jected an English Dictionary to be illustrated with particular phrases to be selected from Tillotson's sermons." "There is a living writer," said Dugald Stewart, "who combines the beauties of Johnson, Addison, and Burke, without their imperfections. It is a dissenting minister of Cambridge, the Rev. Robert Hall. Whoever wishes to see the English language in its perfection, must read his writings." No one can be familiar with the style of Jeremy Taylor and that of several British essayists, without recognizing his influence upon them. The tincture of his phraseology is discernible in the expressions of Charles Lamb even. The character of Herbert's writings is stamped upon those of Izaak Walton, and the insinuating power of Walton upon the English language has not been, nor will it be, inconsiderable. Had not Martin Luther been trained for, and in the pulpit, he had never been so forceful and popular in his written essays. It was in no small degree by his sermous that he woke up his own mind and that of his countrymen. The literature of Germany and of the world has been animated and enriched by the results of his preaching. Who can estimate the intellectual influence of the Bishop of Hippo, upon his own age; upon the Augustinian, and other monastic orders of succeeding ages; upon John Calvin, and through him, upon Switzerland, Holland, and, by the intervention of John Knox, upon Scotland, England and America; upon Schleiermacher and through him upon Germany? It is not too much to say, that Augustine would never have wielded this power over the race, had he not been a preacher; for his sacred calling stirred up the depths of his soul, and gave him a strength and completeness of character, also a venerableness of name, which a mere philosopher, even one like Aristotle, can seldom, if ever, acquire.

The minister's influence is obvious upon the morals and business of a people. He touches the main-spring of the political machine, and its extremities are quickened. Waking up the intellect, he stimulates to enterprise. Refining the taste, he throws an air of neatness over the parish. He pleads for industry and method, for honest dealing and temperate habits, for good order in the family, and school and State. He preaches from that text which is the mother of friendship and thrift, "Study to be quiet and to do your own business." He infuses new vigor into the counting-room, and new faithfulness over the farm. Where the true preacher is at work, you will see fruits of his labor in even roads and strong walls and thriving arts and a wholesome police; but where the doors of the meeting-house are left unhinged, and the windows broken out, and the pulpit is given up to swallows' nests and the pews to sheep, there you will find a listless yeomanry and ragged farms, thin schools and crowded bar-rooms. The history of a church is often the history of a town; when the one flourishes, the other feels its influence. More than twenty parishes in New England might be mentioned, where

the settlement of a faithful pastor was the prelude to rapid improvements in agriculture and trade, the style of building and of dress, the complexion of politics, and the whole cast of character. What one preacher does for a parish, thousands do for the nation. To the complaint that the ministry is expensive, we may reply in the words of Dr. South: "If there was not a minister in every parish, you would quickly find cause to increase the number of constables; and if the churches were not employed to be places to hear God's law, there would be need of them to be prisons for the breakers of the laws of men."* Is it not as wise an economy to erect houses of worship, as houses of correction; to support religious teachers as to support more watchmen and busier hangmen? Even the history of the name, clergyman, illustrates the humane relations that subsist between the ministerial office and the literature, the morals, the penal code of the community. In the books of English law, we often read of criminals convicted with or without the benefit of clergy. This benefit was an exemption from the kind and degree of punishment prescribed for lay offenders, and the exemption was once extended to all criminals who could read and write. Still it retained its instructive name, the benefit of clergy, because nearly all who had any acquaintance with the rudiments of education were'clergymen, and an ability to read was a legal sign of the sacred office. Hence clergy, scholars and clerks, were convertible terms in the old English style, and clerk is still the law-term for a preacher of the gospel. When a man was convicted of felony or manslaughter, he was "put to read in a Latin book, of a Gothic black character, and if the ordinary of Newgate said, legit ut clericus, i. e., he reads like a clerk, he was only burned in the hand and set free; otherwise he suffered death for his crime." It is indeed a sad feature of past ages, that the circumstance of having received a clerk's education, should have released an offender from the punishment which he deserved; still there is a pleasant meaning in the fact that such an education was supposed to be incompatible with the grossest forms of sin, and that the term, clergyman, was regarded as synonymous with the words learned and good.

It must be admitted that atheists are more frequently found in Christian lands than in any other. Where the true religion is known, the despisers of all religion are the most numerous Even such Pagan philosophers as discarded the popular faith, were unwilling to injure its credit with the mass of men. But among us there are friends of universal education who decry the pulpit, though it is a great educator of the populace ; there are fervid philanthropists who ridicule the missionary, though he carries the blessedness of learning to the heathen; and the founder of one of the most splendid colleges in our land has inserted the condition in his will, that no clergyman shall step his foot on the college grounds. When we hear Franklin speak so often in praise of frugality * Sermon or 1 Kings, xiii. 33, 34.

and industry, and other virtues that derive their chief support from the Bible; when we read his question to an infidel associate, "If men are so wicked with religion what would they be without it?" and his assertion to the same individual, that the great majority of men "need the motives of religion to restrain them from vice ;"* we naturally expect to find him a reverential advocate of the preacher's office. But in his letter to Whitefield, he says, "Now-a-days we have scarce a little parson that does not think it the duty of every man within his reach to sit under his petty ministrations, and that whoever neglects them offends God. I wish to such more humility." And we, in return, wish more consistency to our great men. Why eulogize the end and sneer at the means? Why praise virtue in the general and contemn it in its brightest particular? Our manufacturers say, that the preaching of the gospel makes better cotton-spinners; our landlords, that it makes better tenants; our physicians for the insane, that it hastens the recovery of the diseased in mind; our friends of temperance and of social reform, that it affords efficient aid in every good work. A political economist may easily perceive, that the want of teachers of the truth in Gomorrah must have diminished the value of houses and lands in that doomed city, and that the kingdoms of ancient times would have been less unquiet and transient, if they had been under the influence of a well read and an instructed priesthood. On the lowest principle, then, of a alculating patriotism, how can a Jefferson allow himself to neglect, st.1 more to deride the pulpit, to which his own country, more than any other, owes her political salvation. How suicidal the policy of Lord Chesterfield, and other devotees of an elegant literature, who delight in sneering at the very office that creates a demand for all of enduring value in their writings, and without which there will remain but little of healthy politeness, or of sound letters in Christendom. As we read of an eminent teacher's being accustomed to remark, "Give me the religion of a country, and I will tell you all the rest ;" so we may add, the whole character of a people depends, far more than is commonly recognized, upon the teachings of the pulpit; and the man who aims to undermine rather than regulate the influence of the sacred office, is not, so far forth, an intelligent friend of the State.

The influence of a preacher on the intellect, the taste, the business and morals of a community, is but an illustration of his influence on the religious character. We shall not be suspected of implying, what is never true, that he transforms the heart without the special interposition of the Holy Ghost; and yet there is a sense in which a dependent apostle may declare: "I have begotten you through the gospel." It is not one soul only that he benefits, nor two, nor twenty, but perhaps a hundred; and

* Franklin's Works, Phil. Ed., vol. vi., p. 244.

+ Ib., p. 36.

a hundred eternities otherwise spent in the darkness that no light cheers, are now spent in the paradise of God. Of the hundred immortals thus transformed by the means of a single preacher, who knows but some one may be an instrument of interminable good to a hundred more—may be a Fuller, or a Payson, or a Harlan Page, or a Mrs. Judson? Is it not a moderate calculation, that a hundred faithful disciples will exert an influence which God will bless to the spiritual welfare of at least two hundred of their fellow-men, their kindred or friends for whom they toil and pray; each one on an average bringing two additional talents into the sacred treasury? And these two hundred Christians may impart, as parents do impart in a kind of legacy, their religious character to their children; and a thousand of their children's children may labor, each one in his own circle, for the renovation of other souls. Each one in his own circle of friends, and here are a thousand different circles, and each member of each of these circles has a separate band of his own associates, and the influence thus branches out into a new sphere, and will continue to widen and amplify, and to include still other multitudes. It is well to reflect minutely on the manner in which influence is propagated, filling one area after another, transmitted from a few ancestors to a numerous posterity, and flowing on like a stream, broader and deeper, till it becomes a mystery how such great effects can result from a cause so limited. Nor should we confine our view to the gradual and ceaseless propagation of the influence which the minister may have exerted during his life. We should also consider the new impressions which are often produced by his printed works long after his death. The trains of moral cause and effect which he started by his living voice, are not only continued for ages, but his published discourses are setting original trains in motion; and as the author of written sermons, he sometimes gives an impulse to more minds than he affected by his spoken words. Many a clergyman never dies. If his name were forgotten, he would still be producing effects of which he is not recognized as the cause; but sometimes a clergyman, like Chrysostom, lives and preaches, generation after generation, among a larger community of readers, than he ever orally addressed; and in addition to the good that flows from the multitude who were benefited by his life, is a still greater good that is constantly springing up in minds conversant with his posthumous sermons. He is still beginning to put in train systems of moral influence which are entirely distinct from the systems originated upon the minds of his contemporaries, and continued, by the natural laws of transmission and expansion, from one age to another of their posterity.

The treatises of John Howe on "Delighting in God," and on the "Blessedness of the Righteous;" of President Edwards on the "History of Redemption;" of George Campbell, on "Miracles;" of John Foster, on the "Evils of Popular Ignorance;" of Dr. Chalmers, on the "Evidences of Christianity" were originally preached as sermons: they were

sermons that did not soon grow old. At the last day, what a throng of witnesses will there be to the effect of John Newton's ministrations. We are now feeling this effect in the hymns of Cowper, in the writings of Buchanan, who owed his religious character to the instrumentality of Newton-writings which are said to have first awakened the missionary spirit of our own Judson; in the works of Dr. Scott, another monument of Newton's fidelity, and a spiritual guide to hundreds of preachers and thousands of laymen; in the words and deeds of Wilberforce, who ascribed a large share of his own usefulness to the example and counsels of the same spiritual father. Edmund Burke, on his death-bed, sent an expression of his thanks to Mr. Wilberforce for writing the "Practical Christianity," a treatise which Burke spent the last two days of his life in perusing, and from which he confessed himself to have derived much profit*-a treatise which has reclaimed hundreds of educated men from irreligion, but which would probably never have been what it now is, had not its author been favored with Newton's advice and sympathy. What shall we predict as the ultimate result of Whitefield's more than eighteen thousand addresses from the pulpit, and of the impulse which he gave to the activity of the whole church, friends and foes, in America and Britain? His power was felt by Hume, Bolingbroke, Foote, Ches terfield, Garrick, Rittenhouse, Franklin, Erskine and Edwards; by the miners and colliers, and fishermen of England, the paupers and slaves, and Indians of America. "Had Whitefield never been at Cambuslang, Buchanan, humanly speaking, might never have been at Malabar." When, too, will cease the influence of Payson's pulpit? For we read that during his ministry of twenty years, interrupted by frequent sicknesses, he admitted to the communion-table more than seven hundred who had never previously separated themselves from the thoughtless multitude. William Jay began to preach the gospel before he was sixteen years old; he delivered nearly a thousand sermons before he had passed his minority; for more than fifty years he was active in the pastoral office at Bath, and was honored there with numerous proofs of his usefulness; among those who have been radically improved by his discourses, are the founder of Spring Hill College, the martyred missionary, Williams, and several living preachers; his practical writings have been the comfort of hundreds of families, morning and evening, on both sides of the Atlantic; and his influence, though it may become less and less apparent, will become, in fact, more and more powerful through all time. If the Christian scholar would meditate often on this diffusive nature of truth and goodness, on the inherent value of even one mind, in its influence over its contemporaries, and still more over succeeding generations, an influence which is inevitable, resulting from our sympa thetic nature; if he would follow this widening train of moral causes hrough time to the judgment, when a single soul shall be revealed as * See Life of Wilberforce, Amer. ed., p. 183.