GOOD AND BAD DIVISIONS.

31

A still greater service was the larger proportion of the discourse which they redeemed for the practical enforcement of the subject. Among the less earnest of their predecessors, a sermon was chiefly an exhibition of logical adroitness, or

sive peculiarities." Many of these are really distinct and independent topics, and, veiled under the heads of one discourse, we have virtually a series of nine sermons. Still worse is the following hydrocephalic division. It occurs in a sermon on "Most gladly will I glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me;" and it is from the pen of one whose masculine intellect and moral grandeur long secured for him the honours of a "master in Israel"-the late Sir Harry Moncreiff. "I shall shew, firstthat the more our thoughts are accustomed to dwell on our real condition, as fallen and fallible creatures, and on our personal weakness and infirmities, we shall be so much the less inclined to give way to our natural tendency to overrate anything which we have either done or attained, and shall every day feel more sensibly our entire dependence on the grace and power of God; and, secondly-I shall shew that we shall learn to think with a reflected satisfaction, or exultation, on personal defects or infirmities, which become the occasion to bring us into close or sensible communion with God, or which operate as indirect or eventual means by which the power of Christ rests on us." Amongst many youngsters of the West Kirk the "jelly piece" at that evening's tea-table depended on the repetition of Sir Harry's "heads;" but a chain-shot like this would, "at one fell swoop," cut off all such epicurean expectations. Contrast with this the shrewd old Nestor of the modern pulpit. Mr Jay has a sermon on the text, "And David said in his heart, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul: there is nothing better for me than that I should speedily escape into the land of the Philistines;" and it is thus that he disposes of it: "This language consists of two parts -his fear; and his folly. First, his fear; David said, I shall now perish one day by the hand of Saul.' Second, his folly: There is nothing better for me,'" &c. What can be more simple, more exhaustive of the subject, and more easily remembered, than "David's fear and folly?" A good division occurs in Dr Welsh's sermon on, "Be sure your sin will find you out:" "Sin may find you out in temporal judgments-most likely it will find you out in the terrors of a guilty conscience-and it is sure to find you out at the judgment-seat of God." And we remember over an interval of many years the quaint comprehensiveness of an address on the evening of a communion Sabbath, by a venerable divine still living. The text was, "Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord;" and this was the division: "This evening I wish to say, first, A word to those who this day have not seen the Saviour, and are sorry; secondly, A word to those who have not seen Him, and are not sorry; and, thirdly, A word to those who have seen Him, and are glad.”

mere verbal legerdemain, and the lesson deduced from the text was a decent formality, rather than an urgent appeal; and among the more earnest, doctrinal discussion frequently occupied the hour allotted to the sermon, and the application was huddled up into a few hasty "uses" at the close. It was very much as if, at the breakfast-table, a professor had begun to prelect to his students on the composition of bread, the natural history of the cereals, the virtues of starch and gluten, and the process of fermentation, and just as the hungry alumni were about to handle the rolls, the college bell summoned them away; or, if we may confess what we have sometimes felt in surveying those immense doctrinal disquisitions finishing off in a feeble word of enforcement: as you saw the prodigious preparations, the cautious and deliberate approaches, and the huge earthworks thrown up by way of covering, you hoped that such engineering was to end in a magnificent cannonade, and the capture of some important stronghold, and were, therefore, not a little disappointed when the crack of a popgun, or a puff from an unshotted culverine, closed for a week the ceremony. Had the home-going, business-like vigour of South, or the practical spirit of Tillotson, pervaded the massive theology of the Commonwealth, it is likely that the results would have been greater, and more enduring; as it is also to be lamented, that from the absence of evangelical motives, the better methods of the new school of sermonisers for a long time failed to produce any material advantage to the cause of religion and morality.

Were it needful to exemplify the better system then introduced, we might contrast the careless and slovenly conclusions of the older sermons, with the impressive perorations and emphatic endings of which South and Tillotson set the example, and which were improved upon by many of their followers. -But we must not exhaust the patience of our readers.

It only remains to be added that, like the pulpit orations of

the Reformers and the old Church of England worthies, as well as of the preachers in Roman Catholic countries, South's sermons were spoken. On the other hand, heedless of royal edicts to the contrary, Tillotson persisted in reading his discourses, and, notwithstanding the popular prejudice against this method, attained a success which has found for him too many imitators.

SELECTIONS FROM DR SOUTH.

Man in Paradise.

The

[This discourse was delivered in St Paul's on Lord Mayor's Day, the 9th of November 1662, and before the preacher was thirty years of age; and although he lived for more than half a century afterwards, he never again equalled, much less eclipsed, this wonderful effort. We agree with Basil Montagu that "the English language affords no higher specimen of its richness and its strength than is to be found in this beautiful sermon." text is Gen. i. 27, and in the following extracts we have sought to preserve as much continuity as is consistent with our limits. After stating that the image of God in man consisted in “that universal rectitude of all the faculties of the soul, by which they stand apt and disposed to their respective offices and operations," he goes on to take a survey of the understanding, the will, and the passions or affections.]

The UNDERSTANDING was then sublime, clear, and aspiring, and, as it were, the soul's upper region, lofty and serene, free from the vapours and disturbances of the inferior affections. It was the leading, controlling faculty; all the passions wore the colours of reason; it did not so much persuade as command; it was not consul, but dictator. Discourse was then almost as quick as intuition; it was nimble in proposing, firm in concluding; it could sooner determine than now it can dispute. Like the sun, it had both light and agility; it knew no rest but in

motion; no quiet, but in activity. It did not so properly apprehend, as irradiate the object; not so much find, as make things intelligible. It did arbitrate upon the several reports of sense, and all the varieties of imagination; not like a drowsy judge, only hearing, but also directing their verdict. In sum, it was vegete, quick, and lively; open as the day, untainted as the morning, full of the innocence and sprightliness of youth; it gave the soul a bright and a full view into all things, and was not only a window, but itself the prospect.

Adam came into the world a philosopher, which sufficiently appeared by his writing the nature of things upon their names: he could view essences in themselves, and read forms without the comment of their respective properties: he could see consequents yet dormant in their principles, and effects yet unborn and in the womb of their causes: . . . till his fall, he was ignorant of nothing but of sin; or, at least, it rested in the notion, without the smart of the experiment. Could any difficulty have been proposed, the resolution would have been as early as the proposal; it could not have had time to settle into doubt. Like a better Archimedes, the issue of all his inquiries was an Heureka, an Heureka, the offspring of his brain without the sweat of his brow. Study was not then a duty, nightwatchings were needless; the light of reason wanted not the assistance of a candle. This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to seck truth in profundo, to exhaust his time and impair his health, and perhaps to spin out his days and himself into one pitiful, controverted conclusion. There was then no poring, no struggling with memory, no straining for invention. His faculties were quick and expedite; they answered without knocking-they were ready upon the first summons-there was freedom and firmness in all their operations. I confess 'tis difficult for us, who date our ignorance from our first being, and were still bred up with the same infirmities about us with which we were born, to raise our

thoughts and imagination to those intellectual perfections that attended our nature in the time of innocence, as it is for a peasant bred up in the obscurities of a cottage to fancy in his mind the unseen splendours of a court. But by rating positives by their privatives, and other arts of reason, by which discourse supplies the want of the reports of sense, we may collect the excellency of the understanding then by the glorious remainders of it now, and guess at the stateliness of the building by the magnificence of its ruins. All those arts, rarities, and inventions, which vulgar minds gaze at, the ingenious pursue, and all admire, are but the relics of an intellect defaced with sin and time. We admire it now, only as antiquarians do a piece of old coin-for the stamp it once bore, and not for those vanishing lineaments and disappearing draughts that remain upon it at present. And certainly, that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepid, surely was very beautiful when he was young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise.

2. The WILL was then ductile, and pliant to all the motions of right reason; it met the dictates of a clarified understanding half way. And the active informations of the intellect, filling the passive reception of the will, like form closing with matter, grew actuate into a third and distinct perfection of practice. The understanding and will never disagreed, for the proposals of the one never thwarted the inclinations of the other. Yet neither did the will servilely attend upon the understanding, but as a favourite does upon his prince, where the service is privilege and preferment; or, as Solomon's servants waited upon him, it admired its wisdom, and heard its prudent dictates and counsels, both the direction and the reward of its obedience. It is, indeed, the nature of this faculty to follow a superior guide to be drawn by the intellect; but then it was drawn as a triumphant chariot, which at the same time both follows