons, and sometimes abused the privilege. But we know from the sermons of the great and saintly Chrysostom that he, too, frequently made his vast audience laugh. To quote but one instance, when he was preaching against the extravagant Byzantine fashion of bejewelled and gorgeously embroidered boots, he described the dandies who wore them delicately picking their way to church. "If you don't want to soil your boots," he said, "I recommend you to take them off your feet and

wear them on your heads. You laugh," he cried, "but I rather weep for your follies."

4. It seems to me to be altogether a mistake to be too stereotyped in our notions of " the dignity of the pulpit." The illustrations of the Hebrew prophets, of the great Apostles, of Christ Himself, were incessantly drawn from the commonest objects and the most familiar incidents of daily life. Room should be left for the greatest variety of topic and abundance of illustration. An illustration in a modern sermon may take the place of those parables, the Divine secret of which was absolutely unique. An illustration, and the lesson which it carries with it, may often be remembered for years, when the very same thing expressed conventionally and in the abstract might be forgotten almost as soon as uttered. The preacher might say, like the poet :

"From Art, from Nature, from the schools,

Let random influences glance,

Like light in many a shiver'd lance

That breaks about the dappled pools:

The lightest wave of thought shall lisp
The fancy's tenderest eddy wreathe
The slightest air of song shall breathe
To make the sullen surface crisp."

5. But what is needed in the pulpit most of all is simplicity and sincerity. What American writers call "personal magnetism" is that impressiveness of the individuality of which Aristotle describes the most commanding element under the head of 00s. It is this which makes some men take an audience by storm before they have spoken a single sentence. If a speaker be manly, straight forward, earnest, sincere—he cannot possibly fail. This simplicity and sincerity are compatible with styles and methods which, if they were not part of the writer's whole self, and the result of all the influences which have been brought to bear upon him, might not be so described. Sincerity and simplicity of heart may wear the gorgeous rhetoric of Milton's prose, and yet give us no sense of unreality; and, on the other hand, unreality may clothe itself in a style of ostentatious commonplace and monosyllabic baldness. The passionate earnestness of Burke burns through the periods so

stiff with golden embroidery. South alluded with scathing contempt to the imagery of Jeremy Taylor. Nevertheless, Jeremy Taylor's style came to him as naturally as Milton's, or Carlyle's, or Wordsworth's, or Ruskin's, or that of any other great writer who has been received at first by all the professional critics with shouts of ignorant disdain. I should recommend every preacher to amend such faults in his style as he sees, and as he can amend, but otherwise never to think of his style at all, and simply to say what he has to say as naturally as he can; to say nothing that he does not mean, and to mean nothing which he does not say. If he does this he will be thoroughly well understood by all, for heart will speak to heart, and whether his style be as plainly Saxon as John Bunyan's, or as full of long Latin words as some passages of Shakespeare, will make no difference. "Preach so that the very servant-maids will understand you," was the advice given by a prelate to a young deacon; and the maid-servants, yes, and even street Arabs, will understand any man who speaks to them with real feeling on human subjects and in a human way. Let a man but speak that of which he is heart and soul convinced, and the poorest sermon will do some good.

Posturing assumption, artificial sainthood will avail no one long, and even eloquence and learning without sincerity will produce no real effect. "Why to thee? why to thee?" said the burly and handsome Fra Masseo to poor ragged, emaciated Francis of Assisi. "I say why should all the world come after thee, and every one desire to see and hear and obey thee? Thou art not handsome, thou art not learned, thou art not noble; therefore why to thee? why does all the world run after thee?" But even as he spoke the words the good-humoured brother knew that the answer was not far to seek. It lay in the personality, the intensity of devotion, the depth of self-sacrifice which were the secrets of the age-long influence of the sweet saint who took forsaken Poverty to be his bride.

Dean Hook was always regarded as an effective preacher at Leeds by the multitudes who thronged the great parish church. He gave the secret of his success in these words :

"I am convinced that one of the things which makes my ordinary sermons