VI.—1. Memoirs of the Wesley Family; collected from original Documents. By Adam Clarke, LL.D. 2. An Account of the Rise and Progress of the &c. &c. VII.-Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the existing state of the Corporation of the City of London, and to collect information re- specting its Constitution, Order and Government, &c., together with the Minutes of Evidence and 195 III.-1. A Letter to a Convocation Man, concerning the Rights, Powers and Privileges of that Body. 4to. 1697. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. William Fraser, B.C.L. 2. The Authority of Christian Princes over their Ecclesiastical Synods asserted, with particular respect to the Convocations of the Clergy of the Realm and Church of England, occasioned &c. &c. IV.-1. Theologia Moralis S. Alphonsi de Ligorio, Funda- toris Congregationis SS. Redemptoris ac olim Episcopi S. Agatha Gothorum. Editio novissima; &c. &c. 369 401 THE CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER. JULY, 1854. Concionalia. By the Rev. H. THOMPSON, M.A., No long time ago, in examining a village church in one of the midland counties, the attention of a casual visitor was attracted by a paper in the Rector's pew, which somewhat resembled a placard. On investigation it was found to be a sermon, headed, On the Vanity and Uncertainty of Human Life, and labelled, 'in case of an accident.' If, by chance, the worthy Incumbent should happen to forget the discourse he intended to deliver, here was a safe reserve. Human life was sure always to be uncertain; moralists would always call it vain; the sermon, therefore, could never come mal-à-propos, and there it lay, bearing amusing witness to the character and value of-we will take the liberty of coining a word-English Homiliology. Of all stiff, unreal, stilted demonstrations of religion, probably the sermons of the last century were the most remarkable specimens; and, if perhaps nowhere to be found in their original pasteboard and brocade character, they are still formidable enough in the compositions of the school which denominates itself orthodox and moderate, and which is termed by others high-and-dry. The sermons which came from the pulpits of Potter and Lavington, of Cornwallis and North, were like the hoops and toques of the routs and of Ranelagh; an outrageous caricature of formality, that must have disgusted any century except the seventeenth. When Blair was held up by Johnson -a man in so many respects before his age-as the model of pulpit eloquence, when the dictum of the great doctor was, that his sermons were more golden than gold, what must have been the depth of the degradation to which church oratory had sunk! Wherever we turn it is the same thing. At the beginning of the century, Addison, a man of deep religious feeling, commends Sir Roger's plan for the instruction of the Worcestershire peaAt the chaplain's first settling with me, I made him a sants. 6 6 6 'present of all the good sermons which have been printed in English, and only begged that every Sunday he would pronounce one of them in the pulpit. I could heartily wish,' says the Spectator, that some of our country clergy would follow 'this example; and instead of wasting their spirits in laborious compositions of their own, would endeavour after a handsome ' elocution and all those other talents that are proper to enforce what has been penned by greater masters. This ' would not only be more easy to themselves, but more edifying 'to the people.' Imagine a country congregation, year after year, listening, open-mouthed, to the glittering wit of South, the polished prettinesses of Tillotson, the heavy learning of Stillingfleet, the profounder erudition of Lloyd: the same Sunday always producing the same sermon, whatever might be the circumstances of the hearers,-the priest never able to appeal to local events, home occurrences, anything, in short, that could touch and interest; the instructor turned into a sermonmachine, and the sermons so evolved as unintelligible as if they had been written in Latin. And this was at the beginning only of that age-our Church's passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Time went on; religion was in England almost, and in the Scotch Establishment entirely, eliminated from the pulpit. We find Clayton consulting Lady Suffolk-a Bishop taking advice from an adulteress -on the composition of a sermon. We may read-if we have patience in every episcopal charge, the watchword that was afterwards Talleyrand's, surtout point de zèle; we see Doctors of Divinity delivering with universal applause the same sermons which they had produced before an university audience, to criminals, condemned, and struggling, in the last agonies of their earthly existence, to make their peace with God. We find, as Wesleyanism developed the numerous resources of natural preaching, the laced coat of the orthodox' party stiffening into cast-iron, their somnolence morphinised into death. Persons, we believe, are now living, who can remember a curate hunted from a metropolitan pulpit because it was his custom to raise his eyes from his manuscript. Persons who have not long been dead, could recollect the discourse delivered by a dignitary in the parish church of S. Giles, and addressed to three classes,-the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good were told that they needed no advice,―let them persevere in their righteousness, and the kingdom of heaven would be their reward; the badbut in such a congregation (S. Giles's!) it was uncharitable to suppose that such a class could be found; the indifferent lost much by not exerting a little more energy, in order that their reward might not only be rendered more certain, but more |