sure its doing its errand. Every friend of virtue knows the power of lively, animated conversation, in the hands of wicked men, to corrupt our youth; but it is hard to convince those who have not made full proof of conversation for good purposes, how great a power is lying unused in their hands. We often hear it stated that preaching is God's appointed method of saving the world; and the passage is quoted, "It pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe;" but no evidence has been adduced to vindicate the assumption that the reading of written sermons is the preaching here intended. The reasonable presumption is that written sermons were wholly unknown when the Apostle recorded that fact. His charge to Timothy to "preach the word, instant in season, out of season," harmonizes well with the supposition that he talked, talked earnestly, and as the Spirit gave him utterance. When Christ commanded his disciples, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature," had he any intention that a line or two from that gospel should suffice as a mere motto to some long disquisition on the nature of true virtue, interspersed with hints of Christ and his salvation as remote from the apprehension of the common hearer as the fixed stars? We have, it is true, a great many discourses that are not so bad as this; but we have a great many that fail of establishing an inevitable conviction, this is the very word of God. We have many a prayer after a sermon, that God would bless his truth now presented, which starts the question, Has his truth been presented? We had a good text; but the long discourse failed of establishing any close and living relation to that text; and taking matter and manner into the account, we cannot resist the conviction that the Lord is of our mind, in demurring to recognize what has now been spoken, as his message to that congregation. We came to the house of prayer hoping to meet a messenger from God, speaking the truth in love; not love in a figure, or on stilts; not love "in linked sweetness long drawn out;" or in well rounded periods, in the full costume of pulpit rhetoric and logic; but love unrestrained and overflowing from an inexhaustible foun

tain of divine and human tenderness, from the very life of God in the soul of man. In place of that we get an essay, a disquisition, a homily. We asked for bread, and received a stone.

Take the ministerial account of existing failures; here it is: "There is talent enough, thought enough, but lack of adaptation." Could there be a greater lack than this? Why a stone has weight, and form, and color, in perfection; but it lacks adaptation; it won't nourish. The preaching which so extensively prevails may have a form of sacred words, but what if it fails to get the ear and the interest of the majority of the congregation? Is it successful preaching?

"Ah," it is said, "preaching is different from anything else; it has the peculiar disadvantage of offering an unwelcome theme; for the majority of the people, like Gallio, care for none of these things."

It is not to be denied that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God;" but the attempt to derive from this a full account of the want of interest in our Sabbath services, comes of an unwillingness to convict ourselves of failure in duty. The assertion, these are spiritual truths, which only the spiritual man can discern, is hastily, and most unwarrantably, assumed to be equivalent to the declaration, that faithful preaching must necessarily be uninteresting to the majority of any congregation. This assumption, if allowed, would certainly offer a convenient screen, for those who desire one, to protect uninteresting and unproductive discourses from rebuke and censure; but it cannot be allowed, for it is utterly untrue. The real account of the matter has been perhaps inadvertently, but truly given; the sermons which fail to get the ear and interest of our congregations, "fail through lack of adaptation.'

"What!” it will perhaps be demanded, with flushed cheek and perturbed mind, "do you mean to assert that I do not preach that gospel which St. Paul declares to be 'the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth""?

We assert nothing. We simply assent to what you have affirmed, as a truth confirmed by our own observation, that there is in most preaching a lack of adaptation. It is adapted to weary and to alienate, not to interest and to enlist in the service of

Christ. It seems in your hands to lack the manliness and the heartiness of the Apostle whom you have quoted. The man who gloried in the cross of Christ, who cared naught for bonds and affliction, who declared, "None of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy and the ministry which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God." Think you this man ever contented himself with reading his message to an uninterested congregation, consoling himself under his unproductive labor with the assertion that the gospel must needs be dull to the unspiritual? No indeed! that did not the Apostle Paul. He had experience of congregations of all sorts; believing and unbelieving; decorous and riotous; assenting and dissenting; but uninterested !—never.

"Well, what would you have? He that finds fault with our existing order of things is bound to point out the remedy. How shall we amend?"

We answer, get a deeper experience of the love of God in your own soul. Give yourself to Christ in a far more comprehensive consecration than you have ever yet attained to. Get such an experience of the indwelling Comforter that you shall dare to tell it, naturally, earnestly, with a single eye and heart to the weal of your hearer; in sublime indifference to all that the schools and the schoolmen have to say against untrammeled conversational preaching. You want nothing but a greatly increased knowledge, and fearless love of Christ, and of his love to man, to supply all your lack of adaptation. Get this and you will need no argument in favor of a natural and most effective manner of preaching. And do not fail to remember that you can have what you need for the asking; for your Heavenly Father is more willing to give his Spirit to them that ask him, than parents to give good gifts to their children.

ARTICLE X.-ENGLAND DURING OUR WAR.

"BRITAIN was too jealous of America to govern it justly; too ignorant of it to govern it well; and too distant from it to govern it at all." Thus wrote Thomas Paine, in one of his terse and stirring pamphlets of the Revolutionary era. Though three generations of independence have absolved Great Britain from all responsibility for the government of the territory included in the United States, and though the distance between the two countries is practically annihilated by the swiftness and frequency of intercourse, it is as true to-day, for quite other reasons, that Britain is too jealous of the United States as a political and commercial power, to do justice to our cause, and too ignorant of our Constitution and policy to comprehend us at all, in this new and strange crisis of our affairs. When we speak thus of Britain, we mean that England which is represented before the world by its governing class, its political leaders, and largely by its metropolitan press ;that England whose most accomplished and typical men, such as Earl Russell and the Right Honorable W. E. Gladstone, M. P., can discover in the uprising of a great people for the defense of national unity, of constitutional government, and of regulated liberty, only a war of ambition for so many leagues of disputed territory; whose most imperial and imperious journal has constantly averred, for twelve months past, that “the United States of North America have ceased to be;" and whose leading literary and political reviews have vied with each other in blundering references to our history and geography, and in disparaging comments upon our political institutions and our social condition.

But we do not forget that there is another England. There was a party in England upon whose intelligence and justice our fathers relied, down to the very day of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, Jefferson made it matter of com

plaint against Congress for amending his draft of that paper, that "the pusillanimous idea that we had friends in England worth keeping terms with, still haunted the minds of many," and that "for this reason those passages which conveyed censures on the people of England were struck out, lest they should give them offense."* No doubt that memorable Congress was, upon this point, more wise and just than Jefferson. Franklin knew well the friendly disposition of Chatham and Camden in the House of Lords, of Wilkes and afterward of Burke in the House of Commons. "Were I an American," said Camden, in his place, "I would resist to the last drop of my blood." My Lords," said Chatham, "resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your imperious doctrine of the omnipotence of Parliament and the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave." In the House of Commons, Wilkes uttered the prophetic warning: "In the great scale of empire you will decline from the decision of this day; and the Americans will rise to independence, to power, to all the greatness of the most renowned states; for they build on the solid basis of general public liberty;" and Edmund Burke gave to reluctant but fascinated auditors his magnificent predictions of the greatness and glory of America. Then, as now, there were in England friends of America "worth keeping terms with;" though Dr. Samuel Johnson and John Wesley then, like the Saturday Reviewers and the Thomas Guthries of to-day, vented their ponderous sarcasm and pious invective against our American struggle, and British jealousy and ignorance failed to appreciate the greatness and the justice of our cause.

All the phases of English sentiment touching American affairs, that were developed during our Revolutionary struggle, have repeated themselves in the current war. There have not been wanting political leaders and men of aristocratic associations who have shown an intelligent comprehension of the causes of the war, and a candid appreciation of the government of the United States; the great middle class of England,

*

Autobiography, p. 19, in Vol. 1 of Washington's edition of his works.