ly inherent in compositions of such a character. Impassioned and flowing orations, such as these in general are, -and originally composed for the pulpit, cannot but occasionally fatigue the mind in perusal,-but at the same time it is obvious, that they possess a freedom, a boldness, and an impetuosity, with which sermons written only to be read could never have been inspired. Even in reading them silently, the ear soon gets accustomed to their modulation, which is for the most part grand and harmonious-and if there be in it rather too much manner, it is at least, that of a master.

It cannot, we think, be denied that sermons are not, in general, very good reading. Nor is this owing to the lukewarmness of readers, so much as to the incompetency of preachers. In a printed sermon, at least, we expect something like views of human nature, and a knowledge of human life,-if not exhibiting great philosophical power, yet surely apostolic fervour and simplicity. If we find in sermons neither the one nor other of these, there seems no good reason for reading them at all-and we neither can nor ought to admit their author to be privileged to speak publicly as a teacher. This does not hold equally of sermons delivered in a church. We go to church to pray, and to worship God. The influence of the place the sanctity of the ministerial office the worth, it may be, of the man who holds it-the devotion necessarily inspired by the recurrence of a hallowed day-all render the Sabbath-service most blessed to human beings. Even though the sermon we then hear may be in itself of little value-it is heard by the heart in its holiest mood, and the good which it may contain, is received among the other sacred influences of the house of God. But published sermons are not always perused in such lofty states of mind, nor can they be; and if they are not only destitute of any remarkable intellectual power, but also unadorned by the simplicity of the gospel, or the beauty of holiness-the least arrogant and self-sufficient reader may lay them aside in weariness or disgust, unwilling that high things should be debased, pure things sullied, or mysterious things profaned. The evil of dull, stupid, confused, and illwritten sermons, is one of considerable magnitude; and no more effectual VOL. V.

plan could be devised for alienating the youthful mind from habits of religious meditation, than to weary them with such sermons by way of religious exercise. The benefit then is incalculable which a volume of truly good sermons must confer on the rising generation, when it has been widely established as a family-book, as this of Dr Chalmers will inevitably be-and that benefit is produced, as well by the good which such a familybook does, as the evil which it prevents.

But there is another class of sermons of which the evil, though it is much greater, will not by many be so readily admitted-and these are moral sermons-that is to say, sermons from which religion, as essential to all morality, is upon principle excluded. In them we find sometimes cold and bare metaphysics, in the place of the awful and sublime mysteries of the gospel-the self-sufficiency of speculative minds arranging into all their classes the duties born of human society, and that regulate the dealings of men, in place of that prostration of the true Christian spirit that looks to God alone for its duties, and the meaning of its duties-and worst of all, á confident security in the power of mere human virtues, whether of passive or active benevolence, to work out the salvation of man, in place of a humble confession of the utter worthlessness of them all, excepting as they are inspired by, and exist in the will of God, as revealed to mankind in the Christian dispensation. Let no one deny that such ser mons exist, written too by men of amiable and elegant minds, and incorporated with the body of our theo logy. Let them at once rather say, that such sermons are the best of all. But wiser men know that all the sources of the highest eloquence are dried up in the mere moral preacherthat his faith subdues all feelings to one level, and that far from an elevated one-and that, philosopher though he may be, he is blind to the only true philosophy, that of Christianity. These are the preachers, who, by ex aggerating human virtues, have some times come to speak of man as of God

who have not feared to bring for ward a heathen philosopher by the side of a blessed name-and who, throwing into the shade the divinity of Christ, have sought for his resem 3 N

blance in Socrates, willing, as it might seem, to consider them both in the light of pure, unoffending, and suffering mortals, put to death by men who could not understand either their wisdom or their innocence. Of the danger of such preaching as this, it is impossible to give an exaggerated pic

ture.

But there still remains another class of preachers, of whom we would say a very few words-orthodox preachers. Mr Foster has written an essay on the causes of the aversion of, men of cultivated taste to evangelical religion, and in the present volume Dr Chalmers has a sermon on a subject somewhat similar. We are almost disposed to think that neither of them has treated his theme with perfect candour. It must be, and ought to be hateful not to men of cultivated taste alone, but to all men of right feeling, to hear the pure simplicity of the language of the New Testament profaned, by being incorporated with the vile and vulgar slang of many, called orthodox or evangelical, preachers. The vital doctrines of Christianity come polluted, degraded, and vulgarised, from their mouths-in one confused and undistinguishable mass. The most dread ideas are associated with those of the most familiar sort-a rude eagerness takes the place of a lofty enthusiasm and words, that the soul fears to hear unless in hours of high and solemn preparation, are impiously vollied out by ignorant and uneducated men, among all the hideousness or meanness of their own sectarian jargon. Now, in such cases, it is not the man of cultivated taste who feels disgust and aversion at the mere phraseology of such preachers, but it is the man of real piety, who is shocked by the blasphemous spirit of their harangues. It is shocking to see one of the blindest of the uninitiated discharging the office of high-priest-to see

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." It is true that the mysteries of Christianity are, by the influence of the Divine Spirit, made intelligible to the most humble-but, we are not to take the humility of the orthodox upon their own word, nor to believe them to speak that of God when their minds are obviously under the continued influence of thoughts, energies, feelings, and recollections of a low, grovelling, and earth-born nature, and

such as are loathsome in a man, and, therefore, can form no part of a Christian. The solution of many of the great difficulties which, to an unbelieving mind, exist in the Christian faith, is to be found in the depth of human passion-and they who would explain them must know something of the mysteries of joy and grief, and of all the manifold agitations that travel like tempests through our souls

else may they rave of orthodoxy for ever without really awakening one mind to a true sense of its condition; for how can we draw light from them who are themselves sitting in darkness?

Now (using the words in a sense that will be plain,) of the two, we cannot help considering the moral preacher less pernicious than the orthodox. The one is sadly deficient no doubt, but the other is wholly blind; for he has neither cultivation of mind sufficient to enable him to discover clearly mere moral axioms, nor that wisdom of the heart sufficient to comprehend the mysteries of Christianity. The moral preacher too, provided we are on our guard, cannot lead us far astray-for, it may be said, that he walks through grounds already laid out, and provided with clear paths -whereas the orthodox preacher of the class described, is like a blind man pretending to be our guide along the shores of the sea, not only ignorant of its quick sands, but of the ebbing and flowing of the tide. The one, finally, deals with caution of the things of this world-the other rashly stumbles forward into the vastness of eternity.

Now, all this should be considered before it is asserted that men of cultivated minds are naturally averse to evangelical religion, or that they are to be blamed for being so to certain kinds of it. Shew them evangelical religion as it really is, and we believe that men of cultivated taste, provided they be also men of real intellectual power, will prefer it to mere dry and unsatisfactory morality. They will see the face of the human soul reflected in the depths of the love of God, with features more celestial than it ever before assumed to their unassisted vision. When confounded or afflicted by calamity, they will see, flowing from that source, waters of comfort more pure and copious than ever flowed over the faded verdure of life from the shallow urn of human virtue.

We well know that both Foster and Chalmers have advanced other reasons for the aversion of such men to what is called evangelical religion. Foster, especially, has attributed it, in great measure, to the power which the virtues of magnanimity and courage, as exhibited in Greek and Roman story, continue to exert over the moral judgments of men who have, in youth, been devoted to classical literature. And we grant that there is weight in his argument. But unless we greatly mistake, none but the weakest of scholars bestow any permanent undue love or admiration on the heroes of antiquity who fight before us in the Iliad of Homer, for example, or form their moral judgments on their practice, as if they had been real living men. They exist in a world of their own, unlike in almost all things to that in which we move. Yet, though we feel that no such men ever did exist, we feel, at the same time, that they are poetical representatives of an age which is called by way of eminence, the heroic. We delight in them, therefore, as in beings like but most unlike to ourselves-beings created out of imperfect realities by the imagination of a great poet, and breathing the undecayed spirit of antiquity. The virtues which they possess, we feel to be the virtues of an early era of society, and we feel at once their strength and their weakness. No sensible man ever thought Achilles a perfect model of a hero, except as a Greek before the walls of Troy-nor does any sensible man pay much deference to the wisdom of Nestor. On the contrary, the Iliad delights and enchains us by the vivid and moving picture which it exhibits of the barbarous spirit of a barbarous age.

Though, therefore, men of cultivated taste may think, and think rightly, that such imperfect virtues, as the courage and magnanimity of the heroic ages are better than any other fitted for poetry, we do not believe that they often, if ever, carry their admiration of them so far as to prefer them, in their hearts, to the virtues inculcated by evangelical religion, and to dislike that religion because its spirit is hostile to that of the mythological religion of antiquity. On the contrary, we believe, that those scholars who have studied the Greek poetry most

philosophically, and who have perused, in general with most earnestness, the character and spirit of all antiquity, feel most profoundly the utter inadequacy of all its most splendid displays, to satisfy our highest conceptions even of mere human virtue-and that their conviction of the truth of Christianity, and of the superior excellence of the character it breathes, is rendered more deep and stedfast by their knowledge of the melancholy debasement of the human mind, in the ancient world, as well during the most simple state of manners, as that of the highest refinement and civility.

When such evangelical preachers as Foster himself, or Chalmers, speak, in the language of Scripture, of Christian virtues, to men of the finest education, there is no fear of their inspiring their hearers either with disgust or aversion. If the doctrine of the depravity of human nature is true-and that it is so, the virtues of men speak as clearly as their vices, and their happiness even more affectingly than their misery-mankind must know and feel it to be true, however much they may at times wish to hide it from themselves. By such preachers they will hear that and other mysteries spoken of as mysteries ought to be-gradually unfolded in the light of the gospel, and not forced upon them in darkness; and thus, while all those feelings of our human hearts are awakened by their eloquence, on which the proof of the truth of vital Christianity depends, we will not fail to hear responses of that truth echoed back to us from all the passing scenes and events of this our agitating mortal existence.

It is because this volume of Sermons, by Dr Chalmers, contains a discussion of many of those great questions of vital Christianity, that we think it even more valuable than his Astronomical Discourses. He is the minister of Christ, and therefore feels it to be his duty not to fear to explain his Word. He is not ashamed of the sacred volume; and therefore, unlike many of the timid preachers of the day, who wish not to offend the prejudices of their hearers, he discloses its contents, however humiliating they may be to the pride of man. Yet his doctrine leaves us far happier beings than the cold comfort of the moralist. He speaks of our high alliance with God, and deals with a creed, whose