sublime efforts ever addressed to an intelligent audience." This is indeed a habit into which it must be the easiest thing in the world to fall; but, whether for good or evil, I am inclined to think that an audience never listens less to prayer than when it is misdirected toward itself. There seems to me, however, one thing worse than praying and forgetting whom we should address; and that is, praying and forgetting whom we are addressing. The prayer in question was interlarded with invocations of the divine name to an extent enough, of itself, to grate very harshly upon the taste; but as to the spirit of the prayer the suppliant would certainly have appeared to any unprejudiced hearer to have been addressing a being of exalted rank and of high character, but not otherwise differing greatly from himself. I have heard, who has not?-addresses to the Deity of a very extraordinary nature, from uneducated men, and however difficult I may have found it to repress a smile, I have never for a moment supposed that that would be charged to the speaker as irreverence, which even my imperfect judgment could see to be nothing more, and nothing worse, than pure ignorance. But familiarity in approach to the divine being, upon the part of an educated man perfectly acquainted with the powers of language and the meaning of words-is quite another matter; and the effect, to my mind, was simply shocking. I have been a Dissenter all my life, and must frankly confess that I have found its system of extempore prayer a difficulty prone to end in total failure. What can our petitions be, after all, but repetitions? Even in our private prayers, I cannot help thinking that, faith being general and submission general, we err if we begin to specify details as though we were drawing up a legal document to which an omission might prove fatal. But even the more important personal matters, as to which any Christian would be sure to ask for guidance, are-with few exceptions-prohibited to the pulpit, which, absolutely unable to enter into individual cases, has to confine itself for the most part to the purest generalisations. So far, liturgical and non-liturgical services are almost upon a par; and I think a dissenter must be very simple minded, or very prejudiced, if he supposes that by getting rid of a liturgy he has escaped the danger of formalism, and the necessity of repetition. Common sense seems to me to point in the opposite direction; and to lead us to expect that the benefits which are supposed to accrue from the system of extemporaneous prayer, will be dependent, not only upon powers which are exceptional, but upon a frame of mind which everyone knows cannot be commanded, and which it is therefore idle to count upon at set intervals. But supposing informal prayer to possess every advantage which its friends could claim for it, it is impossible that it should escape liability to dangers arising from personal unfitness or error. I feel no doubt whatever that the prayer which so shocked me was offered up in all sincerity and good intent. I am at least equally certain that to address the Almighty with irreverent familiarity in public can do nothing but harm, no matter how well-meaning the motive may have been. Eloquence of diction is far worse than useless, in prayer. Minuteness of detail is needless, even

where it is possible. What is left to us, but the spirit of supreme reverence; alike needful whether we pray, or trust, or submit; not to be expressed-much less superseded-by any fashion of speech whatsoever, but perfectly capable of expressing itself without any. This given, the

spirit, at any rate, of prayer, cannot be absent. This away, forms or the absence of forms are equally valueless, and we had better be silent. Neither in the still solemnity of a Friends' meeting, or in the sonorous monotony of the Catholic mass, should I find intelligible utterance of my feelings; but give me either of these, a thousand times over, rather than that I should be compelled to listen to a man who almost presumes to give advice to his Maker.

Had I been writing for effect, it would have been most inartistic upon my part to have left the sermon to the last, because there is really nothing to say about it. Not that it was by any means destitute of ability, but the reverse. The preacher almost ostentatiously showed that he had burdened himself with no notes; but he need not have troubled himself-his sermon would have proved that. Its general tendency, if strings of clever commonplaces have tendencies, was to the effect that all was sure to be right, that we had no occasion to trouble ourselves about Time or Eternity; that, in fact, God would see to everything. Here was a rendering of the truth that God is Love, free enough in all conscience, and so far heavenly as to appear much better suited to heaven than earth. If all our remorses and tribulations and longings and terrors are to be summed up into so concise a compass, the riddle of the world is soon read; and with reverence be it said, was hardly worth the propounding. But hungry souls who may have gone to that house of prayer famishing for comfort and for nourishment, must, I expect, have gone away as empty as they came. To those who need bread it can but be a matter of secondary importance whether they are put off with a stone or with a dish of sugared froth. The latter may be the pleasantest, but one or the other equally means starvation.

II.

After my unfortunate experience at chapel, I not unnaturally directed my steps next Sunday to church. The town of Slowborough, to which I wended my way, lies high and dry among great sweeps of down-like common and vast corn-fields; and is principally remarkable for having been a great deal more important in the past than ever it is likely to be in the future. It possesses a dozen shops, in which the archæology of commerce may be advantageously studied, as I can testify who have seen the same goods in the same windows for some years past—a dozen public-houses, decorous resorts to which those who have nothing to do repair to do it-four streets, down which you might fire a gun at any time without much fear of doing mischief-an old-fashioned pillared market house which forms a delightful resort for the young in wet

weather-a workhouse, and a church. Forty coaches are said to have passed through it daily in the old coaching days. They are represented by an omnibus uncertain in its time and limited in its accommodation. A great ecclesiastical establishment spread its influence from it all over the surrounding country. It is reduced to a heap of antique stones in a garden. Strange old-world carvings are built into the walls of its houses with an effect more saddening than ornamental. Stately stone mansions here and there invite people of large families and limited incomes temptingly, but are mostly "to let.' Smaller tenements occasionally fall down for lack of repair, and no man rebuilds them. Slowborough is now, as nearly as possible, four and ahalf miles from anywhere, and appears to be dropping, calmly and complacently, clean out of human ken. Still it has its Church, sole relic of all its vanished greatness; spacious, wealthy, and restored. Into a comfortable seat in this edifice I was courteously ushered, and found enough to occupy me, before the service began, in wondering what the restoring architect's object could have been in placing an elaborate sham window-frame in front of an old stained-glass window, in such fashion that the latter was never wholly concealed, nor more than half revealed, place yourself as you would. Of the Church prayers I need say nothing. They were not very well read, and the musical portion presented considerable ground for improvement; but this part of the service was performed decorously-if somewhat coldly-and the beautiful liturgy of the Church of England is always the same. The clergyman took as his text a passage from the account of the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon, which struck me as being singularly insusceptible of practical treatment; just one of those historical points in fact upon which it is so easy to talk so much, and say so little. All fears, however, arising from the nature of the text, were speedily dispelled by the discovery of the fact that the sermon had no earthly connection therewith. The departed potentates were evidently intended merely as pegs, upon which, when once screwed-up, we hang whatsoever we think fit and trouble ourselves no more about them. What the preacher did think fit to attach to them was something very strange indeed; for his sermon was simply an angry, and sometimes even violent diatribe against the Liberation Society. I have not the slightest sympathy with the Liberation Society, and happen to be of the firm belief that its objects, however theoretically right, could not be carried out in the present day without the most deplorable results. But I also believe that the pulpit is neither the place for the attack or for the defence of any such matters, and when I heard the members of the body in question held up to wholesale scorn as men whose only desire it was to rob the Church," I could not repress a feeling of indignation. Surely sufficient harm has been done in political life by the reckless assumption that all who are with us are right, and all who differ from us are knaves or fools, without importing such a method of judgment into the very service of God. I know men who have given time, money, health, and comfort to the furtherance of this movement, which they believe to be just and

feasible. I am of a totally different opinion; but shall I on that account cease to respect them, or shall I stigmatise them as a horde of robbers? Such sentiments appear to me sufficiently unholy anywhere, that they should be expressed from a pulpit is beyond bearing; and that any hearer should spiritually profit by them passes all rational belief. So feeling, I left the stately and ornate church precisely as I had left the neat and decorous chapel-empty, or worse.

I should be very sorry to be understood as meaning these instances to stand as examples of my average experience, which they certainly are not. I simply give them as illustrations, which have come under my own recent knowledge, of "how not to do it" in two very different ways. We are often asked to decide why the influence of the pulpit is on the wane-here are two methods in which that result may be brought about with remarkable celerity. Is the power of the pulpit diminishing? I cannot say; but if it be so, I should think the reason why, might be more profitably sought in the pulpit than in the pews. If I cannot leap a gate which presented no difficulty to me years ago, it is more likely, I take it, that I have grown weaker, than that the gate has grown taller. If men address the Deity irreverently, or, forgetting all about Him, address their fellow creatures politically, doubtless the power of the pulpit will decline, and who would wish it otherwise? The needs of man, the mysteries of being, the dark majesty of eternity-these will ever oppress the soul as they have always done, and will drive it to seek for guidance and comfort. I leave any candid person to decide whether these are to be found in discourses such as I have described without exaggeration; and to judge whether they will long be sought for where they are so evidently not to be had. Surrounded by an increasing intellience, and by an increasing assertion of the right of private judgment in the details of creed, it is time that those who desire the success of the Church should lay aside all prejudice, and revert to the simple principles upon which all Christian Churches are alike founded, and upon which there is no real controversy. If a liturgical form of worship should appear to be more generally helpful to us, it is of no moment whether our ancestors, three centuries back, were right or wrong in rejecting it at that time. If the Church of England have any sure foundation at all, that foundation is very independent of all that the Liberation Society may propose or accomplish. And if we cannot do better, in Church or Dissent, than give our congregations what will disgust some, and feed none--in all seriousness it will become us best to be silent.

Thinking of the strange specimens of worship to which I have alluded, my mind involuntarily turned to a very different form of devotion which I had seen, far away and long ago, and which had impressed me much. Wandering about an old French town, in the dusk of evening, I had strayed idly into its one Church, whose doors were open, as they had been open, century after century with scarcely an interruption. The great gaunt aisles were wrapped in gloom and silence; the capitals of the massive pillars were lost in darkness; virgins, saints, and martyrs loomed indistinctly from their pedestals: all the frippery of superstition

was softened and shadowed into mystery. There was no priest in the place, no service, no sound; only in a corner, before a small side chapel, lit by a single candle, a woman lost in solitary prayer. The dim shadows, the perfect stillness, the loneliness-all filled me with a sensation of awe which the voice of man would but have rudely interrupted. The very atmosphere breathed prayer, humility, and reverence; the very silence was eloquent. It is the house of prayer, which is the house of God. All our services, simple or elaborated, are but means to the same end-devotion. It is an end which can be obtained without their aid, and which may easily be banished by their injudicious use, How many an empty discourse, whose speech was not silvern, has sadly reminded us that, at least, silence would have been golden.

ACHESPÈ

LONDON TO HEIDELBERG.

ROM London to Heidelberg: "-how delightful that sounds! Yes, to one who has not gone through the journey in the hot dry weather of August. But I suspect if people were honest with themselves, most would shudder-no, not shudder, but begin to perspire, at the mere thought. Suppose you have got through the horrors of that middle passage, the Straits of Dover, by means of the improved double steamboat and safely landed at Calais-there new troubles begin. Firstly, one has a fight for something to eat and drink, in utter uncertainty how many minutes will be allowed for its deglutition; and a dreadful sense of having entered on that process of spoliation which I fancy everyone thinks he is being subjected to who pays without knowing exactly what he is paying. By the way, how is it that in the Restaurant at Calais the waiters do not all speak English? What a comfort it would be to the half-dazed Britisher if he could only use his mother tongue at all events just after his first affliction is over. Then comes the effort to find the train for Brussels and the proper carriage to get into. As each one is one of perhaps several hundreds, and as the French Railway Companies are exceedingly sparing of their rolling stock, the chances are, that the poor man runs to and fro with his inevitable bags and rugs-the latter enough to make a person hot even to look at—in the hope of discovering a corner vacant next to a window. But how often