sermons to slumber over; for they contained nothing but roughnesses, and yet were full of sentences which formed rather general maxims, than mere matter of temporary application. He entered at once, not only into the spirit, but into the very middle of his subject, with such facility, and such powers of enlarging upon it, that he made his hearers acquainted with more in a short time, than might have been given to them on ordinary occasions by a hundred sermons.

He had, as was remarked before on another occasion, a peculiarity of delivery, and awkwardness of attitude, more particularly observable in the pulpit; but the attention of his hearers soon wholly merged in the matter, and was carried from the preacher to the subject. He seemed indeed to be inattentive to all arts and elegancies of elocution, and to prefer what might show him anxious to do his best and do credit to his subject, rather than to be at all desirous of the graces and decorations of delivery. He persuaded his hearers, that, whatever he might be considered, however he might shine, however he might offend against more accurate taste, he reserved his whole powers for his subject. The manner of his preaching was strong and striking, and rather of a reproving cast, than soft or moving. He certainly approached the ludicrous, when he attempted to move by his oratory. In his delivery, that taste and application to the wants and desiderata of his subject, which is conspicuous in his writings, was looked for in vain. His voice is stated to have been rough and inharmonious, and his accent provincial. This is not sufficiently qualified. His voice was not strikingly rough, but on the contrary in private sweet and very distinct; but though deep, it was by no means strong, nor very capable of exertion. Its roughness, if any, was on occasional exertion. On first entering a church, where he was performing service, or a room where he was speaking, it was rather strikingly pleasant, because natural. Neither was his accent peculiarly provincial. It might have been called rather wanting in refinement, but by no means disagreeably so.

Of his method of composing sermons, probably the best illustration may be drawn from his own rules on this subject, delivered in his lectures; yet to see how far he was consistent with himself, and adopted his rules into his own practice, and also how many additions he found it necessary to make when the practice of them came before him, it may be well to give one or two observations upon it. Indeed from the activity and energy of his mental powers, which led

him to think of many points at once, from his being every where a minute and penetrating observer, and applying that observation to some purpose and some object; from the general turn of his thoughts towards higher contemplation, from the constant recurrence of his duty, from his heart being wholly in this business, it is more than probable that he would himself be inclined to give great weight to this part of his writings. There is a reason which might probably prevent his appearing in public as a sermon-writer during his life, besides his own ingenuous declaration a," that they are in such constant use, that he was glad to change his living because they came too often over." This is, that he was perhaps indebted to his sermons, or at least the enlargement of his subject in this way, for his works on Moral Philosophy, Evidences of Christianity, and Natural Theology, as most of those sermons that remain seem clearly formed upon thoughts connected with his favourite subjects, and some of them contain the same sentiments, and even expressions which are to be found in his latest productions, though from their date evidently composed before he had any views of publication. Some of these sermons are published in this edition for the purpose of confirming this statement. Instead of any disparagement to him as a writer, it is presumed they will show that his works were certainly fondlings of his mind, and seem to have called forth the repeated application of his thoughts, and to have shared under one shape or another even the advanced powers of his intellect. His method of composing sermons then appears to have been this :-He let himself into the midst of his subject, and reduced what he had to say, or what he intended to say, into method and heads, before he encountered it, so as to see both beginning, middle, and end, at one view. He rarely undertook a subject at a venture. He was constantly in the habit of turning it over and over at his leisure, and guarding its progress by repeatedly turning back to where he set out, so that he came more than half prepared to his paper. Thus what is said of his being a rapid composer,

a Meadley.

b Meadley. The incident that gave rise to Meadley's information was the following in later life, when on a visit at Buckden previous to his being installed to the subdeanery of Lincoln, he was asked to perform the Sunday duty there, and on being afterwards requested to leave his sermon there for private perusal, he answered, "You may have it, madam, freely, but it is what neither you nor any body else can make out, for I had much ado to make it out myself." Having promised, however, to get it copied, he shortly after gave it to his daughter, who, astonished as she well might be, at the laborious charge committed to her, plagued

or his seldom transcribing his sermons, might easily be accounted for. "Slow composition," in speaking of the composition of sermons in one of his charges, "does not in general answer; it makes breaks, and interrupts the flow of thought." But he was rather to be called a desultory than rapid composer of a sermon; at any rate he was by no means a rapid finisher. He seldom was without two or three sermons lying unfinished on his table; which he took up according to the channel of his thoughts, and was thus enabled to stuff them so much with acute observation, and pithy sentences. He recommends in the same charge, "frequent transcribing." "One writing," says he, "is worth many readings. It may be said perhaps that so much anxiety about diction destroys one of the best properties of popular writing, ease of style and manner. The very reverse of this is the truth, unless we choose to call slovenliness ease. There are no compositions in the language which have been so admired for the very quality of ease as those of the late Mr. Sterne; yet none I believe ever cost their author more trouble. I remember to have seen a letter of his, in which he speaks of himself as having been incessantly employed for six months upon one small volume." He also recommends "frequent revisals of what was written." This was his own case. No man for instance was so particular about punctuation; in many of his writings the only intelligible marks of his pen at first sight are prodigious commas. He seems to have been careful, and even almost proud, not only to bring forward what he conceived from his own experience to be the prevailing desiderata of the subject, but to grapple with any obvious difficulties. This indeed is said very happily a to be a distinguishing character of his works, and it seems to have been partly the cast and bent of his mind. He never seems to refuse any the most knotty point, for fear of not encountering it with sufficient force; nor to have avoided any perplexing intricacy, for fear of not disentangling it so as to make it intelligible to his hearers. He seldom attempted to make more than one or two impressions, in one sermon, for this reason, that a sermon is better worth the labour which conveys any one impression, than that which is so full of matter, that it either leaves the hearers in doubt what to take hold of, or

him so much for explanations of what he himself could not make out, that he tried what dictating would do, and in this task he was interrupted by the friend who gave Meadley this information.

a Chalmers.

wholly lost in a mass of confusion. For much the same reason, he was a friend to short sermons. "Let one impression," said he to a friend, "be but made, and send it home with your congregation, and you do more for them than giving them twenty comments."

One prevailing defect which is sometimes complained of, and which has struck many of his congregation on hearing him from the pulpit, is a want of close or conclusion, or gradual winding up of his subject. He never spun out his discourse; whether short or long he finished it as soon as he had no more to say. He was not much in the habit of appealing to the feelings of his congregation, and seems not to have relished the usual way of applying what he had previously been saying by any well wrought or artificial mode of addressing their feelings. Nor does it seem so much from any studied design, much less from any artifice, that these abrupt conclusions so often occur, but rather from an unwillingness to affect what he did not feel, and what he could not have delivered with any degree of self-possession. Though by no means deficient in feeling and pathos, which he had the power of rousing in the best way by natural, unaffected touches, not too much dwelt upon, he was certainly more partial to the way of working conviction by reason, than taking any advantage of feeling, when he did not feel. Though possessed of the warmest feelings of religion, he never indulged in the religion of feeling.

He might indeed have discovered from the manner in which his early sermons were received, (supposing the specimens given do mark his true method of writing at that time,) that the delivery of such was but ill suited to his inelegant manner. He might think, if he reasoned upon it, that whatever moved the affection was perishable as the affection itself; whatever made an impression upon the understanding, or wrought conviction by the force of reason, was at least more likely to be permanent; but it was more consistent with his natural character to suppress or conceal his feelings. On religious subjects he seldom conversed, and rarely spoke at all upon them with any of his family. Whether in addition to this constitutional bias he felt that the display of even natural feelings was often attendant upon weakness or affectation, and that man's religious feelings were too awful a subject for bunglers to meddle with, it is clear as well from his manner of preaching as from the composition of his later sermons, that there was not an attempt made to

guide either himself or his hearers by feeling. So much indeed do most of his later sermons, published and unpublished, partake of this character, that they have been, though rather injudiciously, classed amongst moral and religious essays, in utter regardlessness of what he expresses in one of his own charges: "The danger however (i. e. of preaching up the necessity of faith, which was left to be unproductive) is nearly overpast. We are on the contrary setting up a kind of philosophical morality, detached from religion, and independent of its influence, which may be cultivated, it is said, as well without Christianity as with it; and which, if cultivated, renders religion, and religious institutions, superfluous. A mode of thought so contrary to truth, and so derogatory from the value of revelation, cannot escape the vigilance of the Christian ministry. We are entitled to ask upon what foundation this morality rests. If it refer to the divine will, (and without that, where will it find its sanctions, or how support its authority?) there cannot be a conduct of the understanding more irrational than to appeal to those intimations of the Deity's character, which the light and order of nature afford as to the rule and measure of our duty, yet to disregard and affect to overlook the declarations of his pleasure which Christianity communicates. It is impossible to distinguish between the authority of natural and revealed religion. We are bound to receive the precepts of revelation for the same reason that we comply with the dictates of nature. He who despises a command which proceeds from his Maker, no matter by what means or through what medium, instead of advancing, as he pretends to do, the dominion of reason, and the authority of natural religion, disobeys the first injunction of both."a

Instead of making a sermon to a text, he not unfrequently chose his text after he had completed his sermon; not, according to the old receipt, because his text would suit any sermon, or his sermon any text, but because he was in the habit of considering the wants of his congregation, or of turning over some subject which wanted to be made plain to his hearers, without a particular reference to his text or any single passage of Scripture. There is a story by Meadley of his making eight sermons from one text. Two or three appear amongst his collection with the text specified, "Exhort one another daily, while it is called to-day, lest any of you be hardened

a

This was preached in the year 1790, not long after the publication of his Moral Philosophy.