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MEN AND BOOKS 
 
 STUDIES IN HOMILETICS 
 
 LECTURES INTRODUCTORY TO 
 
 TEE TEEORY OF PREACEINa 
 
 BY 
 
 AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 
 
 LATE BARTLET PROFESSOR OP SACRED RHETORIC IN ANDOYEB 
 THEOLOGICAi SEMINARY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1882 
 
Copyright bt 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S BONS. 
 
 1882. 
 
 jftanWtn prejEfjS : 
 
 STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND, AVERY, AND CO. 
 BOSTON. 
 
•ft£C. SEP 1882 
 THSOLOGIC. 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 A THOROUGHLY trained preacher is first a man, at home 
 among men : he is then a scholar, at home in libraries. No 
 other profession equals that of the pulpit in its power to 
 absorb and appropriate to its own uses the world of real life 
 in the present and the world of the past as it lives in books. 
 A very essential part of a preacher's culture, therefore, con- 
 cerns his use of these two resources of professional power. 
 The large majority of the topics commonly treated by pro- 
 fessors of homiletics as miscellanies will be found to arrange 
 themselves naturally in these two lines of discussion. By so 
 arranging them, I have sought to gain the concentration of 
 unity and the cumulation of order. 
 
 Like the Lectures on "The Theory of Preaching," in a 
 former volume, these discussions retain the form and style of 
 the lecture-room in which they were delivered, in response 
 to the practical inquu'ies of students on the eve of entrance 
 upon their life's work. Almost no other changes have been 
 made than those which were necessary in the mechanical 
 revision for the press. 
 
 It should be observed, respecting that portion of this work 
 
 which discusses the study of books, that its design is limited. 
 
 I have by no means attempted to give an analysis of English 
 
 iU 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 literature, nor to plan the studies of men of literary leisure, 
 nor to advise respecting the reading of miscellaneous classes, 
 as President Porter has so usefully done in his work on 
 "Books and Reading." My aim is to answer the inqumes 
 of young pastors whose collegiate training has created liter- 
 ary aspirations which ought to be perpetuated in the life- 
 long labors of their profession. 
 
 It will be objected, to some of the counsel given in these 
 pages, that to many young preachers it is impracticable. 
 This objection is treated at length near the close of the vol- 
 ume. But at present this should be said of it : that any plan 
 of effort or of study auxiliary to the work of the pulpit, to be 
 largely useful, must, from the nature of the case, be largely 
 ideal in its character. One of its chief virtues must be its 
 power to sustain the aspirations of a preacher, rather than to 
 measure his achievements. Diversities of gifts, diversities 
 of culture, diversities of health, and diversities of leisure, 
 must create such diversities of condition among pastors that 
 no two of them can find precisely the same plan practicable 
 to them both. 
 
 All that professional criticism can do, therefore, is to 
 present to all, as to one, the true ideal of the labor auxiliary 
 to homiletic culture, and trust to the good sense of each to 
 decide for himself how far, and with what eclectic skill, it is 
 practicable to him. It is worth much to have a good ideal 
 of any thing that is worth doing. The grandest lives are but 
 approaches to grand ideals. The very sight of a good 
 library, though just now unused, is a stimulus and a cheer 
 to a missionary in the backwoods. So an ideal of a life's 
 work is valuable as a suggestion of effort, perhaps for ever 
 
PREFACE. V 
 
 impracticable in the full, yet for ever susceptible of approxi- 
 mation. Such an ideal does much for a youthful pastor, if it 
 marks out the line of ascent on which he wUl gain the loftiest 
 altitude and the broadest vision, with the least waste of 
 mental and moral forces. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAcn 
 
 The Original Soiirce of Oratorical Culture. — A Preacher's Study of 
 his Own Mind. — Study of Other Men; of Individuals; of Secu- 
 lar Assemblies; of Religious Awakenings 1 
 
 LECTURE n. 
 
 Study of Men, continued. —The Factitious Reverence for Books.— 
 The Popular Idea of a Clergyman. — The Clergyman of Liter- 
 ary Fiction. — Clerical Seclusion; its Effects on the Pulpit.— 
 Antipathy to Political Preaching. — Waste in Ministrations of 
 the Pulpit ~ 1'^ 
 
 LECTURE ni. 
 
 Study of Men, continued. — Study of Eccentric Preachers. — A 
 Negative Ministry. — Preaching in an Age of Excitement. — 
 Literature not constructed for the Masses; Consequent Peril to 
 the Pulpit. —Resemblances between the Pulpit and the Greek 
 Drama. — Popular Revolutions often Independent of the Edu- 
 cated Classes 33 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Study of Men, continued. — Popular Revolutions distorted for the 
 Want of Educated Leadership; the Clergy the Natural Leaders 
 of the Popular Mind. — The Clergy sometimes Ultra-conser- 
 vative; Effect of a Tardy Leadership. — Consequence of an 
 
 Exclusive Ministry 49 
 
 vii 
 
VUl TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 FAGB 
 
 Study of Men, continued. — Clerical Influence with Educated 
 Classes more largely Moral than Intellectual, Reflexive rather 
 than Direct. — Anomalous Relations often created between 
 the Church and the World 67 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 Study of Men, concluded. — Practice of Leading Minds in History. 
 
 — Ancient Theory of Education. — Theory of the Middle Ages. 
 
 — Modern English Theory. — Individual Examples. — Eminent 
 "Writers who decry Oratorical Study 83 
 
 LECTURE Vn. 
 
 Study of Literature for Clerical Discipline. — Objects of the Study; 
 Discipline, not Accumulation; Discovery of Principles of Effec- 
 tive Speech; Power of Unconscious Use of Principles; Assimila- 
 tion to the Genius of Great Authors 96 
 
 LECTURE Vin. 
 
 Objects of the Study of Literature, continued. — Knowledge of 
 One's Own Adaptations; Necessity of this to the Ministry; 
 Illustrations of the "Want of it. — Peril of an Educated Min- 
 istry. — Study of Books conducive to Self-appreciation . . Ill 
 
 LECTURE IX. 
 
 Selection of Authors. — "Worthless Books. — Universal Scholarship 
 a Fiction. — Impracticable Plans of Reading. — Rebellion 
 against Necessary Limitations. — Controlling Powers in Litera- 
 ture 127 
 
 LECTURE X. 
 
 Study of the Few Controlling Minds, continued. — An Objection 
 considered. — The English Literature Predominant. — "Ver- 
 nacular as compared with Foreign Literature. — Utility of 
 Culturethe True Test. — Selfishness in Culture . . . .146 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. IX 
 
 LECTURE XI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Superiority of the English Literature; the English a Composite 
 Order of Mind; a Literature of Power as distinct from Knowl- 
 edge; a Christian Literature; a Protestant Literature; a Lit- 
 erature of Constitutional Freedom; a Balanced Literature; a 
 Mature Literature; a Popular Literature; Prolific of Models 
 of Persuasive Speech 160 
 
 LECTURE XII. 
 
 Kecognition of an American Literature in our Studies ; its Intrin- 
 sic Worth in some Departments ; an Offshoot of the Literature 
 of England; American Theological Literature Original . . 177 
 
 LECTURE XIII. 
 
 Choice of Authors regulated in Part by Professional Pursuits; 
 Choice of Authors Comprehensive; Variety not at the Ex- 
 pense of Scholarship; Literary Affectations ; Cant in Literature; 
 Breadth Essential to Richness; Autocracy of Authors . . 192 
 
 LECTURE XIV. 
 
 Breadth of Range in Study, continued; the Clergy in Danger of a \ 
 Narrow Culture. — Dr. Arnold's Advice to Young Preachers. — 
 Living Speakers as Models ; Magnitude of Unwritten Litera- 
 ture; its Representative Character; Powerlessness of the Press 
 to express it; Necessity of the Study of it to True Conceptions 
 of Oral Eloquence; Essay and Speech distinguished . . . 207 
 
 LECTURE XV. 
 
 Study of the Bible as a Literary Model. — The Neglect of the Scrip- 
 tures by the Taste of Scholars. — Defect in our Systems of Edu- 
 cation. —The Bible the Most Ancient Literature Extant: its 
 Representative Relation to the Oriental Mind. — Oriental Races 
 not Effete. — The Bible the Regenerative Power in the Revival 
 of the Oriental Mind 224 
 
 LECTURE XVI. 
 
 Study of the Bible as a Literary Classic, continued. — The Bible 
 incorporated into all Living- Literature; Spenser; Shakspeare; 
 Milton; Wordsworth; English Hymnology; Forensic Elo- 
 
X TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAea 
 
 quence. — Debt of Infidelity to the Scriptures. — Intrinsic 
 Superiority of Biblical Models. — Bearing of Inspiration on 
 Literary Merit ; in What consists its Literary Superiority ? . 238 
 
 LECTURE XVII. 
 
 Study of the Scriptures as Classics, concluded. — Professional Value 
 of Biblical Models to a Preacher. — Biblical and Theological 
 Forms of Truth. — Biblical Forms in Religious Awakenings. — 
 Scholarship blended with Religious Feeling in Biblical Study . 256 
 
 LECTURE XVIII. 
 
 The Methods of Literary Study by a Pastor. — Preliminaries. — Ne- 
 cessity of Critical Reading; of Philosophical Modes of Read- 
 ing. — Anomalies in Literature. — Reading with Division of 
 Labor; Essential to Intelligent Study; to Profound Knowledge; 
 to Extent of Learning 269 
 
 LECTURE XIX. 
 
 Methods of Study, continued. — Comparisons of Authors. — Com- 
 parisons of National Literatures; of Departments; of Litera- 
 ture with Art. — Disclosure of Delicate Qualities. — Relative 
 Excellences. — Special Culture of Weak Points. — Tyranny of 
 Natural Tastes. — Collateral Reading of Biography and His- 
 tory; Illustrated 281 
 
 LECTURE XX. 
 
 Methods of Study, continued. — Reading with Practice in Compo- 
 sition; improves the Quality of Study; promotes Originality. — 
 Proportion of Executive Power to Critical Taste. — Methods of 
 connecting Study with Composition. — Imitations of Authors. — 
 Daily Composing prefaced by Daily Study. — Appreciation of 
 Genius associated with Just Estimate of One's Self . . . 295 
 
 LECTURE XXI. 
 
 The Practicability of Literary Study to a Pastor. — Any Scholarly 
 Plan of Study an Ideal One. — Study must be made Practicable. 
 — Retrenchment of Executive Miscellanies. — Severe Bodily 
 Discipline Essential. — Assisted by Moral Virtues. — Originality 
 of Plans. — Scholastic Ideal alone, not Practicable. — Necessity 
 of Concentration. — Interruptions anticipated .... 309 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XI 
 
 LECTURE XXII. 
 
 FAOB 
 
 A Plan of Study of the English Literature. — A Historic Line of Pro- 
 fessional Reading, — Collateral Lines pursued as suggested by 
 the Professional Line. — Remote Portions of the Literature read 
 by Departments. — Fragments of Time Utilized. — Light Litera- 
 ture reserved for Periods of Leisure. — The Plan detailed, 
 from A.D. 1350 to A.D. 1850. — Miscellaneous Hints ... 325 
 
,h£c. s;; 
 
 ^THBOLOGIC; 
 MEN AND BOOKS; 
 
 OR, 
 
 STUDIES IN HOMILETICS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 IKTEODUCTIOF. — STUDY OF MEN; OF A PREACHER'S 
 OWN MIND; OF OTHER MEN. 
 
 The first orator in the order of time had nothing to 
 make him an orator but his head and his heart and his 
 study of men. He had no treatises, no models, no ob- 
 jective eloquence in any form, to guide him. He had 
 only human nature to work with as well as to work 
 upon. The instinct of speech he improved into elo- 
 quence by experiments upon men as hearers of speech. 
 
 Then, when the reflective process began in his mind, 
 and he reasoned out the first crude science of his art, 
 he must have reasoned upon the simple facts of his 
 experience. His primary question was not, What is elo- 
 quence in its philosophical germ ? or, Has it any such 
 germ ? It was. How is it that men are actually moved 
 by speech ? What, in fact, persuades men ? What has 
 done this as a matter of experiment ? Upon that his- 
 tory of eloquence as an experience of living minds, 
 
2 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i. 
 
 possibly of but one living m.ind, must have been laid 
 the first stone of the arch of oratorical science. 
 
 But while the first orators, and, following them, the 
 writers, — for speech must have preceded writing, — 
 had only men to study, their productions became to 
 their successors an additional source of oratorical cul- 
 ture. Observe : not an independent, but a supplement- 
 ary source. It is a source, which, from the necessity 
 of the case, could be valuable only so far as it embodied 
 the results of a knowledge of human nature. Demos- 
 thenes, by incorporating into his orations the principles 
 of eloquence derived from the study of men, rendered 
 those orations a source of culture to all subsequent 
 generations. We therefore have a second source of 
 oratorical culture in models of effective writing and 
 speaking. 
 
 Observe, that, when we speak of models of effective 
 writing and speaking, we include all successful and 
 permanent literature. The grand test of power in 
 speech is the Napoleonic test of character, — success. 
 The final test of success, from which there is no appeal, 
 is permanence. All literature, be it oral or written, 
 which bears these tests, may be a source of professional 
 discipline to a public speaker. Not merely orations, 
 speeches, sermons, but all written thought which bears 
 the stamp of success, must embody some of the princi- 
 ples of power in the expression of thought by language. 
 In defining the range of it, we do not inquire what 
 authors and speakers have written and spoken according 
 to one standard or another, by the rules of one authority 
 or another, to the taste of one age or another, but 
 simply who have succeeded. We do not ask who have 
 succeeded in the right cause or the wrong, with good 
 
LECT. I.] STUDY OF MEN. 3 
 
 motive or bad motive, by honest purpose or by knavery, 
 but who have succeeded in any cause, with any motive, 
 by any means of speech. 
 
 Proceeding to apply^the view here given to the 
 studies of a preacher,|'I propose, in this and the suc- 
 ceeding Lectures, to speak of a preacher's study of 
 MEN and of his STUDY OF BOOKS as sources of oratorical 
 discipline/ 
 
 I. Upon a preacher's independent study of men the 
 following suggestions deserve remembrance : — 
 
 1. Every preacher may obtain much of oratorical cul- 
 ture from attention to the processes of his own mind. 
 The study of men every man may pursue for himself. 
 We have at least the same facilities in this respect that 
 the first orator had. In the study of men a preacher 
 should rank first his own mind. You have in your own 
 selves an original and independent source of rhetorical 
 knowledge. No other can be more so. 
 
 (1) In development of this view, let it be observed 
 that every man's experience contains biographical inci- 
 dents suggestive of oratorical principles. Every educated 
 mind which is therefore accustomed to self-inspection 
 has in itself a history of oratorical appliances. You 
 have listened to public speakers ; you have heard ser- 
 mons ; you have read successful literature ; you know, 
 therefore, what truths have moved your own mind, 
 and in what forms, and in what combinations with 
 other truths. You have learned to distinguish between 
 speakers who instruct your intellect only and those who 
 move your sensibilities. Your memory is full of inci- 
 dents of success or failure in experiments of speech 
 which other men have made upon yourselves. Have 
 you not unconsciously laid the foundations of your 
 
4 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i 
 
 self-knowledge, in part, in this knowledge of your own 
 susceptibility to persuasive speech ? 
 
 Here, then, is a general criterion by which to judge 
 of your own aj)pliances to other minds, — a general cri- 
 terion, I say, because individualities differ in details. 
 Very much spurious composition would collapse if the 
 writer would honestly apply to it the test, " Would this 
 move me ? Would these thoughts, thus expressed, sat- 
 isfy the cravings of my nature ? Would this strain of 
 argument convince my intellect, this style of reproof 
 reach my conscience, this method of appeal sway my 
 heart?" 
 
 Many a preacher knows that the best of his own ser- 
 mons can not stand this homely test. The salient inci- 
 dents in his own mental history, which are always most 
 fresh in his memory, suggest something very unlike his 
 own productions. His experience as a listener, and his 
 practice as a preacher, are founded on different ideals 
 of success. If he were to choose, on the spur of the 
 moment, the preacher to whom he owes, more than to 
 any other, his noblest conception of the power of the 
 pulpit, he would choose the man above all others most 
 unlike himself, and whose sermons, not only in degree 
 of excellence, but in kind and in aim, are most diverse 
 from his own. 
 
 (2) Not only do incidents salient in every man's life 
 suggest principles of eloquent speech, but the more 
 profound history of every man's character is full of 
 similar suggestions. Every character has a history of 
 changes. They lie deeper than transitory movements 
 of intellect, and awakening of sensibilities. As preach- 
 ers we have to deal mainly with fundamental changes 
 of character. Our great aim is to produce changes, 
 
LECT. I.] PERSONAL HISTORY. 6 
 
 some of wliich are revolutionary. The plow of the 
 pulpit runs deep, if it runs at all to the purpose of the 
 pulpit. 
 
 A preacher needs, therefore, to study the history of 
 his own character. He needs wisdom to read it aright. 
 Your own life antecedent to your religious awakening ; 
 the causes and the process of that awakening ; the un- 
 written experiences which gather in your memory around 
 the crisis of your conversion, if that crisis disclosed itself 
 to you ; and the visible stages in the process of your 
 religious growth thus far, — are most vital resources of 
 that kind of culture which you need as a guiding mind 
 to others through similar experiences. Other changes 
 auxiliary to these are scarcely less important. Changes 
 of opinion, of taste, of mental habit ; changes in the 
 proportion of the spiritual to the physical in your 
 nature ; changes inevitable to progress from the infancy 
 to the maturity of godly principle within you ; any 
 and every change which your self-consciousness marks 
 as fundamental to growth of character, — are resources 
 of knowledge to you respecting means and methods of 
 working, combinations of truth most helpful to success, 
 and the entire furniture of your mind for the work of 
 training characters which are in need of or are under- 
 going similar changes under your ministrations. 
 
 Yet does not the history of the pulpit give evidence 
 of inattention to this kind of personal history, which 
 must lie back of it in the memory of the preacher? 
 We preach too little of and from the work of God 
 within us ; too much, perhaps, about our external his- 
 tory, but too little about the principles involved in the 
 deeper processes of spiritual life, which do not disclose 
 themselves in events, nor provide the material for an 
 
6 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect, i 
 
 anecdote, but are subterranean, and tributary to all 
 growth. Much of the fanaticism of the pulpit would 
 be forestalled, if preachers were more studious of God's 
 method in the training of themselves. As a rule, 
 fanatical preachers were not converted by fanaticism. 
 They are never themselves improved by fanaticism. 
 They know this, if they interpret honestly their own 
 history. A regenerate man preaching from his own 
 regenerate experience could not be a fanatic : he could 
 not so disturb the divine balance of truth. Some 
 short-sighted modes of doing good, some unnatural ap- 
 peals to the consciences and the feelings of men, much 
 claptrap, egotism, humdrum, animal magnetism, in the 
 pulpit, would be displaced by more profound resources, 
 and more intensely vitalized expedients, if preachers 
 read human nature more adroitly in their own. 
 
 Preachers often attempt to influence audiences, not 
 only by isolated arguments, illustrations, appeals, but 
 by prolonged plans of ministerial effort, which they 
 know, when they fairly awaken to the realities of the 
 case, have no root in the underground of their own 
 characters. Revivals of religion are sometimes labored 
 for by expedients which are untrue to the preacher's 
 own history. They are expedients which he knows 
 would, if he had encountered them at a critical period 
 of his life, have caused his own soul to revolt from 
 the truth, to despise the truth, or to stagnate under the 
 truth. He is the very last man, it may be, to have 
 responded favorably to a prophecy of his own sermons. 
 
 Have you not yourselves observed the fact in the 
 history of preaching, that ministers who fall into un- 
 philosophical modes of preaching are themselves the 
 most uninterested listeners to such preaching ? Preach- 
 
LEOT. I.] UNPHILOSOPHICAL PREACHINQ. 7 
 
 ers are proverbially hard hearers. One reason is, that 
 there is so much in preaching which is unreal to any- 
 body's experience. They who preach claptrap are not 
 edified by claptrap any more than their hearers. Those 
 who preach humdrum are not interested in humdrum 
 when they hear it. They sleep under it more pro- 
 foundly, if possible, than other men. Seat them as 
 listeners to such preaching, and, if their eyes are open, 
 they are as the fool's eyes, like those of other hearers. 
 A great and live soul, which can furnish its own fire, 
 is required to get aglow under such preaching. The 
 authors of it never do : they never feel even the 
 crackling of thorns under such a pot. Ignatius Loyola 
 might have been converted under such preaching, but 
 never the Rev. Dr. Dunderhead. 
 
 The same is true of inordinately intellectual preach- 
 ers. By this I mean those preachers in whom intel- 
 lectual enthusiasm exceeds and overpowers religious 
 fervor. Such preachers are not morally moved by the 
 preaching of their peers. They are not religiously 
 edified by extreme profundity, or by imaginative pyro- 
 technics, or by mystical reveries, in other preachers. 
 The men who move them are probably the plain men 
 who talk right on. The text may move them ; the 
 prayer may melt them ; the hymn may make them 
 weep : but the immensely intellectual sermon, which 
 is that, and nothing more — they know too well the 
 stuff it is made of. 
 
 The phenomenon will sometimes discover itself to 
 you in the experience of the pulpit, that a preacher's 
 professional life and his personal life are at antipodes to 
 each other. He preaches almost any thing, in any way, 
 except the thing, in the way, which the Holy Ghost 
 
8 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i. 
 
 lias made a living thing and a living way to his own 
 soul. You perceive, then, the fundamental character of 
 the principle, that a preacher should study his hearers 
 in himself. Other things being equal, no other preach- 
 ing is so effective as the preaching which is rooted in a 
 man's ovni experience of truth. Such truth he knows. 
 Comparatively speaking, he knows nothing else. 
 
 2. Every preacher has also a source of rhetorical 
 culture in the study of other men. Real life every- 
 where is full of power in speech. Character can scarce- 
 ly express itself in language other than the dialect of 
 eloquence. Whether it be so denominated in books or 
 not, it is such in fact. Books should be conformed to 
 life, not life to books. 
 
 (1) Individual character in its rudest forms is power 
 in speech. The market-place, the streets, the fields, the 
 workshops, the counting-rooms, the court-rooms, the 
 schoolhouses, the platforms, the firesides, the steam- 
 boats, the rail-cars, the exchange, every place, every 
 thing, in which men are off their guard, and speak 
 right out what they think and as they feel, with no 
 consciousness of trying either to think or to feel, are 
 teeming with natural eloquence. Books bear no com- 
 parison with this eloquence of life. The world could 
 not contain the books which would have been requisite 
 to express this unwritten development of power in 
 oratorical forms of utterance. 
 
 You can not observe two men making a bargain with- 
 out witnessing an example of something which enters 
 into the highest art of persuasion. You can not listen 
 to the words, constructions, intonations, of an angry 
 man, without meeting some of the elements of all 
 earnest oratory. A man chasing his hat in a gale acts 
 
LECT. I.] SECULAR ASSEMBLIES. 9 
 
 in pantomime a principle which Demosthenes could not 
 safely ignore in striving for the crown. The slang of 
 the street, the dialect of the forecastle, the lingo of 
 collegians, illustrate principles of style which underlie 
 forms of power in thought and utterance which have 
 lived a thousand years. A woman over the couch of a 
 sick child speaks in words which have roots running 
 down into the original ideal of pathos in all literature. 
 Animated conversation illustrates principles, and takes 
 on forms, which no eloquence of the senate or the 
 pulpit can do without. How often does our wearied 
 criticism of a public speaker express itself in some such 
 inward exclamation as this, " Oh that he would step 
 down from his stilts, and talk as we heard him talk at 
 the tea-table on a certain evening ! " 
 
 These most common and therefore neglected forms 
 of individual character in daily life are full of the re- 
 sources of homiletic culture to any one who will take 
 the trouble to observe them for that purpose. At this 
 point is seen one of the vital dependences of the pulpit 
 on pastoral duty. No preacher can afford to be a 
 preacher only, and live in his study alone, were it only 
 for liis need of homiletic suggestion coming directly 
 from the homes and the business of his people. To 
 know thoroughly one able man in your parish is the 
 counterpart of a homiletic treatise in teaching you how 
 to preach to all the peers of that man. 
 
 (2) The conduct of secular assemblies often discloses 
 the working of power in speech. Much wisdom which 
 preachers have occasion for may be learned from the 
 answer to the question, " How do lawyers who gain 
 their cases deal with juries ? How do they work differ- 
 ently in addressing a bench of judges?" If it were 
 
10 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i. 
 
 possible, I would have every minister of the gospel 
 practice law. Some of our ablest preachers have been 
 subjected to that preliminary discipline, and never 
 without acknowledging their obligations to it through 
 a lifetime. 
 
 How are town-meetings governed by a few words 
 from a few plain men? How is it that an educated 
 man sometimes fails in such an assembly, outgeneraled 
 by a farmer or a blacksmith? How is a city mob 
 quelled by a dozen men with no weapons more deadly 
 than a billy ? Why are a dozen policemen a match for 
 a hundred desperadoes ? The elements of power which 
 explain that phenomenon have their parallels in oratori- 
 cal forces. The principle which explains, in part, the 
 fact that an army of sixty thousand men keeps in sub- 
 jection sixty millions of aliens in British India is the 
 same which explains, in part, the coming conversion of 
 the world by a handful of preachers with no auxilia- 
 ries to speech but prayer. 
 
 Edward Everet't could hold in silence an audience of 
 three thousand scholarly minds by an oration which 
 passed at once into the standards of literature ; and 
 Charles Sumner could command the most intelligent 
 and independent Senate in the world, not one of 
 whom liked him personally, by a speech which became a 
 thesaurus of learning and a landmark of history. Yet 
 neither of these princely orators could get a hearing of 
 ten minutes from a crowd in the street, if the Hon. 
 Stephen A. Douglas were known to be there to oppose 
 them. What caused these diversities ? Anybody who 
 will explain such facts as these truthfully must dis- 
 cover in the process some practical rhetorical wisdom, 
 and that the very last which a preacher can afford to lose. 
 
LECT. I.] EELIGIOUS AWAKENINGS. H 
 
 Are some of these things done by other means than 
 speech, and by foul means in part ? Very true. But 
 all successes in real life have their counterparts in 
 speech. Foul means, to be successful, must appeal to 
 elements of human nature which are normal to it. A 
 right appeal to those elements a preacher may make 
 with hope of equal success. The susceptibility of the 
 human mind to such appeals is the basis of all elo- 
 quence. The business of real life, therefore, is full of it. 
 The study of men succeeding and failing in that busi- 
 ness must be prolific of wisdom to a public speaker. 
 The late Lord Lytton gives advice to a young London 
 author, saying, " Never write a page till you have 
 walked from your room to Temple Bar, mingling with 
 men, and reading the human face." He adds the fact 
 that great poets have, for the most part, passed their 
 lives in cities. 
 
 (3) We find also a specially valuable resource of 
 homiletic culture in the study of masses of men under 
 religious excitement. Sympathetic religious awakenings 
 are phenomena of life as old as nations : to them is 
 due by far the major proportion of Christian progress. 
 More than half of the history of Christianity in this 
 world would be blotted out if we should erase the rec- 
 ord of the great sympathetic waves of religious sensi- 
 bility which have rolled over communities and nations 
 and races. The modern excitement which we term a 
 revival illustrates only one phase of an experience of 
 which, in kindred forms, history is full. 
 
 Revivals are often spoken of as an American product. 
 It is true that American revivals have had peculiarities 
 growing out of the national temperament and history ; 
 but in the sense of being in spirit limited to one ooun- 
 
1 2 MEN AND BOOKS. [le'7T. i. 
 
 try or another, or one nation or age rather than another, 
 they are not American. Revivals are a normal working 
 of human nature moved by supernatural forces. They 
 have never been provincial. All the past is dotted over 
 with them : all the future must be the same. Our hope 
 of the world's conversion is a dream, if religious pi jg- 
 ress is to be measured by that of the intervals between 
 these great awakenings of the popular heart. 
 
 Such awakenings, therefore, are a very vital object of 
 a preacher's study. Generally, sympathetic religious 
 excitements are the result of preaching. Consecutive 
 plans of preaching should contemplate them, and be 
 adjusted to them. Under a wise ministry, blessed of 
 God, they are sure to occur. A pulpit not adjusted to 
 them is like a system of husbandry not planned for a 
 harvest. One of the saddest sights in the history of 
 the pulpit is that of a ministry which regards revivals 
 as abnormal, and which therefore adjusts itself in schol- 
 arly ease and refinement to the slow and well-nigh 
 hopeless growth of periods which lie between revivals. 
 
 Such a ministry, you will observe, are very apt to find 
 their chief interests and excitements outside of their 
 profession. They give themselves to literature, to sci- 
 ence, to art, to reforms, to social life, to the improve- 
 ment of their private fortunes. Some of our standards 
 in literature have been the work of clergymen who did 
 the work, and could do it, because their professional 
 plans did not contemplate nor aim at overpowering 
 awakenings of the people. Few men in the pulpit can 
 adjust themselves to the divine plans in this respect, as 
 history has thus far given us the means of interpreting 
 them, and yet find time and mental force to create lit- 
 erary standards which shall live to future times. The 
 
LECT. I.] PHILOSOPHY OF REVIVALS. 13 
 
 exhortations to scholarly aims which we give and receive 
 are always to be accepted with this qualification, that, 
 in a successful ministry, religious awakenings may 
 overwhelm a preacher with professional labors to such 
 degree as to render literary pursuits for the time imprac- 
 ticable. Such awakenings must command the profound 
 and prayerful study of men who mean to be a power in 
 the instrumental control of them. 
 
 The practical question is, How are they brought 
 about? What procedure of the pulpit is conducive 
 to them ? A country village, remote from the excite- 
 ment of metropolitan crowds, is agitated by a strange 
 quickening of religious inquiry. Skeptics look upon it 
 as an epidemic. What has Christian philosophy to say 
 of it ? What instruments have apparently wrought the 
 change? What methods of preaching, what subjects 
 in the pulpit, what auxiliary agencies outside of the 
 pulpit, have seemed to be the working forces ? Hard- 
 featured and cross-grained men are subdued by a female 
 Bible-reader ; so that a quaint observer applies to them 
 the old couplet in the primer, — 
 
 " Whales in the sea 
 God's voice obey." 
 
 What is the secret of her power ? A roving evangelist 
 whom three-fifths of the community despise reaches 
 the other two-fifths with such power of moral suasion, 
 that the majority are compelled to smother their con- 
 tempt, or to express it in tones which echo a secret fear 
 that he is right, and they are wrong. How does he do 
 it? Prayer-meetings are crowded in the " Black Sea " in 
 Boston. A motley assembly of five thousand, whom no 
 other than a religious teacher could keep silent for ten 
 
14 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i. 
 
 minutes, are thus held for an hour by the plainest of 
 plain religious talk in Burton's Theatre in New York. 
 Twenty thousand men and women in the Crystal Palace 
 at Sydenham are held in such stillness that they all 
 hear one voice intelligibly. How are these things done ? 
 What is the philosophy of the success of such men as 
 Whitefield, Summerfield, Spurgeon, Finney, Moody? 
 
 Right or wrong, normal or abnormal, these are facts 
 in popular history. They are known and read of all 
 men. They assume the importance of crises in the 
 history of nations. In our own day they are growing 
 to the magnitude of the old Roman gladiatorial shows. 
 The simple power of speech seems now to be achiev- 
 ing results in popular excitement, which in Pagan life 
 could be created only by brutal and sanguinary spec- 
 tacles. What philosophy of speech can explain them ? 
 Wise is the man who can give the reason why speech 
 should thus supplant the dagger and the lasso and the 
 trident. 
 
 As specimens of the questions on this subject which 
 a preacher needs to ask and answer, let the following 
 be specified : ^ Are revivals of religion a normal method 
 of divine working for the world's conversion? What 
 is their relation to divine sovereignty? Are any laws 
 of the working of the Holy Spirit in them discoverable ? 
 In what condition of the popular mind are revivals to 
 be looked for ? What agency of the pulpit is prepara- 
 tive to a revival ? What agencies auxiliary to the pulpit 
 are most essential? Are evangelistic labors desirable 
 under a settled ministry ? What types of theology are 
 dominant in the most valuable revivals ? What place 
 
 1 The majority of these inquiries have been published in the appendix 
 to the " Theory of Preaching." 
 
tECT. I.] STUDY OF REVIVALS. 15 
 
 should be assigned in them to doctrinal preaching? 
 Has the service of song any special value in them? 
 Are children proper subjects of conversion in revivals? 
 What are the pathological perils incident to such awak- 
 enings ? How are those perils avoidable ? How can 
 they be counteracted when not avoidable ? Are minds 
 of high culture naturally subject to these popular awak- 
 enings ? Does the subsidence of a revival imply reli- 
 gious decline ? Does popular re-action from a revival 
 neutralize its value ? What policy of the pulpit should 
 characterize the period immediately following a revival ? 
 What are the differences, if any, between the tj'pe of 
 piety of those who meet the religious crisis of their 
 lives in revivals and those who meet it in more tranquil 
 times? What is that change in professing Christians 
 which often occurs in revivals, and is called "reconver- 
 sion " ? Is President Edwards's work on the " Religious 
 Affections" adapted to the present religious inquirers? 
 If, by a philosophic study of these and kindred ques- 
 tions, we can come at those principles of human nature 
 which underlie the divine economy in the sympathetic 
 awakenings of society to the realities of eternity, we 
 gain thereby the very pith and marrow of homiletic cul- 
 ture. I repeat, therefore. Study the great awakenings 
 of the past. Investigate the spiritual life of the Ref- 
 ormation. Read Tracy's history of the " Great Awaken- 
 ing" in President Edwards's day. Observe critically 
 the similar movements of our own day. Read the " Year 
 of Grace in Ireland," the " History of the Hawaiian 
 Islands," the "History of Missions in Madagascar." 
 Study the lives of pre-eminent revival preachers. Read 
 the memoirs of Whitefield, Wesley, Nettleton, Finney, 
 Lyman Beecher, Dr. Kirk. Observe narrowly the facts 
 
16 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. i. 
 
 of current history bearing on the subject. Be familiar 
 with the ministries of such men as Mr. Spurgeon. Learn 
 something from them alL Study opposite characters 
 in the history of revivals. 
 
 Above all, preserve a docile state of mind in such 
 studies. Take an expectant attitude. Look for pro- 
 gressive evolution of wisdom in the administration of 
 the pulpit. Never allow your mind to settle down in a 
 quiescent state, under the conviction that the policy of 
 the pulpit is fixed by the past for all time. 
 
 A most fatal position to the clergy of a nation is that 
 assumed by a portion of the clergy of this country and 
 of England, which holds them aloof from the experience 
 of modern revivals, and which some of them avow as 
 antagonistic to such awakenings. Fatal, I say, is such 
 an attitude to the spiritual power of the ministry. A 
 pulpit thus sundered from these quickenings of the 
 popular heart can never be the pulpit of the future. 
 The work of this world's redemption will sweep grandly 
 over it, and bury it in oblivion. Or, if it lives, it can 
 represent only a fragmentary and sickly development 
 of religious life. It can only build up a Christian 
 infirmary in which shall be gathered the invalid classes 
 of Christian minds. All the signs of our age indicate 
 increase rather than diminution of these popular ex- 
 citements. The ministry must understand them, must 
 be in sympathy with them, must be masters in the 
 control of them, or must perish under the billows of 
 them which are sure to roll in upon the church of all 
 coming time. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 STUDY OP MEN, CONTESrUED. — CERTAIN CLERICAL IN- 
 FIRMITIES, EFFECTS ON THE PULPIT. 
 
 3. Resuming the subject of the study of meu where 
 we left it at the close of the last Lecture, let us now 
 observe the fact that this study is often undervalued, 
 because of a factitious reverence for books. 
 
 This must be recognized as one of the perils of stu- 
 dious minds engaged in a practical profession. True, 
 the opposite peril also exists ; but it besets only indolent 
 minds. Mental indolence finds a very cheap pabulum 
 in underrating scholastic learning. But studious men 
 are tempted on the side of their scholastic tastes. We 
 need to see the relations of the two in some approach 
 to equilibrium. We will not say with Patrick Henry, 
 " Sir, it is not laooks, it is men, that we must study ; " 
 but we say, "Books and men we must study." 
 
 A 3'oung man once inquired of me, " Can you direct 
 me to a book which shall teach me to write a sermon ? " 
 I receive letters of inquiry founded on the same ideal 
 of homiletic discipline. " No," must the answer be : 
 " there is no such book. From the nature of the sub- 
 ject there can be none." Preaching is one of the arts 
 of life, — as much so as the use of the telegraph. It 
 never can be learned as an abstract science only. From 
 books may be learned principles, nothing more. Leo- 
 
18 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. n. 
 
 tures can portray the theory of preaching, nothing else. 
 Criticism is that theory in fragments. 
 
 The peril here named is often aggravated by an 
 excess of the conservative temperament. This entices 
 men of books and schools often to live as if the acqui- 
 sition and classification of printed knowledge were the 
 chief object of life, rather than the growth and the use 
 of character. The clergy, therefore, are often charged, 
 and sometimes justly, with reverence for the past at 
 the expense of the present and in distrust of the future. 
 One of the most seductive positions which can be of- 
 fered to a scholar is a fellowship in a large and ancient 
 university. But scarcely could a more perilous position 
 be accepted by a man, who, like a clergyman, looks 
 forward to a practical profession as the work of his life. 
 
 Whatever has been once crystallized and labeled in 
 our cabinet of thought, we are tempted to prize at the 
 cost of those creations which are still in the fluid state, 
 and in the seething process before our eyes. Clerical 
 tastes, therefore, often need a counterbalance to the 
 conservative temperament. We must remember that 
 a vast scene in the drama of human history is now 
 acting. We and our cotemporaries are the dramatis 
 personce. A link in the chain of historic causes and 
 effects is now forging. 
 
 Specially should this be borne in mind, that divine 
 communications to the world have always been made 
 through the medium of real life. Living men live a 
 great truth, and so truth comes to the birth. The 
 Bible is, almost wholly history and biography. Ab- 
 stract knowledge is given in it only as interwoven 
 with the wants and the experiences of once living gen- 
 erations. God took out of the circle of universal his- 
 
LECT. II.] TRUTH IN LIVING MEN. 19 
 
 tory a single segment, and the result is a revelation. 
 Men lived under special divine superintendence and 
 illumination, and the product is — a Bible. 
 
 So all the great truths which have moved the world 
 have been lived. They have been struck out by collis- 
 ion of thought with the living necessities of the world. 
 Monotheism exists only as an experience vital to living 
 men: it has come into being as a revolt from living 
 idolatries. Liberty is a possession sprung from the 
 pressure of living despotisms. True theory in all de- 
 partments of civilized culture is a life. It has grown 
 out of the brooding of thought over an experience of 
 living barbarism. Scholarsliip, therefore, is always the 
 pupil of Providence when it is the leader of men. It 
 must be studious always of Providence in the experi- 
 ence of living generations, if it would hold its leader- 
 ship. That mind lags behind Providence which studies 
 only the past. It is alv/ays a little too late in its opin- 
 ions, its tastes, its culture, and therefore in its power of 
 adaptation to uses. 
 
 Why should we not feel for the nineteenth century 
 somewhat of the respect wliich men of the twenty-ninth 
 will feel for it ? Why not place the ages abreast with 
 each other in their chances for rank in our literary 
 regard ? Studying in this manner the phases of a liv- 
 ing civilization, we shall surely learn something which 
 no records of a defunct civilization can teach us. No 
 generation of men, in God's plan, lives for nothing. 
 Every generation is a positive quantity in the world's 
 problem. It adds something to the knowledge or the 
 power of the world which its predecessors never knew. 
 The world's life is thus a growth, always a growth, 
 without retrogression and without pause. We should 
 
20 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ii. 
 
 not allow ourselves, then, to undervalue for oratorical 
 discipline the study of living men, through a morbid 
 reverence for books as the sacred repositories of the 
 past. "Books and men, men and books," should be 
 our motto. 
 
 Tliis view is enforced by the fact that accumulation 
 is not the chief object of a scholarly life : if it were, 
 we should never have been fated to spend one-third 
 of our lives in sleep. The great object of life, and 
 therefore of culture, is character, — the growth, the 
 exercise, the use, of character. We gain, surely, as vig- 
 orous a character, and as much of it in amount, from 
 the study of men as from that of books. No culture 
 can be symmetrical which is restricted to either. Each 
 needs the other as its complement. 
 
 It should be further remarked, that symmetry of 
 culture in this respect is essential to a hopeful courage 
 in the ministry. A minister who studies only the past 
 is almost sure to be distrustful of the future, and de- 
 spondent of the i^resent. He sees the future in a false 
 perspective: tlierefore to him the former times were 
 always better than these, and the future is doomed to 
 be worse than either. He is an incorrigible pessimist. 
 Two clergymen, once companions in this seminary, met, 
 after twenty years of labor in the ministry, in which 
 both had had a fair measure of success. Said one in a 
 brisk, cheery tone, " I have a hard life of it, but I 
 enjoy a hard life. It pays to have a hard life. I have 
 such a glorious trust in the future ! " Said the other, 
 unconsciously sinking his tone to the habit of his mind, 
 " I have a hard life too. I try to endure it patiently, 
 but I shall be glad when it is over. The future looks 
 dark, very dark, to me. My chief satisfaction is in the 
 
LECT. 11] POPULAR IDEA OF A CLERGYMAN. 21 
 
 past." This man was the more leariied of the two, but 
 he had worn out his courage by excessive conservatism. 
 He was weary and footsore from walking backward. 
 A few years later he was gathered to the fathers with 
 whom his mental life had been buried for twenty years. 
 His friend, I think, still lives ; and, if so, I venture to 
 affirm that he still has a hard life, and enjoys it as 
 hopefully as ever. Such men never grow old. Which 
 of the two men illustrates the better ideal of a clerical 
 scholar? Which has been worth the most to the world? 
 Which has the most brilliant record of self-culture to 
 carry into eternity ? 
 
 4. Enthusiasm in the study of men should be stimu- 
 lated by that which is well known to be, in this respect, 
 the popular idea of a clergyman. 
 
 The popular conception of a clergyman is that he is, 
 ex' officio, in reapect to the knowledge of mankind, an 
 ignoramus. \ Be it true or false, this is the popular 
 notion of the clerical character. It produces not a 
 little of that feeling towards the clergy which vibrates 
 between amusement and contempt. In the popular 
 faith we belong to a race of innocents. If not all 
 Vicars of Wakefield, we are cousins-german to that 
 reverend greenhorn. Men of the world feel it to be 
 refreshing when an able preacher breaks loose from the 
 hereditary conventionalisms of the clerical guild, and 
 thinks and talks and dresses and acts as thet/ do. 
 
 This popular notion is, of course, a caricature ; yet 
 to some extent the habits of the clergy foster it. For 
 instance, no other body of men are in so much danger 
 of excessive seclusion from the world as are the clergy. \ 
 Relics of the theory on which clerical celibacy was 
 founded yet linger among the ideas wliich clergymen 
 
22 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ii. 
 
 have of the clerical office. We do not avow it, yet 
 many feel a special reverence for a celibate minister. 
 So long as the Romish clergy keep alive that fiction 
 in the persons of godly and faithful men, some Protes- 
 tant ministers will make unconscious concessions to it. 
 
 The idea of a priesthood, also, yet remains in the 
 Protestant conception of a clergy. So long as the 
 Church of England keeps alive that notion, and makes 
 it respectable by the culture and the industry and the 
 piety of her clergy, the ministry of other churches will 
 insensibly be drawn towards it. Seclusion from men 
 for the sake of communion with God is the conception 
 which lies at the bottom, not only of many of the popu- 
 lar ideas about the ministry, but of some of the notions 
 which the ministry entertain of themselves. 
 
 One consequence of this drift of things is, that the 
 ministry often stand aloof from the real world. Men 
 often do not act themselves out in our presence. 
 They do not express all their opinions in our hearhig. 
 Principles and practices grow up in a community, and 
 pass unnoticed by the ministry for years, in some cases, 
 because the ministry know nothing of their existence. 
 
 For illustration, take the change which has been 
 going on for the last twenty years in the Christian 
 theory of amusements. That change is a very signifi- 
 cant one. It is one to which the ministry, whenever 
 they recognize it, will find that they must yield some- 
 thing of the clerical theory of fifty years ago. Yet 
 one may well be surprised at the apathy and apparent 
 ignorance of some of our ministry on the subject. A 
 certain Methodist conference once adopted a minute 
 against the playing of croquet, and were supported in 
 it by so clear-headed a man as President Finney ; ap- 
 
LECT. II.] WASTE OF CLERICAL POWER. 23 
 
 parently ignoring the fact that Christian opinion in a 
 multitude of our churches only laughs at such relics 
 of a monastic age. The rising generation are in some 
 danger of being swept into an extreme of license in 
 popular amusements, for the want of an intelligent 
 hajadiing of the subject by their ministry. 
 
 "The use of tobacco is not a sign of a heavenly mind. 
 But that was a woful diagnosis of the condition of 
 earthly minds which led an American publishing so- 
 ciety to bear its written testimony against tobacco at 
 the very time when men were boiling over at the re- 
 fusal of that society to utter its testimony against 
 American slavery*..^ " What is this Chri:.;lianity," men 
 asked, " which shuts its eyes to the public sale of a 
 woman on the auction-block, and opens them so very 
 wide at a pipe in the laboring-man's mouth?" Such 
 misuses of Christian truth involve a cost to the cause 
 of Christ which would bankrupt it if it were any other 
 than the cause of Christ. In ways which I have not 
 time to detail, changes may come upon the opinions 
 and temper of a people, which a secluded clergy may 
 nut detect till those changes develop themselves in 
 some overt revolution at which we stand aghast. 
 
 In milder form the same error shows itself in the 
 fact that the theory of religious life taught in some 
 pulpits is not recognized by the people as a reality. 
 That is one of the saddest illustrations of waste in 
 clerical power, in wdiich the people quietly shove aside 
 the teaching of the pulpit as nothing but perfunctory 
 deliverances. The preacher is imagined to preach 
 them because it is his business to do it, he is paid 
 for doing it : not that he believes it, not that he 
 expects the people to believe it, as a matter of heart 
 
24 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. n. 
 
 and life ; but it is the proper outflow of professional 
 routine. Is it not sometimes obvious that the theory 
 of the pulpit has no even approximate representative 
 in a living church? Do not instances occur in which 
 preachers themselves, who are vicegerents of God in 
 the pulpit, do not meet the people out of it as if they 
 expected their viceroyal authority to be heeded, nor 
 as if they were at all aware of the fact that it is 
 not heeded in real life ? Souls are lost, for which some- 
 body must give account, by means of the contrast 
 which the people sometimes feel between the intense 
 fidelity of the preacher in the pulpit and the apparent 
 obliviousness of it all by the man out of the pulpit. 
 
 5. This defect lies at the foundation of that notion 
 of clerical character which is most common in the lit- 
 erature of popular fiction. The clergyman of literary 
 fiction is the secular parson. He is a priest, or some- 
 thing equivalent, whose business is to perform certain 
 official functions, and nothing more. He plods in rou- 
 tine ; his preaching is routine ; his prayers are routine ; 
 his parochial service is routine ; his whole life is rou- 
 tine. The vital, rather the fatal, point is, that his life is 
 chiefly outside of the life of his parishioners. They feel 
 no sense of reality in any thing that comes from him 
 to themselves. Substantially they live and die without 
 him, except that he baptizes their children, and buries 
 their dead. He may be a fox-hunter, and it shall make 
 no difference that reaches them. If he is of upright 
 character, he is an innocuous saint, who is but half a 
 man. He knows nothing of this world, and he has no 
 business here when men have any earnest work on hand. 
 In whatever the people feel to be a reality such a cler- 
 gyman is always in the way. 
 
LECT. n.] THE CLERGYMAN OF FICTION. 25 
 
 An engraving was exhibited for sale in London not 
 long ago, in which a nobleman was pictured in the last 
 gasp of life, having been fatally injured in the hunting- 
 field. By his bedside stands a white-haired but ruddy- 
 faced and smirking clergyman in gown and bands, with 
 closed praj'er-book under his arm. His professional 
 duty to the dying man is over. His eager face shows 
 that the departing soul is forgotten in his interest in 
 the story of the hunt, which is going on in the chamber 
 of death. A caricature, this, doubtless ; but could it 
 ever have found spectators to enjoy it, or a purchaser 
 to pay for it, if it had no original in real life ? Carica- 
 tures which men laugh at and pay their money for are 
 cajicattires of som ething. 
 
 tSo is it with the parson of literary fiction. He is not 
 nearly so vital a character in the affairs of life as an old 
 Roman augur was. ] The augur did something to the 
 purpose of real life. He told the people when to fight 
 a battle, when to raise a siege, when to launch a fleet. 
 The clergyman of fiction has no such dignity. Doubt- 
 less the clergyman of fiction is an exaggeration. Upon 
 large numbers of both the Romish and Protestant clergy 
 it is a libel. Still, that it exists is evidence that more 
 or less foundation for it exists. We give occasion to 
 such a caricature by every word and act and silent 
 usage by which we suffer the pulpit to become a subli- 
 mated institution, aloof by its elevation or its refine- 
 nient from the life men are actually living, the thoughts 
 they are thinking, the habits of feeling they are indul- 
 ging, and the pursuits in which they are expending the 
 force of their being. 
 
 An opinion was reported to me a few years ago as 
 coming from the superintendent of the police of one of 
 
26 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. u. 
 
 our Atlantic cities, to this effect ; that, so far as his 
 observation went, there was no other class of men who 
 knew so little of real life as the clergy. This judgment 
 was not uttered in bitterness of feeling. I did not 
 understand that the author of it belonged to that class 
 of men, who are not few in any large community, who 
 are best known as haters of ministers. He spoke from 
 his experience of the phase of society with which he was 
 most familiar. Whatever might be true of the clergy 
 elsewhere, down there where he saw men and women 
 in need of those influences which the clergy are sup- 
 posed to represent he thought they were the least effec- 
 tive workers. They were easily imposed upon. They 
 started impracticable methods of working. They could 
 not get access to the vicious and degraded. I, of course, 
 do not indorse this criticism. I give it as one of the 
 waifs indicating what the world says and believes about 
 us. We need to face the facts of the popular theory as 
 they are. 
 
 Further : it should be observed, in illustration of the 
 same point, that portraits of character given in the pul- 
 pit sometimes do not seem to the people to be true to 
 real life. Preachers often paint character in the general. 
 Depravity is affirmed and proved as depravity is in the 
 abstract, not as it is softened and adorned by Christian 
 civilization. Piety is illustrated as sainthood, not as it 
 is deformed by infirmity and sin. Hearers sometimes, 
 therefore, seem to themselves to be described as demons, 
 when they know that they are not such, and other 
 hearers to be described as saints, when they know that 
 they are no more such. Have you not listened to ser- 
 mons which no living man who knows what the world 
 is would be likely to accept as true to life ? Such work 
 
LECT. u.] POLITICAL PREACHING. 27 
 
 in the pulpit appears to hearers as a work of art. It is 
 a fancy sketch. It may be praised or censured, as one 
 would criticise the Dying Gladiator, by the very men 
 of^^hom it ought to have been a breathing likeness. 
 \ It has been said of the old New-England ministers, 
 that they knew being in general more thoroughly than 
 they knew man in particular. So the modern world 
 often believes of the modern preacher, that he knows 
 man in the abstract more thoroughly than he knows men 
 individually. A consequence of this popular idea of the 
 ministry is a widening of the distance between the pul- 
 pit and the pejsj^ Sometimes 3'ou will find the laity 
 settled comfortably in the conviction that the pulpit 
 does not mean to reach them. They may live as they 
 list, and may repose in their immunity from rebuke ; 
 and yet their clergy shall be firing the shot of a sound 
 theology, or intoning the periods of a venerable liturgy, 
 oveir"ttrSif heads all the while. 
 
 6.* This sense of security from the aims of the pulpit 
 is often at the foundation of the antipathy of hearers to 
 that which they call "political preachin^/j Generally 
 that antipathy is morbid. They are so unused to feeling 
 the ministries of the clergy as a reality touching the 
 vital affairs of life, that when, on the eve of a national 
 crisis, they listen to a sermon on the duty of Christian 
 citizens, they are disturbed by it as an innovation. It 
 breaks up the repose they have been accustomed to 
 enjoy in the sanctuary. To many good men it appears 
 sacrilegious to discuss such mundane afi"airs so near to 
 the sacramental table. They call it desecration of the 
 pulpit. What does this mean, but a confession that 
 they have been so long used to regarding the pulpit as 
 standing on the confines of another world, that it is a 
 
28 MEN AND BOOKS. [lkct. u. 
 
 novelty to them when it presumes to concern itself with 
 the affairs of this world by any such methods as to 
 make itself felt ? 
 
 This is one of the most astonishing distortions of Chris- 
 tian opinion which our age has witnessed. The extreme 
 of it came to my notice, a few years before the civil war, 
 in the case of a very worthy man, and an advocate of 
 reticence in the church on the question of American 
 slavery. To test his principle in the matter, I inquired 
 of him whether he thought it the duty of Northern 
 Christians to send preachers to Utah. "• Certainly," was 
 the reply. "What should a preacher do in Utah?" — 
 "Visit the people, hold meetings, preach, as he would 
 elsewhere." — "But what about polygamy ? " — "He 
 should let that alone." — "Do you mean to say that a 
 preacher should go among a people who are living in 
 a state of legalized adultery, and be silent upon that 
 sin?" — "Yes." — "Then, what would you have him 
 preach about ? " — " The gospel^ 
 
 The courage of the man was refreshing. But what 
 of the opinion? An instance not dissimilar came to 
 my knowledge in Western New York on the day of the 
 national fast following the assassination of President 
 Lincoln. On the morning of that day the pastor of 
 one of the churches in the village had ventured to 
 utter in his sermon a few very moderate and saintly 
 words, somewhat in the style of a bishop's benediction, 
 on the guilt of rebellion to the powers that be. The 
 language was not positive enough to disturb any but 
 a morbid mind ; but it ruffled the placidity of some of 
 the audience very perceptibly. It was the theme of 
 considerable comment after the service. Said one who 
 had heard it, " That was a bold sermon, a very bold 
 
LECT. II.] THE MISSION OF COMFORT. 29 
 
 sermon." I ventured to suggest that it might have 
 been bolder without disturbing Enoch. Tlie reply of 
 my companion was, " It was a great deal for us to hear. 
 We are not used to hearing any thing from our pulpit 
 that means ^nyhody.''^ Contrast tliis theory of the 
 pulpit with the observation of Coleridge : " If I were a 
 preacher at St. Paul's in London, I would not preach 
 against smuggling ; but, if I were a preacher in a village 
 of wreckers on the coast, see if I would preach against 
 any thing else ! " 
 
 Why should not the usage of the pulpit be such, that, 
 as a matter of course, hearers shall understand that we 
 mean somebody ? Why should not preaching be always 
 so trutliful in its biblical rebuke, so intelligent in its 
 knowledge of men, so stereoscopic in its power to 
 individualize character, so resonant in its reponses to 
 the human conscience, that hearers shall be unable not 
 to understand that we mean somebody? The pulpit 
 should be a battery, well armed and well worked. 
 Every shot from it should reach a vulnerable spot 
 somewhere. And to be such it must be, in every sense 
 of the word, well manned. The gunner who works it 
 must know what and Avhere the vulnerable spots are. 
 He must be neither an angel nor a brute. He must be 
 a scholar and a gentleman, but not these only. He 
 must be a man^ who knows men, and who will never 
 suffer the great tides of human opinion and feeling to 
 ebb and flow around him uncontrolled because un- 
 observed. 
 
 7. Not only in the way of rebuke does the pulpit 
 often fail in its mission, through the want of a masterly 
 acquaintance with mankind. Often the failure is more 
 marked in respect to its mission of comfort. If there 
 
30 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. u. 
 
 is one thing more obvious than another in the general 
 strain of apostolic preaching, it is the preponderance of 
 words of encouragement over those of reproof and 
 commination. In no other thing did inspired preach- 
 ers disclose their inspired knowledge of human condi- 
 tions more clearly. The world of to-day needs the same 
 adaptation of the pulpit to its wants. We preach to a 
 struggling and suffering humanity. Tempted men and 
 sorrowing women are our hearers. Never is a sermon 
 preached, but to some hearers who are carrying a load 
 of secret grief. To such we need to speak as to "one 
 whom his mother comforteth." What delicacy of touch, 
 what refinement of speech, what tenderness of tone, 
 what reverent approach as to holy ground, do we not 
 need to discharge this part of a preacher's mission ! and 
 therefore what rounded knowledge of human conditions! 
 Is it a cynical judgment of the pulpit to affirm that 
 in our times it has reversed the apostolic proportions 
 of preaching in this respect? It is vastly easier to 
 denounce rampant sin than to cheer struggling virtue. 
 Preaching to the ungodly is more facile than preaching 
 to the church. And in preaching to the church it is 
 less difficult to reprove than to commend, to admonish 
 than to cheer, to threaten than to help. Hence has 
 arisen, if I do not misjudge, a disproportioned amount 
 of severe discourse, which no biblical model warrants, 
 and which the facts of human life seldom demand from 
 a Christian pulpit. Look over any large concourse of 
 Christian worshipers, number the stern and anxious 
 faces among them, — faces of men and women who are 
 in the thick of life's conflict. Where shall the cunning 
 hand be found to reach out and keep from falling these 
 weary ones? Very early in life, commonly, does the 
 
LECT. II.] POPULAR CRITICISM OF THE PULPIT. 31 
 
 great struggle of probation begin. The buoyant joy of 
 youth is short lived. 
 
 • " Shades of the prison-house begin to close 
 Upon the growing bo7j." 
 
 Probation, more than any other word in the language, 
 tells the story of every human life. With this one fea- 
 ture of human experience the mission of the pulpit has 
 chiefly to do. Above all other things, therefore, in the 
 clerical character, this world craves the power of help- 
 fulness. The Master walking on the sea in the night, 
 and stretching forth his hand to the sinking Peter, is 
 the emblem of that which a Christian preacher must be 
 in every age, if he would speak to real conditions, and 
 niiiii«ter to exigent necessities. 
 \ Intelligent laymen are often sensible oi j^aste in the 
 ministrations of the pulpit, growing out of the want, 
 either of knowledge, or of tact in adapting them to the 
 facts of human experiericej_\ The conversation of such 
 laymen will often disclose this. Their criticisms, it is 
 true, are to be received with caution, as are all the 
 popular criticisms of the clergy. They are sometimes 
 thrust upon our notice by vain men, by men who ignore 
 the real claims of the pulpit upon their respect, occa- 
 sionally by men whom it is not uncharitable, and may 
 not be unwise, to rebuke for their unconscious envy of 
 ministerial prerogatives. It is generally to be presumed 
 that the clergy, like masters in other professions, know 
 their own business better than such critics know it. 
 But, with all reasonable deductions, it will be found 
 tliat this sense of waste in the pulpit is felt by men of 
 sufficient character, and in sufficient numbers, to deserve 
 attention. They believe, whether truly or not, that the 
 
32 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. n. 
 
 failure of the pulpit to reach certain classes of society 
 is attributable to a distance between the pulpit and the 
 pew which a more thorough knowledge of men would 
 do away with. 
 
 Said one of these lay critics, speaking of the sermons 
 
 of a certain pastor in Massachusetts, " Mr. B always 
 
 seems to me to be just about to begin, to get ready, in 
 prodigious earnest to do something ; but the something 
 never looms in sight." The criticism was true. The 
 radical defect in that pastor's sermons was not want of 
 culture, not want of piety, not want of power innate ; 
 but, relatively to the character of his hearers, it was an 
 excess of scholasticism. He commonly preached, either 
 from or at the last book he had read, often at the last 
 thrust of skepticism from " The Westminster Review." 
 This he did to an audience made up chiefly of tradesmen 
 and mechanics, and operatives in a factory, who never 
 heard of " The Westminster Review " outside of their 
 pastor's sermons. To them he seemed always to begin 
 a great way off. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 STUDY OF MEN, CONTINUED. — ECCENTRIC PREACHERS. 
 — OPPOSITE RELATIONS OF LITERATURE AND THE 
 PULPIT TO THE MASSES. — POPULAR REVOLUTIONS 
 AND THE EDUCATED CLASSES. 
 
 8. Continuing the train of thought introduced in 
 the preceding Lectures, I venture upon another sugges- 
 tion, which to some may seem questionable. Let it pass 
 for what it is worth. It is, that we shoukl be watchful 
 of the ministries of certain eccentric clergymen. 
 
 In every age of religious awakening, there is a class 
 of preachers who break away from the conventionali- 
 ties of the pulpit lawlessly. They trample upon time- 
 honored usages. They are apt to handle irreverently 
 the opinions and the policy of the fathers. As a conse- 
 quence, they originate new methods of preaching. In 
 many respects they do evil. Whether the average of 
 their influence is evil or good may be an open question. 
 
 Such preachers, though not safe models for imitation, 
 are valuable subjects of homiletic study. Though they 
 may be heretical in doctrine, they furnish instructive 
 hints to sounder men. Specially they are apt to preach 
 as men coming down to and into the homes of men. 
 They have the knack of making men believe that preach- 
 ing is a reality to them. The impression they make is 
 that of a business of real life. Better men and wiser 
 
 33 
 
34 MEN AND BOOKS. [lbct. m. 
 
 preachers looking on may learn things from them which 
 shall both broaden and deepen the reach of the pulpit. 
 Those most dissimilar to them may be roused by them 
 to feel the inanity of some things which were invalua- 
 ble when they were original, but which the world has 
 outlived, and which are now effete. The tendencies of 
 the clerical mind to live upon routine are sometimes 
 checked by one such comet in the clerical firmament. 
 
 A popular critic, a few years ago, observed that not 
 one in twenty of the newspapers of the week before 
 
 had failed to make some allusion to the Rev. A 
 
 B . When that can be said of any clergyman who 
 
 has not committed forgery, and said after he has been 
 in the public eye for twenty-five years, it is a sign of 
 power in the man. Such a ministry as his is worth 
 studying. It is an egregious folly to imitate him : his 
 sermons no other man can reproduce. But it is impos- 
 sible that they should not contain elements which can 
 be transfused into the preaching of other men with 
 advantage. We may well give time and thought to 
 the ministry of any man who holds together by thou- 
 sands, and for years, keen, clear-headed laymen in the 
 church, and who reaches a corresponding class of minds 
 outside of the church. The ministry of any such 
 preacher is a legitimate object of homiletic study, what- 
 ever we may think or suspect of the man. 
 
 On the other hand, we have reason to be anxious 
 about any ministry which is visibly producing no im- 
 pression, — no evil, no good, perceptibly. I do not say 
 that such an appearance is always real. But it should 
 cause anxiety : it should set a preacher to searching for 
 the facts, and to the righting of errors. That is never 
 the normal attitude of the pulpit in which it barely 
 
LECT. III.] PREACHING IN TITVIES OF EXCITEMENT. 35 
 
 holds its own. In such a state of things it will gener- 
 ally be found that something new in the methods of the 
 pulpit is practicable and wise. We should keep our 
 minds, then, in a receptive mood towards the apparent 
 successes of preachers unlike ourselves. Prove those 
 successes, hold fast only that which can be proved ; 
 but study them. Be sure that you reject nothing that 
 is proved. 
 
 An objection to the views here advocated deserves a 
 moment's notice. We are said to be living in an age 
 of unnatural excitements ; and the pulpit, it is believed, 
 ought not to cater to them. " Safe men " tell us that 
 we must not be whirled out of the old orbits of the 
 planets by cometary and centrifugal attractions. 
 
 To this it should be observed, in rejoinder, that the 
 charge may be true, without damage to the clerical 
 policy here commended. It may be that we are living 
 in an abnormal current of social changes. It may be 
 that we are passing through a period of transition in 
 history in which one sea is pouring itself through a 
 narrow channel into another, like Erie into Ontario. 
 Niagara, therefore, may be the fit emblem of our modern 
 life. We may be approaching very near to the last 
 times. The world may be moving with a rush which is 
 its ultimate momentum. But one of the first princi- 
 ples of Christianity is to take men as it finds them and 
 where it finds them, and thus and there to adjust itself 
 to them. Its mission is to do for men all that it can do 
 under the disadvantages which sin or any other invin- 
 cible fact creates. A Christian pulpit can not wait for 
 men to come into a state in which they can receive its 
 ministrations gracefully, tastefully, in a scholarly way, 
 or even contemplatively and candidly. Least of all 
 
36 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. m. 
 
 has the pulpit any right to refuse to be received in any 
 other way. 
 
 A preacher's first business is to find men, to go 
 where they are, and then to speak to them as they are, 
 and speak so as to be heard. We must speak to them 
 anywhere and anyhow, so that at the least we get a 
 hearing. That is not wisdom, it is not piety, it is not 
 reverence for venerable things, it is stagnation, it is 
 timidity, often it is mental indolence, sometimes it is a 
 refined but intense selfishness, which holds a preacher 
 still in ancient ruts of ministration through fear of 
 ministering to unnatural excitements. We had better 
 do some things wrong than to do nothing. 
 
 9. An educated ministry needs to consider the study 
 of men for rhetorical culture by the side of another 
 fact ; which is, that the literature of the world is not 
 constructed for the masses of society. This is true of 
 the great body of literature in any language. Books 
 for the masses are comparatively a modern idea. 
 
 (1) The old theory on which national literatures 
 have all been founded was, that readers must inevitably 
 be few. The chief popular forms of any classic litera- 
 ture are the ballad and the drama. Prose literature 
 has not had till recently much of the popular element 
 in any language. In the main, it has never been de- 
 signed either to represent the common mind, or to be 
 read by the common people. The ballad and the 
 drama also have not been created for readers. They 
 were designed, the one to be sung, and the other to be 
 witnessed on the stage. This was for the very neces- 
 sary reason that they grew up at a time when the 
 people did not know how to read, and were not expect- 
 ed to become readers. It was a time when in England 
 
LECT. m.] CBLAHACTER OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 37 
 
 it was sufficient to save a man from the gallows tliat 
 lie knew how to read. This was English law till the 
 time of George IV. Therefore select classes of mind 
 have been the object aimed at in English literature. 
 
 (2) The reading classes have been select not only 
 in numbers, but in character. They have been exclu- 
 sives. They have been contracted fragments of nations. 
 Their distinction has been, that they were unlike the 
 bulk of the people, and not in sympathy with the people. 
 Their exclusiveness was their glory. Their own social 
 position demanded the popular ignorance as a back- 
 ground. Authors treated them as a superior class. 
 They were cajoled by an obsequious recognition of 
 their caste. Both authors and readers held themselves 
 as retainers of the nobility with an abjectness which 
 often intensified the contempt they all felt for the herd 
 of the people. It is a humiliating fact ; but such were 
 the soil and the atmosphere from which the bulk of 
 modern literature grew. 
 
 (3) The English literature has a larger infusion than 
 any other of the popular element; but it is not and 
 never has been thoroughly popular. Such a literature 
 is yet to be created. Look into the prefaces of the 
 standard books in our language, turn to the correspond- 
 ence of authors, peruse the books themselves, and you 
 will discover how oblivious authors have been of the 
 actual numerical majority of the nation. Read John 
 Foster's essay on " Popular Ignorance." In the dialect 
 of the English press the " reading public " and " the 
 nation" have never been synonymous, nor approxi- 
 mately so. Even so late as when Addison and Swift 
 were delighting a select public of readers, the masses of 
 the English people never heard of them. The masses 
 
38 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ra. 
 
 at that period found their chief excitements at country 
 fairs and boxing-matches and dog-fights and bull-bait- 
 ings. The only gleam of literary thought which found 
 its way to them, aside from the pulpit, shone from the 
 footlights of the strolling theaters. 
 
 John Foster records the following fact as well au- 
 thenticated to his judgment by direct testimony from 
 that golden age of English letters : On one Sunday 
 morning, in one of the rural churches, the service was 
 read with unusual rapidity, and every legal expedient 
 adopted to shorten the time during which the people 
 should be detained in the house of God. At the close 
 of the service the officiating clergyman gave publicly 
 his reason for thus abbreviating the duties of .the hour. 
 
 He said that " Neighbor B " was about to bait a bull 
 
 in the afternoon, and he wished to give the people ample 
 time to prepare for the enjoyment of the scene. So 
 distant from the enjoyment of the literature of England 
 were the masses of the English people. 
 
 One reason which has made the poetry of Homer the 
 favorite of English scholarship is the intensely aristo- 
 cratic spirit which breathes through the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey. Not a trace of the democracy of literature 
 is found in Homer, nor indeed, so far as I know, in any 
 ancient poetry, except the Greek drama and the poetry 
 of the Hebrews: hence the English aristocracy intui- 
 tively exalt Homer in their estimate of libraries. Eng- 
 lish noblemen translate Homer, and write laudatory 
 criticisms upon him. It may reasonably be doubted 
 whether the intrinsic merits of the Odyssey and the 
 Iliad would ever have lifted them to the rank they hold 
 in English criticism, if they had not chimed in so harmo- 
 niously with aristocratic tastes in English scholarship. 
 
LECT. m.] ENGLISH AUTHORS EXCLUSIVE. 39 
 
 (4) In the history of English literature the readers 
 who stood between authors and the people at large did 
 not by any means stand midway between. They were 
 much nearer to the guild of authors than to the level 
 of the nation : therefore they were not good conductors 
 of intellectual stimulus from the upper to the nether 
 regions. A gulf as impassable almost as that which 
 separates Dives and Lazarus shut off the masses of the 
 people from the privileges, the occupations, the sympa- 
 thies, and the ideas of the authors. The project of 
 sinking a shaft of intelligence from above down into 
 the torpid strata of the national mind was never origi- 
 nated by the old standard productions of our language. 
 No trace of it is to be found in the general conception 
 of the mission of literature, even so late as a hundred 
 years ago. Publishers are yet living who remember 
 when such an idea was in its infancy. They can recall 
 the time when a sale of five thousand copies of any thing 
 was deemed a prodigious success in their trade. The 
 sale of Walter Scott's works in his own lifetime — and 
 Scott died in 1832 — was deemed a miracle of literary 
 achievement, and it bankrupted his publishers, after 
 all. When the process of stereotyping plates was in- 
 vented, it was thought by the more conservative pub- 
 lishers to be of doubtful value, because the sale of so 
 few works would justify the expense of plates. But 
 now a publisher hesitates to accept a manuscript which 
 is not worth stereotyping. Books the sale of which is 
 less than five thousand copies are regarded as the small 
 enterprises of the press. 
 
 The facts here noticed should be taken into the ac- 
 count in judging of the limited rewards which some of 
 the most illustrious English authors have received in 
 
40 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ni. 
 
 their own lifetime. Critics are fond of contrasting the 
 contemporary with the posthumous fame of authors. 
 We are reminded, as if it were an anomaly, that no 
 collected edition of Shakspeare's plays was demanded 
 during his life ; that Milton received but five pounds 
 for " Paradise Lost ; " that Bishop Butler, the most pro- 
 found of English prelates, was not known outside of 
 his own diocese ; that Spinoza's works, though they 
 played an important part in revolutionizing the philoso- 
 phy of Europe, brought no income to the author. Mr. 
 Froude says that it is only by accident that a work of 
 genius becomes immediately popular. I doubt this as- 
 sertion. What is there, what has there ever been, in the 
 great works of our literature which is fitted to make 
 them popular ? They are not addressed to the people, 
 not fitted to the popular taste or comprehension. To 
 this day the actual readers of Milton are few. Those 
 who heartily enjoy Shakspeare are but a fragment of 
 the reading public. Even on the stage, no manager 
 succeeds in resuscitating the great dramatist for any 
 long period. Let a work of genius, like " The Pilgrim's 
 Progress," be made for the people, and the people recog- 
 nize it. But the great bulk of our literature is made 
 for the few ; and it has its reward in being appreciated 
 by the few. 
 
 A change is in progress. A popular literature, good 
 and bad, is in the process of growth. But the old 
 standard literature of our language, that which has 
 grown venerable with centuries, that which contains 
 the classic models of English thought and speech, and 
 that to which, therefore, all scholarly minds turn for 
 literary stimulus and refreshment, is a literature, which, 
 for the most part, has known no such thing as the peo- 
 
LECT. III.] PERIL TO CLERICAL TASTES. 41 
 
 pie in the process of its creation. It does not represent 
 the people ; it is not of the people ; it has never lived 
 among the people ; it is not dear to the people ; it is not 
 known by the people. 
 
 (5) \The exclusive character of national literatures 
 exposes the clerical mind to obvious peril in respect to 
 clerical sympathy with the people. It is clear, on the 
 face of things, that such a literature must be in some 
 respects what the Christian pulpit ought not to be, and 
 that a successful pulpit must, in some other respects, be 
 what such a literature is not. Yet it is equally plain 
 that a mind formed by such a literature alone is in 
 danger of acquiring tastes which are averse to popular 
 modes of thought, to popular habits of feeling, and to 
 the study of popular necessities. A preacher may so 
 study such a literature as to be dwarfed in his aptitudes 
 for the pulpit. If he forms his mental character by the 
 study of such books alone, he will inevitably reverse 
 the process of his education for the ministry. Disin- 
 tegration may take place in his natural tastes for the 
 popular service. Culture itself may unfit him for the 
 pulpit, except as an arena for literary achievement. 
 
 I have known instances in which this disorganizing 
 process has been fatal. A student's clerical tastes have 
 been demoralized. He has become disinclined, and 
 therefore unfitted, to the work of the ministry, by an 
 abuse of the very process which was designed to fit 
 him for it. He has shrunk back on approaching the 
 practical labors of the pulpit, tlirough the force of 
 acquired tastes which had the tyranny of instincts over 
 his moral purposes. Such a revolution in the character 
 of a candidate for the pulpit is usually irremediable. 
 The best thing we can do with him is to make a pro- 
 
42 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. hi. 
 
 fessor of hira. The inspiration of the pulpit has gone 
 out of him to return no more. 
 
 We need to face this fact squarely. The very disci- 
 pline of literary culture to which we subject ourselves 
 in a course of collegiate and theological training is at- 
 tended with this incidental peril. Like all other great 
 benefits of culture, literary discipline is gained at costs. 
 It becomes us, therefore, to know that the danger exists, 
 and that, for full growth in fitness to the pulpit, we 
 need a study of men to which no extant literature 
 invites us. 
 
 (6) We should never lose sight of the fact, that, while 
 there is a literature of the pulpit and in the pulpit, 
 the pulpit still has objects which no other medium of 
 literary expression has. The pulpit is identified with 
 the people in the very groundwork of its construction. 
 It stands in among the people. It exists for the people. 
 It depends for all its legitimate uses and successes upon 
 the sympathies of the people. It reminds one of the 
 Pantheon at Rome, which stands down among the shops 
 and hovels of the poorest poor, partly buried in the 
 rubbish of ages, but, for all that, a symbol of the history 
 of a great people for ever. 
 
 The pulpit is not designed for select audiences. Its 
 object is not to furnish entertainment to luxurious 
 minds, or scholarlike enjoyment to tranquil minds. Its 
 object is to meet the necessities of minds, which, for the 
 most part, must be engrossed in a care for their neces- 
 sities. The pulpit addresses chiefly the millions who 
 are struggling for a living, and who find the struggle so 
 severe, that books are as dreamlike a luxury as a coach 
 and livery. A man of books ranks in their minds with 
 millionaires. On this great low-ground of society the 
 
LECT. m.] THE GREEK DRAMA. 43 
 
 pulpit stands alone. Literature has no other depart- 
 ment, which in its very nature, as growing out of the 
 aims for which it exists, is so intensely popular as that 
 of the pulpit. The modern newspaper, even, does not 
 bear comparison with it in this respect. The news- 
 paper does not strike so deep as the pulpit does in its 
 theory of popular necessities. It can not, therefore, 
 reach so.^rofound and permanent a style of thought. 
 
 (7)\The only thing I can recall which deserves to be 
 termed literature, which is at all suggestive of the pulpit 
 i.i the ideal on which it was constructed, is the old 
 Greek drama. \ The Greek drama was oral in the form 
 of its conarrfiunication : so is the pulpit. The Greek 
 drama discussed the profoundest problems of human 
 destiny: so does the pulpit. The Greek drama ex- 
 pressed the ideas which lay deepest in the most enlight- 
 ened theology of the day : so does the pulpit. Above 
 all, the Greek drama existed for the people ; and so 
 does the pulpit. 
 
 In this respect the Greek drama was exceptional to 
 almost all other ancient literature. The people of the 
 ancient cities of Greece were the auditors and the 
 judges of the drama of their times. The entire body 
 of the free citizens of Athens — not a literary coterie 
 alone, not the members of a university alone, not the 
 pupils of a school of philosophy only, not a set of 
 pleasure- seeking idlers, but the entire citizenship of the 
 metropolis — heard the plays of Sophocles and Euripi- 
 des. The accomplished professor of the Greek language 
 and literature in Amherst College is of the opinion 
 that probably Grecian women were permitted to attend 
 the exhibition of the tragic drama on the Greek stage, 
 and that even the slaves were not forbidden to attend. 
 
44 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. in. 
 
 The most magnificent triumphs of Grecian genius were 
 popular festivals. This department of Greek literature 
 grew up with the Greek people. Their minds awakened 
 it; their demands stimulated it; their tastes passed 
 judgment upon it ; their sympathies made it what it 
 was. So far as any Pagan literature could foreshadow 
 a Christian institution, the Greek drama foreshadowed 
 the Christian pulpit. It did so with an approach to 
 resemblance which has never been equaled by any 
 subsequent literature of equal dignity. 
 
 This idiosyncrasy of the pulpit, in comparison with 
 the great mass of the literatures of the world, should, 
 therefore, never be forgotten in the ardor of our literary 
 pursuits. The pulpit exists for the people. It depends 
 for its existence, in any broad growth, upon its union 
 with the popular sympathies. 
 
 10. The relations of the pulpit to the people are 
 affected, further, by the fact, that, in the moral history 
 of the world, great popular changes often take place 
 independently of the educated classes of mankind as 
 such. 
 
 This is a phenomenon in history which is exceed- 
 ingly prolific of suggestion. I am not confident that 
 the philosophy of it is wholly intelligible, nor that it 
 represents abstractly the normal method of the progress 
 of the race. But of the fact there can be no question 
 in the mind of any thoughtful observer of real life. 
 The fact is most obvious, in respect to changes for the 
 better, in popular sentiment. Evil works most fre- 
 quently from above downward, — from the head to the 
 heart of society. The bulk of mankind are more re- 
 ceptive of evil than of good from their superiors. A 
 licentious court can make a people licentious more 
 
LECT. III.] THE CULTIVATED CLASSES. 45 
 
 readily than a moral court can make a people moral. 
 An infidel aristocracy can make a nation infidel more 
 easily than a Christian aristocracy can make a nation 
 Christian. The most destructive forms of evil do, in 
 fact, usually begin in high places, and work downward. 
 On the contrary, it very frequently happens that pro- 
 found moral movements for good begin low, and work 
 upward. 
 
 (1) Let us group the cultivated classes of mankind 
 for a moment, and observe how the fact stands. First 
 we have the class of royal and aristocratic birth, — the 
 class represented by the crown and the court. Then 
 comes the military class, represented by the sword. 
 Then we have the literary class, strictly so called, — 
 the class represented by the university and the library. 
 Then follow the clerical, the legal, and the medical 
 classes, represented by the three liberal professions, to 
 which must be added, in our day the fourth profession, 
 the journalists, represented by the most powerful of all 
 printed literature, — the newspaper. To these succeed 
 the small but very influential class of artists, repre- 
 sented by painting, sculpture, and music. 
 
 Finally must be appended a class peculiar, for the 
 most part, to our own times, so far as it is distinct from 
 the rest. It consists of those whose chief distinction is 
 their wealth, and whose culture springs from the con- 
 sciousness of power wliich wealth creates, and from 
 the leisure which wealth renders practicable. This last 
 class have a refinement which is often diverse from that 
 of court, or school, or camp, or studio, or profession. It 
 is a refinement in which manners take the precedence 
 of mind. These several classes are all of them, in some 
 sense, educated. The idea of culture is prized among 
 
46 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. iii. 
 
 them. We may, without essential error, speak of them 
 as the cultivated portions of mankind. Beneath them, 
 in respect to educated thinking and whatever else that 
 implies, lies the great balk of the human race. Numeri- 
 cally estimated, these cultivated classes are but insig- 
 nificant fragments of the whole. 
 
 The point I wish now to emphasize is, that often 
 great changes of moral sentiment take place in that 
 vast low-ground of society, with which not one of these 
 educated classes, as such, has any visible connection. 
 Lidividuals from the educated classes are reached by 
 such changes, but not the classes as classes. Religious 
 awakenings of vast reach often start down there before 
 they become visible in the aerial regions above. Ad- 
 vanced ideas of liberty and of national policy, which 
 are rooted in moral principle, often exist in the popular 
 feeling down there, long before they have worked up 
 high enough to find the general voice to speak them 
 from the cultivated strata of thought. 
 
 (2) We have a notable illustration of this truth in 
 the history of the antislavery controversy in this coun- 
 try. Looking back to it, now that the main question 
 is determined, do we not discover that the masses of 
 the people have been generally in advance of their 
 leaders on that subject? Where both classes lagged 
 behind the purposes of Providence, have not the many 
 been less distant in the rear than the few ? Have not 
 the intuitions of the people been, at almost any time, 
 more far-seeing than the statesmanship of the Senate ? 
 Have not the people been, at almost any time, ready 
 for progress which our wise men thought unsafe, but 
 which God at length hurled us into, as if in the anger 
 of his exhausted patience ? 
 
LECT. m.] AMERICAN SLAVERY. 47 
 
 The masses of the people never heartily supported 
 the compromises which made up nearly the whole of 
 our statesmanship on the subject for half a century. 
 Compromise — that miserable burlesque of wisdom 
 where moral principles are at stake — was the sura 
 total of the vision of our wise men through all that 
 period ; but the instincts of the people were never 
 genial to it. When President Lincoln said, " If slavery 
 is not wrong, nothing is wrong," the conscience and 
 common sense of the people responded, " So say we 
 all." President Lincoln himself was a child of the low- 
 grounds. His ideas of political economy and of social 
 rights he got out of the woods. His nearest approach 
 to metaphysical culture was splitting rails. His knowl- 
 edge of books was almost limited to the Bible and 
 Shakspeare. All that he knew of history he learned 
 from Abbott's histories for cliildren. 
 
 If the cultivated mind of our country had been more 
 childlike in its wisdom, and had followed the intima- 
 tions of Providence more swiftly, it would have had no 
 difficulty with the common mind in executing peacea- 
 bly the plans which God at last thrust upon the nation 
 in carnage. Carnage is not the normal and necessary 
 instrument of great revolutions. In this also the masses 
 of our people were right in their convictions. " Slavery 
 is wrong," said they, " and it must die ; but it can die 
 by peaceful means." In this conviction they were 
 nearer to the ultimate principles of God's government 
 of nations than were the few fanatical leaders who 
 ignored the reformatory potency of time. They were 
 nearer to the old Mosaic wisdom on the subject, — that 
 marvelous system of jurisprudence, to which we owe 
 so many germs of the world's latest and wisest states- 
 
48 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. hi. 
 
 manship. History in future ages will tell this story 
 more truthfully than living chroniclers are now doing 
 it. 
 
 Y Even up to this hour, is it not the rude instincts of 
 the people which are taking the lead of political opinion 
 in the solution of those problems, consequent upon the 
 civil war, which have a moral and religious basis ? The 
 cultivated classes as a whole are not leading this 
 people : they are following. The real leaders are men 
 of the people, as distinct from, and to some extent op- 
 posed to, the men of culture. Such, at least, is the 
 horoscope as I read it. '^ow, otherwise, could the phe- 
 nomenon ever have been possible, which we have wit- 
 nessed within the last decade, — that the government 
 of a great nation hung in suspense upon the votes of 
 a few negroes in the backwoods of Louisiana and the 
 everglades of Florida, who could not write their own , 
 names, nor distinguish their ballots from circus-tickets ? ,^ 
 
 One is reminded often, in observing such phenomena, 
 of the declaration of the apostle, " Not many mighty, 
 not many noble, are called." It appears as if men of 
 culture did not generally read Divine Providence aright 
 till they are needed as leaders of great movements 
 which have, in the main, been originated without 
 them. After a certain growth of reforms we must 
 have the leadershij), either of high intelligence, or, in 
 the absence of that, of miraculous inspiration. God 
 does not jDermanently abrogate the law by which the 
 superior governs the inferior mind ; but temporarily, 
 and when inspiration and miracle can not be interpo- 
 lated into the system of affairs, he does suspend that 
 law by making the low-grounds of society the birth- 
 place of great ideas. 
 
LECTURE rV. 
 
 EELATIONS OP THE CLERGY TO REVOLUTIONS OP 
 POPULAR OPINION, CONTINUED. 
 
 (3) The views already presented suggest, further 
 that sometimes popular revolutions of opinion become 
 distorted and corrupt for the want of an educate* 
 Christian leadership. Then come mutterings of ana? 
 chy. These, if not heeded, swell into bellowings of 
 revolution. It is my conviction that ponderous ques 
 tions of right and wrong are now seething among th< 
 masses of the nations, which have been started b} 
 truthful ideas. They are, at the bottom, legitimate 
 problems of Christian inquiry. They are such ques 
 tions as socialism strives frantically to answer. Among 
 them are the social problems which are chafing some 
 of the Southern States of our republic. In all the 
 great nations of Christendom questions of this nature 
 are threatening to turn the world upside down. A 
 blind sense of wrong is buried under the enormous 
 inequalities of our civilization, which the first influence 
 of Christianity tends to lash into frenzy over the first 
 principles of government and social order, with a reck- 
 lessness which breeds civil wars. Looking at the facts 
 as they are known and read of all men, and as they 
 are suffered by the great majority, human nature cries 
 out against them. It declares, that, if Christianity 
 
 49 
 
50 MEN AND BOOKS. [lkct. iv. 
 
 means any thing, it means something very different 
 from this. Then follow, the world over, the questions, 
 " What and why and how and wherefore," down to the 
 roots of things. 
 
 Yet this entire volume of popular questionings of 
 the drift of our civilization might be answered so as to 
 promote the peace of nations and the brotherhood of 
 races, if the educated mind of the world would accept 
 them as questionings which ought to be answered, in- 
 stead of beating them down by a repressive conserva- 
 tism, by pride of race, by the tyranny of wealth, and 
 by bayonets. Because those questions are ignored, or 
 falsely answered, by the educated classes, they continue 
 to inflame the unsatisfied mind below. That low- 
 ground of humanity, ignorant and debased as it is, 
 can not rid itself of them. It surges around them 
 angrily and blindly. The more obstinately the mind 
 above crowds them down, or holds still in contempt of 
 them, the more tempestaously, often deliriously, and in 
 the filial result demoniacally, the mind below clamors 
 for a settlement of them. At length, in the fullness of 
 its times, the mind below breaks loose from estab- 
 lished institutions. The laws and usages of centuries 
 give way. Rabid diseases of opinion take the place of 
 healthy and quiescent faith, — all for the want of a 
 dispassionate, scholarly. Christian leadership. 
 
 (4) At the root of almost all the intoxicated de- 
 velopments of popular opinion, there is a truth. It is 
 la truth distorted, but still a truth ; a truth tainted by 
 error, but a truth nevertheless ; a truth bloated by 
 intemperate defenses, but a truth for all that. A mys- 
 terious power has set it fermenting in secret in the 
 inexpressible intuitions of ignorant minds, as if in the 
 
LECT. IV.] THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 51 
 
 bowels of the earth, where the sun never shines. It 
 must work its way up to light and air. If there is no 
 other way for its ascent, if the repressive forces above 
 are so ponderous and so compact that it can not lift 
 them off gently, then it must spout up volcanicall3^ It 
 will not be smothered passively. A man buried alive 
 will beat the coffin-lid. So these undying truths, pent 
 up in the souls of ignorance and debasement, will 
 struggle for egress. They will find their way out 
 wherever they can discover the weakest spot in the 
 shell with which conservative society becomes crusted 
 over. The Providence of God certainly works some- 
 times in this seemingly anomalous neglect of the edu- 
 cated powers of the world. 
 
 I say "• anomalous," because it is not the normal way 
 of Providence to ignore culture, or to work without it. 
 But sometimes, when culture, as represented in the 
 upper classes of great nations and ruling races, is false 
 to its mission, and treacherous to its origin, God starts 
 great truths into life in the hearts of the masses, not in 
 the heads of the few. He lets them work a long time 
 there, in a half blinded way, before the few discover and 
 embrace them. 
 
 An episode illustrative of this in literary history was 
 witnessed in the origin and early fate of the " Pilgrim's 
 Progress." Who wrote the " Pilgrim's Progress," and 
 where ? A tinker in Bedford jail. By whom, and why, 
 was the tinker shut up in Bedford jail ? The upper 
 classes of a great empire put him there to prevent his 
 Ijreaching other such things as the immortal allegory. 
 And how was it received by contemporary opinion? 
 Thousands of colliers and peasants and humble trades- 
 men read it, and admired it, and loved it, long before 
 
62 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. iv 
 
 the literary and social magnates of England found out 
 that it was literature, and that a great prophet was 
 born among them. 
 
 God's method of working is marvelously democratic. 
 If there is one idea which takes precedence of all 
 others in the divine choice of tunes, localities, instru- 
 ments, and methods, it is not the idea of rank, it is not 
 the idea of sect, it is not the idea of. birth, it is not 
 the idea of culture: it is the idea of numbers. To 
 an aeronaut, at a very little distance above the earth, 
 mountains and valleys are indistinguishable. So, it 
 should seem, to the eye of God, distinctions of class are 
 invisible. Humanity is spread out as a plain. The 
 most attractive spots to the divine eye are those where 
 are to be seen the densest clusters of being. The apos- 
 tolic policy in laying the foundations of Christianity is 
 the divine policy through all time and the world over ; 
 " beginning with Jerusalem," and advancing thence to 
 the conquest of the great cities of the world. 
 
 11. The object for which I dwell, perhaps at need- 
 less length, upon this peculiarity in the divine method 
 of procedure, is to observe specially that the natural 
 leaders of these movements of the popular mind which 
 are started by the first principles of religion are the 
 Christian ministry. The legitimate teachers of the 
 people in the ground-principles by which such move- 
 ments should be regulated are the ministry. Chris- 
 tianity has conservative as well as quickening and 
 progressive bearings upon social order, which it is the 
 province of the ministry to teach. The wisest states- 
 manship of nations does not teach them in forms such 
 that the popular mind can take them in, and appreciate 
 the truth of them. It falls to the clergy to represent 
 
LECT. IV.] CLERICAL LEADERSHIP. 53 
 
 them in moral rather than in political principles, tend- 
 ing to the regulation of progress and the moderation of 
 change, and thus to the prevention of sanguinary- 
 revolutions. The divinely chosen friends of the people 
 to do this service for them are the ministry. It is 
 theirs to win popular confidence, to calm popular pas- 
 sions, to restrain popular vices, and to teach neglected 
 virtues. It is theirs to teach popular rights as balanced 
 by popular duties. These duties find almost none to 
 proclaim them among the political leaders of the people. 
 They are such as these, — respect for superiors, obedi- 
 ence to authorities, charity to evil-doers, patience under 
 wrongs, freedom from envy, intrusting government to 
 intelligence and virtue, election of superiors rather than 
 equals to high places of trust and power. These things, 
 so vital to republican life, political chiefs, for the most 
 part, ignore. The only order of men who will or can 
 teach the people this divine balance of rights and duties 
 in self-government are the Christian ministry. Yet to 
 perform this mission wisely, or with any chance of 
 success, the ministry must know the people, must sym- 
 pathize with the people, must recognize the rights and 
 wrongs of social life ; and to do either of these they 
 must study the people. 
 
 Probably there is not a country-village in the land, 
 which has any considerable history, in which there is 
 not some mind, or group of minds, which represent the 
 kind of mental inquiry here described. They may be 
 within the church, but more probably are outside of 
 the church, yet are superior material for the growth 
 of the church. The pastor of such minds should be 
 beforehand with them. He may be assured that they 
 represent a movement which extends to other minds in. 
 
64 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. iv. 
 
 adjacent villages. The pulpit should be brought down 
 and planted alongside of them. The geographical 
 locality of the church should be in the midst of their 
 homes; and its structure should be such as to seem 
 homelike to them. But, most of all, the pastor should 
 be able to win them by his obvious knowledge of their 
 condition, and his friendly appreciation of their wants. 
 
 12. These suggestions naturally introduce another in 
 the same line of thought. It is that a certain portion 
 of the clergy of every generation seem either insensible 
 or hostile to popular movements of inquiry which have 
 their origin in Christian ideas. 
 
 (1) This, it should in justice be observed, is not true, 
 generally, of those portions of the clergy which are free 
 from State control. History will make distinction in 
 this respect between the ministry and the priesthood of 
 Christendom. Still, in the ministry of free churches, 
 the exception occurs frequently enough to indicate a 
 peril to clerical character and a hinderance to clerical 
 usefulness. It is not a very rare exception that the 
 clergy is represented by a man who suffers popular 
 inquiries, which are rooted in the gospel which he 
 preaches, and which therefore, as a Christian teacher, 
 he ought to understand and to answer, either to go by 
 him unheeded, or to encounter from him an unqualified 
 hostility. He thus permits the activity of the common 
 mind to outrun him in new channels of thought. 
 
 (2) Delay in assuming leadership of popular inquiries 
 often results in consigning the people to an infidel 
 leadership. Infidelity in this respect is often enlight- 
 ened, and to some extent, vitalized, by Christianit3% 
 "While the clergy are busy, as in the main they ought 
 to be, with teaching and applying the gospel in its 
 
LECT. IV.] INFIDEL REFORMS. ' 55 
 
 spiritual relations to individuals, infidel lecturers and 
 writers, knowing nothing and caring nothing about the 
 salvation of souls, do detect the bearings of the gospel 
 on social questions. They often advance ahead of the 
 clergy in the public declaration of those bearings. 
 f / Hence comes to pass that phenomenon which history 
 repeats over and over, and which is so perplexing to a 
 candid observer ; viz., that the infidelity of a country or 
 an age seems to be wiser than the Christian ministry, 
 and more successful in obtaining the leadersliip of re- 
 forms which owe their origin to the gospel, yes, to the 
 preaching of the very men, some of whom fail at last 
 to assume their natural right of leadership in those 
 reforms. 
 
 (3) Sometimes the leadership of reforms which were 
 Christian in their origin becomes so identified with 
 skepticism in religion, that to follow it is to be treacher- 
 ous to Christ and to his church. Then, for a time, the 
 clergy are constrained by their religious convictions to 
 stand aloof from such reforms, lest they should degrade 
 the pulpit into an auxiliary to anarchic infidelity. That 
 is a fearfully false position in which to place the Chris- 
 tian ministry. Yet it may come about from a want of 
 alertness in the clerical mind to see the wants of the 
 popular mind seasonably, and to supply those wants by 
 assuming promptly the leadership which is the clerical 
 prerogative. 
 
 More than once, for instance, in the religious and 
 political history of Germany, popular liberty has been 
 so identified with infidelity, that the best Christian 
 minds throughout the empire have felt compelled to 
 range themselves on the side of despotic re-action on 
 the part of the government. The "Liberty party" 
 
66 ' MEN AND BOOKS. Ilect. iv. 
 
 were " Red Republicans," sympathizing with the Social- 
 ists of France, and the Carbonari of Italy, and • the 
 Nihilists of Russia. They taught, as many of them 
 who are now refugees in this country are teaching, the 
 tyranny of property in land, the usurpation of marriage, 
 the inhumanity of the Christian religion, and the neces- 
 sity of abolishing the idea of God. In defense of these 
 monstrosities, they believed in no silken power of free 
 discussion, but in the musket and the guillotine. Law, 
 from God or man, was despotism. 
 
 The consequence has been, that such men as Trend 
 lenburg and Hengstenberg, and with them and after 
 them the most eminent leaders of German thought in 
 both the Church and the State, have been driven, in 
 defense of social order, to sustain the government in the 
 establishment of, with one exception, the most rigid 
 military despotism in Europe. In this they have done 
 only what we should all have done in their place. 
 When things have come to such a pass that liberty 
 means anarchy, and the abolition of despotism means 
 the abolition of God, there can be no question where 
 Christian and clerical authority ought to stand. 
 
 Where, then, lay the mistake of the religious leaders ? 
 I answer. It probably lay farther back, in not watching 
 and detecting the popular restlessness in its beginnings, 
 instructing its infancy, and creatmg ideas of liberty 
 which were scriptural and rational, and thus aiding 
 in building up a public opinion which should have 
 deserved the sympathies of Christian men. Probably 
 it was once in the power of the Christian thinkers of 
 Germany, clerical and laical, to control the popular 
 inquiry on the one hand, and the policy of the govern- 
 ment on the other ; for it is well known that the 
 
LECT. IV.] GERMINATION OF REFORMS. 57 
 
 government of Germany lias been largely in the hands 
 of kings, emperors, and statesmen who personally have 
 been religious men. 
 
 But that time, once passed unimproved by the clergy, 
 left them no alternative afterwards but the wretched 
 choice between despotism and atheism. They chose, 
 as they ought to have done, the lesser evil ; but in so 
 doing they threw an immense weight into the scale of 
 infidelity. German atheists to-day have this to say for 
 themselves, that all the religion they know any thing 
 about is a religion of aristocrats and bayonets. . Who 
 can compute the dead weight which Christianity must 
 carry in such an unnatural alliance of truth with error? 
 Christianity, in its normal working, never creates a 
 state of things in which the best that good men can do 
 is to make a choice of evils. Where that is the situa- 
 tion, sometliing has always been wrong in the antece- 
 dent management. 
 
 The question is often asked in this form, " Ought the 
 clergy to lead, or to follow, in the agitation of moral 
 reforms ? " In my judgment, it does admit of compact 
 answer in this form. The question of leadership is a 
 question of dates. It is in the beginnings of such move- 
 ments, before they have reached the stage of agitation, 
 that the work of the clergy is required. When reforms 
 are in their germination is the time for the clerical hand 
 to insert itself in methods of wise and temperate con- 
 trol. That then the clergy should be leaders, not fol- 
 lowers, does not admit of question. The people have 
 no other leaders whose prerogative is so sure. 
 
 (4) This leads me to observe, that,|if the clergy wait 
 in inaction till the popular mind is so profoundly 
 agitated on a great moral reform that it will hear 
 
oS iTEX A>-D BOOKS. [lbct. iv. 
 
 nothing else, it is then often too late for the pulpit to 
 be a power of control in that reform. \ A preacher then 
 seems to speak in self-preserratioTi. The current has 
 rolled in around him. and has risen to the level of his 
 lips, and he speaks because he must speak. His speak- 
 ing then is the sputtering of a drowning man. 
 
 Moreover, the e:t<itus of the community is then fixed. 
 Opinions are settled, prejudices are full grown, the 
 stream is set immovably, and prcibably some new foun- 
 tain of opinion is already opened. Popular opinions of 
 the kind now in question do not become popular till 
 about the time when new opinions are forming under- 
 neath. A man who wakes to the discovery of a truth 
 at the last moment of its general adoption is still 
 behind his age. That truth is still green in his hand, 
 when it has ripened, and shed its seeds, in the hands of 
 others. Its fruit is germinating in other forms, which 
 are likely to meet from him the same hostility or neglect 
 with which he encountered their forerunners. 
 
 Have you never known a pastor whose entire minis- 
 try had the look of a losing race ? He was not only 
 not in advance of his age. not even abreast with his age, 
 but a little, and only a little, behind his age ; so near 
 that he could always be in at a victory, but never there 
 in the fight. A clergyman subjects his professional 
 prestige to a heavy discount, if he permits any popular 
 excitement which is rooted either in Christianity, or in 
 hostility to Christianity, to escape his knowledge, or to 
 advance to its results without his care. To be a power 
 of control in such excitements he must lay a magnetic 
 hand upon them in their beginnings. 
 
 (d) The principles here afl&rmed are not limited in 
 their application to moral reforms technically so called. 
 
LECT. rv.] THEOLOGICAL rS'QUIEY. 59 
 
 Thev have a much broader range. To iUustrate this, 
 let several things be specified to which thev are ger- 
 mane. A revival of religion, for instance, ought never 
 to take a minister unawares. Dependent as revivals 
 are upon the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit, they do 
 not come without premonitions ; that is to say, signs of 
 their approach are visible to eyes which are open, and 
 watchful for them. There is nothing in the philosophy 
 of a revival which locks it up to occult causes. It will 
 commonly foreshadow its approach in certain spiritual 
 experiences, either within the church, or in Christian 
 families, or in sabbath schools, or, it may be, in spiritual 
 changes in a preacher's own soul. A wise pastor, 
 studious of the laws of the Holy Spirit's working, will 
 often discern tokens of his special presence on the eve 
 of a work of special power. 
 
 Again : a renewal of popular inquiry upon any doo- 
 trine of our faith ought never to be ignored by the 
 pulpit. A few years ago the doctrine of retribution 
 started a wave of popular interest in many sections of 
 this country, which is still in progress. Believers and 
 unbelievers felt a fresh desire to investigate that doc- 
 trine. In a multitude of cases, opinions have been 
 revised. Conflicting opinions upon it have agitated 
 many communities. Theories have been broached re- 
 specting it which were locally new. Old errors have 
 been revivified, and re-adjusted to suit modem tastes. 
 Believers in universal salvation have become believers 
 in a non-eternal retribution through their faith in 
 modem necromancy. In some localities Restorationism 
 is thus intrenched in the popular faith to-day more 
 stronglv than it was twentv vears ago. 
 
 What, now, should be the poHcy of a Christian pulpit 
 
60 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. rv. 
 
 during sucE a decade of revived inquiry? Evidently 
 it should not be a policy of reticence. The pulpit 
 should not ignore such a revival of popular interest 
 in one of the standards of the faith. We should not 
 retire from it in disgust at its origin. What if the 
 wretched flummery of Spiritualism is in some cases at 
 the bottom of it. That is no reason why the clergy 
 should hold themselves aloof and aloft from it as a 
 thing of degraded birth. 
 
 A case to the point occurs to me. In a certain parish 
 in Massachusetts, Spiritualism had stolen a march. 
 Starting with a fortune-teller, it crept into a group of 
 respectable families. An educated physician gave it 
 prestige. Stances were held every fortnight. Soon 
 Dr. Channing and Benjamin Franklin began to dance 
 on the tipping tables. The intermediate state and 
 eternal retribution were revised. Several church-mem- 
 bers dropped their ancient faith at the bidding of the 
 ghosts of their grandmothers. Their pastor, when 
 inquired of about the still revolution which was going 
 on in his parish, scouted it because of its origin. He 
 was preaching that winter upon the parables of our 
 Lord. He could not descend from so lofty a height 
 to contend with the twaddle of the sSances, But his 
 people could. Ought he not to have followed them ? 
 Ought he not to have known what they were think- 
 ing of and talking of, and whither they were drifting 
 under the lead of the skeptical physician ? 
 
 Christianity never stands upon its dignity. It de- 
 scends wherever man descends. Its mission is to save 
 the lost. And to save, it seeks : it does not wait to be 
 sought. The clergy are ex officio guardians of Christian 
 doctrine. They should claim instant leadership of 
 
LECT. IV.] AN EXCLUSIVE CLERGY. 61 
 
 popular discussion, and should show by their mastery 
 of the subject their ability, and therefore their right, to 
 hold that leadership. Never should such a revival of 
 popular inquiry upon a Christian doctrine be allowed 
 to come to a head in a reconstruction of opinion, with- 
 out the wise and winning voice of the pulpit. 
 
 It is on the same principle, and no other, that any 
 question of practical morals which arouses a commu- 
 nity should summon its pastor to the van. \ Temper- 
 ance, the desecration of the Lord's Day, reform of the 
 " social evil," the ethics of trade, the evils of caste, 
 the relations of capital to labor, should be watched 
 narrowly by the clergy whenever and wherever they 
 are attracting the thinking of the people. ^ It will 
 never do to turn these topics outside of the church, 
 and consign them to strolling lecturers in lyceums 
 and music-halls, and to wire-pullers in political con- 
 ventions. If the clergy let these things alone, on the 
 plea that the pulpit has more spiritual functions, those 
 spiritual functions can not long hold any leadership of 
 the people. 
 
 13. The relations of the clergy to the popular mind 
 have still another phase in which they need review. I 
 refer to that condition of things in wliich it sometimes 
 happens that the clergy become identified with the 
 cultivated classes of society to the practical exclusion 
 of the lower classes ; and the point to be specially noted 
 is, that, in such a state of affairs, the pulpit ceases to be 
 a spiritual power with any class. 
 
 The Rev. Dr. James Alexander laments the tendency 
 of some ministers to seek chiefly "the society of the 
 rich and the lettered," as he describes them, " instead of 
 being lights to the world." He adds, "The democracy 
 
62 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. rv. 
 
 must be reached. People must be made to feel that the 
 heart of the minister is with them. Common people 
 require this. The age requires it. Young men require 
 it." He was not the man to put on record even so mild 
 an expression of the facts as this, if he had not seen 
 evidence of the need of it, and more, among the clergy 
 of which he was an honored representative. 
 
 (1) But this view is enforced by a deeper principle 
 than any demand of classes or of the age. Upon it 
 depends the very existence of the pulpit as a moral 
 power. Aim at the educated classes exclusively, or 
 even chiefly, and you lose mastery of all classes. Iso- 
 late a Christian pulpit from the sympathy of the unedu- 
 cated masses, and you forfeit respect for it as a power 
 of control among the ranks of culture. 
 
 You may sometimes detect evidence of this in the 
 history of individual churches. There are churches 
 which have allowed themselves to become representa- 
 tives of the refinement and the wealth of a community 
 to the practical exclusion of its laboring classes. They 
 have aimed at the heads of society to the neglect of its 
 " hands." They forget that to every " head " there are 
 two " hands." The ministry of such churches are not 
 respected even in those churches as a power of spiritual 
 control. They are not recognized as an authority. 
 Their churches, standing themselves aloof from the 
 simple feelings and relationships which constitute the 
 plane of humanity in real life, expect their pastors to" 
 minister to their pleasure, and be guided by their opin- 
 ions. They expect preaching to meet their tastes rather 
 than their necessities. Their pastors commonly do as 
 they are tacitly bidden. Such churches will not long 
 retain pastors who will not do it. 
 
LECT. IV.] CHARACTER OF CLERICAL INFLUENCE. 63 
 
 As a consequence, such a ministry loses all mastery. 
 They lose their liberty as public teachers, and their 
 authority as public leaders. They deserve to lose them. 
 They are in an unnatural position as it respects the 
 masses of the people ; and a subtle instinct in the very 
 classes of culture which have tempted them aloft pro- 
 nounces the position a false one. Nobody looks up to 
 them as men of apostolic power. As men, such preach- 
 ers may be loved ; as social equals, they may be re- 
 spected; for the truths they do utter they may be 
 commended. Smooth and pleasant things may be said 
 of them for their fidelity in preaching " the gospel," as 
 they call it. In quiet times, in the routine of worship, 
 in pastoral functions, they may fill a place of seeming 
 honor. But they are not revered by their most devoted 
 friends as spiritual superiors. They are not looked 
 up to as men whose opinions are an authority, whose 
 approval is a reward, whose rebuke is feared as carry- 
 ing the weight of a message from God. They are the 
 very last type of a Christian ministry which the people 
 will feel to be a power in the land. 
 
 (2) In further explanation of this phenomenon it 
 should be remarked that the influence of the clergy 
 with the cultivated classes of society is to a consid- 
 erable extent a moral as distinct from an intellectual 
 influence. \The time has long since gone by when the 
 clergy were ex officio the intellectual superiors of all 
 their parishioners. They minister now to many who 
 are, in point of intellectual force and general culture, 
 their equals, and to some who are their superiors. The 
 pulpit is criticised now with a freedom which springs 
 from the conscious power, and therefore the right, to say 
 what the pulpit ought to be, and to judge of what it is. 
 
64 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. iv. 
 
 Laymen as a class know less of theology than they did 
 a half-century ago, but they know more of some other 
 things. They do not listen to preaching as conscious 
 inferiors to the man who is addressing them, so gener- 
 ally as they once did. 
 
 As a consequence, the influence of the pulpit with 
 the cultivated classes is pre-eminently a religious in- 
 fluence. It is the influence of the man, of his personal 
 weight, of his devotional spirit, of his self-forgetfulness, 
 of his eminence in all the passive clerical graces. The 
 most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most 
 heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who 
 clamor for superlatively intellectual or sesthetic ser- 
 mons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of 
 the preaching to which he listened. He said it was too 
 severe a strain upon the intellect to be sympathetic 
 with the spirit of worship. " In the house of God " he 
 wanted to meditate " upon the simple verities and the 
 undoubted facts of religion," not upon mysteries and 
 abstractions. 
 
 The distinction between religion and theology is one 
 which such hearers prize highly. While they want 
 thought, not ranting, in the pulpit, they do not crave 
 abstruseness, nor is it the intellectual character of the 
 ministry which chiefly wins their respect. That must 
 not be beneath their respect, but neither is it nor can it 
 be now an eminence to which they look up with pain- 
 ful awe. This class of hearers think much of the de- 
 votional services of the pulpit. They look there for 
 much which wins and holds their confidence in the 
 clergy. For their personal help in a religious life they 
 want a religious teacher whose prayers uplift them. 
 V The Episcopal Church of this country, relatively to 
 
LECT. IV.] DEVOTIONAL SERVICES. 65 
 
 its limited numbers, embraces a larger proportion of 
 culture than any other sect of Christians. Yet its 
 pulpit as a whole is intellectually inferior to that of 
 any of the other great sects of the American Church. -A 
 What is it that holds such an amount of educated mind 
 in its allegiance to the Christian faith? It is mainly 
 their respect for and attachment to their ancient liturgy. 
 They know, and it goes to the hearts of thousands of 
 devout believers among them every Sunday, that the 
 Litany is the most sublime, comprehensive, and affect- 
 ing piece of liturgic expression in the language. They 
 will bear almost any amount of commonplace in the 
 sermons of a clergyman who so puts his soul into that 
 incomparable production as to make them feel his 
 heart in equal pulses with their own. 
 
 In our own denomination the fact is not always so 
 obvious; but the evidences of it are still abundant, 
 that the culture of our congregations is moved by the 
 religious more than the intellectual spirit of the pulpit. 
 The clamorers for sensationalism in our pulpits are 
 those who really know least about good preaching, and 
 are the poorest judges of it when they hear it. The 
 more ignorant a people are, the more fuss they make 
 about the want of mental gifts and acquisitions in their 
 pastors. They will dismiss a really learned pastor, and 
 complain that they are not "fed," when his sermons 
 have •' meat " enough in them to gorge such hearers to 
 repletion. 
 
 It is to be hoped that you will not experience tliis 
 evil ; but the chances are that some of you will. If you 
 do, I trust that the council which dismisses you will be 
 faithful enough to put on record, as one council did in 
 such a case, " Resolved that our brother, the Rev. Mr. 
 
66 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. iv. 
 
 A , in our judgment has given to this church and 
 
 congregation meat fully equal to their digestive powers." 
 pTes, it is the commonplace mind that complains most 
 loudly of commonplace preaching. The black congre- 
 gations of our cities and the South are notoriously the 
 most censorious critics of simple preaching. They 
 often feel themselves insulted if a man who can write 
 preaches to them an extemporaneous discourse. | 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 CLERICAL INFLUENCE WITH THE EDUCATED CLASSES, 
 ITS CHARACTER. — THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD, 
 THEIR RELATIONS DISTORTED. 
 
 (3)\PuRSUiNG a little further our review of the re- 
 lations of the clergy to the educated classes, let us 
 observe that clerical influence over those classes is very 
 largely a reflexive influence. It rolls back over the 
 cultivated heights of society by the force of its accumu- 
 lations below.\ Do we not all sometimes trace our first 
 response to" a preacher's influence, even our discovery 
 of the fact that he has in him the germs of power as a 
 leader of men, to the fact of his moving others ? We 
 feel his power through the medium of our respect for 
 his power over them. No man who is not past feeling 
 any thing great can be insensible to the spectacle of a 
 man moving to their eternal well being the masses of 
 uncultured mind by so simple an instrument as preach- 
 ing. There is a sublimity in it which all feel who are 
 not imbruted in sensuality. The educated mind will 
 involuntarily extend to such a man a respect to which 
 his culture can lay no claim. 
 
 The landed gentry of England flocked to hear White- 
 field, not because of any thing in him which they 
 discovered : the discoverers of his genius were the 
 uncultivated throngs in the fields and on the commons 
 
 67 
 
68 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 of England. It was the great field-preacher in the 
 lowlands whose voice reverberated to the surrounding 
 heights, and commanded a respect which might never 
 have found expression in any other way. The refine- 
 ment, and the culture, and the wealth, and the noble 
 birth of England, never found the man out till the 
 rudeness, and the ignorance, and the plebeian tastes, 
 and the poverty of England, had opened hearts to him. 
 Then the classic heads of England came to their senses 
 about him. Mr. Spurgeon, in our own day, is illustrat- 
 ing the same phenomenon. 
 
 One of the most useful of American evangelists, 
 when he began to speak in public, was advised by a 
 group of wise men not to expose thus his infirmities of 
 speech and poverty of thought. For the time they 
 were right in that counsel. Even now he would not 
 claim that his right to speak consists in the affluence 
 of his materials, or the elegance of his diction. Yet 
 the elite of Boston and Brooklyn numbered thousands 
 in his audiences. Such critics as those of " The New- 
 York Tribune" found a theme of thoughtful discus- 
 sion in his work as a social phenomenon. 
 
 Why is this? Not, probably, because of any thing 
 which they feel of power in his discourses, but because 
 they feel the fact that other thousands of lower grade 
 are moved by him. His power over his superiors is a 
 reflection of his power over his and their inferiors. A 
 secret conviction sways thoughtful minds, that such a 
 man is in many respects a representative of a Christ- 
 like ministry. His success is one of the natural se- 
 quences of the preaching of the gospel in ways in 
 which spiritual power takes precedence of all other 
 elements of successful speech. The thing which he is 
 
LECT. v.] LEADERSHIP IN EMERGENCIES. 69 
 
 doing is the business of a Christian preacher. The 
 higher classes no less resolutely than the lower with- 
 hold their spirit of obeisance from any man who is too 
 good for it, too refined, too scholarly, too gentlemanly, 
 or too indolent and too weak. The preacher, there- 
 fore, who has no power with the common people, has, 
 in fact, no power with anybody. The pulpit which has 
 no standing-ground down in the lowlands of society 
 has none anywhere. An exclusive ministry is always a 
 weak ministry. 
 
 (4) The weakness of an exclusive ministry is often 
 not disclosed till spiritual emergencies arise. In quiet 
 times, specially in stagnant times, it may pass unde- 
 tected. But let emergencies come which agitate all 
 classes, and then the hollowness of such a miniotry will 
 reveal itself to all classes. The cultivated will be as 
 prompt as those below them to detect it, and to fling it 
 from them. They look around them for a spiritual 
 leader, to some man who has not sought to please them. 
 Over the heads, it may be, of their own pastors, they 
 will look to some minister of Christ whom they descry 
 in the distance, down on the plain, in the dust and the 
 heat of the battle. For such a man, whose spiritual 
 power has been proved by emergencies, the rest of us 
 must fall back to the right and to the left. The Church 
 wants Mm. The heart of the Church has felt the 
 pulsations of his heart ; and now the brain of the 
 Church singles him out by a judgment well-nigh unani- 
 mous. The Church wants his experience ; she wants 
 his knowledge of men ; she wants his insight into the 
 popular necessities ; she wants his skill in touching the 
 springs of popular sensibility : more than all else, she 
 wants his sympathy with God's spirit in movement 
 
70 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 upon the popular conscience. Under such conditions, 
 vox populi vox Dei. Such a man always finds his 
 reward even in this world: it is only a question of 
 time. 
 
 14. j^nother sequence of any general deficiency in 
 clerical knowledge of and sympathy with men is the 
 establishment of anomalous relations between the 
 church and the world. 
 
 The biblical idea of the church is simply that of 
 an organized body of regenerate mind : the biblical 
 idea of the world is that of the unsaved multitude of 
 unres'enerate mind. Two classes of character, and 
 only two, make up the human race as the Scriptures 
 represent it ; viz., saints and sinners, friends of God 
 and enemies of God. Much of the power of the pulpit 
 depends on assuming the reality of that distinction. 
 One of the chief objects of church organization is to 
 make that distinction vivid. A living church always 
 fastens that distinction upon the conscience of the 
 world. Apostolic preaching was full of it. Religious 
 reformations always rejuvenate it. Often the first 
 evidence of a religious awakening is a new illumination 
 of that one thought in the experience of the church 
 and in the convictions of lookers-on. 
 
 On the other hand, the amenities of Christianized 
 social life tend to obscure, even to obliterate, that dis- 
 tinction. This is specially true in nations of vigorous 
 mental stock. In such nations Christianity displaces 
 barbarism by refinement : it drives depravity out of 
 brutal into aspiring forms ; it crowds the savage under 
 cover of the lofty vices. The churchly idea is then in 
 perpetual conflict with its imitations for its own exist- 
 ence. The tendency is often almost overpowering to 
 
LECT. v.] CHURCHLY DISTINCTION, 71 
 
 confound regenerate graces with ornate and silken forms 
 of irreligion. 
 
 In such a state of society — and it is one which is 
 inevitable in any nation which has reached the higher 
 stages of a Christian civilization — ^Xfiiy much depends 
 on the adjustments of the pulpit. [The pulpit has an 
 office like that of " Old Mortality " in Walter Scott's 
 romance, — to cut over again, and engrave deeper in the 
 popular conscience, the conviction of the old distinction 
 between saint and sinner. \ One of the vital aims of the 
 pulpit must be to enfcJfce the scriptural ideal of what 
 the church should be and of what the world is. Any 
 thing which enervates the pulpit in that work must 
 tend to fuse the church and the world together in the 
 judgment even of thoughtful meu. The reality of 
 consecration on the one side and of ungodly living on 
 the other will grow dim in proportion as each ap- 
 proaches the other in its external signs. 
 
 The point, therefore, to be emphasized is, that any 
 general deficiency in the clerical knowledge of the 
 world must tend directly to that end : it must tend to 
 blot out this churchly distinction. It is well known 
 that the theory of the moral nature of man which has 
 been taught in some New-England pulpits has resulted, 
 in some cases, in the abolition of all church organiza- 
 tion, and the disuse of the Lord's Supper as the token 
 of churchly prerogative. To the same result tends 
 iefnorance of the world in clerical ministrations. It 
 tends to leave the fusion of the church and the world 
 to go on unchecked by any forcible delineations of the 
 difference between them. A ministry not knowing 
 men as they are will not preach to men as they are. 
 Not recognizing the face of their own contemporaries, 
 
72 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 they will not speak to their own contemporaries. Men 
 who do not themselves feel the pulsations of the popu- 
 lar heart can not minister to the real diseases of the 
 popular condition. 
 
 Furthermore, the pulpit, under such circumstances, 
 is apt to be full of side-issues. Preaching becomes 
 powerless from overshooting, or shooting at random. 
 Preaching by routine takes the place of original think- 
 ing. One is reminded by it of the old rule of English 
 military tactics, by which a platoon of infantry, at the 
 CQmmand " Fire," were taught to discharge their mus- 
 kets on a dead level before them, without aiming at 
 any thing, and then to wheel around to the rear. 
 
 Such preachers will often preach against forms of 
 sin which are for the time extinct, and exhort to 
 virtues which are just there out of place, and just then 
 untimely. They may describe fossilized characters, 
 instead of the living men and women. They will 
 depict sinners in the general, and saints in the abstract, 
 instead of American or English Christians and sinners. 
 They will urge proportions of truth which the popular 
 conscience will not respond to as the most pressing 
 need of the hour. They will preach in a dialect which 
 is not abreast with the growth of the language. They 
 will hold on to phraseology which is obsolete every- 
 where else than in the pulpit. They will betray no 
 insight into the modes of thinking, the types of inquiry, 
 the subjects of interest, the convictions of truth, and the 
 tendencies to error, which are in the living souls around 
 them. They will preach so that many thoughtful men 
 will not believe them : as many more will not believe 
 that they believe themselves. No large proportion of 
 a community will feel their presence as that of a reli- 
 
LECT. v.] THE CHUECH AND THE WORLD. 73 
 
 gious power. The masses of society especially, who 
 are immersed in the struggle for a livelihood, will not 
 come within reach of the echo of their voices. 
 
 A church formed under the influence of such a 
 ministry, it is obvious, can have no power of conquest 
 in the world. The sense of distinction between it and 
 the world must become practically defunct. Thinking 
 men will feel, and blunt men will say, that there is no 
 difference between the character and life of such a 
 church and many of the more respectable forms of 
 worldliness. Worldly organizations with religion 
 enough in them for ornament, associations for reform, 
 charitable leagues, secret societies, will grow up and 
 take the place of the church in the estimation of many, 
 because they see no churclily mission in actual opera- 
 tion, of which they feel the need. 
 
 Meanwhile the deepest religious inquiries of men of 
 profound conscience do not turn to such a church for 
 an answer. Those inquiries go on outside of the 
 church, with no leanings to it, and no listening ear for 
 its teachings. A class of thoughtful men arise who 
 are not in the church, who do not wish to be there, 
 who can not be persuaded to be there, and yet whose 
 consciences do not convict them when the pulpit, in 
 stereotyped phrase, prays for deliverance from ''the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil," and declaims against 
 "haters of God, and enemies of the cross of Christ." 
 They form a third class who are not consciously the 
 one thing or the other. They do not " profess and call 
 themselves Christians ; " yet their consciences do not 
 respond when the pulpit addresses them as sinners in 
 distinction from saints. 
 
 You can judge for yourselves of the extent to which 
 
74 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 this picture is approximately true in our own day. 
 The main point which I wish to observe is, that such a 
 state of things is a distortion of the normal relations 
 of church and world, and that it results inevitably 
 from any general sense of clerical unfitness to the 
 world of real life. It follows as a necessary sequence, 
 when the popular mind is left in want of a ministry 
 which is wise in its knowledge of its own times, 
 thoroughly cordial in its sympathy with its own times, 
 and vigorous in adapting the pulpit to the spiritual 
 wants of its own times. This third class of minds 
 need a living pulpit in order to be made sensible of 
 the presence of a living church. They need, not a 
 pulpit of the past, not a pulpit of the future, but a 
 pulpit of to-day. They need to see a live man at the 
 head of the elect. Else their response is quick and 
 stern, "Who are you, that you should claim to be 
 elect?" 
 
 As to the material of preaching, they need not so 
 much new truth as old truth freshened. -They want 
 the ancient substance of the gospel as apostles preached 
 it, but clothed in the experience of to-day, and coming 
 out boldly yet winningly in the speech of to-day. They 
 want the old creeds of the church, which reverent men 
 and saintly women have chanted, translated into the 
 dialect of common life. They claim the right to test 
 those creeds as uninspired productions. They will test 
 them by the common sense of men in the interpreta- 
 tion of God's word. In that process they claim that 
 the advance which the human mind has been making in 
 centuries of popular development shall be recognized. 
 They ask that the Scriptures as represented by modern 
 creeds shall seem to be consistent with themselves and 
 
LECT. v.] AN HYPOTHESIS. 76 
 
 with the necessary convictions of the race. They wait, 
 sometimes a long while, for a living pulpit which shall 
 speak out for them these yearnings of their own souls, 
 and help them to understand themselves. No other 
 kind of ministry can ever win them to the visible 
 church of Christ. 
 
 Here the inquiry is pertinent for the moment, What 
 would be the consequence of a permanent isolation of 
 the clergy from the popular sympathy ? I answer with- 
 out hesitation, The destruction of the church as a living 
 power. The few whom we now recognize as a third 
 class — not churchmen, yet not reprobates, earnest think- 
 ers and of upright lives — would increase in numbers 
 and in influence. Christianity is too far advanced in its 
 conquest of human thought to be extinguished by the 
 defection of one or two generations of either church or 
 clergy. In other hands Christian thinking would live, 
 and Christian discussion would make itself heard. Now 
 and then platoons of inquirers would fall back into infi- 
 delity. Here and there fraternities of them would 
 become absorbed in moral reforms. But the bulk of 
 them would press their way into some form of organiza- 
 tion which should express the idea of Christian fellow- 
 ship, but which, we may be assured, they would not call 
 a church. They would then create for themselves and 
 their children some order of religious teachers which 
 they would not call a clergy. IVIeanwhile, as it respects 
 power of conquest in the world, by the side of such an 
 organization the church and her clergy would be 
 stranded. 
 
 But we need not fear any such result. God does not 
 permit the clergy to fall permanently out of rank into 
 false relations to the world. It is cheering to note how 
 
76 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 seasonably divine intervention prevents that disaster. 
 Religious awakenings on the eve of emergencies are 
 constantly vitalizing the pulpit anew. Metaphorically 
 speaking, new blood is put into clerical leadership. 
 The spiritual anseinia is cured. Preachers are often, 
 in popular phrase, " reconverted." Men who have been 
 deficient in consecrated graces, and some of whom have 
 held theories unfriendly to direct ministrations, are re- 
 formed. They either preach inconsistently with their 
 theories, or they change their views, and seem to them- 
 selves to experience a new baptism from the Holy 
 Ghost. By some means the end will always be gained, 
 of securing to the church a ministry which shall be 
 sympathetic with their own generation, and studious of 
 the wants of their own times. 
 
 The views here advanced I am very sensible are 
 liable to misinterpretation. It is difficult to state the 
 truth on the subject forcibly without exaggeration. 
 Principles affirmed must be qualified, and some of the 
 qualifications are as important as the principles. State- 
 ments of fact also must be limited ; and often the lim- 
 itations are essential to prevent invidious comparisons. 
 I have endeavored to limit and to qualify as the truth 
 demands ; yet I am sensible of the danger of seeming 
 to judge the ministry cynically. 
 
 I beg you to note, therefore, that the criticisms upon 
 men, implied in my remarks on this subject, I do not 
 apply to the evangelical body indiscriminately. They 
 are true of many in some sections of the church, and 
 of few in others ; of many at some periods, and of few 
 at others. Let me quote here a slip which I take from 
 one of the secular periodicals of London. I by no 
 means indorse it. I present it as a specimen of the 
 
LECT. v.] A CLERICAL CARICATURE. 77 
 
 impression which may be unconsciously made upon 
 men of the world by an educated, refined, scholarly 
 clergy representing one or more of the historic denomi- 
 nations of Christendom. 
 
 The editor in question classifies the clergy of Eng- 
 land thus : " We have first the mild, school-visiting, 
 weak-eyed, tea-drinking, croquet-playing curate, with a 
 strong conviction that he stands in need of feminine 
 sympathy; then the pet parson, who finds his way 
 into the drawing-rooms of fashionable watering-places, 
 as a fly into a sugar-basin ; then the comical parson, 
 who is great in organizing archery clubs and bazaars, 
 as well as in enacting the part of social buffoon on every 
 possible opportunity ; then the dancing parson and the 
 hunting i^arson ; and lastly the parson who is denomi- 
 nated par excellence ' fast.' " 
 
 You will observe here, that no place is found for 
 apostolic ministers of Christ, in numbers sufficient to 
 form a class, in the whole body of the English clergy. 
 Nothing limits it absolutely to the clergy of the Estab- 
 lishment. The picture is, of course, a caricature: more, 
 it is a libel upon very valuable branches of the church 
 of Christ. Yet even as a caricature it is instructive. 
 Caricatures do not spring up like mushrooms. This 
 one could not have existed if the classes which it satir- 
 izes did not exist in sufficient numbers to suggest it, 
 and to be suggested by it. It could not exist if there 
 were not a considerable minority of the clergy who are 
 making on the world the impression which it exagger- 
 ates. They are men of the world in all that makes up 
 its artificial life, and yet are not feeling after and min- 
 istering to the profound necessities of the world as a 
 world of lost sinners for whom Christ died. I repeat, 
 
78 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 therefore, that, in some sections of the church, the criti- 
 cisms I have made are true of many, and in others of 
 few. My belief is, that in all they are applicable to a 
 minority, and that, relatively, a small one. In some 
 periods of history, also, these criticisms are more ob- 
 viously true than at others. 
 
 But at all periods, in all sections, under all condi- 
 tions of real life, the peril which they suggest exists. 
 This is the point which I wish to impress. The ten- 
 dency to the disastrous state of things which they 
 imply is always attendant upon the preaching of the 
 gospel in a world like this by such instrumentalities as 
 even the best that human nature furnishes. "1 The ten- 
 dency lies deep in our civilization to subordinate moral 
 distinctions to social distinctions, and therefore to be 
 swayed by whatever is found afloat on the surface of 
 the so-called "upper classes " of society;J^ 
 
 Let that tendency become domiuam; in the ministra- 
 tions of the gospel, and it betrays itself in such phe- 
 nomena as these ; viz., the organization of churches by 
 social affinities chiefly ; the erection of church edifices 
 so costly and ornate that the poor can not feel at home 
 in them ; the crowding together of such churches in 
 fashionable localities, in which " society " lives, and 
 "the people" do not; the consequent adjustment of an 
 educated pulpit to educated hearers only ; the gradual 
 separation of the poor from the rich and of the ignorant 
 from the cultivated in religious worship ; the gradual 
 concentration, therefore, of the wealthy and the refined 
 into one or two denominations of Christians ; the usage 
 in those denominations of acting upon the poor and the 
 ignorant, if at all, by methods which create a sense of 
 social distance between the superior and inferior ; the 
 
LECT. v.] MISSION-CHAPELS. 79 
 
 sequence that success in winning the inferiors to Christ 
 is made impossible, and the effort to do it under such 
 conditions farcical ; and finally, as the result of all these 
 things, a worldly ambition among the clergy to be mag- 
 nates over magnificent churches whose secret pride is 
 that they have no poor, no ignorant, no rude wor- 
 shipers in their gorgeous temples, and whose fixed 
 purpose it is not to tolerate such worshipers under 
 the same roof with themselves. 
 
 It is this peril which I have wished to portray 
 temperately yet truthfully. I think there are facts 
 in the present drift of things in our own denomination, 
 specially in our cities, which should set us on double 
 guard against it. Calvinistic denominations are all 
 giving evidences of its existence. The rise of Meth- 
 odism was a revolt of spiritual forces against it. But 
 now, even Methodism gives signs of its encroachment 
 upon the ancient discipline. 
 
 The establishment of mission-chapels in our large 
 cities by the prominent evangelical sects is, in my 
 judgment, a very questionable experiment. It has not 
 the rig-ht look for the working of a Christian church. 
 I am not prepared to say that it may not be the best 
 thing now practicable, things being as they are. Hu- 
 man nature must be taken as we find it, in the higher 
 classes as in the lower. In such a reform of Christian 
 usage as these remarks suggest, we must begin by 
 working as we can. We must cherish the patient 
 virtues with wliich the apostles trained the imperfect 
 graces of the early church. But the first thing we 
 have to do is to see our existing policy as it is. We 
 should mark its inevitable tendency to foster a classi- 
 fication of Christians by mutual repulsion of classes 
 
80 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 from each other. Its tendency is directly to falsify the 
 apostolic principle which lies at the very foundation of 
 a church of Christ : " We, being many, are one body 
 in Christ." Whatever may be said in defense of it, 
 it is just what Christ did not do when he entered 
 Jerusalem as a preacher. It is just what the apostles 
 did not do at Corinth and at Ephesus. Is it not what 
 neither of them would do to-day if they were to itiner- 
 ate among our American churches ? 
 
 To illustrate the temptation to which a pastor may 
 he exposed by the spirit of caste in our metropolitan 
 churches, let me relate a single case which occurred 
 in one of our Eastern cities. A certain preacher of 
 considerable local popularity had gathered a large and 
 wealthy and intelligent congregation, not surpassed, if 
 equaled, by any other in the State. Not a pew was 
 unsold in the church, and not a seat often vacant on 
 the Lord's Day. AiDplications for pews Avere made 
 months in advance of a supply. Every thing that 
 could minister to the pastor's worldly comfort or ambi- 
 tion he had at his command. For salary, voyages to 
 Europe, increase of library, long vacations, he had only 
 to ask, and he received. The social eminence of his 
 congregation created an eminence for him on which he 
 was seen and sought after from afar. Yet he was not 
 content. He felt himself restrained from the work of 
 his life by the very luxury of his position, and this from 
 the fact that he had none of God's poor among his 
 people. Not one family worshiped in his church from 
 the humbler walks of life. It could not be said of his 
 ministry, " To the poor the gospel is preached." They 
 could not shun a pest-house more cautiously than they 
 did his church-door. The long row of private car- 
 
LECT. v.] THE " HYPOCHONDRIAC " PASTOR. 81 
 
 riages before it, some of them with liveried drivers on 
 the boxes, on a Sunday morning, was a grief to him. 
 He had no agrarian sympathies ; but he felt himself 
 called of God to preach to the drivers as well as to 
 their masters. 
 
 He at length sought a consultation with the leading 
 men in his society, and told them his affliction. He 
 told them frankly that he had done all he could do for 
 them and their families, conditions being as they were, 
 and now he wanted an increase of his conOTegation of 
 a different social rank. He asked them to put galleries 
 into their church edifice, hoping by that means to 
 achieve his object. They heard him respectfully, but 
 blandly refused his request. He reasoned and pleaded 
 with them, to no effect. They thought he was hj'po- 
 chondriac, and offered to send him to Europe. But to 
 go to Europe would be only to " change the place, and 
 keep the pain." He was an hypochondriac of the class 
 to which our Lord belonged when he wept over Jeru- 
 salem. He must preach the gospel to the poor, or he 
 could not be content with his life's work. His people 
 argued that galleries would injure the architecture of 
 their beautiful temple ; but he reasoned them out of 
 that fear, so far at least as to silence them. 
 
 At last they plainly told him that it would be dis- 
 agreeable to them and their families to have a crowd 
 of the poor thronging the same place of worship with 
 themselves. They belonged to the high classes of 
 society, and wished to remain such. They would not 
 have galleries over their heads. One of the saints told 
 him plainly that he did not believe that God meant to 
 have the rich and the poor worship under the same 
 roof. He had ordained the distinction, and was re- 
 
82 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. v. 
 
 sponsible for the consequences. The pastor, with grief 
 and indignation, at length told them that it was more 
 than he could bear. Much as he loved them, grateful 
 as he felt for their kindness, he must leave them.. 
 Preach to the poor somewhere he must and would, if 
 he had to go into the streets to do it. And they let 
 him go into the street. They found a successor who 
 was not " hypochondi'iac." All honor to the man ! 
 But what of the church as a spiritual power in the 
 world ? How soon would such churches, though as the 
 stars of heaven in multitude, be successful in the con- 
 version of the world ? Indeed, how much better would 
 the world be than it is now, if it were converted to the 
 type of Christianity which such churches represent? 
 Give me rather the philosophy of Socrates and Plato, 
 and the faith of Cicero, than such a Christianity. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 THE STUDY OF MEN, CONCLUDED. — I^RACTICB OP 
 LEADING MINDS IN HISTORY. 
 
 15. The theoretical consideration of the study of 
 men as a means of rhetorical discipline invites us to 
 observe further, in concluding the discussion, that the 
 study of living men as a source of discipline is com- 
 mended by the general practice of leading minds in 
 history. The remarks I have to make on this point 
 will not add much to your note-books. Yet they are 
 necessary to illustrate the reality of the views I have 
 presented, as proved by experience. 
 
 The truth is, that the majority of us have passed 
 through our courses of collegiate training, under erro- 
 neous impressions, probably, of the proportion in which 
 books have contributed to the making of controlling 
 minds in real life. The cases have been exceptional 
 in which power of control has been gained largely in 
 any department of life without this practice of the 
 study of men as distinct from the study of libraries. 
 
 (1) Much is signified to the purpose here by the 
 ancient curriculiun of education. The ancient systems 
 of education included provision for extensive travel. 
 The Greek and Roman schools of learning were never 
 considered adequate to the complete training of men 
 for public life. The training of the schools, it was 
 
 83 
 
84 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 assumed, was to be followed by travel in other lands. 
 No man would tben have regarded his literary culture 
 as finished, even in its foundations, without the appen- 
 dix of travel to the scholastic discipline. 
 
 This was the ideal of a liberal education throughout 
 the middle ages. It has always been the English ideal, 
 to this day, of the most perfect educational training. 
 The idea of deriving the whole of a young man's mental 
 discipline from schools of learning is a modern, and 
 specially an American idea. Here it has arisen from 
 the extension of scholastic privileges to multitudes who 
 have not the means of travel, and also from the fact 
 that the early entrance of young men upon public life 
 here in part takes the place of travel in pressing them 
 into some knowledge of the world. 
 
 Plato was thirty years old when Socrates died. He 
 spent eight or nine years under the instruction of 
 Socrates, and then he spent ten years in Megara, 
 Magna Grecia, and Sicily, before he returned, and en- 
 tered upon his public life in Athens. In this country, 
 six of the corresponding ten years in a young man's 
 life are spent in the first experiments of professional 
 duty. Practically those six years are a part of his 
 professional discipline. We all find it such in fact. 
 "VVe depend on the first years of our public life for that 
 part of our training which the early systems of educa- 
 tion derived from travel.B^ut, come from what source 
 it may, it comes from some source in nearly all the 
 cases in which a power of control is gained largely in 
 any department of public life. 
 
 (2) Not to rest with general assertion on a point of 
 so much interest as this, let me recall to you certain 
 biographical facts in the history of literature, and of 
 
LECT. VI.] SHAKSPEARE. 85 
 
 government, and of the arts. These embrace specially, 
 among others, some which relate to the habits of distin- 
 guished speakers. 
 
 But first let me recall the one man who illustrates 
 almost every thing in literary history. The point in 
 the history of the English drama which Shakspeare 
 marks most vividly is that in which it ceased to be 
 scholastic, and became popular. Shakspeare disowned 
 the tyranny of literature, and defied the tyranny of crit- 
 icism. He became what he was to the English drama 
 simply by being what he was to the English people. 
 Critics have tried hard to make out for him a large 
 acquaintance with books ; but that is the very thing 
 of which the evidence is least in his history. 
 
 On the other hand, nothing else is so certain in the 
 meager knowledge we have of his personal career, as 
 that he acted his own plays, lived in the world which 
 he sought to entertain, studied the tastes of his own 
 companions, and wrote for the people of his own times. 
 Never was man more intensely a man of the present. 
 From the latest researches in Shakspearean literature, 
 it appears that he seldom or never wrote a tragedy till 
 some one else had first tried the public taste on the 
 same subject. M. Guizot, who, though a Frenchman, 
 has written the keenest criticism upon Shakspeare's 
 works which I have met with, finds nothing else in 
 them so characteristic, and so philosophically explana- 
 tory of their success, as the fact that they evince a most 
 masterly knowledge of his own age and country, and 
 that he wrote in a spirit of ardent loyalty to them ) 
 both. 
 
 The next illustration is Raphael. Says one of the 
 most intelligent critics of this prince of painters, "Hia 
 
86 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 paintings seem as if he had gone about the streets, 
 and, whenever he found an expressive face or attitude, 
 had daguerreotyped it on his brain, and gone back to 
 his studio to reproduce it." The point of interest in 
 the criticism is the fact that such was precisely the fact 
 in Raphael's professional habits. His most celebrated 
 faces are almost all of them portraits. His personal 
 friends, the celebrated women of his age, some of the 
 courtesans of Rome and Florence, still live on his 
 canvas. Such was the extent to which he carried 
 this fidelity to real life, that some critics even question 
 his originality of conception. 
 
 A third example is Edmund Burke. One of his 
 critics, speaking of Burke's writing, says of the man, 
 " He was a man who read every thing, and saw every 
 thing." The key to his success as an author — an 
 author, I say, for he was no speaker — is to be found 
 in his own criticism of Homer and Shakspeare, of whom 
 he said, " Their practical superiority over all other men 
 , arose from their practical knowledge of all other men." 
 Burke respected the popular mind. In his appeals to 
 it he laid out his whole strength. Some of his most 
 profound reflections on political economy he embodied 
 in his " Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol." And what 
 was the " Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol " ? Nothing 
 but a political pamphlet written to carry on a political 
 campaign in a single shire. His " Essay on the Sublime 
 and Beautiful " was the product of a period of recrea- 
 tion. The hard work of his life was expended on the 
 practical affairs of England. He was one of the most 
 ardent and original of theorists ; yet such was his sub- 
 jection of theory to fact in his knowledge of mankind, 
 that his was the first leading mind in Europe which 
 
LECT. VI.] HISTORICAL EXAJMPLES. 87 
 
 recovered from the intoxication of the French Revolu- 
 tion, and detected the drift of it towards anarchy. 
 
 A fourth illustration is Curran, the Irish orator. His 
 mother used to say of him, " O Jackey, what a preacher 
 was lost when you became a barrister ! " The old lady 
 was right if Curran would have carried into the minis- 
 try the same methods of self-discipline which he prac- 
 ticed for the bar. He laid the foundation of his success 
 as a barrister in the coifee-houses of London. 
 
 The London coffee-houses of that day were what the 
 " London Times " and other metropolitan newspapers 
 are now. Curran used to spend two hours every night 
 in them for the purpose of studying the politicians 
 whom he found there, observing their ways, their 
 speech, their opinions, even their dress. He would go 
 from one to another, selecting those which he said 
 " were most fertile in game for a character-hunter." In 
 this respect he represented almost all the public men of 
 his day who became eminent in the public life of Eng- 
 land. Lord Macaulay says that the coffee-house was 
 then a national institution, so general was the resort to 
 it of men whose public efforts of speech and authorship 
 ruled the realm. 
 
 Fox and Mirabeau I name as men of great power in 
 speech without great learning. As students of books 
 they were too indolent to accumulate the materials of 
 their own speeches : each had his fag. But as observ- 
 ers of men they were indefatigable : therefore, in spite 
 of their deficiencies in the knowledge of libraries, they 
 became masters in parliamentary debate. These men 
 represent a class of minds which spring up in every 
 country of free speech. 
 
 Napoleon is a seventh example. He founded libra- 
 
88 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 ries, but never entered them. But that was no boast 
 when he said, "I know man." He used to visit in dis- 
 guise the seaports of France to converse in person with 
 the fishermen and sailors and smugglers. He illustrated 
 the way in which a man of the world will often spring 
 at a bound, in religious argument, to results which a 
 scholastic mind would have reached, if at all, with slow \ 
 and wary steps. Thus it was that the superhuman 
 nature of Jesus Christ revealed itself to him. When , 
 he formed the celebrated "Code" which bears his 
 name, he gathered around him the first jurists of the 
 empire, including those of the old monarchy ; and he 
 astonished them all by the practical wisdom with which 
 he fused the conflicting materials which they furnished 
 him, into one consistent and feasible system of organic 
 law. His method of studying any subject which the 
 welfare of the empire required him to master was to 
 summon a group of conflicting living authorities on 
 that subject, and set them to arguing with each other 
 in defense of their respective opinions. 
 
 Another instance to the point is Walter Scott. He 
 lived with the multitude. His official duties kept him 
 a large part of the time in a Scottish court of quarter 
 sessions. Hence it has been so often said that his 
 fictions read like histories, while the histories of other 
 men read like fictions. In his school-days Scott was a 
 dull boy and an inveterate truant. He would entice 
 one or more of his companions to run away with him 
 to Calton Hill or Arthur's Seat, and there he would 
 practice upon them his art of story-telling. He was an 
 unwearied conversationalist : nobody was too high, and 
 nobody too low, for him to talk with. In the " For- 
 tunes of Nigel " he represents one of the characters as 
 
LECT. VI.] WALTER SCOTT'S EXAMPLE. 89 
 
 saying that a man of active mind can not talk with the 
 boy who holds his horse at a watering-place, without 
 obtaining some new thought. He used to go to the 
 fish-market at Billingsgate to study the dialect of the 
 fishwomen. He has been known to pause in the street 
 to jot down on a scrap of paper, or on his thumb-nail, a 
 ; word which he caught from a passer-by. 
 
 In his novels he draws so largely upon real life that 
 they are not properly called romances. He deals with 
 living characters, employs living dialects, records as 
 fictions actual occurrences. His own henchman, Tom 
 Purdie, is described in the "Red Gauntlet." The 
 death of the Templar in " Ivanhoe " was an exact copy 
 of a death-scene which occurred to a friend of Scott 
 while pleading a cause in his presence in a court-room 
 in Edinburgh. The localities of most of his stories he 
 describes from his own sight of them. He visited the 
 Continent to see for himself the localities of " Quentin 
 Durward." The best guide-book to the lakes of Scot- 
 land is said to be Scott's " Lady of the Lake." 
 
 Aristocratic as he was in his aspirations, he still 
 enjoyed the common people more heartily than the 
 society of his equals. The professors of the University 
 of Edinburgh complained that he chose the society of 
 men of business rather than their own. He held to 
 that choice deliberately. He said that he found the 
 conversation of men of the world to be more original, 
 and more fit to feed a literary spirit, than that of literary 
 men themselves. In a moment of petulance he declared 
 that the dullest talk he ever listened to was that of a 
 group of literary men at a dinner-table. " I love the 
 virtues of rough and round men," he says : " the others 
 are apt to escape me in sal-volatile and a white pocket- 
 handkerchief." 
 
90 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 Again he writes ; " I have read books enough, and 
 conversed with enough of splendidly educated men in 
 my time ; but I assure you I have heard higher senti- 
 ments from the lips of poor uneducated men and women 
 than I ever yet met with out of the pages of the Bible." 
 On another occasion, when his daughter condemned 
 something for being "vulgar," he replied, "You speak 
 like a very young lady. Do you not know the mean- 
 ing of the word ' vulgar ' ? It is only ' common.' Noth- 
 ing that is common, except wickedness, can deserve to 
 be spoken of in a tone of contempt. When you have 
 lived to my years, you will agree with me in thanking 
 God that nothing really worth having in this world is 
 uncommon." 
 
 A ninth example is Patrick Henry. His bank- 
 ruptcy in a country store in Virginia was a foregone 
 conclusion because of the way in which he spent his 
 time. His habit was to collect a company of villagers 
 in his store, and give them a subject of conversation, 
 and then fall back and listen to their talk. Popular 
 modes of thought, popular ways of argument, popular 
 styles of illustration, popular sophistries, popular ap- 
 peals, he studied thus month after month. That was 
 his university, his school of oratory, his library. The 
 principles and methods he learned there he adopted 
 and imitated in his subsequent political career. He 
 was the orator of the rabble all through life. He talked 
 like the rabble, lived like the rabble, ate and drank and 
 dressed like the rabble. He did this designedly for the 
 sake of swaying the rabble in his public speeches. 
 
 One witness testifies to this from Mr. Henry's lips : 
 " Mr. Chairman, all the larnin' upon the yairth air not 
 to be compared with naiteral parts." Yet to studies 
 
LECT. VI.] WHITEFIELD'S EXAMPLE. 91 
 
 and abuses of this kind he owed at last his power to 
 send the House of Burgesess rushing from their seats 
 at the close of his description of a thunder-storm, or 
 rather his adroit use of one which occurred near the 
 close of one of his addresses. He was a representative 
 of the whole class of public speakers who are so delu- 
 sively called " natural orators." There are no natural 
 orators. They all study oratory in studying men. 
 
 Passing now to the pulpit, I name but one other 
 illustration, George Whitefield. His name is often 
 adduced as an example of untaught, spontaneous elo- 
 quence. He was no such thing. No man was ever 
 further from it. For patient, laborious, painstaking, 
 lifelong study of the art of oratory, give us George 
 Whitefield as the prince of students. Long before his 
 conversion, when he was a tapster in his mother's 
 tavern, he studied the English dramatic writers till he 
 knew large portions of them by heart. He personated 
 some of their female characters amidst rounds of ap- 
 plause from the villagers. Though sometimes intoxi- 
 cated, he composed sermons, and tried the effect of 
 them on the crowd around the doorposts. He stole 
 hours of the night for the study of the dramatic por- 
 tions of the Bible. Thus was it that the great field- 
 preacher was made. 
 
 One effect of these experimental studies on his own 
 mind was to create such a sense of the difficulty of 
 preaching well, that, after his conversion, he says he 
 never prayed against any corruption in his life so much 
 as he did against being tempted into the ministry too 
 soon. " I have prayed a thousand times," he says, " till 
 the sweat has dropped from my face like rain, that 
 God would not let me enter the ministry till He thrust 
 me forth to his work." 
 
92 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 In this spirit of reverence for his work, he became 
 through his whole ministry a student of his audiences. 
 He was incessantly trying experiments upon his con- 
 gregations. The same sermons he preached over and 
 over, till they were crowded with variations and im- 
 provements. Garrick, who himself owed much to his 
 study of Whitefield, said that Whitefield never finished 
 a sermon till he had preached it forty times. He 
 preached from thirty to forty thousand sermons, but 
 only about seventy-five have found their way into 
 print. This is some index to the extent to which he 
 must have carried repetition of the same discourses. 
 
 The pulpit is crowded with illustrations, either of 
 the neglect, or the use, or the abuse, of this study of 
 men as a source of homiletic culture. They might 
 be multiplied indefinitely, but it is needless. 
 
 (3)1 proceed, therefore, to remark that the same view 
 is confirmed by the opinions of a class of writers and 
 speakers derogatory to the value of rhetorical culture. 
 
 Oratorical study has to contend with the expressed 
 judgments of certain orators and writers who say that 
 it is useless. They have succeeded, as they imagine, 
 without it. They have refused to be hampered by it. 
 They have trusted to the instinct of speech and the 
 cravings of a full mind for utterance. They have but 
 filled the mind with thought, and then let it express 
 itself. They have followed the counsel they so often 
 give to young preachers, " Find something to say, and 
 then say it." They therefore dispute the value of all 
 conscious efi'ort for oratorical discipline. Cicero, after 
 writing the " De Oratore," condemned books on rheto- 
 ric. Macaulay, though the author of criticism enough 
 to make volumes of rhetorical suggestion, decries con- 
 
LECT, VI.] RHETORICAL STUDY. 93 
 
 scious study of rhetorical science. George "William 
 Curtis in this country has reproduced Macaulay's judg- 
 ment with approval. He sums up the whole argument 
 by saying that rhetoric makes critics, but never orators 
 nor writers. 
 
 These men represent a class of writers and speakers, 
 themselves successful, whom every flourishing age of 
 literature has produced, and who have no faith in the 
 scientific culture of oratory for any other purpose than 
 that of mental gymnastics. Its direct practical value 
 they doubt or deny. 
 
 Test, now, these opinions by the actual experience of 
 such men, and what do they amount to ? Simply this : 
 they are comparative opinions, in which abstract rheto- 
 ric is weighed against the literary discipline of real 
 life. Such critics have profited so much more from the 
 study of men than from the stud}' of rhetorical treatises 
 that the latter sink into insignificance in the comparison. 
 Is it conceivable that Cicero's orations grew out of 
 innate, unstudied eloquence alone? His own confes- 
 sions contradict this. Is it imaginable that Macaulay's 
 style was the fruit of unconscious ebullition of power? 
 A thousand years of criticism could never convince the 
 literary world of that. Is it possible that Mr. Curtis's 
 "Easy Chair" was never manufactured? If the styles 
 of these writers are specimens of spontaneous genera- 
 tion, the world does not contain any thing which is not 
 such. The immortal columns of Greek architecture are 
 no more made, studied, elaborated things than are such 
 styles as theirs. Those styles have been originated, 
 compacted, adorned, polished, by laborious study of 
 speech and authorship in real life. Their authors have 
 studied rhetoric in embodied forms. They have prac- 
 
94 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vi. 
 
 ticed it, as literary journeymen, in the mental collisions 
 and abrasions of public life. They lived it many years 
 before they could command their facile pen. 
 
 All opinions, therefore, of successful writers, deroga- 
 tory to the study of oratory, are to be taken as only 
 practical testimonies to the value of the study of it as 
 embodied in living men. Whatever may be the bear- 
 ing of them upon the scholastic culture of rhetoric, 
 they are the most emphatic witness possible to the 
 value of its practical culture through an elaborate and 
 lifelong study of mankind. 
 
 To recapitulate, then, the several aspects of the sub- 
 ject which we have considered : we have observed that 
 every preacher may obtain much oratorical culture 
 from the study of his own mind ; that he has a similar 
 source of culture in the study of other men ; that this 
 study is often undervalued, because of a factitious rev- 
 erence for books ; that this stud}'- should be stimulated 
 by that which is well known to be the popular idea of 
 a clergyman ; that the need of it in some quarters is 
 indicated by the idea of a clergyman which is most 
 common in literary fiction ; that the absence of it dis- 
 closes itself, not only in the unfitness of the pulpit to 
 its mission of reproof, but also in its unfitness to the 
 mission of comfort ; that we ma}^ learn something to 
 the purpose from the study of eccentric preachers ; that 
 the study of men is specially needful to educated 
 preachers, because the literature of the world is not 
 constructed, in the main, for the masses of mankind ; 
 that the need of it is enforced by the fact that often 
 great changes of popular opinion occur independently 
 of the cultivated classes as such ; that in such, popular 
 changes the clergy are the natural leaders of the peo- 
 
LECT. VI.] SUMMARY. 95 
 
 pie ; that a certain minority of the clergy are found to 
 be insensible or hostile to such changes ; that, when the 
 pulpit becomes identified with the cultivated classes 
 alone, it loses power of control over all classes ; that, 
 when the pulpit betrays a want of knowledge of men 
 as they are, the result is the creation of anomalous rela- 
 tions between the church and the world ; and that the 
 study of men here recommended is supported by the 
 practice of leading minds in history. 
 
 You will not understand me as decrying scholastic 
 discipline in the comparison. On that subject I have, 
 in the sequel, other things to say. But I have wished 
 t ) establish at present this as one part of a preacher's 
 necessary and perpetual discipline for his life 's work : 
 that he must be a student of men, himself a man of 
 his own times, living in sympathy with his own times, 
 versed in the literature of his own times, at home 
 with the people of his own charge, observant of the 
 movements of the popular heart, and aspiring in his 
 expectations of controlling those movements by the 
 ministrations of the pulpit. 
 
 That was a confession which no minister should 
 oblige himself to make, as a late professor in one of 
 our theological seminaries did in the last year of his 
 life, that for half a century he had read more Latin 
 than English. That was the mark of a mind whose 
 roots were in an obsolete age, and whose culture was 
 chiefly in a language, a literature, and a style of think- 
 ing, which never can again be dominant in the civili- 
 zation of the world. 
 
LECTURE VII. 
 
 THE STUDY OP LITERATURE FOR CLERICAL DISCI- 
 PLINE. — OBJECTS OF THE STUDY. 
 
 II. We have observed in analyzing the sources of 
 our oratorical knowledge, that, while there is but one ori- 
 ginal source, an auxiliary source is found in the study 
 of models, and that in the term " models" we include 
 all successful and permanent literature. This exten- 
 sion of the term is essential. Our primary notion of a 
 model is limited. When a painter speaks of a model, 
 he means by it a painting, or the thing which is to be 
 transferred to canvas, and nothing more. When a 
 sculptor speaks of a model, he means by it the human 
 form, or a piece of statuary, and nothing more. In criti- 
 cism of poetry a model is a poem, and nothing more. 
 In military art a model is a historic campaign, or the 
 plan of a battle, and nothing else. That is to say, a 
 model has primarily a professional limitation. 
 
 When, therefore, a preacher conceives of a model, he 
 is apt to think only of a sermon, or at most of an ora- 
 tion. Consequently he is in danger of limiting his read- 
 ing for homiletic discipline to sacred or secular speech. 
 The point, therefore, needs to be emphasized as a pre- 
 liminary, that we should not restrict our idea of models 
 to any such professional range. The advice often given 
 to young preachers in respect to their reading is nar- 
 
 96 
 
LECT. VII.] DEFINITION OF "MODELS." 97 
 
 row, in that their attention is directed exclusively to 
 oratorical literature. In my judgment, that is not even 
 the chief source of homiletic culture derivable from 
 books. In the broader view, all successful and perma- 
 nent literature is a collection of models to an educated 
 mind. 
 
 \The culture which a preacher needs from books is 
 substantially that which any other professional man 
 needs. Excepting the necessities of the profession, the 
 less his culture is narrowed by professional affinities in 
 its range, the better. Nearly the most meager prepa- 
 ration you could acquire for the pulpit would be the 
 reading of the whole mass of English sermons, and 
 nothing else. Every book which is a book is a model 
 of something to an educated mind. By a preacher, 
 every book he reads should be read as a model of some- 
 thing. Whatever has achieved success, specially what- 
 ever has been long-lived, we may be sure contains 
 something, which, if intelligently studied, will be to a 
 preacher's culture what the torso of Hercules is to 
 sculptors. 
 
 Moreover, our conception of a model to a professional 
 man should not be limited to literature as distinct from 
 philosophy or from science. There is a distinction here ; 
 but it is not so important to a professional man as 
 to one whose life is made up of literary pursuits. A 
 mind moving in the orbit of a great practical profession 
 must be open to culture from any thing in our libraries 
 which represents the world's past or living thought. 
 Every such volume is a model to such a mind, in the 
 sense that it contains something helpful to its disci- 
 pline or its furnishing for its life's work. One young 
 preacher I knew, who found the most effective awake ner 
 
98 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vn. 
 
 of his own mind to original production in the study of 
 La Place's " Mechanique Celeste." Such are the occult 
 affinities between literature and science, that there is 
 a mental appropriation of them both by an alert mind, 
 in which the distinction between them vanishes. 
 
 Bearing in mind, then, the principle that the range 
 of a preacher's possible study of models opens to him 
 all standard libraries, the remarks I wish to make 
 upon the subject arrange themsejives naturally under 
 the objects of the study, the selection of authors, and 
 the methods of the study. 
 
 1st, The Objects of the study of books : what are 
 they? I answer, in the general. The object is discipline 
 as distinct from accumulation. Its results, when prop- 
 erly conducted, will never be the mere conglomeration 
 of knowledge. Its aim is discipline ; its process is 
 discipline ; its result is discipline. A certain mental 
 growth is the sum and substance of it. A man knows 
 nothing of the rudiments of the culture to which it 
 belongs who has not begun to be conscious of mental 
 growth under that culture. One of the first and most 
 profound impressions which the study of books should 
 make upon a man is that of the distinction between 
 literary labor and literary leisure. No habits like those 
 of a literary amateur can accomplish the object in view. 
 The aim is never a luxury, except in that stage which 
 mature discipline at length reaches, in which labor is 
 itself luxury. But, in particular, the chief objects of 
 a pastor's study of literature are four. 
 
 The first is a discovery of the principles of effec- 
 tive thought, and its expression in language. We all 
 come to the study of books with minds uninformed as 
 to what is excellence, and what is not. No man's lit- 
 
LECT. VII.] DISCOVERY OF PRINCIPLES. 99 
 
 erary instinct is at the first a sufficient guide to his 
 literary judgment. What are the principles of efiPective 
 literature is a question to be answered by an after- 
 process to that of feeling the power of literature. It 
 is a process of reflection upon a previous experience. 
 It is as purely a process of discovery as a search in a 
 gold-mine. 
 
 Novalis said that painting was "the art of seeing." 
 So the true study of books is the art of seeing what 
 is and what is not there. You read, for instance, an 
 author who moves you. He stimulates your intellect ; 
 he arouses your sensibilities ; he delights you, fascinates 
 you, elevates you to an unwonted height of mental and 
 moral excitement ; he becomes therefore a favorite with 
 you ; you feel grateful to him for his disclosure to you 
 of a new world of thought and feeling. At first you 
 have no disposition to any process of reflection. You 
 only feel, as Dr. Franklin felt his first hearing of White- 
 field. But by and by the time of reflective stud}' comes. 
 You ask, What is it in my favorite author which makes 
 him what he is to me ? What are the roots of his pro- 
 ductions which make them such a vital and vitalizing 
 power to me? The answer, unless your experience has 
 been factitious, will disclose to you one or more of the 
 elements which make all vital literature a power to all 
 minds. 
 
 Until our minds go through that reflective process 
 of discovery, we know nothing of books as an object of 
 criticism. We have no intelligent tastes in literature. 
 We have no culture of scholarly judgment. We are, in 
 respect to libraries, in that inchoate state in which a 
 man often is in respect to painting, or sculpture, or 
 music, in which he honestly confesses, " I do not know 
 
100 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vii. 
 
 what is artistic excellence, I only know what I like." 
 Exactly thus we might express our state of culture in 
 literature before the critical taste is formed in us by an 
 introversion of mind upon our own instincts, and by 
 thought upon the objects which have pleased or roused 
 them. We do not know what is excellent in literary 
 creation: we only know what we like. Whether our 
 taste is true to any lofty ideal we do not know : we 
 only know what we like. A savage knows as much 
 when he struts around in his adornments of beads and 
 peacock feathers. A child knows as much when his 
 tears are dried at the jingle of nursery-rhymes. 
 
 On the other hand, the faculty of good taste under 
 high culture becomes one of superlative excellence. 
 It is an instance in which an acquired faculty rivals 
 original endowments of mind. We should not be 
 deceived by our associations with the word " taste." It 
 is the only single word by which our language expresses 
 the thing in question. Yet the word is unfortunate in 
 the multiplicity of its uses. We connect it so much 
 with millinery and upholstery and bijouterie, if not 
 with the pleasures of the table, that we often carry it 
 into literature with degrading associations. We need 
 there to enlarge and ennoble it. It expresses there one 
 of the last and noblest results of mental discipline. 
 I can not call it virtue : usage calls it taste. " Virtue " 
 is reserved for a class of conceptions totally distinct. 
 ^ Yet taste does express lofty intellectual character, 
 not moral character, but a development of intellect 
 which stands over against moral character, and corre- 
 sponds to it in dignity/i By it we distinguish what is 
 true from what is factitious in letters. We penetrate 
 by it to that which is deepest in thought. We reach 
 
LECT. vu.] FACULTY OF GOOD TASTE. 101 
 
 that which, in literary expression, corresponds to integ- 
 rity in morals. We discern, therefore, that which is and 
 must be long-lived. Taste under high culture gives to 
 a scholar, not only knowledge, but foreknowledge, of 
 literary history. He learns to look into the future with 
 as -much confidence as he feels in his knowledge of the 
 past. He pronounces judgment on certain works with 
 the confidence of an oracle. He says of them, "These 
 must fade : there is in them that which dooms them to 
 decay." Of other works he says as confidently, " These 
 will live : these express the soul of man and the voice 
 of God in forms which the world will not willingly let 
 die." 
 
 This finished taste represents a state of mental con- 
 quest. A man's own insight into the life of literature 
 becomes a law to him. He is an independent thinker, 
 reader, scholar, author, preacher. His own insight, if 
 it conflicts, as it sometimes will, with a popular taste, 
 gives him repose, while that taste lasts, in the assurance 
 that it will be ephemeral. He can work on calmly in 
 his own way. He is like an eagle in his eyrie : he 
 knows that he sees farther than his contemporaries , 
 he knows as surely that he must succeed in the end. 
 Wordsworth expressed grandly this vision of the lit- 
 erary future, when he replied to the outburst of hostile 
 criticism with which " The Excursion " was received at 
 the first. " This will never do," said Jeffrey in " The 
 Edinburgh Review." "It must do," responded the 
 poet, as if inspired. " I very well know that my work 
 will be unpopular ; but I know, too, that it will be im- 
 mortal." 
 
 The second object of a preacher's study of litera- 
 ture is that familiarity with the principles of effective 
 
102 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xn. 
 
 thought and expression which gives one a working 
 knowledge of those principles as distinct from a critical 
 knowledge. We need such an inwrought possession of 
 them, that, in our own productions, we can apply them 
 unconsciously. In the act of composing, the mind can 
 not pause to recall by sheer lift of memory a principle 
 of good writing, and then apply it by conscious choice. 
 This is specially true of select hours of composition. 
 All writers have such hours. Our best work is done in 
 such hours. The mind then is lifted by the impulse 
 of original invention. Thought is ebullient. An act of 
 creation is going on. The creating mind then must 
 seize involuntarily upon the forms of language which 
 lie nearest, and which come unbidden. Lawlessly, 
 rudely, arbitrarily, it uses those forms, so far as any 
 conscious selection is concerned. 
 
 If, therefore, we have not so learned the principles of 
 power in speech as to be able to apply them uncon- 
 sciously, we can not apply them at all. Therefore we 
 need to acquire such familiarity with those principles, 
 that our command of them shall be what the uncon- 
 scious skill of the athlete is to muscle and sinew. 
 
 In this view it is obvious that the familiarity of 
 unconscious use of principles of literary expression 
 marks a high state of mental discij)line in respect to 
 executive skill. We have observed that the object of 
 literary study is discipline, not accumulation. We have 
 observed also that a full discovery of the principles 
 of taste marks a high discipline in respect to criticism. 
 The point now before us indicates an advance upon the 
 discipline of criticism. It contemplates discipline in 
 respect to executive skill. Such possession of the 
 principles of effective writing as that involved in the 
 unconscious use of them marks power of execution. 
 
LECT. VII.] TASTE AND EXECUTION. 103 
 
 \ No man can Lave listened to Edward Everett or 
 Rufus Choate, for example, without being sensible of 
 the fascination of some of their prolonged and invo- 
 luted passages.. - They are marvelous phenomena of 
 executive discipline. Pages could be selected from 
 their writings in which the processes of reasoning, of 
 judging, of analysis, of comparison, of combination, of 
 imagining, of memory, of abstraction, and of invention, 
 all interlace each other in one marvel of expression. 
 The mental strain of producing the wondrous network 
 seems like torture to a critic who is looking on ; yet 
 those processes embrace each other with a kindliness 
 which makes them seem, to one who feels only the 
 naturalness of their evolution, like the play of spiritual 
 beings at their ease. We obtain a new conception of 
 the susceptibility of discipline which is in every mind 
 from such specimens of high art in discourse. 
 
 This view is confirmed by the fact that exquisite 
 taste often exists without executive skill. Eminent 
 critics are often not superlative writers. This is only 
 saying that they know more than they can do. The 
 reason is found in the distinction before us, between a 
 discovery of the principles of effective speech, and such 
 a possession of them as would secure unconscious obe- 
 dience to them in one's own productions. It has been 
 said of Lord Brougham, that in his own writings he 
 violates nearly all the rules which in his criticism of 
 others he prescribes. The critical study of books 
 tends to prevent such anomalies as this, by giving us 
 the principles of good writing in illustrated forms. We 
 most readily become familiar with them, if we have 
 them exemplified. The example which we enjoy will 
 tend to fix in our taste the principle which otherwise 
 
104 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vii. 
 
 it would be a drudgery to remember. Like all other 
 knowledge, that is most homelike to us which comes 
 through the medium of an experience. 
 
 This attractive knowledge of rhetorical principles 
 comes to us but very slightly from rhetorical treatises. 
 Some minds, it is true, may be fascinated by rhetoric in 
 its scientific forms, and for their own sake. Dr. Arnold 
 could honestly speak of Aristotle, after years devoted 
 to a study of his works, as " that dear old Stagyrite." 
 But very few minds are so affectionately constituted. 
 Few, therefore, attain to such passionate love of abstract 
 science in their studies. The large majority become 
 fascinated by such studies only through the medium of 
 example in favorite authors. 
 
 A fine illustration of this is found in the literary dis- 
 cipline of Dryden. Dryden is one of the acknowledged 
 masters of the English language. In his day he was 
 an autocrat in criticism. Nobody presumed to question 
 a decision by Dryden. Yet he says of himself, " If I 
 have gained any skill in composition, I owe it all to 
 Archbishop Tillotson, whose works I have read many 
 times over." One can not but marvel at his choice of 
 a model; but it illustrates the power of any choice 
 which a man makes with enthusiasm, and therefore 
 enjoys. 
 
 The same truth is illustrated in an interesting fact 
 in the literary history of Edmund Burke. I know of 
 no fact which furnishes a more instructive key to the 
 structure of Burke's mind. When he was about seven- 
 teen years old he conceived a passionate fondness for 
 the works of Milton. In a debating-club of which he 
 was a member, in Dublin, his Miltonic taste still exists 
 on record. Among other examples of it the record 
 
LECT. VII.] LITERARY ASSIMILATION. 105 
 
 states that Burke rehearsed the speech of Moloch in 
 the " Paradise Lost," and followed it with his own criti- 
 cisms upon it. Thus it is that literary models which 
 attract us fondly to themselves plant within us the prin- 
 ciples of effective speech which underlie those models, 
 and make them what they are. We much more cor- 
 dially, and therefore successfully, aim at resemblance to 
 a living character than at obedience to an abstract law. 
 This is as true in literary as in moral discipline. An 
 example is worth more than a rule. An illustration 
 has more authority than a command. 
 
 This view suggests a third object of a pastor's study 
 of books ; viz., asshnilatlon to the genius of the best 
 authors. There is an influence exerted by books upon 
 the mind which resembles that of diet upon the body. 
 A studious mind becomes, by a law of its being, 
 like the object which it studies with enthusiasm. If 
 your favorite authors are superficial, gaudy, short-lived, 
 you become yourself such in your culture and jouv 
 influence. If your favorite authors are of the grand, 
 profound, enduring order, you become yourself such to 
 the extent of your innate capacity for such growth. 
 Their thoughts become yours, not by transfer, but by 
 transfusion. Their methods of combining thoughts be- 
 come yours; so that, on different subjects from theirs, 
 you will compose as they would have done if they had 
 handled those subjects. Their choice of words, their 
 idioms, their constructions, their illustrative materials, 
 become yours ; so that their style and yours will belong 
 to tlie same class in expression, and yet your style will 
 never be merely imitative of theirs. 
 
 It is the prerogative of great authors thus to throw 
 back a charm over subsequent generations which is 
 
106 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect, vn. 
 
 often more plastic than the influence of a parent over 
 a child. Do we not feel the fascination of it from cer- 
 tain favorite characters in history? Are there not 
 already certain solar minds in the firmament of your 
 scholarly life whose rays you feel shooting down into 
 the depths of your being, and quickening there a vi- 
 tality which you feel in every original product of your 
 own mind? Such minds are teaching you the true 
 ends of an intellectual life. They are unsealing the 
 springs of intellectual activity. They are attracting 
 your intellectual aspirations. They are like voices 
 calling to you from the sky. 
 
 Respecting this process of assimilation, it deserves 
 to be remarked, that it is essential to any broad range 
 of originality. Never, if it is genuine, does it create 
 copyists or mannerists. Imitation is the work of un- 
 developed mind. Childish mind imitates. Mind una- 
 wakened to the consciousness of its own powers copies. 
 Stag^nant mind falls into mannerism. On the contrary'-, 
 a mind enkindled into aspiration by high ideals is never 
 content with imitated excellence. Any mind thus 
 awakened must above all things else be itself. It must 
 act itself out, think its own thoughts, speak its own 
 vernacular, grow to its own completeness. You can 
 no more become servile under such a discipline than 
 you can unconsciously copy another man's gait in your 
 walk, or mask your own countenance with his. 
 
 A fine example of assimilation as distinct from 
 mannerism is famished by the literary history of Cole- 
 ridge's " Christabel." That poem on its first appear- 
 ance produced a profound impression. It was circulated 
 in manuscript among the scholars of England several 
 years before its publication. It is believed by good 
 
LECT. vn.] ASSIMILATION AND OPINIONS. 107 
 
 critics to have exerted a powerful influence upon the 
 subsequent writings of Byron and Shelley and Scott. 
 A casual reading of it in a little circle in which Shelley 
 was present affected him so deeply that he fainted. 
 Some of his poems published afterwards bore traces 
 of the poetic stimulus which his imagination then 
 received. Mr. Lockhart says that it was the hearing 
 of " Christabel " from manuscript which led Scott to 
 produce the " Lay of the Last Minstrel." It gave to 
 all those poets a conception of the possibilities of the 
 English language in freedom of versification, and spe- 
 cially in the expression of supernatural imagery, which 
 was new to them. Their minds drank it in, and ap- 
 propriated it, as flowers do light. Yet what critic has 
 ever thought to charge them with imitating " Christa- 
 bel " ? Assimilation of it in their poetic culture ren- 
 dered mannerism in copying it impossible. 
 
 Further : it should be observed that identity of opin- 
 ions with those of a great author is no evidence of 
 assimilation to his genius. It no more follows that a 
 man has a Platonic or an Aristotelian mind because he 
 adopts Platonic or Aristotelian opinions than that his 
 body belongs to one or another of the moUuscan species 
 because his digestion craves a molluscan diet. Assimi- 
 lation goes deeper than the plane of opinions. In any 
 broad culture it will be generous to diverse models. 
 From the fountains of conflicting opinions it will derive 
 the fluids of its own life, and they shall be all the more 
 pure and the more vital for the mingling. 
 
 It is a mark of a narrow culture that a man feels no 
 sympathy of resemblance to widely different characters 
 in the history of thought, even to those whose opinions 
 are in flat contradiction. Great minds are more nearly 
 
108 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect, vii. 
 
 alike in their genius than in their opinions. Great and 
 sincere minds tend always to unanimity in their final 
 influence. A student of their works may become more 
 sensible of this than they themselves were. You may 
 derive from them a more generous growth than they 
 had. You may feel the identity in spirit of the very 
 works in which, perhaps, they fought each other as 
 champions of rival factions. 
 
 Among the recent discoveries in Athenian architec 
 ture, it has been found that the lines of a Doric column, 
 which have for ages been supposed to be vertical, and 
 parallel to each other, are almost imperceptibly con 
 vergent as they ascend from the pedestal ; so that, if 
 projected to an immense height above, they would meet 
 in a point. It is believed that the Greek artistic mind 
 adopted this model, not fortuitously, but with design, 
 to express thus the ultimate oneness of all ideas of 
 beauty. 
 
 So it is with the aspirations of great minds as ex 
 pressed in their works. They seem to run in grooves 
 of eternal parallels, in which they can never come 
 together. They might traverse the universe apparently, 
 and come around to the i:)oint of their starting, as defi- 
 ant of union as ever. But the great Architect of 
 mind has not so constructed them. An appreciative 
 student of their works may discern, what they could 
 not, — a point in the upper firmament of thought in 
 which the lines of their influence converge, and they 
 become as one mind in their projection upon the world's 
 future. 
 
 Do not all generous minds already judge thus of the 
 two great lines of thought represented by Aristotle and J. 
 Plato? Do not such minds feel the same ultimate \ 
 
LECT. VII.] HIGH CULTURE LIBERAL. 109 
 
 sympathy between the life's work of Leibnitz and of 
 Bacon? Do we not often catch glimpses of the same 
 destiny of union between Kant and the Scotch pliiloso- 
 phers ? Let a scholarly mind keep itself open and 
 receptive in its study, and it can not fail to experience 
 this consciousness of the convergence of the great 
 thinkers through the blending of them in its own 
 culture. 
 
 \^One advantage, therefore, of literary study, is that 
 it tends to liberalize mental culture in those lines of 
 thought in which culture is most profound,. By such 
 discipline we become disinthralled from partisanship. 
 Be it in philosophy, in theology, in aesthetics, in art, a 
 partisan spirit is sure to be outgrown. Positive as 
 our opinions may be, we spurn bondage to schools of 
 opinion. One of the most striking evidences often of 
 a young man's growth under such discipline as I 
 am advocating is, that he outgrows a school of some- 
 thing in which he was once an enthusiast, and uncon- 
 sciously a servitor. As we approach maturity of 
 culture, we become conscious that we have a culture 
 which lies deeper than our opinions, and which runs 
 under opposing schools. 
 
 Our expressed opinions may often be governed by 
 the wants of our own age or the business of our own 
 profession. They may represent but a fraction of the 
 entire circle of our beliefs. But a perfect culture 
 might master the beliefs of all ages, so as to hold all 
 the truth that was ever in them. Assimilation to the 
 loftiest in literature may give us a vision of truths 
 which minds of narrower discipline will ignore. Thus 
 expanded in its culture, a scholarly mind becomes 
 eclectic in its opinions in every tiling. It becomes' 
 
110 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vn. 
 
 calm also in the utterance of them. It will be generous 
 to opponents in proportion to its trust in itself. It can 
 afford to cherish both these qualities of a liberal mind. 
 
 One other remark upon this point of assimilation to 
 the genius of literature is that from its nature it must 
 be the work of time. All mental discipline is such, 
 but this peculiarly : no man reaches it at a bound. A 
 sudden appearance of it in a man's professions is sus- 
 picious. He is probably self-deceived. His enthusiasm 
 for the great authors is probably not a genuine growth 
 into their likeness, but an upstart fancy for them, — for 
 their defects, it may be, rather than for their excellences. 
 It may be even so poor a thing as an affectation of 
 sympathy with their reputation, instead of a genuine 
 reverence for their character. In the nature of the 
 case, like all other enduring growths, a true assimila- 
 tion to the noblest ideals is the process of a lifetime. 
 A collegiate and professional education can do little 
 more than to plant the germ of it, and fertilize the soil 
 which shall nurture it through life. 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 OBJECTS OF A PASTOK's STUDY OF LITERATURE, CON- 
 CLUDED. — THE ADJUSTMENT OF SELF-ADAPTA- 
 TIONS. 
 
 To the three objects of literary study already con- 
 sidered should be added a fourth, which is to facilitate 
 a man's knowledge of his own powers and adaptations 
 to professional labor. 
 
 It is unsafe to trust incautiously the early fascina- 
 tions of books or men over a young mind. Our earli- 
 est tastes may give us false ideas of our own capacities. 
 Specially do we need to study our favorite authors with 
 reference to our adaptations to our life's work. I We 
 are not supposed to be mere literati by profession. We 
 do not study literature for its own sake and that only : 
 we have a laborious profession in prospect. Our studies 
 must fit us for that, or they may become a hinderance 
 to our life's work^ \ We need to know our own adapta- 
 tions ; and that literary enthusiasm is a woful blunder 
 which misleads us in that self-knowledge. 
 
 The theory of Jesuitism in one respect is most in- 
 structive. The whole Jesuit policy turns upon the 
 adaptation of men to work, and work to men. The 
 Jesuit theory is, that every man is better fitted, or may 
 be made so, to one thing than to another ; and that 
 every work requires one man more imperatively than 
 
 111 
 
112 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vm 
 
 another. It assumes to fit the man to the work, and 
 the work to the man, as precisely as Nature fits together 
 the brain and the skull. Jesuitism is wise so far as 
 this, that it lays the study of adaptations at the basis 
 in building an order of public men. That study must 
 lie at the foundation of the liberal professions, if they 
 are to be powers in the world. 
 
 The study of adaptations must form the clergy. 
 Under a free system, every clergyman must perform 
 that study for himself. For the want of it men have 
 often entered the ministry under a mistaken self- 
 estimate. Is it not one of the most obvious and pain 
 ful facts of clerical life, that men have entered the 
 ministry who would never have done so if they had 
 known seasonably their own natural qualifications? 
 Such men fight the air, through life it may be, because 
 they do not understand their own mission. 
 
 The importance of the error here indicated justifies a 
 consideration of it at some length, at the expense of an 
 excursus from our main-line discussion. The peril of 
 a wasted life in the ministry, through errors in self- 
 estimate, will be best illustrated by a case in hand. A 
 graduate of this seminary once came to me asking 
 advice respecting his abandonment of the ministry for 
 some other profession. He had been a pastor two 
 years. He was pleasantly and usefully settled. He 
 made no complaint of his people, nor they of him. 
 He did not wish for a different parish. But he thought 
 he had better leave the pulpit. Why ? The reason lay 
 wholly in the mental make and culture of the man. 
 He had inveterate tastes for a different line of mental 
 activity from the one which the ministry opened to 
 him. By natural constitution those tastes were pre- 
 
LECT. vm.] A PASTOR'S MISTAKE. 113 
 
 dominant in him. His collegiate training and his read- 
 ing had intensified them. He had denied them, and 
 chosen the ministry as a profession from convictions 
 of religious duty, as Pascal did under similar circum- 
 stances, but with no such mental rest in his choice as 
 Pascal experienced. He found that the practical duties 
 of the pulpit were a drudgery to him. He felt no intel- 
 lectual elasticity in them. To be a guiding mind to 
 others in the office of a religious teacher did not draw 
 out his aspirations. He seemed unable to make himself 
 what the Scriptures call "apt to teach." He had 
 struggled with himself two years in silence to force his 
 mind and body to do the bidding of his conscience, and 
 to do it joyously ; but the effort was undermining his 
 health. A nervous headache had become the invariable 
 consequence of a morning's work in the writing of a 
 sermon, and an afternoon given to chemistry or flori- 
 culture was the only remedy. He dragged himself 
 through another year of purgatorial fidelity to his 
 ministerial vows ; and then his health was so seriously 
 affected as to leave no question as to the path of duty. 
 He left the ministry, studied for three years another 
 profession, and is now contented, healthy, happy, and 
 useful in it, and as a layman is pronounced by his 
 pastor to be the most devoted and useful member of his 
 church. 
 
 One thing is certain of this case : it is that a woful 
 mistake was made at the outset for the want of a thor- 
 ough study of the man's own aptitudes. At least six 
 years of his early manhood were, not lost indeed, but 
 extravagantly expended on an experiment which a more 
 thorough self-knowledge would have prevented. 
 
 A similar experience, I think, in less degree, befalls 
 
114 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vm. 
 
 some men wlio remain in the ministry. Are they not 
 found in all denominations ? They work at cross-pur- 
 poses with Providence, because it is a long while before 
 they accept themselves for what they are. They at- 
 tempt things which they can not do, or as often they 
 fail to do things which they might do, because they dare 
 not attempt them. 
 
 The late Dr. Griffin used to say that he thought 
 Providence designed him for a metaphysician. I sup- 
 pose it is very certain that no other man who knew 
 Dr. Griffin, thought that Providence would have been 
 wise in any such designation of a man who was so 
 eminently an orator by nature and by training. 
 
 Dr. Chalmers expressed the opinion, that, as he said, 
 " Nature had cut him out for a military engineer." In 
 the public life which he afterwards led, he, too, thought 
 that his specialty of talent for public influence lay in 
 the department of intellectual philosophy. He proba- 
 bly stood alone in both those opinions to the day of his 
 death. Chalmers was by nature a statesman. In the 
 Church his great power lay in the discovery and the 
 use of administrative principles. The reach of his mind 
 in this respect was marvelous. He was in the Church 
 the counterpart of Edmund Burke in the State. The 
 thing in which consisted the greatness of both would 
 have prevented either from taking the first rank as 
 metaphysicians. 
 
 Professor Stuart believed, that, when he began his 
 public life, he had no special taste or aptitude for 
 sacred literature, or any department of philology ; but 
 no one else believed this of him after it was found 
 that the youthful pastor in New Haven, though crowded 
 by the care of the old " Center Church " in a powerful 
 
tEC3T. vra.] OBLIQUE USEFULNESS. 115 
 
 revival of religion, still kept his Hebrew Bible within 
 reach of his dinner-table, that he might devote to it the 
 fragments of time stolen from that meal. 
 
 Providence is often very kindly in pressing men into 
 a service which they would never have been wise 
 enough in self-knowledge to choose for themselves. 
 Yet often the wisdom of Providence is not regarded, 
 or the finger-point is not seen. Perhaps, like Nelson, 
 men turn their blind eye to the telegraphic order. 
 Then comes a long history of wasted ministerial 
 enaiigy. 
 
 ^Ministerial energy, when it is not all a waste, is often 
 most extravagantly expended on the results it achieves. 
 Do you not know men in the ministry who have been 
 sailing obliquely all their lives ? All that some accom- 
 plish in the ministry is accomplished laterally to their 
 conscious aims J In their deliberate aims they fail ; in 
 incidentals to those aims, which Providence always 
 seems to be on the watch for in ill-regulated lives, they 
 succeed. The sum total of their work, when it shall 
 be tried as by fire, may be this, — relative uselessness 
 in the things they have aspired to, and relative success 
 in the things they have undervalued. To them is 
 fulfilled the promise : " Thou shalt hear a voice behind 
 thee, saying, This is the way ; walk ye in it." " The 
 door into life," says a living writer, " generally opens 
 behind us. A hand is put forth which draws us in 
 backward." This is eminently true of the professional 
 life of a certain class of ministers. 
 
 Here, for example, is a man who honestly thinks that 
 poetry is his birthright, while in fact his very make is 
 prose personified. The Muses were slumbering at the 
 hour of his birth. He wastes himself in rhymes which 
 
116 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vin. 
 
 are " published for the author," — that rose-colored 
 gauze by which is covered the polite negative of pub- 
 lishers. This is literally true of one of the early grad- 
 uates of this seminary. Rather, it was true ; for I am 
 grateful, for his sake, that he has found rest in a world 
 where even he can aspire to no such poetry. He had a 
 wasted ministry here, so far as man could judge of it, 
 because he was for ever puttering at verses which could 
 command no circulation except by the anxious assiduity 
 of a blind man who made a pittance by their sale. An- 
 other man for several years sent to me by mail, as often 
 as about once a quarter, his poetic deliverances, printed 
 on tinted sheets at his own expense. Of their quality 
 what shall I say ? The old couplet in the Primer — 
 
 " In Adam's fall 
 We sinned all " — 
 
 is a gem in the comparison. 
 
 There is a man, who, like Dr. Griffin, because he 
 knows the difference between metaphysics and psy- 
 chology, imagines that intellectual philosophy is the 
 forte of his brain and the end of his creation ; while in 
 fact the elements of a popular orator are the constituents 
 of his nature, and those he despises. He wastes him- 
 self in attempts to settle the problems of the ages. 
 His book — the labor of his prime, and the darling of 
 his soul — is for sale at the bookstalls, on that shelf 
 which is so sad a monitor to aspiring authorship, the 
 shelf placarded with "Fifty Cents." Yet the pulpit, 
 if he would but lift his downcast eyelids to see it, would 
 be a throne to him. 
 
 One of the most successful preachers now laboring 
 in a city of the interior, when he left this seminary, 
 
LECT. VIII.] ERRORS IN SELF-ESTIMATE. 117 
 
 endeavored, earnestly to convince me that philosophical 
 study and authorship were the department in which lay 
 prospectively the design of liis creation. Not one of 
 his instructors shared that opinion. His scholastic life 
 had thrown a glamour around that group of studies, so 
 that, for the time, he saw nothing else. He did not 
 begin to be himself till the spell was broken by a reli- 
 gious awakening among his people. 
 
 Again : a man conceives that literary criticism, or the 
 study of languages, is his /orie; while in fact his most 
 valuable talents are colloquial. He wastes himself in 
 struggling after a place in reviews, or pining for a 
 professorship, when the place of honor for him, because 
 the place of richest usefulness, would be the pastoral 
 routine of a parish. 
 
 Another is persuaded, that, if he has any specialty 
 of fitness, it is to advance the Christian culture of the 
 more thoughtful and educated classes ; while in fact he 
 is only on a level with such classes. This deserves to be 
 noted as the most frequent error in self-estimate by a 
 certain minority of educated clergymen. Man}' such 
 preachers have culture enough, backed by natural force 
 enough, to go into classes of society below them, and 
 make their power felt there like a hydraulic engine. But 
 some of them waste themselves by aims at that which 
 they suppose to be the standard of pulpit eloquence in 
 cities. They do not understand why they are not more 
 thoroughly known by Providence, and by committees 
 of vacant metropolitan pulpits. It is astonishing how 
 many secret enemies such men have. Great is the mys- 
 tery of their life's trial. But the truth is, that the 
 church of a factory-village or a farming-town would 
 be more than the temple of Jerusalem to them in an 
 
118 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vm. 
 
 eternal estimate of their lives ; because, working on a 
 level below them, they could work with downright 
 power. 
 
 The mistake here indicated is one of the perils pecu- 
 liar to an educated clergy, — peculiar in degree, if not in 
 kind. No judgment is more hollow, none betokens more 
 ignorance of the philosophy of ministerial success, than 
 that sometimes cherished by a youthful preacher, that, 
 because he is an educated man, therefore he must min- 
 ister to educated men ; because he has acquired culti- 
 vated tastes, therefore his parish must consist of families 
 of cultivated tastes ; because he has become familiar 
 with refined society, and has acquired the manners of a 
 gentleman, therefore his pastoral charge should be in 
 refined society, and his manners should have gentlemen 
 to appreciate them. If Providence does not order his 
 lot by the law of intellectual and social affinity, the 
 cause of Christ suffers a mysterious waste of ministerial 
 usefulness, and he suffers a mysterious eclipse. The 
 man has not found his place, nor the place its man, till 
 each is adjusted to the other by the satisfaction of 
 mutual similitude. Like must minister to like. This 
 is what it amounts to when we put it into the most 
 charitable form of plain English. 
 
 I speak of this as a frequent error among young 
 preachers, the most frequent of all that concern the 
 topic before us. I am glad that my observation enables 
 me to testify, that, with rare exceptions, it is but a 
 youthful folly, outgrown in the tug of real life and 
 under the pressure of eternal things. I have known 
 but one instance in which it extended into a preacher's 
 middle life. 
 
 The truth is, that the error is oblivious of one of the 
 
LECT. viii.] THE LAW OF INFLUENCE. 119 
 
 plainest principles of ministerial success ; viz., that, to 
 achieve any thing worthy of the clerical office, a minis- 
 ter must work from above downward. The ministry 
 is something more than a profession in which a man is 
 struggling for a living, and a position among his equals. 
 It is a grander thing than all that, — a thing of God's 
 making. It is a power from God, or it is nothing to the 
 purpose. Its work is that of a superior on an inferior 
 mind. The law of gravitation bids a laboring man to 
 work down hill with his spade and his wheelbarrow, if 
 he can. That law is not more imperative than the 
 spiritual law which bids clerical influence to flow from 
 above downward. Thus regulated, all culture is avail- 
 able in a preacher's work. Nothing else is like it in 
 the range which it gives to the worker. The highest 
 culture finds its use in the lowliest labor. Often the 
 richest fruits of culture will be discovered in despised 
 spheres of effort. Mental discipline of the rarest finish 
 will find its reward in the exhaustion of its resources 
 upon ignorant and debased materials. 
 
 One of the most accomplished of our American mis- 
 sionaries spent her life in Africa. Her education, her 
 refinement, her tastes, her manners, would have graced 
 and elevated any metropolitan society. Yet her testi- 
 mony was, that she found use for them all in the Chris- 
 tianizing of savages. She was not conscious of one 
 wasted gift. She had no regrets over useless acquisi- 
 tions. Not a single accomplishment of her beautiful 
 youth — her drawing, her painting, her music — ever 
 lay idle. She was right in her judgment of herself 
 and her life's work. It will bear the test of eternity, 
 whatever this world may say of it. 
 
 The same principle applies to ministerial labor every- 
 
120 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. viii. 
 
 where. Locality and surroundings have very little to 
 do relatively with its prospect of results. No other 
 work is so absorbent in its power to appropriate to itself 
 all the resources which culture can bring to it, even in 
 its rudest and most unpromising forms, provided only 
 that culture be wise enough to be humble, and to labor 
 on something below its own level. \ The clerical hand, 
 if it is a cunning one, will be always reaching down- 
 ward in its activity. ' There is an infinite sadness in the 
 sight of a minister oY Christ turning from the level he 
 stands on to lift himself into the air above him, or strug- 
 gling horizontally on a stream that is level with his lips, 
 instead of being content to stand where he is sure of 
 his footing, and to work down upon the strata beneath 
 him. Any ignorance of himself which leads a man to 
 this inversion of his life's work may doom him to a bar- 
 ren and disappointed ministry. If in excej)tional cases 
 this result does not follow, it is because the providence 
 of God sometimes compassionately provides an inferior 
 work for the man when it is impossible to develop the 
 man to the best work of his opportunities. But such 
 adjustments are adjustments to the man's infirmities, 
 -not to his strength. He is never all that he might have 
 been. He is like the patriarch Lot, to whose whining 
 over the risk of climbing the mountain his guardian 
 angel gives way. 
 
 Details might be specified, if it were necessary, in 
 the work of the pulpit, in which there is sometimes a 
 certain proportion of waste, because energy is expended 
 in methods of preaching and styles in preaching (some- 
 times imitated methods and styles) which the preacher 
 can not execute well. It is a OTcat things for a man to 
 know what he can do. It is a greater thing to do that, 
 
LECT. Till.] MIS JUDGMENTS OF SELF. 121 
 
 and not something else, to aspire to it if a man is self- 
 distrustful, to come down to it if he is self-conceited, 
 to be content with it and grateful for it when he finds 
 it out. To have done any tiling in such a service is a 
 thing to be grateful for for ever. " Permitted to preach 
 the gospel seven months " is the epitaph on the tomb- 
 stone of an alumnus of this seminary, who died before 
 he had a parish of his own. It was placed there at his 
 dying request. 
 
 It is not always, I do not think it is generally, any 
 unusual defect of piety which leads to these distortions 
 of clerical life. It is chiefly the want of self-knowledge. 
 I mean that this is the weight which turns the scale 
 adversely to a man's usefulness. Whatever be his moral 
 delinquencies, if he is a man of genuine consecration at 
 heart, they will give way if they are not protected by 
 honest intellectual misjudgments. The moral growth, 
 on the other hand, is greatly expedited by the mental 
 rectitude, when once gained. Therefore I say, that, in 
 respect to the point before us, the chief want is the 
 want of a correct self-estimate. No matter how it is 
 gained, whether through the heart or through the brain, 
 the critical need is that of a full measurement of self in 
 comparison with other powers in the world, like that 
 which life in the business of the world very soon forces 
 upon a man of sense in reference to capacities for suc- 
 cess in the business of the world. For the want of this 
 gauging of one's self skillfully, the early years of min- 
 isterial life are often like those of a young landsman 
 before the mast. 
 
 Returning, now, from this excursus, and applying 
 these views to the main topic before us, let us observe 
 the bearing of a study of books upon the discovery of a 
 
122 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. viu. 
 
 man's own adaptations. We liave already given ample 
 space to the study of men as one expedient for a min- 
 ister's culture. We have now to observe, as tending 
 to the same result, the self-discipline which comes from 
 literary pursuits. Until a man knows a certain amount 
 of the work of the great minds in literature, he has no 
 adequate standard by which to gauge himself. 
 
 It has become a truism, that self-educated men are 
 but half educated. They are apt to blunder into errors 
 which the educated mind of the world has long ago 
 exploded. They announce as original discoveries that 
 which the history of opinion long ago recorded and as 
 long ago refuted. They seem to themselves to be origi- 
 nal in processes of mind which a better knowledge of 
 libraries would teach them are the common property 
 of thinkers. Much as a man gains from actual conflict 
 with living minds, he may gain much even of the same 
 kind of knowledge, though different in detail, from the 
 accumulated thinking of the past. No living genera- 
 tion can outweigh all the past. If books witliout expe- 
 rience in real life can not develop a man all around, 
 neither can life without books do it. ^'I'here is a certain 
 dignity of culture which lives only in the atmosphere 
 of libraries.* There is a breadth and a genuineness of 
 self-knowl^ge which one gets from the silent friendship 
 of great authors, without which the best work that is in 
 a man can not come out of him in large professional 
 successes. 
 
 Disraeli says, " The more extensive a man's knowl- 
 edge of what has been done, the greater will be his 
 power of knowing what to do." He adds substantially, 
 that those who do not read largely will not themselves 
 deserve to be read. This is doubly true in view of the 
 
LECT. viii.] SELF-APPRECIATION. 123 
 
 effect of reading upon a man's criticism of himself. 
 The whole class of romantic ambitions which have been 
 illustrated will almost surely disappear from a young 
 man's mental habits, if he gains the consciousness of 
 thorough scholarship in even one line of study. The 
 juvenility of such ambitions is discovered in the pro- 
 cess. The cost of their indulgence to a man's executive 
 force in a great practical profession takes its proper 
 place in his estimate of them. He learns the magnitude 
 of that which must be done to realize them by adding 
 any thing to that which has been done. One of the 
 unerring signs of this mental growth in a young man is 
 a certain sobering of tone in his judgment of himself, 
 which springs from an expansion of his studies. It is 
 to character what the ripening of colors is to painting. 
 The character is enriched by the very process which 
 subdues its exuberant confidence. This view is too well 
 known among educated men to need further expansion. 
 
 But there is another view, not so often recognized, 
 which deserves more attention than it receives. It is 
 that the study in question stimulates self-appreciation, 
 as well as represses self-conceit. You may learn for the 
 first time of the existence of certain powers within you, 
 from the awakening of those powers in response to the 
 similar gifts of other minds distinguished in literature. 
 Your own enthusiasm awakened by good models may 
 disclose to you susceptibilities and powers which you 
 never conjectured as existing within you. 
 
 Sir James Mackintosh gives it as the result of his 
 experience as an educator, that, with all the evils of 
 self-exaggeration among young men, the evils of self- 
 depreciation are greater. Among Christian young men 
 this certainly is true. Many young men are not suffi- 
 
124 ' MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. vm. 
 
 ciently aspiring. They do not aim at labors whicli are 
 within their reach, because they are not immediately 
 conscious of power to perform those labors. Nor will 
 they be conscious of it till some inspiration from without 
 awakens it in them. That inspiration often comes from 
 a simple extension of literary study. Give to yourself 
 a hearty, affectionate acquaintance with a group of the 
 ablest minds in Christian literature, and, if there is any 
 thing in you kindred to such minds, they will bring it 
 up to the surface of your own consciousness. You will 
 have a cheering sense of discovery. Quarries of thought 
 original to you will be opened. Suddenly, it may be, 
 in some choice hour of research, veins will glisten with 
 a luster richer than that of silver. You will feel a new 
 strength for your life's work, because you will be sen 
 sible of new resources. 
 
 There is no romance in these assertions. The only 
 peril in making them is, that the class of minds who 
 need them, and of whom they are true, are not the class 
 who will most readily appropriate them to themselves. 
 Still they express a truth, which, with all its perils, we 
 do right to accept, and apply with inspired adroitness, 
 saying, " Let him that readeth understand." 
 
 A very striking illustration of this kind of mental 
 awakening, on a large scale, from the study of literary 
 models, is found in the transition of European mind 
 from the middle to the later ages of the Christian era. 
 The dark ages, as we call them, followed the entire loss 
 of the Greek and Latin classics. The effect of that loss 
 was an almost entire oblivion of good models of literary 
 expression. The mind of the middle ages strove to 
 work alone : it began de novo the history of letters. The 
 consequence was the suppression, for the time, of the 
 
LECT. viii.] REVIVAL OF LETTERS. 125 
 
 natural genius of those ages. It never rose from that 
 depression till the ancient literatures were recovered. 
 
 Gasparin of Barziza, one of not more than three or 
 four minds to whom is due the credit of starting the 
 revival of the ancient classics, says that he gave himself 
 to the study of Cicero till his own instinct was devel- 
 oped within him, by which he could judge of the Latin 
 language, and till his own power to use the language 
 grew to maturity under that single discipline. The 
 study of one author developed him to his maturity. It 
 was the recovery of the Greek and Roman treasures 
 which stimulated the awakening of the genius of the 
 middle ages, as it was the loss of them which had 
 originally depressed it, and enslaved it to vitiated tastes. 
 What is true of national minds. i&- as true of individuals 
 and of orders of public men. / Let the ministry be igno- 
 rant of the best authors of the past, and their own 
 powers will lie undeveloped in proportion to the depth 
 of that ignorance. ' Lift them out of such ignorance, 
 and their own poWers receive an original impulse in 
 proportion to the extent and the depth of their scholar- 
 ship. 
 
 It is one object, then, of a pastor's study of literature, 
 to reduce and to elevate his estimate of his own powers. 
 The object is to restrain and to stimulate, to check and 
 to cheer. If a man is inclined to see himself at either 
 end of the telescope, the right study of models of lit- 
 erary excellence will act as a corrective, and give him 
 his natural eyesight. I know of nothing else that is 
 better fitted to give temper to a young man's criticisms 
 of his own productions, so that his judgment shall be 
 calm and clear, as keen as steel, and yet as true, than 
 a large acquaintance with those works which have 
 become monumental in Christian literature. 
 
126 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. viii. 
 
 To recapitulate, and to distinguish clearly the four 
 objects which we have now considered, I observe that 
 the first, the discovery of the principles of taste, will 
 tend to make a correct writer ; the second, the famil- 
 iarity with those principles, will tend to make a natu- 
 ral writer ; the third, assimilation to the genius of the 
 best authors, will tend to make an original writer ; 
 and the fourth, a just estimate of his own powers, will 
 tend to make both a modest and a courageous writer. 
 In other words, the first develops a man's literary per- 
 ceptions; the second, his literary skill; the third, his 
 literary genius ; the fourth, his good sense in literary 
 aims. 
 
LECTURE IX. 
 
 SELECTION OF AUTHORS FOR PASTORAL STUDY. — 
 PRELIMINARY HINTS. — CONTROLLING MINDS IN 
 LITERARY HISTORY. 
 
 2d, We have thus far considered the objects of a 
 pastor's study of literature. The second thing to be 
 regarded in that study is the selection of authors. 
 
 Rogers the essayist remarks that " a very useful book 
 might be written on the art of reading books, if we 
 could get a Leibnitz or a Gibbon to compose it." True : 
 yet the reading of the majority of educated men must 
 be governed so much by circumstances which can not 
 be controlled by any theory of scholarship, that I think 
 the hints which are necessary on the subject must be 
 susceptible of very flexible application. Scarcely any 
 subject of professional inquiry is less capable of rule. 
 Of the principles which concern it, two preliminaries 
 need to be first remarked. The first is, that in practice 
 these principles will cross and qualify each other. Any 
 one of them alone would be one-sided and impracti- 
 cable. They must be considered singly, yet applied 
 collectively ; and each must be subjected to limitations 
 by the others. Otherwise, as literary advice, they 
 would be nonsense. 
 
 The second preliminary is a repetition, for the sake 
 of emphasis, of a remark already made in the preface of 
 
 127 
 
128 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. tx. 
 
 this volume, and which will be treated more at length 
 in the sequel, — that, at the best, scholarly principles of 
 selection can suggest only an ideal of a pastor's use of 
 books, which must be in many cases theoretic, but out 
 of which each man may obtain the elements for forming 
 his own. Some can use more of it than others. 
 
 I have hesitated whether to venture at all upon the 
 question of a pastor's selection of books, I am so well 
 aware that practically that selection can seldom, if ever, 
 satisfy a scholarly ideal. But to make any selection 
 wisely, of even a few volumes, a pastor must have a 
 scholar's ideal in mind : therefore I attempt it, trusting 
 to your good sense to see the limitations and qualifi- 
 cations which the condition of your life's work render 
 necessary. One book which deserves a scholar's read- 
 ing is worth for a pastor's discipline a dozen of inferior 
 quality. 
 
 (1) With these preliminaries in mind, let it be first 
 observed that we must put out of our account of lit- 
 erature vicious and worthless books. A book may be 
 vicious in literary influence, which is not immoral. It 
 may foster false principles of taste, and minister to 
 degraded conceptions of scholarship. A book may be 
 worthless, which has no positive power for evil. A 
 book which is a negative quantity in the sum total of 
 our acquisitions is a worthless book. Menzel, in his 
 history of German literature, says, "Bad books have 
 their season, as vermin have. They come in swarms, 
 and perish before we are aware. How many thousands 
 of books have gone the way of all paper, or are now 
 moldering in our libraries ! " 
 
 We make a stride of advance into the heart of a 
 seemingly unconquerable library when we have accus- 
 
LECT. IX.] DEAD AND LIVING BOOKS. 129 
 
 tomed our minds to the reality of bad books in that 
 which goes by the name of literature. Books false in 
 principle, corrupt in taste, effeminate in influence, or 
 negative in all that respects high culture, are to be 
 found in all our large collections. There are books 
 which once had some force for good or ill, but which 
 the world has outlived. A man has no more use for 
 them now than for an Arabic work on alchemy or 
 magic. Hundreds of such volumes are to be reckoned 
 in all libraries which are reckoned by thousands. 
 There are folios of commentary on the Scriptures, 
 works in criticism, works in philosophy, which have 
 been displaced bodily in the living thought of mankind, 
 and which will never be resuscitated except by anti- 
 quarian curiosity. 
 
 That which De Quincey calls the " knowledge-litera- 
 ture " of the world, as distinct from the " power-litera- 
 ture," is incessantly changing : it is constantly retiring 
 to the attics and lofts and inaccessible shelves of libra- 
 ries, unread and forgotten. Later knowledge must 
 for ever crowd back into oblivion the earlier. Such is 
 the law of progress. If a displaced literature is re- 
 stored by antiquarian research, it is of no use ; for, as 
 Horace Walpole says, " What signifies raising the dead 
 so often, when they die again the next minute ? " 
 
 We need, then, to begin our studies with an agile 
 effort of good sense to distinguish between books which 
 are living literature, and books which are dead. Do not 
 revere every thing which appears between two muslin 
 covers. Remember Charles Lamb's demand for "books 
 which are books." It is a partial relief from the night- 
 mare which one feels in the vision of a huge library, to 
 remember that there is a vast multitude of volumes, as 
 
130 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 comely as any to the eye, and as tempting to the bibli- 
 ographer, which are not living literature in any scholarly 
 sense of the term or for any scholarly use in real life. 
 We can no more use them for the purposes of a living 
 civilization than we can use mastodons and ichthyosauri 
 as beasts of burden. 
 
 Further : we need not adopt any very limited range of 
 the term " literature " in order to rid ourselves of them. 
 We need not be so chary of the title as to withhold it, 
 as Professor Henry Reed does, from professional and 
 technical and sectarian books. A much more liberal 
 policy than this will serve the purpose ; for the works 
 to which I refer, as related to scholarly culture, are 
 useless to us in any way whatever. No profession, or 
 art, or sect is served by them. They are not models 
 of any thing but ignorance, or vicious taste, or self- 
 conceit, or puerile fiction, or exj^loded and superannu- 
 ated science. They are the paralytic literature of the 
 world. It mumbles to us in thickened speech, and 
 with distorted visage. Let us cover up its deformity 
 compassionately, and pass on. 
 
 I do not pause to specify more narrowly what these 
 volumes are, because practically our exclusion of them 
 is necessitated by other principles of selection, even 
 more imperatively. It is essential, however, that this 
 principle be firmly lodged in our minds at the threshold 
 of our advance, — that we must not read, even in a 
 cursory way, every book we happen to lay our hands 
 on, nor look with awe upon every volume we have to 
 strain our eyes to see in our libraries. 
 
 (2) A second principle of selection is, that we must 
 abandon the idea of universal scholarship. The Hon. 
 Mr. Toombs of Georgia is reported to have once said 
 
LECT. EX.] UNIVERSAL SCHOLARSHIP. 131 
 
 that he could carry the treasury of the Confederate 
 States of America in his hat. Probably it could have 
 been put into less space than that. So, I suppose, the 
 time must have been when all extant literature could 
 have been committed to memory, and covered by one 
 hat. But it is a truism which we often seem to forget, 
 that no man can perform that achievement now. 
 
 The idea of literary omniscience long ago became a 
 fable. It was true when foxes talked with hares, and 
 frogs were erudite philosophers. Comparatively speak- 
 ing, no very large portion of the literature now stored 
 in the world's libraries can be known to any one mind. 
 It is the cant of literature which makes pretensions to 
 the contrary. Division of labor is nowhere more im- 
 peratively demanded than in scholarly reading. The 
 wisest scholar of the age must be content to die in 
 ignorance of the greater part of what other men have 
 known, and to possess an equal proportion of that 
 which he does know only at second-hand. 
 
 It is the right of every pupil in any branch of learning 
 to receive cautiously the oracles which professors are 
 apt to give, I must confess, more authoritatively than 
 their own acquisitions justly warrant. A single fact 
 speaks more than a homily on this point : it is, that the 
 mechanical process of reading those books which are or 
 have been the standard literature of their times would 
 require more than three thousand years. Such is the 
 estimate of a respectable English critic. If Homer had 
 begun the labor at twenty years of age, and read till 
 this time, he would still have had two hundred and 
 fifty years of it before him. If Plato had been set to 
 the task by the immortal gods of Greece, he would not 
 by this time have got beyond the discovery of America. 
 
132 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 Dante and Racine and Goethe and Shakspeare would 
 still be unknown to him ; and Wordsworth and Bryant 
 and Longfellow he would never have heard of. 
 
 It is evident, then, how little of the wisdom of the 
 past any living man can know within the limits of one 
 lifetime. This conviction forces itself upon extensive 
 readers sooner or later. It is well to admit it " sooner " 
 rather than " later." Robert Southey, one of the most 
 voluminous readers that England has ever produced, 
 at the age of fifty years writes : " After all, knowledge 
 is not the one thing needful. Provided that we can 
 get contentedly through the world, and to heaven at 
 last, the sum of all the knowledge which we can collect 
 by the way is infinitely more insignificant than I like 
 to acknowledge in my own heart." 
 
 What, then, should be the influence of this impossi- 
 bility of universal scholarship upon our literary plans ? 
 I answer in three particulars. One effect of it should 
 be to prevent our wasting ourselves in impracticable 
 plans of study. Every young man should take the 
 measure of his time, his physical health, his degree of 
 independence of other avocations, and specially his 
 power of mental appropriation. Then his plans of 
 reading should be adjusted accordingly. No other one 
 habit is so unproductive to a student as that of omnivo- 
 rous reading. The space which such a reader traverses 
 in libraries is no evidence of his culture. The most 
 useless men living are the bookworms who are nothing 
 more. There are men who devour books because they 
 are books. They read as if they fancied that the me- 
 chanical process of trotting doggedly through libraries 
 were the great business of a life of culture. Such men 
 can not possess sound learning. 
 
LECT. IX.] RESTRICTIONS OF STUDY. 133 
 
 ^ A writer in "The Edinburgh Review" very justly 
 \ satirizes them as " entitled only to the praise of being 
 very artificially and elaborately ignorant. They differ 
 from the utterly uncultivated, only as a parrot who 
 talks without understanding what he says differs from 
 a parrot who can not talk at all " You have made 
 a great discovery when you have found out what is 
 and what is not practicable to yourself. Carlyle, ad- 
 [ dressing the students of the University of Edinburgh, 
 1 said to them : " It is the first of all problems for a man 
 ; to find out what kind of work he 's to do in this uni- 
 verse." So is it the first of problems in the details of 
 a scholar's life to find out what he can do. To attempt 
 impracticable plans of reading is one of the most dis- 
 couraging of literary mistakes. It leads many young 
 men every year to abandon all hope of a scholarly life. 
 Another effect of the fact before us should be to pre- 
 vent our minds from acting feverishly under the neces- 
 sary limitations of our reading. "VVe should submit to 
 the literary privations of our lot gracefully. No man 
 will do his best in literary effort till he can work con- 
 tentedly. Our early efforts are often inflamed by a 
 certain heat of blood which indicates a chafing of the 
 spirit against the restrictions of time and sense and 
 finite faculties. That is a bad absorbent of literary 
 energy. We must rid ourselves of it. We must aban- 
 don the ambition, which Fontenelle says he indolged in 
 early life, " of driving all the sciences abreast." At the 
 basis of our culture, in this respect as in others, we 
 should lay our religious principle. By prayer, if need 
 . be, bring your mind into a state of contentment with 
 the limitations of human knowledge, and of your own in 
 particular. You have made some progress in the culture 
 
f 
 
 134 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 of a manly habit of study, if, with an earnest sense of 
 the dignity of an educated life, you can spend an hour 
 alone in a large library, and can come out of it with a 
 perfectly equable and happy resolution in your own 
 life's work. 
 
 Says the late Professor Reed of Philadelphia, " It is a 
 bewildering thing to stand in the midst of a vast con- 
 course of books. It is oppressive to conceive what a 
 world of human thought and human passion is dwelling 
 on the silent paper, how much of wisdom is ready to 
 make its entrance into the mind that is prepared to wel- 
 come it. It is mournful to think that the multitudinous 
 oracles should be dumb to us." Who of us does not 
 understand this mourning over inaccessible knowledge ? 
 Yet we have no reason to mourn. The restrictions 
 upon our knowledge are a part of our discipline ; and, 
 as we have seen, discipline, not accumulation, is the 
 great object of a scholarly life, as it is of every life. 
 
 Gibbon was one of the most laborious of readers ; yet 
 he says, " We should attend, not so much to the order 
 of our books as of our thoughts. The perusal of a 
 work gives birth to ideas. I pursue those ideas, and 
 quit my plan of reading." Gibbon in this remark hits 
 the vital point. "^A book is valuable for the ideas it 
 starts in the mind, rather than for those it puts thereJ 
 The book depends more on what you bring to it than 
 on any thing you take from it. No knowledge is of 
 vital moment to a man, which is not thus reproductive 
 within him, which does not, in some sense, work itself 
 into character. Of knowledge we need so much, and 
 only so much, as we can assimilate to ourselves in some 
 form of character. If to possess less than that is a. 
 misfortune, to possess more is no blessing. The mind's 
 
LECT. IX.] POWERS OF CONTROL. 135 
 
 capacities can be no more than full. We have no more 
 reason to mourn over unconquerable departments of 
 knowledge than over inaccessible planets and angelic 
 travels. Contented with our literary limits, we can 
 advance to our life's work buoyantly. 
 
 The tliird effect of the view we have taken should be, 
 that we should regard a choice selection of volumes as 
 the first step to success. This is obvious. We should 
 make an elaborate selection of the best only. If we 
 can read but one volume in a year, let that one be wor- 
 thy of a scholar's ideal of good reading, all the more so 
 because it is but one. Our chief peril is that of allow- 
 ing ourselves to be impelled by the pressure of our pro- 
 fessional avocations down an inclined plane, from the 
 scholarly upland to which our collegiate training lifted 
 us, to a level so low that no scholarly eye can recognize 
 us fraternally. Read only the best, therefore. Then 
 the whole remaining literature of the world should be 
 as irrelevant to any purpose of ours as the cinders of 
 the library of Alexandria. 
 
 (3) The thkd principle of selection should be, that 
 we rank first in our estimate those authors who have 
 been controlling powers in literature ; not necessarily 
 first in the order of time in our reading ; not, indeed, 
 that we must read all of them at any time ; not, as we 
 shall see in the sequel, that all of us must read any of 
 them outside of our own vernacular, but that we should 
 mentally give them the first rank, in point of intrinsic 
 worth, as models of the noblest culture. What we do 
 read we should select and read under the elevating 
 influence of this recognition of what is the best. 
 
 In stating this principle, I purposely speak of our 
 estimate of literature, rather than of our personal study 
 
136 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 of it, because the exigencies of professional life will 
 not permit every pastor to read largely in this regal 
 literature of all the ages. Because Homer was in one 
 sense the father of all poetry, it does not follow that 
 every pastor in Oregon, and every missionary in Africa, 
 should read Homer. We shall return to this qualifica- 
 tion again in a future lecture : at present it is sufficient 
 to note that we should rank the authors in question as 
 the first in our scholarly judgment. 
 
 Taking the standard literatures of the world together, 
 there is a groujD of names which all scholarly judgment 
 has placed at the fountain-head of the streams of thought 
 which those literatures represent. They are the origi- 
 nals of all that cultivated mind has revered in letters. 
 They have been powers of control. The world of mind 
 has recognized them as such. Their names, therefore, 
 float on the current of all times. In any enlightened 
 age and country they become known to schoolboys. 
 Several suggestions respecting them deserve notice. 
 
 First, They are not numerous. In any one of the 
 standard literatures of the race you can number this 
 order of imperial minds on the fingers of one hand. In 
 the Hebrew literature, not more than three ; in the 
 classic Greek, not more than three ; in the Hellenistic 
 Greek, only two ; in the Roman, possibly two ; in the 
 Italian, only one ; in the French, less than that ; in the 
 Arabic, the Spanish, the Scandinavian literatures, none ; 
 in the German, only three; and in the English, but 
 four. 
 
 Of course, opinions would differ in the assignment of 
 individuals to groups so small as these ; but they would 
 not differ as to the main assertion. I do not assume to 
 speak ex cathedra on this matter. I have sought to 
 
LECT. IX.] FRENCH LITEEATURE. 137 
 
 enlighten my own judgment by correspondence with 
 scholarly readers in several departments in which they 
 are acknowledged experts. I discard, also, as I have 
 remarked before, the technical restriction of the term 
 " literature " by which philosophy and science are ex- 
 cluded. That restriction is not germane to the purpose 
 now in view. An original philosopher, for instance, 
 may give character to a nation's thought for centuries 
 with such authority that no technically " literary " au- 
 thor shall equal or approach him as a national power. 
 It is the great poivers over national thought that we 
 seek to discover in such an estimate as the one now 
 before us. As the result, therefore, of the means of 
 judgment which I possess, I should reckon the world's 
 royal names in literature as follows ; viz., in the Hebrew 
 tongue,^^loses^JDiividj3n^^ ; in the classic Greek, 
 
 Hpmerj Pla^o, and Aristotle ; in the Hellenistic Greek, 
 St. Paul and St^John ; in the Roman, Cigero andVirgil ; 
 in the Italian, Dante. 
 
 In the French I have said, "less than one," because 
 no mind among French scholars has, so far as I can 
 discover, exerted a formative and permanent influence 
 outside of France itself. Some critics would name 
 Voltaire among the first class of authorship ; but his 
 influence outside of France has been short-lived. Even 
 among his own countrymen, I am informed that few 
 French authors of equal eminence are so little read 
 to-day. Scarcely any works of solid French literature 
 find so poor a sale as those of Voltaire. His fame and 
 his influence were at their height among his contempo- 
 raries, and have been steadily declining ever since his 
 last triumphant entrance into Paris, shortly before his 
 decease. The ruling influence of France in modern 
 
138 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 civilization has been in politics more than in literature. 
 If Descartes deserves a place in so select a group as I 
 have in mind, I confess that my imperfect knowledge of 
 his writings and of the opinion of experts about them 
 does not qualify me to affirm it, and perhaps I ought 
 not therefore to deny it. Let my impression pass for 
 what it is worth. 
 
 The Arabic, the Spanish, and the Scandinavian litera- 
 tures have all of them fallen into the second and third 
 ranks of authorship. In the German I should follow 
 the general voice of German critics in selecting the 
 names of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant. In the English, 
 after much hesitation, I assign the first rank to Chau- 
 cer, Shakspeare, Bacon, and Wordsworth, — to Chaucer 
 as the historic head of English poetry, to Bacon for 
 his influence on the national mind of England in all 
 departments of thought, to Wordsworth as having revo- 
 lutionized English poetic tastes, and to Shakspeare as 
 the "myriad-minded," the poet of all times and nations. 
 I hesitate in excluding the name of Milton ; and many 
 would dissent from the position which I assign to 
 Wordsworth. But for this I have the authority of 
 Coleridge. It may interest you to know that one of the 
 most accomplished critics in our own country, to whom 
 this classification has been submitted, added to the 
 English quadrilateral the name of Hawthorne as being 
 an absolute and solitary original in English letters. 
 
 The main point, however, to be noted, is that all 
 scholarly opinion would limit the authors of the first 
 rank in literary influence upon national mind to very 
 few in number. The marvels of genius are like cen- 
 tury-plants. Ages of mediocrity often separate them. 
 They are elect spirits, and generally they are given 
 only to elect nations. 
 
LECT. rx.] PERPETUITY OP LITERATURE. 139 
 
 This suggests, further, that these authors of the first 
 class claim their rank by virtue of their power over 
 other literature. They have given to national litera- 
 tures their great impulses of development. Their 
 names mark epochs of growth. They have been awak- 
 ening powers. Multitudes of other great minds, who 
 but for these would never have been great, have been 
 aroused by these the greater. We can not appreciate 
 the other literature of the world without knowing the 
 creative power of these few originals. No man knows 
 well the Greek development of mind, who does not 
 know Homer and Plato. No man knows the Italian 
 graft upon the Latin stock, who does not know Dante. 
 No man knows the ripening of Christian civilization 
 in the English mind, who does not know Chaucer and 
 Bacon. And no man can judge profoundly of all the 
 existing drifts of culture, who does not know, or who 
 refuses to recognize as literature, the writings of David 
 and Isaiah and St. Paul. This liistoric position of a 
 very few names along the line of the world's advance- 
 ment would be sufficient to attract attention to them, 
 as the first in rank of representatives of what the mind 
 of the race has thought and felt and expressed in liter- 
 ary forms. 
 
 Again : these authors of the first order claim their 
 position by reason of the perpetuity of their influence- 
 They live while others die. All poetry feels to this 
 day the impulse of Homer: all philosophy feels the 
 impulse of Plato. German literature abounds with 
 commentaries on Shakspeare, and calls him inspired. 
 No Italian scholar becomes eminent in any department 
 of thought, without paying tribute to Dante. No 
 modern thinker in Europe or America climbs to pre- 
 
140 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 eminence as a power with his contemporaries, except 
 on the ladder which Bacon has erected. Everywhere 
 those minds which represent most prophetically the 
 literature of the future are those which are most pro- 
 foundly imbued with the literature of the Hebrews. 
 Wordsworth, speaking of the ancient classic literatures, 
 says, " We have appropriated them all ; " and of Mil- 
 ton he says, " He was a Hebrew in soul." 
 
 This immortality of the few royal minds of the past 
 is the ultimate test of their authority. Nothing else 
 proves a thing as time does. Nothing else gives author- 
 ity like the unanimity of ages. It is not safe for a 
 young man to dissent from such authority as this. It 
 is virtually the voice of the common sense of mankind. 
 Says Coleridge, " Presume those to be the best the 
 reputation of which has been matured into fame by the 
 consent of ages." If there is any truth in universal 
 convictions, every mind that is intent on scholarly 
 culture will sooner or later seek its most enduring 
 impulses, directly or indirectly, from those few ideals 
 which the common consent has pronounced the grand- 
 est, the most symmetrical, and the most intense. That 
 is a foolish waste in one's policy of study which leads 
 one needlessly to sacrifice those ideals by expending 
 one's enthusiasm on their inferiors. 
 
 Yet it should be observed that in the study of this 
 class of authors, with the exception of the inspired 
 writers, we do not seek direct contributions to our pro- 
 fessional labors. We do not seek to appropriate their 
 contents bodily, but their scholarly influence* We are 
 not ferreting out examples for imitation. ^^Ve are not 
 preparing to quote Homer in our sermons, nor to preach 
 Lord Bacon or Shakspeare. The weakest possible 
 
LECT. IX.] GREAT MEN NOT SCHOOLMEN. 141 
 
 preaching may be that in which our study of these 
 authors is visible. They are to exist in our own work 
 only by the transfusion of their genius into our own 
 mental character. \ We seek to be mentally uplifted by 
 them. The least significant part of their usefulness to 
 us will appear in the form of quotation. Indeed, one 
 of the perils of extensive reading, to be watched and 
 shunned, is that of excessive extract from other authors. 
 Avoid a mania for quotation: a great deal of literary 
 cant appears in that form. You will soon note in your 
 reading two classes of authors who quote little. They 
 are those who are the most original, and those who are 
 the most profoundly sincere. 
 
 Further : the study of this first class of authors has 
 a special tendency to promote independence of provin- 
 cial narrowness in our culture. The secret of the 
 perpetuity of their power is, that they are universal in 
 their adaptations. They appeal to and they represent 
 elements which are innate in human nature. They are 
 independent of sect, or class, or school. Hence comes 
 their literary autocracy. Schools may have grown out 
 of them, but they were never schoolmen. They did 
 not aim to found schools. No man was ever less of a 
 Platonist, in the sense of a Platonic partisan, than Plato 
 himself ; no man was ever less of a Baconian, in the 
 scholastic sense, than Bacon himself. What schools of 
 poetry did Homer and Shakspeare found? Schools 
 grow up with smaller minds. They would be as offen- 
 sive to those whose names they bear as the apostolic , 
 sects were to Cephas and St. Paul. 
 
 A preacher, therefore, by drinking in the spirit of 
 such authors, imbibes a constitutional antidote to con- 
 tracted tastes, to narrow opinions, and to cramped 
 
142 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix 
 
 methods of working. Let a young scholar drink deep 
 at these fountain-heads of power, or absorb their influ- 
 ence from the atmosphere around him, and he must do 
 violence to his whole scholarly nature if he becomes a 
 bigot or a cynic. You will discover, if you take pains 
 to observe it, that often purely theological extremes 
 and distortions of opinion are corrected or forestalled 
 by a purely literary culture. Such are the affinities 
 of all truth with all truth, that breadth of culture any- 
 where tends to produce breadth of culture everywhere. 
 Who, as a rule, are the most liberal thinkers in theol- 
 ogy ? In whom do you find the most evenly balanced 
 faith? Are they not the men of profound and en- 
 larged literary sympathies ? On the other hand, if you 
 find a preacher who holds and tries to preach an im- 
 practicable dogma which outrages the common sense of 
 men, can you not affirm safely beforehand that he is a 
 man of contracted readhig ? He knows little or noth- 
 ing of the great creators of the world's thought in 
 libraries. When, for example, I hear that a celebrated 
 English preacher has been heard to say that the reason 
 why God permits the wicked to live is that " He knows 
 they are to be damned, and is willing to let them have 
 a little pleasure first," I know without inquiry that that 
 preacher is not a man of books. I venture to affirm 
 that he has never read Spenser's " Faerie Queene." 
 It is doubtful whether he could with a clear conscience 
 read Shakspeare. Such a ferocious notion in theology 
 never could survive contact with the regal order of 
 minds in literature, even the most remote from theo- 
 logic thought. It is the property of a little mind, fed 
 by little minds, and sympathetic with no other. 
 
 To these suggestions it should be added, that, to 
 
LECT. IX.] WASTEFUL BEADING. 143 
 
 these authors of the first rank, inferior literature should 
 be largely sacrificed. The chief peril of a preacher in 
 his reading is suggested by this remark : it is that he will 
 devote a disproportionate amount of time to ephemeral 
 books. We are apt to sacrifice the great powers of lit- 
 erature, not of design, but by neglect. The reading 
 of the majority of educated men, I think, is wasteful. 
 We read newspapers and magazines indiscriminately. 
 What do we want to know of the murder in North 
 Street last night, or the forgery in State Street last 
 week? William Prescott the historian used to in- 
 struct liis secretary, in reading to him the morning 
 newspaper, never to read about an accident or a crime. 
 He applied to his newspaper the same eclectic econo- 
 my of time which he practised in exploring the Spanish 
 archives. 
 
 Stern self-discipline should adjust the proportion of 
 our reading. It is well to read such an author as Car- 
 lyle ; but by what right do we neglect for his sake 
 such writers as Bacon and Milton ? It is well enough 
 to know Byron as the representative of a certain phase 
 of English poetry; but what principle of scholarly 
 policy justifies our sacrifice to him of such an author 
 as Dante ? What axiom of economy leads a preacher 
 to buy Hood's poems, when he is too poor to own a 
 copy of Shakspeare? or to purchase the works of 
 Thomas Moore, when he can not afford to own Words- 
 worth? Who can, without a twinge of scholarly con- 
 science, spend an hour a day over the newspapers of the 
 week, when he has never opened even a translation of 
 Schiller ? If I am rightly informed, merchants in active 
 business do not feel able to spare half of that time for 
 their morning paper. Is the accumulation of money 
 
144 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. ix. 
 
 of SO much more value than tlie accumulation of brains ? 
 In these suggestions, however, I have in mind the habits 
 of a healthy scholar, not those which disease has de- 
 moralized. 
 
 I once took up from a student's table a book of three 
 hundred duodecimo pages on the culture of poultry. 
 I took occasion to ascertain from him afterwards that he 
 had never read a page of Spenser's " Faerie Queene," 
 and he did not know who wrote the " Canterbury Tales." 
 On another occasion I took from the shelf of a young 
 pastor's library a book of nearly equal dimensions with 
 the other, on the breeding and training of horses. Pos- 
 sibly a cramped salary may compel a pastor to own such 
 a book, as his wife must own a cookery-book ; yet in 
 the case in question there was no such economic neces- 
 sity, and I learned from that pastor that he had never 
 been able to " wade through," as he expressed it, a his- 
 tory of the Reformation. What busmess has an edu- 
 cated man, not pressed by the necessities of poverty, 
 to be plodding through the literature of the farmyard 
 when three-quarters of Westminster Abbey are unknown 
 to him? 
 
 An earnest scholar will sacrifice much that is useful 
 in inferior literature, if his knowledge of it must be 
 purchased at the cost of acquaintance with names which 
 must outlive it a hundred years. Dr. Arnold saj^s, 
 " As a general rule, never read the works of any ordi- 
 nary man except on scientific matters, or when they 
 contain simple matters of fact. Even on matters of 
 fact, silly and ignorant men, however honest, require 
 to be read with constant suspicion ; whereas great men 
 are always instructive, even amidst much of error. In 
 general, I hold it to be certain that the truth is to be 
 
LECT. IX.] BIBLIOMANIA. 145 
 
 found in the great men, and the error in the little ones." 
 Pascal said that he had left off reading the Jesuits, 
 because, if he had continued it, he must have "read a 
 great many indifferent books." 
 
 Once more : not merely worthless literature should 
 be sacrificed, but, for the sake of the best, we must 
 sacrifice much which would be very valuable to us if 
 we had not the best. Pliny said that no book had ever 
 been written which did not contain something profitable 
 to a reader. Leibnitz and Gibbon, both of them vora- 
 cious readers, expressed the same opinion. One of the 
 most rapid and voluminous readers and writers of our 
 own day once told me that he had never read a book 
 which did not give him some new thought. 
 
 These judgments, with qualifications, are true ; yet 
 they do not justify that bibliomania which leads a man 
 to seize upon the book which lies nearest to him, because 
 it is a book," and because something or other can be got 
 from it. We must sacrifice a great many good books. 
 We must let go our hold upon much which would be a 
 model to us if we had no better. We must force our 
 way grimly through the heaps of them which bestrew 
 our path in order to reach the smaller but weightier 
 heap which lies beyond. Otherwise we shall be very 
 large readers of comparatively small thought. Our 
 culture will suffer from a plethora of little books. The 
 after-clap of their reading will be more distressing than 
 that of the little book in the Apocalypse. 
 
LECTURE X. 
 
 SELECTION OF AUTHORS, CONTINUED. — PREDOMI- 
 NANCE OF THE ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Before proceeding to consider other principles bear- 
 ing upon a pastor's study of books for homiletic culture, 
 let a moment be given to a plausible objection to the 
 principle already advanced, that we should exalt to the 
 first rank the few controlling minds in the world's 
 literatures. It is urged that that principle would prac- 
 tically doom a pastor to reading nothing but the ancient 
 classics, or at best to waste himself on dead or foreign 
 languages. 
 
 I have in the sequel much to say of the practicability 
 of literary study to a pastor. But for the present, and 
 in application to the point in hand, I answer, The objec- 
 tion is often a valid one. Therefore I have said that 
 we should rank first in our estimate of literature the 
 authors of first rank. Then we should read them, if 
 we can. This is the practical summary of the principle 
 before us. But, further, it is not impracticable for the 
 majority of pastors in active service to know the lead- 
 ing authors in foreign literatures through translations. 
 The prejudice against translations is not sensible. It 
 was originated when literature was less voluminous, 
 than now. Ralph Waldo Emerson reads translations, 
 and respects them. His reading would have been 
 
 146 
 
LECT. X.] BEADING TRANSLATIONS. 147 
 
 restricted vastly, if he had not done so. Who sup- 
 poses that he gets his quotations from the originals of 
 the Veda and of Confucius ? 
 
 It is not impracticable, then, for the majority of pas- 
 tors to read translations of Homer and Plato. It is 
 not impossible to own, and to read in some vacation, so 
 readable and so portable a book as Carey's " Dante." 
 For the intrinsic value of Dante's "Inferno," let me 
 cite the opinion of Mr. Prescott the historian. He 
 says that he deems it " a fortunate thing for the world 
 that the first poem of modern times should have been 
 founded on a subject growing out of the Christian reli- 
 gion, and written by a man penetrated with the spirit 
 of its sternest creed. Its influence on literature has 
 been almost as remarkable as that of Christianity itself 
 on the moral world." It surely is an irreparable loss 
 to the culture of a preacher to remain through life igno- 
 rant of such a poem. So of Goethe's " Faust " and 
 Schiller's " Robbers." Coleridge's translation of Schil- 
 ler's " Wallenstein " and the " Piccolomini " would pro- 
 mote a double purpose by giving you German classics 
 in splendid English poetry. One might select twenty 
 or thirty volumes of English translations which would 
 give to a hard-worked pastor, not by any means a mas- 
 terly knowledge, but a very useful and usable knowl- 
 edge, of the best authors in the great literatures of the 
 world outside of the English tongue. 
 
 Again : it is not impracticable for all pastors to 
 exercise the spirit of this principle in the selection of 
 authors of our own language. Every educated man 
 can read and enjoy the great writers in English litera- 
 ture. We can spend our time on these rather than on 
 the little ones. In doing this we may reaUy imbibe 
 
148 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x. 
 
 mucli of the best literary culture of all times and coun- 
 tries. The great authors of England have fed upon 
 the ancient and the modern continental literatures of 
 Europe. Wordsworth was right when he said, " We 
 have reproduced all that." He was right to this ex- 
 tent, that English literature has reproduced in Christian 
 forms the best of all that Pagan literature ever was. 
 
 (4) The principles of selection in literary study 
 already discussed need to be qualified by a fourth 
 principle, which is, that, in our choice of authors, the 
 literature of the English language should predominate. 
 You have no reason to think meanly of your acquisi- 
 tions, or to apologize for them, if they are limited to 
 your mother-tongue. In the majority of cases a pas- 
 tor's reading will be limited thus, be his theory of read- 
 ing what it may. In such a case he has no reason to 
 be ashamed of the necessity. This view is contested 
 by good critics ; and I approach it with a sense of the 
 difficulty of expressing to you what I believe to be the 
 exact truth, without being misunderstood. Yet my 
 conviction is the growth of years, that, if there is one 
 peril greater than another to our scholarly habits, it is 
 that of doing injustice to the literature of England. 
 Intense as our national spirit is in other respects, it 
 does not rise to the level of the birthright we possess 
 as inheritors of the treasures in the English tongue. 
 
 In a discussion of the subject, we have to encounter, 
 in the first place, a prejudice which attributes superiority 
 to whatever is foreign. The distant, the strange, the 
 unknown, the half-known, awes a cultivated mind often 
 as it does the rudest. We are apt to stand agape at 
 the wisdom locked up in a foreign speech, as children 
 do in listening to foreign conversation. Did you never 
 
LECT. X.] THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 149 
 
 experience this? I must confess to having stood mo- 
 mentarily in speechless wonder, in my first efforts to 
 acquire the German language, because a German truck- 
 man in the street could talk the language so much more 
 volubly than I could, and a dray-horse, in understand- 
 ing him, was my superior. Yet as senseless as that is 
 the feeling which underlies much of the preference 
 often felt for foreign literatures above our own. If in- 
 dulged with equal knowledge of the literatures brought 
 into the comparison, it is literary cant. This is the 
 ground of the pre-eminence given to the French lan- 
 guage in some schools for the education of women. 
 
 Then, in approaching the question of the worth of 
 the English literature, we encounter the atmosphere 
 which is created by our system of training in the 
 ancient classic languages. Our collegiate system we 
 have taken chiefly from the English universities. Those 
 grew up at a period when England had no literature 
 of her own. The reverence then paid to the ancient 
 classics was normal and necessary. Generally speaking, 
 there was no other literature which deserved reverence. 
 The revival of the ancient learning created for the 
 modern mind the only models in existence which were 
 of superior finish for the purposes of liberal culture, 
 except the sacred models of Palestine. The new enthu- 
 siasm for learning must have looked to Athens and 
 Rome, or nowhere. Hence arose that profound rever- 
 ence for what is called classic study, which tinges the 
 university system of England, of which the American 
 college is an offshoot. That reverence is not a whit 
 too profound absolutely ; but it is, by a vast proportion, 
 too exclusive relatively. 
 
 Our usage by which we designate the ancient litera- 
 
150 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x. 
 
 tures by the term " classic " is an evidence of the depth 
 to which the preference of the ancient authors over 
 every thing English is embedded in our scholarly inher- 
 itance. It is as if nothing English could deserve the 
 title of a classic, i.e., of a model for the education of 
 mind. English authorship has been compelled to con- 
 tend for its right to the name in its own language. A 
 youth of to-day is at first confused when he hears the 
 phrase "English classics." 
 
 i^ Our collegiate discipline — and here lies the precise 
 point of its defect, in my judgment — preserves no just 
 proportions between the ancient and the English clas- 
 sics. -The English literature is a fact to which it does 
 no justice in its theory of the education suitable to an 
 English or an American pupil. This literature is now 
 the accumulation of centuries. It is expanding with 
 every decade of years. Yet who of us ever obtained 
 in our collegiate experience any very exalted conception 
 of it as compared with the Greek and Latin models ? 
 I think I speak the experience of a majority of educated 
 Americans in saying that a sense of the classic rank of 
 the English literature is a discover}^, which, for the most 
 part, they have to make for themselves after they have 
 left our collegiate and professional schools. It dawns 
 upon us as a novelty when we begin to extend our Eng- 
 lish reading. When we do admit it, when the glory of 
 our native literature forces it upon us, we feel a sense 
 of regret that the discovery has come to us so late in 
 our mental history. We turn to our own language, 
 then, with something of the rebound with which we 
 spring to a long-neglected virtue. 
 
 Again : the presumption is always in favor of the pre- 
 eminence of the literature of one's vernacular tongue in 
 
LECT. X.] VERNACULAR LITERATURE. 151 
 
 one's culture, if that tongue has a literature. If a lan- 
 guage has no literature, the mind to which it is vernacu- 
 lar is so far a barbarous mind. Culture, in the high 
 sense of the term, is impracticable to it in its native 
 tongue. But, if a language has a literature, that litera- 
 ture is an expression of the national mind. It is a prod- 
 uct of that mind. Of that mind, the man himself is 
 a fragment ; his own mental structure is a part of the 
 growth which has made the literature. He sustains to 
 it, therefore, a relation which he can not sustain to any 
 embodiment of foreign thought. It is a relation of 
 sympathy and kindred. The very life-blood of thought 
 flows to and through him by means of the vernacular 
 arteries, as it can not by transfusion from any foreign 
 fountains. 
 
 Says Dr. George P. Marsh, " Deep in the recesses 
 of our being, beneath even the reach of consciousness, 
 or at least of objective self-inspection, there lies a cer- 
 tain sensibility to the organic laws of our mother- 
 tongue." He elsewhere adduces two facts in proof of 
 this. One is, that a man's vernacular language, though 
 forgotten, " can never be completely supplanted or sup- 
 plied by another ; " and the second is, that those who 
 grow up speaking many languages very seldom acquire 
 complete mastery over any one of them. That which 
 is true of linguistic acquisition is doubly true of liter- 
 ary culture. The secret sympathies of mind with truth 
 in the vernacular speech more than realizes Words- 
 worth's fancy of the communings of the seashell with 
 its native ocean. No man can do violence to those 
 sympathies without a loss in the breadth and natu- 
 ralness of his own development. The confusion of 
 tongues bears every mark of a curse upon the race. It 
 
152 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x. 
 
 is an evil of incalculable magnitude, that we must 
 derive so mucli of our mental training through other 
 media of expression than that which we grow up with, 
 and grow into as our minds expand from childhood. 
 
 Experience in the conducting of foreign missions 
 confirms these views. The original idea of foreign 
 missionary work, and the one which first roused Chris- 
 tian enthusiasm most profoundly, was that the heathen 
 world must be Christianized mainly by the agency of 
 preachers sent from Christian lands. I heard in my 
 boyhood the claims of foreign missions urged on Ameri- 
 can Christians and students for the ministry, on the 
 ground that thousands of preachers must be sent from 
 Christian countries, outnumbering by multitudes the 
 whole Protestant clergy of the world. " How shall 
 they hear without a preacher? and how shall they 
 preach except they be sent ? " was the text. Inspired 
 authority for it seemed to be given at the outset. 
 
 Experience has corrected all that. It has proved 
 that heathen nations are not to be reached, any more 
 than Christian nations, in the large masses, by a minis- 
 try which to them is foreign, trained in a foreign civil- 
 ization, pervaded by foreign modes of thouglit, and 
 using tlieir vernacular under the embarrassments cre- 
 ated by the mixture of the idioms of a foreign speech. 
 It has long since become trite that the great bulk of 
 the work of Christianizing the heathen world is to be 
 done by a native ministry trained originally by foreign 
 teachers, but ultimately taking the work into their own 
 hands. Minds created under the influence of the lan- 
 guage spoken by a people are needed to become con- 
 trolling powers in the Christian civilization of that 
 people. The secret sympathies with vernacular speech 
 run very deep. We are all ruled by them. 
 
LECT. X.] STUDIES OF AlVIATEUES. 163 
 
 Applying this principle, then, to our own prepara- 
 tions for the American pulpit, I contend that if a Greek 
 or a Latin, or a German literature, or all combined, have 
 for us claims superior to those of our English speech, 
 it is a thing to be proved. Perhaps it can be proved ; 
 but the presumption, in the nature of things, is against 
 it. 
 
 Further : the utility of a man's culture, other things 
 being equal, requires the ascendency in it of the litera- 
 ture of his native language. Culture is for use, not for 
 display, not for literary enjoyment mainly. The weak- 
 est education is that which is aimed at display. The 
 highest homoeopathic ^^ituration of the educational 
 ideal is that of a modern French boarding-school for 
 young ladies. It is worthy of the " nugiperous gentle- 
 dame " whom the " Simple Cobbler of Agawam " de- 
 scribes as " the very gizzard of a trifle, the product of 
 a quarter of a cipher, and the epitome of nothing." 
 
 But the most selfish education, and therefore the nar- 
 rowest of all educational ideals which may be respec- 
 table for strength, is that which is directed to literary 
 pleasure. 
 
 The danger from tliis source to the integrity of a 
 pastor's studies justifies a brief excursus at this point 
 upon the selfish ideal of a scholarly life. No concep- 
 tion of life, not grossly sensual, can be formed, which is 
 more odious for the intensity of its selfishness than the 
 life of a man of letters who is that and nothing more, 
 with no aims in his studies but those of an amateur 
 student. A studious man in dressing-gown and slip- 
 pers, sitting in the midst of a choice library which is 
 adorned with works of art and costly relics of antiquity, 
 yet from which not a thought goes out to the Intel- 
 
154 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x, 
 
 lectual or moral improvement of mankind, is a model 
 of refined and fascinating selfhood. Under certain 
 conditions it may do more evil than the life of a 
 libertine. Walter Scott's ideal of life, as expressed in 
 the building and furnishing of Abbotsford, was not 
 the true ideal of a Christian scholar. For their influ- 
 ence on the tastes of educated men, give me rather the / 
 drinking-songs of Robert Burns. These are the less 
 seductive to such men, and carry their antidote on 
 the face of them. Prescott the historian pronounces 
 the mental luxury of successful composition one of the 
 two most exalted pleasures of which man is capable ; 
 the enjoyment of a reciprocated passion for woman 
 being the other. 
 
 Conceive of a man so constituted, or so trained to 
 literary enjoyment, that he can honestly say, as Buffon , 
 did of his hours of composition, " Fourteen hours a day 
 at my desk in a state of transport ! " It is not difficult 
 to see that such a man's life may become as selfish in 
 its literary enjoyment as that of another man in his 
 sensuality. Is there not, indeed, a class of literary 
 men who suggest to us the doubtful query whether 
 they have any large, generous sympathy with their 
 kind ? Their studies are conducted with a stolid indif- 
 ference to the questions which are agitating the masses 
 of mind underneath them. At a sublime altitude above 
 such problems as those which involve the salvation, the 
 liberty, the education, the bread, of the millions, these 
 favorite sons of literary fortune dwell in an atmosphere 
 of rarified selfishness, from which comes down now and 
 then a sneer at the boorishness, or a fling at the fanati- 
 cism, of those who are humbly striving to feed the , 
 hungry, and clothe the naked, and save the lost. 
 
LECT. X.] LITERATURE AND PROFESSIONS. 155 
 
 Give us rather the literary spirit of ]\Iilton, who 
 returned from his tour in Italy, and gave up his pro- 
 jected visit to the Acropolis of Athens, " because," 
 said he, " I esteemed it dishonorable in me to be linger- 
 ing abroad, even for the improvement of my mind, 
 when my fellow-citizens were contending for liberty at 
 home." Dr. Arnold was so sensible of the peril of 
 literary selfishness, that he held firmly to the opinion 
 that literary pursuits " should never be a profession by 
 themselves." They should be an appendage always to 
 some business or profession which should keep a man's 
 mind healthy by interesting him in the questions of 
 real life and in his own times. Speaking of Coleridge's 
 " Literary Remains," he says, " There were marks 
 enough that his mind was diseased by the want of a 
 profession. The very power of contemplation becomes 
 impaired or perverted when it becomes the main object 
 of life." Mr. Froude the historian has been heard to 
 say, that, if his son sought to make literature his profes- 
 sion, he would oppose it as he would an imprudent 
 marriage. Yet Froude speaks from experience of the 
 error which he condemns. A pastor's life meets pre- 
 cisely the conditions wliich such critics deem most 
 healthfully conducive to success in literary study. Lit- 
 erary labor held by the necessities of a profession in 
 adjustment with the real world we live in, and made 
 tributary to great and unselfish uses, — this is the 
 Christian ideal of a scholar's life. 
 
 Yet, returning to the main point before us, this is one 
 of the most cogent reasons that can be urged for giving 
 pre-eminence in our culture to the literature of our own 
 language. We belong to the English-speaking stock. 
 With the exception of foreign missionaries, the Ameri- 
 
156 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x. 
 
 can clergy must find their life's work among an English- 
 speaking people. If heathen preachers were prepared 
 to carry on the Christian work efficiently, they would 
 do it among their own countrymen more efficiently 
 than you can do it. 
 
 It is not merely the accumulations drawn from our 
 vernacular, and applied to direct use in our labors, 
 which will fit us most effectually to influence the minds 
 of our countrymen. It is more than these : it is the 
 very breath of mental life which we take in from the 
 literature of our vernacular. It is the very essence of 
 all there is in us which gives us claim to be called edu- 
 cated men, and which qualifies us for intellectual and 
 moral leadership. We must derive this chiefly from 
 our vernacular literature to fit us to influence most 
 effectively those who speak our vernacular language. 
 That literature is an expression of their minds as it is 
 of ours. That language is a medium of more than 
 speech between us and them. It is a medium of mag- 
 netic currents of brotherhood. Speak English, and 
 they understand you. Think in English, and you think 
 their thoughts. Feel the pulsations of an E,»glish cul- 
 ture, and you feel the throbs of their heart^ Live in an 
 English literary atmosphere, and you live near to their 
 level, — far enough above them to insure their respect 
 for you as their superior, yet near enough to them to 
 feel yourself at home with them, and make them feel 
 at home with you---^ 
 
 Let me, in passing, notice one phenomenon in the 
 history of theological education which I do not en- 
 tirely understand, but which illustrates the peril.'into 
 which an educated preacher sometimes falls. \It is 
 that foreignprs educated for the pulpit in this country 
 
LECT. X.] ANGLICIZING FOREIGN LITERATURE. 157 
 
 are seldom inclined to spend their professional life 
 among their own countrymeiij^ A German educated 
 here seldom wishes to preach to Germans ; or a Jew 
 to Jews ; or a Swede to the Swedes of our north-west ; 
 or a Welshman to the Welsh churches of Pennsylvania. 
 I have repeatedly known them to struggle with the 
 infirmities of an imperfect knowledge of the English 
 language, and persist for years in the conflict with 
 the adverse influences they encounter among American 
 congregations, rather than to preach in their vernacu- 
 lars to their own countrymen, t Even a black man I 
 have known to throw away the advantages of kindred 
 race to lift himself up into competition with the white 
 race. Such struggles ai^ among the saddest mistakes 
 in professional policy-Ji They are struggles against 
 nature. They abandon invaluable advantages ready to 
 one's hand, for the sake of others which must be gained 
 by years of toil, and which, if gained, never can equal 
 the treasure lost. A preacher, above all men, should 
 never abandon his vernacular if he can help it. As 
 well may a fish leap out of the sea. 
 
 Even those contributions to our culture which we 
 receive from foreign sources need to be Anglicized in 
 our use of them. They should be received with Eng- 
 lish tastes, seen with English eyes, interpreted with 
 English idiom, wrought into our opinions under the 
 superintendence of English discipline, and adjusted to 
 our use with a certain sifting and weighing process 
 conducted with a heavy preponderance of English 
 habits of thought. Every literature which is trans- 
 ferred from its native soil to be used as an exotic in 
 another land needs to be passed through some native 
 mind of that land, which shall act in a spirit of loyalty 
 
158 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. x. 
 
 to its own language. Otherwise that exotic literature 
 can not be largely useful there. It will not be useful 
 because it can not be used. No national literature is 
 ever dug up, and transported and replanted bodily. 
 The living forces of a nation's libraries can not migrate 
 in any such way. Laws of national character repre- 
 sented by diversities of speech forbid such violent 
 transitions. 
 
 Therefore nothing dooms a man to greater sterility 
 in the pulpit than the attempt to import whole the 
 spirit of a foreign culture. Sermons to an Anglo- 
 American audience, founded upon an exclusive or 
 ascendant German model, expressive of German habits 
 of thought, clothed in German idioms, though in Eng- 
 lish words, are useless, — necessarily so, though they 
 may not contain an error or a distortion. I once knew 
 a pastor, who, under the pressure of severe pastoral 
 duties, preached to his people through a winter, on 
 Sunday afternoons, a free translation of the sermons 
 of a German preacher. He was dismissed in the 
 spring. Similar would be the tendency of German 
 sermons to a German audience expressive of English 
 culture alone. The same is true if the ancient litera- 
 tures have predominated in the forming of a preacher's 
 mind. 
 
 Said a clergyman of high repute in the ministry, " I 
 always fear for the result when I see a very scholarly 
 man enter the pulpit." The remark was founded on 
 his observation of the fact that eminently scholarly 
 men are often alienated unconsciously in their tastes 
 from the national mind of their own country. They 
 live so much in dead or foreign languages, among 
 modes of thought wliich are alien to those of their 
 
LECT. X.] FOREIGN LANGUAGES. 159 
 
 own times and kindred, that they do not sympathize 
 with their audiences, and therefore have no magnetic 
 power to move them. No literature is so universal in 
 its adaptations to the mind of the race as to be abso- 
 lutely independent of its national history. Even that 
 of the Bible is not so. It is Jewish in its type and 
 spirit. We can not use it with power until we Angli- 
 cize it. We are obliged to bring to it our own minds, 
 trained in the school of English thought, and to receive 
 it into our own culture as into English molds, before 
 we can reproduce it in English sermons to which the 
 sympathies of an American audience will respond. 
 
 De Quincey entertained such strong convictions on 
 the subject of servitude to foreign languages, that he 
 said the act of learning a new language was in itself 
 an evil. " Unless balanced " by other studies, he de- 
 clared it to be "the dry rot of the human mind." He 
 expressed more temperately the true principle of cul- 
 ture in this respect by saying to a young man, " So 
 frame your selection of languages, that the largest 
 possible body of literature available for your purposes 
 shall be laid open to you at the least possible price 
 of time and mental energy." " The largest available 
 for your purposes : " this is common sense. And to 
 every man of English or American stock, except a 
 professional philologist, it requires the subjection of 
 every thing outside of the English tongue to acclima- 
 tion in the atmosphere of English libraries. 
 
LECTURE XL 
 
 PREDOMINANCE OF THE ENGLISH LITEEATTJRE, CON- 
 TINUED. — ITS INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY. 
 
 In addition to that which has been already remarked 
 of the predominance of the English literature in a 
 pastor's studies, it should be further observed, that, all 
 things considered, the English literature is intrinsically 
 superior to every other. In the preceding Lecture we 
 claimed this superiority for it on the ground of profes- 
 sional usefulness. It is now claimed on the ground of 
 intrinsic worth. I repeat the qualifying clause of the 
 statement, " all things considered." It is a foolish par- 
 tisanship in learning to decry any of the great collec- 
 tions of wisdom which represent the growth of great 
 nations in intellectual power. That man has one of the 
 elements of scholarship yet to acquire, who is unable to 
 admit the inferiority in some respects of that which, as 
 a whole, may be his favorite language and liis dearest 
 resource of thought. 
 
 I do not wish to assert extravagant claims, still less 
 to speak magisterially of literatures in which I am not 
 at home. I assume to give you only the judgment 
 which is founded upon that knowledge of our own 
 literature which is current among educated men, and 
 is supplemented by the judgment of other literatures 
 expressed by men whose knowledge entitles them to 
 
 160 
 
LECT. XI.] THE ENGLISH LITERATUEE. 161 
 
 be received as authorities. In a sober estimate thus 
 formed I must think that our own literature heads the 
 list. The grounds of this judgment are numerous, and 
 they underlie the whole discussion of what is and what 
 is not vital in the current of a nation's thought. "We 
 can do little more than to glance at them with remark 
 sufficient to indicate the line of argument. 
 
 In the first place, the argument is narrowed in its 
 range by the fact that but few of the literatures of 
 the world can enter into the account at all. There 
 have been but few great literatures in history. You 
 will easily recall them. The only great ones of anti- 
 quity are those of Palestine, Greece, and Rome. The 
 Egyptian, the Arabic, the Hindoo, the Chinese, are all 
 provincial. They are all either infantile in character, 
 2, or lateral to those lines of culture which have projected 
 '• themselves with power of control into modern thought. 
 Those secondary literatures had no power of reproduc- 
 tion. They were eddies in the stream and along the 
 shore of civilization. 
 
 Then, of the modern literatures, all that can bear 
 comparison with each other are the English, the French, 
 and the German. No intelligent scholar would place 
 by the side of these the Italian, the Spanish, the Portu- 
 guese, or those of the Scandinavian nations. It is at 
 the head of these imperial literatures which have made 
 and are making the deepest grooves in history, that I 
 would place the work of the English mind as a whole, 
 and as a means of culture to be used upon the world of 
 the present and the future. 
 
 This is, furthermore, presumptively true, because the 
 English literature is the expression of a composite order 
 of mind. Nations, like individuals, are subject to physi- 
 
162 MEN AND BOOKS. [lbct. xi. 
 
 ological laws. One of these laws is, that virility of 
 national mind is proportioned to the intermingling of 
 virile races. Mental power does not flow in the iso- 
 lated currents of national being which aristocratic 
 jealousy has kept running for centuries in the channels 
 of pure blood. In this relation of things pure blood is 
 weak blood. It runs low, and grows pale. It is what 
 Shakspeare calls " pigeon-livered." Mental force flows 
 rather in the crosses and reduplications and interfusions 
 of diverse and even contrary elements of being. Con- 
 quests which bring warring elements into one solution 
 are essential to the best intellectual resultant. The 
 best national mind in the history of civilization is what 
 the composite column is in architecture. It consists 
 of a union of eclectic forces. We can not designate 
 it briefly and yet more definitely than by terming it a 
 composite mind. 
 
 Just this the English mind is in its make. The Eng- 
 lish literature is an expression of such a composite 
 mind. There is no other spot in the Old World into 
 which so many diverse streams of life-blood have 
 flowed as into the British Isles. Not a full-blooded 
 race in all the northern and central parts of Europe is 
 unrepresented in the present blood of Great Britain. 
 Those are the cool regions, where forceful men are 
 made by the very elements. This is a vital fact, that 
 the cool zones of Europe have poured their populations, 
 either for colonization or conquest, into the original 
 reservoir of the British Empire. Germany and France 
 have both contributed some vital vigor through the 
 Angles, the Saxons, and the Normans, to the living 
 English. 
 
 Dr. George P. Marsh finds linguistic evidences, in the 
 
LECT. XI.] THE ENGLISH MIND. 163 
 
 structure of the Anglo-Saxon dialects, of a marvelous 
 commingling of tribes in the early invasions of Britain. 
 He pronounces the linguistic evidence of such a com- 
 mingling more conclusive than the historic evidence. 
 "Diversity, not unity, of origin," he says, is indicated 
 by the structure of the Anglo-Saxon. There is no evi- 
 dence that any one people ever spoke it outside of 
 Great Britain. It bears internal signs of having grown 
 up there from heterogeneous elements imported from 
 abroad. Moreover, philologists think they find traces 
 of the same heterogeneousness of origin in the modern 
 dialects still existing around the North Sea, the district 
 from which the early invaders of Britain came. In 
 no other part of Europe, it is said, are there so many 
 forms of language, witliin the same area, which are not 
 intelligibly interchangeable, as are found there. Such 
 philological phenomena all point to the fact of a most 
 remarkable solution of ingredients foreign to each other 
 in the original compound which forms the basis of the 
 English tongue. And what the English tongue is in 
 this respect, the English mind is, from which our litera- 
 ture has sprung, and of which it is the immortal expres- 
 sion. 
 
 It is accordant with all the laws which govern the 
 growth of national minds, that a literature which is the 
 natural representative of such a composite mind in 
 books should be, as a whole, the superior of the litera- 
 tures springing from the provincial resources which 
 have been tributaries to the stock of that mind. The 
 " Father of Waters," it is to be presumed, has a volume 
 and a momentum exceeding those of any one of its 
 feeders. 
 
 The same law which in this respect has made our 
 
164 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 literature what it is, is now operating anew in our awn. 
 country to make our literature what it is to be. Races 
 are intermingling here to an extent unprecedented 
 since the Gothic conquests of Rome. New blood is 
 flowing in from every source on the globe which con- 
 tains the elements of national vigor. It is borne hither 
 in the veins of the most enterprising and athletic 
 classes of the old nations. Such are always the migrat- 
 ing classes. They are the classes in which family stock 
 has a future. It has not spent itself in the vices and 
 luxuries of a decadent civilization. Such migratory 
 hordes always carry with them the germs of great 
 nations. That virility which first appears in the 
 growth of numbers and of material prosperity will by 
 and by show itself in a new stock of composite mind. 
 This, again, will reproduce and prolong under new con- 
 ditions the national literature. It must be English at 
 heart, but broadened and deepened to represent the 
 mind of a new world. 
 
 The claims of the English literature to pre-eminence 
 An our culture are confirmed by a third fact ; viz., that 
 the English as compared with other literatures is pre- 
 eminently a literature of power as distinct from a 
 literature of knowledge only. Turn to De Quincey's 
 "Essays on the Poets." In his essay on Alexander 
 Pope you will find very clearly expressed a vital distiac- 
 tion between the literature of power and the literature 
 of knowledge. *rhe function of the literature of knowl- 
 edge is to teach : that of the literature of power is to 
 move. " The first is a rudder ; the second, a sail." To 
 illustrate, he inquires, " What do you learn from the 
 ' Paradise Lost ' ? Nothing at all. What do you learn 
 from a cookery-book? Something you did not know 
 
LECT. XI.] LITERATURE OF POWER. 165 
 
 before, on every page. But would you, therefore, put 
 the cookery-book on a higher level than the ' Paradise 
 Lost ' ? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, 
 of which a million separate items are but a million ad- 
 vancing steps on the same earthly level. What you 
 owe is poiver ; that is, expansion and exercise to your 
 own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, 
 where every pulse and each separate influx is a step 
 upwards, — a step ascending, as upon Jacob's ladder, 
 from earth to mysterious altitudes." 
 
 I can not develop this idea further so vividly as you 
 will find it expressed in the essay to which I have 
 referred. The whole essay, by the way, is a superior 
 specimen of criticism. The point I would observe 
 more particularly is, that, in the judgment of European 
 critics, the English literature as a whole is superior to 
 any other modern embodiment of thought as a litera- 
 ture of power. It is a plastic as distinct from a didactic 
 literature. The most intelligent German scholars con- 
 cede this respecting English poetry as compared with 
 that of their own language. German critics write 
 commentaries on Shakspeare as on one of the prophets. 
 M. Guizot concedes substantially the same thing to the 
 English as compared with the French drama. 
 
 Our literature is less accumulative than the German, 
 but more creative. An impulse received from its great 
 models strikes deeper, and lives longer. The English 
 mind is constructive, and builds for durability. We 
 have more numerous poets, historians, orators, whose 
 productions have become standards and whose influ- 
 ence is of the creative sort, than are to be found in 
 either of the rival literatures of the Continent. Ger- 
 man philosophers and philologists are more numerous 
 
166 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 than ours. French scientists are more numerous than 
 ours. But with these exceptions our authors of the 
 rank which De Quincey designates by the word "power" 
 as contrasted with "knowledge," outnumber those of 
 France and Germany together. On such a subject as 
 this, few men can claim to be authorities. But the 
 drift of critical judgment among scholars, if I have 
 not misread it, is in this direction, giving ascendency 
 to the English over the Continental literatures in 
 respect to creative and durable vitality. 
 
 Again : the English is pre-eminently a Christian lite- 
 rature. No other is to so large an extent pervaded with 
 Christian thought. No other has so little in its stand- 
 ard works that is adverse to Christianity. No other is 
 so profoundly rooted in the Christian theory of life. 
 No other deals so intelligently with Christian ideas of 
 destiny. No other is so reverent towards the Christian 
 Scriptures. No other owes so much of its own vitality 
 to the literature of the Hebrews. 
 
 These features constitute the great distinction of our 
 literature above those of antiquity. No Pagan embodi- 
 ment of thought can possibly be a substitute for it or an 
 approximation to it. It stands on an upper level, above 
 Greek and Roman culture, in the very fact that it is 
 built on Christianity. It therefore embodies a large 
 experience, which the ancient classic languages had not 
 even words to express, if the ancient people had had 
 the ideas. Coleridge, for example, declares that " sub- 
 limity " in the true conception of it is not extant in 
 any production of the Greek literature. He contends 
 that it is a modern idea which was Hebrew in its origin. 
 Yet the English literature is full of it. Moreover, tho 
 sterility of the classic Greek language in words expres- 
 
LECT. XI.] LITERATURE OF FREEDOM. 167 
 
 sive of Christian thought is seen in the very existence 
 of the New Testament. But our English tongue is 
 built upon Christian thought. 
 
 The English is also a Protestant literature, — Protes- 
 tant as distinct from a Romish, and equally distinct 
 from an infidel bias. In this it stands above both its 
 rivals on the Continent. Dr. Newman of Oxford says, 
 speaking of the conversion of England to Rome, " The 
 literature of England is against us. It is Protestant in 
 warp and woof. We never can unmake it." This fea- 
 ture of it gives to it a splendid opening into the world's 
 future, if there is any truth in our faith that the world 
 is to be converted to some simple, spiritual, apostolic 
 type of Christianity. 
 
 Furthermore : the English is the literature of consti- 
 tutional freedom. It is not a literature of anarchy, nor 
 of despotism, as so large a fragment of the Continental 
 literatures is, but is an expression of constitutional lib- 
 erty. I emphasize, it is an expression of that liberty. 
 It is not a silent nor an expurgated volume in respect 
 to the ideas of freedom which are upheaving the 
 nations. The body of it has never sprung by stealth 
 from a muzzled press. It has not been obliged to 
 ask leave to be, from the, police. Next to the Bible, 
 no other single fortress of liberty in the world is so 
 impregnable as the walls and buttresses of English 
 libraries. 
 
 Those libraries are full of outbursts of the love of 
 liberty in poetic forms which stir the passions of na- 
 tions. The common people sing them in their homes ; 
 mothers over cradles ; and plowmen among the hills. 
 Our libraries are full of calm and scholarly defenses of 
 freedom in the forms of constitutional argument which 
 
168 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 create great statesmen for the leadership of nations. 
 They are full of the statute laws of England, which 
 are liberty embodied in good government. They are 
 full of histories of liberty in the great battles and revo- 
 lutions of England, — a record which a nation never 
 retreats from or dishonors till it falls oif from the 
 platform of great Powers. 
 
 Other nations can not know our literature with safety 
 to despotic ideas. Men have to expurgate it, as slave- 
 holders did our school-books before the civil war, in 
 order to make it innocent of hostility to despotism. 
 The poetry of England must be riddled with expurga- 
 tions, before it can be safely taught in the schools of a 
 people who fear the growth of free ideas. The Bible 
 is but a fragment of that mass of thought which 
 Romanism would expel from our schools. The sonnets 
 of Milton and Wordsworth, the speeches of Edmund 
 Burke, the story of Magna Charta, the biography of 
 Wilberforce, the battle of Bunker Hill, must all be 
 expunged or garbled before Romanism is safe in com- 
 mon schools in which the English literature is taught 
 or sung. No poetic fiction is it, but the most prosaic 
 of sober facts in political economy, which Wordsworth 
 uttered : — 
 
 " We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 That Shakspeare spake." 
 
 This affiliation of our literature with constitutional free- 
 dom is a feature of it which must open avenues for it 
 into the world's future. Certain great arteries of life 
 in the great nations run directly into it. The heart of 
 the nations is beating in sympathy with it to an extent 
 not true of any other literature dead or living. 
 
LECT. XI.] WELL-BALANCED LITERATURE. 169 
 
 Moreover, the English is a well-balanced literature. 
 No important department of it is meager. In some 
 departments the Continental literatures surpass it in 
 affluence ; but the critic betrays ignorance of the Eng- 
 lish mind who pronounces it barren in any of the great 
 lines -of scholarly thought. 
 
 VThe only department of culture in which England is 
 poor, as compared with the Continental countries, is 
 that of the fine arts. \ Canova gave the true explana- 
 tion of that when he said, " It is all owing to your free 
 institutions. They drain away genius from the arts to 
 the bar and the House of Commons. Had England 
 been Italy, Pitt and Fox would have been your artists." 
 In no great department of literature is the English 
 language barren. 
 
 Our literature is evenly balanced, also, in the fact of 
 its aversion to extremes of opinion, and extravagances 
 of culture. In philosophy, in criticism, in morals, in 
 poetry, in theology, in politics, the English mind re- 
 volts from excesses. As a whcle, the literature is 
 healthy. It is full-chested, and walks erect. In the 
 main, it is a liberal and candid literature. It is free, 
 also, from innate inclinations to sentimentality or to 
 mysticism. It is an earnest growth of thought rooted 
 in good sense. If a literary monomaniac happens to 
 spring up, and attract attention by unseemly antics, the 
 reading people of England look on long enough to 
 laugh, and then go about their business. 
 
 Opposites are well balanced in our literature. It 
 never surges this way and that, as if a whole nation 
 had run mad for the want of mental ballast. In this 
 respect it is superior to that of France. No single 
 man could ever have had such power to lead the Eng- 
 
170 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 lish. people on a tramp of delusion and godlessness as 
 Voltaire had over the French mind. It was not in the 
 make of the English mind to be thus inveigled into a 
 volcanic revolution. Both nations had their revolu- 
 tions. Both executed their monarchs on the scaffold. 
 But England did it decently, under the forms and in 
 the spirit of her ancient laws. She did not sacrifice 
 all her institutions for the sake of doing it. The 
 conscience of the nation acted in it a great national 
 tragedy, with no heart for ribaldry and brutality. It 
 was done under a rSgime marked by days of religious 
 fasting. 
 
 Macaulay says that the two most profound revolu- 
 tions in English history were that which effaced the 
 distinction between the Norman and the Saxon, and 
 that which effaced the distinction between master and 
 slave. Both were brought about by silent and imper- 
 ceptible changes. Civil war accomplished neither; 
 moral causes produced both. It is impossible to fix 
 the time when either ceased to be. Lord Macaulay 
 says that the institution of villanage has never been 
 abolished by statute to this day. With such history 
 as this in the process of making, and constantly going 
 on record in her libraries, and taught in her universities, 
 and fostered by her pul^iits, and acted in her drama, and 
 sung in the ballads of her people, it has never been 
 possible for England to have a " Reign of Terror." 
 
 The literature of this English stock, therefore, excites 
 trust in its genuineness. It is a grandly equable tiling 
 by which to form a scholar's mind. It cultivates his 
 powers symmetrically. It exalts intellectual and moral 
 above material and turbulent causes in his judgment 
 of events. It creates a predisposition in his tastes 
 
LECT. XI.] MATURE LITERATURE. 171 
 
 to a moderation of passionate opinions and to an 
 appreciation of opposites both in historic and in living 
 character. 
 
 Yet again : the English is the most mature of all ■ 
 the great embodiments of the world's thought. It ex- 
 presses the results of the longest growth of power in 
 literary forms. It has claims, superior to those of any 
 other, to be regarded as the last and ripest fruitage 
 of intellectual energy that the world has yet seen. 
 The proof of this can only be hinted at here. 
 
 In the comparison with the ancient literatures, it is 
 sufficient to say, as we have before observed, that the 
 English has utilized them all. It is in part built upon 
 them. It has absorbed whatever is vital in every one 
 of them. If they were extinguished to-day in their 
 original forms, every idea they contain which is vital 
 to mental culture could be reproduced from the Eng- 
 lish literature alone. Dr. Johnson said, that, in his 
 day, almost the whole bulk of human thought and learn- 
 ing could be expressed in a vocabulary drawn from the 
 writings of Bacon, Raleigh, and Shakspeare. It is 
 more strictly true that not a thought which is of any 
 value to the present or the future of civilization can be 
 found, in either of the three great literatures which 
 represent the ancient development of mind, which is 
 not extant in English libraries. Consequently no man 
 can thoroughly master the English literature without 
 receiving unconsciously into his own culture the sub- 
 /stantial literary life of Palestine, Greece, and Rorae^^ ' 
 
 Large account may fairly be made of this fact in the 
 case which is prominently before us, of a man whose 
 life is given to an arduous profession, and who, there- 
 fore, can find little time or mental force for the study 
 
172 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 of the ancient classics. Let him master the classics 
 of his own vernacular, and he is breathing an atmos- 
 phere made up, in part, of the best Hebrew and Greek 
 and Roman models all the while. 
 
 In the comparison of the English with the German 
 and French literatures, it is sufficient, so far as the point 
 of relative maturity is concerned, to note the fact that 
 the English is much the oldest of the three, and yet is 
 growing abreast with its rivals. So far back as when 
 Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Hooker, and 
 Jeremy Taylor had all appeared, the French literature 
 was barely beginning. De Quincey says, that, in the 
 time of Corneille, he was the only French living author 
 of general credit, and Montaigne the only deceased 
 author of equal eminence. The English had an im- 
 mense bulk of literature long before that, which has 
 lived to our day. As to German literature, at that 
 time it was almost a cipher. The English literature is 
 by far the most mature of those of modern growth, in 
 that it has the longest historical development, and is yet 
 thriving. It gives no signs of decadent taste. 
 
 Still further : the English is the nearest approach the 
 world has seen to a popular literature. Strictly speak- 
 ing, there is no popular literature in existence ; but 
 ours is an approximation to it to an extent which is 
 not true of an}^ other which has existed since the time 
 of the old Greek drama. Created as it has been 
 under the influence of free institutions, it is a nearer 
 approach to the masses of the people than any other 
 of modern times. A mind formed under its sway has 
 less to acquire from other sources in order to fit it for 
 leadership of the masses of men than if formed under 
 any foreign cuHure whatever. 
 
LECT. XI.] GERMAN LITERATURE. 173 
 
 The spirit of the French literature, in this respect, 
 was expressed in the sentiment of Voltaire, that the 
 people should be amused, and have bread, but should 
 never be tempted to reason ; for, " if the people became 
 philosophers, all would go to destruction." The liter- 
 ary mind of France, till a recent date, has had no faith 
 in the people. Moreover, so far as French authors do 
 address themselves to the popular mind, it is chiefly to 
 the Parisian mind; and they publish much which is 
 vicious both in morals and in taste. The chief repre- 
 sentative of popular literature in France is the French 
 novel, the most corrupt of all modern fiction. It 
 seldom deserves a place in a popular library. 
 
 In Germany we find a similar gulf between the 
 people and the national literature. I am unable to say 
 what changes may be taking place there in this respect ; 
 but, if I am rightly informed, there is scarcely another 
 body of men living, of equal numbers and intelligence, 
 comprising so many masters of solid learning, who are 
 so far removed from the masses of the people as the 
 scholarly men of Germany. German taste in literature 
 seeks the clouds. My attention has been called to the 
 fact, that, so far as German books are addressed to the 
 popular mind, they are aimed at a lower grade of intel- 
 lect than the same class of books in this country. 
 They assume that the people are nearer childhood in 
 their tastes. The paternal idea which pervades so 
 largely the German theory of government is prominent 
 in German books for the people. 
 
 This involves no disparagement of the German litera- 
 ture in other relations. Palliations of the existing 
 state of things are found in the political distractions of 
 Germany for the last half-century. German govern- 
 
174 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xi. 
 
 ments have virtually said to German scholars, " Think 
 and print for yourselves and among yourselves. Do not 
 set the people to thinking." Consequently, as related 
 to the English, the German literature is inferior in those 
 elements which go to make a thinking commonalty. 
 The English has more of the popular mind and heart 
 expressed in it, and in forms which can reach and 
 inspire the popular mind and heart. It assumes the 
 existence among the people of a more manly mind and 
 a broader range of thinking. It has more of those 
 universal ideas which appeal to human nature as such 
 and in its maturity of development, and which are 
 seconded by the large common sense of mankind. 
 
 Consequently, a mind in whose culture English 
 thought and taste predominate will, other things being 
 equal, have a larger capacity of influence over the 
 popular mind than one in whose growth the German 
 literature is ascendant. It will have less of the con- 
 traction of an exclusively scholastic discipline. 
 
 Finally, the English literature contains a rich depart- 
 ment devoted to the several forms of persuasive speech. 
 Eloquence proper is more largel}'' represented in the 
 English language than in any other in all history. The 
 forensic and deliberative eloquence of England has con- 
 tributed standards to libraries which have almost no 
 counterpart, and can have none, in any other living 
 language. The senate and the bar on the continent 
 of Europe have till recently been almost nonentities for 
 any purpose of oratorical culture. The restriction of 
 free speech there has doomed the Continental libraries 
 to sterility in both these departments which are so 
 essential to the culture of a public man in America. 
 
 The strictly professional literature of the pulpit also is 
 
LECT. XI.] EUROPEAN PULPIT. 175 
 
 largely represented in our native tongue. De Quincey, 
 by a refreshing departure from his usual contempt for 
 the clergy, admits that the living pulpit of England is 
 uttering a vast amount of unpublished literature every 
 Sunday. The English language has a large contribu- 
 tion from the pulpit of the past also already among its 
 published standards. In the richness of tliis depart- 
 ment it stands unrivaled. The ancient classics contain 
 no word for such a thing as a pulpit. Preaching was 
 an undiscovered art when Plato taught and when 
 Homer sung. Aristotle's rhetoric would be proof, if 
 there were no other, that he never heard a sermon. 
 The vocabulary of Plato and Homer can not express 
 all the ideas which are predominant in Christian 
 preaching. 
 
 The French and the German pulpits bear no com- 
 parison with the English. They contain no single 
 models which equal Barrow and South and Taylor and 
 Robert Hall. Still less do they contain any such 
 variety as is found in the history of English preaching. 
 The French ideal of the pulpit is too theatrical for 
 profound and long-lived influence. The Germans can 
 hardly be said to have an ideal of it which reaches up 
 to the German ideal of learning. In the German view 
 the pulpit is beneath scholarly criticism. Tholuck, 
 Krummacher, Nitzsch, Schleiermacher, and Steinmeyer 
 are fair representatives of the first rank of German 
 preachers in the last half-century. Not one of them 
 would be placed by an intelligent critic by the side of 
 American preachers of the corresponding rank. 
 
 The English language, on the contrary, overflows with 
 the literature of the pulpit. It abounds in material 
 which secular critics admit to he literature. This is a 
 
176 MEN AND BOOKS. [lkct. xi. 
 
 concession which secular criticism makes with difficulty. 
 But the fact compels it. We have standards which 
 were created by the pulpit, to which scholars in all 
 departments of thought turn, as among the choicest 
 productions of the English mind. The bearing of this 
 opulence of our literature in the forms of persuasive 
 speech upon the claims of it on the study of a preacher 
 is obvious. 
 
 It is not that the ancient or the foreign literatures 
 should be ignored, or estimated lightly, but that they 
 should be subordinated. We should go to them from 
 an English culture, and come back from them to an 
 English culture. Enlarge that culture, expand it, 
 deepen it, elevate it, but let, it in the end be English, 
 pervaded by English tastes, controlled by English good 
 sense, and supported by sympathy with English models. 
 
LECTURE XII. 
 
 THE PLACE OF AjVIEEICAN LITERATURE EST THE 
 STUDIES OF A PASTOR. 
 
 (5) The views thus far advanced suggest a prin- 
 ciple in the selection of authors, by which the princi- 
 ples already named should be modified. It is, that, 
 in our estimate of authors, the just claims of Ameri- 
 can literature should be recognized. The chief value 
 of this suggestion is felt not so much in the practical 
 selection of books as in the spirit in which a pas- 
 tor's studies are conducted. Respect for the national 
 mind of one's own' country and for contemporaneous 
 authorship is a prime factor in the preparation of a 
 man to minister to his own countrymen. The same 
 law by which a preacher's culture is impaired for pro- 
 fessional service by an excessive fondness for the 
 ancient rather than the modern, or the distant above 
 the near, in literary development, holds good respecting 
 a similar preference of the foreign to the national 
 literature. 
 
 It must be conceded that one of the dangers to the 
 reading of an American pastor is that he will read 
 disproportionately American books. Our proximity to 
 them, the ease with which they can be obtained, and 
 the fulsome style of criticism in which American peri- 
 odicals indulge, expose us to the peril of wasting our 
 
 177 
 
178 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xn. 
 
 mental force on works of ephemeral authority./ An 
 American library needs frequent weeding to rid it of 
 books which do not wear well in the judgment of 
 mature scholarship. ., One of the most eminent of our 
 American scholars, at the time of his decease, had hun- 
 dreds of such discarded volumes in his attic-chambers, 
 where he had hidden them for years, that his eye might 
 not be wearied by the sight of them, and, perhaps, 
 that his vanity might not be wounded by the remem- 
 brance of his folly in purchasing them. During the 
 civil war, when manufacturers gave large prices for 
 waste paper, many libraries were reduced in bulk, but 
 improved in quality, by the sale of American books to 
 peddlers. 
 
 Still, in this as in more important things, it is a pro- 
 tection against the extreme to see and to trust the mean. 
 The principle is a sound one, that an American scholar 
 should recognize the growth of American mind. In 
 books, as in affairs, that growth demands a scholarly 
 respect. ^ The literature of one's country does not 
 deserve the pre-eminence which belongs to that of one's 
 vernacular. . The growth of a language is a more 
 profound development of mind than the peopling of 
 a continent, or the organization of a republic. But 
 there is a literary justice which a preacher should not 
 withhold from the literature of his country in his ad- 
 justment of proportions in his own reading. He can 
 not do it without peril to the adaptations of his own 
 culture to professional service. 
 
 Our American literature, be it observed, then, claims 
 our recognition on three grounds. One is that of its 
 intrinsic merits in some departments. In poetry it 
 must in candor be admitted that we have nothing yet 
 
LECT. xn.] POEMS IN ACTION. 179 
 
 to show which criticism places by the side of the great 
 poets of England. The American is not yet a poetic 
 temperament. Our civilization has not yet reached the 
 poetic stage of its development. Our national history 
 is not old enough to create for itself the poetic enthu- 
 siasm. We have, also, in the past of the English mind, 
 so radiant a constellation of poets, that the taste of our 
 own scholars delights in them without attempting to 
 emulate their luster. " Like thee I will not build ; 
 better I can not," said Michael Angelo of the dome of 
 Santa Maria in Florence. Such may be the instinct 
 of the American imagination in visiting the " Poets' 
 Corner" of Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Whatever be the cause of the phenomenon, we owe 
 it to the integrity of our critical judgment to acknowl- 
 edge the fact that our literature is not eminent in this 
 department of production. We are a young nation. 
 We have been living poems. Many events in our his- 
 tory are grand themes for poetic story. Says a writer 
 in " The Edinburgh Review," " There is a poetry of 
 the past, of the mountains, the seas, the stars ; but a 
 great city seen aright is tenfold more poetical than 
 them all." A Pacific railroad is a poem in act. The 
 State of Massachusetts is a poem. Old Governor Win- 
 throp is a hero beyond Greek or Roman fame. The 
 colonization of Kansas is splendid material for a great 
 epic : so is the war of the rebellion. Magnificent mate- 
 rials have we in our history for poetry which shall by 
 and by rival Wordsworth's sonnets, and Shakspeare's 
 historical dramas. They will give birth to great poems 
 when age has gathered around them the imaginative 
 reverence of scholars. As Carlyle says of " The May- 
 flower," " Were we of open sense, as the Greeks were, 
 
180 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xii. 
 
 we had found a poem here, one of Nature's own, such 
 as she writes in broad facts over great continents." 
 
 In several other departments, however, we have a 
 literature already of which we need not be ashamed. 
 In the department of history America is represented 
 by authors whom European criticism does not hesitate 
 to rank by the side of the great historians of England. 
 Baron Alexander Humboldt thought that there was not 
 in existence a finer specimen of historic writing than 
 Prescott's " Ferdinand and Isabella." In the depart- 
 ment of the es^ay we have writers representing in 
 monographs nearly all the varieties of English style as 
 perfectly as writers of the same class in Great Britain. 
 \ In prose-fiction Walter Scott and Charles Dickens 
 are the only names which deserve to precede that of 
 Cooper. Mrs. Stowe must be credited with having 
 produced a romance which has had a larger circulation, 
 in more numerous languages, than any other book ever 
 published, except the Bible. 1\\ forensic and parliamen- 
 tary eloquence the names of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, 
 Sumner, do not suffer by the side of Burke, Pitt, 
 Fox, Brougham. In the department of demonstrative 
 eloquence I do not know the name in the annals of 
 any living nation which should stand before that of 
 Edward Everett. For that style of eloquence, Everett's 
 orations are well-nigh perfegitJ^ 
 
 In the literature of the pulpit there certainly are 
 names, of the living and the dead, which must be 
 ranked as equals, at least, of the most powerful preach- 
 ers of England. In no country in the world has the 
 pulpit proved its power by its effects more consj)icu- 
 ously than in ours. The fear sometimes expressed of 
 the decline of the American pulpit is not entirely un- 
 
LECT. XII.] OUR LITERATURE ENGLISH. 181 
 
 warranted ; yet, all things considered, the evidences of 
 decline are offset by evidences of improvement. Our 
 pulpit has a fluctuating history ; but on the whole it 
 has never had a more docile, and at the same time 
 intelligent, hearing than it has to-day. The decline of 
 the pulpit in the sense so much boasted of by skeptical 
 critics is disproved by the very impunity with which 
 those critics proclaim their sentiments. They would 
 be at the whipping-post, and their books burnt by the 
 hangman, if the American pulpit had not assisted by 
 its reasoning habits to enlighten and liberalize the 
 popular faith. On the ground, therefore, of its intrinsic 
 merits, American literature deserves to be recognized 
 in our estimate of the resources of our professional 
 discipline. 
 
 It deserves recognition, also, as an offshoot of the 
 literature of England. This is at present its relative 
 position. As we have no American language, neither 
 have we an American literature, which is not a graft 
 upon the English stock. Their literature is ours, and 
 ours is theirs. In this respect our literature partakes 
 of the same character with that of nearly all the insti- 
 tutions which lie deepest in our civilization. Those 
 institutions are essentially English. Our religion, our 
 jurisprudence, our educational policy, our periodical 
 press, our tendencies in philosophy, in a word tlje make 
 of American mind in all its great expressions of itself, 
 are English at bottom. They are not German ; they 
 are not French ; they are not derivatives from the 
 ancient republics : they are English. No man under- 
 stands the American mind who fails to appreciate this, 
 or who does not act upon it in his public life. 
 
 Public speakers among us fail to reach the popular 
 
182 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xn. 
 
 heart, if their own culture is tinged with foreign and 
 ancient literatures to such extent as to make those 
 obvious in public speech. The chief defect in senator 
 Sumner's speeches was the excessive freedom with 
 which he indulged in quotations from the ancient 
 classics, and allusion to the ancient mythology. He 
 was at home in English literature and history. He was 
 master of a solid English style. For durability and 
 richness of material, no other speeches in the Senate, 
 since Mr. Webster's day, were equal to his. Yet he did 
 not seize and hold the popular mind. Even the United- 
 States Senate sometimes wearied of him. This was in 
 part because of the artificialness created by his freedom 
 in the use of the learning he had derived from the 
 dead languages. In the real affairs of life, and specially 
 in the government of great nations, men demand an 
 intensity, and a homeliness of aim at present realities, 
 which forbid a very free and very obvious use of 
 foreign and ancient lore. It chills their sympathies 
 to quote from an author who has been two thousand 
 years in his grave. Therefore it weakens a speaker's 
 grasp of the popular mind. 
 
 It is a mystery to many that the English Parliament 
 should tolerate so much as they do of that which 
 seems like pedantic use of the Latin, and, to some ex- 
 tent, of the Greek languages in parliamentary debates. 
 The English House of Commons is said to be the most 
 prosaic body of men living. An}^ thing like " fine writ- 
 ing " they put down with their inimitable " Hear, 
 hear ! " in a tone of derision which a young speaker 
 never ventures to encounter but once. The style of 
 their debates is almost wholly conversatiofial. The 
 prime qualities which command their hearing, if not 
 
LECT. xn.] CLASSIC QUOTATIONS. 183 
 
 their votes, are good sense in talking to the point, and 
 stopping at the end. Yet some of their most eminent 
 debaters interlard their speeches with classic quotations 
 to an extent which seems inconsistent with the parlia- 
 mentary taste as evinced in other things. 
 
 I have never till recently met with a satisfactory 
 explanation of the apparent anomaly. But probably 
 the truth is this, that the great majority of those quo- 
 tations are relics of the school-days of the members of 
 Parliament. They are almost all of them graduates 
 of the two universities. In the universities, classical 
 study is the central discipline. It overshadows every 
 thing else. It takes largely the form of committing 
 to memory favorite passages from Greek and Latin 
 authors, and imitating their versification. A certain 
 routine of such passages becomes as familiar as the 
 English alphabet to the graduates of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge. To a great extent, they all know by heart 
 the same extracts, and know the English of them. 
 When, therefore, twenty years after graduation, they 
 meet in Parliament, and harangue each other, an apt 
 recitation from one of the old text-books of the uni- 
 versity, given with the proper intonation and prosody, 
 is instantly recognized and understood by four-fifths of 
 the audience. It comes to them also with the golden 
 associations of their youth. Hence the applause with 
 which such a quotation, if apt, is often received. More 
 than once a ministry has been unseated by the irre- 
 sistible power of a piece of sarcasm clothed in the 
 words of Juvenal or Cicero. 
 
 This explanation, which I have from a trustworthy 
 source, is plausible, to say the least. But it is obvious 
 that an American senator who should imitate in that 
 
184 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xii. 
 
 respect an English leader in the House of Commons 
 would have no such prepossessions in his audience to 
 protect him from the charge of pedantry. In this 
 country, audiences scarcely tolerate a Greek or Roman 
 tinge in the style of public speech. But they bear 
 any thing belonging to our vernacular. With all our 
 hereditary antipathy to English aristocracy, and our 
 rivalship with English prestige, we are still English at 
 heart. We feel in every throb our English origin. 
 We confess our kinship to English modes of thought. 
 We love the old mother-country. We can not help 
 this till we cease to think in the mother-tongue. 
 ^American literature has furthermore a special claim 
 upon the clergy, in the fact that the theological think- 
 ing of this country has been to a certain extent original. 
 In no part of the world in modern times has theological 
 discussion ^ been more vigorous, or more unique in its 
 character.^ Some of the ablest minds of the last centu- 
 ry spent their lives in it. It has also commanded a 
 respect among the laity which it has not received in 
 England or in Continental Europe. Men who in Europe 
 would have been foremost as philosophers and states- 
 men have here been found among our theologians. 
 The ablest contributions of this country to mental 
 philosophy have been made at the instance of theology, 
 and chiefly in direct connection with theology. 
 
 The Puritan type of theological thinking in this 
 country, even as compared with the corresponding type 
 in England and in Holland, was largely original. The 
 inquiry is often made, by those who are not familiar 
 with the theological history of New England, whether 
 or not it has developed any thing new in theological 
 science. The controversy between the " Old School " 
 
LECT. XII.] NEW-ENGLAND THEOLOGY. 185 
 
 and the " New School " in the religious thought of this 
 country has retired into the shade in consequence of 
 the re-union of the Presbyterian Church. It has given 
 place to a totally different class of discussions. It is 
 worthy of consideration, therefore, in a brief excursus 
 from the main theme before us. 
 
 Is the orthodox theology of New England an ad- 
 vance upon that of the older confessions ? A glance 
 at the character of the early clergy of New England 
 will go far to answer this inquiry. They were remarka- 
 bly self-reliant men, made such by the force of their 
 origin and condition. They wore no man's livery. 
 They were not predisposed to recognize uninspired 
 authorities in matters of religious faith. It is im- 
 possible to read the history of the four New-England 
 Colonies, before their separation from Great Britain, 
 without observing, that, from the very landing at 
 Plymouth, the idea of independence had possession 
 of the colonial mind. In government, in religion, in 
 social civilization, our fathers scented subjection to 
 human authority a great way off. Probably the world 
 has never seen a more intense development of indi- 
 vidualism. 
 
 In religion, especially, the New-England mind was a 
 law to itself. In religious affairs they saw the extreme 
 of peril to all men's liberties, and their vigilance against 
 authority was sleepless accordingly. It was with dif- 
 ficulty that they recognized the necessity even of the 
 fellowship of churches. A scheme for a " consocia- 
 tion " of churches, which was laid before the Massachu- 
 setts Legislature in 1662, never got further than the 
 order that it be printed " for the consideration of the 
 people." The people have had it in safe "considera- 
 
186 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xii. 
 
 tion" ever since. Independence was in the air. It 
 pervaded every important subject of colonial interest. 
 It was the last thought of a true Pilgrim when he 
 retired to rest at night, and the first that sprang to the 
 birth in his mind in the morning. No body of men 
 were ever more faithful illustrations of that "eternal 
 vigilance " which is " the price of liberty " than the 
 people of these Colonies. 
 
 This feature in the make of the New-England Puri- 
 tans has given character, down to this day, to the whole 
 drift of New-England theology. They knew no right 
 more sacred, and no duty more imperative, than that 
 of private judgment. At the same time they did not 
 have the means of forming their theology as a deriva- 
 tive from other standards than the Bible. They had 
 not access to large libraries. They were isolated from 
 frequent correspondence with the old countries. There 
 was no such intimacy of correspondence between the 
 American clergy and their Scotch and English brethren 
 as that which fed the English Reformation from the 
 fountains of the Dutch and Genevan schools. No such 
 volume, for instance, as the " Zurich Letters," grew out 
 of the relations of the colonial ministry of this country, 
 or their immediate successors, to their brethren in Great 
 Britain. They had no ecclesiastical ties binding them 
 as a body to authorities and standards on the other side 
 of the Atlantic. If they acknowledged the standards 
 of the European churches, they did so feeling at entire 
 liberty to modify them, or to attach to their formulsB 
 an interpretation of their own. 
 
 In New England, as matter of fact, the right and 
 the duty of private judgment were a right and a duty 
 exercised. Separate creeds for separate churches were 
 
LECT. xn.] OUR THEOLOGY ORIGINAL. 187 
 
 the rule. Each church changed established formulae 
 at its own pleasure. Even individuals, by the ancient 
 usage of New England, were at liberty to frame their 
 own creeds in their own language ; and their fitness 
 to be admitted to the communion of the church was 
 judged of, so far as doctrinal tests were concerned, by 
 the soundness or the unsoundness of such private 
 creeds. Originality in theological literature was the 
 necessary outcome from the conditions of colonial life 
 here from the very first. If this country was to have 
 any theological thinking at all, it was a foregone con- 
 clusion that it must be original. It was predestined 
 to be home-made, like the rye bread upon their tables 
 and the homespun cloth in their looms. 
 
 Moreover, the early theologians of America were 
 preachers. Many of them were eminent preachers. 
 Their theology has come down to us largely in the 
 form of sermons. They constructed their theology for 
 the pulpit. It was suggested to them by the demands 
 of the pulpit rather than by the demands of the school 
 as represented in any current system of philosophy. 
 No other type of theology since apostolic days has been 
 so purely the product of the pulpit, aimed at the objects 
 of the pulpit, breathing the spirit of the pulpit, and 
 actually preached in the pulpit, as the theology of New 
 England. 
 
 In this respect of its homiletic origin, the New-Eng- 
 land theology was widely diverse from the patristic 
 and mediaeval confessions. Those were largely the 
 product of the schools. They grew out of the abstract 
 relations of philosophy to a revealed faith. They 
 were in some degree subservient to the philosophies of 
 the respective ages in which they crystallized into 
 
188 MEN AJSTD BOOKS. [lect. xii. 
 
 creeds. The Puritan theology, on the contrary, and 
 specially that type of it which grew up in New Eng- 
 land, was the theology of the pulpit. The men who 
 framed it were preachers, and, either consciously or 
 unconsciously, they aimed to produce a theology which 
 should preach well. The pulpit was their throne, not 
 the school, not the chair of philosophy, not that of 
 ecclesiastical dominion. 
 
 Theirs was a theology, also, which was molded by 
 powerful religious awakenings. These, in the peculiar- 
 ities of their development, were intensely American. 
 As time passed away, they became almost an idiosyn- 
 crasy of American religious life. Not in their ultimate 
 spirit, but in many of their external phenomena, they 
 were American. So peculiar were they in some 
 respects to this country, that for a long time they have 
 been regarded in Great Britain and in Germany as 
 the result of some peculiar diathesis of American tem- 
 perament. Under the dominant influence of religious 
 awakenings, the theology of New England has grown 
 up to its maturity. 
 
 All these facts in the history of our theological litera- 
 ture tended to give it originality. It is the work of 
 men who were, by the force of circumstances without 
 and of tendencies within, thrown back upon their own 
 resources. They recommenced theological inquiry de 
 novo. They laid new foundations, and erected new 
 structures. For good or for evil, such was the fact. 
 We have no occasion to blink it, and no right to deny 
 it. We unconsciously falsify history, if we try to se- 
 cure for the New-England theology the prestige of un- 
 swerving conformity to the more ancient standards by 
 conceiving of it as a mere reproduction of them. It 
 
LECT. XII.] CALVINISM IMPROVED. 189 
 
 claimed to be, and it was, an advance upon them. In 
 the direction of truth or of error, according to the 
 prepossessions of the lodker-on, it was a progress. Its 
 authors chiimed for it the title of an improvement in 
 theology as a human science. They called it Calvinism, 
 but Calvinism improved. In my judgment, they com- 
 mitted a mistake in theologic policy in clinging so 
 pertinaciously to the name of Calvin. The system 
 they framed was not Calvinism, as Calvin taught and 
 preached. They started with the assumption that the- 
 ology is an improvable science, and they ended with 
 the claim that they had improved it. They claimed 
 thus to have evolved, more completely and symmetri- 
 cally than Calvin had done, the spirit of the Scriptures, 
 and to have made the scriptural faith appear more 
 reasonable, and more accordant with the necessary 
 beliefs of the human mind. 
 
 Yet this fact has been almost wholly ignored by the 
 opponents of the popular theology. Scarcely a trace 
 of its recognition can be found in the writings of Dr. 
 Channing. He almost invariably auned the shafts of 
 his argument and invective at the theology of Calvin, 
 not at that of his own contemporaries. The same is 
 true of the whole history of that side of the debate 
 which he represented down to our day. 
 
 Specially is the originality of New-England theology 
 true of it, as represented in a succession of theologians 
 extending over -nearly a century and a half backward 
 from our own times. The leading theologians of New 
 England during this period — beginning with the elder 
 Edwards, and ending with one still living — have done 
 more, in the way of original thinking, for the advance 
 of strictly theological science, than any other equal 
 
190 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xii. 
 
 number of men, within an equal space of time, since 
 Augustine's day. 
 
 iThe theological work of the reformers, as I under- 
 and it, was mainly the recovery of a lost theology : 
 that of this catena of American theologians has been 
 the establishment of an advanced theology.x They 
 have been originators in a sense which can not properly 
 be affirmed of the great bulk of their contemporaries in 
 this country or in Europe. We do an injustice which 
 history will eventually undo, if we try to throw a sus- 
 pension-bridge over their heads, and to attach our own 
 work to that of the theologians who preceded them, as 
 if nothing new in theological thinking had been done 
 in the interval. They certainly were originators, if 
 any man ever was. As such they will stand in the 
 final version of theological history. If opprobrium is 
 attached to the fact. New England must bear that; 
 if dignity, she is entitled to this. 
 
 The German theologians recognize the same thing 
 whenever they inform themselves of the history of 
 American theological thought. As a rule, I am told, 
 they know very little of it. A solid and useful work 
 remains yet to be done by some American student in 
 German}^, to publish in the German language a history 
 of the American development of theological opinion. 
 But, so far as our most eminent theologians of the last 
 century and a half are known at all in Germany, Ger- 
 man scholars detect in them an original vein of thought. 
 The same is true of English scholars. When such a 
 man as Frederick Robertson reads President Edwards, 
 he finds in him the germs, as he says, of an original 
 style of thinking. It strikes him not as a reproduc- 
 tion, but as a discovery. 
 
LECT. XII.] AN ADVANCED THEOLOGY. 191 
 
 Resuming the line of suggestion from which we have 
 deviated, let the fact be noted, that this originality of 
 our theology furnishes a peculiar ground of claim for 
 American literature upon the studies of a preacher. 
 You do not know the full development of theological 
 science, if you study it only in the older European 
 standards. The American development, and specially 
 that of New England, as being the earliest and the 
 most adventurous and the most unique, is needed to 
 fill out the programme of the coiirse which theology 
 has actually taken in the history of opinion. 
 
LECTURE XIII. 
 
 BEARING OF PROFESSIONAL PURSUITS ON A PASTOR'S 
 STUDIES. — BREADTH OF RANGE IN SELECTION OF 
 BOOKS. 
 
 (6) Some of the remarks already made suggest an- 
 other principle of selection in pastoral studies. It is 
 that the true ideal of a pastor's reading must be regu- 
 lated in part by his professional duties ; in how great 
 part, the good sense of each must decide. The prin- 
 ciple is vital, that reading for the direct purpose of 
 homiletic use is a necessity, and as such should be 
 respected. It not only is not unscholarly, but a pas- 
 tor's scholarship is radically defective, without it, and 
 this for two reasons. 
 
 One is the necessity of such study to the dignity of 
 other literary pursuits. That is a degrading definition 
 of literature which excludes from it professional studies. 
 We create effeminate conceptions of it when we isolate 
 it from the tug of real life. It becomes the accom- 
 plishment of an idle character, if you limit it to the 
 amusement of idle hours. 
 
 Professor Henry Reed notices the popular use of the 
 -ph.vase\ belles-lettres as indicating the tendency, of a 
 certain class of minds to this degrading notion. ^That 
 phrase was the invention of an effeminate taste, which 
 sought to hide its own feebleness under the guise of a 
 
 192 
 
LECT. xin.] PEOFESSIONAL ENTHUSIASM. 193 
 
 foreign tongue. Coleridge remarks it as one of the 
 disastrous revolutions of England, that " literature fell 
 away from the professions." For the earnestness, and 
 therefore for the dignity, of our literary pursuits, we 
 need to associate them with some regular and necessary 
 avocation in life. The necessity of labor for a living 
 is not a hinderance, but a help, to the depth of our 
 scholarly life. Every important vocation in life has 
 some literature of its own : at least, it has a history 
 which a man is the wiser for knowing. The clerical 
 profession has a literature which no clergyman can 
 afford not to know. 
 
 A second reason for this principle of selection is its 
 obvious necessity to professional success. There are 
 two kinds of interest in the clerical office. One is the 
 direct interest in its objects ; the other, interest in it 
 as a profession. Providence has benevolently arranged, 
 for our assistance in life's labors, that we are so made 
 as to enjoy, not only the results, but the process to 
 results. Pleasure is imparted, not only at the end, but 
 on the way to the end. This professional joy is as 
 legitimate to a clergyman as to a lawyer. 
 
 Not that it is the highest motive to clerical fidelity, 
 but it is an innocent and a stimulating motive. The 
 highest success is never gained without it. The pos- 
 session of it, however, leads necessarily to study of 
 professional literature. This is as it should be. Our 
 tastes in reading ought to be tinged with the pecu- 
 liarities of our profession to a sufficient extent to make 
 them tributary to it. The two may blend, so that the 
 one shall never be a drudgery, and the other never 
 effeminate. 
 
 (7) Our choice of authors should cover as large a 
 
194 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xra. 
 
 range of literature as can be read in a scholarly way. 
 This as a theory seems self-evident ; yet in practice it 
 is at this point that the hopelessness of the scholarly 
 life to a pastor appears most invincible. Yet, be it 
 ever so limited in its practical application, the recog- 
 nition of the principle is invaluable to a pastor's schol- 
 arly spirit. 
 
 Observe, in confirmation of this, the uselessness of 
 variety, if gained at the expense of scholarship, in 
 reading. Adults in years are often juvenile in culture. 
 This juvenile period is characterized by three things, — 
 reading is amusement, the choice of authors is for- 
 tuitous, and opinions about authors are either an echo 
 of their reputation, or a wilful contradiction of it. No 
 profound personal sympathy with authors is yet created, 
 and no antipathies for which scholarly reasons can be 
 given. Our collegiate curriculum does not commonly 
 advance a student much beyond this juvenile period 
 of culture, unless he is above the average age of colle- 
 gians, and has read more than they commonly read. 
 
 In this juvenile period the first peril encountered is 
 that of reading too much and too variously. We are 
 in danger of skimmmg the surface of every thing that 
 falls in our way, without penetrating any thing. One 
 very soon wearies of such reading, if it is directed to 
 any thing which deserves to be called earnest literature. 
 To read such literature with any pleasure we must be 
 ourselves in earnest; and to be in earnest in it we 
 must penetrate it in spots. The mind, otherwise, is 
 like a bird always on the wing. This is not scholarly 
 reading. No man will pursue it long in the use of 
 serious literature, unless he falls into an affectation 
 of scholarly tastes. 
 
LECT. xm.] LITERARY AFFECTATION. 195 
 
 A second peril to wliicli the juvenile period of cul- 
 ture is exposed is that of literary affectation. Did 
 you never see a freshman in college, in a fit of literary 
 eagerness, carrying to his room a huge folio in Latin, 
 or a set of the Greek classics, under the hallucination 
 that scholarly culture must have some such unknown 
 and unknowable beginning in order to he scholarly? 
 Profuse and promiscuous reading often results from 
 such affectation of literary aims. 
 
 One of the humiliating confessions which we have 
 to make for educated men is, that there is not a little 
 of affected taste among them. This is of so great im- 
 portance to a youthful scholar, that it demands notice 
 by an excursus from the line of the present discussion. 
 You will discover, as you extend the range of your 
 reading, that there is a class of authors who at first 
 awe you by their prodigious learning, by their glib use 
 of the technical dialect of scholarship, and by their 
 oracular opinions. But they are among the authors 
 whom you most quickly outgrow. The conviction 
 soon forces itself upon you that they are pretentious. 
 Their dialect is not necessitated by their thinking: 
 their reading has been discursive, not penetrative, and 
 their productions are too heavily indebted to their com- 
 mon-place books. You find that other authors, less 
 voluminous, with a less gaudy parade of the tackling 
 of science, and with a more simple style, move you 
 more profoundly, and their influence lives longer in 
 your mental growth. 
 
 Religion and religious men suffer often, at the hands 
 of the men of books, from the charge of cant. The 
 charge is too often true. But it is my firm belief, that 
 among any number of plain Christian men and women 
 
196 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiii. 
 
 cliosen at random, there will be found less of that mor- 
 bid affection than can be found among an equal number 
 of literary and scientific authors and literary amateurs 
 chosen at random. What is cant in religion ? It is 
 nothing but affectation of unreal virtue ; not conscious 
 hypocrisy, but unconscious self-deceit. As a mental 
 phenomenon it is not confined to religion. The same 
 thing essentially vitiates manners in society. It is 
 ■witnessed in the enthusiasm of travelers, in the raptures 
 of connoisseurs of art, in the patriotism of politicians, 
 and in the conscientiousness of obstinate minorities. 
 It infects as well the aspirations of authorship and 
 the early enthusiasm of readers. It is a ubiquitous 
 infirmity of human nature. Indeed, do we not distrust 
 ourselves more in this respect, the more we know of 
 ourselves ? But a fragment of our experience, proba- 
 bly, is absolutely free from affected virtue. That 
 fragment is commonly purified of this taint by the 
 discipline of emergencies. Yet even death does not 
 press it out of some natures. They die as they have 
 lived, deceivers and deceived, or, to speak more exactly, 
 deceived, and therefore deceivers. Authors who make 
 the most showy parade of mental integrity are often 
 guilty of some glaring sign of its opposite. Carlyle 
 has been the severest censor of the English public 
 for its insincerity in every thing; yet Carlyle's style 
 in the very utterance of his invectives is one of the 
 most disingenuous specimens of quackery in modern 
 authorship. 
 
 It is no marvelous thing, then, if we find cant in 
 books in which we least expect it. Critics who have 
 an honest culture complain of it in all the great litera- 
 tures of our day. Addison complained of it in his 
 
LECT. XIII.] LITERARY JUGGLERS. 197 
 
 contemporaries. It was the butt of Dr. Johnson's 
 sarcasm ; yet the old elephant was not free from it 
 himself when he tried to dance. Menzel and Niebuhr 
 stigmatize it in the German literature. Guizot has 
 scorned it in one department of the French literature. 
 (Niebuhr flatly charges it upon some of his literary con- 
 temporaries, that whole pages of references to authori- 
 ties were copied from others, a few here and a few 
 there, with no attempt at verification, but purely to 
 impose on the reader by a parade of extensive reading. 
 Such is the jugglery of scholarship. 
 
 I could name two celebrated writers of this country 
 who belong to the class of literary jugglers. In one 
 case, if he ever read his footnotes in their original 
 connections, he would have found some of them to be 
 hostile, and some of them irrelevant, to his own posi- 
 tions. As I do not suppose him to have been con- 
 sciously a knave, the most charitable construction of 
 his error is that he borrowed them, and imposed them 
 on his readers, trusting to their ignorance as he had 
 to his own. In the other case, a theological controver- 
 sialist was hard pressed by an opponent more learned 
 than himself. He " read up," as we call it, for the exi- 
 gency, and gave to the public a rejoinder in which were 
 heaped together mediaeval names which his readers had 
 never heard of, and he probably had not heard of till 
 then. As authorities, some of them were worth little 
 more than the London " Punch." His opponent saw 
 through the trick at a glance, and never answered what 
 he doubtless deemed an affectation which was beneath 
 him. That is a ruse which is never perpetrated with- 
 out being discovered by somebody. 
 
 Returning, now, from the excursion we have taken 
 
198 MEN AWD BOOKS. [lect, xiii. 
 
 from the point iii hand, let us observe, that, if grave and 
 mature authorship is capable of such affectations, the 
 taste of youthful readers, till it is chastened by breadth 
 of culture, may be at least in equal peril. We need, 
 therefore, to guard ourselves against extent of reading 
 which would be gained at the expense of scholarly 
 reading. Variety is not scholarly, if it is not so thor- 
 ough as to result in symmetrical culture, so far as it 
 goes. It is unscholarly, for instance, ever to read a 
 book for the sake of talking of it, or to be able to 
 say that one has read it, or to be able to quote from it 
 in one's own production. 
 
 The real culture of a man shows itself in his original 
 tliinking, not in that which he prates about, and puts 
 on parade. Give us your thought, man, your thought ! 
 That is the proof to us of what you have lived in your 
 own mental being. That tells us what you are. Who 
 cares for any thing else j^ou have to give ? Sly hints 
 of prodigality in the use of books go for nothing. Do 
 not be awed by them when you encounter them in the 
 authors you read. You can provide all such pabulum 
 for yourself, and then you will know what it is worth. 
 Do not allow an author to impose it upon you for any 
 higher worth than it would have if it came from your 
 own pen. 
 
 A noteworthy fact in this connection is, that one's 
 reading, and one's use of reading in one's own produc- 
 tions, will act and re-act upon each other. What the 
 one is, the other is apt to be. Therefore, freedom from 
 affectation in your use of books in sermons will tend 
 to secure the same freedom in the reading of books. 
 Make no display of learning or of varied culture. The 
 loopholes through which a hearer can look into your 
 
LECT. xin.] MENTAL INTEGRITY. 199 
 
 library should be made as few as possible in your 
 preaching. A thorough-bred traveler does not boast 
 of his travels. He is mindful of Lord Chesterfield's 
 advice to his son, not to begin every fragment of his 
 conversation with, " When I was in Japan." So a 
 genuine scholar does not pry open the crevices through 
 which the extent of his reading can be seen. 
 
 A young man has gained one of the prime elements 
 of scholarship, when he has learned the worth of art- 
 lessness in his literary dealings with himself. Play no 
 tricks upon yourself. Do not be hoodwinked into an 
 imitation of the trick^-a£. authors. Be honest in your 
 secret literary habits, v^eep yourself always on the safe 
 side of plagiarism in your sermons. Be assured that 
 you ivill plagiarize unconsciously quite as much as is 
 consistent with the rights of authorship) As a specimen 
 of the care which should be practiced in this respect, 
 if you quote in your sermon, see to it that you put the 
 signs of quotation into your delivery as well as into your 
 manuscript. In a word, be yourself in literature as in 
 religion. Let your reading be, and appear to be, in 
 your use of it, the symbol of a real life. There is such 
 a thing as intellectual integrity. The price of it is 
 above rubies. If you will plan your reading, and use it 
 with this kind of truthfulness to yourself, the range of 
 your reading and the symmetry of your culture will be 
 exponents of each other. The variety of your reading 
 will grow to meet the wants of your culture. Beyond 
 that, it is of no imaginable use to you or to others. 
 
 But, while protection against affectation of literary 
 culture is the first need of a youthful writer, there is, 
 on the other hand, an obvious value in that variety of 
 study which is a genuine index of symmetry. Let the 
 
200 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xm. 
 
 fact be observed, therefore, that all the excellences of 
 literature are not to be found in any narrow group of 
 writers. Every great mind is great by virtue of some 
 sort of individuality. That individuality represents a 
 power. But no mind represents all such individuali- 
 ties. The universal genius is a fiction : it can be real- 
 ized only in a mind of infinite capacities. We speak 
 of Shakspeare as if he were such a genius ; but it is 
 hyperbole. If he is the first of poets for his excellences, 
 he is the first, also, for his faults. Intensity in author- 
 ship generally exhibits itself, in part, by violations of 
 taste. 
 
 Only by varied reading, therefore, can we combine 
 in our own tastes any very wide range of excellences. 
 We must achieve our object as a bee gathers honey. 
 Apiarists tell us that no two honeycombs have pre- 
 cisely the same flavor. A bee can not concoct the most 
 delicate honey from any one species of flora. Diver- 
 sities of the saccharine element must be distilled from 
 species which are opposites, some of which are even 
 antidotes to each other. So the finest culture is the 
 transfusion of the greatest breadth of literature. Oppo- 
 sites and antidotes in thought may blend in mental 
 character, and produce a flavor which no other com- 
 pounds can imitate. 
 
 The principle involved here is not impaired in value 
 by any degree of richness which one may find in a few 
 favorite authors. There is a virtue in variety for the 
 sake of variety. The illustrious Literary Club, to 
 which Dr. Johnson belonged, included, besides him, 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke, the latter 
 the most profound thinker of the age. But Goldsmith 
 expressed a practical want, even in the society of such 
 
tECT. XIII.] CULTUKE SYIVIPATHETIC. 201 
 
 men, when lie advocated the enlargement of the club 
 by the introduction of new members, "because," he 
 said, "the original members had traveled over each 
 other's minds so often and so thoroughly." So it is 
 with our culture from books, even the wisest and most 
 quickening. We appropriate from them in time all 
 that our affinities can appropriate. We must have 
 fresh food to keep the mind new and progressive in its 
 tastes. 
 
 Further : a certain variety of knowledge is necessary 
 to the perfection of any one species of knowledge. 
 An old book often receives a new power to enlighten 
 or to quicken us from our perusal of a new one. Still 
 more is diversity of mental character necessary to per- 
 fection in any one quality. Culture is sensitively sym- 
 pathetic : it is a compound of sympathies. Diseased 
 culture in one respect generates disease in other re- 
 spects. Amaurosis in one eye may cause the other eye 
 to weep itself blind : so a contracted culture is, for that 
 reason, a shallow one. Of two authors, for instance, 
 we appreciate one the better for appreciating the other 
 justly. Of two departments of a library, we penetrate 
 the one the more profoundly for every glimpse of 
 insight which we obtain into the other. Of two na- 
 tional literatures, we have a master}- of the one in some 
 degree proportionate to our conquest of the other. In 
 all nature every thing helps everj- other thing. In the 
 ultimate products of mind there are no rival litera- 
 tures nor antagonist departments : they are mutual 
 auxiliaries. The history of human thought is a history 
 of great alliances. Breadth of reading, therefore, pro- 
 motes depth of descent in any one spot. 
 
 Again : it is a calamity to a public speaker to subject 
 
202 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiii, 
 
 his culture to the exclusive influence of any one author, 
 or group of authors. Mental servitude often follows 
 extravagant enthusiasm for one writer, or for the writers 
 of one school. Individuality of character, then, is sac- 
 rificed. Not merely is independence of opinion lost: 
 indeed, that may not be sacrificed perceptibly, and, 
 because it is not, the student may imagine that his 
 mental freedom as a whole is unimpaired. Not so : his 
 culture is literally suh-jected. It lies under the hoof 
 of a contracted authorship. Such a mind has no catho- 
 licity of taste. It reveres nothing which does not come 
 within the vision of the few minds to whom it looks 
 up as oracles. 
 
 Cicero tyrannized thus at one time over a class of 
 Italian scholars. Erasmus describes, in a dialogue 
 which he satirically calls " Ciceronianus," a man who 
 for seven years read no book but Cicero. He had only 
 Cicero's bust in his library, and sealed his letters with 
 a seal engraved with Cicero's head. He had composed 
 " three or four huge volumes, in which he had criticised 
 every word of Cicero, every variation of every sense 
 of every word, and every foot or cadence with which 
 Cicero began or closed a sentence." 
 
 Dr. Johnson tyrannized over a class of educated 
 minds in England. Even so robust a mind as that 
 of Robert Hall confessed to having worked through a 
 period of servitude to Johnson in his early discipline. 
 Coleridge has more recently swayed another class of 
 readers with an authority which no man should con- 
 sciously submit to for an hour. 
 
 In the pulpit, Dr. Chalmers, for a time, was an autocrat 
 over a large class of admirers. Few men have appeared 
 in the modern pulpit whose faults and virtues have 
 
LECT. xm.] LITERARY SERVILITY. 203 
 
 more frequently been copied entire. I do not say 
 reproduced, but copied ; for the spirit of a great mind 
 is never reproduced in us till we have either lived 
 through or overleaped a servile admiration of him, and 
 become consciously independent. Soon after Chalmers 
 published his "Astronomical Discourses," a swarm of 
 little Chalmerians, if I may coin the word, appeared 
 in the pulpits of Scotland and America. The pulpit of 
 Scotland has not entirely recovered from that influence 
 to this day. 
 
 Carlyle has given a similar lurch to a class of minds 
 in our own literature. Twenty or thirty years ago 
 American taste, as represented by a considerable group 
 of writers, reeled under the blow of Carlyle's tyranny, 
 from which it has never yet fully righted itself. 
 
 In this country one man is to-day exercising autocracy 
 over a class of youthful writers and scholars. Scarcely 
 a year passes in which I do not find evidences of this 
 in manuscript sermons. It is difficult to convince a 
 man by criticism of his subjection to a contemporary 
 author. I often make such criticism when I know 
 that it will be rejected now, but that the subject of it 
 will surely see the truth of it eventually. This is true 
 of the present sway of the author in question over a 
 certain class of minds. Few things appear to me so 
 sure in the future of American literatiu'e as that the 
 educated mind of this country will outgrow its adula- 
 tion of him and his works. His is a diseased mind, 
 and the world is sure to find it out. Some of you will 
 live to witness a change of literary opinion of him not 
 unlike that which has overtaken the literarj^ fame of 
 Byron. In both cases you are safe in assuming the 
 existence of distorted literary tastes from the distortion 
 
204 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xm. 
 
 of religious faith. It was not possible for Byron to 
 be a true literary guide while his rebellion against reli- 
 gious restraint was what it was. A worse than any 
 literary bondage inthralled him. So of the author I 
 have in mind : pure as his private life is, it is impossible 
 for his intellect to be a great and true literary seer 
 so long as he hesitates whether or not to apply to the 
 being of God the personal pronoun. 
 
 Sometimes servitude to authors takes the form of 
 subjection to one school in philosophy. Then a young 
 scholar trusts nothing, reveres nothing, knows nothing, 
 sees nothing candidly, which conflicts with the school in 
 which he has been tutored. He looks at every thing 
 under the shadow of the school. He apes the dialect 
 of the school. The truths of common sense, which 
 other men can express in the language of common 
 sense, he puts into the formulce of the school. The 
 most simple elements of belief he must transmute in 
 the laboratory of the school. Nothing seems literary 
 to his taste, nothing puts on the glamour of literary 
 associations, so as to excite his respect, till it has been 
 fused in the alembic of the school. 
 
 Such subservience to one or to few models of thought 
 is a sad folly, an enormous folly. But one book in 
 the world deserves such submission of the intellect, 
 and that book never claims it in respect to literary 
 taste. A young man should check the beginnings of 
 such a folly in his own consciousness. An amateur in 
 the cultivation of orange-trees tells me that the fruitage 
 of the tree depends on the size of the box in which 
 3^ou pack its roots when it is young. Cramp them then, 
 and you can never make other than a dwarf of it. 
 Give them large room to expand, and the quality, as 
 
tECT. XIII.] FASTIDIOUS CRITICISM. 205 
 
 well as abundance, of the fruit, will reward your fore- 
 thought. So it is with a young scholar's early tastes. 
 By an agile effort of good sense he can rid them of a 
 narrow prejudice when it is new. Later in life he can 
 only live it through at the expense of a great deal of 
 contraction of usefulness, and alloy of pleasure. 
 
 Some minds never do live through their self-subjec- 
 tion to a one-sided authorship. In the weaker class of 
 minds the effects of such a period of enslavement sink 
 deep, and become a second nature. They become as 
 inevitable and involuntary as the distinction between 
 the right and left hands, — a distinction which physi- 
 ologists now declare to be entirely unnecessary, if the 
 physical mechanism could only be started into volun- 
 tary use without it. It is said that our right-handed 
 habit of body has the effect, upon a man lost in a 
 forest, of insensibly twisting him around to the left, to 
 the extent of eventually moving in a circle, through 
 the mere instinct of the right side to take the lead 
 of the left, and that the circle, other things being 
 equal, will always be described in one way, — from right 
 to left. Such a monotonous circle does the life's cul- 
 ture of some men become, who are never emancipated 
 from a one-sided twist received in their early discipline. 
 They never learn to do even-handed justice, in their 
 literary judgments, to any broad fraternity of authors. 
 They never learn to enjoy any wide range of scholar- 
 ship. They never become, therefore, men of generous 
 culture in their own development. They are always 
 lost in the forest, and always tramping in a spiral. 
 Ruskin says that a false taste may be known by its 
 fastidiousness. " It tests all things," he says, " by the 
 way they fit ii." But a true taste, he contends, is 
 
206 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xm. 
 
 " reverent and unselfish," for ever learning, for ever 
 growing, and " testing itself by the way it fits things^ 
 This is as true in literature as in art. 
 
 Let us, then, be jealous of the influence of schools 
 in any thing. Be watchful of the power of favorite 
 authors over you. Professor Reed says he has known 
 a man " late in life to lose the power of sound literary 
 judgment and enjoyment," through "bigotry in the 
 choice of books." It seems, at the first sight, to be 
 an ungenerous caution to a young writer ; but it is a 
 very necessary one. | Beware of your favorites in any 
 thing, — your favorite author, your favorite preacher, 
 your favorite instructor, the head of your sect, the 
 originator of your school in philosoi^hy, the leading 
 expounder of your type of theology, the representative 
 man in your beau ideal of culture. Stand off, and 
 measure them all.-'- Wait a while: let your judgment 
 of them take years in the forming. Receive trustfully 
 and gratefully whatever they give you which satisfies 
 the varied cravings of your nature, and helps your 
 culture to an even balance, but hold in suspense for 
 a time any influence from them which surfeits some 
 tastes, and leaves others to starve. 
 
 There must come, in the lives of us all, a period at 
 which we revise our early enthusiasms, and smile sadly 
 at some of them. A blessing to us are those authors 
 and those men, whom, after that ripening period, we 
 find that we have not outlived. The blessing will be 
 proportionate to their number and to the range of 
 culture which they represent. 
 
LECTURE XIV. 
 
 BREADTH OF RANGE IN PASTORAL STUDY, CON- 
 TINUED. — THE STUDY OF LIVING SPEAKERS. 
 
 Before we leave the topic of breadth of range m 
 our studies, an excursus deserves a brief consideration, 
 upon the fact that the clergy are under peculiar temp- 
 tations to narrow discipline. Not all is true which is 
 often affirmed of the literary bigotry of the ministry. 
 Yet the fact of the peril is a reality. 
 
 The intellectual intensity of the clerical profession is 
 one source of the peril. It demands intense concentra- 
 tion of mind. Like other men of sense, the clergy 
 must be about their business. They must work at it 
 in dead earnest. Reading, therefore, is at the best but 
 an appendage to professional duty. A very large 
 portion of a pastor's waking hours must be given to 
 mental production, not to accumulation, not to the 
 culture which books give. The temptation follows 
 inevitably to be content with a contracted range of 
 reading ; if not with professional reading alone, with a 
 range of other reading which has no freshening variety. 
 
 Again : intensity of moral excitement in the ministry 
 enhances the peril. Professional duty in the ministry 
 draws deep and exhaustively upon the moral sensibili- 
 ties. It absorbs vitality, as white-heat does oxygen. 
 A pastor, therefore, is often in danger of having no 
 
 207 
 
208 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 spirit left in him for literature which does not contrib- 
 ute directly and palpably to professional service. No 
 other profession equals the ministry in respect to this 
 moral pressure from above and around, crowding it 
 down and inward upon its peculiarities. No other 
 enlists such forces of conscience in behalf of its pecu- 
 liarities. 
 
 Further : unenlightened convictions of conscience in 
 the ministry sometimes enhance the peril of a con- 
 tracted culture. Impulse of conscience must often be 
 balanced by good sense, before it will permit a clergy- 
 man to engage happily in any very broad range of 
 reading. Conscientious prejudices against learning 
 constitute one of the perpetual burdens of the church. 
 ^^The clerical right to culture has been purchased at an 
 immense cost of conflict with unenlightened consciences. 
 I have known a clergyman who had passed through a 
 collegiate and professional training of seven years, who, 
 at the end of it, thought it not right for a minister to 
 read Shakspeare. When the Rev. Edwards A. Park, 
 D.D., occupied "this rhetorical chair, he formed among 
 the students a Shakspeare Club, for the elaborate 
 discussion of the style, the philosophy, the plots, and 
 the theology of Shakspeare. It encountered so much 
 opposition from timid consciences, in the seminary and 
 out of it, that he thought it necessary to deliver a lec- 
 ture on the " propriety of studying Shakspeare, and the 
 special usefulness of the study to ministers." 
 
 It is to be conceded that the danger apprehended 
 by some fervent pastors, of a spiritual chill from intel- 
 lectual enthusiasm, is not wholly imaginary. Periods 
 have occurred in which some sections of the church 
 have suffered thus. Such was the case with the Church 
 
LKCT. XIV.] CONSCIENCE IN STUDY. 209 
 
 of Scotland in that portion of the eighteenth century 
 in which the characteristic representatives of her pulpit 
 were such men as Dr. Blair and Dr. Robertson. They 
 were eminent in the literature of Scotland, but of arctic 
 temperament in her pulpit. Such periods are singu- 
 larly alike everywhere. A lenient morality supplants 
 fervid piety ; doctrinal Christianity is held esoterically 
 as a thing to be believed, but not preached ; truisms 
 and commonplaces make up the staple of sermons ; the 
 clergy give themselves to other avocations than that of 
 apostolic preaching ; and the great bulk of the people 
 slumber in religious torpor. The awakened mind of 
 Scotland gave to such a ministry a name which is .fitting 
 to it in all times, by calling it "Moderate." Every 
 ministry of every age needs protection against the 
 danger of a " moderate " pulpit. .. We must admit the 
 danger, and be fore-armed against it. 
 
 But this need not prevent our recognition of the 
 opposite peril. Our profession appeals so powerfully 
 to the religious part of our nature, that often a young 
 minister is obliged to instruct and to discipline his con- 
 science, and to crowd it to a liberal action, before he 
 can peacefully pursue lines of study which are essential 
 to his intellectual growth, and therefore to his profes- 
 sional success. Probably we have all felt a momentary 
 thrill of sympathy with the rule of a certain evangel- 
 ist, to read no book but the Bible. Yet one sequence 
 of that rule was, that his range of materials for the 
 pulpit was so limited, that he was obliged to ask the 
 reporters not to report his sermons. A pastor should 
 not cherish a conscience which must be coddled at such 
 a sacrifice of his intellectual breadth. The laws of God 
 require it as little as the canons of good taste. A 
 good conscience is always good sense. 
 
210 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 In these several modes, through the mental intensity 
 of clerical duties, through the intensity of moral excite- 
 ment attending them, and through false convictions of 
 conscience, the clergy are exjDosed to peculiar tempta- 
 tions to a contracted culture. Therefore we should not 
 read professional literature alone. Even in professional 
 literature we should not confine ourselves to school or 
 sect. \ One cause of awkwardness and monotony in ser- 
 mons is often that their authors read little but sermons 
 and kindred theological writings. For the full vigor of 
 the pulpit we need a cross of sermons with other forms 
 of literature. Then, diversity of school and of sect is 
 vital. The Church of England has furnished a very 
 different order of preachers from those of Scotland. 
 The Methodist and the Presbyterian types of preaching 
 are almost antipodes. The Congregational Church of 
 New England has a type of its own. You might search 
 the continent of Europe over, and not find, in all its 
 history of all its sects, a preacher like Dr. Emmons, or 
 another like Dr. Buslmell. 
 
 We must be generous, then, in our appreciation of 
 diversities. No other bigotry is so degrading as bigotry 
 in culture. It underlies oj)inions, and insures bigotry 
 there. Bfe our reading much or little, we should read 
 always in the spirit of respect for varieties, even oppo- 
 sites, in literary character. I can not more fitly close 
 this review of the necessity of variety in our reading 
 than by quoting the opinion of Dr. Thomas Arnold of 
 Rugby. He thought more profoundly upon the whole 
 theory and practice of education than any other man 
 of our times. 
 
 In a letter on the studies of a clergyman, he expresses 
 himself as follows ; viz., " I would entreat every man 
 
LECT. XIV.] UNWRITTEN LITERATURE. 211 
 
 with whom I had any influence, that, if he reads at all, 
 he should read widely and comprehensively ; that he 
 should not read exclusively what is called divinity. 
 Learning of this sort, when not mixed with that com- 
 prehensive study which alone deserves the name, is, I 
 am satisfied, an actual mischief to a man's mind. It 
 impairs his simple common sense. It makes him nar- 
 row-minded, and fills him with absurdities. If a man 
 values power of seeing truth, and judging soundly, let 
 him not read exclusively those who are called divines. 
 With regard to the fathers, in all cases preserve the 
 proportions of your reading. Read, along with the 
 fathers, the writings of men of other times and of 
 different powers of mind. Keep your view of men 
 and things extensive. He who reads deeply in one 
 class of writers only, gets views which are sure to be 
 perverted, and which are not only narrow, but false. If 
 I have a confident opinion on any one point connected 
 with the improvement of the human mind, it is on 
 this." 
 
 (8) The principles already named should be quali- 
 fied by another, which is that a scholarly ideal of study 
 includes the study of unwritten literature. The habit 
 which is practicable to a pastor in this respect is not 
 the appropriation of a great amount of time to the 
 purpose, but the cultivation of professional vigilance in 
 improving such opportunities as fall in his way. Do 
 not waste them by making entertainments of them. 
 Make them tributary to your stock of oratorical knowl- 
 edge. A great oration, a masterly constitutional argu- 
 ment, a powerful forensic plea, a finished sermon, 
 uttered by the living voice, belong, as much as our 
 libraries do, to the literature of the age. A preacher's 
 
212 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 culture must suffer, if he ignores them. Generallj, a 
 young man's first awakening to the dignity of a schol- 
 arly life is the result of his listening to an oral address. 
 My own first conceptions, which have never been essen- 
 tially changed, of excellence in English style, I owe to 
 my hearing, at the age of sixteen years, an oration 
 by Edward Everett, at a Commencement of Amherst 
 College. Our debt to such literary models we often 
 undervalue, because they are not a book. We do not 
 see them on our library-shelves. Several things con- 
 cerning them deserve attention. 
 
 This unwritten literature is of great magnitude and 
 variety. Very little, comparatively, of the bulk of 
 cultivated thought, finds its way to the press. The 
 most voluminous and the weightiest part of it is speech, 
 not writing. I say deliberately the weightiest litera- 
 ture of the world is spoken, not written. Tliat, and 
 that only, is literature, which is power in thought as 
 expressed in language. Thought moving other minds 
 at the will of him who utters it, — this is literature. 
 The weightiest volume of it is not in our libraries. 
 Our schools have little direct concern with it. True, 
 it is a paradox to denominate it literature; but the 
 paradox is not deceptive, and no other word expresses 
 it as well. 
 
 Earnest conversation is full of this unwritten litera- 
 ture. The table-talk of many other men besides Luther 
 and Coleridge and Johnson is as worthy as theirs of 
 a place on our bookshelves. Emerson says, " Better 
 things are said, more incisive, more wit and insight are 
 dropped in talk and forgotten by the speaker, than gets 
 into books. The problem of both the talker and the 
 orator are the same." 
 
LECT. XIV.] LITERATURE IN CONVERSATION. 213 
 
 Dr. Johnson became a scholarly authority in Eng- 
 land by his conversation more than by his writings. 
 His sway of English literature proceeded from the club- 
 house rather than from the printing-house. Hence that 
 sway is in our day becoming a myth. We do not find 
 good reason for it in his writings. Walter Scott talked 
 more poetry, and Edmund Burke more eloquence, than 
 they ever wrote. Men used to part with Dr. Arnold 
 at midnight, mourning over the loss to the press of 
 the materials of literature which they had heard from 
 his lips in the few hours before. The " Autocrat of 
 the Breakfast-Table " grew out of the request of the 
 friends of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes that he would 
 print some of his conversations. There is a humble 
 pastor in Essex County, Massachusetts, who has been 
 repeatedly petitioned by his clerical brethren to save 
 for them in permanent form the seeds of prolific 
 thought which he has scattered at random among them 
 in meetings of ministerial associations. The Rev. 
 Henry Ward Beecher is said to have talked more and 
 sounder theology than he knows how to preach. 
 
 Home-life in many cultivated families abounds with 
 unwritten literature. It is often full of healthy criti- 
 cism of books, of art, of music, of material nature, and 
 full of more than golden links of suggestion which 
 bind these to life and to eternity. A record of the 
 select hours in many cultivated households, through 
 any period of five years' continuance, would form a 
 volume of literature as vital as any in the world. 
 
 Specially in crises of history, it does not require 
 knowledge of libraries to create the materials of libra- 
 ries. In critical periods, like those of the rise of 
 Christianity, the Crusades, the Reformation, the civil 
 
214 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 wars in England, the English Commonwealth, the 
 American Revolution, the overthrow of American 
 slavery, men and women who have nothing that the 
 world calls literary culture live literature in thousands 
 of humble homes. They talk literature, though it may 
 be ungrammatically. Families by thousands, during 
 the war of the Rebellion, lived books like that of the 
 " Schonberg-Cotta Family." 
 
 In a similar manner, the colloquial instructions of 
 schools, the interviews of pastors with their parish- 
 ioners, the emotive utterances of meetings for religious 
 conference, contain the richest germs of literature. 
 They contain, often, the latest and the wisest and the 
 most hearty developments of that which makes power in 
 books. Say what we may of the dullness of prayer- 
 meetings, churches are sometimes sensible of an intel- 
 lectual as well as a spiritual quickening in them, which 
 they do not get from an equal amount of discourse 
 from the pulpit. Some pastors are nearer to the very 
 magazine of literary power : they draw more heat 
 straight from central fires in their plain talks on a 
 sabbath evening than in the sermons of the day. The 
 people know nothing of either as literature ; but they 
 feel the difference none the less. The difference is just 
 that which they feel between the reading of a bright 
 book and the reading of a dull one. A pastor in the 
 city of Boston has been heard to say, " If I must 
 choose one to the exclusion of the other, between the 
 pulpit and the dais of the conference-room, give me the 
 conference-room. On the latter, I and my audiences 
 are ten feet nearer to each other in more senses than 
 one." 
 
 I once inquired of an alumnus of this seminary, what 
 
LECT. XIV.] HOMELY LITERATURE. 215 
 
 lived in his memory as having been the most powerful 
 mental stimulus to him in the curriculum of the semi- 
 nar}'. He answered without hesitation, " The Wednes- 
 day evening conference." He specified particularly the 
 conferences conducted by one professor. Not all the 
 rest of the instructions he received here had laid him 
 under so deep an obligation as the plain, extempora- 
 neous talks of that one man. In a vast variety of 
 these homely forms are found unwritten volumes. I 
 am not msensible of the ease with which this view may 
 be burlesqued. It may seem to be ludicrously dis- 
 proved in the very next prayer-meeting you attend. I 
 concede drawbacks, but claim that a residuum remains 
 which is worthy of our libraries. Put into type the 
 very thoughts which fly like shuttles back and forth 
 amonsf livinix minds in their homeliest intercourse about 
 almost any thing in which they are in dead earnest, and 
 you have in the result books which would live by the 
 side of venerable names in folios. 
 
 It deserves note, therefore, that a literary man makes 
 a fundamental mistake, who neglects to observe litera- 
 ture in these homely, unwritten forms. No matter how 
 aspiring he may be in liis aims, he can not afford to 
 ignore these low grounds of literary expression. No 
 author can afford to lose the discipline of conversation 
 with illiterate men. It supplies a stimulus, and in some 
 respects a model, which he can obtain nowhere else. 
 Sir Walter Scott expressed his opinion on the subject 
 extravagantly ; but he was right in the principle for 
 which he contended, that men are original thinkers and 
 talkers on that which is the business of their lives. 
 The professors of Edinburgh, dining out, were recre- 
 ating : the merchants of Edinburgh, in their counting- 
 
216 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xrv. 
 
 rooms, were working to the extreme of their mental 
 tension. 'This made the difference to Sir Walter 
 between dullness and earnestness. No man is dull who 
 is really in earnest about any thing, be it but the twist 
 of a pin's head. 
 
 hy does literary seclusion, if long unbroken, induce 
 salthiness of mind? Why does literary monasti- 
 / cism always fail in its aims ? Why was " Brook Farm " 
 a failure ? Poets, philosophers, scholars, seers, went 
 there, expecting to pass their evenings in " high con- 
 verse " of kindred souls. But I have been told, as 
 coming from one of them after he had outlived the 
 dream, that they sometimes went out at sunset, in the 
 desperation of their mental vacuity, and leaned over 
 the pig-sty, thrusting sticks at the swine for occupation. 
 This is a caricature, doubtless; yet it is quite in the 
 order of nature that its equivalent should have occurred. 
 Literary culture revolts from such seclusion as heartily 
 and inevitably as religion does from the monastery and 
 the convent. It is not good for man to be alone^ 
 
 Specially is it true that a public speaker can not 
 afford to be ignorant of speech as practiced by those 
 who hear him. A preacher can not afford to part with 
 a knowledge of speech as it exists in the homes of his 
 people. If you become men of power in the pulpit, — I 
 mean if 3'ou become spiritual chiefs, and not merely 
 conventional figure-heads to your churches, — you will 
 owe your power in jDart to the very men and women 
 and children who feel it from you. The power comes 
 in part from them to you, before it goes back as power 
 from you to them. When our Lord would teach his 
 disciples a great principle in the philosophy of religion, 
 " he set a little child in the midst of them." So do the 
 
tECT. XIV.] ELOQUENCE REPRESENTATIVE. 217 
 
 great principles of truth in many other things come 
 into clearest light by illustration in the most artless 
 and unconscious exemplars. Common things illustrate 
 profound things. Common people are often the most 
 original. Therefore you will discover, that, to move 
 them with your thought, j^ou must know and respect 
 their thought. To reach them with your style, you 
 must master their style. I do not say must use their 
 style, but must master it. To reach them at all, you 
 must know what their mental experience is, what they 
 have lived through, and what experiment of life they 
 are trying, when you try your power upon them. Their 
 mental life and your mental life must run in parallels 
 not wide apart from each other. Otherwise your speech 
 can never bridge over the gulf between. Thinking 
 men will hear you incredulously ; good women will sit 
 solitary under your ministry ; and children will look at 
 you from the corners of their eyes. 
 
 Yet again : unwritten literature has a representative 
 cliaracter. Whenever it succeeds, it represents a mass 
 of unwritten thought which lies below it. The great 
 orator in real life is the spokesman of those who hear 
 him. He utters thoughts which are floating in dimmer 
 conceptions and more homely words in their hearts. He 
 is the interpreter to them of their own souls. Therein 
 lies his power over them. He plays upon an instru- 
 ment which is tuned by a more cunning hand. Listen- 
 ing to such a man, therefore, gives insight into the 
 thought of the living generation. It is studying litera- 
 ture in the very process of its formation. What would 
 we not give, if we could listen to-day to Edmund Burke 
 on the impeachment of Warren Hastings, or to Robert 
 Hall on the death of the Princess Charlotte, or to 
 
218 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 Webster in his reply to Hayne ? To study these phe- 
 nomena in the very process of their evolution would 
 give to our culture what no books contain. It would 
 be like watching the crystallization of the Kohinoor. 
 
 But such, in kind, are the processes of the oral litera- 
 ture of our own times. They are forming deposits, 
 some of which will be permanent. The next genera- 
 tions will read them, as we now read Burke and Jeremy 
 Taylor. They will regret that they never heard the 
 living orators and preachers of to-day, as we regret that 
 we never heard those whose names bore a halo in our 
 youth. You have heard men say that it would be a 
 lifelong regret to them that they never heard Webster, 
 Clay, and Calhoun, the great triumvirate of the United- 
 States Senate. Let us prize wliile we have them the 
 opportunities of hearing the models of living eloquence 
 in our day. They are the chief representatives of that 
 immense collection of literature which real life is creat- 
 ing in unwritten forms. 
 
 Moreover, an oral address is a form of literature 
 which can not be completely represented by the press. 
 The old idea, — as old as eloquence itself, — that the 
 living voice is above all other media of communicating 
 thought, is confirmed by all the ages. This superiority 
 to the press is the birthright of the pulpit. The press, 
 with its thundering enginery, can not represent the 
 man in an oral address. Yet the man is the soul of 
 the oral address. His physical framework is part of it. 
 Attitude, gesture, tone, eye, lip, the muscular varieties 
 of countenance, all that goes to make up what the 
 ancients called the vivida vultus, and that secret mag- 
 netic emanation from the whole person, the origin of 
 which we can not locate in any one member or feature, 
 
LECT. XIV.] ELOQUENCE OF PANTOMIME. 219 
 
 — these are all symbols of a speaker's thought as truly 
 as his words are. 
 
 In the old Greek pantomime not a word was uttered ; 
 yet it sometimes aroused an audience to such excite- 
 ment, that, on certain subjects, it was forbidden by 
 law. King Ferdinand of Naples, after the revolution- 
 ary movements of 1822, addressed the lazzaroni from 
 the balcony of the palace, in the midst of tumultuous 
 shouting, and used no language but that of signs, and 
 yet made himself entirely intelligible. " He reproached, 
 threatened, admonished, forgave, and finally dismissed 
 the rabble as thoroughly persuaded and edified by the 
 gesticulations of the royal Punch, as an American 
 crowd would have been by the eloquence of Webster." 
 Much more may vocalized thought in the oral address 
 surpass written thought in a book. As a type of lit- 
 erature the oral production must have peculiarities 
 which the press can not preserve to us. 
 
 This is illustrated in the standing fact of historic 
 eloquence, that, as recorded, it commonly disappoints 
 us. The great orators of the past seldom or never 
 in the reading equal our expectations. Who feels that 
 the orations of Demosthenes equal the reputation of 
 the first orator of Greece ? His name could never have 
 held the place it has in modern criticism, were it not 
 for the momentum given to liis fame by Athenian 
 opinion. Our best judgments of the orators of the 
 past are the historic judgments : they are the opinions 
 of them which criticism has inherited. If we had 
 picked up the works of Cicero in a nameless scroll on 
 the coast of Siam, it is doubtfid whether we should 
 have discovered for ourselves their superlative excel- 
 lence. So of the Earl of Chatham: his speeches do 
 
220 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xiv. 
 
 not explain to us why the House of Commons should 
 have quailed before his utterance of the word " sugar." 
 All that remains of Patrick Henry leaves a shadow 
 of mystery over his reputed power with the House of 
 Burgesses of the Old Dominion. 
 
 Among preachers none disappoint us more than 
 the most illustrious of them. We can not discover 
 Whitefield and Robert Hall in their published sermons. 
 We have to accept the traditions of their unintelligible 
 success. Of any one of Whitefield's sermons it is lit- 
 erally true, that, though we have every word of it in 
 print, we have but a fragment. The major part of the 
 s^anbols of his thought are not in his words. The man 
 is not there. The soul of the orator is not there. The 
 spiritual witness to the union of his soul with the souls 
 of his hearers is not there. These were intangible and 
 evanescent. The audience felt them, but no invention 
 of science could transmit them. One can scarcely read 
 a sermon of Whitefield's, with a remembrance of the 
 effects it wrought, without a feeling akin to that which 
 one has in looking upon a body which is awaiting its 
 resurrection. A living oratory, therefore, should be 
 regarded as a type of literature which can be thor- 
 oughly known in no other form. 
 
 Once more : a study of printed literature alone may 
 give us false conceptions of what oral eloquence is. 
 Some excellences of printed thought are not adapted 
 to oral speech. You have heard it said of a sermon, 
 " That will read better than it sounds." It is a severe 
 criticism. An oral address ought not to read better 
 than it sounds: if it does so, it is an essay, not a 
 speech. On one occasion, when a speech in the House 
 of Commons was highly praised in the hearing of Mr. 
 
LECT. XIV.] SPEECH AND ESSAY. 221 
 
 Fox, he inquired, " Does it read well ? " — " Yes, grand- 
 ly," was the answer. " Then," said Mr. Fox, " it was 
 not a good speech." The principle is a subtle one, but 
 the facts of parliamentary eloquence confirm it. The 
 converse of the principle is equally true, — that a pro- 
 duction which does not read well may for that reason 
 have been a good speech. 
 
 From this principle it follows that a man who studies 
 only printed literature may obtain a false theory of oral 
 eloquence. This peril is no fiction. It is working evil 
 in the living ministry. Scores of ministers are preach- 
 ing after the model of the essay. They are literally 
 " talking like a book." They are not orators. They 
 will not be such, till they form an ideal of eloquence 
 which involves the act of imagining an audience, and 
 constructing thought for expression to the ear. 
 
 Here let a brief excursus be indulged upon the ques- 
 tion, often asked, "What is it in oral speech which 
 distinguishes it from the essay ? " I can not answer 
 this very perspicuously by definitions ; but perhaps it 
 can be answered by a contrast of examples. The 
 following is an extract from a recent essay on the 
 " End of God in Creation : " — 
 
 " What was the final cause of creation ? The transition from 
 the unconditioned to the conditioned is incomprehensible by the 
 human faculties. What that transition is, and how it could take 
 place, and how it became an actualized occui-rence, it is confessed 
 on all hands are absolutely incomprehensible enigmas. We can 
 not reasonably imagine, then, that, if we are thus ignorant of the 
 nature and the mode of this stupendous fact, we can nevertheless 
 comprehend its primitive ground, can explore its ultimate reasons, 
 can divine its final motive. Nor can we think to unveil the Infinite 
 Soul at that moment, when, according to our conceptions, the eter- 
 nal imiformity was interrupted, and a new mode of being, abso 
 
222 MEN AND BOOKS, [lect. xiv. 
 
 lutely unintelligible to iis, was first introduced. We can not 
 think to grasp all the views which were present to that Soul, 
 extending from the unbeginning past to the unending future, and 
 to fathom all its purposes, and to analyze all its motives. If any- 
 where, we must here repel every thing like dogmatic interpretation 
 of the phenomena, and admit whatever is put forth only as con- 
 jectural in its nature, or at all events partial, and belonging far 
 more to the surface than to the interior of the subject." 
 
 This is essay. Listening to it, one can not fail to see 
 that it needs to be read in order to be appreciated. 
 To a hearer it is dull ; to some hearers, obscure. Yet 
 are not some sermons constructed on this model? Are 
 they not inevitably delivered with intonations and a 
 cadence which almost compel the sense of humdrum in 
 the listener? 
 
 Take, now, the same theme, and the same leading 
 thoughts, and the same succession of thoughts, but 
 expressed in the following style : — 
 
 " Why did God create the universe ? Creation is incomprehen- 
 sible to man. What is creation? How was it possible? How 
 did it ever come to be? I can not answer. Can you? Every 
 man of common sense confesses his ignorance here. But if we 
 are ignorant of what creation is, and how it is, can we imagine 
 that we understand why it is? Shall we think to unveil the mind 
 of God in the stupendous act? That moment when God said, 
 ' Let there be light,' was a moment of which we can know nothing 
 but that ' there was light.' Shall we think to see all that God 
 saw ? Can we look through the past without beginning, and the 
 future without end, and fathom all his purposes and all his mo- 
 tives? Can we by searching find out God? If we must repel 
 assertion anyuhere, we must do so here. Whatever we may think, 
 it is but little more than guess-work. At the best, it can be but 
 knowing in part. The most we can know must be on the surface. 
 It can not penetrate to the heart of the matter." 
 
LECT. xrv.] PREACHING ESSAYS. 223 
 
 Is not this speech, as distinct from essay ? Is not the 
 difference obvious? Is it not vital to oral style? Some 
 critics would underrate it. They would pronounce it 
 superficial, because it has not the ponderous structure, 
 and the swelling cadence, of the original. They would 
 call it popular, as distinct from scholarly, because it 
 can be appreciated in the hearing. 
 
 Whatever may be true of such criticism, my point is, 
 that oral speech to any class of hearers requires certain 
 peculiarities which do not belong to the essay, and 
 are not largely illustrated in printed forms of thought. 
 Therefore, by studying those forms alone, a preacher 
 may obtain false ideas of oral eloquence. The natural 
 fruit of such a training is, that a preacher should read 
 essays from the pulpit all his life without knowing it. 
 The myster}^ of his ministry to him may be, that he 
 can interest his people so much more effectively out of 
 the pulpit than in it. But the mystery is no mystery. 
 It is simply, that, out of the pulpit, he speaks, and in it 
 he essays. This is the reason why preachers are so 
 often requested to repeat or to publish their extempo- 
 raneous sermons, while their written sermons, of vastly 
 more solid worth, lie unhonored in their desks. This 
 is the secret reason why the conference-room sometimes 
 sustains the pulpit which stands in ponderous dignity 
 above it. It is because in the one the preacher talks, 
 and in the other he soliloquizes. In the one he is 
 eloquent therefore ; in the other — what shall I call it ? 
 
LECTURE XV. 1 
 
 THE STUDY OF THE SCRIPTTIRES AS LITEKAEY 
 
 CLASSICS. 
 
 (9) One remaining principle, by which other prin- 
 ciples of selection in our study of books should be 
 qualified, is thaK we should study the Scriptures as 
 literary models. It furnishes a cheering solution, in 
 part, to the problem of the practicability of scholarly 
 culture to a pastor, that a very vital portion of that 
 culture may be derived from the one volume which is 
 central to his professional labors. No other profession 
 finds in its most necessary and vital work such a 
 stimulus to intellectual depth and breadth as that 
 which the pulpit finds in the study of the Scriptures. 
 Good cheer is this to an overburdened pastor. 
 
 Allusion was made to some of the biblical writers, 
 in speaking of the choice of authors who have been 
 controlling powers in history. I have purposely re- 
 served the consideration of the study of the Bible as 
 a whole, because its study as a collection of literary 
 productions may be advocated by reasons peculiar to 
 itself. 
 
 Let me ask you to note first — without comment, 
 
 1 Portions of the lectures on the Study of the Scriptures have been 
 already published in a sermon preached before the government ol 
 Massachusetts. 
 224 
 
LECT. XV.] THE SCRIPTURES IGNORED. 225 
 
 for the point is so obvious — the distinction between 
 the study of the Bible as a religious revelation and the 
 study of it as a literary classic. 
 
 This suggests immediately the singular neglect of 
 the Bible by modern literary taste. It is one of the 
 subtle collateral evidences of human depravity, that 
 the republic of letters has so generally ignored the 
 Scriptures as a literary production. Such is the habit 
 of the scholarly thought of our times, that, when the 
 idea of a model of such thought is first suggested to 
 us, it is in connection wholly with uninspired names. 
 If a stranger at a university were to ask one, on the 
 spur of the moment, to give the names of ten models 
 of the first class in the history of the press, the reply 
 would doubtless be entirely oblivious of the writers of 
 the Bible. 
 
 As purely literary labor, and for scholarly purposes 
 alone, where is criticism of the Bible ever taught, 
 outside of theological schools? By the common con- 
 sent of scholars, commentaries on the Scriptures are 
 relegated to the curriculum of professional study. 
 Even there they are often regarded as provincial, not 
 to say unscholarly. Would the literary study of the 
 Bible, think you, be welcomed at Harvard College with 
 the same respectful enthusiasm with which a course of 
 lectures on Shakspeare, by an expert in Shakspearean 
 literature, would be received ? Could a biblical club for 
 the literary criticism of the Pentateuch be sustained at 
 Yale College as vigorously as the Chaucer Club was 
 sustained at Andover a few years ago ? This is one of 
 the developments of what I have elsewhere denomi- 
 nated the cant of literature. The secret and uncon- 
 scious antipathy of the human mind to the moral aim 
 
226 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 of the Scriptures betrays itself in that vanity of scholar- 
 ship which affects to despise or ignore their literary 
 claims. 
 
 Or put the case in another way. One can easily 
 imagine what a stir in the learned world would be 
 created, if certain portions of the Bible were recent 
 antiquarian discoveries, claiming no inspired authority. 
 Suppose that the first chapter of Genesis had been 
 exhumed, during the last insurrection in India, from 
 the ruins of an old temple of Vishnu. Conceive that 
 the Fifty-first Psalm had been just deciphered from a 
 hieroglyph in the Pyramids. Picture to 3^ourself the 
 latest importation of a slab from Nineveh as contain- 
 ing the first known inscription of one of the closing 
 chapters of the Book of Job. Imagine that the Sermon 
 on the Mount had just come to light from a lost and 
 recovered book of Seneca, or had been found among the 
 meditations of Aurelius Antoninus. What an ecstasy 
 would rouse the dignity of the scholastic world ! What 
 an inundation we should have of literary astonishment ! 
 What exultant monographs from Westminster Reviews. 
 What eager quotations from the revered authors, as the 
 peers of Confucius and Plato ! Our universities would 
 resound for a decade with eulogiums upon the resur- 
 rection of a noble antiquity. 
 
 But because the Scriptures are the word of God, 
 because they claim authority in morals, because they 
 press close upon the conscience, the literary mind of 
 the race has silently turned away from them as models 
 of literary culture, and has expended itself on gods and 
 goddesses of its own creation. 
 
 Our current systems of education are founded in part 
 on this perversion of scholarly taste. They assume that 
 
LECT. XV.] THE BIBLE IN COLLEGES. 227 
 
 the study of the Bible is not a necessity to a liberal 
 education. It ranks with the study of anatomy or of 
 the law of mortmain. So far as I know, the only ex- 
 ceptions to this view are found in the German gym- 
 nasia, where the Old and New Testaments are, or were 
 a few years ago, criticised and taught by the side of 
 Xenophon and Virgil. The study of the Bible in our 
 American colleges — what shall I say of it? Do I 
 wrong it in saying that it is an expedient of collegiate 
 police ? Is it not sometimes required mainly because 
 the authorities do not know what else to do with 
 Monday morning? Such at least was the usage in my 
 time. 
 
 The fact is a singular one, that in the German schools, 
 where the inspiration of the Bible is often discarded, 
 and where Ezekiel and St. Paul are criticised precisely 
 as criticism deals with Aristophanes and Juvenal, the 
 literature of the Bible is restored to respectable appre- 
 ciation. It is recognized as a model of scholarly cul- 
 ture. The moment the weight of inspiration is taken 
 off, and a scholar can approach the Scriptures with no 
 response of conscience to them as a religious authority, 
 then respect returns for them as literary classics. 
 
 It is worthy of notice, that in this country a positive 
 retrograde has taken place on this subject in the col- 
 legiate curriculum. During the first century of the 
 existence of Harvard College, the Greek New Testa- 
 ment was the only Greek text-book put into the hands 
 of its students. The time was, when Hebrew was taught 
 there as an undergraduate study. The professors could 
 some of them converse in Hebrew. How much do the 
 undergraduates of the venerable university know of 
 Hebrew now ? How often do its learned faculty regale 
 themselves in Hebrew colloquy ? 
 
228 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 To appreciate the Bible ourselves, then, as a literary 
 classic, we need to emancipate ourselves from the cur- 
 rent opinion of educated men on the subject. "We have 
 probably grown into that opinion unconsciously. Un- 
 educated Christians, in their indiscriminate reverence 
 for the Scriptures, may be nearer the truth than we are 
 in our scholarly judgment. We may have a process 
 of self-discipline, more severe than we anticipate, to go 
 through in restoring the Bible to its true place in our 
 literary estimate. It will not do to approach it with 
 prepossessions against it as a literary model. 
 
 But, approaching it in an appreciative, scholarly spirit, 
 we find incitement to the literary study of it in the 
 fact that the Bible contains the oldest literature in the 
 world. Interest in antiquity for its own sake is legiti- 
 mate. That interest is a normal fruit of education, as 
 well as a natural instinct of the human mind. Every 
 mind has roots in the past. A thing is presumptively 
 true, if it is old ; and an old truth men will revere. 
 We all have historic feelers, which reach out for some- 
 thing to lay hold of, and to steady our faith, amidst the 
 rush of events. He is not a bold man who can tear 
 himself loose from the underground of former ages. It 
 would be an irreparable loss to the educating forces of 
 Christendom, if the faith of the Christian world could 
 be destroyed in the descent of the existing races of 
 men from one pair ; so ennobling, and so stimulating to 
 culture, is this instinct of reverence for a long-lived 
 unity. The human instinct of reverence for the old 
 story of a paradise, with its halo of the golden begin- 
 ning of things, is quickening to high culture. 
 
 Much of the disciplinary power of the Greek litera- 
 ture comes to us through our intuitive reverence for the 
 
LECT. XV.] ANTIQUITY OF THE BIBLE. 229 
 
 long-lived. So long as Macpherson's imposture was 
 undiscovered, and his works were received as the veri- 
 table productions of Ossian, they exerted a perceptible 
 influence upon the men of letters in England through 
 the magnifying power of their reverence for ancient 
 genius. The literary firmament was ablaze with enthu- 
 siasm for the great Northern poet. It was like the 
 northern-lights, as transient, indeed, but, wliile it lasted, 
 as enchanting. Had the poems of Ossian been other 
 than an imposture, it is by no means certain that they 
 would not have perpetuated their first renown till this 
 day, so sensitive is the vision of literary taste to any 
 gleam of genius from a b3"gone age. 
 
 With all the abuses to which this susceptibility of 
 our nature is liable, it is in our nature, and for wise 
 purposes. Within its normal limits, and kept in bal- 
 ance by the spirit of inquiry, its operation is healthful. 
 No grand elevation of society, and no finished culture 
 of the individual, is ever attained without its aid. We 
 have, then, a very obvious ground of literary interest 
 in the Scriptures, which is altogether independent of 
 their inspiration and of their moral uses, in the fact that 
 they contain the earliest known thoughts of our race in 
 literary forms. To give definiteness to this fact, let 
 several specifications be observed in illustration of it. 
 
 It is, for instance, a fact, the significance of which 
 infidelity appreciates if we do not, that the only 
 authentic history of the world before the deluge is 
 found in the sacred books of Christianity. The world 
 of the future never can know any thing of the ante- 
 diluvians except from the Jewish historian. It would 
 be worth centuries of toil to the socialism of Europe, 
 if it could blot out this one fact in the relations of 
 
230 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 the world to the Pentateuch. The late Professor B. B. 
 Edwards thought it probable that we have also in the 
 books of Moses, what no other literature can show, a 
 fragment of poetry which was actually composed in 
 the antediluvian infancy of the race. Does it not help 
 us to some conception of the venerableness of these 
 volumes to recall, that, by the commonly received chro- 
 nology, they were written eleven hundred years before 
 Herodotus, whom the world has consented to honor as 
 the father of history? 
 
 The Hebrew jurisprudence is by the same chronology 
 seven hundred years older than that of Lycurgus, and 
 two thousand years older than that of Justinian. You 
 have heard that Thomas Jefferson was indebted, for his 
 conception of our American government, to the polity of 
 an obscure church in Virginia. But republicanism was 
 foreshadowed in the Hebrew commonwealth nearly 
 three thousand years before the settlement of James- 
 town. The principle of the New-England town-meet- 
 ing, in which De Tocqueville found the corner-stone of 
 our free institutions, was originated by Jethro, the ven- 
 erable father-in-law of Moses. 
 
 The lyric poetry of the Hebrews was in its golden 
 age nearly a thousand years before the birth of Horace. 
 Deborah sang a model of a triumphal song full five 
 hundred years before Sappho was born. The author of 
 Ecclesiastes discussed the problem of evil five hundred 
 years before Socrates in the Dialogues of Plato. The 
 Epithalamium of the Canticles is nearly a thousand 
 years older than Ovid's " Art of Love." The Book of 
 Esther was a venerable fragment of biography, more 
 strange than fiction, at least twelve hundred years old, 
 at the dawn of the romantic literature of Europe. The 
 
LECT, XV.] THE BOOK OF JOB. 231 
 
 Proverbs of Solomon are by eight hundred years more 
 ancient than the Treatises of Seneca. 
 
 Dr. Johnson once read a manuscript copy of a pas- 
 toral story to a group of friends in London. They 
 begged of him to inform them where he obtained it, 
 and who was the writer. Imagine their amazement, 
 if he had told them that it was an ancient treasure, 
 written, in a language now dead, nine hundred years 
 before the Georgics of Virgil, seven himdred years 
 before the Idyls of Theocritus, and twenty-five hundred 
 years before the discovery of America, and that it had 
 been remarkably preserved among the archives of the 
 Hebrews ; for it was no other than the Book of Ruth. 
 
 Jeremiah is as properly pronounced the founder of 
 the elegiac school of poetry as Mimnermus, to whom 
 its origin is commonly ascribed ; for they were, proba- 
 bly, for a short time, contemporaries, the Hebrew 
 prophet being by half a century the senior. 
 
 The entire bulk of the prophetic literature of the 
 Hebrews ; a literature extraordinary ; one which has 
 laws of its own, to which there is and can be no 
 parallel in any uninspired workings of the human mind 
 — this mysterious, often unfathomable compendium of 
 the world's future, which the wisdom of twenty cen- 
 turies has not exhausted, was, the whole of it, anterior 
 to the Augustan age of Rome. Even the writers of 
 the New Testament are all of them of more venerable 
 antiquity than Tacitus and Plutarch, and Pliny the 
 Younger. 
 
 What shall be said of the Book of Job? Biblical 
 scholars only conjecture its age ; but the argument for 
 its great antiquity appears to me, though not by any 
 means conclusive, at least as strong as that for its later 
 
232 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 origin. If the first hypothesis be true, this is the oldest 
 volume now existing, at least eight hundred years 
 older than Homer. It was already an ancient poem 
 when Cecrops is conjectured to have founded Athens. 
 When Britain was invaded by the Romans, it was more 
 time-worn than the name of Julius Csesar to-day is to 
 us. Natural philosophers now turn to its allusions as 
 the only recorded evidence we have of the state of the 
 arts and sciences from three to four thousand years ago. 
 A modern commentator on the book has collated from 
 it hints of the then existing state of knowledge respect- 
 ing astronomy, geography, cosmology, meteorology, 
 mining, precious stones, coining, writing, engraving, 
 medicine, music, hunting, husbandry, modes of travel, 
 the military art, and zoology. Any work, surely, which 
 should be so fortunate as to be of uninspired author- 
 ity, and should give to the world the obscurest 
 authentic hints of the state of these sciences and arts 
 forty centuries back, would be hailed as a treasure 
 worthy of a nation's purchase. In the study of such a 
 volume we may legitimately feel the same enthusiasm 
 which Napoleon, in the campaign of Egypt, sought to 
 arouse in his soldiers, when he exclaimed to them, 
 " Forty centuries look down upon you." 
 
 Whatever is becoming to a scholarly spirit, then, in 
 a love of ancient literature, for the sake of the stimu- 
 lating and ennobling effect of its antiquity, we have 
 reason to cherish for the Scriptures, considered merely 
 as literary classics. 
 
 We find another inducement to the literary study of 
 the Scriptures, in the fact that they sustain a regenera- 
 tive connection with Oriental civilization. Two things 
 comprise the points essential to this aspect of the 
 subjesot. 
 
LECT. XV.] ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION. 233 
 
 One is, that the Oriental mind is giving no signs of 
 having finished its work in history. What is the law 
 of Providence respecting nations and races which have 
 finished their work as powers in the world's destiny? 
 It is a law of doom. Such nations and races die. 
 Christianity, which is the flower and fruitage of Provi- 
 dence, has always been prophetic in its instincts. It 
 has never bound itself to the soil anywhere. The law 
 of its being is, that it shall pass away from superannu- 
 ated to youthful races, from decadent to germinant na- 
 tions, from expiring to nascent languages, from senile to 
 virile literatures. Then those races, nations, languages, 
 and literatures which represent its abandoned con- 
 quests die, if they have in them no recuperative power 
 to fit them for future use. Under this law of divine 
 operation the entire Oriental stock of mind, if it has 
 no Christian future, ought now to be evincing signs of 
 dissolution. But this is by no means true of it. The 
 nations which represent it are not, as a whole, dying 
 out. They are not visibly approximating their end. 
 More than one of the Asiatic races seem to be as full- 
 blooded, and as virile in their physical make, and as 
 likely to endure for thirty generations, as they did a 
 thousand years ago. They seem to be waiting in grand 
 reserve, as the beds of anthracite have waited with 
 latent fires, for future use. That ancient development 
 of man which began on the plains of Shinar bids fair 
 to live by the side of its Occidental rival, even if it 
 does not outlive this by reason of its calmer flow of 
 life. 
 
 If it does thus live, all analogy would lead us to 
 believe that there is something in it which deserves 
 to live. There is something in it which Providence 
 
234 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 has a use for in the future. It has energy; it has 
 resources ; it has faculty ; it has manly tastes and pro- 
 clivities ; it has something or other, which, under 
 divine regeneration, will be a cause of growth, if in- 
 fused into the life-blood of the Western races. The 
 circle of Occidental development may be enlarged by 
 it. The channel in which our civilization is moving 
 may be thus widened and deepened. 
 
 The other fact bearing upon the topic before us is, 
 that, if new systems of thought are to grow up among 
 the Asiatics, with any function of control in the world, 
 they must be the creations of the Bible. Nothing else 
 represents the Oriental mind in any form which can 
 ever rouse it to its utmost of capacity. Nothing else, 
 therefore, can ever make it a power in the future civ- 
 ilization. None but a visionary can look for a rejuve- 
 nescence of Asia in coming ages from any internal 
 forces now acting there independently of the Scrip- 
 tures. The history of the East contains nothing which 
 can ever be to the world, for instance, what the revived 
 literatures of Greece and Rome were to the middle 
 ages of Europe. Explorers find nothing there out of 
 which great libraries can grow. They find nothing 
 that calls for or promises to the future great universi- 
 ties, or new systems of philosophy, or advanced scien- 
 tific researches. The East is the land of pyramids and 
 sphinxes. Whatever that immense territory has to 
 contribute to the civilization of the future must come 
 from the germination of biblical thought. It must 
 be the working of biblical inspiration in the spiritual 
 renewal of Oriental character, which nothing but the 
 religion of the Scriptures can produce. 
 
 Why should it be deemed visionary to look for this 
 
LECT. XV.] ORIENTAL LITERATURES. 235 
 
 as one of the results of the infusion of European mind 
 now going on in Western and Central Asia ? Already 
 the germs of Christian universities and libraries exist 
 there which may one day allure literary travel from 
 the West, as those of England and Germany do to-day. 
 Inspired prophecy aside, it is no more visionary to 
 predict the re-creation of Oriental mind in forms of 
 new literatures superior to any the world has yet 
 known, through the plastic influence of the Scriptures, 
 than it was to anticipate the birth of the three great 
 literatures of Europe as the fruit of the modern revival 
 of the literatures of Greece and Rome. The minds of 
 nations move in just such immense waves of revolu- 
 tion. Reasoning a priori, they seem impossible : so 
 do geologic cataclysms to a race which lives in quiet 
 over slumbering volcanoes. But, reasoning a posteriori, 
 they are only the natural effect of a great force gen- 
 erating great forces. They seem as gravitation does 
 to a race which has no conception of what it would 
 be to exist without it. The diurnal revolutions of the 
 earth are not more normal or more sure. 
 
 The Asiatic races have, indeed, a fairer intellectual 
 prospect than Europe had at the time of the revival 
 of letters ; and this for the reason that they are to 
 receive their higher culture in Christian instead of 
 Pagan forms. Conceive what a difference would have 
 been created in the destinies of Europe, what centuries 
 of conflict with barbarism would to human view have 
 been saved, if the Greek and Roman literatures could 
 have come into the possession of the modern European 
 mind freighted with Christian instead of Pagan thought, 
 and if, thus Christianized, they could have been wrought 
 into European culture ! 
 
236 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xv. 
 
 Yet this, to a very large extent, appears likely to be 
 the process of intellectual awakening to which the 
 immense forces of Asiatic mind are to be subjected. 
 Asiatic literatures of the future are to be the direct 
 product of centuries of Christian culture in other lands. 
 They are to have no Paganism to exorcise, as European 
 civilization had, from the very models which are to 
 inspire them. In Asia, Paganism is to represent in 
 the future, not only dead institutions, oppressive gov- 
 ernments, degrading traditions, and popular wretched- 
 ness, but a puerile literature as well. It can never 
 there, as it did in Europe, go into solution with Chris- 
 tianity through the force of a Pagan culture so beau- 
 tiful and so lofty as to command the reverence of all 
 scholarly minds. 
 
 With this view of the future of the Oriental world, 
 it is certainly a remarkable feature of the divine plan 
 that Revelation should be for ever stereotyped, as it is 
 so largel3% in an Oriental mold. It looks, does it not, 
 as if the Oriental type of the race were yet to be a 
 power in the world through the Scriptures, as the only 
 vital nexus between its future and its past. 
 
 Napoleon used to say that the only theater fit for 
 great exploits Avas the East. Europe, he said, was 
 contracted : it was provincial. The great races were 
 beyond the jNIediterranean. They were in the ancient 
 seats of empire, because the numbers were there. 
 There may be more of truth in this than he meant to 
 utter. The grandest intellectual and moral conquests 
 of the world may yet follow the track of Alexan- 
 der. 
 
 From this^train of suggestion, tlie inference is obvi- 
 ous, that th^ time can not be distant when enterprising 
 4 
 
LECT. XV.] THE FUTURE OF LITERATURE. 237 
 
 scholarship will not be content to omit the Hebrew and 
 Christian Scriptures from its resources of culture. A 
 mind which is imbued with biblical learning has a home 
 in the future of literature, and among the majorities of 
 cultivated races, which no mind can have without itA 
 
LECTURE XVI. 
 
 THE DEBT OF LIVING LITERATUEES TO THE BIBLE. — 
 INTRINSIC SUPERIORITY OF BIBLICAL MODELS. 
 
 If the relation of the Scriptures to the future of 
 Oriental civilization should seem to be a distant motive 
 to biblical culture, let us observe one which is more 
 immediate in its influence, in the fact that the Bible is, 
 to a large extent, incorporated into all the living litera- 
 tures of the world; not into all of them in equal 
 degrees, but into all sufficiently to be felt as a power. 
 When we speak of the literary sway of European and 
 American mind, we speak of the conquests of the Scrip- 
 tures. The elemental ideas of the Bible lie at the 
 foundation of the whole of it. Christianity has 
 wrought such revolutions of opinion, it has thrown into 
 the world so much original thought, it has organized so 
 many institutions, customs, unwritten laws of life, it 
 has leavened society with such a potent antiseptic to 
 the putrescent elements of depravity, and it has, there- 
 fore, created so much of the best material of humanity, 
 that now the noblest scholarship can not exist but as a 
 debtor to the Christian Scriptures. 
 
 The debt of literature to the Bible is like that of 
 vegetation to light. No other volume has contributed 
 so much to the great organic forms of thought. No 
 other is fusing itself so widely into the standards of 
 
 238 
 
LECT. XVI.] POWER OP THE BIBLE OVER MIND. 239 
 
 libraries. Homer and Plato and Aristotle were long 
 since absorbed in it as intellectual powers. This vol- 
 ume has never yet numbered among its religious 
 believers a fourth part of the human race, jet it has 
 swaj'ed a greater amount of mind than any other vol- 
 ume the world has known. It has the singular faculty 
 of attracting to itself the thinkers of the world, either 
 as friends or as foes, always, everywhere. The works 
 of comment upon it of themselves form a literature of 
 which any nation might be proud. It is more volumi- 
 nous than all that remains to us of the Greek and 
 Roman literatures combined. An English antiquarian, 
 who has had the curiosity to number the existing com- 
 mentaries upon the Scriptures, or upon portions of 
 them, found them to exceed sixty thousand. Where is 
 another empire of mind to be found like this ? 
 
 Here is a power, which, say what we may of its 
 results, has set the Christian world to thinking, and 
 has kept it thinking for nearly two thousand years. 
 The unpublished literature of the Christian pulpit sur- 
 passes in volume all the literatures of all nations. "If 
 the sermons preached in our land during a single year 
 were all printed," says a living scholar, " they would 
 fill a hundred and twenty millions of octavo pages." 
 \rhe Bible is read to-day by a larger number of edu- 
 cated minds than any other book. The late revision of 
 the New Testament in our own language is not yet one 
 year old ; yet its circulation amounts to two millions 
 and a half of copies. This sale, unprecedented in the 
 history of any other volume, indicates an immense 
 reserve of interest in the book, which, till now, has had 
 no such means of expressing itself. The mind of the 
 English-speaking races must have been saturated with 
 
240 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi. 
 
 biblical thought, and to a great extent with biblical 
 faith, for a long time, to account for such a phenome- 
 non. Multitudes are poring over the book, and are 
 feeling its elevating influence, Avho never think of it 
 otherwise than as an authority for their religious faith. 
 V Our own language owes, in part, the very structure 
 it has received to our English Bible. No Englishman 
 or American knows well his mother-tongue till he has 
 learned it in the vocabulary and the idioms of King 
 James's translation.\ The language first crystallized 
 around this translation as the German language did in 
 less degree around Luther's Bible. In English form 
 the Bible stands at the head of the streams of English 
 conquests and of English and American colonization 
 and commerce. It must control, to a great extent, the 
 institutions which are to spring up on the banks of 
 those streams the world over. 
 
 It is interesting to observe how the influence of the 
 Bible trickles down into crevices in all other litera- 
 ture, and shows itself, at length, in golden veins, and 
 precious gems of thought, which are the admiration of 
 all observers. The late Professor B. B. Edwards, in 
 illustration of this fact, notices the following details ; 
 viz., " An essay has been written to prove how much 
 Shakspeare is indebted to the Scriptures. The Red 
 Cross Knight in the ' Faerie Queene ' of Spenser is 
 the Christian of the last chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Ephesians. The ' Messiah ' of Pope is only a para- 
 phrase of some passages in Isaiah. The highest strains 
 of Cowper in the ' Task ' are an expansion of a chap- 
 ter of the same prophet. The ' Thanatopsis ' of Bryant 
 is indebted to a passage from the Book of Job. Lord 
 Byron's celebrated poem on ' Darkness ' was founded 
 on a passage in Jeremiah." 
 
i-ECT. XVI.] THE BIBLE IN MODERN POETRY. 241 
 
 Wordsworth's criticism of Milton, that, "however 
 imbued the surface might be with classical literature, 
 he was a Hebrew in soul," is true of very much that is 
 most inspiring and most durable in our modern poetry. 
 Wordsworth's " Ode on Immortality " could never have 
 been written but for the creative effect upon the poet's 
 imagination of such Scriptures as the fifteenth chapter 
 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians and the eighth 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. Pantheism has 
 a cool way of appropriating a great deal of Christian 
 poetry. Thus it claims Wordsworth. But the most 
 autobiographic passages in " The Excursion," descrip- 
 tive of the communion of his soul with nature, could 
 never have been conceived but by a mind which was 
 permeated by the inspiration of the One Hundred and 
 Forty-eighth Psalm. 
 
 " In such access of mind, in such high hour 
 Of visitation from the living God," 
 
 is the language in which he himself describes that 
 communion. 
 
 Shakspeare's conception of woman is another illus- 
 tration to tlie same effect. De Quincey claims it as an 
 absolute original by no other genius than Shakspeare. 
 But in the last analysis Shakspeare's ideal is only 
 the Christian ideal, which suffuses with refinement our 
 modern life. We owe it ultimately, not to poetry, nor 
 to the drama, but to the biblical fact of the atonement. 
 Nothing else has made the conception possible of a 
 Desdemona or an Ophelia growing out of a sex de- 
 graded in all other than Christian literatures. 
 
 The hymnology of all modern languages has been 
 absolutely created by the Hebrew psalmody. The 
 
242 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi. 
 
 ancient classics have not, so far as I know, contributed 
 a stanza to it. Not a line of it lives, through two 
 generations, in which the genius of the Psalms of 
 David does not overpower and appropriate all other 
 resources of culture. The old English and Scottish 
 ballads never exerted on the national mind a tithe of 
 the influence of the Hebrew psalm. The common- 
 wealth of England owed its existence, in part, to the 
 psalm-singing of Cromwell's armies. On the continent 
 of Europe, also, the whole bulk of the despotism of 
 the middle ages went down before the rude imitations 
 of the Hebrew psalmody by Clement Marot and Hans 
 Sachs. The battle-song of Gustavus Adolphus was 
 originally published with this title, " A Heart-cheering 
 Song of Comfort on the Watchword of the Evangelical 
 Army in the Battle of Leipsic, Sept. 7, 1631. God 
 with Us." 
 
 The Bible has also formed the best standards of de- 
 liberative eloquence in modern times. The Earl of 
 Chatham was sensible of his own indebtedness to it. 
 Patrick Henry and James Otis were often likened in 
 their lifetime to the Hebrew prophets. Lord Brougham 
 and Daniel Webster both acknowledged their obliga- 
 tions to the same models. Webster was for years the 
 biblical concordance of the United-States Senate. His 
 ablest opponents, in preparing their speeches, used to 
 resort to him to furnish them with scriptural passages 
 and metaphors to point their weapons against him. 
 Such was his command of the same resources, that 
 he could afford to give them liberally, and without 
 upbraiding. 
 
 To all departments of modern literature the Scrip- 
 tures have been what they have been to modern art. 
 
LECT. XVI.] THE BIBLE IN INFIDEL WRITINGS. 243 
 
 It has been said that the single Christian conception 
 of a vircrin and her child has done more for the eleva- 
 tion of art than all the exhumed models of Greece and 
 Rome. It is a well-known fact that nothing in art 
 itself succeeded in crushing out the moral abomina- 
 tions which many, of those models expressed until the 
 Christian religion flooded the whole realm of beauty 
 with more intense ideas ; so that, to the purest taste, 
 the Greek Venus has become imbecile by the side of 
 the Christian Madonna. So are the literary models 
 of the Scriptures working, as germs of power in modern 
 literature, beyond the depth of Greek and Roman 
 thought in its choicest and most durable forms. 
 
 I will name but one other form in which the obliga- 
 tions of modern literature to the Scriptures is illus- 
 trated : it is that of the unconscious debt of infidelity 
 to biblical resources. The infidel literature of our 
 times owes nearly all the vitality it has to its pilferings 
 of Christian nutriment. It lives by its unconscious 
 suction from Christian fountains. " The Cotter's Sat- 
 urday Night" is not more palpably indebted to the 
 Scriptures than are some of the finest passages in 
 Shelley's "Queen Mab." The "Paradise Lost" and 
 the " Pilgrim's Progress " are not more really the out- 
 growth of the old Hebrew soul than are some of the 
 sublimest conceptions of Lord Byron's " Cain." No 
 man could have written " Cain " or " Queen Mab " 
 whose genius had not been developed by a Christian 
 civilization, and whose infidelity had not been fired by 
 collision with the Epistle to the Romans. The power 
 to he so blasphemous grew out of Christian knowledge ; 
 and the power to express the blasphemy with such 
 lurid grandeur sprang from the culture which Chiis- 
 tianity had created. 
 
244 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi. 
 
 E'he atheism of Great Britain, which is working so 
 ,strously among the artisan chisses of the kingdom, 
 owes its chief resources of power over the popular 
 mind to the fact that it holds on to so much of scrip- 
 tural thought. \ Its capital ideas are biblical ideas. 
 Strip it of these, and it would have no chance of a 
 hearing in the workshops of Birmingham. What else 
 than Christianity ever gave to the human conscience 
 spring enough to enable it to conceive of such a thing 
 as a practical religion without a God? Yet this is 
 English atheism to-day. It is not vice ; it is not con- 
 scious blasphemy ; it is not moral nihilism : it is an 
 aim at moralit}^ moral culture, moral principle, moral 
 progress, even moral worship, after its kind, — all which 
 it audaciously proposes to support without a God for 
 the center of the moral instincts. When did the hu- 
 man soul ever before get force enough of moral instincts 
 to conceive of such a project as that ? 
 
 Similar to the lesson taught by the atheism of Great 
 Britain is that taught by the most powerful phases of 
 infidelity in this country. It Avould be entertaining, 
 if it were not too painfully solemn, to observe the 
 depth to which Christian thought has penetrated, and 
 the extent to which Christian colorings of speech have 
 suffused the culture exhibited by the most brilliant of 
 the infidel lecturers and writers among us. Mark it 
 anywhere, — on the platform, in the newspapers, in 
 magazines, in books: the materials of thought which 
 these men are wielding, to the saddest hurt of an un- 
 thinking faith, are at bottom Christian products. No 
 other class of literary men are so profoundly indebted 
 to the Scriptures, yet so profoundly oblivious of the 
 debt. 
 
LECT. XVI.] THEODORE PARKER. 245 
 
 Open one of their books, turn to its most captivating 
 pages, sift its style, weigh its thought; and what do 
 you find of good sterling worth? Wherever you find 
 clear ideas held in honest Saxon grip, you find them 
 vitalized by something or other which they owe to 
 Christianity. Here it is a truth as old as Moses ; there 
 it is the power to conceive of the opposite of a truth : 
 again it is an antithesis of half-truths ; farther on it is 
 a dislocated quotation, or a warped and twisted allu- 
 sion : now it is a fungus overgrowing a germ of truth 
 which gives it its power to grow ; then it is a Pantheis- 
 tic turn to language which Pantheism never originated, 
 but which, in its original, Christian souls love. Even 
 down to the indefinable ingenuities of style, you find 
 at work the alert and sinewy fingers of a Christian 
 culture. The very sentences which express or imply 
 semi-Paganism in theology, but the structure of which 
 makes them play in the very heavens of beauty like 
 the coruscations of the northern-lights, are, as speci- 
 mens of style, the product of our Oriental yet Saxon 
 Bible. Are Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, at the root 
 of the thoughts and the forms which you feel in such 
 pages ? No : it is Moses ; it is Isaiah ; it is David ; it 
 is St. John ; it is Christ. Take away the elements of 
 culture which these have contributed to such literature, 
 and no man would care what heroes or philosophers 
 might claim the residuum. 
 
 The most striking illustration, in my judgment, which 
 has exhibited the truth of the fact before us in our 
 own country, is that given by the Rev. Theodore 
 Parker. For twenty j^ears the most vital infidelity in 
 this land was personified in him. He brought to the 
 solitary altar at which he ministered in Boston a gen- 
 
246 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi. 
 
 erous scholarship, a mercurial genius, a versatile com- 
 mand of thought, and a fascinating style. Taking 
 him all in all, his was a more earnest character than 
 that of any other man who has gained any thing like 
 equal eminence in the ranks of active hostility to what 
 he called " the popular theology of New England." 
 The purity of his life was almost ascetic. For one, I 
 am compelled to concede the power of the man in his 
 lifetime, whatever may be true of it now. I do not 
 think that any candid man among us who knows the 
 classes of mind which were reached, and the momentum 
 given to them, for twenty years, from that Twenty- 
 eighth Congregational pulpit, will feel, that, as a friend 
 of truth, he can afford to ignore that power, or to 
 underrate it. 
 
 But it was not the power of his infidelity : it was 
 the power of his unconscious obligations to truth. His 
 vital and vitalizing ideas were Christian ideas. He 
 owed them to the Book which he disowned. He drank 
 them in from all the living literatures which he mas- 
 tered. He maligned religion as we conceive of it. 
 He ridiculed Scriptures which to us are sacred. He 
 denounced as barbaric the ground-work of our hope of 
 heaven. He scoffed at our ideal of a Redeemer, He 
 uttered words which from our lips would be blasphemy. 
 Yet the interior forces which bore up as on an oceanic 
 ground-swell this mass of error were forces every one 
 of which sprung from that ocean of inspired thought 
 whose great deeps were broken up in the civilization 
 around him. 
 
 What were some of those forces? In what ideas 
 did they find their origin ? They were such as these : 
 the fatherhood of God, the unity of the human brother- 
 
LECT, XVI.] INSPIRATION AND LITERARY MERIT. 247 
 
 hood before God, the dignity of manhood, the inten- 
 sity of life as the prelude to immortality, and, more 
 than all else, the application of these ideas to social 
 and national reforms. These were the forces which 
 he wielded. Without them the world would not have 
 heard of him. Yet these are, every one of them, bib- 
 lical forces. He owed them to the Christian Scrip- 
 tures ; and he owed the susceptibility to them in the 
 popular mind on which he worked so disastrously to 
 that interpretation of the Scriptures which has ex- 
 pressed itself in our New-England theology. Thus it 
 is with every development of infidelity which has force 
 enough to make it respectable. It feeds on Christianity 
 itself, and grows lusty therefore. 
 
 To the views thus far advanced respecting the lit- 
 erary claims of the Bible should be added the fact that 
 the Bible contains within itself models of thought and 
 expression which are intrinsically superior to other 
 literature. What do we mean when we speak of the 
 literary pre-eminence of the Scriptures ? This involves 
 two inquiries. 
 
 The first is, What is the bearing of inspiration on 
 literary merit? I answer, It is not such that pre- 
 eminence in literary forms follows from inspiration as 
 a thing of course. Inspiration does not save from 
 literary defects even. It does not necessitate uniform 
 excellence in taste, the most perfect conciseness, force, 
 purity, precision, beauty, of style. It does not even 
 protect against false sj'utax. The Scriptures are open 
 to criticism in these respects, like any other book. It is 
 in the substance and the spirit of the volume chiefly, 
 that its supremacy appears. Literary defects arise 
 necessarily from the freedom of the inspired mind. 
 
248 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xVi. 
 
 In the laws of inspiration God has exercised the same 
 care for human freedom that is displayed in all other 
 divine adjustments. So jealous is the divine mind of 
 the integrity of that inclosure within which a human 
 mind is itself a creator, that, even in the anomaly of 
 inspiration, the human mind is not automatic. In the 
 process of constructing a revelation the inspired mind 
 is left to act out itself. A human coloring suffuses 
 the material of the inspired production, because a free, 
 self-acting will is concerned in it. Hence come literary 
 defects. 
 
 The central fact in this matter is, that, in the inspired 
 record, God has secured the best literary forms possible 
 to the instruments he chose to work with. He has 
 inspired St. Paul to write as well as, under the condi- 
 tions of his work, St. Paul could write. He has in- 
 spired David and Isaiah to speak as well as, under the 
 conditions existing, they could speak. In neither case 
 has he taken from the man his identity. It is no 
 irreverence, therefore, it is only a recognition of the 
 divine plan of procedure, to say that the Bible makes 
 no claim to immaculate excellence in classic forms. 
 
 Again : a pretended revelation, of scholastic origin, 
 would have been very apt to claim absolute perfection. 
 Mahomet did this for the Koran : Jewish bibliolatry 
 did this for the Pentateuch. It is an incidental sign 
 of the divine origin of the Scriptures, that they never 
 do this for themselves. The Scriptures, therefore, come 
 to us in forms of very unequal literary merit. They 
 resemble in this the works of uninspired genius. Ge- 
 nius elsewhere never claims perfection. It never thinks 
 of its own work as literature. It throws itself into 
 its creations with self-abandonment. Jn its noblest 
 
LECT. XVI.] BIBLICAL INTENSITY. 249 
 
 works it is unconscious of its nobility. The very inten- 
 sity of its conceptions creates defects when crowded 
 into human language. So it is with inspiration acting 
 through the agency of a human mind : if the Scrip- 
 tures did not exhibit these diversities, the strongest 
 possible philosophical argument would be established 
 that they are not the work of the men who profess to 
 be their authors. 
 
 The second of the two inquiries suggested is, What 
 are the things in which the Bible does exhibit the 
 superiority claimed for it ? You will readily recall 
 them. I name them only to give definiteness to them 
 as excellences in literature, and not as moral virtues 
 alone, involved vaguely in the gift of inspiration, and 
 therefore outside of our scholarly regard. 
 
 The fidelity of the Bible to the loftiest ideals which 
 the human mind can form of truth and purity is a 
 literary excellence. It is a requisition of good taste, 
 as well as of the moral instincts. That the Scriptures 
 utter no falsehood, minister to no vice, truckle to no 
 conventional corruption, do not ignore the moral affin- 
 ities of the intellect, never confound moral rectitude 
 with beauty, but, in a word, subordinate intellectual 
 to moral integrity, — these are exponents of literary 
 dignit}' which the cultured taste of the world must 
 sooner or later learn to esteem as it does not now. 
 They would give to any other literature a dignity 
 which would command the admiration of all scholarly 
 minds. 
 
 The intensity of the biblical style of thought is a 
 literary excellence. Contrast this with the immense 
 amount of frivolous and aimless thought in all other 
 literature. Inspiration never trifles, never dallies with 
 
250 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi. 
 
 truth, never sports with "the eternities," never per- 
 petrates a pun, never fawns upon great men, never 
 flatters woman, never deals in comedy, never created 
 such a character as that of Shakspeare's " Falstaff," or 
 the universal clown of the modern stage. As a collec- 
 tion of literary productions, the Scriptures look inward 
 to a great central tragedy. An intellectual intensity, 
 therefore, broods over them, which is altogether unique. 
 Those portions of Shakspeare's dramas which exhibit 
 the same quality are those on which, mainly, his fame 
 rests. In him we do not restrict it as a quality of form 
 only: it is the very substance of all that we admire 
 in a great tragic poem. The same is true of it as a 
 quality of biblical thought. 
 
 The oricfinality of biblical thought is a literary excel- 
 lence. This we can not appreciate till we throw our 
 minds back of the Scriptures themselves, back of the 
 whole intellectual training for which we are indebted 
 to them, and think of the mass of novel truth which 
 the Bible has given to the world, and the mass of pre- 
 extant truth which it has freshened and vitalized. Con- 
 trast it with the paucity of ideas in Homer, and are 
 you not sensible of the magnitude of the one and the 
 littleness of the other? If the Greek mind had had a 
 volume containing such a mass of ideas before unknown 
 and inconceivable, temples would have been built for 
 its teaching as the gift of immortal gods. 
 
 As the fruit of its originality, in part, the aptness of 
 the Bible to germinate in uninspired literature is a lit- 
 erary virtue. Regarded as a fertilizing power to other 
 products of the human mind, no other volume can be 
 compared with it. It is marvelously reproductive of 
 kindred thought. The germs of epic poems, of systems 
 
i-ECT. XVI.] THE BIBLE AND LIBERTY. 251 
 
 of philosophy, of political constitutions, and of the 
 eloquence which sways nations in crises of history, are 
 the common thoughts of the inspired authors. The 
 seeds of such culture as that which effloresces in a 
 Milton, a Bacon, a Chatham, a Burke, are here ideas 
 thrown out by men speaking, as if on the spur of the 
 moment, in friendly letters, in talks, to unlettered 
 minds and to children. 
 
 The sympathy of the Scriptures with human liberty 
 is an excellence, which, in equal degree, would redu- 
 plicate to the echo the fame of any other literature in 
 the world. History is largely made up of struggles 
 for freedom. Free thought, free speech, a free press, 
 free soil, free men, free government, are the objects for 
 and against which the great conflicts of the race have 
 been waged. Much of the scholarly thought of the 
 . world has been committed to the service of autocratic 
 and aristocratic privilege. Authors have been, to a 
 considerable extent, the retainers of noblemen. Some- 
 times they have been, like Horace, the slaves of feudal 
 superiors. Against the main drift of national litera- 
 tures the liberty of man has often been compelled to 
 contend for its existence. Some of the living stand- 
 ards in our libraries to-day are the product of a muz- 
 zled press. 
 
 Not a trace of sympathy with such a condition of 
 things is found in the literature of the Bible. The 
 bent of its genius is all on the side of those institu- 
 tions for which free men have fought, and women have 
 suffered. The Bible is pre-eminently the manual of 
 liberty. Those words which have been the watchwords 
 of sanguinary revolutions for the deliverance of nations 
 from oppression express the favorite ideas of biblical 
 
252 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvi 
 
 jurisprudence and song and prophecy. That rulers 
 exist for the people ; that the poor are in law the 
 peers of the rich, and the ignorant, of the wise ; that 
 mankind are one brotherhood, with equal claims upon 
 the fatherhood of God and the fraternity of each other, 
 — are the familiar and central thoughts of biblical 
 poets, historians, lawgivers, prophets, and apostles. 
 The whole strain of the volume is one long protest 
 against the oppressor, and one perpetual song of cheer 
 to the slave. No other literature is in this respect so 
 uncompromising and so self-consistent. It is an incen- 
 diary volume to slaveholders everywhere. Popes place 
 it at the head of the list of books anathematized. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, the Bible is equally the 
 manual of temperate and bloodless reform. It gives no 
 place to the malign emotions in warfare against oppres- 
 sion. Fanatics expurgate and denounce it no less 
 bitterly than tyrants. It tolerates wrong, and incul- 
 cates long-suffering, rather than to invite convulsive 
 revolutions. It trusts to time, and the omnipotence of 
 truth, for the emancipation of mankind. It subordi- 
 nates civil to spiritual liberty, — a thing which fanatical 
 reform has never done, and for the want of which it 
 has always failed. If the spirit of biblical literature 
 had held sway in history, there would never have been 
 a servile war, never would a race or a nation have 
 been emancipated by the sword. Yet the cause of 
 human liberty would have been centuries in advance 
 of its condition to-day. The equipoise of opposing 
 truths, and the consequent smoothness and stillness of 
 beneficent revolutions, are characteristic of biblical 
 thought as opposed to the eternal war-song of all other 
 literature. The ultimate culture of the world will 
 
LECT. XVI.] BIBLICAL STYLES. 253 
 
 transpose the passive and the active virtues in its 
 literary judgments. 
 
 The symmetry of the biblical system of truth is a 
 literary excellence. With no system in form, it is 
 everywhere suggestive of system in fact. The biblical 
 scholar degrades his own work who discerns in the 
 Bible no implications of a self-consistent structure of 
 theology. It is in this respect what every man's real 
 life is, — a plan of God. Every thing in it fits every 
 other thing. What other literature not founded upon 
 it has such balancing of opposite truths, such adjust- 
 ments of the relations of truth, such diversity in unity, 
 such unity in diversity, such a grand march of progress 
 in the evolution of truth? In one sense the Bible is 
 a fragment, made up of fragments ; but it is fragmen- 
 tary as the segment of a circle is fragmentary. 
 
 The number and diversity of literary styles in the 
 Scriptures deserve mention. Although immaculate 
 form is not one of their claims, yet incidentally to 
 their loftiness of thought, and purity of character, 
 excellence of form often appears as if by spontaneous 
 creation. The style of some portions of the Epistles, 
 art has never tried to improve. Who has ever thought 
 to improve the form of the Beatitudes or the Lord's 
 Prayer? What reformer or censor of public morals 
 has ever attempted to improve the style of some of the 
 Hebrew prophets? The narrative style of the evan- 
 gelists, the lyric poetry of the Psalms, the epic grandeur 
 of the Book of Job — what adventurous critic has 
 ever assumed to equal these? They are as nearly 
 perfect as human language permits. Poetic, didactic, 
 philosophic, narrative, illustrative, allegorical, episto- 
 lary, dramatic, oratorical, prophetic, styles are all 
 
254 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xn. 
 
 illustrated in the Bible by specimens of the first 
 order of merit. 
 
 As the sequence of some of the foregoing qualities, 
 a certain power in the literature of the Bible to project 
 itself into the future is worthy of remark. The mate- 
 rials of extant literatures may in one view be classified 
 as literatures of the past and literatures of the future. 
 Some standards of our libraries are only monuments. 
 We admire them, but we never use them. Practically 
 the world has done with them. To high culture the 
 study of them has become a recreation only. They are 
 receding from the earnest life of the world more and 
 more distantly with every generation. 
 
 The Bible, as a literary power, is no such monu- 
 mental structure. Though the oldest, it is still the 
 freshest, literature extant. Covering all the past, it 
 reaches over a longer and grander future. A favorite 
 idea of critics is that of the immortality of literature. 
 The Bible is the only volume which is sure of that. 
 The future belongs to it as to nothing else which the 
 world now reveres in libraries. Its own prophecies are 
 a fair symbol of the prospective vision which illumines 
 it, and assures to it an undying youth. 
 
 Such are some of the salient points definitive of our 
 conceptions of the Bible as a literary classic. The 
 majority of them occur to our thought first and most 
 positively as moral excellences only ; but good taste 
 approves them as well. The affinities between our 
 intellectual and our moral nature are such, that to 
 ignore either involves deterioration of the other. An 
 eminent English critic says that Lord Byron, in the 
 lack of a keen conscience, suffered the lack of the 
 first quality necessary to a true poet. A more subtle 
 
LECT. XVI.] MORAIi AND LITERARY VIRTUES. 255 
 
 illustration of the same kind of affinity is seen in the 
 power of a lofty morality to elevate the very vocabu- 
 lary of a language, and the opposite power of degraded 
 morals to degrade a language also. On the same prin- 
 ciple, certain qualities in the Bible which first strike us 
 as moral qualities only, we claim as literary virtues 
 as well. They augment immensely the power of the 
 volume as an educating force in the discipline of a 
 scholarly mind. I do not dwell upon them at greater 
 length, because they are familiar ; and to expand them 
 might easily degenerate into unmeaning eulogy. 
 
LECTURE XVII. 
 
 THE PEOFESSIONAIi VALUE OF BIBLICAL MODELS TO 
 A PKEACHER. 
 
 The claims of biblical study upon a pastor would 
 be but incompletely treated, if no mention were made 
 of its direct professional service. No other single prin- 
 ciple of success in the work of the pulpit surpasses 
 this, of its dependence on the models of the Bible as 
 guides to both the theory and practice of preaching. 
 
 Every careful student of theology discovers the dis- 
 tinction between truth as it appears in uninspired forms 
 of statement, and the same truth as it appears in the 
 biblical forms. It is not chiefly the forms which attract 
 us in the Scriptures : it is the truth itself, qualified and 
 assisted by the relations in which it is uttered, by its 
 antecedents and consequents in the biblical collocation 
 of materials, by the objects for which it is spoken, by 
 the illustrative elements by which it is pictured, by 
 the frequency with which it is repeated, by the atmos- 
 phere which is thrown around it by the religious 
 feeling of the writer, and by the moral authority 
 which it derives from the reader's faith in its inspi- 
 ration. These often change, by refraction, the per- 
 spective in which the truth is seen. It is a vast 
 variety of such things which makes truth appear truth- 
 ful in the biblical conception and statement of it. It 
 
 256 
 
LECT. xvu.] HISTORIC CREEDS. 257 
 
 puts on a different look when taken out of the locality 
 in which inspiration has adjusted it to its inspired pur- 
 pose. In a word, truth in the Scriptures seems to have 
 been livedo not said only. A soul breathes in it which 
 speaks as never man spake. The same qualities in 
 the biblical representations of truth which give to an 
 unlettered reader a spiritual quickening give to a 
 preacher a kind of culture which is a powerful aux- 
 iliary to his intellectual preparation for professional 
 service. No man needs that culture more. 
 
 For the sake of definiteness of conception on this 
 topic, let us follow it in an excursus from the main 
 subject upon the contrast between the ultimate impres- 
 sion of certain truths in the biblical teaching, and that 
 of the same truths in the forms of science and in a 
 certain class of sermons. 
 
 Our systems of theology do an invaluable service to 
 a preacher. No man can preach the Bible truthfully, 
 who does not preach it with fidelity to a system of 
 truth which pervades it. If we preach it in methods 
 which are reckless of an underlying system, we are 
 sure to derive from it extremes of truth which are not 
 truthful. The best biblical preaching, therefore, is the 
 best theological preaching. The contemptuous treat- 
 ment of dogmatic theology, sometimes heard from men 
 of pettifogging scholarship, does not deserve refutation. 
 Still our theological systems, as represented in the 
 great historic creeds, are all of them polemic in their 
 origin. They have a belligerent look ; they are skele- 
 tons in coats of mail. They have been formed in times 
 when some one truth, or class of truths, was believed to 
 be in peril : they have, therefore, an outlook in some 
 directions more eager and defiant than in others. The 
 
258 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvii. 
 
 majority of them are compromises, in which contending 
 parties placed each its own construction upon ambigu- 
 ous language. Therefore, to a later age, they often bear 
 the look of contradiction. 
 
 This is specially noticeable in the drift of our most 
 scholarly confessions upon doctrines which involve the 
 freedom of the human will. On this subject, truth has 
 been of slow and toilsome growth. She has crept and 
 limped up the great highway of human opinion. "With 
 a great sum " have we " obtained this freedom." Pagan 
 theology everywhere has been saturated to the point of 
 stupor with fatalism. The early Christian thought was 
 dragged with the same poison. The clear enunciation 
 of the liberty of the human will, and of the theological 
 corollaries from it, has been, in the main, the product 
 of the Christian thinking of the last two hundred years. 
 We owe it largely to the political and civil history of 
 the Netherlands. 
 
 Many of the historic creeds of Christendom, there- 
 fore, are wofully disproportioned on this class of doc- 
 triiws. In some of them, these doctrines are set over 
 against their related truths in language which gives to 
 both classes the look of contradictions. They are 
 , stated on the principle of the Duke of Wellington, that 
 //"the way to solve contradictions is to affirm both sides] 
 stoutly." But more frequently these correlated truths 
 are so stated as to depress the fact of human freedom. 
 Divine sovereignty is emphasized ; human responsibility 
 is mumbled. The doctrine of decrees is thundered; 
 that of man's ability is whispered. In all that renders 
 God august and terrible the sound is the blast of a 
 trumpet; in all that should quicken man's conscious- 
 ness of moral dignity and duty the voice is but the 
 echo of an echo. 
 
LECT. XVII.] BIBLICAL THEOLOGY. 259 
 
 As monuments of historic theology, the great creeds 
 of the church are all the more valuable for being just 
 what they are. They mark the struggling faith of 
 believers from theologic infancy upward. We study 
 them with much of the same interest with which one 
 would study the Pinakothek and Glyptothek of Munich, 
 in which is represented the complete history of paint- 
 ing and sculpture. It is no strange thing that they are 
 often illogical, and very far from self-consistent. This 
 is inevitable in the structure of any document which 
 must express the convictions of many independent 
 minds. Macaulay says that " some of the most useful 
 political instruments in the world are among the most 
 illogical compositions ever penned." The same is true 
 of some religious creeds. It grows out of the nature 
 of compromise, in which, from the necessities of the case, 
 the creeds of historic importance have been framed. 
 Compromise of great and sincere beliefs borders hard 
 on contradiction. All honor, then, to these monumen- 
 tal structures of our faith. They have done for the 
 church all that they were ever meant to do. 
 
 But who of us have not been sensible of a more power- 
 ful educating force emanating from the same truths, as 
 they are expressed for a moral purpose, in their biblical 
 forms ? It seems as if the human mind, in direct con- 
 verse with the thought of the Infinite Mind, can not 
 obtain its most formative conceptions of truth, except 
 through the medium of moral sensibilities and a moral 
 aim. Hence it is that we experience such a supreme 
 educating power in the writings of the Hebrew seers, 
 and of the apostles, and in the discourses of our Lord. 
 
 Are we not sensible often that a doctrine of our faith 
 in even a masterly theologic treatise is a different thing 
 
260 MEN AND BOOKS. [lbct. xvii. 
 
 from the same doctrine in the Bible ? It makes a dif- 
 ferent impression. It may be stated with such refined 
 analysis and with such exactest choice of speech, and 
 set in the frame of a system so symmetrical, that you 
 feel unable to add to it or subtract from it as a theo- 
 logic formula ; yet, in the whole treatise built upon it, 
 it has a diEferent ring from that given by the apostles 
 with the same instrument. It leaves a different reso- 
 nance in the ear. It starts a different quivering of the 
 sensibilities. 
 
 Sermons are sometimes constructed after the model 
 of scientific theological treatises, and therefore exhibit 
 the same contrast with biblical teachings. Have you 
 not listened to discourses on eternal punishment, to 
 the theory of which you could not urge valid objec- 
 tion, but which produced a totally different impression 
 from that of the blended sternness and benignity of 
 the teachings of our Lord ? Where do the Scriptures 
 authorize such a final impression of the doctrine as 
 that of President Edwards's sermon on the text, " Their 
 feet shall slide in due time " ? Who ever derived from 
 the Bible such merciless conceptions on the subject, 
 couched in such relentless forms of statement, as are 
 found in some of the sermons of Mr. Spurgeon ? 
 
 Have you not heard discourses on the sovereignty 
 of God, and responsibility of man, not a paragraph of 
 which 3^ou would erase as in itself untrue, which yet 
 left an impression unlike that of the ninth chapter of 
 the Epistle to the Romans, interlined with the eigh- 
 teenth chapter of Ezekiel? Who ever received from the 
 Bible the idea which is embossed on so many brazen 
 sermons, that God's sovereignty is sheer will, almighty 
 will asserting its almightiness ? and, on the other hand. 
 
LECT. xvn.] PREACHING ON THE ATONEMENT. 261 
 
 that human freedom is an omnipotence of will which 
 God is impotent to control? Where in the Scriptures is 
 the thought ever uttered or painted, even in the wild- 
 ness of Oriental hyperbole, which was declared by one 
 of our American preachers, that, " in the repentance of 
 a sinner, man is the giant, and God is but an infant " ? 
 Have you never listened to preaching on the doctrine 
 of the atonement, to which you could not object that 
 any single statement was untrue, but which still you 
 felt to be, in its ultimate impression, out of sympathy 
 with the Epistle to the Hebrews ? Who ever received 
 from the scriptural imagery of Christ's relation to the 
 Father in the work of atonement, that conception of 
 the Father's vengeance which Dr. Watts has versified 
 in a stanza, which, if it had been sung of the Greek 
 Nemesis, would have surpassed any equal number of 
 lines in Homer ? — 
 
 " Rich were the drops of Jesus' blood 
 Which calmed his frowning face, 
 Which sprinkled o'er the burning throne, 
 And turned the wrath to grace." 
 
 Our inherited type of preaching on the doctrine of 
 sin is unscriptural in this respect, that it starts with 
 the idea of the mercilessness of a holy God. It assumes 
 that forgiveness is not the original and spontaneous 
 action of the Divine Mind. Such is the nature of sin, 
 that the primary notion must be, in a holy mind, that 
 it can not be forgiven. This is the idea which is 
 wrought into the most profound discussions of Pagan 
 theology. It is the very life of the Greek idea of fate. 
 It was the finality of the theology of Socrates. The 
 same conception pervades much of the later literature 
 
262 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvii. 
 
 of the world. Turn to one of its latest and most origi- 
 nal productions, — Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." You 
 find this notion of the implacableness of innocence 
 towards the guilty in his appalling picture of the rela- 
 tions of Hilda and Miriam. Hilda the pure, and 
 jNIiriam the fallen — an impassable gulf yawns between 
 them, which eternity can never bridge over. The fallen 
 one stands doomed to an " infifiite, shivering solitude," 
 in whicli she cannot come "close enough" even "to 
 human beings to be warmed by them." " Standing on 
 the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch 
 out her hand, and never clasp a hand of theirs. She 
 might strive to call out, ' Help, friends, help ! ' but, as 
 with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish 
 inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little 
 way." 
 
 This notion has often congealed the heart of the 
 pulpit. Therefore, in preaching even on the doctrine 
 of the atonement, we have failed to represent the spon- 
 taneousness of the love of God as the Scriptures do. 
 We have fettered it with limitations. We have quali- 
 fied it by elections. We have obscured it by figures of 
 bargain and sale. We have counted the elect as if 
 there were danger that too many souls should be ran- 
 somed by the price paid. The inevitable impression on 
 the common mind has been, that the love of God in 
 redemption acts under repression, and with divided or 
 wavering purpose. All this is just what the Scriptures 
 do not teach in their expression of the love of God in 
 the atoning work. There all is free and whole-souled. 
 The way to the heart of God is wide open. There is 
 no conflict in the mind of Godhead. No antagonism 
 of nature or of purpose separates God from Christ. 
 
I.ECT. XVII.] THE SWEDISH CATECHISM. 263 
 
 God gives his Son; Christ gives himself: the purpose 
 of redeeming love is original with both. God, above 
 all other beings in the universe, is a sinner's friend ; 
 the whole Godhead is a sinner's friend. A preacher 
 comes into a different atmosphere from that of the 
 religion of nature, as soon as his mind takes in the 
 unbroken strain of the responses which the Scriptures 
 make to the inquiry " What must I do to be saved ? " 
 
 So of any doctrine which has been hotly contested 
 in the schools. How few discussions of such a doctrine 
 are there, which a Christian heart, when in the most 
 filial communion with God, and reverent fellowship with 
 Christ, feels to be honestly and artlessly truthful to the 
 Scriptures as a whole, breathing the same spirit, and 
 leaving the same impression, without abatement and 
 without hyperbole ! 
 
 You will recognize, therefore, the pertinence of the 
 injunction, that a preacher needs to imbibe the spirit of 
 the biblical models as an addition to, yet distinct from, 
 that of the theologic models. I say, " an addition to " 
 these, not in abrogation of them ; because theologic 
 science must do, and has magnificently done, a work /or 
 the pulpit which can not be brought into the pulpit. 
 We must study philosophic truth in its exactness for 
 the purpose of concinnity of faith, and then we must 
 come back and drink in the spirit of the same truth in 
 its inspired artlessness of form for the purposes of 
 preaching. 
 
 Some striking information to the point here is found 
 in an account, published a few years ago, of the reli- 
 gious state of Sweden. It appears that it was a feature 
 in the organic law of Sweden, that the schools should 
 teach all the youth of the kingdom the Lutheran Gate- 
 
264 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvii. 
 
 chism: as the Swedish pastors termed it, the schools 
 should " teach religion " to the children. Accordingly, 
 every Swedish child of suitable age was "taught reli- 
 gion" by catechetical drill supervised by the pastor 
 of his parish. Probably there was not then, if there 
 is now, another country on the globe where this duty 
 was so scrupulously attended to as there. But, at the 
 time referred to, the complaint was universal among 
 the clergy and the thoughtful laity of Sweden, that the 
 vitality of the old faith was dying out. In hundreds 
 of parishes the youth droned through the Catechism as 
 a necessity to their civil standing in after-life ; but the 
 ancient faith no longer breathed in the ancient form. 
 
 Side by side with this admirably compacted system 
 of catechetical routine, there sprang up an obscure sect 
 of " Lascari," as they were termed ; that is, " readers," 
 as I understand the title. They resembled in spirit 
 the Methodists of England. They derived their name 
 from the fact that their religious teachers, with no 
 ecclesiastical status recognized by either Church or 
 State, were simply readers of the Bible. They erected 
 plain meeting-houses, like barns, to evade the laws of 
 the realm against the unlicensed erection of churches. 
 The people forsook the old temples of their fathers, and 
 flocked in thousands to the cheerless barns of the 
 Lascari, to hear the Bible read. The clergy stood 
 upon their dignity. They scolded the people from 
 their pulpits. The entire respectability of the kingdom 
 frowned upon the innovation. But still the people 
 thronged the meetings of the " Readers." Again they 
 repeated the old story of Christian reform, — that, as 
 Dr. Chalmers said, Christianity is not a power of 
 respectability only, but a power of regeneration. 
 
LECT. XVII.] ROMISH THEOLOGIANS. 265 
 
 Awakened men and women from far and near came 
 together to hear the voice which had raised them as 
 from the dead. Some of them journeyed from ten to 
 sixty miles for the purpose. Many gave evidence of 
 spiritual conversion. The traveler who published the 
 account in this country expressed the opinion that 
 the hope of Protestantism in Sweden was no longer in 
 the old church of Gustavus Adolphus : it was in the 
 despised Lascari. 
 
 The providence of God teaches a significant lesson 
 to the pulpit by such a social phenomenon as this. It 
 is, that to the popular heart there is no other preaching 
 like that which is baptized in the fountains of inspired 
 thought and feeling. The pulpit which is built upon 
 the soundest platform of systematic divinity, and that 
 only, goes down before the living man who invites men 
 to listen to the words of God. It is true no man can 
 build up in the popular faith the best ideal of Christian 
 truth, who has not mastered systematic theology in its 
 most scholarly forms ; but it is equally true that no 
 man can build that ideal who has studied truth in those 
 forms alone. 
 
 This view is confirmed by an acknowledgment which 
 Orestes A. Brownson has made respecting the catena of 
 Roman-Catholic theologians. He says, " The fathers 
 studied and expounded the Scriptures, and they were 
 the strong men, the great men, the heroes of their 
 times. The mediseval doctors studied, systematized, 
 and epitomized the fathers ; and they, though still 
 great, fell below those who were formed by the study 
 of the Scriptures themselves. The theologians fol- 
 lowed, and gave compendiums of the doctors, and fell 
 still lower. Modern professors content themselves with 
 
266 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvii. 
 
 giving compendiums of the compendiuras given by the 
 tlieologians, and have fallen as low as possible without 
 falling into nothing, and disappearing in the inane." 
 
 This would be a libel, if affirmed of the brilliant suc- 
 cession of Protestant scholars who have represented 
 the progressive theological thought of the last three 
 centuries. It is specially untrue of those of our own 
 country. But of the Romish schools it expresses, from 
 one who may be accepted as an authority, the tendency 
 to a deterioration of culture which will be always 
 found where theological science has been divorced from 
 a study of the Scriptures. 
 
 This tendenc}'' is sometimes witnessed in the pulpit, 
 when dogmatic theology is allowed to monopolize its 
 ministrations. Then logic tyrannizes over rhetoric. 
 Theological system overbears homiletic variet}'^ and the 
 adaptations of suasive speech. In confirmation of this, 
 it deserves to be noted that the most cumbrous and 
 least profitable kind of serial preaching, unless it be 
 executed by a man of rare power in popularizing ab- 
 stract thought, is that in which a series of sermons is 
 founded upon the church creed. That was a deserved 
 rebuke which a pastor in Boston once received, when, 
 in the midst of such a series on the Catechism, a dele- 
 gation from his sabbath school waited upon him to 
 inform him that a religious awakening was in progress 
 in the Bible classes, and that they needed other instruc- 
 tion than that which he was giving them ; not other 
 truths, but in other and more versatile forms. 
 
 This fact suggests another, that no other proportions 
 of truth tally so well with the purest type of revivals 
 of religion as the proportions found in the Scriptures. 
 I can not but regard some kind of severance of truth 
 
LECT. XVII.] HYSTERIA IN REVIVALS. 267 
 
 from the biblical ways of putting it as one reason of 
 the pathological affections which have brought revivals 
 into discredit among thinking men. I refer to the 
 whole class of phenomena which medical science would 
 classify under the titles of hysteria and catalepsy. An 
 epidemic of them at the West, many years ago, received 
 the popular name of "the jerks." Something resembling 
 St. Vitus's dance attacked perfectly able-bodied men 
 under the tempestuous preaching of the time. Athletic 
 men from the backwoods of Kentucky, who sought the 
 Presbyterian camp-meetings with angry challenge of 
 "the jerks," were thrown to the ground before the 
 sermon was half finished, and wallowed there till they 
 were borne out into the air, swearing that "the devil 
 was in it." ProbabI}' in some sense he was. But no 
 such phenomena are recorded as attending apostolic 
 preaching, except those which are expressly ascribed to 
 miraculous gifts. Biblical truth in biblical proportions 
 tends always to a certain equipoise of effects. The 
 whole man is reached by it. It produces a quickening 
 of so many and such varied sensibilities, that each 
 balances another. Opposites limit and regulate each 
 other. Paroxysmal excitement is impossible. " Peace 
 I leave with you" is the message which symbolizes the 
 spiritual economy in the working of biblical truth in 
 its biblical adjustments. 
 
 To the views thus far presented, I would add, if the 
 time would permit, a more extended notice of one other 
 topic which I will now name, with only a synopsis of 
 the train of thought which it suggests. It is that the 
 study of the Bible as a literary classic has a tendency 
 to blend scholarship with Christian sensibility in such 
 proportions as to render each a help to the other in, the 
 
268 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvn. 
 
 growth of character. The prominent thoughts on this 
 topic are the following ; viz., the difficulty which Chris- 
 tian scholars often experience in harmonizing in their 
 own character accomplished scholarship and religious 
 faith ; the fact that the ministry contains men of reli- 
 gious ardor but imperfectly regulated by scholarly dis- 
 cipline ; the opposite fact, that it contains also men of 
 superior scholarship, who sympathize but feebly with 
 the popular developments of religious fervor ; the fact 
 that historically these two elements of character are 
 actively combined in the most vigorous periods in the 
 life of the church, and signally so in the most useful 
 men ; the fact that disaster always follows any marked 
 and prolonged disproportion between them in the ad- 
 ministration of the pulpit ; the fact that no other clerical 
 study is so healthfully regulative in this respect as 
 that of the literary models of the Scriptures; and the 
 fact that a biblical discipline of piety thus blended 
 with scholarly culture will work its own way to the 
 most essential principles of art in public speech. 
 
LECTURE XVIII. 
 
 METHODS OP LITEEAEY STUDY. — PEELIMTN ARIES. — 
 CBITICAL READING. — PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD. — 
 DIVISION OF LABOR. 
 
 3d, Having thus far, in our discussion of a pastor's 
 literary studies, considered the objects of the study and 
 the selection of authors, we now proceed to observe 
 the methods of literary study by a pastor. 
 
 It is necessary here, at the expense of repetition, to 
 recall and re-apply the two preliminaries which were 
 named at the outset of our discussion of the selection 
 of authors; viz., that the principles bearing upon the 
 subject must in practice qualify each other, any one 
 of them by itself constituting an impracticable basis 
 of culture ; and that, even with this qualification, the 
 principles collectively constitute at the best only a 
 theoretic ideal of study. 
 
 These preliminaries are even more significantly true 
 of methods of study than of the selection of authors. 
 No one principle can have a monopoly. All combined 
 give us only an ideal : the realization of it is a matter 
 of degrees. A nearer approach to it is practicable in 
 some cases than in others ; but in all cases it is of 
 value to have it as an ideal. It is worth much to 
 know what is scholarly reading. If it is but partially 
 practicable to a man, it is worth something to him to 
 
 269 
 
270 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xviri. 
 
 know that; to be able, therefore, to adjust his plans 
 to that. It is worth much to save time and force 
 from useless struggles, and specially to save himself 
 from the narrowness of underrating a high ideal, be- 
 cause he has tried it, and found it impracticable. I 
 repeat, therefore, that these preliminaries are more 
 necessary as qualifications of the principles we are 
 now about to consider than of those named respecting 
 the selection of authors. 
 
 1. Bearing them in mind, let us observe, that the 
 ideal of scholarly reading is critical reading. Here, 
 again, the distinction between reading and study is 
 elemental. It lies at the foundation of the whole 
 business. In mere reading the mind is passive: in 
 study the mind works. In reading we drift : in study 
 we roAV. 
 
 If Professor Stuart in his prime had been asked how 
 many hours in a day he studied, he would have said, 
 " Three and a half." But he spent at his study-table 
 ten, often twelve, hours. Such was the difference in 
 his estimate between study and reading. A young 
 man wrote to me not long ago that he was studying 
 fourteen hours a day. From my knowledge of his 
 temperament and habits, and from the fact that he 
 adds that he is " growing fat upon it," I doubt whether 
 he is studying two hours in a day. A man does not 
 grow fat upon fourteen hours of study in a da3^ 
 
 Critical reading establishes acquaintance with an 
 author. It discloses also the very process of his lit- 
 erary work. Every author's work is a panorama of 
 his mental processes to one who has the critical insight 
 by which to discover them. Tiiey are more easily dis- 
 covered in some than in others. Some writers are 
 
LECT. xvin.] READING AND STUDY. 271 
 
 secretive : they do not let themselves loose in their 
 speech. But these are inferiors in literary power. 
 The great minds liberate themselves ; they move on 
 winged utterances ; they throw the whole force of 
 their own being into their creations. Then, like other 
 works of creation, the thing created bears the image of 
 the creator. It is impossible, for instance, to read with 
 scholarly care the sonnets of Shakspeare, or Byron's 
 " Cain," without discovering somewhat of the personal 
 life and character of the author. Even a heedless 
 reader can not escape the discovery of the hidden 
 character of the author's mind in reading Hawthorne's 
 " Marble Faun " or " The Scarlet Letter." They pre- 
 sent a still picture of the man which is more suggestive 
 than an autobiograph3^ 
 
 That is unscholarly reading for a professional man, 
 reading for his own culture as a public speaker, which 
 does not disclose somewhat of the process of author- 
 ship. Not the man only, but his work, needs to be 
 made visible. To achieve this requires study, as dis- 
 tinct from reading. The majority of educated men 
 read a vast deal more than they study. The old adage, 
 " Commend me to the man of one book," was founded 
 upon the invaluable worth of critical reading. We do 
 a permanent evil to our own minds, if we read a valua- 
 ble book as we skim the newspapers. It is impossible 
 to appreciate an athletic literature without some degree 
 of the strain of a mental athlete in the study of it. 
 Specially is this true of that mastery of the process of 
 authorship which a public speaker needs to acquire by 
 his reading. 
 
 To illustrate this critical method in reading for pro- 
 fessional discipline, we should observe such things as 
 
270 MEN AND BOOKS. [i.kct. xviii. 
 
 know that; to bo aljlo, thoroforo, to arljiist Iii.s plariH 
 to that. It in woitli rniioh to hhvo tirno and Torco 
 from usclcHS HtniggloH, arif] Kpocially to Havo himself 
 from the iiarrownens of uufUrrratinr^ a high ideal, be- 
 cauHC A« has tried it, and foiinf] it imj^raetieable. I 
 repeat, therefore, tliat tJiene prf-iiminarieH are more 
 neecHsary an qualificatioiiH of tJie pniJcij)leH we are 
 now about to eonsider than of those named respeeting 
 the Heleetion of authors. 
 
 1. IJearing them in mind, h;t uh observe, that the 
 ideal of KchoJarly reading Ih eritieal reading. Here, 
 again, the distinetion between reading and Htudy is 
 elemental. It lies at the foundation of the whole 
 business. In mere reading the mind is passive: in 
 study the mirifl works. In reading we drift: in study 
 we row. 
 
 [i i'rofesHor Stuart in his prime had \)<-i:\i asked how 
 many hours in a day he studied, he would have said, 
 "Three and a half." liut he H[jent at his study-table 
 ten, often twelve, hours. Sueh was the differenee in 
 his estimate between study and reading. A young 
 man wrote Ui me not long ago that he was studying 
 fourteen hours a day. From my knowledge of his 
 temperament and habits, and from the faet timt he 
 adds that he is "growing fat upon it," I doul)t whether 
 he is studying two hours in a day. A man does not 
 grow fat upon fourteen hours of study in a day. 
 
 Critical rea/ling establishes acquaintance with an 
 author. It discloses hXm) the very process of his lit- 
 erary wfjrk. Every author's work is a j»anorama of 
 his mental processes to one who has the critical insight 
 by which to discover them. They are more easily dis- 
 covered in &orue ilaxix in others. Some writers are 
 
LECT. xviu.] READING AND STUDY. 271 
 
 secretive : they do not let themselves loose in their 
 speech. But these are inferiors in literary power. 
 The great minds liberate tlieiiiselves ; they move on 
 winged utterances ; they throw the whole force of 
 their own being into their creations. Then, like other 
 works of creation, the thing created bears the image of 
 the creator. It is impossible, for instance, to read with 
 scholarly care the sonnets of Shakspeare, or Byron's 
 "Cain," without discovering somewhat of the personal 
 life and character of the author. Even a heedless 
 reader can not escape the discovery of the hidden 
 character of the author's mind in reading Hawthorne's 
 " iMarble Faun " or '' The Scarlet Letter." They pre- 
 sent a still picture of the man which is more suggestive 
 than an autobiography. 
 
 That is unscholarly reading for a professional man, 
 reading for his own culture as a public speaker, which 
 does not disclose somewhat of the process of author- 
 ship. Not the man only, but his work, needs to be 
 made vis>ible. To achieve this requires study, as dis- 
 tinct from reading. The majority of educated men 
 read a vast deal more than they study. The old adage, 
 " Commend me to the man of one book," w^as founded 
 upon the invaluable worth of critical reading. We do 
 a permanent evil to our own minds, if we read a valua- 
 ble book as we skim the newspapers. It is impossible 
 to appreciate an athletic literature without some degree 
 of the strain of a mental athlete in the study of it. 
 Specially is this true of tliat mastery of the process of 
 authorship which a public speaker needs to acquire by 
 his reading. 
 
 To illustrate this critical method in reading for pro- 
 fessional discipline, we should observe such tilings as 
 
272 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvin. 
 
 the following. Respecting the materials of thought, 
 Are they true? are they relevant? are they original? 
 are they intense? are they the obvious outflow of a 
 full mind? are they suggestive of reserved force? do 
 they mark a candid thinker, a sympathetic thinker, 
 a mind which puts itself en rapport with the reader? 
 Respecting the style of the work, such points as these 
 need attention : Is the style clear, concise, forcible, pic- 
 turesque? Are the sentences involved ? Does a Latin, 
 or a German, or a Saxon model prevail in their struc- 
 ture? Do laQQjiic sentences abound? interrogatives ? 
 antitheses? parentheses? rhythmic clauses? clauses in 
 apposition ? quotations ? epithets ? long words ? short 
 words ? obsolete words ? archaic words ? euphonious 
 words? synonyms? monosyllabic words? Is the vo- 
 cabulary affluent, or stinted? Is the style as a whole 
 that of oratory, or of the essay ? Is it as a whole natu- 
 ral to the subject and the discussion? Is it as a whole 
 peculiar to the author, or imitative of other authors? 
 Does it indicate in the author the habit of weighing 
 well the forces of language ? Does it contain frag- 
 ments void of thought? Robert Hall's well-known 
 criticism of his own production, which a friend was 
 reading to him for the purpose, illustrates critical study 
 of style : " ' Pierce ' is the word : I never could have 
 meant to say 'penetrate' in that connection." 
 
 It is sometimes said that this critical reading is a 
 pettifogging process, — the mind is contracted by it. 
 Not so, if the volume in hand is one of great and 
 enduring power. A great mind works as the great 
 powers of nature do in producing a multitude of di- 
 minutive creations. We can not neglect these, and 
 yet know that mind thoroughly in its best moods of 
 
LECT. xvin.] THE PHILOSOPHICAL SPIRIT. 273 
 
 authorship. Lord Bacon says, " He that can not con- 
 tract the sight of his mind, as well as disperse and 
 dilate it, wanteth a great quality." Reading in this 
 manner, one acquires not only a knowledge of an au- 
 thor's mental character and habits of thinking, but 
 somewhat of the very process of production in the 
 case in hand. Even a little of such acute reading will 
 create a new perceptive power in all other reading. 
 The knowledge gained will approach the accuracy and 
 intricacy of self-knowledge. 
 
 Are there not some authors with whom already you 
 have formed this kind of personal intimacy? If you 
 should happen upon an anonymous extract from them 
 which you had never seen before, you could pronounce 
 confidently upon their origin. You know it by a word, 
 a tone of thought, an idiomatic sentence or illustration, 
 as you recognize a friend in the distance by his gait, or 
 the swing of his arm. The authorship of the " Waverley 
 Novels " was detected by readers of the " Scottish 
 Ballads " and " The Lay of the Last Minstrel," long 
 before Walter Scott acknowledged the authorship. 
 This critical reading which makes it impossible for an 
 author to secrete himself from readers is the basis of 
 all mastery of books. 
 
 2. Scholarly reading is reading in the spirit of philo- 
 sophical inquiry. 
 
 There is a difference between literary curiosity and 
 literary inquiry. Curiosity contents itself with facts : 
 inquiry seeks for the principles which underlie the 
 facts. Curiosity asks " What ? " inquiry asks " Why ? " 
 Why is one discussion masterly, and another feeble? 
 Why does one volume suggest material for two ? Why 
 is one order of thought superior to another? Why 
 
276 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xviri. 
 
 trates the working of philosophical criticism, and the 
 necessity of it in the explanation of anomalies. 
 
 Again : philosophical inquiry gives dignity to criti- 
 cism. By means of it criticism constantly makes incur- 
 sions into mental science. The rhetorical force of one 
 word may be attributable to a fundamental principle 
 in philosophy. The words "power," "cause," "ought," 
 are unanswerable arguments for certain philosophical 
 truths. The existence of those words is a philosophi- 
 cal fact. The true philosophy of mind can not be 
 evolved without them. Yet the proper use of them is 
 one of the things with which rhetorical criticism con- 
 cerns itself. This is but one of a multitude of ways 
 in which criticism and mental science work into each 
 other's domains. 
 
 Moreover, philosophical criticism often reverses our 
 first judgment of authors. A search for the reason of 
 an opinion will often lead a candid mind to give up the 
 opinion. So our judgments of authors are often heredi- 
 tary judgments. In our maturer culture we can not 
 defend them ; and we discover this by asking why we 
 attribute to such authors the qualities we revere. Our 
 first impressions of authors are also often our juvenile 
 impressions. We find that our literary manhood does 
 not support them ; and we either discover this, or are 
 confirmed in it, by raising the philosophical inquiry, 
 "Why? The glare of a false literature is often thus 
 found out, when a more indolent criticism would be 
 dazzled for a lifetime. 
 
 3. The most useful reading is done by a scholarly 
 division of labor. By this I mean, that critical attention 
 should be directed to one thing at a time. We can not 
 wisely bring to critical reading the habits we form in 
 
LECT. xvm,] ANALYTIC READING. 277 
 
 accumulative reading. Deep boring must be done in 
 spots. The surface we cover with our reading should 
 be dotted over with points at which we sink a shaft of 
 critical inquiry. An inspection of your present habits 
 of reading will probably disclose to you that they have 
 thus far been almost wholly acquisitive and discursive 
 in their character. You have read for information and 
 entertainment, not for critical culture. 
 
 Acquisitive reading for critical purposes is wearisome, 
 because it is unproductive of results. No man will 
 long continue it. Did you ever attempt to drag a tree 
 through a narrow gateway, with the branches headed 
 to the front ; and did you not discover a very conven- 
 ient principle of mechanics when the bright thought 
 occurred to you to turn it end for end ? The single 
 trunk obeyed you, and drew after it the supple branches 
 which were so refractory before. Like such a juvenile 
 error are attempts to carry a great diversity of critical 
 processes along side by side in our reading. The diver- 
 sity bewilders. The objects of our critical attention 
 straggle out on this side and on that. Our thought 
 seizes one and another at random, and drops each to 
 attend to a third, till, by dint of tug and heat, we ad- 
 vance by inches to the discovery that we are losing all 
 pleasure, and gaining no discipline but such as is the 
 common lot of saints. At last, bruised and irritated, 
 we give it up in despair. Reverse the process, fix 
 attention on one thing at a time, and you advance with 
 ease and with the consciousness of progress. 
 
 For the sake of definiteness in our conception of this 
 method, let several applications of it be noticed. Thus 
 division of labor may be applied to the study of diver- 
 sities in kind of literature. For example, the essays 
 
278 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xvm. 
 
 of our language form a department by themselves. 
 Study them as such. Get a clear idea of the English 
 essay, — what it is, what is its relation to other depart- 
 ments of our literature, when it originated, who are 
 its chief masters, what are their peculiarities, and what 
 is the control of the essay over modern opinion. Do 
 not burden your study of the essay by trying to carry 
 abreast with it in your reading English poetry, history, 
 biography, philosophy. Let each of these monopolize 
 your time in turn. One week, or its equivalent, de- 
 voted to a study of the essay alone, will give you a 
 very valuable knowledge, even to some extent a crit- 
 ical knowledge of it, which will assist you in the studies 
 of a lifetime. 
 
 Division of labor may be applied to criticism of sin- 
 gle authors, if they deserve it. Study an author by 
 installments. Study first the sentiment, then the con- 
 struction, then the illustrative materials, then the style, 
 and, finally, his place in the fraternity of authors and 
 in the history of his times. The severest labor of such 
 reading is near the beginning. One advances in it 
 with accelerated speed. You are constantly taking 
 side-glances, also, at other things which you can not 
 help noticing, as you see things out of the corners of 
 your eyes. This relieves the monotony of your work, 
 without burdening your attention with unmanageable 
 varieties. 
 
 This analytic method of study may be applied to 
 the several parts of a discourse or of a poem. It is 
 the method usually adopted in lectures on the struc- 
 ture and composition of a sermon. We study texts 
 by themselves ; introductions are considered alone ; 
 propositions, divisions, conclusions — each receives dis- 
 
LECT. xvni.] ANALYTIC READING. 279 
 
 cussion in its place. The same division of labor may 
 be applied to other species of composition, — to ora- 
 tions, to works of fiction, to histories. This principle 
 of division of labor is the one on which we pursue all 
 other intelligent courses of study: we study theology 
 by topics ; we read history by periods, by royal reigns 
 and dynasties ; medical science is studied by classifi- 
 cation of diseases : why should not the criticism of 
 literature be facilitated by the same principle? This 
 method in the study of books tends to secure profound 
 knowledge at the vital points of literary history. We 
 can not otherwise discover the vital points ; for we 
 shall not otherwise study any one thing long enough 
 to discover its relations to other literature. But, with 
 a few things thus thoroughly mastered, we shall know 
 that our culture is well anchored. We can trust our- 
 selves : gales of false taste will not drag us from safe 
 moorings. What we know, we know; and we know 
 that we know it. If our judgments differ from those 
 of others, we can afford to wait for the decisions of 
 time. 
 
 By this method, ultimately, even the extent of our 
 literary knowledge will be most effectually enlarged. 
 The chief objection to this painstaking study is that 
 the work is slow. But in truth it is the best method 
 for acquisitive study in the end. Dr. Johnson, in his 
 "Lives of the Poets," says that the reason why the 
 ancients surpassed the moderns in literary acquisitions 
 is, that they had a more truthful conception of the 
 limitations of human powers, and confined themselves 
 to one thing. The measure of our knowledge is not 
 so much that of what we gain as of what we hold 
 and use. In war, military policy is not to conquer a 
 
280 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xviii. 
 
 strategic point till force enough is at command to hold 
 it. So, in literary pursuits, conscious mastery at a few 
 points will soon extend itself to others. The points 
 of conquest will soon begin to communicate with each 
 other. There are certain signals in a man's conscious- 
 ness of knowledge by which mastery in one thing helps 
 mastery in another. An interchange of tribute is car- 
 ried on, by which knowledge assists all other knowl- 
 edge. We are not conscious of that, except through 
 profound and thorough scholarship : nothing less than 
 that deserves the name of culture. 
 
LECTURE XIX. 
 
 METHODS OF STUDY, CONTINUED. — LITERARY COMPARI- 
 SONS. — CULTURE OF WEAK TASTES. — COLLATERAL 
 READING. 
 
 4. Continuing the discussion of the scholarly ideal 
 of reading, I remark that it involves studious compari- 
 son of authors with each other. 
 
 Literary comparisons are often involuntary. One 
 can not read, even cursorily, two such authors as Adam 
 Smith and John Ruskin, or two such as Jeremy Taylor 
 and Robert South, without unconsciously instituting 
 comparisons between them. We obtain a more definite 
 conception of each by contrast with the other. From 
 time immemorial the two great orators of antiquity 
 have lived in literary criticism chiefly by means of 
 such comparison. We know Cicero and Demosthenes 
 to-day mainly in the fact that each was what the other 
 was not. The literary mind of to-day would never 
 have known Plato as it does but for the existence of 
 Aristotle. 
 
 This law of comparison rules even our judgment of 
 national literatures. We have a conception of the 
 Greek literature which we never could have had, if 
 the Roman literature had not been superinduced upon 
 it. The Greek idea of beauty is~ more vivid in our 
 thoughts than it could have been but for the Roman 
 
 281 
 
282 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 idea of law. The German and the English and the 
 French literatures are thus illuminating each other in 
 modern critical judgment. Is the allegory of the 
 three artists, illustrative of the differences in the three 
 national minds, too well known to deserve rehearsal? 
 The legend reads that three painters — an Englishman, 
 a Frenchman, and a German — were commissioned to 
 paint a picture of a lion. The Frenchman started the 
 next day for Africa, and there drew his picture of a 
 lion from the life. The Englishman went to the British 
 Museum, and painted his picture from the authorities 
 he found in the library of natural science. The Ger- 
 man shut himself up in his own library, and evolved a 
 lion from the depths of his own consciousness. The 
 caricature will live a long time as a representative of 
 the three literatures and the national minds which 
 they express. 
 
 Comparisons connect different departments of litera- 
 ture. We see the structure of Edmund Burke's mind 
 the more clearly for our knowing his early passion 
 for the poetry of Milton. The eloquence of Massil- 
 lon is the more intelligible to us when we learn his 
 predilection for the poetry of Homer. The dramatic 
 power of Whitefield we understand when we are told 
 of his youthful studies of Shakspeare. Criticism would 
 be deprived of one of its most powerful auxiliaries, if 
 it were dissevered from this study of resemblances and 
 contrasts by comparison of authors. 
 
 The value of this expedient is seen, also, in the fact 
 that comparisons have associated certain names in lit- 
 erature with certain names in art, in current literary 
 opinion. Criticism often expresses its most profound 
 judgment of an author by saying, that, if he had not 
 
LECT. XIX.] SIMILITUDES OF GENIUS. 283 
 
 been an author, he would have been equally eminent 
 in painting or in sculpture. Canova's remark respect- 
 ing Pitt and Fox was founded on the law of mental 
 resemblances. To the Athenian mind, Pericles and 
 Pliidias were of the same stock of mental character; 
 though it is not known that the one ever handled a 
 chisel, or the other ever spoke in public. "Paradise 
 Lost " has suggested to more than one reader the fres- 
 coes of Michael Angelo. Disraeli observes that Milton, 
 ^Michael Angelo, and Handel are parallels to each other 
 in their respective arts. Each represents the same 
 epoch in the history of his art. Dante's " Inferno " 
 and the painting of " The Last Judgment " have a 
 deeper ground of reciprocal suggestion than similarity 
 of theme. One of the keenest of modern critics has 
 characterized the poetry of Shelley by likening it to 
 the coloring of Titian. The relics we have of the 
 speeches of several great generals to their armies con- 
 firm the criticism which their military exploits alone 
 have suggested, that they might have been great ora- 
 tors. Many lovers of eloquence have regretted that 
 Caesar and Napoleon were not restricted by force of 
 circumstances to the senates of nations, rather than to 
 their battlefields. Mr. Everett, characterizing Daniel 
 Webster, compares him to the Prince of Cond^, on the 
 eve of the battle of Rocroi, and to Alexander before 
 the battle of Arbela. These are not fanciful sugges- 
 tions : they are founded on real similitudes of genius. 
 They illustrate the value of literary comparisons as 
 iiuxiliaries to critical knowledge of authors. 
 
 The most delicate qualities of authors are scarcely 
 di.cjverable without the aid of comparisons. Delicate 
 distinctions of color you can not discern, except by 
 
284 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 placing them side by side. So it is in the study of 
 books. Wholesale criticisms of authors, either in praise 
 or censure, are almost sure to be false, because they 
 overlook the refinements of criticism. They would be 
 corrected often by more patient comparisons. Criticism 
 is often like color-blindness, by reason of its inability 
 to see the lights and shadows of literary character. 
 
 This was the defect in Jeffrey's criticism of Words- 
 worth. One must have accustomed one's taste to enjoy 
 serene and lunar models of beauty before one can come 
 to a poet like Wordsworth with an appreciative spirit. 
 This can not be gained without a considerable range 
 of comparative criticism. 
 
 Comparison of authors assists us to a true estimate 
 of the relative value of different qualities in literature. 
 Not all the qualities of good writing are equally valua- 
 ble. Mr. Webster owed much of his success in oratory 
 to the justness of his estimate of strength as superior 
 to beauty in argumentative debate. IMen of the first 
 order in senatorial discussion often choose abruptness 
 of speech, so that their power shall not be in wreathed, 
 and therefore entangled and impeded, by appendages 
 of beauty. Edmund Burke failed in public speech, 
 because of his failure to appreciate the qualities of oral 
 as compared with those of written address. Burke's 
 speeches are essays. His friend Sheridan was a more 
 powerful debater in his day ; yet Lord Brougham says 
 that he played to the galleries, and indulged in clap- 
 trap. If Burke had brought the solidity of his genius 
 to a fair expression by those qualities which Sheridan 
 exaggerated, he would have been to the English Par- 
 liament what Demosthenes was to the Greek republics. 
 Yet such balancing of opposite virtues in composition 
 
LECT. XIX.] SYMMETRY OF CULTURE. 285 
 
 is not gained otherwise than by critical and candid 
 comparison of authors distinguished for each. 
 
 5. As far as possible, our reading should be made 
 tributary to the correction of our own known deficien- 
 cies in literary production. 
 
 Variety in selection of authors is not sufficient to 
 insure symmetry of culture. Our existing tastes may 
 tyrannize over our reading so far as to defeat the object 
 of that variety. Let your mind swing loose in the act 
 of reading, and you will inevitably be swayed by your 
 tastes in appropriating what you read. You will appro- 
 priate only those elements which are kindred to your 
 present tastes. An imaginative mind will coin fancy 
 out of metaphysical definitions, if it reads passively. 
 A prosaic mind will fashion a creed out of poetic im- 
 agery, if it exercises no control of itself in reading. 
 It requires often self-denial to restrain our ruling tastes, 
 and to seek, by dint of patient criticism, for those things 
 which we most need, but do not want. Few scholars 
 achieve this self-conquest whose literary enthusiasm is 
 not largely pervaded by religious principle. 
 
 Observe an illustration of the need of the principle 
 before us to remedy one of the most common defects of 
 preachers ; viz., the want of illustrative power. There 
 is a class of preachers who are men of good sense, who 
 have read extensively, who are well-informed as men 
 of the world, whose discourses are clear, consecutive, 
 well-aimed, and enforced by an earnest spirit. Yet 
 they do not preach breathing sermons. They can not 
 make truth vivid ; they can not freshen stale truths. 
 They are not live men in the pulpit: therefore their 
 preaching is humdrum. Pious hearers who carry in 
 their own souls a coal from a burning altar will call 
 
286 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 it " good preaching ; " but they are not really moved 
 by that preaching any more than the wicked and the 
 indifferent are, who call it stupid. They are self-moved. 
 
 Such a preacher has no right to quiet his conscience 
 by the self-assurance that he has done his duty because 
 he has preached the truth. He has not preached the 
 truth truthfully ; he has not preached it scripturally. 
 In the Scriptures truth is alive. It is all aglow with 
 vitality made to appear vital by the dramatic resources 
 and the quickened sensibilities of the writer. Our 
 friend the preacher has a new process of culture to go 
 through. The imaginative element in him needs to 
 be aroused, and his reading needs to be so directed as 
 to achieve this. V He needs to study the great poets, 
 the dramatic masters, the picturesque historians, biog- 
 raphers, essayists, of our language, and the most dra- 
 matic orators and preachers. \ By such a process of 
 self-discipline the most prosaic mind may acquire some- 
 what of the genius of an orator. Every man has that 
 genius in his nature : every man will show it, ' if his 
 house takes fire. The elements of eloquence, of dra- 
 matic power, of painting, of whatever is vivid in con- 
 ception, and forcible in utterance, are in the germ in 
 every human soul. They need development in every 
 preacher to make the pulpit a throne of power. 
 
 This principle is sometimes needful to remedy a 
 defect the opposite to that just named ; viz., an in- 
 ability to preach logical, direct, and severe discourses. 
 This, though a less frequent defect, is by no means 
 uncommon. It often results from a neglect to cultivate 
 dormant tastes. I can best develop this by an instance 
 which came under my own observation. A young man 
 began his ministry with me who possessed some of the 
 
LECT. XIX.] OVEEGROWN TASTES. 287 
 
 choicest elements of character which it has ever been 
 my lot to witness in one of his years. He was passion- 
 ately attached to the ministry as his life's work. The 
 only lamentation he uttered on his death-bed was that 
 his disease would cost him his profession. 
 
 The chief defect of his character was a beauty devel- 
 oped into a deformity. He was by nature a poet, and 
 by culture he had made himself nothing more. All 
 truth to his mind, assumed imaginative forms, and ex- 
 pressed itself in rhythm. The sternest truths of religion 
 dissolved into images of beauty. Law, predestination, 
 sin, retribution, put on a roseate hue. On themes 
 kindred to his overgrown tastes he could preach, to a 
 solitary and dreaming hearer here and there, with the 
 voice of a charmer. But the majority of his hearers 
 were not moved even to a cold admiration of sermons 
 into which he poured his whole soul. His materials, 
 his methods of division, his style, his indirect, imagina- 
 tive, shrinking appeals, were too ethereal for this home- 
 spun and corrupt world. To the masses his was an 
 unknown tongue. 
 
 Some subjects he could not discuss at all : it was not 
 in him. Retribution, depravity, decrees, he would 
 never have preached upon definitely to the end of time. 
 He probably never made a direct appeal to a hearer's 
 conscience. For robust talk in the pulpit he seemed 
 to have no heart. Yet, strange as it may seem, he had 
 by no means an effeminate nature. In defense of an 
 unpopular opinion he was lion-hearted. In times of 
 persecution he would have been sure to be in the 
 minority and a martyr. He could never have been 
 Luther, but he would have been Melanchthon : Luther 
 would have loved and leaned upon him. His few 
 
288 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 friends revered him for his purity of character. Men 
 who experienced none of the difficulty which he had 
 in obtaining a pulpit felt self-reproached when they 
 communed with him. 
 
 The thing which he needed to make him a preacher 
 was more hardihood. Pie should have forced it. He 
 ought to have studied Edwards on the Will. He should 
 have read Dr. South, and the prose of Milton, and 
 Cromwell's speeches. He ought to have taken as his 
 models John Knox and Richard Baxter and President 
 Finney. He should have gone upon the wharves, and 
 talked to sailors. His brethren in the ministry felt 
 relieved, for his sake, when God removed him : we 
 thought, in reverent remembrance of him, of that fea- 
 ture in the felicity of the redeemed which seems in the 
 Scriptures to represent them as instructors of angels. 
 He appeared to be better fitted to that service than to 
 any demanded in a world like this. 
 
 By the views here expressed, it is not meant that 
 natural tastes are to be suppressed. Symmetry is not 
 worth the loss of vitality. A motionless equilibrium 
 of tastes is more fatal than a vivacious distortion of 
 them. No fault is greater than a tame faultlessness. 
 But there is a practicable regulation of one-sided pro- 
 clivities, which is not the extinction or the enslavement 
 of them. Within reasonable limits let the natural 
 tastes have their way, but develop the dormant tastes : 
 that is the point, and it is practicable. Defects can be 
 so far corrected, that, while you will always do some 
 things better than others, you can still do the others 
 well. No man of common sense in the pulpit needs 
 to be dumb on some subjects, and imbecile to some 
 hearers, for the want of the tastes requisite to " become 
 
LECT. XIX.] COLLATERAL READING. 289 
 
 all things to all men." Still less need any man who is 
 called of God to the ministry be such a deformed man 
 that he must make a one-sided preacher. Put your 
 culture into the weak points of your intellect, as you 
 put your principle into the weak points of your char- 
 acter. You are in no danger in either case of landing 
 upon a dead level. 
 
 6. A scholarly ideal of reading includes a study of 
 the biographies of authors and the history of their 
 times. A book is part of an author's life. In itself it 
 is incomplete ; by itself it may be false : we need to see 
 it as a part of the man. It is, therefore, a good general 
 rule not to read an anonymous book. Now and then 
 an exception occurs, like " Ecce Homo; " but exceptions 
 are rare. Still more significantly is an author a fixture 
 of his age. He is set in the age like a stone in an arch. 
 It is never true literally that men write for future times. 
 They write for their own times : they are made by their 
 own times. The avenue to immortality for any man's 
 influence lies through the life-blood of a living genera- 
 tion. Matthew Arnold means just this when he says, 
 that, "for the creation of a master-work of literature, 
 two powers must concur, — the power of the moment 
 and the power of the man : the man is not enough 
 without the moment." The law of nature is inexora- 
 ble in this conjunction of the man with the time. Even 
 the literature of inspiration is not free from its work- 
 ing. The Bible is intensely a local book : it is historic 
 in its structure. To be understood, and still more to 
 be felt as a power, it must be studied in its historic sur- 
 roundings. Isolate it from those surroundings, and you 
 have one of the most unintelligible of volumes. 
 
 So it is with uninspired authorship : it can not shoot 
 
290 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 over its own age. Every author is the growth of his 
 own times : the roots of his thinking are there. If we 
 would know him well, we must see him there in his 
 natural birthplace, in the very homestead of his literary 
 being. We must first see him as his contemporaries 
 saw him ; then we are prepared to see him with eyes 
 which they had not. 
 
 One or two illustrations of this principle will indicate 
 the importance of it in the history of the pulpit. In 
 the age of the Reformation and that next succeeding, 
 few preachers, so far as I know, preserved strictly what, 
 in modern homiletics, would be regarded as unity of 
 discourse. Often the whole system of grace was pre- 
 sented in one sermon. A preacher would have sub- 
 jected his evangelical spirit to suspicion, if he often 
 discoursed without introducing the doctrine of justifi- 
 cation by faith. It was then that the old homiletic rule 
 was originated, that a man should never preach without 
 saying so much of the gospel, that if a hearer should 
 never hear, and had never heard, another sermon, he 
 should not be ignorant of the way of salvation. 
 
 Modern homiletic science has abrogated that rule. 
 The taste of modern congregations would soon weary 
 of the sameness of the preaching which that rule would 
 create. But how does such preaching appear when seen 
 in the times which created it ? Set it, like a picture, 
 in the frame of its age, and it seems the most becom- 
 ing, because the most necessary, style of preaching. 
 The people were emerging from Romanism. The doc- 
 trines of grace were a novelty. Preaching itself had 
 become a rare accomplishment. Elementary views of 
 doctrines, and those often reiterated, were demanded by 
 the intellectual knowledge and the religious culture of 
 
LKCT. XIX.] PEDANTRY IN SERMONS. 291 
 
 the times. It was more than pardonable, therefore, if 
 Luther and his contemporaries repeated and reiterated 
 the doctrine of justification by faith, and preached it by 
 remote connection with other themes, and dragged it 
 witliout connections into their conclusions. The emer- 
 gencies of the times demanded this homiletic lawless- 
 ness, and the rude taste of the people did not condemn 
 it. To have forced upon the pulpit of that age, with 
 Athenian severity of taste, the homiletic canons of later 
 times, would have been neither good preaching nor 
 good sense. The people of the age were not Athenians. 
 
 Take an illustration from the English pulpit of the 
 seventeenth century. A certain preacher in the reign 
 of the first king James selected for a text the words : 
 " There are spots in your feasts of charity." He an- 
 nounced his subject thus, " Maculce in Epulis.'''' He 
 proceeded to divide his discourse as follows : 1. " Mensa 
 Syharitica ; " 2. " Men%a Centaurica ; " 3. " Mensa Thy- 
 estea.'' Then, by way of contrast, he considered, 1. 
 " Convivium spirituale ; " 2. " Convivium sacramentale ; " 
 3. " Convivium cceleste ; " which last division is ampli- 
 fied as being " cnovQanoa-evooxta," which is still more mag- 
 nificently developed by the subdivisions of " visio 
 divinarum,,^'' " societas angelorum,^^ and " consortium sane- 
 torum.'^ 
 
 True, he translated this gibberish. But our modern 
 criticism, in its impatience, says that he must have been 
 a fool. Perhaps not. Turn to Bishop Latimer, whose 
 power in the pulpit was such that his enemies did not 
 know what to do about it, except to burn the man to 
 ashes. Yet we find him guilty of the same pedantry. 
 The text of his famous "Sermon of the Card," he 
 announces in Latin, "Quis es?" Turn to Jeremy 
 
292 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 Taylor, — no fool surely, — and you find, that in sermons 
 which he artlessly tells us were preached to " the family 
 and domestics of his patron, with a few cottagers of the 
 neighborhood," there occurs a profusion of classical 
 allusion, which seems like the echo of an Oxford lec- 
 ture-room. Quotations from Plautus and Homer occur 
 in a singular medley with others from Cicero and 
 Seneca. 
 
 As sensible men, we must condemn all this ; and we 
 marvel that he had not the good sense to condemn it 
 also. But we do him great injustice, if we judge him 
 by the tastes of this age. One of the most curious 
 inlets to the character of the English pulpit of those 
 times is located just here. Not only is it true that this 
 pedantry accorded with the scholastic taste of that age, 
 but the popular taste refused to respect preaching 
 which was not sprinkled with it. I ojDen almost at 
 random the sermons of a contemporary of Jeremy 
 Taylor, and I find the text quoted in Latin, two Greek 
 quotations on one page, and four Latin extracts on 
 another. Reverence for the classic languages had 
 descended to the seventeenth century from a century 
 earlier, when there was no literature to speak of in the 
 vernacular tongues of Europe. Erasmus risked his life 
 in a mob, because he would not talk Italian. He aban- 
 doned a benefice offered to him in England, because he 
 would not stoop to learn the English language. He 
 often refused to converse in German, though he knew 
 the language expertly. He thought the Reformation 
 degraded by Luther's preaching and writing in German. 
 This was the general taste of the scholars of his age. 
 Erasmus was the most liberal of them all. They looked 
 upon the classic tongues as the only tongues in which 
 a scholarly literature could ever exist. 
 
LECT. XIX.] POPULAR SCHOLASTICISM. 293 
 
 The common people, therefore, did their best to ape 
 the folly of their betters. Through that whole period, 
 down to a time long after Jeremy Taylor, this was the 
 inherited taste of the people. They could not read or 
 understand Latin and Greek ; but they could hear it, 
 and their ears were elongated by that. The relics of 
 that taste remained to our own day. So lately as in 
 the last decade of the eighteenth century, Clarkson pub- 
 lished a pamphlet in England against the slave-trade, 
 which he thought it politic to publish in Latin, lest he 
 should not attract the attention of the learned men of 
 Europe. It is within the remembrance of men now 
 living that German scholars began generally to think 
 it respectable to write commentaries in German. 
 
 In the time of Jeremy Taylor this taste for pedantry 
 was, in one aspect of it, a virtue in the people, what- 
 ever it was in the scholars of the age. In the people 
 it was, in part, the natural expression of their respect 
 for learning. They objected to the learned Edward 
 Pocock, professor of Arabic at Oxford, that he was 
 "a plain, honest man, but no Latiner." Even modest 
 George Herbert, when he began to preach, thought it 
 necessary to awe the people by preaching to them a 
 prodigiously learned sermon, in which he showed them 
 that he was equal to the best as a " Latiner ; " but in 
 his pious simplicity he informed them that he should 
 not generally preach to them so learnedly as that, but 
 henceforth he should try to save their souls. 
 
 These illustrations show the practical necessity of the 
 principle before us to a sound judgment of literature. 
 To know an author well, we must know the man ; and, 
 to know the man well, we must know the times of which, 
 by an irrevocable law of nature, he was the representa- 
 tive and the child. 
 
294 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xix. 
 
 Collateral reading will often disclose to iis the secret 
 of otherwise inexplicable effects of literature in the age 
 when it was written. Contemporary influence is often 
 the mystery of the next age. Our American pulpit 
 already contains remarkable illustrations of this. Presi- 
 dent Edwards's sermons, as we read them, do not ex- 
 plain to us the astonishing effects of some of them. 
 His elocution had almost no concern with them, except 
 to moderate their fiery pungency. No audience of 
 to-day could be plunged into an incontrollable fit of 
 weeping by the sermon on the text, " Their feet shall 
 slide in due time." An eye-witness testifies that Mr. 
 Spurgeon's audiences listen to sermons from him which 
 resemble that one from President Edwards, not only 
 without a tear, but with signs of the most stolid indif- 
 ference. To explain the experience of the church at 
 Enfield, we must take note of the idiosyncrasies of that 
 age as they are pictured in the history of the " Great 
 Awakening." 
 
LECTURE XX. 
 
 ASSOCIATIOlSr OF STUDY "WITH COlVrPOSITION. — ITS NE- 
 CESSITY. — ITS METHODS. 
 
 7. A PRINCIPLE fundamental to a preacher's study 
 of literature is that it should be accompanied with 
 habitual practice in composition. 
 
 If rightly conducted, a pastor's compulsory habits 
 of production are rather a help than a hinderance to 
 the scholarly character of his reading. Criticism and 
 production re-act favorably upon each other. Nothing 
 else is so powerful a tonic to the mind as composing : 
 in certain conditions of the cerebral system it is a direct 
 tonic to the brain, if conducted on the principle of 
 alternation. Composition is creation. It is athletic 
 exercise. The weakest minds are the most active ab- 
 sorbents, with the least capacity of production. The 
 working of a healthy mind in study is like respiration : 
 inhalation and exhalation are reciprocal. Without such 
 reciprocity, a very large portion of our reading must 
 be useless. It passes through the mind, but does not 
 remain there. The power of retention needs the stimu- 
 lus of production. 
 
 What knowledge is that which is most indelibly fixed 
 in your memory, — that which you have learned only, 
 or that which you have taught ? What accumulations 
 are most perfectly at your command, — those which are 
 
 295 
 
296 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 stored by the dead-lift of memory, or those which you 
 have used by reproduction? The discovery is often 
 disheartening, but it is healthful, that one is making a 
 mere valve of one's mind, opening it for a stream of 
 reading to run through, and shutting it upon nothing. 
 
 Again: 'study, without mental production, creates in 
 the mind itself inferior habits of thinking. We think 
 very differently in the two cases, of thinking for the 
 purpose of expression, and thinking passively. We 
 think more clearly and less discursively when we think 
 for the purpose of communication ; we analyze more 
 accurately ; we individualize more sharply ; we picture 
 thought more vividly ; we are more apt to think in 
 words. 
 
 Test this view by your own experience. Why is it 
 that reverie has such a debilitating effect upon your 
 mental energy ? Why is it that nothing else so surely 
 unfits you for a morning's work in composing as to 
 begin it with a waking dream ? And why is it that 
 nothing else breaks up the dream so sternly as the act 
 of thinking with the pen ? Some of the most accom- 
 plished writers have formed the habit of taking the 
 pen in hand as the most efficient aid to quick, con- 
 secutive, clear, profound, and vivid thinking. Robert 
 Southey says, " It is the very nose in the face of my 
 intellect that I never enter into any regular train of 
 thought unless the pen be in hand." 
 
 Professor Stuart, who was one of the most fluent 
 composers of his time, once told me, that, when he 
 was a young man, he was often compelled to quit his 
 sermon, and walk in his garden, in sheer vacuity of 
 thought, not knowing what to say next. " But now," 
 said he, " my mental working is all instantaneous and 
 
LECT. XX.] COMPOSING AND INVENTION. 297 
 
 incessant. Results flash upon me. I draft a plan of 
 a sermon as rapidly as I can move a pen. I could keep 
 a dozen pens in motion, if I had as many right hands." 
 He attributed that state of mental productiveness to 
 his lifelong habit of associating study with composing. 
 
 Mental production, when reduced to a habit, pro- 
 motes originality of thinking. In a perfectly healthy 
 mind the act of composing is a stimulus to invention. 
 The mental state in composing is an elevated state ; 
 the mind then has a masterly sweep of vision. Sir 
 Walter Scott says, " My imagination is never so full 
 of a new work as when I approach the end of one in 
 hand." Clergymen often say that they are never so 
 ready for their week's work in sermonizing as on Sun- 
 day evening. Dr. Thomas Brown, the celebrated pro- 
 fessor of mental science at Edinburgh, was so confident, 
 from his experience, of the power of composing to 
 stimulate his invention, that he at last trusted to it 
 for the suggestion of his most original thoughts. His 
 lectures were written chiefly in the evening before 
 their delivery. Many of his most brilliant trains of 
 reasoning never came to him in his calmer hours. 
 They were originated by the extemporaneous tug of 
 composition, and he lost them if he did not use them 
 then. President Edwards somewhere laments the loss 
 of a thought which came to him while composing a 
 sermon, but which he did not pause to note down, and 
 which he mourns over as so much mental treasure lost 
 for ever. 
 
 This is the secret of the most brilliant extemporane- 
 ous eloquence. When Henry Ward Beecher's " Life- 
 Thoughts " were first presented to him in manuscript, 
 he said he was not ashamed of them : he would 
 
298 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 " father them, if he had ever had them." But many of 
 them he did not recognize. They had come to him in 
 moments of extemporaneous exhilaration, and had gone 
 from him. All such phenomena of literary experience 
 illustrate the secret and unconscious spur which com- 
 posing gives to invention. 
 
 Further : study without composition destroys the 
 natural proportion of executive power to critical taste. 
 True, in a scholarly mind critical taste will always be 
 in advance of executive power. Every studious man 
 knows better than he can do. Still there is a certain 
 proportion between these two things, which can not be 
 impaired with impunity to executive genius. Destroy 
 that proportion, and you create a morbid taste respect- 
 ing every thing which you do yourself. Thus fettered, 
 a man becomes a fastidious and discouraged critic of his 
 own productions. The excellences of authors do not 
 inspire, they only intimidate him. His own failure is 
 always a foregone conclusion. They affect him as the 
 first study of Alexander's campaigns affected Csesar. 
 His sensibility becomes diseased; and his own efforts 
 of executive skill cease to be elastic, because they cease 
 to be hopeful. There is in all intellectual experience a 
 principle corresponding to that moral principle which 
 gives efficacy to prayer. The mind must have faith in 
 order to achieve any thing. 
 
 With such disproportion between taste and executive 
 power comes the temptation, almost irresistibly, to 
 relapse into the habits of an amateur, and abandon 
 original composition altogether. A similar weakness has 
 infected other departments of labor. It was such an 
 excess of critical taste which led Leonardo Da Vinci 
 and Washington AUston to leave so many unfinished 
 
LECT. XX.] COMPOSING AND CRITICISM. 299 
 
 paintings. It is notorious that the majority of Ameri- 
 can artists who go to the galleries of Italy become only 
 copyists : they cease to attempt original production. 
 Said one of the most eminent portrait-painters in this 
 country, after a year's residence in Florence, " I can 
 paint no more. These fellows are painters ; not I." 
 Even of Michael Angelo it is said that he worked in a 
 frenzy while the fever of his first conceptions was at 
 its height, but that, when a work was finished, he re- 
 lapsed into a chill, and his work disgusted him. His 
 ideals and his works were thus in incessant conflict in 
 his mind. 
 
 I suspect that the secret of the unwieldy style of 
 Dr. Chalmers is discovered in the fact, which he con- 
 fesses, that the difference between his ideal and his 
 execution " produced a constant strain." His style is 
 just that, — the straining of a mind in painful labor. It 
 is not the bounding of a mind at ease, drinking in the 
 exhilaration of its work. He never writes as if he 
 loved to write. Robert Southey speaks of his own 
 good fortune in not discovering certain faults in his 
 own work too soon. He says, " I might have been 
 spoiled, like a good horse, by being broken in too 
 early." Tasso came near refusing to publish his 
 "Jerusalem Delivered," because of the painful sense 
 he had of its failure to equal his own critical standard. 
 Dr. Arnold speaks of a certain subject on which he 
 must write ; and he says, " I groan beforehand when I 
 think how certainly I shall fail to do it justice." Such 
 a state of mind is debilitating, like a south wind. No 
 man can do his best on a theme which he approaches, 
 " groaning beforehand." When such debility becomes 
 chronic, a man is in peril of a permanent prostration of 
 
300 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 the executive forces, so that composition shall never be 
 to him other than a drudgery and a sorrow. The evil is 
 never outgrown by neglect of composition ; and culture 
 by other means than composition only aggravates it. 
 
 Let us now observe some of the methods by which 
 the study of books may be associated with practice in 
 composition most successfully. Of these, certain meth- 
 ods of imitation of authors deserve mention. These are 
 of long standing, and of high repute among rhetorical 
 writers. One is that of translation from a standard 
 author to one's own language. The method is to take 
 a page from Macaulay, for example, and by a few read- 
 ings familiarize your mind with the materials, and then 
 reproduce them in your own words. Another of these 
 ancient methods is that of translation from one stand- 
 ard author to another. The idea is to take a passage, 
 as before, and, instead of reproducing it in your own 
 language, to reproduce it in a style imitative of another 
 distinguished author. Transfer thus a page from Mil- 
 ton into a page from Hume. A third of these ancient 
 methods is that of originating your own materials, but, 
 in the expression of them, imitating one or more 
 authors of good repute. 
 
 These methods agree in the principle of imitation. 
 They have been practiced from time immemorial by 
 masters of composition. In ancient times, when the 
 literature of the world was less abundant than now, it 
 would have been deemed folly to dispense with such 
 elaborate methods of self-discipline in the education of 
 a public speaker. You will recall the example of 
 Demosthenes in the study of Thucydides, and of Cicero 
 in the study of several Greek authors. On the revival 
 of the ancient literatures in the middle ages, this imita- 
 
LECT. XX.] IMITATIVE COMPOSING. 301 
 
 tive study of the Greek and Latin classics was carried 
 to an almost fabulous extent. 
 
 In our own times, Daniel Webster, Rufus Choate, 
 Edward Everett, and John C. Calhoun all submitted 
 to this kind of drill. They owed to it, in part, their 
 marvelous command of English style. Webster ac- 
 quired such skill in imitation, that his reproduction of 
 John Adams in one of his orations has been supposed 
 by many well-informed critics to be a quotation. In- 
 deed, some fragments of it were quotations from the 
 letters of Mr. Adams to his wife ; but they were not 
 so extensive or important as to affect Mr. Webster's 
 title to the authorship of the passage in question. Ed- 
 mund Burke's imitation of Lord Bolingbroke, in his 
 " Vindication of Natural Society," Bolingbroke's edit- 
 ors thought it necessary to disown by a card to the 
 public. 
 
 It will not do' to ignore, still less to sneer at, these 
 methods, which are supported by such names and such 
 success. Yet I do not recommend them to preachers, 
 and this for the reason that they are impracticable to 
 preachers. They presuppose leisure. But the early 
 years of a pastor give no such leisure as that which 
 commonly attends the early years of a young man in 
 any other profession. I have never known these 
 methods of discipline to be adopted by a young pastor. 
 I doubt whether a preacher has ever given them a fair 
 trial. I pass them, therefore, to notice a more practi- 
 cable method. 
 
 It is the habit of preparing the mind for daily com- 
 posing by the daily reading of a favorite author. In 
 the suggestion of this method I have._s£ecially in view 
 the necessary habits of preachers, j Preachers must 
 
302 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 be prolific writers : they can not depend on favorable 
 moods for composing. They have before them, not a 
 life of literary leisure, but a life of professional toil, 
 the chief burden of which is mental productiooJl" Said 
 one of the most eminent pastors of Massachusetts in a 
 recent lecture to candidates for the ministry, " I have 
 been twenty years in the pastoral office ; and in all that 
 time I have done but one thing, — to get ready for next 
 Sunday." So the work appears to successful preachers. 
 They can not afford to spend much time as if in a 
 Friends' meeting, waiting for impulses of speech. They 
 must live in a state of mental production ; and, for this, 
 daily composing is the most natural and the most suc- 
 cessful expedient. It has been adopted by the most 
 prolific authors and the most laborious preachers. Lu- 
 ther's rule was " nulla dies sine linea." 
 
 Assuming, then, daily composing as the usual habit 
 of a preacher, the plan here recommended is to com- 
 mence each day with an hour or more of studious read- 
 ing, and then to pass, without interval, from that 
 reading to the work of composing. The advantages 
 of this method are numerous. One is, that it is practi- 
 cable, and is therefore more likely to be adopted than 
 the more laborious methods which imply ample leisure. 
 Another is, that it is an agreeable method, and there- 
 fore easily becomes habitual. A third is, that it can 
 be made to fall in with other objects of study. It can 
 be made both critical and accumulative in its character. 
 In the act of quickening the mind for its own produc- 
 tive labor, you can multiply your resources of thought. 
 
 A fourth and the chief advantage is the direct stim- 
 ulus which the mind may thus obtain for its own work. 
 A wise selection of authors may render this stimulus 
 
MCT. XX.] STIMULATIVE READING. 303 
 
 almost invariable. Do not the majority of young 
 writers spend an hour before composing in the mental 
 toil of uplifting the mind to the level of its work, and 
 concentrating its attention? That hour given to a 
 suggestive author will commonly achieve the object 
 much more easily, with less wear of the nervous system, 
 and with less of spasmodic action in the work of 
 composing. 
 
 Let it be added, in leaving this topic, that the method 
 in question is supported by the practice of many emi- 
 nent authors. Voltaire used to read Massillon as a 
 stimulus to production. Bossuet read Homer for the 
 same purpose. Gray read Spenser's " Faerie Queene " 
 as the preliminary to the use of his pen. The favorites 
 of Milton were Homer and Euripides. F^nelon re- 
 sorted to the ancient classics promiscuously. Pope 
 read Dryden as his habitual aid to composing. Cor- 
 neille read Tacitus and Livy. Clarendon did the same. 
 Sir William Jones, on his passage to India, planned 
 five different volumes, and assigned to each the author 
 he resolved to read as a guide and an awakener to liis 
 own mind for its work. Buffon made the same use of 
 the works of Sir Isaac Newton. With great variety of 
 tastes, successful authors have generally agreed in 
 availing themselves of this natural and facile method 
 of educating their minds to the work of original crea- 
 tion. 
 
 8. One principle remains to be noticed, by which 
 other principles should be affected in our methods of 
 study, which relates to the spirit of criticism. It is 
 that in our studies a generous appreciation of the genius 
 of others should be balanced by a just estimate of our 
 own. 
 
304 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 Two opposite errors are suggested here, against 
 which we need to be fore-armed. The first is that of 
 censorious and illiberal criticism. Gibbon classifies bad 
 critics in three divisions, — those who see nothing but 
 beauties, those who see nothing but faults, and those 
 who see nothing at all. If you see nothing but faults 
 in a great writer, you are in no mood to receive schol- 
 arly culture from him. De Quincey says that a surly 
 reader is inevitably a bad critic. A sarcastic spirit in 
 study is its own punishment. The truth is not in such 
 a spirit. That spirit is receptive only of what is mean 
 and degrading. " One can never know how small a 
 small man can look till he has seen him trying to look 
 down upon a great one." 
 
 Dr. Arnold says of historians, " If a historian be an 
 unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings 
 every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, 
 depend upon it, the truth is not found in him." The 
 seat of the scofi"er is not the seat of wisdon. The late 
 Professor Reed of Philadelphia illustrates the spirit 
 with which a young man, or any man, should read the 
 great lights of literary history. In a letter to a friend 
 he says, " I have just finished a lecture on Hamlet. 
 My reverent admiration for the myriad-minded man 
 has deepened by this study of his dramas : in the lowest 
 deep a lower deep. John Milton is before me in awful 
 grandeur for Monda}^ next." Carlyle says that "great 
 souls are always reverent to that which is over them : 
 only small, mean souls are otherwise." Prescott the 
 historian, by years of genial study, acquired such an 
 affectionate reverence for the great minds in the history 
 of literature, that he requested, that, when he came to 
 die, his remains might be arrayed for the grave, and left 
 
LECT, XX.] SELF-DEPRECIATION. 305 
 
 for a while alone in his library, in the midst of the vol- 
 umes in which he had found the scholarly companion- 
 ship of his life. By that loving fiction he would pay 
 his last tribute to the friends who had cheered him in 
 his blindness. Such is the spirit of a genuine scholar. 
 
 But an error opposite to that of illiberal and sar- 
 castic reading is that of self-depreciation in the contrast 
 with illustrious men. I have already spoken of this as 
 the result of a want of exercise of one's own powers. 
 Sometimes the cause of it lies deeper than that : it is 
 innate. A young writer does not trust his own pen, 
 because he does not trust himself in any thing. The 
 very thought of literary greatness oppresses him : there- 
 fore he does not let himself loose in composing. He is 
 an ascetic, practicing upon himself a severity of criti- 
 cism under which no abilities can expand freely. 
 
 Walter Scott, speaking of Campbell the poet, said, 
 " What a pity it is that Campbell does not give full 
 sweep to his genius! He has wings that would bear 
 him to the skies. He does now and then spread them 
 grandly ; but he folds them up again, and resumes his 
 perch, as if afraid to launch away. The fact is, he is 
 a bugbear to himself." Often is it true that discerning 
 critics see in a young man powers which success has 
 not yet brought out into the light of his own con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 These two elements — reverence for greatness in 
 others, and respect for one's own powers — are correla- 
 tive parts of one virtue : neither is healthy without the 
 other. I have observed so many instances of the latter 
 of these two evils, that I venture to give you in a 
 brief excursus two or three suggestions for its correc- 
 tion. You will anticipate me in the thought that 
 
306 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 liberty in original production is not to be gained by a 
 permanent sacrifice of your own ideals. Cling to your 
 best ideal of any thing. Fail with it, if need be, rather 
 than sacrifice it to success. *' Be true to the dreams 
 of your youth." -*-— ^ 
 
 A second thought is, that,^in a state of mental dejec- 
 tion through self-depreciation, you should write with 
 temporary recklessness. The chief thing needed in such 
 a state of servitude is to write. Do something : create 
 somethin^j^ The servitude must be broken through at 
 all costs. Try your own abilities : give them a chance 
 to prove themselves. Create, somehow, a little inde- 
 pendent history of effort to stand upon. Till you can 
 obtain that, you have no " nov arco " for the fulcrum of 
 your self-respect. If you can not obtain it under law, 
 seize it without law. Be an outlaw in the world of 
 letters. Violate the rules ; defy principles ; get loose 
 from shackles ; clear your mind of the gear of the 
 critics ; write defiantly. Give the rein to your powers 
 of utterance : let them career with you where they will. 
 Criticise their wild work in your after-thoughts, but 
 try them again. Apply the curb as they will bear it, 
 but put the coursers to their speed. 
 
 By such a passionate practice you may develop the 
 germs of your natural forces in composing, be they 
 what they may. You will discover them ; not much, 
 probably, to speak of, and less to boast of, but some- 
 thing worth having and trusting. One Being has 
 thought them worth an act of creation. You will 
 know that you have them. The training of them will 
 come in due time. Robert Southey says, " Write rap- 
 idly ; correct at leisure." Of one of his own poems he 
 says, " ' Madoc ' would be a better poem if written in 
 
LECT. XX.] PERSISTENCE EST COMPOSING. 307 
 
 six months than if six years were given to it." If he 
 had said six weeks, instead of six months, he would 
 have been nearer the truth. 
 
 A third suggestion is, that, in a state of mental 
 despondency, you should write with dogged resolution. 
 Dr. Johnson says that any man can write who will keep 
 doggedly at it. Never yield the point that you can 
 write, and write well. Be indebted to obstinacy, if 
 need be. Pluck is a splendid virtue. Not only strike 
 when the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking. 
 Mind, like iron, is full of latent heat. It is more 
 malleable in some cases than in others ; but in all it is 
 susceptible of white-heat. Therefore make it an inva- 
 riable rule not to give up a subject of a sermon on 
 which you have begun to write. A vast amount of 
 waste of clerical effort is caused by succumbing to dis- 
 couraged effort. The wasted introductions of sermons 
 are " an exceeding great multitude." When indicative 
 of a habit, they signify mental debility. Finish, there- 
 fore, every thing you undertake, for the sake of the 
 mental discipline of success. ]\Iak€ something of the 
 refractory theme and the barren text. The process will 
 not intoxicate you by its results. You will often floun- 
 der tlirough the sermon, not much wiser at the end 
 than at the beginning, and hardly knowing how you 
 got through. You will be sometimes reminded of 
 Aaron's luckless attempt at statuary. You need not 
 dance around it; perhaps you will dash it in pieces; 
 but go through the process of making of it a likeness 
 to some living thing in the heavens, or in the earth, or 
 under the earth. You will be the stronger in will- 
 power over difficult themes, if in nothing else. 
 
 Take encouragement from the example of Sir Wil- 
 liam Hamilton : — 
 
308 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xx. 
 
 " There is scarcely a case on record where there existed a greater 
 antagonism between an author and his pen than in the case of Sir 
 William Hamilton. In reading his pure and limpid language, it is 
 hard to realize that he was not a ready writer. But even while 
 occupying the chair of logic and metaphysics in the University of 
 Edinburgh, and every day delivering from it those lectures on 
 metaphysical science which have made him famous throughout the 
 world, he could never take his pen at any time, and write a certain 
 required amount. Indeed, he always took up his pen with extreme 
 reluctance. Owing to this aversion to composition, he was often 
 compelled to sit up all night in order to prepare the lecture which 
 was to be the wonder and admiration of every person who heard 
 it the next day. This lecture he wrote roughly and rapidly, and 
 it was copied and corrected by his wife in the next room. Some- 
 times it was not finished by nine o'clock in the morning, and the 
 weary wife had fallen asleep, only to be wakeful and ready, how- 
 ever, when he appeared with fresh copy." 
 
 One other suggestion is, that you should trust the 
 predisposition of the world to receive favorably the 
 work of a young man. You have nothing to fear from 
 the world's criticism, unless you invite it by self-con- 
 ceit. The severity of criticism falls on middle-aged 
 and old men, A young man, and specially if he is a 
 clergyman, has every facility he can reasonably ask for 
 for a successful beginning of his life's work. Wait ten 
 years, and you will yourself marvel at the patience of 
 your first parish. The " dead line " of " fifty years " is 
 a long way off. If you live to reach it, you may have 
 achieved a success which will make you indifferent to 
 it. If you have not, it will not be owing to any want 
 of generosity in the verdict of your contemporaries 
 upon you as a youthful preacher. 
 
LECTURE XXI. 
 
 THE PEACTICABELITY OF LITERARY STUDY TO A PAS- 
 TOR. — PRELLMHsTARY SUGGESTIONS. 
 
 4th, I HAVE thus far endeavored to give you some 
 ideal of the true study of literature in respect to its 
 objects, the selection of authors, and the methods of 
 the study. 
 
 The peril attending any such endeavor is, that it will 
 only awaken in you a sense of the impracticability of 
 the study to one who is immersed in the cares of a 
 pastor's life. That is a profitless kind of advice which 
 only impresses upon its recipients a sense of its useless- 
 ness to them. I wish to make the hints I have given 
 you a real help to you, if possible. Therefore, before 
 leaving this subject, I propose to add some suggestions 
 upon the practicability of literary study to a pastor. 
 
 1. Let me ask you to observe several preliminary 
 suggestions respecting a plan of scholarly reading. 
 
 (1) It is frankly conceded, as has been already re- 
 marked in the preface to this volume, that any scholarly 
 plan of study must, to the majority of pastors, be, to 
 a greater or less extent, an ideal one. The practica- 
 bility of it is a matter of degrees, exceedingly variable 
 at different times, as well as to different persons. The 
 ideal element must enter largely into any plan that 
 shall be largely useful. If there are any to whom it 
 
 309 
 
310 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxr. 
 
 can be only an ideal, it is not therefore useless, even to 
 them. The negative value of a lofty ideal of scholarly 
 life is not to be despised. It may act as a censor of a 
 preacher's sermons, keeping alive a taste which will 
 exclude unscholarly methods and material which he 
 knows to be such, but which he will not avoid, except 
 through a silent respect for his dumb library. The 
 very sight of a library of a thousand volumes well 
 chosen is a stimulus to a pastor who for months may 
 not be able to read a volume. Says Bishop Hall on 
 " The Sight of a Great Library," " Neither can I cast 
 my eye casually on any of these silent masters but I 
 mugt learn somewhat." 
 
 \But the large majority of educated pastors can read 
 something, if they will. Evidences abound that they 
 do read very considerably. The charge can not be 
 sustained against our American clergy, certainly not 
 against the clergy of New England, that they cease to 
 be scholars when they become pastorgj^ Look at the 
 reports of " ministers' meetings," and clerical " associa- 
 tions," and at the pastoral contributions to the weekly 
 and quarterly press. The subjects there discussed show 
 that our pastors are men of books as well as men of 
 affairs. In the meridian of their labors, and at the 
 head of large and exacting parishes, they do not turn 
 the key upon their libraries. They are vigilant ob- 
 servers of the current of scientific and theological 
 thought around them. The only question is, whether 
 their reading is regulated by the wisest economy in 
 choice and methods. One does not beat the air, then, 
 who endeavors to give to youthful preachers a high and 
 enduring ideal of a scholarly life. They are entering 
 into a fraternity of scholars who find time and mental 
 force for some ideal. 
 
LECT. XXI.] READING AT RANDOM. 311 
 
 If further evidence is needed on this point, look to 
 the pulpits of other lands and times.^ Calvin was as 
 laborious in the pulpit as out of it. He often preached, 
 for weeks together, every day in the week ; yet there 
 are his immense folios to speak for him as a scholar. 
 Bochart ministered daily while building his " Phaleg " 
 and " Hierozoicon." Owen was incessant in preaching 
 while his exposition of the " Hebrews " was in progress. 
 Lightfoot was faithful to his pastoral duty while he was 
 amassing his wealth of Talmudic learning. Lardner 
 and Pye Smith and Hartley Home had pastoral charges 
 in London. Bloomfield was a vicar. Trench, Alford, 
 and Ellicott were among the working clergy when they 
 planned their learned works, and published a part of 
 them. Stier was a pastor: so was Ebrard. Henry, 
 Scott, Doddridge, Adam Clarke, were laborious and 
 able ministers. Kingsley was a hard-working pastor: 
 so, at one time, was Stanley. These men illustrate, by 
 their union of pastoral duties with a scholarly life, that 
 where there is a will there is a way. 
 
 But much is gained, if the presence of a scholarly 
 ideal in the furniture of a pastor's mind achieves no 
 more than to arrest the habit of reading at hap-hazard. 
 This is the bane of the existing habit, probably, of the 
 large majority of educated men. The time we spend 
 in reading print of some kind is more considerable than 
 the majority of us suppose. I once inquired of a hard- 
 worked metropolitan pastor how much time daily, on 
 the average, he spent in reading of all sorts, aside from 
 that directly necessary to his preparation for the pulpit. 
 He replied, " Not an hour." Then, correcting his hasty 
 count, he said, "Two hours." Again reflecting, said 
 1 See North British Review for 1860. 
 
312 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxi. 
 
 he, " I read the magazines. Yes : three hours and a 
 half would cover it all." Well, a great deal can be 
 done in three hours and a half a day. A distinguished 
 commentator wrote five volumes of commentary in less 
 than three years, working but three hours and a half 
 a day. The Rev. Albert Barnes wrote sixteen volumes 
 in less than an equal number of years, devoting to them 
 only the hours before breakfast. 
 
 But the precious three hours and a half dwindle to 
 a very small fragment, if one hour is given to the news- 
 paper, and another to the magazine. They are largely 
 wasted time, through the habit of reading without plan. 
 More than time is wasted by it. Mental force is wasted, 
 and mental debility is invited in the place of it. It is 
 worth a great deal to a man's whole character as a man 
 of culture, if that waste is forbidden by a scholarly 
 ideal of what good reading is. Be it so that scholarly 
 reading would restrict a pastor to few, some to very 
 few, volumes in a year ; better -that than the wasteful 
 and debilitating effect of reading at random. Be it 
 that a pastor can read but ten, five, three volumes in 
 a year: those few, well chosen and well read, may 
 make all the difference between a scholar and a boor 
 in his mental tastes and professional habits. A good 
 ideal of scholarly reading is not useless, if it can regu- 
 late wisely an imperfect culture. 
 
 One good book is a great power in the making of a 
 youthful mind. Is there not somewhere one man to 
 whom you expect to be grateful for ever for his forma- 
 tive power over the development of your mind ? What 
 is one hook but the mental being of one man? Why 
 may not your obligations to the book be as incalculable 
 as to the man? Reverently read the one book, then, 
 
LECT. XXI.] PROFESSIONAL VIGILANCE. 313 
 
 if you can do no more. Better this than none at all. 
 Better this by far than the slipshod mode of life which 
 befits only indolent minds, and invites an oblivion of 
 libraries. Oblivion of libraries is akin to softening of 
 the brain. 
 
 To bring to a definite point this vexed question, is 
 it too much to claim that every educated pastor not 
 disabled by disease can perpetuate in active life the 
 amount, if not the kind, of literary culture which his 
 collegiate curriculum once created in him? Is it not a 
 decline from that level which commonly creates the 
 " dead line of fifty " ? And is that decline ever a ne- 
 cessity. '■'■ Ineredulus odiy In proof I could name to 
 you an eminent pastor, for forty years in the city of 
 New York, whose habit through all that time, with rare 
 and brief suspensions, was to read daily at least ten 
 lines in some Greek or Latin classic. That simple expe- 
 dient drew after it, and made practicable to him, other 
 expedients of culture which kept his mind rich and 
 full and strong till the day of his death. At seventy 
 years he had found no " dead line." 
 
 (2) The study of books need not be made impracti- 
 cable by the study of men, which has been so earnestly 
 recommended. The latter study does not require re- 
 tirement and mental concentration. It is discursive. 
 One may pursue it in. the streets. Pastoral duty gives 
 large opportunity for it. It requires chiefly the mental 
 habit of professional vigilance. Let a pastor live in a 
 state of alertness towards all resources of oratorical 
 knowledge, and he will find them in every thing that 
 he sees and every thing that he hears. That habit 
 of literary lookout which led Walter Scott to pause in 
 the street to make note of a new word, and which led 
 
314 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxi. 
 
 Stothard to travel with a pencil tied to his finger, with 
 which he made a drawing of every apple-tree he met 
 with in a journey, illustrates the state of professional 
 watchfulness which a pastor needs in his study of men. 
 Carry thus the image of your pulpit always with you. 
 Never give way to an idle mind. Never vegetate. 
 Hours of physical recreation aside, that is never neces- 
 sary to a healthy man. Be for ever on the lookout for 
 tribute to your pulpit. You will find it in every thing, 
 everywhere. One preacher was once led to correct an 
 ungainly posture in the pulpit by observing the crooked 
 gait of a lame man in the street. Another was set 
 upon a course of voice-building by noticing the resem- 
 blance of his natural tone to the quacking of a duck. 
 Live in such a state of professional outlook, and you 
 may pursue the study of men daily, and yet not take 
 an hour from the time consecrated to your library. 
 
 (3) It should be remarked, further, that some plan 
 of scholarly reading must be made practicable, if a 
 pastor would save himself from intellectual decline. 
 The chief peril of a pastoral office is that of a busy 
 intellectual stagnation for the want of persistence in 
 liberal studies. This was the peril which was so fatal, 
 as Professor Tholuck thought a quarter of a century 
 ago, to the Protestant clergy of Prussia. It can not 
 be said to be unknown in this country. In my judg- 
 ment, the existence of the " dead line of fifty " is not 
 wholly but chiefly due to it. 
 
 It should therefore be a foregone conclusion, when 
 a young man enters the ministry, that some plan of 
 literary study shall be made practicable. Sacrifices 
 must be made to it, — sacrifices of ease, sacrifices of 
 needless recreation, sacrifices of notoriety, and sacrifices 
 
LECT. XXI.] EXECUTIVE MISCELLAIOTES. 315 
 
 of pecuniary interests. If a young man does not value 
 it sufficiently to make such sacrifices to it, it is imprac- 
 ticable to him. 
 
 (4) The best culture for success in the pastoral office 
 is not consistent with the appropriation of any large 
 proportion of time to the miscellanies of the church. 
 
 I refer here to that department of clerical labor 
 which is made up of executive affairs. A certain 
 amount of this is necessary to the fellowship of the 
 churches : therefore every pastor must so far supervise 
 it. It would be dishonorable to shirk it. But, outside 
 of the individual church and its immediate sisterhood, 
 there is an amount of executive duty, which, as many 
 practice it, becomes a profession by itself, to which the 
 pulpit and its tributary studies are subordinated. The 
 management of institutions, the direction of societies, 
 the care of the denominational press, leadership in eccle- 
 siastical assemblies, membership of innumerable com- 
 mittees, of boards of trust, of special commissions, all 
 inflicting an endless amount of correspondence, — these 
 form a distinct department of clerical labor, and create 
 a distinct class of clerical workers. There are men, as 
 you well know, whose chief usefulness is in this line 
 of service. Their pulpits are secondary to it, and their 
 libraries are more distant still from their chief ambition. 
 If one of them were called to account for the neglect 
 of his library, he could only plead, as did the ancient 
 prophet of Judsea, " Thy servant was busy here and 
 there." 
 
 It need not be said that this class of clerical workers 
 are performing a very useful and necessary labor, which 
 somebody must do. Those who drift into it are com- 
 monly men whose tastes and tact enable them to do it 
 
316 MEN AND BOOKS, Llect. xxi. 
 
 well. They deserve commendation unqualified. But 
 the point I press at present is this, that this department 
 of our profession is not intrinsically congenial with the 
 genius of a preacher and the tastes of a scholar. As 
 a rule, therefore, it must be conducted at a loss of the 
 highest clerical discipline. Eminence in it can not be 
 combined with eminence in the pulpit. Some of its 
 duties can as well be discharged by laymen. 
 
 Exceptions to the rule occur, as in the case of Dr. 
 Chalmers, who, both as a preacher and as an executive, 
 was a genius. But such cases are not numerous enough 
 to affect the rule. Every young pastor, therefore, 
 should canvass and decide for himself the question 
 whether his mission of usefulness to the church lies 
 in seeking or accepting any large amount of this kind 
 of work. The inquiry should be answered early in 
 his professional career. I very well remember the form 
 in which it presented itself to my own mind in my early 
 manhood. I trust to the freedom of the lecture-room 
 in referring to it for the sake of the glimpse it will give 
 you of the opinions on the subject entertained by a 
 considerable class of the older ministry. 
 
 The question lay between my immediate entrance 
 upon a pastoral charge, and my taking a fourth year 
 of study. The ecclesiastical body under whose direc- 
 tion I was studying so kindly interested themselves in 
 my plans as to appoint a committee to express to me 
 their judgment that I should accept the pastoral ser- 
 vice without delay. The argument of the committee 
 was, that a certain moderate average of power in the 
 pulpit, subordinated to a large inventive faculty in mis- 
 cellaneous labors, was a more useful ideal of the clerical 
 life than that of a more able pulpit to which learning 
 
LECT. XXI.] EXECUTIVE MISCELLANIES. 317 
 
 and studious habits should pay tribute. Letters from 
 several very estimable pastors confirmed that counsel. 
 Said one, "The church needs workers, not students." 
 A judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts sent 
 a message to me, saying, "It does not require many 
 books to convert souls." Of them all, but one man 
 dissented from the general drift of opinion. He advised 
 a fourth year of preparatory study. " Lay a broad 
 foundation," said he, "and then build high." 
 
 I saw that the problem covered, not merely one year 
 or two, but the whole character of my ministry ; in 
 fact, it was whether I should be a preacher, with the 
 tastes and the studious habits which a preacher's life 
 requires, or should make the pulpit an appendage to 
 a life of miscellaneous activities. I chose the pulpit 
 and the stud3^ The fourth year at the seminary was 
 a fraction of a life's plan. I have no inducement to 
 speak, of the results of my choice any further than to 
 say that I should repeat it if the same alternative were 
 again before me. 
 
 The same question will force itself upon you sub- 
 stantially, though the form may vary. The miscellany 
 and the study will array themselves before ^ you as 
 rivals, and you must choose between them, j The board 
 of directors, the board of trustees, the ecclesiastical 
 council, the prudential committee, the managers of 
 this, and the delegation to that, will stand before you 
 as competitors of your pulpit, and you must make 
 your selection. Will you be a committee-man, or will 
 you be a preacher ? Will j^ou be a man of affairs, or 
 will you be a scholar?/ Will you be in demand as the 
 ubiquitous delegate to councils, or the executive leader 
 of your presbytery, or will you be a prince in your 
 
318 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxt. 
 
 pulpit, with the accessories of culture which that im- 
 plies ? Every pastor should decide the question with 
 an enlightened policy, knowing what he gives up, and 
 why. Mediocrity, I admit, can be gained in both 
 departments of service. But ought any young man 
 to plan for mediocrity? The world is not suffering for 
 the want of that commodity. 
 
 I think I have seen more deplorable waste of minis- 
 terial force in needless dissipation of time upon execu- 
 tive miscellanies than in any other form which has come 
 under my notice, which did nc.t involve downright indo- 
 lence. For one thing, you will soon discover, if you 
 go into this kind of work to any great extent, that it 
 costs a large amount of time for ten men to do the 
 work of one. When did ever a committee of ten men 
 on any thing work fast ? William Jay, the celebrated 
 pastor at Bath, once said, that, if Noah's ark had been 
 intrusted to a committee for the building of it, it would 
 still be on the stocks. It is inherently difficult to secure 
 unanimity among an able committee, so that work can 
 go on rapidly. Remember always that 3^our most brisk 
 and efficient work must be solitary work. One hour 
 in your study is worth three in the committee-room. 
 You do this miscellaneous work, if at all, at this enor- 
 mous cost of time. 
 
 In this dissuasion from excessive labor upon the mis- 
 cellanies of the church, you will understand that I 
 speak of the policy of pastors in old and organized 
 settlements, to which the majority of you will minister. 
 Missionary labor, and work on the frontier, must, of 
 course, come under a different rSgime, because they 
 must meet different necessities. One such frontiersman 
 I could name to you, who is a hero beyond all earthly 
 
LECT. XXI.] CONSECRATION TO THE PULPIT. 319 
 
 fame. He might have been the man of whom the 
 preacher said, " One man among a thousand have I 
 found." 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter, then, is this : 
 if in God's providence you are called to the charge of 
 a well-established church in the midst of such churches, 
 and if you are led by God's teaching to believe that the 
 pulpit is the throne of power for you, give yourself to 
 that pulpit. From it 3^ou maj speak to less than a 
 hundred souls. Remember that Jeremy Taylor did 
 that at Golden Grove. Dr. Chalmers did that at Kil- 
 many. President Edwards did it at Stockbridge. You 
 may have as clear a self-knowledge in this respect as 
 Richard Hooker had when he wrote to his ecclesiastical 
 superior. Archbishop Whitgift, " I am weary of the 
 noise and oppositions of this place. God and nature 
 did not intend me for contentions, but for study and 
 quietness." And he proceeds to pray that he may be 
 removed to "some quiet parsonage, where," he sa3^s, 
 " I may see God's blessings spring out of mother-earth." 
 It was this modest but true self-knowledge which put 
 it into his power afterwards to write the " Ecclesiastical 
 Polity," which has brought his name down to our times. 
 
 I repeat, therefore, if it is given you to see that the 
 pulpit is your throne, give yourself to it and to the 
 scholarly life which is essential to it. Ally your study 
 with it, and make your home there. Leave executive 
 bishoprics of the church universal to other hands. 
 There are men enough who can do that service, whose 
 tastes develop genially towards it, and whose success 
 shows that they were created for it. It will never 
 suffer for the want of aspirants. When did ever an 
 office of executive duty in the church go begging ? If 
 
320 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxi. 
 
 -you have been created for the other thing, do that thing. 
 
 \ Preach ; let other men govern. Preach ; let other men 
 organize. Preach ; let other men raise funds, and look 
 after denominational affairs. Preach; let other men 
 hunt up heresies, and do the theological quiddling. 
 Preach; let other men ferret out scandals, and try 
 clerical delinquents. Preach ; let other men solve the 
 problems of perpetual motion of which church history 
 is full. Then make a straight path between your pul- 
 pit and your study, on which the grass shall never grow. 
 Build your clerical influence up between those two 
 abutments)! 
 
 (5) Any plan of clerical study will fail which is not 
 founded upon a stern physical discipline. You must 
 know the laws of health, and must observe them, if 
 you would succeed in a lifelong plan of literary effort. 
 High culture, like high attainments in piety, depends 
 largely on a subordination of the body to the mind. 
 The body needs a gentle training to the endurance of 
 brain-work. By patient training we can educate the 
 body to endure double the amount of intellectual labor 
 which is generally possible to it at the age of twenty- 
 five years. I need hardly say that no great intellectual 
 success can be attained by a man whose body is in 
 subjection to any appetite. 
 
 (6) Any plan has little probability of success which 
 is not assisted by certain moral virtues. You can not 
 work well with your brains and your heart in conscious 
 conflict with each other. Especially your intellectual 
 aspirations must have the approval of your conscience. 
 If questions of conscience about any thing in your 
 intellectual life are yet unsettled, settle them as the 
 very first duty you have to perform. Agree with thine 
 
LECT. XXI.] UNITY OF SPIRIT. 321 
 
 adversary quickly. Your chariot will drag more heavi- 
 ly than Pharaoh's in the Red Sea, if your conscience 
 blocks the wheels. 
 
 Of the special virtues necessary to a pastor's success 
 in literary pursuits, the chief are, reverence for literary 
 work as religious work, persistence in your own work 
 as that for which God created you, patience with your- 
 self, incessant prayer for success, and trust in divine 
 promises of success. The whole business of ministerial 
 culture needs to be thus baptized in the religious spirit 
 as absolutely as the administration of the Lord's Supper. 
 Do not begin it till you can see the truth of this. 
 
 Without such moral auxiliaries as these, you must 
 become an ungodly man in order to succeed. You 
 must gain unity of soul in one direction or the other. 
 One reason for the brilliant success in literature of 
 some intensely irreligious men is that they had rid 
 themselves of all religious scruples. Their whole being 
 was a unit in literary pursuits. Goethe and Byron and 
 Lord Macaulay seem to have been instances of this : 
 hence their marvelous literar}^ acquisitions, and power 
 of execution. One reason for the success of Satan in 
 the dominion of this world is the absolute intellectual 
 singleness of his being. He concentrates power, with no 
 drawbacks caused by conscientious relentings, doubts, 
 scruples. In a moral being, intellectual force pure and 
 simple, unregulated by moral sensibilities, is Satanic force. 
 
 (7) No plan will probably succeed which is not in 
 some important features your own. You can not wisely 
 import whole into your culture the literary advice of 
 another mind. Take the advice, but take it for what 
 it is worth to you. Scarcely two men can execute 
 well the same plan of a scholarly life. Some men 
 
322 MEN AND BOOKS. [lkct. xxi. 
 
 have more carburet of iron — the stuff that steel is 
 made of — in their blood than others. Their mental 
 constitution is affected by it. Each man, therefore, 
 must, in some respects, frame his own plan. All that 
 an instructor can do is to give you hints, principles, 
 facts from the experience of others. The question is 
 not what is absolutely the superior plan, but what is 
 the best for you, with your health, with your power 
 of mental appropriation, with your amount of time for 
 literary work, in your parish, and at your age. 
 
 The yeomen of the Carolinas framed out of their 
 own experience and common sense a better plan of 
 civil government than John Locke framed for them 
 with the most profound philosophy of the age, and a 
 thousand years of European experiment in government 
 at his command. So you are in some respects wiser 
 than the most learned of your teachers concerning 
 what you can do in literary culture. You need also 
 the discipline of forming your own plan to qualify you 
 to execute any plan. 
 
 (8) No plan will be likely to succeed which is 
 founded upon a scholastic ideal alone. The scholastic 
 mind can not be, without amendment, a model for the 
 professional mind. Yours, from the nature of the case, 
 must be the professional mind. It must be scholarly, 
 yet not scholastic. Leibnitz, Gibbon, Descartes, Cole- 
 ridge, Wordsworth, Southey, were by profession literati. 
 They were nothing else. The experience of such men 
 needs to be tested by the professional judgment, before 
 they are applied to men in a profession to which 
 literary pursuits must be but an appendage. A pastor 
 should frame a plan adapted to professional necessities, 
 and then he should respect that plan as profoundly as 
 if it had the imprint of a score of universities. 
 
LECT. XXI.] CONDITIONS OF BRAIN-FORCE. 323 
 
 (9) You should so arrange your plan of study as to 
 secure as much concentration of effort as is practicable. 
 It is not wise to have more than one or two great lines 
 of study planned and in operation at one time. A day 
 can not be of much value for studious labor, if it is 
 whittled up into shavings of time. Different depart- 
 ments of study must be pursued in succession, time 
 enough being allotted to each to secure the benefit of 
 continuity. The details of such a plan every man must 
 devise for himself ; but the principle is invariable, — 
 that the plan be so adjusted as to obtain mental con- 
 centration ; and for concentration you must have time 
 for continuity of impression. 
 
 Recent psychological investigations into the condi- 
 tions of brain-force disclose the fact, that the most 
 effective force of the brain in continuous labor requires 
 duality of objects of pursuit. Rest of brain does not 
 require cessation of work, but change of work. Change 
 is more restful than idleness. This indicates that the 
 true economy of power in study is found in having two 
 lines of study between which the mind may interplay. 
 
 (10) You should so form your plan of study that it 
 can sustain interruptions. Any plan of study in pas- 
 toral life must be interrupted. Times will occur when 
 it must be suspended. Awakenings of the popular con- 
 science may absorb all the mental energy of a pastor 
 in perpetual production. Our profession is one which 
 abounds with emergencies. These must be anticipated. 
 A power of sustained purpose must be cultivated, 
 which can hold study in reserve when study is imprac- 
 ticable, and not be demoralized by the suspension. We 
 must plan for interregnums, so that they shall not 
 result in anarchy. 
 
324 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxi. 
 
 (11) Your courage in pursuing any plan you may 
 devise should be sustained by the certainty of your 
 mental growth. You will not always be what you are 
 now in point of intellectual strength. Growth is your 
 destiny. Your professional labors will compel growth. 
 They are more productive of mental enlargement than 
 the life of a literary man without a profession. The 
 kind of growth which they will necessitate in you will 
 re-act with a power which will surprise you upon your 
 efficiency as a reader. Your power of mental appro- 
 priation will increase marvelously : hence will come 
 the faculty of rapid reading. Nothing is more sure to 
 disclose itself as a result of years of scholarly reading, 
 and professional composing in alternation, than the gift 
 of rapid mastery in both. As you will write sermons 
 rapidly, so you will appropriate books to your stock of 
 thought rapidly. Some volumes which now would cost 
 you a second reading you will by and by master with 
 one. Some which now require a full and cautious 
 study, by and by you will appropriate by their tables 
 of contents and their prefaces only. 
 
 This destiny of growth should be largely trusted by 
 a youthful preacher. Without it, his life would be 
 hopelessly overladen. I well remember, that, when I 
 began my ministry, a good doctor of divinity said to 
 me, " Be content to work hard for ten years, and then 
 you can take it easy." His advice was on a level with 
 his grammar. He should have said, " Be content to 
 work hard for ten years, and then you can begin to 
 work harder ; but it will be with more cheering results." 
 No other work of God in creation was so grand as the 
 creation of a man : so nothing else in life is so grand a 
 thing as the growth of a man. 
 
LECTURE XXn. 
 
 A PLAN OF PASTORAL STUDY IN ENGLISH 
 LITEEATUEE. 
 
 2. Passing now from the preliminary suggestions 
 already made, I wish to apply as far as possible the 
 principles advanced in the preceding Lectures to a plan 
 for the study of English literature. My aim here is to 
 give you a method by which substantially the majority 
 of pastors can make practicable, by dint of self-disci- 
 pline, a lifelong study of the literature of our language, 
 which shall be sufficiently productive of results to save 
 them from intellectual decline. 
 
 (1) Run a line of professional reading through the 
 history of the literature. A line of professional read- 
 ing should be the backbone of every clergyman's lit- 
 erary life. I have not here in view the bulk of the 
 professional literature, but a historic line of it only. 
 The advantages of this may all be summed up in one, — 
 its naturalness. It is natural for a professional man to 
 make his profession the center of his culture. This is 
 only adjusting your studies, in form and by design, to 
 what they will be, and must be in fact. This is the 
 principle of all wise methods in real life. Necessities 
 must be first cared for. The spinal cord of real life is 
 labor to meet necessities. So it should be with literary 
 pursuits in the midst of professional avocations. A 
 
326 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxn. 
 
 pastor "will obtain Ms most valuable knowledge of our 
 literature by building it up gradually alongside of the 
 clerical profession. 
 
 (2) Pursue collateral lines of reading as they are 
 suggested by professional studies. Any great trunk of 
 literature, like that formed by one of the professions, 
 will be dense with branches running out from either 
 side, into which study will diverge naturally. For 
 instance, you can not familiarize yourself with the Eng- 
 lish pulpit of the seventeenth century without discov- 
 ering that you must acquaint yourself also with that 
 most creative period of English history. The Revolu- 
 tion, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration are in 
 the heart of it. 
 
 By the law of literary association, collateral lines of 
 reading will branch out in all directions. You will be 
 surprised to find how large a portion of the entire body 
 of the literature is covered by the immediate and 
 obvious lines of collateral study. Let me illustrate 
 this by a single example. At the first view it appears 
 unnatural to associate the pulpit with the stage. How 
 can a pastor's professional reading lead him naturally 
 to the study of Shakspeare ? I answer, No two things 
 are more indissolubly connected in English liistory 
 than the sermon and the drama. There are one or 
 two periods in the history of the English pulpit in 
 which we can not judge well of it without taking into 
 account the taste of the people for theatrical displays. 
 Whitefield and Shakspeare are thus brought hand to 
 hand. The sermons of Bishop Latimer can not be 
 appreciated otherwise. 
 
 (3) Portions of our literature which are remotely 
 connected with the pulpit should be read by depart- 
 
LECT. XXII.] STUDY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. 327 
 
 ments. Do not read the plays of Ben Jonson to-day, 
 and Izaak Walton to-morrow, and Charles Lamb on 
 Wednesday. Read continuously for a while by depart- 
 ments. English poetry, for instance, forms a depart- 
 ment by itself. A few great divisions will classify the 
 whole of it. A very few names should be its nuclei. 
 Beginning with Chaucer (who died in A.D. 1400), ad- 
 vance two centuries, and you come to Spenser and 
 Shakspeare, contemporaries. Proceed half a century, 
 and you overtake Milton, and, a quarter of a century 
 later, Dryden, who died precisely three hundred years 
 after Chaucer. A century and a half farther on, you 
 find Wordsworth, who died four hundred and fifty years 
 from Chaucer. English poetry can all be gathered in 
 clusters around these names ; and it is of little moment 
 with which of them one begins one's study of that 
 department. 
 
 (4) Generally plan to occupy fragments of time 
 with standard literature. In a pastor's life, fragments 
 of time must be utilized, or the loss in the aggregate 
 is immense. Do not be prodigal of Monday mornings : 
 there is no need of it. We should keep at hand in 
 our own libraries, on our study-tables, such authors 
 as the four great poets, such prose-writers as Bacon, 
 Hooker, Milton, Burke, Butler, Macaulay. The habit- 
 ual intercourse of our minds with a dozen of the 
 leading spirits of our libraries, in the freedom of frag- 
 mentary reading, will create innumerable little feeders 
 to our culture, which will keep it full and rich and 
 pure. 
 
 (5) Much of the light literature of the language 
 may be naturally reserved for periods of relief from 
 professional labor. English fiction has become a very 
 
328 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxn. 
 
 vital department of the national thought. Clergymen 
 used to ignore it. That is no longer wise, if it ever 
 was so. We must know it ; but we need not give to it 
 our most valuable time. It is wasteful to read Charles 
 Dickens in the midst of a winter's campaign of profes- 
 sional toil. A healthy mind in a healthy body does 
 not need such costly recreation : reserve it for vaca- 
 tions. More than economy of time is thus gained : we 
 gain sympathy of daily pursuits. Seek mental recrea- 
 tion from change of mental labor. Do not unbend to 
 the extreme every day. That is not natural relief to 
 spring from extreme to extreme. A well-trained mind 
 husbands its strength most effectively by passing from 
 a greater to a less degree of mental tension, not to 
 no tension at all. Remember the physiological law of 
 duality. We must dare to be ignorant of light litera- 
 ture till the natural time for it comes in our plan of 
 life. 
 
 (6) I pass on now to give you a line of professional 
 reading as illustrated from the history of the English 
 and American pulpit, from which the most that I ex- 
 pect is, that it may be suggestive to you of some more 
 minute plan, or some other, yet, for the purpose, an 
 equivalent plan of your own. 
 
 In the following pages I attempt to combine four 
 features ; viz., to distinguish the most eminent of Eng- 
 glish and American preachers, to group these in historic 
 clusters, to assist your memory of our literature as a 
 whole by associating these clerical names with their 
 secular contemporaries, and to arrange these groups in 
 chronological order. I select only representative names, 
 and from the most strongly marked periods in the his- 
 tory of our pulpit. Of course a multitude of eminent 
 
LECT. xxii.] ENGLISH PULPIT A.D. 1350-1550. 329 
 
 names must be omitted. Of the names which I recite, 
 I will ask you to underscore those which I shall desig- 
 nate as specially deserving of study, either as profes- 
 sional representatives or as literary standards. 
 
 The dates I arrange as nearly as possible in the cen- 
 ter of the public life of the authors clustered around 
 them, reckoning a quarter of a century on either side 
 of the date specified. This method is sufficiently 
 accurate. You will generally find it convenient, in 
 your attempts to fix dates of authors in your memory, 
 to associate the name with some central date of author- 
 ship, rather than the date of birth or death ; unless one 
 of these happens to synchronize with the beginning, or 
 middle, or end, of a century, as is the case with Chaucer 
 and Dryden and Wordsworth. 
 
 Beginning, then, with the earliest period of the British 
 pulpit, the first date I name is A.D. 1350. This being 
 long before the Reformation, the pulpit had scarcely an 
 existence in England. But one name deserves mention 
 in so condensed a catalogue as I am attempting to form. 
 Within a quarter of a century on either side of this 
 date lay the public life of John Wickliffe. Under- 
 score his name as the only representative of the infancy 
 of the English pulpit. It may assist our mastery of 
 the secular literature of the language to note that 
 Wickliffe was contemporary with Geoffrey Chaucer; 
 the one sustaining to English preaching the same rela- 
 tion that the other did to English poetry. 
 
 From this period nothing appears to our purpose for 
 about two hundred years. Note the date A.D. 1550. 
 Within twenty-five years of this date, before and after, 
 lay the major part of the public life of William Tyn- 
 DALE, Miles Coverdale, John Knox, Hugh Latevlee, 
 
330 MEN AND BOOKS. [x.ect. xxii. 
 
 Thomas Cranmer, John Fox, and William Cart- 
 wright. 
 
 The most vital literary activity of the reign of Henry 
 VIII. was concentrated upon the translation of the 
 Bible. Upon that the revival of the pulpit hung sus- 
 pended. It was a question of life and death to preach- 
 ing. To very few men are the English and American 
 churches so much indebted through all time as to Tyn- 
 dale. The " blasphemous beast," as Sir Thomas More 
 called him, gave to the church the chief model of King 
 James's Bible Underscore the name of Tyndale as 
 the pioneer in the work of translating the Scriptures, 
 that of Knox as the father of the Scottish Reforma- 
 tion, that of Latimer as one of the earliest martyrs to 
 the liberty of the pulpit, and that of Cranmer as the 
 founder of the Anglican Church. 
 
 It may assist u^:, in connecting the religious with the 
 secular literature of this period, to remark the fact that 
 these men were wholly, or in part, contemporary with 
 Sir Philip Sidney, the author of the "Art of Poesy," 
 and Roger Ascham, the father of English educators; 
 and to this and the succeeding period belongs the name 
 of Sir Walter Raleigh. 
 
 The next date of importance is A.D. 1600. The 
 half-century of which this is the center covers substan- 
 tially the public life of a very small group, of which 
 Richard Hooker, Dr. Donne, Bishop Hall, and 
 George Herbert are the chief. Through the whole of 
 the long reign of Elizabeth the pulpit had to struggle 
 for leave to be at all. Brilliant as the age was in other 
 departments, the literature of the pulpit was meager 
 in the extreme. Queen Elizabeth did not take kindly 
 to preachers : she said that two in a diocese were an 
 
LECT. XXII.] ENGLISH PULPIT A.D. 1550. 331 
 
 ample supply. In London many churches were closed 
 for the want of preachers. Says Bishop Sandys, 
 preaching before the Queen, " Many there are who do 
 not hear a sermon in seven years, I might say in seven- 
 teen." In Cornwall, Neal says there was not one man 
 capable of preaching a sermon. At one time the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford had but three preachers, and these 
 were all Puritans. 
 
 This state of things was the inheritance wliich the 
 Church of Rome had bequeathed to the Church of 
 England. The depreciation of preaching in the Church 
 of England which exists to-day had its origin then. 
 Hence, also, arose the extreme poverty of the pulpit at 
 the date before us. Hooker, the darling of the Church 
 of England to this day, is declared, by one of the best- 
 informed critics of English literature, to sustain to 
 English prose somewhat of the same relation that 
 Chaucer sustained to English poetry ; he having writ- 
 ten the first solid prose-work of logical structure, and 
 clear, forcible style. Bishop Hall was one of the earli- 
 est writers of laconic and racy English : he has been 
 called the " English Seneca." The gentle George Her- 
 bert, the humble country parson, will live long after 
 his infidel brother. Lord Herbert, is forgotten. This 
 little group of clerical writers were surrounded by 
 Shakspeare, Spenser, Beaumont and Fletcher, Philip 
 Massinger, and Ben Jonson, of dramatic fame ; and 
 Lord Bacon was their contemporary. 
 
 Passing on a little more than half a century, let us, 
 for the convenience of the synchronizing with the 
 Restoration of the Stuarts, select the date A.D. 1660. 
 This year is in the heart of the most eventful period 
 of English history, and of the golden age of the pulpit 
 
832 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxn. 
 
 as well. Within a quarter of a century of the Resto- 
 ration, on either side, we find two parallel columns of 
 great names. In the Established Church appear Arch- 
 Ijishop Leighton, Jeremy Taylor, Isaac Barrow, 
 Archbishop Tillotson, Robert South, Edward Still- 
 ingfleet, and William Sherlock, all of them men of 
 great power in their day, and some of them authors 
 of standards in literature which will live as long as the 
 language lives. Among the nonconformists we num- 
 ber Joseph Calamy, Richard Baxter, John Owen, 
 John Flavel, John Bunyan, Stephen Charnock, 
 and John Howe. England has not seen since their 
 day an equal number of men of equal rank in her 
 pulpits. Contemporary with these galaxies of clerical 
 genius, it will help our memory of the period as a 
 whole, to recall John Locke, Sir William Temple, Sir 
 Thomas Browne, Abraham Cowley, Samuel Butler, 
 John Dryden, and, princeps inter pares, John Milton. 
 
 A sad decline appears as we advance another half- 
 century. The revolution of 1688, with the oppressions 
 which preceded it, and the confusion which followed it, 
 and the outbreak of infidelity in the persons of Hobbes, 
 Shaftesbury, and Bolingbroke, greatly depressed the 
 pulpit. Its ablest productions were controversies with 
 infidelity. The close of the seventeenth century was 
 a dark day for the spiritual vitality of both England 
 and Scotland. 
 
 Adopting the year A.D. 1700 as the next center, we 
 find before and after it Bishop Lowth, Bishop Atter- 
 bury, Samuel Clarke, Bishop Hoadley, Ralph 
 Erskine, Bishop Butler ; and, on this side of the 
 Atlantic, we note the first name which lifts the 
 American pulpit to the level of that of the mother- 
 country, in the person of Cotton Mather. 
 
LECT. XXII.] ENGLISH PUI-PIT A.D. 1750-1800. 333 
 
 Contemporary with these, wholly or in part, were 
 the essayists who founded "The Spectator," Addison 
 and Richard Steele ; the originators of the English 
 novel, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett ; also Pope, 
 Gay, and Prior, noted as the Jacobite wits of the day ; 
 Hobbes, Bolingbroke, and Shaftesbury, the trio of noted 
 freethinkers ; and Congreve, Sir Isaac Newton, and 
 Bishop Berkeley. Isaac Watts deserves mention as 
 the first man who redeemed English hymnology from 
 doggerel, although he wrote not a little of it himself. 
 
 Advancing another half-century, we reach the date 
 A.D. 1750. This was the age of tame politeness in the 
 Church of England, and the secession of Methodism 
 from it. Within twenty-five years of this date comes 
 the public life of Dr. Hugh Blaie, Bishop Horsley, 
 Dr. Wh,lia]VI Paley, and, outside of the Establish- 
 ment, Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, George 
 Whitefield, the senior Edwaeds, Joseph Bellamy, 
 Samuel Hopkins, and Samuel Davies. 
 
 These numbered among their contemporaries the 
 club of which Dr. Johnson was the autocrat, including 
 Goldsmith and Edmund Burke ; the three great histo- 
 rians of the empire, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon ; 
 William Cowper, who wrought a revolution in English 
 poety ; Dr. Reid, the father of the Scotch philosophy ; 
 the elder Earl of Chatham, who stood at the head of 
 parliamentary eloquence ; and Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 Advancing to the beginning of the present century 
 (A.D. 1800), we find not one man in the Church of 
 England who deserves to rank with the following 
 names out of it : Andrew Fuller, Robert Hall, John 
 Foster, Thomas Chalmers, and, in this country, 
 Dr. Tlmothy Dwight, Dr. Nathaniel Emmons, Dr. 
 
334 MEN AND BOOKS. [lbct. xxn. 
 
 Jonathan Edwards, Dr. John M. Mason, Dr. Edward 
 Payson, Dr. Edward Griffin, and Dr. William E. 
 
 C BANNING. 
 
 To this period, for the most part, belong, in secular 
 literature, Robert Burns and Samuel Rogers ; the Lake 
 Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; also the 
 earlier group whose names commonly occur together, 
 Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Shelley, and Keats ; Charles 
 Lamb, Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell ; and, in the 
 Scotch philosophy Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Thomas 
 Brown. The chief literary revolutions of the time 
 were Scott's originating of the historical romance, and 
 Wordsworth's simplifying and humanizing of English 
 poetry. The latter movement has affected all the 
 literature of the language since that day : Charles 
 Dickens could not have existed but for the advent of 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Adopting one more date, A.D. 1850, we come into 
 groups of names, some of which are fragrant in the mem- 
 ory of the living : William Jay ; Dr. Edward Pusey, 
 the father of the ritualistic re-action in England ; 
 William Archer Butler ; Archbishop Whately ; Dr. 
 Henry Melville ; Frederick Robertson ; Dr. Thomas 
 Guthrie ; Mr. Spurgeon ; and, in this country, Albert 
 Barnes ; Dr. Lyman Beecher ; Dr. Nathaniel W. Tay- 
 lor, the father of the so-called " New-Haven Divinity ; " 
 Horace Bushnell ; Dr. Charles Finney, the most 
 noted revivalist of modern times ; Dr. Gregory Bedell ; 
 Dr. Stephen Olin ; Dr. Francis Wayland ; Dr. James 
 Alexander ; and Dr. James H. Thornwell, the most 
 eminent pulpit orator of the southern half of our 
 Republic. 
 ^Contemporary with these names should be associated 
 
M«T. xxn.] OTHER HISTORIC LINES. 335 
 
 those of Alison, Mackintosh, Hallam, Prescott, and 
 Motley, as historians ; Macaulay, Caiiyle, Jeffrey, 
 Sydney Smith, Talfourd, De Quineey, and Washington 
 Irving, as essayists; Cooper, Thackeray, Dickens, and 
 Hawthorne, as novelists ; Tennyson, Bryant, Longfel- 
 low, and Whittier, a^s poets ; and Sir William Hamilton 
 as a metaphysician. • 
 
 This catalogue of clerical names, you will understand, 
 I give you as only a representative one, with which it 
 is desirable to be acquainted as far as possible. Of 
 these, I have distinguished about thirty names of men 
 whose writings and memoirs would give you a very 
 fair knowledge of the entire history of the pulpit in 
 our language, so far as that is extant in libraries. 
 These thirty names a pastor at the meridian of his 
 labors can make himself acquainted with, even if he will 
 give to them only fragments of time. It is a kind of 
 study which does not necessarily demand the severest, 
 long-continued, and unbroken application. A man of 
 affairs can make it a supplement to his professional 
 life. 
 
 I would not be understood to limit our method of 
 beginning the study of English literature to the study 
 of the pulpit. I advise this only as the most natural 
 one to a pastor in active life. It is natural to build the 
 literature around the profession as its center. But 
 some may find an equally suggestive help in an historic 
 line of English philosophers from Lord Bacon down- 
 ward. A similar line of suggestion might be framed on 
 the history of the English essay. A very superior one 
 might be drawn, making English poetry the historic 
 center from Chaucer to Wordsworth. 
 
 The least valuable method, in my judgment, is that 
 
336 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxii. 
 
 which is, perhaps, the most frequently chosen. It is the 
 basis of many abortive attempts to master the bulk of 
 our literature. I allude to that which arranges the 
 contents of English libraries along the line of political 
 history, and associates the illustrious names with the 
 royal dynasties of England. This method, plausible 
 in theory, will be found cumbrous in the experiment. 
 Better by far is it to follow some historic line drawn 
 within the literature itself, and then make excursions 
 from that laterally into other departments. 
 
 It is of less importance than at first appears, what 
 specific line be made central. I have chosen that of the 
 pulpit. But our profession suggests others of perhaps 
 nearly equal value. Theological science is splendidly 
 developed in our language. An historic line drawn 
 in that department would command the professional 
 enthusiasm of many pastors, for the purposes of study, 
 more powerfully than the homiletic line. The history 
 of churchly organization may be more stimulating to 
 another. The liturgic development in the history of 
 English thought may be attractive to some. The line 
 of English commentary on the Bible may be the more 
 awakening to others. The sway of the English Scrip- 
 tures over our entire literature is very marked. The 
 very structure of our language has been in part 
 modeled by them. It matters little what be chosen 
 as the central line of research, except that it should, 
 in the majority of cases, be within the natural range of 
 the profession, so as to command the zest of profes- 
 sional enthusiasm, and the unity of mental life, which 
 the labors of the profession create. Find such a line 
 of central development in something. Such are the 
 natural affiliations of all great departments of thought, 
 
LECT. xxn.] AUXILIARY SUGGESTIONS. 337 
 
 that any one will be found to be suggestive of every 
 other one. There have been no isolated developments 
 of the national mind: therefore there are no isolated 
 representations of it in books. A book vrhich is a 
 book is kindred to every other book. Even two such 
 diverse expressions of genius as English poetry and 
 English art are in close sympathy with each other. We 
 have before remarked the natural affiliation of the 
 English pulpit with the English drama. George White- 
 field and David Garrick were mutual helpers. Build a 
 nest, therefore, for your thought anywhere in an Eng- 
 lish library, and the flight from it to the whole circum- 
 ference will not be unnatural, or on weary wings. 
 
 I add in closing, without extended remark, several 
 auxiliary suggestions. 
 
 It is not necessary for your purpose to read very 
 largely in any one author, except those of inspired 
 authority. 
 
 It is not necessary to read an equal amount in all. 
 
 It is not necessary to read in chronological order. A 
 beginning can be made in the middle. One method 
 recommended by some critics is to begin with the 
 present time, and read backward. 
 
 The more distant an author is from our own times, 
 as a general rule, inspiration aside, the less important 
 is that author to modern culture. This is the reason 
 wh}^ in the list given in the foregoing pages, the most 
 recent group is the most numerous. 
 
 In some instances, the preachers named in this cata- 
 logue have not left a large collection of sermons in 
 print. This is true of Whitefield and Tyndale. Our 
 knowledge of their public ministry must be obtained 
 from their memoirs, and the history of their times. 
 
838 MEN AND BOOKS. [lect. xxn. 
 
 Their influence on the history of the pulpit is too 
 important to permit the omission of their names. 
 
 In the reading of sermons, a few specimens thor- 
 oughly criticised are more valuable to our culture than 
 volumes read for purposes of literary refreshment. 
 
 For mental quickening in the act of composing ser- 
 mons, one should follow eclectically one's own tastes. 
 If the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid starts your 
 mind upon a track of original invention, study that 
 proposition. Find out by experiment what will arouse 
 your thinking power, and make it articulate, and then 
 study that. The range of your mental affinities, as I 
 have before remarked, will surely widen. The floricul- 
 turist sets a geranium to sprout in a very small recep- 
 tacle ; but it soon outgrows its birthplace. So an 
 intellectual taste will expand beyond the scope of its 
 germ. Nothing is more sure to grow. 
 
 Pursuing literary study by any plan equivalent to 
 the one here recommended, you will not fail of a very 
 encouraging success. Progress will be slow at the 
 first, but it will increase in speed as you advance. 
 Your power of mental appropriation will grow im- 
 mensely as you approach middle life. It is no cause 
 for discouragement, if its full growth is long delayed. 
 Some of the richest fruits of autumn are the late fruits. 
 So are there minds which are richly endowed by nature, 
 but which develop slowly. Whenever your maturity 
 does appear, be it late or early, you will be able to read 
 rapidly. Many valuable books you will be able to 
 master without a plodding pace through the whole of 
 them. Fragmentary reading of them will suffice. In 
 the maturity of a man's culture, if it has been wisely 
 regulated, and vigorously nurtured, very few books 
 
LECT. XXII.] IMAGINARY CRITICS. 339 
 
 demand of him a reading entire. That which he brings 
 to a book will often be so large a proportion of what he 
 finds m it, that he has only to give a glance of recogni- 
 tion to many pages, and pass on. 
 
 Even a little of such reading as is here advised, 
 though sadly unsatisfactory to your growing tastes, will 
 still keep alive, as nothing else can, a scholar's vigilance 
 over your sermons, and make them worthy of a schol- 
 ar's hearing. One of the most eminent of the Presby- 
 terian pastors of New York, of the generation just now 
 passing away, was once inquired of how he could have 
 made his habits of argument in the pulpit so uniformly 
 exact, without even a momentary slip in his logic ; for 
 such was the reputation of his masterly pulpit. He 
 replied, that he was accustomed to imagine a legal mind, 
 like that of Daniel Webster, among his hearers, and 
 he aimed never to present in his pulpit a train of reas- 
 oning to which the great jurist could object. Every 
 preacher needs such imaginary critics of his sermons. 
 We can find them in the silent friends who throncr our 
 libraries. Make a friend of every good book you own. 
 " There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother." 
 
IIsTDEX. 
 
 Accumulation not the chief object 
 of a scholar's life, 20. 
 
 Acquisitive reading compared with 
 philosophical methods, 279. 
 
 Adaptation to professional labor, 
 111. 
 one object of literary study, 111. 
 the study of it must form the 
 clergy, 112. 
 
 Adaptations, Jesuit theory of them, 
 111. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, state of masses 
 in England in his time, 37. 
 his charge of affectation upon 
 English literature, l'J7. 
 
 Adolphus, Gustavus, his battle- 
 song, 242. 
 
 Affectations in literature, 195. 
 
 Affinity, law of, in the choice of 
 clerical labor, 118. 
 
 Africa, life of a missionary in, 119. 
 
 " Agawam, Simple Cobbler of," 
 quoted, 153. 
 
 Ages, dark, the work of the Euro- 
 pean mind at that time, 124. 
 
 Alexander, Dr. James, quoted, 61. 
 
 Allegory illustrative of the three 
 great literatures of Europe, 282. 
 
 Allston, Washington, his fastidious 
 taste, 298. 
 
 Amateur studies, peril of selfish- 
 ness in them, 153. 
 
 American literature, intrinsic mer- 
 its of it, 178. 
 its English affinities, 181. 
 its poetry compared with that of 
 England, 179. 
 
 American poetry in action, 179. 
 
 American pulpit, the question of 
 its decline, 180. 
 
 American theology as judged by 
 German scholars, 190. 
 
 American theologians have been 
 eminent preachers, 187. 
 
 Amusements, Christian theory of 
 
 them, 22. 
 Ancient classics in the American 
 college, 149. 
 ideal of a liberal education, 83. 
 Analytic reading, 276. 
 Angelo, Michael, his mode of pro- 
 fessional working, 299. 
 Anglicizing foreign literatures, 157. 
 Anglo-Saxon language not spoken 
 
 out of Great Britain, 163. 
 Anomalies in literatvire, 274. 
 Antiquity of biblical history, 229. 
 of Hebrew jurisprudence, 230. 
 of Hebrew poetry, 330. 
 of Hebrew prophetic literature, 
 
 231. 
 of the Book of Job, 231. 
 of the Book of Ruth, 231. 
 reverence of the human mind for 
 it, 228. 
 Aristotle and Plato one in their 
 
 final influence, 108. 
 Arnold, Dr. Thomas, his advice to 
 a young preacher, 210. 
 affection of him for Aristotle, 104. 
 his conversational powers, 213. 
 his opinion of censorious critics, 
 
 304. 
 his opinion of Coleridge's "Lit- 
 erary Remains," 155. 
 his opinion of making literature a 
 
 profession, 155. 
 his opinion of reading inferior 
 
 authors, 144. 
 his self-distrust, 299. 
 Arnold, Matthew, his opinion of 
 authors in relation to their 
 times, 289. 
 Art, resemblances between it and 
 
 literature, 283. 
 Artists, American, in Italy, 299. 
 Asiatic literatures in comparison 
 with modern, 161. 
 
 341 
 
842 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Asiatic races, their intellectual 
 
 prospect, 235. 
 Assassiuatiou of President Lincoln, 
 
 28. 
 Assimilation, identity of opinions 
 not necessary to it, 107. 
 to great minds, the work of time, 
 
 110. 
 to the genius of authors, 105. 
 essential to originality, 100. 
 illustrated in the history of 
 " Christabel," 106. 
 Atheism, its character in England, 
 244. 
 its obligation to the Bible, 244. 
 Athenian architecture, the Doric 
 
 column, 108. 
 Athens, relation of the people to 
 
 the drama, 43. 
 Atonement, unlimited, 262. 
 unscriptural ways of preaching 
 it, 261. 
 Author, his book a part of his char- 
 acter, 270. 
 his dependence on the age he 
 lives in, 289. 
 Authors, acquaintance with them 
 in their works, 270, 273. 
 compensation to them, 39. 
 perpetuity of their influence, 139. 
 secretive in their works, 270. 
 " Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," 
 
 its origin, 213. 
 Awakenings, religious, begin in 
 the lower classes, 46. 
 study of them, 11. 
 Bacon, Lord, his opinion of critical 
 
 studies, 273. 
 Barnes, Albert, his habits of study, 
 
 312. 
 Beecher, H. W., his "Life- 
 Thoughts," 297. 
 Belles-lettres, its effeminate mean- 
 ing, 192. 
 Bible, the, contains the oldest 
 known literature, 228. 
 debt of English atheism to it, 
 
 244. 
 debt of infidelity to it, 243. 
 debt of living literatures to it, 
 
 238. 
 debt of the English language to 
 
 it, 240. 
 in what consists its literary supe- 
 riority, 249. 
 its educating power, 259. 
 its influence in various poems, 
 
 240. 
 its influence on art, 243. 
 
 Bible, the, its influence on deliber- 
 ative eloquence, 242. 
 its influence on human liberty, 
 
 251. 
 its literature a literature of the 
 
 future, 254. 
 its methods of reform, 252. 
 its power over thinking minds, 
 
 239. 
 its professional value to a preach- 
 er, 256. 
 its relation to Oriental civilizar- 
 
 tion, 232. 
 its symmetry of doctrine, 253. 
 its variety and excellence of 
 
 styles, 253. 
 the intrinsic superiority of bibli- 
 cal models, 247. 
 the neglect of it by modern lit- 
 erary taste, 225. 
 the number of commentaries 
 
 upon it, 239. 
 the study of it as classic literature, 
 
 224. 
 the study of it in American col- 
 leges, 225, 227. 
 theological and biblical forms 
 
 compared, 257. 
 what do we mean by its literary 
 superiority? 2-17. 
 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, 
 
 Burke's imitation of him, 301. 
 Books, a multitude of them worth- 
 less, 128. 
 Bookworms, their uselessness, 132. 
 Bossuet, Jacques B., his use of 
 
 Homer, 303. 
 Breadth of culture promotes depth, 
 
 201. 
 Britain, Great, intermingling of 
 races in its population, 162. 
 its relation to the Anglo-Saxon 
 language, 163. 
 "Brook Farm," one cause of its 
 
 failure, 216. 
 Brougham, Henry, criticism by and 
 of, 103. 
 his opinion of Sheridan, 284. 
 Brown, Dr. Thomas, his habit of 
 
 composing, 297. 
 Brownson, Orestes A., his opinion 
 
 of Catliolic theologians, 265. 
 Bryant, William Cullen, indebted- 
 ness of the " Thanatopsis " to 
 the Scriptures, 240. 
 Buffon, George L., his rapture in 
 
 composing, 154. 
 Burke, Edmund, compared with 
 Sheridan, 284. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 843 
 
 Burke, Edmund, liis early passion 
 for Milton, 104. 
 his essay on "The Sublime and 
 
 Beautiful," 86. 
 his imitation of Bolingbroke, 
 
 301. 
 his "Letter to the Sheriffs of 
 
 Bristol," 8fi. 
 his study of men, 86. 
 the cause of his failure as a 
 speaker, 284. 
 Byron, indebtedness of his " Cain " 
 to the Bible, 248. 
 the effect of " Cliristabel" upon 
 
 him, 107. 
 the indebtedness of bis "Dark- 
 ness " to Jeremiah, 240. 
 Calvinism improved by theologians 
 
 of New England, 189. 
 Campbell, Thomas, Scott's opinion 
 
 of him, 305. 
 Canova, Antonio, his opinion of 
 
 English art, 169. 
 Cant in literature, 195. 
 in religion and in literature com- 
 pared, 196. 
 Caricature of the English clergy, 
 
 of the secular parson, 25. 
 Carlyle, Thomas, his address at the 
 University of Edinburgh, 133. 
 his affectation in stjde, 196. 
 his opinion of great men, 304. 
 his opinion of " The Mayflower," 
 
 179. 
 servitude of some literary minds 
 to him, 203. 
 Caste in churches, an example of 
 
 it, 80. 
 Catechetical instruction in Sweden, 
 
 263. 
 Catechism, serial preaching on it, 
 
 266. 
 Catholic theologians criticised by 
 
 Orestes A. Brownson, 265. 
 Chalmers, Dr. Thomas, his early 
 judgment of himself, 114. 
 his executive abilities, 316. 
 his opinion of the power of Chris- 
 tianity, 264. 
 his style, 299. 
 
 servitude of the Scottish pulpit 
 to him, 202. 
 Character, a preacher's study of 
 his own, 5. 
 of a preacher full of oratorical 
 
 suggestions, 4. 
 unreal portraits of it in the pul- 
 pit, 26. 
 
 Chatham, Earl of, disappointment 
 
 in reading his speeches, 219. 
 " Christabel," its influence on other 
 
 poets, 107. 
 Christian experience and scholar- 
 ship, their relation, 267. 
 Christianity, condescending in its 
 aims, 60. 
 false applications of, to real life. 
 
 23. 
 its influence on modern civiliza- 
 tion, 2.39. 
 Choate, Rufus, his style, 103. 
 Church, th(4, and the world, dis- 
 tinct, 70, 73. 
 Churchly distinction obscured, 71. 
 Cicero, his opinion of rhetorical 
 study, 92. 
 servitude of Italian scholarship 
 to him, 202. 
 " Ciceronianus," by Erasmus, 202. 
 Clarkson, Thomas, his publishing 
 
 in Latin, 293. 
 Classes, ambition of preachers re- 
 specting the higher classes, 117. 
 mutual repulsion of, SO. 
 " Classic," limitation of the term, 
 
 150. 
 Clergy, the, and priesthood, dis- 
 tinct, 54. 
 consequence if they are isolated 
 
 from the people, 75. 
 exclusive, (i9, 73, 78. 
 not ex offlcio superiors of the peo- 
 ple, 03. 
 of England, 77. 
 
 of New England scholarly, 310. 
 often hostile to progress, 54. 
 the natural leaders of the people, 
 52. f i' y 
 
 their ignorance of the world al- 
 leged, 26. * 
 their neglect of popular changes, 
 
 58. 
 their influence reflexive, 67. 
 their temptations to a narrow 
 
 culture, 207. 
 worldly ambition a peril, 79. 
 Clergymen, eccentric, the study of 
 
 them, 33. 
 Clerical influence moral more than 
 intellectual, 63. 
 office more than a profession, 119. 
 Coffee-houses of London, 87. 
 Coleridge, S. T., early history of 
 "Christabel," 106. 
 his opinion of great authors, 140. 
 his opinion of Greek literature, 
 166. 
 
344 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., his opinion of 
 Wordsworth, 138. 
 his opinion of specific preaching, 
 
 29. 
 his translations of Schiller, 147. 
 Dr. Arnold's opinion of his " Lit- 
 erary Remains," 155. 
 Collateral reading, 289. 
 Collegiate education, ancient class- 
 ics in, 149. 
 Comfort, the mission of, 29. 
 Common people, a preacher must 
 
 know their speech, 216. 
 Comparison of authors in our read- 
 ing, 281. 
 involuntary, 281. 
 the effect of it on our views of 
 
 national literatures, 281. 
 the effect of it on our judgment 
 of departments in literature, 
 282. 
 unites names in literature with 
 names in art, 282. 
 Compensation of authors for their 
 
 books, 40. 
 Composite mind of England, 162. 
 Composition, associating it with 
 reading, 295. 
 choice hours of composing, 102. 
 daily composition a necessity, 
 
 302. 
 executive skill in it a high art, 
 
 102. 
 persistence in difficult compos- 
 ing, 307. 
 reckless, 306. 
 promotes invention, 297. 
 Concentration necessary to success 
 
 in study, 323. 
 Conference-meeting compared with 
 
 the pulpit, 214. 
 Conscience in study, 209, 320. 
 unenlightened in the ministry, 
 208. 
 Conservatism of the clergy often 
 
 extreme, 54. 
 Consociation of churches in Massa^ 
 
 chusetts in 1662, 185. 
 Controlling minds in literature, 136. 
 enumerated, 137. 
 objection to reading them, 146. 
 in classic Gr(;ek literature, 137. 
 in English literature, 138. 
 in German literature, 138. 
 in Hebrew literature 137. 
 in Hellenistic Greek literature, 
 137. 
 Conversation, Dr. Johnson as a 
 conversationalist, 213. 
 
 Conversation, eloquence abounds 
 in it, 212. 
 of illiterate men, one form of lit- 
 erature, 215. 
 Cooper, James F., his rank as a 
 
 novelist, 180. 
 Corneille, Pierre, his use of the 
 
 Latin classics, 303. 
 Cowper, William, criticism of 
 " There is a fountain," etc., 274. 
 Montgomery's edition of his 
 
 hyrnn, 275. 
 obligations of "The Task" to 
 the Scriptures, 240. 
 Creeds, origin and character of the 
 historic creeds, 257. 
 sermons formed under their in- 
 fluence, 260. 
 tested by the common sense of 
 
 the people, 74. 
 their expression of human re- 
 sponsibility, 258. 
 Crises in history, their power to 
 create unwritten literature, 213. 
 Critical reading, 270. 
 illustrated, 272. 
 not petty, 272. 
 Criticism, censorious, 304. 
 generous, 304. 
 and production reciprocal in their 
 
 action, 295. 
 and executive power dispropor- 
 tioned, 2i)8. 
 Cross-purposes in the ministry, 114. 
 Cultivated classes grouped, 45. 
 Culture, enlarged by the study of 
 the best authors, 141. 
 not ignored by the Providence of 
 
 God, 51. 
 its relation to opinions, 109. 
 sympathetic with all other cul- 
 ture, 201. 
 Curran, John Philpot, his study of 
 
 men, 87. 
 Curtis, George William, his opinion 
 
 of rhetorical study, 93. 
 Dante, Prescott's opinion of the 
 
 "Inferno," 147. 
 Dark ages, state of the European 
 
 mind at that time, 124. 
 Delay in taking the lead of popu- 
 lar reforms, 54. 
 Demagogism of Patrick Henry, 90. 
 Democratic, the divine way of 
 
 working, 52. 
 De Quincey, Thomas, extract from 
 his " Essay on Pope," 164. 
 his distinction between different 
 literatures, 164. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 345 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, his opinion 
 of the study of language, 150. 
 
 Depravity illustrated in literary 
 neglect of the Bible, 226. 
 
 Descartes, his place in the litera- 
 ture of France, 138. 
 
 De Tocqueville, 230. 
 
 Directness in the pulpit, 29. 
 
 Discovery of principles of effective 
 speech, 98. 
 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, his opinion of 
 extensive reading, 122. 
 
 Distinctions, moral subordinated to 
 social, 78. 
 
 Division of labor in reading, 276. 
 illustrations of it, 277. 
 influence of it upon extent of 
 knowledge, 279. 
 
 Doctrine, Christian, the clergy its 
 natural guardians, 60. 
 
 Doric column, a peculiarity in its 
 structure, 108. 
 
 Douglas, Stephen A , compared 
 with Edward Everett, 10. 
 
 Drama, Guizot's opinion of the 
 French and English, 1(55. 
 
 Dryden, John, his indebtedness to 
 Tillotson, 104. 
 
 Duality, the physiological law in 
 study, 323. 
 
 Earnestness, all men in earnest 
 about something, 213. 
 
 Eccentric ministers, study of them, 
 33. 
 
 Economy of time in reading, 143. 
 
 Educated classes, the clergy, when 
 identified with them, 6i. 
 
 Education, ideal of it in ancient 
 times, 83. 
 ideal of it in England, 84. 
 ideal of it in the middle ages, 84. 
 
 Edwards, President, Frederick 
 Robertson's opinion of him, 
 190. 
 the power of his preaching mys- 
 terious, 294. 
 
 Edwards, Professor, B. B., his illus- 
 trations of the influence of the 
 Scriptures, 240. 
 his hint respecting antediluvian 
 poetry, 230. 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, condition of the 
 pulpit in her reign, 330. 
 
 Eloquence disappointing to subse- 
 quent generations, 219. 
 false conceptions of it from 
 
 printed literature, 220. 
 its representative character, 217. 
 of real life, 218. 
 
 Eloquence utters the thought of 
 
 the hearer, 217. 
 Emergencies, the popular judg- 
 ment of the pulpit in them, 
 69, 
 Emerson, R. W., his use of trans- 
 lations, 146. 
 his opinion of conversational 
 literature, 212. 
 England, ideal of a liberal educa- 
 tion in, 84. 
 reception of Whitefleld in, 68, 
 English aristocracy, their admira- 
 tion of Homer, 38. 
 English authors and people con- 
 trasted, 39. 
 English language, its debt to the 
 
 Scriptures, 240. 
 English literature, a Christian 
 literature, 166. 
 a literature of constitutional 
 
 freedom, 167. 
 a Protestant literature, 167. 
 a well-balanced literature, 169. 
 an approximation to a popular 
 
 literature, 172. 
 an expression of composite order 
 
 of mind, 162. 
 character of it, 37-40. 
 compared with ancient litera- 
 tures, 161. 
 compared with the French and 
 
 German, 173. 
 Dr. J. H. Newman's opinion of 
 
 it, 167. 
 European opinion of it, 165. 
 intrinsic superiority of it, 160. 
 its claim to the title " classic," 
 
 150. 
 its oratorical department, 174. 
 leading representatives of it, 138. 
 maturity of it, 171. 
 plan of a pastor's studies of it, 
 
 325. 
 predominance of it in a pastor's 
 
 studies, 148. 
 restriction of reading to it de- 
 fended, 148. 
 English mind, character of it, 163. 
 English neglect of the fine arts, 
 
 Canova's explanation, 169. 
 English poetry, grouping of the 
 
 great poets, 327. 
 English pulpit compared with the 
 French and German, 175. 
 of the seventeenth century, 291. 
 English Revolution of 1648, com- 
 pared with the French of 1789, 
 170. 
 
346 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 English Universities, state of litera- 
 ture when they were founded, 
 149. 
 Enthusiasm, professional, 193. 
 Episcopal Church, its relation to 
 the educated classes, CA. 
 its litany more powerful than its 
 pulpit, 65. 
 Erasmus, his prejudice against 
 modern languages, 292. 
 his satire on the literary autoc- 
 racy of Cicero, 202. 
 Essay and oral speech, the differ- 
 ence illustrated, 221. 
 opinion of Charles James Fox, 
 221. 
 Everett, Edward, his rank as an 
 orator, 180. 
 his description of "Webster, 
 
 283. 
 compared with Stephen A. Doug- 
 las, 10. 
 Exclusiv^e church illustrated, 80. 
 Exclusive churches their working 
 
 and its results, 62. 
 Exclusive ministry, consequences 
 of it, if general, 78. 
 effect on churchly distinctions, 
 
 73. 
 has no power of conquest, 73. 
 its loss of power over all classes, 
 
 61. 
 weakness of it, 69. 
 "Excursion, The," Jeffrey's criti- 
 cism of it, 101. 
 Excursus on literary affectations, 
 195. 
 on the contrast between biblical 
 
 and theological forms, 257. 
 on the difference between the 
 
 essay and the speech, 221. 
 on the evil of self-depreciation in 
 
 composition, 305. 
 on the New-England theology, 
 
 185. 
 on the peril of wasted life in the 
 
 ministry, 112. 
 on the selfish ideal of a scholarly 
 
 life, 153. 
 on the temptations of the clergy 
 to narrow culture, 207. 
 Executive miscellanies of the 
 church, 'Mo. 
 skill in comi)osition a high art, 
 102. 
 " Faerie Queene," the, its obliga- 
 tions to the Scriptures, 240. 
 Familiarity with principles of effec- 
 tive speech, 101. 
 
 Fanaticism founded always on a 
 truth, 51. 
 
 Fanatics not benefited by preach- 
 ers of their own class, 6. 
 
 Favorite authors, their influence, 
 105. 
 
 Favorites in literature to be read 
 with caution, 206. 
 
 Fenelon, his use of the ancient class- 
 ics, 303. 
 
 Ferdinand, king of Naples, his 
 speech to the rabble in sign- 
 language, 219. 
 
 Fiction, the clergyman of the novel- 
 ist, 24. 
 
 Fine arts in England, Canova's 
 opinion of them, 169. 
 
 Foreign languages, study of, De 
 Quincey's opinion of, 159, 
 literatures Anglicized, 157. 
 literatures, the prejudice in favor 
 
 of them, 148. 
 missions, the original idea of con- 
 ducting them, 152. 
 
 Forgiveness, nature and the Scrip- 
 tures contrasted respecting it, 
 262. 
 
 Foster, John, quotation from him, 
 38. 
 
 Fox, Charles James, his opinion of 
 the difference between essay 
 and speech, 221. 
 his study of men, 87. 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, his hearing of 
 Whitefield, 99. 
 
 Freedom of the human mind in 
 inspiration, 248. 
 of the will, its subjection in his- 
 toric creeds, 258. 
 
 French boarding-schools criticised, 
 153. 
 
 French literature, 137. 
 the influence of Voltaire on it, 
 
 137. 
 not a popular literature, 173. 
 
 Froude, James, his opinion of mak- 
 ing literature a profession, 
 155. 
 his opinion of works of genius, 
 40. 
 
 Gasparin of Barziza, his study of 
 Cicero, 125. 
 
 Germany, infidel reforms in, 56. 
 popular revolutions in, 55. 
 
 German literature, leading repre- 
 sentatives of it, 137. 
 its affectations, Menzel's opinion, 
 
 197. 
 not a popular literature, 173. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 347 
 
 Gibbon, Edward, his classification 
 of critics, 304. 
 his method of reading, 134. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, and the " Lit- 
 erary Club," 200. 
 Gray, Thomas, his use of Spenser's 
 
 " Faerie Queene," 303. 
 Greek drama, resemblances of it 
 to the pulpit, 43. 
 literature , leading representatives 
 
 of it, 138. 
 pantomime, its intelligibility and 
 power, 219. 
 Griffin, Edward Dorr, his early 
 
 judgment of himself, 114. 
 Growth of the power of mental ap- 
 propriation, 324. 
 Guizot, Francois Pierre, his criti- 
 cism of Shakspeare, 85. 
 his opinion of affectation in 
 
 French literature, 197. 
 his opinion of tlie French and 
 English drama, 1G5. 
 Gymnasia of Germany, criticism of 
 
 the Scriptures in them, 227. 
 Hall, Bishop, his thought on the 
 
 sight of a library, 310. 
 Hall, Robert, his criticism of his 
 own style, 272. 
 his servility to Dr. Johnson in 
 his youth, 202. 
 Hamilton, Sir William, his diffi- 
 culty in composing, 308. 
 Harvard College, its early teaching 
 
 of the sacred languages, 227. 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his charac- 
 ter in his works, 271. 
 his place in English literature, 
 
 138. 
 theology of the "Marble Faun," 
 262. 
 Hebrew jurisprudence, its antiqui- 
 ty, 230. 
 literature, leading representa- 
 tives of it, 137. 
 lyric poetry, its antiquity, 230. 
 prophetic literature, its antiquity, 
 
 231. 
 psalmody, its influence on Eng- 
 lish history, 242. 
 psalmody, its influence on mod- 
 ern hymnology, 241. 
 Hellenistic Greek literature, its 
 
 leading representatives, 137. 
 Hengstenberg, Ernst W., his sup- 
 port of despotic re-action, 56. 
 Henry, Patrick, his motto respect- 
 ing studies, 17. 
 his methods of studying men, 90. 
 
 Henry VIII. of England, litera- 
 ture during his reign, 330. 
 
 Hercules, the torso, 97. 
 
 Herbert, George, his use of Latin 
 quotations, 293. 
 
 Holmes, Dr. O. W., his conversa- 
 tional power, 21.3. 
 the origin of "The Autocrat of 
 the Breakfast-table," 213. 
 
 Homer's " Iliad," admiration of the 
 English aristocracy for it, 38. 
 
 Homely literature, 215. 
 
 Hooker, Richard, estimate of his 
 relation to English prose, 331. 
 his judgment of himself and his 
 adajitations, 319. 
 
 Humboldt, Alexander, his opinion 
 of William Prescott, 180. 
 
 Hymnology, its debt to the Hebrew 
 psalmody, 241. 
 
 " Hypochomlriac " pastor, an ex- 
 ample, 80. 
 
 Hysteria in revivals, 267. 
 
 Ideal of the studies of a pastor 
 necessary to any plan of study, 
 .309. 
 the negative value of an ideal 
 plan of study, 310. 
 
 Ignorance of the world among the 
 clergy, 26. 
 
 Illustrative power, want of it in 
 preaching, 285. 
 excess of it in preaching, 286. 
 
 Imitation of authors in disciplinary 
 composition, 300. 
 
 Impracticable plans of study, 315- 
 322. 
 
 Incidents, biographical, illustrating 
 rhetorical principles, 3. 
 
 Individual character is power in 
 speech, 8. 
 
 Infidelity and reform, 54. 
 in Germany, and re-actions from 
 
 it, 56. 
 in the United States, its debt to 
 the Scriptures, 244. 
 
 Influence, clerical, the law of it, 
 119. 
 
 Inspiration, its bearing on the 
 literary merit of the Scriptures, 
 247. 
 not a protection against literary 
 defects, 247. 
 
 Integrity of intellect, 199. 
 
 Intellectualism, those who preach 
 it not moved by it, 7. 
 
 Intensity of biblical thought, 249. 
 of moral excitement in the min- 
 istry, 207. 
 
348 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Jay, "William, his opinion of com- 
 mittees, 318. 
 Jeffrey, Francis, his criticism of 
 
 Wordsworth, 101, 284. 
 "Jerks, the," in the religious ex- 
 citements of the West, 267. 
 Jesuits, their theory of adaptation 
 
 between men and work. 111. 
 Job, the Book of, its antiquity, 
 
 231. 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, and the " Lit- 
 erary Club," 200. 
 his colloquial power, 213. 
 his opinion of the acquisitions of 
 
 the ancients, 279. 
 his opinion of the English vocabu- 
 lary, 171. 
 his opinion of the habit of dogged 
 
 composing, 307. 
 his reading the story of Ruth, 231. 
 his tyranny over a class of minds, 
 202. 
 Jones, Sir William, his method of 
 
 composing, 303. 
 Jugglers, literary, examples, 197. 
 Juvenile culture, characteristics of 
 it, 194. 
 tastes, 99. 
 Knowledge, literature of, distinct 
 
 from that of power, 129. 
 Kentucky Presbyterian camp- 
 meetings, 2G7. 
 Laplace's "Mechanique Celeste" 
 used for mental quickening, 98. 
 Lascari, the, of Sweden, 264. 
 Latin and English, example of dis- 
 proportion, 95. 
 Latimer, Bishop, his use of Latin 
 
 forms, 291. 
 Laymen, their criticism of the pul- 
 pit, 31. 
 Leadership jn reforms, a preroga- 
 tive of the clergy, 52. 
 a question of dates, 57. 
 delay in assuming it, 54. 
 often assumed by infidelity, 54. 
 should be assumed early, 57. 
 Leadership, spiritual, sacrificed by 
 
 neglect of it in reforms, 61. 
 Leading minds in history, their 
 
 study of men, 83. 
 Liberality of profound culture, 109. 
 Liberty, the English a literature 
 
 of,' 167. 
 liincoln, President, his assassina- 
 tion, 28. 
 quotation from him, 48. 
 Literary jugglers, 197. 
 labor and literary leisure, 98. 
 
 Literature, American, an offshoot 
 of the English, 181. 
 and science not distinct in the 
 
 term " models," 97. 
 homely forms of it, 215. 
 in conversation, 212. 
 not technically restricted, 137. 
 not made for the masses, 36. 
 of power and of knowledge, 164. 
 of the past and of the future, 254. 
 the good sacrificed to the better, 
 
 144. 
 the object of its study is disci- 
 pline, 98. 
 the preacher's culture like that 
 
 of other professional men, 97. 
 theology liberalized by it, 142. 
 unwritten, its representative 
 
 character, 217. 
 unwritten, should be studied, 211. 
 unwritten, the magnitude and 
 variety of it, 212. 
 Locke, John, his plan of govern- 
 ment for the Carolinas, 322. 
 Lord's Supper, the disuse of it in 
 
 some churches, 71. 
 Lytton, Bulwer, his advice to a 
 
 3'oung author, 11. 
 Macaulay, T. B., his opinion of cer- 
 tain political instruments, 259. 
 his opinion of rhetorical study, 
 
 92. 
 his opinion of revolutions in 
 England, 170. 
 Mackintosh, Sir James, his judg- 
 ment of young men, 123. 
 Macpherson's " Ossian," its first 
 
 influence, 229. 
 "Madoc," Southey's opinion of its 
 
 composition, 306. 
 " Marble Faun," its doctrine of sin, 
 
 262. 
 Marot, Clement, influence of his 
 
 hymns, 242. 
 Marsh, Dr. G. P., his opinion of 
 original races of Britain, 163. 
 his opinion of vernacular lan- 
 guages, 151. 
 Masses, the, exclusion of authors 
 and readers fi"om them, 37. 
 in the time of Addison, 37. 
 literature not made for them, 36. 
 "Mavflower, The," a poem in act, 
 
 179. 
 Mental integrity, 199. 
 
 servility, 202. 
 Menzel, Wolfgang, his opinion of 
 affectation in German litera- 
 ture, 197. 
 
 >i 
 
INDEX. 
 
 349 
 
 Menzel, "Wolfgang, his opinion of 
 
 bad books, 128. 
 Methods of a pastor's study, 269. 
 Methodism, its ancient spirit im- 
 paired, 79. 
 Middle ages, the ideal of educa^ 
 
 tion in them, 84. 
 Milton, John, Burke's early criti- 
 cism of him, 105. 
 his abandonment of his journey 
 
 to Athens, 155. 
 his use of the Greek classics, 303. 
 Wordsworth's criticism of him, 
 140. 
 Ministry, an aggressive, 36. 
 
 an inefficient, 34. 
 Mirabeau, his study of men, 87. 
 Miscellanies of the Church a hin- 
 
 derance to study, 315. 
 Misjudgments of one's self, 121. 
 Mission chapels a doubtful device, 
 
 79. 
 Missions, foreign, the original idea 
 
 of conducting them, 152. 
 Mistakes in the choice of a profes- 
 sion, 112. 
 Models, extension of the term, 96. 
 not limited to literature as dis- 
 tinct from science, 97. 
 superior to rhetorical treatises, 
 104. 
 " Moderate" ministry of the Church 
 
 of Scotland, 209. 
 Montgomery, James, his edition of 
 
 Cowper's hymn, 275. 
 Moody, evangelist, 68. 
 Moral virtues necessary to success 
 
 in study, 320. 
 Naples, speech of King Ferdinand 
 
 in the language of signs, 219. 
 Napoleon, his study of men, 88. 
 his opinion of the Eastern races, 
 236. 
 National literatures, exclusive, con- 
 trasted with the pulpit, 41. 
 Negi'O congregations, their criticism 
 
 of preachers, 66. 
 New-England Colonies, absence of 
 large libraries, 186. 
 independent character of the col- 
 onies, 185. 
 theology constructed by preach- 
 ers, 187. 
 theology molded by religious 
 
 awakenings, 188. 
 not Calvinism, 189. 
 originality of it, 184. 
 " New School " and " Old School " 
 theology in New England, 185. 
 
 New Testament, the sale of the re- 
 vised version, 239. 
 
 Newman, Dr. J. H., his opinion of 
 English literature, 167. 
 
 Niebuhr, his opinion of affectation 
 in German literature, 197. 
 
 Novalis's definition of painting, 
 99. 
 
 Numbers the chief idea in the di- 
 vine estimate of man, 52. 
 
 Objects of the study of books, 96. 
 
 Oblique usefulness, 115. 
 
 " Old Mortality," 71. 
 
 Opinions and culture, their relation 
 to each other, 109. 
 
 Opposites in literary character, 
 sympathy with them, 108. 
 
 Optimism and Pessimism illustrat- 
 ed, 20. 
 
 Oral address and essay, difference 
 illustrated, 221. 
 address not fully represented in 
 
 print, 218. 
 eloquence disappointing to the 
 next generation, 219. 
 
 Orator, spokesman of his hearers, 
 217. 
 the first in the order of time, 1. 
 
 Oratorical culture, the sources of 
 it, 1. 
 study, opinions adverse to it, 92. 
 
 Oriental civilization, its relation to 
 the Scriptures, 232. 
 mind, its future destiny, 235. 
 races not dying out, 233. 
 
 ' ' Ossian , " its first influence on Eng- 
 lish literary taste, 229. 
 
 Oxford University, preaching in 
 the time of Queen Elizabeth, 
 331. 
 
 Painting, American artists in Italy, 
 299. 
 
 Pantheon, a symbol of the pulpit, 
 42. 
 
 Pantomime, its power in Greek and 
 in Italian usage, 219. 
 
 Park, Dr. E. A., his Shakspeare 
 Club, 208. 
 
 Parker, Theodore, his character, 
 246. 
 his leading ideas, 247. 
 his obligation to Christian civili- 
 zation, 246. 
 
 Parliament, English, use of classic 
 quotations, 182. 
 
 Partisanship in culture outgrown, 
 109. 
 
 Pascal, Blaise, his change of profes- 
 sion, 113. 
 
850 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pastoral duty auxiliary to the pul- 
 pit, 9. 
 Pastors, examples of scholarship 
 
 among them, 311. 
 Pathological phenomena in revi- 
 vals, 267. 
 Pedantry in sermons illustrated, 
 
 291. 
 Perfunctory preaching, 23, 24. 
 Perpetuity of great authors, 139. 
 Persistence in difficult composi- 
 tion, 307. 
 Personal history, neglect of, by 
 
 preachers, 5. 
 Pessimism and Optimism illustrat- 
 ed, 20. 
 Philosophical criticism, its effect 
 on juvenile opinions, 276. 
 method of reading, 273. 
 servitude, 204. 
 Physiological laws, their relation 
 
 to national minds, 162. 
 " Pilgrim's Progress, The," early 
 
 reception of it in England, 51. 
 Plagiarism, 199. 
 
 Plans of study necessarily ideal, 
 309. 
 negative value of ideal plans, 310. 
 Plato and Aristotle one in final in- 
 fluence, 108. 
 Plato, his travels, 84, 
 Pliny, his opinion on books, 145. 
 Pocock, Edward, criticism on his 
 
 preaching, 293. 
 Poetry, American and English, 
 compared, 179. 
 English, grouping of authors, 327. 
 in action, 179. 
 
 mistaken self-estimates concern- 
 ing it, 116. 
 Police, superintendent of, his opin- 
 ion of the clergy, 26. 
 Political preaching, 27, 28. 
 Pope, Alexander, De Quincey's es- 
 say on him, 164. 
 his use of Dryden, 303. 
 obligation of "The Messiah" to 
 the Scriptures, 240. 
 Popular idea of a clergyman, 21, 
 26. 
 literature, none exists, 36. 
 mind, its unsettled state, 49. 
 revolutions begin in lower class- 
 es, 45, 46. 
 revolutions, independent of the 
 
 upper classes, 44. 
 revolutions, relations of the cler- 
 gy to them, 49-^1. 
 rights balanced by duties, 53. 
 
 Portraits of character in the pul- 
 pit, unreal, 26. 
 Power, literature of, distinguished 
 
 from that of knowledge, 164. 
 Powers of control in literature, 
 135. 
 designated, 137. 
 enumerated, 136. 
 Practicability of study to a pastor, 
 309. 
 examples, 311. 
 
 some plan made practicable, 314. 
 not conflict with study of men, 
 313. 
 Preacher, his experience as a listen- 
 er, 4. 
 his need of knowledge of the 
 
 speech of the people, 216. 
 his profession and life in conflict, 
 
 24. 
 often deficient in illustrative 
 
 power, 285. 
 sometimes excessive in illustra- 
 tive power, 286. 
 Preaching, abstract, 72. 
 direct, 29. 
 essays, 223. 
 
 in times of excitement, 35. 
 of the Reformers, 290. 
 on the atonement, 262. 
 pedantry in, 291. 
 side-issues, 72. 
 to the church and to the ungodly, 
 
 30. 
 unphilosophical methods of it, 6. 
 untimely forms of it, 72. 
 Prescott, William, his affection for 
 his library, 304. 
 his opinion of the " Inferno," 147. 
 his reading, 143. 
 
 Humboldt's opinion of him, 180. 
 Present age, depreciation of it, 18. 
 Priesthood and ministry distinct, 
 
 54. 
 Priestly notion of the clergy, 22. 
 Private judgment, the right of it 
 exercised in New England, 186. 
 Principles of speech, unconscious 
 
 use of them, 102. 
 Probation the leading idea of hu- 
 man life, 31. 
 Profession, mistake in the choice 
 
 of one, 112. 
 Professional duties, their relation 
 to a pastor's studies, 192. 
 enthusiasm, 193. 
 reading central in a pastor's 
 
 studies, 256. 
 vigilance, 313. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 351 
 
 Professions, the, and literature, 155. 
 Dr. Arnold's opinion, 155. 
 Fronde's opinion, 155. 
 Proportion between ancient and 
 modern classics, 150. 
 biblical proportions of truth tend 
 
 to equipoise, 2(37. 
 in preaching to the church and to 
 
 the world, 30. 
 in reading, 143. 
 of executive power to critical 
 
 taste, 298. 
 of rebuke and commendation in 
 
 preaching, 30. 
 of truth in the Scriptures, 259, 
 
 2G6. 
 of truth, the distortion of it in 
 revivals, 2(36. 
 Pulpit, American, 180. 
 American, question of its decline. 
 
 181. 
 amount of literature in it annu- 
 
 ally, 239. 
 and pew, the distance between 
 
 them widening, 27. 
 compared with meetings for con- 
 ference, 214. 
 English, as related to the drama, 
 
 320. 
 English, at the restoration of the 
 
 Stuarts, 321. 
 English, at the time of the revo- 
 lution of 1688, 332. 
 English, in the reign of Eliza- 
 beth, 330. 
 French and German, compared 
 
 with English, 175. 
 idiosyncrasy of it, 42. 
 its policy in times of inquiry, 59. 
 not designed for select audiences, 
 42. 
 Puritan theology of New England 
 compared with that of Holland. 
 184. 
 "Queen Mab," its debt to Chris- 
 tian ideas, 243. 
 Quotation restricted, 198. 
 Quotations by Bishop Latimer, 291. 
 by contemporaries of Jeremv 
 
 Taylor, 292. 
 by George Herbert, 293. 
 from Greek and Latin authors. 
 292. ' 
 
 classic, in the English Parlia- 
 ment, 182. 
 classic, in United-States Senate. 
 182. ' 
 
 Races intermingled in Great Brit- 
 ain, 162. 
 
 Reading, breadth of range in it, 194. 
 
 classes of England, 37. 
 
 collateral, 289. 
 
 difference between it and study. 
 270. '' 
 
 for mental quickening, examples, 
 303. 
 
 philosophically, illustrated, 273. 
 
 philosophically, necessary to ex- 
 plain anomalies, 274. 
 
 preliminary to composition, 301. 
 
 variety useless, if not scholarly, 
 
 with generous judgment of au- 
 thors, 303. 
 with self-appreciation, 303. 
 Real life the medium of revealing 
 
 truth, 18. 
 Rebuke, the mission of, 29. 
 Recapitulation of the argument on 
 
 the study of men, 94. 
 Reed, Professor Henry, his defini- 
 tion of literature, 130. 
 his meditations on libraries, 134. 
 his opinion of belles-lettres, 192. 
 his spirit in criticism, 304. 
 Reform, biblical reform temperate, 
 
 philosophy of it, 58. 
 Reformation, the, preaching of the 
 
 Reformers, 289. 
 Representative character of unwrit- 
 ten literature, 217. 
 Resemblances in literature, 282. 
 Responsibility of man, unscriptural 
 
 modes of preaching it, 260. 
 Restoration of the Stuarts, state of 
 
 the pulpit at the, 331. 
 Restorationism, increase of faith in 
 
 it, 59. 
 Retribution, biblical and scientific 
 forms of the doctrine, 260. 
 effect of Spurgeon's way of 
 
 preaching it, 294. 
 popular opinions on the doctrine 
 revised, 59. 
 Revision of the New Testament, 
 
 its sale, 239. 
 Revival of letters, 125. 
 Revivals, books on them, 15. 
 clergy who ignore or oppose 
 
 them, 12, 16. 
 docility in the study of them, 16. 
 foreshadowed, 59. 
 inquiries respecting them, 14. 
 not provincial, 11. 
 pathological affections in them. 
 267. ' 
 
 philosophy of them, 13. 
 
852 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bevivals, sought for by unphilo- 
 sophical expedients, 6. 
 study of them, 14. 
 the biblical proportions of truth 
 
 best adapted to them, 266. 
 value of them to the Church, 16. 
 Eevivalists, study of their biogra- 
 phies, 14. 
 Kevolution of 1688, English pulpit 
 
 at that time, 332. 
 Revolutions, the divine law of their 
 
 working, 47, 48. 
 Rhetorical treatises, adverse opin- 
 ions of them, 92, 94. 
 Right and left hands physiologically 
 
 equal, 205. 
 Rights, popular, balanced by duties, 
 
 53. 
 Robertson, Frederick, his opinion 
 
 of President Edwards, 190. 
 Rogers, Henry, on plans of reading, 
 
 127. 
 Roman literature, leading repre- 
 sentatives of it, 137. 
 Ruskin, John, his description of a 
 
 false taste, 205. 
 Sachs, Hans, influence of his 
 
 hymns, 242. 
 Sandys, Bishop, chaplain to Queen 
 
 Elizabeth, 331. 
 Satan, his mental unity a cause of 
 
 his power, 321. 
 Scandinavian literatures, their place 
 in comparison with others, 161. 
 Schiller, Coleridge's translations of 
 
 his dramas, 147. 
 Scholarship, universal, 1.31. 
 Scholasticism in the pulpit, .32. 
 Schoolmen, great men not such, 
 
 141. 
 Scotland, her pulpit in the eigh- 
 teenth century, 209. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, circulation of his 
 books, 39. 
 his experience in composing, 297. 
 his ideal of life at Abbotsford, 
 
 154. 
 his opinion of Campbell, 305. 
 his opinion of common people, 
 
 90. 
 his opinion of literary society, 89, 
 
 215. 
 his study of men, 88. 
 origin of the " Lay of the Last 
 
 Minstrel," 107. 
 the authorship of " Waverley," 
 273. 
 Seclusion of the clergy, 22. 
 literary, unhealthiness of it, 216. 
 
 Secular assemblies, their subjection 
 to eloquent speech, 9. 
 parson described, 24. 
 Selection of books, 128. 
 Self-appreciation, 123. 
 
 and self-distrust, 305. 
 Self-educated men, 122. 
 Self-distrust of Thomas Campbell, 
 
 305. 
 Self-estimates, errors in them, 
 
 117. 
 Selfishness, literary, 153. 
 Sensationalism, ignorance of those 
 
 who crave it, 65. 
 Serial preaching on the Catechism, 
 
 266. 
 Servitude to philosophical schools, 
 
 204. 
 Shakspeare Club in the Andover 
 Seminary, 208. 
 German criticism of him, 165. 
 his ideal of woman, 241. 
 his study of men, 85. 
 not a universal genius, 200. 
 Shelley, Percy B., effect of " Chris- 
 tabel " upon him, 107. 
 his resemblance to Titian, 283. 
 indebtedness of "Queen Mab" 
 to the Scriptures, 243, 
 Sheridan, Richard B., compared 
 
 with Burke, 284. 
 Side-issues in preaching, 72. 
 Similitudes of genius, 283, 
 Simplicity in preaching approved 
 
 by the best hearers, 64. 
 Sin, heathen and biblical ideas of 
 its forgiveness contrasted, 261. 
 Slavery, American, history of the 
 
 controversy, 46. 
 Southey, Robert, a quotation from 
 him, 132. 
 his advice respecting composi- 
 tion, 299, 306. 
 his criticism on " Madoc," 306. 
 his dependence on the pen for 
 thought, 296. 
 Sovereignty of God, biblical and 
 scientific ways of preaching it, 
 260. 
 Spenser, Edmund, debt of the 
 " Faerie Queene" to the Scrip- 
 tures, 240. 
 Spiritualism, an illustration of it, 
 60. 
 its relation to popular opinions 
 of retribution, 60. 
 Spurgeon, Charles H., his severe 
 preaching and its effect, 260, 
 294. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 853 
 
 Stereotype-plates, opinion of them 
 
 by publishers at first, 39. 
 Stothard, Thomas, his professional 
 
 vigilance, 313. 
 Stowe, H. B., her rank as a novel- 
 ist, 180. 
 Stuart, Professor Moses, his early 
 judgment of himself, 114. 
 his early poverty of thought, 
 
 296. 
 his habits of reading and study, 
 270. 
 Stuarts, restoration of, state of the 
 
 puljiit at that time, 331. 
 Study of men, examples in the 
 practice of eminent men, 83-92. 
 preacher's study of his own mind, 
 
 3. 
 preacher's study of other men, 8. 
 Studies of a pastor, an independent 
 plan necessary, 321. 
 a scholastic plan not pertinent, 
 
 322. 
 encouraged by the certainty of 
 
 growth, 324. 
 habits of certain European pas- 
 tors, 311. 
 ideal plan necessary, 309. 
 limitations of them, 133. 
 negative value of an ideal plan, 
 
 310. 
 practicability of them, .309. 
 rapid study practicable in middle 
 
 life, 324. 
 so conducted as to admit of in- 
 terruptions, 323. 
 so conducted as to secure concen- 
 tration, .323. 
 Style, relative value of strength 
 and beauty, 284. 
 variety and excellence of it in 
 the Scriptures, 253. 
 Suffering classes, adaptation of the 
 
 pulpit to them, 30. 
 Sumner, Charles, contrasted with 
 Stephen A. Douglas, 10. 
 his use of classic quotations, 182. 
 Sweden, catechetical instruction, 
 263. 
 the lascari, 264. 
 Symmetry of culture, 285. 
 of culture necessary to courage, 
 
 20. 
 of the biblical system of truth, 
 253. 
 Sympathetic character of high cul- 
 ture, 201. 
 Table-talk, its value in many fami- 
 lies, 212. 
 
 Tasso Torquato, his self-distrust, 
 
 299. 
 Taste, a superlative faculty, 100. 
 its working in mental culture, 
 
 101. 
 not virtue, 100. 
 Ruskin's description of a false 
 
 taste, 205. 
 without executive skill, 103. 
 Tastes, clerical, demoralized, 41. 
 juvenile, 99. 
 natural, not to be suppressed, 
 
 288. 
 overgrown, 287. 
 Taylor, Jeremy, pedantry in the 
 
 pulpit of his times, 293. 
 " Thanatopsis," its indebtedness to 
 
 the Scriptures, 240. 
 Theology, biblical and scientific 
 forms of it, 256. 
 influence of literary culture in 
 
 liberalizing it, 142. 
 of New-England original, 184. 
 Third class of minds between the 
 
 church and the world, 73, 
 Tholuck, Professor F. A., his opin- 
 ion of Prussian pastors, 314. 
 Tillotson, Archbishop, Dryden's 
 
 use of his works, 104. 
 To^Ti-meeting of New England, 
 its principle suggested by Je- 
 thro, 230. 
 Translations, Coleridge's transla- 
 tions of Schiller, 147. 
 the reading of them defended, 
 
 147. 
 use of them by R. W. Emerson, 
 146. 
 Tyndale, William, debt of the Eng- 
 lish Church to him, 330. 
 Types of preaching, denomination- 
 al diversity of them, 210. 
 Unity of discourse, want of it at 
 the Reformation, 290. 
 of spirit necessary to success in 
 study, 321. 
 Universal scholarship a fiction, 131. 
 Untimely preaching, 72. 
 Unwritten literature, its represen- 
 tative character, 217. 
 magnitude and variety of it, 212. 
 should be studied, 211. 
 crises in history create it, 213. 
 Utah, preaching in, 28. 
 Vacations, reading of fiction in 
 
 them, 327. 
 Variety in reading, 194. 
 necessary to perfection of knowl- 
 edge, 201. 
 
354 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Variety in reading useless, if not 
 scholarly, 194. 
 valuable for its own sake, 200. 
 Vernacular language, Dr. G. P. 
 Marsh's opinion of it, 151. 
 literature, the claims of it to as- 
 cendency, 151. 
 Vinci, Leonardo da, his fastidious 
 
 taste, 298. 
 Vocabulary, English, Dr. John- 
 son's opinion of it, 171. 
 Voltaire, his influence on the 
 French literature, 137. 
 his influence on the French revo- 
 lution, 170. 
 his use of Massillon, 303, 
 Walpole, Horace, his opinion of 
 
 antiquarian libraries, 129. 
 Wasteful reading, 143. 
 Waste of power in the pulpit, 31. 
 Watts, Dr. Isaac, his hymn on the 
 
 atonement, 31. 
 Waverley novels, discovery of their 
 
 authorship, 273. 
 Webster, Daniel, his imitation of 
 John Adams, 301. 
 his use of the Scriptures, 242. 
 preaching criticised by him, 64. 
 
 Whitefield, George, disappoint- 
 ment in reading his sermons, 
 220. 
 his study of men, 91. 
 reception of him in England, 
 68. 
 Wickliffe, John, his place iu the 
 history of the English pulpit, 
 329. 
 Wordsworth, William, a quotation 
 from, 31, 1G8, 241. 
 " Ode on Immortality," its debt 
 
 to the Scriptures, 241. 
 his opinion of English literature, 
 
 140. 
 his opinion of Milton, 140. 
 his rejjly to Jeffrey, 101, 
 Jeffrey's criticism of him, 101. 
 the debt of " The Excursion " to 
 the Scriptures, 241. 
 World, distinction between it and 
 
 the Church, 70, 73. 
 Young men, the world predisposed 
 
 to favor them, 308. 
 Youth, the consciousness of proba- 
 tion begins early, 31. 
 " Zurich Letters," no such volume 
 iu New England, 186. 
 
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 Majesty's Senior Inspector of Schools. 
 
 rREDERIOK the GREAT and die SEVEN TEARS' WAR. By F. W. Longhail. 
 of BaUic CoUege, Oxford. ^^ 
 
 The above 13 Volumes in Roxbnrg Style, Leather Labels and Gilt Top. Pu 
 up in a handsome Box. Sold only in Sets. Price per Set, $13.00. 
 
 ••• Tke above book for tale by all booksellers^ or will be tent, ^tt #r «x^*m 
 ttmrgatj^d, upon receipt qf the price by the publishers. 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
 
 743 AND 745 Broauway, Nkw Yoks 
 
RE-ISSUE OF THE 
 
 Complete Writings of 
 
 Dr. y. G. Holland, 
 
 It is believed that the aggregate sale of Dr. Holland's Books, 
 amounting as it does to half a million volumes, exceeds the 
 circulation of the writings of any other American author. There 
 is not a single book of his which has not had an unquestionable 
 success, and most of them have been in such constant and 
 increasing demand that the plates are actually worn out. 
 
 Since The Bay Path, Bittersweet, and the Titcomb Letters 
 were first published, twenty millions of people have been added 
 to our population, and an entire new generation of readers has 
 come upon the stage. For these reasons, a new edition has 
 become imperatively necessary, and the publishers have done 
 their best to make their part of the work correspond with the 
 importance which the popular verdict has given to Dr. Holland's 
 productions. It is believed that the whole work will compare 
 favorably with the best issues of the American press. 
 
 TITCOMB'S LETTERS, EVERY-DAY TOPICS.— 
 
 GOLD FOIL, First Series. 
 
 THE JONES FAMILY, EVERY-DAY TOPICS.— 
 
 LESSONS IN LIFE, Second Series. (Now first 
 
 PLAIN TALKS, published.) 
 
 BITTERSWEET, KATHRINA, 
 
 MISTRESS OF THE PURITAN'S GUEST, and 
 
 MANSE, Other Poems. 
 
 SEVENOAKS, NICHOLAS MINTURN, 
 
 ARTHUR BONNICASTLE, BAY PATH, 
 MISS GILBERT'S CAREER. 
 
 Each one volume, 12mo, - - Price, $1,25, 
 
 *^^* For sale by all booksellers, or sent, post-paid, upon receipt of 
 price, by 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, Publishers, 
 
 743 AND 745 Broadway, New York. 
 
Date Due 
 
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