the range of his vision at the moment he uttered that fierce blast against unpreaching prelates, commencing: "What are they doing? Some occupied in the king's matters, some in the privy council; so troubled with lordly living, so proud in palaces, couched in courts, ruffling in their rents, dancing in their dominions, burthened with ambassages, pampering of their paunches." It calls to mind old Wimbledon's picture of the clergy of his day, as sketched in his Annals: "They be clothed as knights, they speaken as earles, while others are winning much gear as merchants. These proud prelates are too much blent with shining of riches, for they make their mansions like churches in greatness; but the poore man, for default of clothes, beggeth, and with an empty wallet cryeth at their doores."

Jeremy Taylor, the immortal author of Holy Living and Dying, a work that Wilmott has so happily characterized as "a divine pastoral, in which the solemnities of piety and wisdom, like the painter's tomb in Arcadia, breathe a tender seriousness over all the scenery of fancy, eloquence, and learning," did not hesitate to resort to humor whenever he thought it would enforce the truth of his text. His sermons are full of a vivacity as exhilarating as that which makes Livy the most entertaining of historians, and Montaigne the most charming of essayists. He draws his illustrations from every quarter, manifesting a most astonishing familiarity with all the learning of his time, and aptness in applying it. The son of a barber, he early manifested a deep and earnest love for study. He was the wonder of his college, both on account of his astonishing mental precociousness, as for the beauty of his person and the sweet amiability of his temper. "When he preached his first sermon," says a cotemporary, congregation took him for some young angel, newly descended from visions of glory." His charming temperament and lambent humor are constantly visible in his pulpit discourses. How humorously he describes the wife who has usurped the rule of the husband. "A ruling woman is intolerable; but that is not all, she is miserable too. It is a sad calamity, my brethren, for a woman to be joined to a fool or a weak person; it is like a guard of geese to keep the capital, or as if a flock of sheep should read grave lectures to their shepherd, and give him orders how or when he should conduct them to pasture. It is a curse that God threatened sinning people, to be ruled by weaker people. To have a fool to one's master is the fate of miserable and unblessed

people; and the wife can never be happy unless she be governed by a prudent lord, whose commands are sober counsels, whose authority is paternal, and whose sentences are charity."

Of the evil tongue he declares: "It sometimes praises God and rails at men; it is sometimes set on fire, and then it puts whole cities in combustion. It is unruly, and no more to be restrained than the breath of a tempest. Reason should go before it, and, when it does not, repentance comes after it. It was intended for an organ of divine praise, but sometimes the devil plays upon it, and then it sounds like a screech-owl."

Commenting upon the sin of much speaking, he says: "And indeed there are some persons so full of nothings that, like the strait sea of Pontus, they perpetually empty themselves by the mouth, making every company or single person they fasten on to be their Propontis. Such an one was Aneximinus. He was an ocean of words, but only a drop of understanding." In his sermon on the Mercy of the Divine Justice we have this passage: "The Italian gentleman was certainly a great lover of his sleep who was angry with the lizard that waked him when a viper was creeping into his mouth. When the devil is entering into us, to poison our spirits and steal away our souls when in sleep, God sends his sharp messages to awaken us, and we call that the enemy, and use arts to cure the remedy." Dr. Rustin, concluding his very eloquent eulogy upon Bishop Taylor, dethat he had the good humor of a gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the profoundness of a philosopher, the wisdom of a chancellor, the sagacity and beauty of an angel, and the piety of a saint." Taylor's religion was of too cheerful a character to be shrouded by the gloom of asceticism. He was too close a student of the springs and motives of the human heart, not to be aware that a religion thus preached could never attain a lasting lodgment in the minds of men, or make any thing else than sour hypocrites. He therefore essayed to win men to the doctrines that he preached by comprehensive, cheerful dis courses, illuminated with the light of a chaste fancy, and mel lowed by a gentle, persuasive humor that fascinated while it convinced.

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Did space permit, we might further illustrate our subject by numerous extracts from the sermons of Andrews, Hooker, South, and many of lesser fame. We can not refrain from giving a quotation characteristic of the humorous element of the early Eng

lish pulpit from Henry Smith, who was a preacher at St. Clement's, in London, and who died about the year 1610. In discoursing on the marriage tie, he thus settles the question of equality or superiority of the sexes: "The woman was made out of a rib from the side of Adam, not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out of his side to be a support to him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be most tenderly beloved. God so ordered this matter between this man and this woman, that this agglutination and adhesion, the one to the other, should be perpetual; for by taking a bone from the man, who was somewhat monstrous by a bone too much, to strengthen the woman, putting flesh instead thereof to mollify the man, he made a most sweet complexion or agglutination between them, like harmony in music, for their amiable cohabitation. It is specially to be noted, my brethren, that this bone which God took from the sleeping man was out of the midst of him, as Christ wrought salvation out of the midst of the earth. The species of the bone, too, is noteworthy; it is expressed to be a rib, a bone of the side, not of the head, for woman should not be domina, a ruler. Nor was it of any anterior part, because she is not prælata, preferred before the man. Nor a bone of the foot, as she is not serva, a slave. But mark it, brethren, it was a bone of the side, because she is socia, the companion of the man. For do they not walk side by side and cheek by cheek, as companions? Finally, brethren, it must be plain to the meanest comprehension that, whenever a man taketh a wife-and every man, if he is a man, will do it-let him remember the maim made in his own side in the garden of Eden, and endeavor to restore it by a healthy and delecta ble rib."

Here we have a homely but truthful and natural picture of the relative positions it was intended the sexes should occupy in this world, in most striking contrast with those wretched caricatures, so monstrous and shocking to every refined mind, thrown off by the unsexed advocates of women's rights in this strange age of ours. But Milton more delicately and beautifully sets forth the true, natural, and beautiful relations of the sexes to each other, in the following exquisite description of the newly created in paradise:

"Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed:

For contemplation he, and valor formed;

For softness she, and sweet attractive grace;
He for God only, she for God in him.
His fair large front and eye sublime
Declared absolute rule; and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders huge;
She, as a vail down to her slender waist,
Her unadorned golden tresses wore

Disheveled, as the vine curls her tendrils;

Which implied subjection, but to be used with gentle sway,
By her yielded, by him best received."

It will be well for the world if it leaves these beautiful relations undisturbed. They are the natural relations of the sexes, and any attempt to change them must only result in manifold evils to both. The early English divines, judging from this extract suggesting these reflections, clearly understood the true distinctive differences in the relations of the sexes; and often seized upon the occasions of the marriage ceremonial to enforce them in the quaint and humorous style of preaching of that day. The modern pulpit, in abandoning almost entirely a resort to humorous illustration, has by so doing most certainly demolished the force and efficacy of its teachings. Old Fuller once most truthfully said "that an ounce of cheerfulness and humor was worth a pound of sadness to serve God with." Say what we may of this sad world in which our lot is cast, sad because of sin and death, a little of the sherry must be mingled with the bitters of life to make our condition endurable. Our graver

faculties and thoughts are much chastened and improved by a continued blending and interfusion of the lighter and more cheerful; so that the sable cloud should continually be made to turn forth its silver lining on the sight. The preacher's duties are similar to those of the orator, as defined by Cicero: "Dixit quidam eloquens et verum dixit, ita dicere eloquentem ut doceat, ut delectet, ut flectat." Preaching, then, has three ends, namely, that the truth should be known to us, should be heard with pleasure, and move us; and in order to compass all these requisites, there exists the necessity of an occasional resort to humorous illustration. "God has given us wit and humor, flavor and brightness, laughter and perfumes to enliven the days of our pilgrimage," says the genial, whole-hearted Sydney Smith. Why, then, should not his gifts be used and enjoyed as well in the pulpit as out of it? They are his, and therefore good gifts; and if

the preacher has bestowed upon him a genius for humor, why should he be forced to keep it down and under restraint, substituting for it a dry, unnatural, and costive style, lacking in all the persuasive properties and graces of genuine eloquence? It is a sad mistake to suppose that a man should be gloomy and morose because he is devout; as if misery and gloom were acceptable to God on their own account, and playful humor and cheerfulness offenses.

The ascetic style of preaching that delights "to deal damnation round the land," and to represent the great Ruler of the universe as a God of rigid, inexorable justice instead of infinite mercy and love, must necessarily create hypocrites. Men, it should be remembered, who are frightened into convictions of religious truth, are apt to forget all about it when the first spasm of alarm is over. As Bishop South in one of his sermons says of popularity, so is it with this species of religion': "Like lightning, it only flashes upon the face and is gone; and it is well if it do not hurt the man." Such preachers may be conscientious and earnest, but their solemnity and asceticism both in and out of the pulpit cast a gloom about the doctrines that they preach, rendering them repulsive to the great majority of their hearers. The apostle who "was made all things to all men that he might save some," and who so earnestly instructed Timothy "to be gentle to all men," evidently did not relish this style of preaching. If the modern clergy would add knowledge of the springs and motives of human action to the sum of their other gifts, it would enlarge greatly their sphere of influence. The fact is, the system of education pursued in our theological seminaries savors too much of the monastic character, cramping instead of enlarging and liberalizing their minds. It is a fact well known that our most able, eloquent, and efficient pulpit orators have been and are men who for years prior to entering the ministry were in the active pursuits of the mercantile world or in the practice of the law and of medicine. Their previous training schooled them into a practical knowledge of human nature, liberalizing their views, sharpening their faculties, giving them great advantages over their less favored colleagues, who had fewer opportunities, amid the cloistered shades of theological seminaries of acquiring that comprehensive knowledge of man's nature and the world's ways so efficient for good when exhibited in the pulpit.