which are really at the foundation of sin, selfishness, and the "pagan virtues"; for they have an imposing march and a valorous outside which are not without their effect even upon the imaginations of the good. We have rarely seen a more eloquent representation of a Christian excellence, one written more closely to the heart of the subject, than the sermon on Forbearance. "The undiscerning," he says, "may mistake it for dulness, and want of becoming chivalry. But to the all-seeing God there is beauty in such repose, beyond the exploits of strength and bravery. In the finest statues of ancient art, the last perfection is a calmness of posture, seeming to embosom unbounded power."

The style of pulpit discourses of the present day betrays the influence of the established dictator of diction at our colleges. There is a formal neatness and pharisaic precision of expression common to most preachers who are rhetoricians by the grace of Dr. Blair, which appear to us ingeniously infelicitous as channels of spiritual thought and emotion. We have seen many sermons, written by men who felt warmly and conceived vividly, in which piety was strangled in the process of putting it into sentences and paragraphs. Style should follow, not determine, the action of the mind; and clearness of expression will be more likely to spring from clear conceptions, than from following rules which mangle the thought in the very act of setting it in clear light. Mr. Bartol's style is free from all blemishes of smartness, crispiness, and merely mechanical precision; but it offends occasionally in the opposite extreme of sedateness, fulness, and luxuriant excess of ornament and illustration. Its characteristic merit is a grave energy of movement, which often rises into majesty, and never sinks into feebleness, with little to disturb the harmony of its motion but a too frequent use of interrogations. This form of speech, from its snapping and trampling character, is felt at times as a harsh intruder into the author's melodious paragraphs; but in a majority of instances, it is almost concealed by the rich and flowing drapery in which the author clothes it; and there are numerous sentences in which the reader hardly knows he is committing himself to such a perilous companion, until he obtains a distant view of the " little crooked thing that asks questions," posted truculently at the end of the period. In

VOL. LXX. NO. 146.

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one great merit of a preacher's style, that of shedding over the composition a light caught from the stainless beauty of the Christian ideas it conveys, Mr. Bartol is commonly successful; but even the purity of this effect is lessened by the bewildering abundance of images and comparisons which he pours over every page, until the thing illustrated is in danger of being lost in the splendor of the illustrations. Nothing but the firmness of his hold upon central principles prevents his style from being, in this way, altogether overloaded, losing all consistency of purpose, and becoming confused and disjointed.

It is difficult to cull passages from the volume for quotation, as there are no paragraphs deliberately eloquent, and set as traps to catch the reader's admiration. The following may be given as a specimen of the author's plain speaking:

"Are you nominal Christians or real Christians? We are all one or the other. Suppose the angel of God should descend, and, breaking up the decent and orderly ranks as they now appear, classify us; how many would be on the one side, and how many on the other? - -on your own conscience, my friend, where would you be? It is said that there are in Boston more than twelve thousand communicants professing their love for Christ in the ordinance of his supper? Are they all real Christians? They would shake this city from the centre to the circumference, if they were. Not a sin, public or private, could dare long to stand unabashed before their searching gaze and spotless example. For virtue, religious character, is influential. It is not to be altogether withstood, any more than gravitation or the tides. A healing and reforming power will go out of it (for this is God's ordination) wherever it moves. We talk of reform and reformers. A good, virtuous, Christian character is the only real, effectual, lasting reformer in the world. And before twelve thousand real Christians, these vile deceptions in trade, these social pollutions, the horror of which we are just beginning to these evil customs, that exist only by compliance and sufferance, these traps and temptations, now set without a blush to take captive men's honor and virtue, would flee away with a brand of intolerable ignominy from our sight. The existence of bad habit and bold iniquity is, rightly viewed, a reproach to the church; for, were the church really what it is in name, the habit and the iniquity could not so quietly endure."

see,

The sermon entitled, The Spiritual Mind, is one long strain of devotional eloquence. The passages which more espe

cially refer to the spiritual world," in which God presides, and Christ intercedes, and bands of elder and younger angels minister," are very grand and inspiring. We can only extract a couple of paragraphs.

"But the spiritual mind, while opposed to what is carnal, completing what is moral, and discerning the significance of what is formal, has, of course, a positive and intrinsic quality of its own, which we must go beyond all terms of negation and comparison to set forth. To be spiritually-minded, then, is to have a sense, a conviction, and inward knowledge of the reality, solidity, and permanent security of spiritual things. It is to believe and see that there is something more in God's universe than outwardly appears; something more than this richly compounded order of material elements, with all its beauty and lustre; something beyond the sharply-defined glittering objects that crowd the landscape. It is to understand that day and night, seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, are not the only facts possibly subject to the notice of the undying soul. It is to be aware that even the broad streets and mighty pathways which the astronomer descries, laid out from globe to globe, do not embrace the whole or highest survey of God's creation. But beyond, within, or above all, there verily is a scene, a society of lofty, intelligent existence, where are brighter displays of God's nearness and love; a company of immortals, escaped from this empire of change; a circle of children in harmonious ranks about the infinite Father, on whose forms, "vital in every part," death comes not to lay his finger, and whose feet no sorrow or disappointment can clog or trip, as they run in endless pursuit of truth and goodness.

"The spiritual mind not only sees, as in cold vision, this inner or upper world gloriously triumphing in its stability over the passing kingdom of earth and sense, but enters into relation with it, feels surrounded by it, bows to it, and realizes an inspection from the living firmament of its power. It repeats, indeed, in the chambers of its own hidden life, the experience of the great spiritually-minded writer to the Hebrews, when, after enumerating a long list of ancient worthies, who had died in the faith many centuries before, their names rising up like ranges of mountains on the horizon of history, he represents them as actually present, like the amphitheatre of witnesses at the Grecian stadium, and says to his fellow-believers, Wherefore, seeing we are compassed about by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking

unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith;' a passage of stirring power, which no literature out of the Bible can match. And even such a holy, unseen environment the spiritually. minded man walks in the midst of, or, with a forthrunning and believing imagination, draws around him, and feels its potent virtue. He beholds vividly beside him their bright examples; for they have finished the race before him. He hears them, from their seats of bliss, with united cry cheer him on; and his feet gain swiftness in the way of all honor and well-doing. The rays from their crowns of glory are concentrated from the whole canopy of heaven into the little earthly space over which he speeds to do God's bidding; and he heeds not the ephemeral allurements of earthly pleasure, or the side-lights of human fame."

In the sermon on Belshazzar's Feast, there is much picturesque imagery and vivid description; but perhaps the most striking exhibition of the author's power of painting with words, is in The Song of the Redeemed. The principle illustrated is that by which "toil, pain, and trial, however hard and sharp and grievous in the experience, turn to comfort and delight in the retrospect;" and the following passage exquisitely pictures the sailor.

"The same principle operates in the hardships of peaceful life. The sailor has a like gladness from the dangers with which he has been environed on the stormy deep. His rough and flinty experience, too, melts in this crucible of inward recollection, by some wondrous alchemy changed to gold. He would not lose now from mind the rough winter, the perilous voyage, the tempestuous Cape, in doubling which, the biting frost and the bitter wind did their worst upon him, and his bark wellnigh foundered in the trough of the sea. Not a hurricane, or season of scant allowance, or exposure to deadly disease, would he part from. Sweeter than the music of harps and organs, the breezes whistle and the billows rage from afar; and more beautiful than the calm inland lake, reflecting the wood and the verdant hill-top near which he was born, that foam still sparkles, and those breakers swell and gleam, into which, as he clomb the giddy mast and grasped the frozen rigging, he had wellnigh been plunged. The gloomy patches of the scene charm him more than any spots of sunshine. He interprets the almost intolerable accidents that overtook him into a good and gracious Providence, and sings of his calamity, privation, and fear."

We must close our extracts with one passage from a ser

mon replete with meditative beauty and a still searching pathos, entitled, The Record of the Year. It refers to the good ministries of sickness and death.

"I have seen too much the gracious work that sickness, with all her sharp instrumentalities, does, to wish to close my eyes on, or pass slightly over, her entries in the book of life. She is the angel who comes not alone and unattended to the body and soul of man. Herself dark, she comes with a bright retinue. Patience, resignation, spiritual thoughts of God and of futurity, come with her. Penitence, flying back over the past, yet the pardoning mercy of the gospel flying with her, and shedding rays of heaven on her mournful way; resolution, pluming herself for a better course; good affections to the Father above, and the brethren around, often unfolding more strong and tender than they had ever done before in health; - these are the attendant spirits and close companions of sickness, to whose presence and precious agency we can all testify. And so this page of our record shall be to us no page of fell chance or dark misfortune, but written with the finger of God, not in the train of outward circumstances merely, but for enduring instruction, on the tables of the heart. For as the most blazing effulgence of heaven sleeps within the black cloud, so in this lowering darkness and eclipse of bodily suffering often lies the, very brilliance of a spiritual and divine.glory.

"God, my friends, by his Son Jesus Christ lifts up even this burden of death. He lifts it up in the assurance that they are not dead, though their mortal frames are dissolved; that they are not silent, though by our dull ears their voices are unheard. They praise him still, though not in the faint tones of this our humble worship. Their virtues live and grow, still sacred in his care, though canonized in no human calendar. Nay, they are not only themselves immortal, but they keep alive, or create, the faith and sense of immortality in our hearts. They have made a path with their feet into the blessed land; they have filled up and bridged over with their hallowed dust the separating gulf from time into eternity. To the meditative and prayerful soul, they send back their appeal. Being dead in the body, they yet speak for truth and goodness with louder tone and more persuasive pathos than when their words fell on our outward hearing. They have gone, that they might awaken our virtue. They have gone, that they might chill and discourage our worldly lusts. They have gone, that, from their purer, spiritualized being they might sanctify our motives, and touch with a thrilling and arousing,