rolls chapel, and calmly turned on the | Geddes hurled her stool at the head of sand for a second hour, the congrega- the dean at Edinburgh (July 23, 1637), tion are said to have audibly expressed and when the funeral sermon of Sir Edtheir satisfaction. The use of the hour-mondbury Godfrey was being preached glass seems to have gradually declined at S. Martin's, two stalwart divines subsequent to the era of the Revolu- stood, one on each side of the preacher, tion. lest he should, in presence of the congregation, be assassinated by the Roman Catholics. Strange, even to irreverence, were the titles of some of the sixteenth and seventeenth century sermons. Of such were these following: "Baruch's Sore gently opened and Salve skilfully applied; "The Snuffers of Divine Love; ""A Spiritual Mustard-Pot to make the Soul sneeze with Devotion;' "Crumbs of Comfort for Chickens of Grace;" "A Balance to weigh facts ""Matches lighted at the Divine Fire," etc., etc. in; In turbulent times the preacher was occasionally exposed to violence. At the first sermon at Paul's Cross in Mary's reign a dagger was hurled out of the congregation which struck one of the side-posts of the pulpit, and the preacher was with some difficulty conveyed away to the shelter of S. Paul's School. During the Civil Wars the royalist clergy were not infrequently interrupted in their sermons. A musket was levelled at the Bishop of Lichfield by a Puritan soldier in S. Andrew's, Holborn, and a carbine was pointed at the minister of Hanwell reproving a military audience for the habit of profane swearing a practice, by the way, for which an old Scotch lady found a somewhat remarkable excuse. "Our John swears awfu', and we try to correct him," said she bewailingly, of the shortcomings of a near relative; but she continued: "Nae doubt it is a great set-off to conversation." Men are ever prone to Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to. And we are told of the Border minister preaching on the third commandment and exclaiming, "For my part, I would rather steal all the horned cattle in the parish than take that holy name in vain." Bishop Lindsay essayed to continue his sermon amid a scene of most brutal violence the day when Jenny Aylmer, Bishop of London, once Lady Jane Grey's tutor, who used to play bowls at Fulham on Sunday afternoons, alleging that exercise was as needful to him on that day as his dinner, was once roundly taken to task by the virgin queen for fulminating against excess of female apparel; and her Majesty assured the ladies-in-waiting that if he ever offended in like manner again "she would fit him for heaven, but he would walk there without staff and leave his mantle behind him." Probably he ran no further risks, for he was the most obsequious of divines, even on one occasion offering to lose a tooth in order to prove to the queen, who shrank from the operation, that the pain was not so very great. Nor was Aylmer the only preacher who encountered Elizabeth's rebukes. Dean Nowell was discoursing before her one Ash Wednesday, when he inadvertently began to touch upon the sign of the cross, whereupon the queen's voice was heard from the royal closet, commanding him to quit his godless digression and return to his text. Bishop Lloyd likewise gave offence by touching on a topic still more delicate. The good prelate was anxious that the queen should be brought to consider her latter end. Preaching before her he designedly selected the text, "So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." Elizabeth much disliked the advice thus conveyed, and subsequently remarked that it would be well for the bishop to keep his arithmetic to himself, adding, that in her experience the greatest clerks were not necessarily the wisest men. The well-known text, "Top(k)not come down," is said to have been aimed by Rowland Hill at the vanity of his own wife's headgear. Latimer thus indi rectly rebukes the female fashions of | fly and paused a while, adding signifithe day in a sermon on the Nativity :— cantly, "but I have missed it." I think Mary had not much fine gear. She was not trimmed up as our women are nowadays. I think, indeed, she had never a fardingale, for she used no such superfluities as our fine damsels do, for in the old times women were content with honest and simple garments. Now they have found out these roundabouts; they were not invented then; the devil was not so cunning as to make such gear; he only found it out afterwards. As in the days of Elizabeth and James we read of "thundering preachers" (John Knox was "like to ding the pulpit in blads and fly out of it"), "awakening preachers," and "pious and painful preachers," so also in times more recent have they been none the less graphically classified thus: Mr. Leckie, of Loupington, was a sound preacher and great expounder of the kittle parts of the Old Testament; Mr. Sprose, of Annack, was a vehement and powerful thresher of the Word, making the chaff and vain babbling of profane commentators fly from his hand; while Mr. Waikle, of Gowanry, was a quiet hewer-out of the image of holiness in the heart.1 Pepys gives an account of a sermon of Dr. Critton's, at Whitehall, wherein the preacher remarked, "Not for all the pains that ladies take with their faces, he that should look in a charnel-house could not distinguish which was Cleopatra's, which Fair Rosamond's, or But if the pulpit is to give no uncerwhich belonged to Jane Shore." To tain sound, so also must it speak in a the same purport is the story told of language understanded of the people. Père Honoré, who, preaching a course "Well, my friend," said a clergyman of Lent sermons, added to the effect of sent for to the sick-bed of a parishioner, his eloquence by producing from be-and what induced you to send for neath his habit a skull which he would ex assume to have belonged to various me?" The man was very deaf, and says,' "He 66 why the deuce did you send for him?" Chalmers once preaching on cruelty to animals described in such glowing terms the excitement of an English huntingfield, with its assemblage of gallant knighthood and hearty yeomen, the clearness of the autumnal day, the highbred coursers, echoing horns, and the dying agonies of the fox, that Lord Elcho's huntsman, who was present, declared it was with the utmost difficulty that he could restrain himself from giving a view holloa. Perhaps one of the most decisive examples of that successful eloquence which Clarendon defines as a strange power of making oneself believed, was afforded by the sudden starting to their feet of the entire congregation, when Massillon preached for the first time his wonderful sermon upon the few that will be saved. A like effect was produced in the Abbey by Horsley when preaching before the House of Lords 1 Galt, Annals of the Parish, p. 231. (30th January, 1793); on this occasion | royalty, seems to have played him the whole assembly, stirred by the false, so that he quitted the pulpit experoration, rose with one impulse, and claiming abruptly, "Lord, pardon our remained standing till the close of the infirmities." sermon. Froude tells us that when But politics, and especially in stormy the preacher at S. Eustache spoke of times, have also been treated of in the the execution of Mary Stuart, he roused pulpit. Hoadley's sermon on the words such a tempest of passion, that orator" My kingdom is not of this world,” and audience broke down together, gave rise to the Bangorian controversy, melting into community of tears. which raged so furiously, 1717-18, that When Father Coneck preached in the at one crisis business in the city came great towns and cities of Artois, the to a complete standstill, the Exchange churches were so crowded that he used was deserted, and even many of the to be suspended in the middle of the shops were closed. Peto, preaching building by a rope in order to be heard; before Henry VIII. at Gravesend, and so great were Dean Kirwan's alluding to the question of the divorce, powers of persuasion, that his sermons scrupled not to tell the king that the repeatedly produced contributions of dogs should lick his blood as they had £1,000 or even £1,200. licked up the blood of Ahab. White, Bishop of Winchester, in his sermon on the death of Mary, took as his text the words, "Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive," and quoted the Scripture declaring that Mary had chosen the better part, while her suc Audible approbation was at one time the fashion of the day. Thus when Spratt and Burnet preached at S. Margaret's, Westminster, part of Burnet's congregation hummed so long and so loud that he sat down to enjoy the effect produced as he rubbed his face with his handkerchief; his rival, how-cessor was but as a living dog, and so ever, was somewhat disconcerted at so open an expression of opinion, and stretched forth his hand as he exclaimed, "Peace, I pray you, peace." But the poet of Olney held sterner views: 'Tis pitiful better than a dead lion. The flatterers of Elizabeth, on the other hand, praised her "as the glory of her sexe, the myrrour of majesty, whom all Protestant generations shall forever call blessed, a woman after God's own heart; a diamond in the ring of the To court a grin, when you should woo a monarchs of the earth, notwithstanding soul. the roarings of Buls of Basan, and the Centaurs and Minotaurs of Rome." Hugh Peters termed Charles I. the great Barabbas of Windsor, who must not be released but suffer for his country. South calls Milton the blind adder, who spat venom on the king's person; while Cromwell is Baal, "a bankrupt, beggarly fellow, who entered the Parliament house with a torn, threadbare coat and a greasy hat, perhaps neither of them paid for." The notorious sermon of Sacheverell, on Palm Sunday, 1715, rent the kingdom Preaching was probably originally extempore, the written sermon being a product of the Reformation era, a sort of check on any doctrinal extravagance on the part of the preacher, who could thus be brought to book on complaint of his audience. Monmouth, as chancellor of Cambridge, intimated to the clergy the displeasure of Charles II. at the use of periwigs and-a strange combination written discourses. His Majesty stated that this latter usage had its beginning "in the disorders of the late times," and it was clearly re-into two factions, and no fewer than garded in the light of a Puritanical innovation. South repeated his sermons from memory, which once, at any rate, when he was preaching before 1 Stanley's Westminster Abbey, p. 535. forty thousand copies of it were sold. "Bold Bradbury," as Queen Anne called him, preached on her death from the words, "Go, see now this cursed woman and bury her, for she is a king's daughter ;" and Charles Wesley | Bible and Shakespeare jointly which was actually apprehended as a Jaco- had brought him to that ancient see; bite, and taken before the magistrates Wesley in fifty years preached over in Yorkshire, because he had made use forty thousand sermons; Hook burned of an expression "praying for the res- over two thousand when he left Leeds, toration of the banished ones." and Grimshaw in the wild districts adjacent to the Brontës' home preached habitually thirty-six sermons in a fortnight. Popular preachers have often been great employers of proverbs. St. Jerome quotes the proverb of the gift horse; S. Bernard the equivalent of Love me, love my dog; and Latimer closes a sermon with the saying, One man may lead a horse to water, but ten men can't make him drink. Rowland THE ABBÉ GRÉGOIRE AND THE FRENCH descended to punning. Hill even Preaching one day at Wapping, he assured his hearers of grace being shown to the very worst of sinners, even to Wapping sinners. Most of these latter were in the seafaring line, and one day a clergyman preaching in the same neighborhood made use of several nautical metaphors, the better to press home his subject. Be ever on the watch," said he, "so that on which ever tack the Evil One bear down on you, he may be crippled in action." "Ay, master," muttered an old salt, "but let me tell you that will entirely depend on your having the weather gauge of him.” Much has been said of the practice of buying and selling sermons, a practice, by the way, of no very special novelty. Just before Toplady was about to be ordained, Osborne the bookseller, the friend of Johnson, offered to supply him with a stock of original sound sermons for a trifle. "I would sooner buy second-hand clothes," was the reply. "Don't be offended," said Osborne, "I have sold many to a bishop." The price of sermons, as of all else, has varied with the times. In 1540 a bishop of Llandaff received from the churchwardens of S. Margaret's, Westminster, for a sermon on the Annunciation, a pike, price 2s. 4d., a gallon of wine, Sd., and boat hire; in all, 3s. 4d. In the seventeenth century sermons seem to have been valued at about 5s. each. But the difficulties of composition have been by no means universally felt. Sharpe, Archbishop of York, was wont to acknowledge that it was the From The Nineteenth Century. REVOLUTION. To any one who has studied human nature, whether in novels, psychology, moral philosophy, or in society as it exists around us, the value of treating revolutionary characters will at once be apparent. In times of revolution human passions are set free from the restraints of society; the attempts to master them seem to call forth all that is greatest in man's nature, and to lay bare the veins and arteries of the moral being to the inspection of the historical dissector. Individuals may be either good or bad, they may be heroes or devils; but whichever they are, whether we have to deal with a Gabriel or a Lucifer, they are always interesting, and always form a fit subject for the student of human nature and of human motive. The best-known men of the Revolution are unsatisfactory for several reasons. The Girondins were unpractical pedants, unfit to lead at a time when men of action were imperatively called for, and they received the reward of their pedantry in an almost complete annihilation of their party. Danton, the giant of Carlyle, the statesman after the manner of Comte, was found wanting at the critical moment, and perished before the narrower, but sterner and more consistent, fanaticism of Robespierre. Even the "Incorruptible" himself fell from an originally high ideal, and allowed the guillotine to flow with the blood of men whose chief crime in his eyes was that they were dangerous rivals. Amidst all these fanatical, weak, the satanic characters of history, but as a guide, as a priest, and as a friend. When first we hear of Grégoire he is neither stirring up provinces to enthusiasm for universal reform nor exercising his powers of oratory on the mob of the Palais Royal; he is simply trying to Do the good that's nearest, Helping, when he meets them, vacillating, or deliberately criminal | looks at him that one would have liked men, there was one who showed a to have known him, not for the gloomy, consistent moral purpose, and who, tragic sympathies which draw one to whether right or wrong, seems to have believed what he said, and to have acted up to his belief - Grégoire, Bishop of Blois. Of him his earliest biographer has said that "revolutions left him as they found him, a priest and a republican." We first hear of him as a public man some years before the meeting of the States General, and he died in the year 1831, just after the Revolution of July, which overthrew the restored monarchy. He was an author as well as a priest and a states- He is collecting books for his parishman. We have before us a list of ioners, trying to raise them from that some hundred works which he wrote degrading depth of ignorance to which on various subjects. They cover a they have been reduced by a selfish and wide range. Ecclesiastical history, unscrupulous court, and which is so poetry, general literature, philanthropy, soon to bear terrible fruit. politics, all owe something to him. The word vandalism was invented by him à propos of the destruction of works of art by revolutionary fanatics, and his innocent creation was discussed in Germany by learned patriots, who tried to elucidate the question how far the new word was a true description of the Vandals. This being the man, how would he act in the storm which was about to burst over France? Grégoire had always been a republican. He tells us, in his "Mémoires," that while a curé in Lorraine, before the Revolution broke out, he was a member of a society the object of which was the bringing about the annexation of that From many points of view, then, province to Switzerland, and so to give Grégoire is interesting to us. There is it the benefit of the institutions of a portrait of the bishop published in the little republic. He also warmly M. Hippolyte Carnot's edition of his espoused the cause of the Jews, op"Mémoires." It is the bust of a sim- pressed by laws whose barbarity was ple French ecclesiastic. There is in his only equalled by their shortsightedness face neither the fire nor the stern, un-laws which, in trying to fetter membending enthusiasm of a Bossuet, nor bers of that unhappy nation in their the dreamy and somewhat quietistic rights as citizens, only drove them benevolence of the saintly Fénelon; deeper and deeper into the policy of nor is one met by the almost inhuman cunning and the arts of dishonest look of concentrated learning which money-making which long persecution strikes one on beholding the portrait of Döllinger. There is the long, white hair, the benevolent mouth, and broad, practical face so often seen in the quiet atmosphere of the typical French country parish. There is nothing gloomy, nothing revolutionary, nothing of the morbid, though too practical, fanaticism of a Robespierre. There is an air of quiet determination, unobtrusive and inoffensive. He has evidently read much and thought much, but he is still supremely human. One feels as one had made a kind of second nature to them, closing, as it did, to them every path which led to straightforwardness and good citizenship. He wrote a pamphlet in their favor, and appealed to the enlightenment and common sense of the rulers of Europe. Besides this, he was connected with the Société des amis des noirs, founded to influence public opinion on the wretched condition of the slaves in the colonies; and he afterwards had the immortal honor of being the first man in any country |