It ought to be the business of some one to superintend the ministrations which the nation endows. True enough, the nation does amply remunerate the episcopacy, though miserably the majority of the clergy; but it must not be concealed, that the bishops do not so much as aim at ascertaining in what way the clergy preach to the scattered congregations. There are few of the country parishes in Ireland in which the bishops ever set their foot (we speak advisedly). They send the rural dean-and our experience of rural deans happens to be, that they are the most inefficient and worthless of the clergy in their several localities themselves. Sometimes this official, instead of bringing his paper, with a series of questions to be answered, sends it through the post to be filled up by the incumbent. But if he comes, and sits down to fill it for five minutes in the rector's study, he asks, out of his printed paper :- "What is the gross income of your parish?" "What the net?" "Have you a school?" "Have you an evening service?" "Have you been resident?" "Is your house insured?" "What is your average congregation?" "Is your house in good repair?" Your offices?" "Your church?" "Have you lodged a terrier of your glebe in the registry office?" "How much is your tax to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners?" &c., &c.-these same questions, and none other, having been answered, year by year, in the same way as before. Then follows the visitation, not of the bishop to the clergy, the people, or the parishes, but of the clergy to the bishop, at some time and place, fixed without consulting their pockets or convenience, but his own; and after they have travelled far to see him, and paid his registrar pretty smartly for calling out their names, the majority of them are dismissed without one word, after bowing to his lordship, for the next twelve months. None of them is asked a single question bearing upon the real character, earnestness, assiduity, or spirituality of his work; much less is any effort made to ascertain it by personal inspection.

We believe it will be found, and, in fact, we are in a position to establish the proof-indeed, some of the best known ministers and of longest

standing in the Church of Irelandhave already testified publicly that, during the whole period of their ministry, they never saw a bishop in their parishes, and never had one question put to them at visitations bearing upon the spirituality of their office or their work. Surely, it is no wonder the public should have wellgrounded complaints to make of a ministry without responsibility or supervision; and, in fact, it is to the immortal honour of the Church of Ireland that, notwithstanding all this, and much more, which we forbear to mention, she possesses a body of clergy who can, we verily believe, stand comparison with the ministers of any church of any time or place, for everything that constitutes energy, zeal, and efficiency.

One recently appointed, excellent bishop has really set about visiting the parishes of his diocese, to preach himself. The design is excellent, and, no doubt, great good will result; but we want, even more than this, that the bishop should drop in at the time of divine service, sit in the church, as Archbishop Magee used to do, worship with the people, listen to the sermon, and find out for himself, instead of employing others to report of their neighbours.

We want, besides, training in the exercise of teaching others what young men have learned in the University. The want of such training, in truth, is felt so much, that numbers of voluntary societies for composing, and debating, and declaiming, are being established by young men themselves, in and out of the University; and many thus obtain qualifications for teaching of which they would be otherwise utterly destitute. But this is a miserably inadequate preparation for their work. An Established Church, surely, should not trust to a chance training of her candidates for the ministry. The consequence of doing so is, that rectors requiring curates make unavoidable mistakes, when obliged to present men altogether untried for ordination, and untried till after ordination, as well as before. When some of these young men stand up in the pulpit, it becomes painfully evident that the God of nature never intended they should be teachers, having conferred no single gift or qualification on them

for instructing others. The misery of this is that whatever amount of conscientious effort such men bring to their pulpit duties ever after, they only continue preachers because those they are sent to teach have no voice in the matter.

We have before our mind one excellent man of this description, of whom a Protestant peasant, who once heard him preach, said, with great simplicity, "He is like a man that had chaff in his throat." Another such excellent and pious person we know, who disarms criticism by constantly asking the same question, "Do you not think it a good thing for one to know his own deficiencies?" to which a lady of our acquaintance, tired enough of the truisin, at last replied, "Yes, indeed; but would it not be a miserable thing if one knew nothing else." Now, no distinction is more real than that between gift and grace. Without the latter, of course, the former would be of no value in a minister; but, certainly, the gifts, in some moderate degree, are indispensable in a public teacher; and the man who is so ignorant of himself, and so undiscerning, as to stand up without shame to teach others without the least qualification, should not be inflictedalbeit with parchments in his handsupon a people, without one single effort having been made to find out whether he possesses the gift of teaching.

We consider it an additional disadvantage of the written sermon, that so long as it is permitted in the Church, it will open the door for incompetent ministers, and render nugatory the efforts which may be adopted to ascertain fitness. We heard an observation lately made by a highly-intellectual gentleman, a long time a parishioner of one of the class of ministers above mentioned. He said "I have been for thirteen years listening to Mr. He preached, of course, from a great many texts, yet I heard from him but one sermon all the time." This was, no doubt, a strong way of expressing his sense of the sameness, the barrenness, the inefficiency, and, we fear we must say, the worthlessness of the preaching to which he had to listen. Such ministers, in general, lack common sense and tact; they know not that they

are destitute of all sympathy from the congregation. The man whose eyes are upon his paper cannot see the people's countenances to ascertain their feelings, and preaches all the doctrines from one text, with a deplorable complacency, like the old Scotch minister, who said "I preach the haill body of divinity every Sabbath." Nor can they tell when to stop. It may be truly said of many of them, as a fox-hunting gentleman said once of a Connaught clergyman, who kept him above an hour at a lecture at family prayer before breakfast, when he wanted to get off and meet the hounds-"Well, I dare say, he is a very good man, and has a clear idea enough of eternity, but he has no notion at all of time."

Some good men, again, who would probably imagine that to think on their subject would be to repudiate inspiration, and that to read and store the mind with such good thoughts as they could not themselves originate, would be as bad as theft, when they are at a loss for ideas, make up for the want by continuous exhortation and very emphatic exclamations. They are empty of thought, but full of truisms. We happen to know one clergyman, who used the phrase"My dear brethren" 235 times (as reported by one of his own parishioners), in one sermon, though we imagine that a clergyman who has anything else to say may not use it a second time. One frequently hears a clergyman (of a certain class), say, as if it was a matter not to be ashamed of "I preached that sermon without any preparation whatever;" and it is to be feared they often confound a distaste for study and mere indolence of disposition with that holy trust which waits on God for given words. It appears to us that a preacher, who, in order to warn his congregation against the wiles of Satan, mentions the devil's name 109 times in one sermon, does not by this familiarity make his people the more afraid of the adversary. Nor, on the other hand, does the man who assumes a high tone of spirituality, by a copious use of devotional phrases, without thought, sentiment, exposition, or argument, inspire devotional feeling. Generally speaking, preachers who indulge in this vapid style of preaching, make the text a motto merely, instead of the subject

of discourse-a kind of terminus a quo-a point from which to dash off, and never return. A friend of ours lately amused himself and others at the expense of a young clergyman, who selected for his text "Let it alone this year also," and seemed well enough satisfied with himself and his performance. "John," said his friend, "I never knew a man stick so close to his text as you did this evening." "I am glad you think so," was the gratified reply. "Well, I do think so," said the friend, "for your text was—‘Let it alone;' and having read it, you did let it alone to the end of the sermon.

There are other kinds of extremes equally injurious to the influence of pulpit ministrations. For instance, an excessive and slavish following, not only of the matter, but the manner, of the old divines of the sixteenth century, of the pedantic erudition which smothered their genius and natural powers, of their perplexing divisions and subdivisions, which are not in the least in harmony with modern habits of thought, and are as far from the examples we have of apostolic preaching, as they are foreign to the method a minister of the Crown, for example, would take to expound his measures to Parliament, a judge to simplify a case to a jury, or any person in society to expound or enforce his views upon any question to any audience. We really wonder that simple and homely men, who talk after the manner of mankind in general for the rest of the week, do not feel how grotesque it is to adopt a style so ill-befitting them, so absurd and unnatural, for the half hour in the pulpit on Sundays. A Presbyterian friend amused us highly, by describing a sermon he once heard in one of the churches of that body. The preacher, a stranger, having occupied a full hour already, and having arrived at the stage of "fifthly and lastly," the wearied congregation, supposing he was about to close, manifested evident tokens of satisfaction, but after disposing of his "fifthly and lastly," to their utter dismay, he continued "And now, having answered the various objections that may be made preliminary, I pass to the body of the subject, which I propose to deal with in three leading particulars." However, in going into the body of the

VOL. LXIII.-NO. CCCLXXIII.

subject, he emptied the body of the edifice, and was brought abruptly to a conclusion. We remember once hearing a sermon in the county of Waterford, on the harvest, from the text"Thrust in the sickle," and we can never forget the threefold division"We must all become ripe-how do we become ripe--and what shall be done to us when we are ripe." But the excellent old man who preached, was himself of a ripe age, and to say the truth, his sermon on the harvest was admirable.

Not only is the following of the quaint divisions and subdivisions of old theologians objectionable and injurious, but the adoption of their phraseology, of their technicalities, of their tedious amplification of metaphors, is wholly unsuitable, and to many most offensive. At this point in our observations we cannot refrain from referring to the Rev. John Foster's thoughtful, and still too little known Essay "On the Aversion of Men of taste to Evangelical Religion."

Among the causes of that aversion he notices the peculiarity of language adopted in religious discourse-the use of theological terms, barbarous to the uninitiated-although our language is competent to express all religious ideas without the aid of an uncouth phraseology. Technical terms there must ever be—" atonement, justification, mediation," and others but the number that cannot be reverently and judiciously dispensed with are few. The Bible must be freely quoted, but need not be turgidly paraphrased in a discourse, or passages aimlessly repeated, merely to turn a sentence, or from mere habit. A compound phraseology of scripture and ordinary speech is also to be avoided. With respect also to the mischievous effects on religious teachers, and on minds of a highly intellectual order, of the great mass of bad writing that is generally in the hands of the public on subjects of an Evangelical kind, Foster says:"A grand cause of displacency encountered by Evangelical religion among men of taste is, that the great school in which that taste is formed, that of polite literature, taken in the widest sense of the phrase, is hostile to that religion." The estimate of the depraved moral condition of

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human nature is quite different in revelation and polite literature-consequently the redemption by Jesus Christ, which appears of such momentous importance in the one, is, in comparison, a trifle in the other. "Some of the higher order of our popular writers have aided the counteraction of literature to Evangelical religion by careless or malignant ridicule of things associated with it." But divines have not recommended their message by the elevation of style it might be expected to inspire: "I suppose it will be instantly allowed that the mode of expression of the greater number of Evangelical divines, and of those taught by them, is widely different from the standard of general language, not only by the necessary adoption of some peculiar terms, but by a continued and systematic cast of phraseology; insomuch that on reading or hearing five or six sentences of an Evangelical discourse, you ascertain the school by the mere turn of expression, independently of any attention to the quality of the ideas. If, in order to try what those ideas would appear in an altered form of words, you attempted to reduce a paragraph to the language employed by intellectual men in speaking or writing well on general subjects, you would find it must be absolutely a translation. You know how easily a vast mass of exemplification might be quoted; and the specimens would give the idea of an attempt to create, out of the general mass of the language, a dialect which should be intrinsically spiritual, and so exclusively appropriated to Christian doctrine as to be totally unserviceable for any other subject, and to become ludicrous when applied to it. And this being extracted, like the Sabbath, from the common course of time, the general range of diction is abandoned, with all its powers, diversities, and elegance, to secular subjects, and the use of the profane. It is a kind of popery of language, vilifying everything not marked with the sign of the holy church, and forbidding any one to minister religion except in consecrated speech."

"Does religion," the Essayist asks again, "affect to show and guard its importance by relinquishing the simple language of intelligence, and assuming a sinister dialect of its own?"

Some preachers would seem to have such an idea; but we agree with Foster that it would be an improvement if Christian_truth were conveyed in that neutral vehicle of expression which is adapted indifferently to common serious subjects. The diction objected to "gives the Gospel too much the air of a professional thing, which must have its peculiar cast of phrases for the mutual recognition of its proficients, in the same manner as other professions, arts, crafts, and mysteries have theirs." "This is giving an uncouthness of mien to a beauty which should attract all hearts."

But the writer anticipates an ob66 It must jection that may be made. be acknowledged that in some instances innovations of doctrine have been introduced partly by declining the use of the words that designated the doctrines which it was wished to render obsolete; but they have been still more frequently and successfully introduced under the advantage of retaining the terms while the principles were gradually subverted, and therefore I shall be pardoned for repeating this once more, that since the peculiar words can be kept in one invariable significance only by keeping that signification clearly in sight in another way than the bare use of those words themselves, it would be wise in Christian authors and speakers sometimes to express the ideas in common words, either in expletive and explanatory connexion with the peculiar terms, or, occasionally, instead of them." He says, once more, admirably,—“ If evangelical sentiments could be faithfully presented in an order of words of which so small a part should be of specific cast (as the necessary terms salvation, repentance, justification, sanctification, &c.), they could be presented in what should be substantially the diction of Addison or Pope. And if even Shaftesbury, Bolingbroke, and Hume, could have become Christians by some mighty and sudden efficacy of conviction, and had determined to write thenceforth in the spirit of the Apostles, they would have found, if these observations be correct, no radical change necessary in the consistence of their language.'

By the use of a more general

phraseology, hypocrisy would find it difficult to support its imposture. Hypocrisy, want of talent, neglect of study and preparation for a discourse, and absence of heart in the work, all find a cover from observation and discovery in the parrot use of stereotyped phrases. Men of taste are kept from sympathy with evangelical religion by pride of intellect, by a superficiality in their knowledge of the principles of Revelation, but mostly, perhaps, by finding that the preachers and teachers of the Gospel do not seem to occupy an intellectual level as high as their own a conclusion partly produced by this very use of a "barbarous phraseology in the pulpit, but principally by the infrequency among religious teachers of a comprehensive conception of the doctrines they are inculcating, as these affect the case of men of large intellectual powers, but of deficient veneration, and an imperfect sense of the Divine holiness and man's responsibility.

In addition to the deformities so happily described above in language which is the more remarkable as coming from one who was himself a dissenting minister, we may notice the unsuitableness of the frequent introduction of old questions no longer important ar interesting, old heresies nowhere now existing, and arguments in refutation of them suggesting for the first time the doubts they deal with. Critical sermons displaying scientific lore, the preacher's learning, the brilliancy of his imagination-turning the discourse into what Cicero calls ETTIDEIKTIKÒV—“a thing made up to be looked upon," while the illiterate part of the congregation are totally forgotten, cannot be too plainly condemned. Objections are often answered which were never heard of by the simple souls to whom the refutations are addressed. Some of them are but half answered, so as to deposit a sediment of unbelief, where none before existed, and so as to offend thoughtful people. Complaints are urged against the English version of the Scriptures recklessly, by many who could scarcely translate the original, so as to shake the trustful confidence of those who understand no other language but their mother tongue; and ad captandum statements are rashly flung about, no

where more unsuitable than where a whole congregation sit in silent attention to listen to the message of truth from the lips of the minister. Anecdotes are introduced on things in general offensive to good taste, and beneath the dignity of the place and the purpose. Flattering addresses to the Aquillas and Priscillas present, are mingled with a discharging of the clergyman's conscience" upon others, and the whole is wound up by an enumeration of the different sorts of sinners in the congregation, and a stereotyped peroration of denunciation, exhortation, and consolation, to the hardened, the impenitent, the halting, the backslider, the convinced, and the believing.

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Frequently enough, too, preaching is heard which perhaps should not be blamed, inasmuch as it pleases, and no doubt profits many, yet appears anything but edifying to the discerning few-who are at the same time without any of that cynical spirit which is so apt to condemn only because others approve. We remember listening to passages which immense congregations appeared to consider the highest eloquence, that appeared wind and confusion on a careful consideration of their import, or rather want of import; such, for example, as the following, which we have heard almost in a buzz of approval:

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We heard the same preacher, on another occasion, discourse of the beautiful music from heavenly voices, such as never fell upon mortal ears,' and stopping suddenly short, ask in altered tone, the question, "Wouldn't you like that?" When an old lady sitting near us, and evidently a lover of melody, having first looked round, in high excitement, to see if all others were as deeply moved as herself, unable any longer to suppress her emotions, exclaimed aloud—“Oh, glory be to God."

Although it be quite true, and the observation is as old as Cicero, that "prudence in the hearers is the mea