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SOME GREAT PREACHERS.

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Domestic servants generally went where they pleased, and took the children where they pleased. I remember being taken to hear a great dissenting preacher at Gainsborough. At Derby I heard Robert Hall, and some Wesleyan stars. In town I heard Rowland Hill, Edward Irving, and other well-known preachers. Everybody returning home from a fortnight in town was asked what preachers he had heard, and what he thought of them.

Extempore preaching was very rare in those days, and was thought almost miraculous. It was just beginning to find a place in education. In some religious families the little children were taught to preach, or at least to write short sermons. William Cayley, in my house at Charterhouse, used to boast that he preached at home every Sunday. He did not want for courage or for tongue.

But to none of the examples I have named could I ascribe my ineffectual aspiration after eloquence. Robert Hall was fluent, easy, and agreeable; but he was monotonous, he seldom rose to eloquence, he made no hits, and he had a snuffle which could not but annoy strangers. Rowland Hill, when I heard him, was long past his best days, and I remember him with reverence and a certain liking rather than anything to call admiration. Edward Irving was a prodigy, but His sentences were so long and so organ but his own could have taken a hearer into them or out of them. It was such a work of intonation and accentuation. I heard him preach for more than two hours--my father thought it had been only one hour-and I was sorry when he

not in my lines. involved that no

stopped; but he inspired no rivalry. The Wesleyan preachers I heard were earnest and vigorous, but jarred a little on one's taste.

In proportion as all these preachers were classical, or what we should call educated, they introduced little Scripture. In proportion as they quoted texts they failed in style. But when style, that is, good taste, is once given up there ensues descent to a lower and still lower depth. For really powerful preaching all depends on that earnestness of tone and manner which implies and conveys absolute conviction. But this requires very little education-nay, it finds in education its greatest difficulty. The most ignorant and uninformed man can deal with a few simple truths better than the scholar who has been elaborating them into form all his life, and he can apply a score or two familiar texts better than the well-read critic or polemic.

Had the plan of my life been an intention and a design, deliberately formed in a manner I was conscious of, and for tangible reasons, I might have pursued it better and more consistently. As it was I allowed other fancies to come in the way, without much caring how far they were compatible with what I simply believed to be my destiny; just as the old Pagan divinities exercised much free will and licence under cover of certain irresistible Fates. Any time from eight years old to fifteen I should have been delighted to run away from school or home, and find myself at sea anywhere between the Equator and the Poles, fighting Frenchmen or whales, no matter which. But as it would be wrong, and was also

THE AMPHIBIOUS INSTINCT.

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impossible, I could only dream, and my clerical destination was a fact.

The sight of water in any quantity always took me out of myself, and seemed to change my very nature. A broad river reach, a good big pond, or a swimming-bath was enough. Is this inherited, or an accident of early formation? Are we chickens, or ducklings, or sea-gulls from the egg?

I stood one bright summer's day on Filey Brigg with my father, watching the clear blue waves rising far above our heads and falling in white foam at our feet, and felt an almost irresistible desire to plunge into the rising and falling wall of waters. My father remonstrated. I thought I knew better, but, happily, obeyed. Some years after, late in an evening, I was actually on the point of going into a pretty considerable surf in Alum Bay, in the Isle of Wight. Some men chanced to come up, and one of them said, 'Sir, if you go into that water you will never come out again.' Scarcely believing the warning, I felt it my duty to act upon it.

Taking headers into the pool under the floodgates below Sandford Lasher was one of the most delightful of my Oxford enjoyments. It is an excellent imitation of danger, with just enough of the reality, for lives have been lost there, besides some placed in great jeopardy.

I have seen the like instinct frequently cropping up under apparently adverse conditions. A bright farmer's daughter exclaimed one day, 'I do so love the water!' As two of her brothers were at sea, and the sea itself was not more than a dozen miles off, I

VOL. I.

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thought she might have had a taste, or at least a sight, of the sea. On my asking the question it appeared she had never seen a larger piece of water than her father's cattle-pond,

CHAPTER X.

PARSONS AND PARSONS.

VERY early an old Gainsborough friend of our family, whom I and my brother John visited after our migration to Derby, said my father had made a great mistake in marking out John for the man of business, and me for the parson. I rather think my brother thought so too. He was too dutiful even to complain, though his innermost heart's wish was to go to college. But when his elder brother broke loose from the business, John had to be put in his place. For myself I never doubted or criticised my clerical destination.

There are those who think such destinations injurious. They would rather a man graduated in some other vocation, and in that way mixed upon more equal terms with the world: well in it, and rising through it, before claiming to be wiser or better than it. My own experience, but I must confess also my own predilections, are much in favour of the priest, or the Levite, or at least the Nazarite, from his birth. It is something to fall back upon, and that cannot be easily shaken off.

My own retrospect suggests that there is much

ARCHIBALD FOX.

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more to be said for another objection to the common run of clerical careers. That objection is, that you set a man to preach to others for the salvation of their souls, who never felt the least anxiety as to the salvation of his own. He is to cry danger who never felt it; he is to invite to a banquet who never hungered, to wells of life who never knew thirst. Speaking for myself, I cannot remember ever to have felt a misgiving as to my own salvation. I was, so I felt, on the right road. I might diverge into flowery paths on the right hand or the left, but the road was still in sight, and easily regained. I might rest, and be too thankful, but a little extra exertion would soon make up for lost time. There was always the

sense that I was saved.

I remember having an hour's discussion with Archibald Fox, a pupil of Chalmers, in which he argued that every Christian course must be preceded by a terrible trial, a struggle between life and death, the agonies of one dying to the world before his spiritual rising again in Christ. I maintained that such moods were exceptional; I think I even believed them to be morbid. True growth in grace I believed. to be regular, like the growth of a healthy plant or a vigorous human frame. As for healthy plants and vigorous frames, perhaps the less I now say about them the better; but I now cannot help seeing that few men, if any, have had much power, or even desire, to win souls who have not themselves gone through the dark and dismal passage which poor Archibald described, and from which I fear he never himself completely emerged.

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