(3.) The one is honoured only here by the depraved, the other is honoured yonder by angels and by God.

CONCLUSION: My poor pious brother, let not thy poverty oppress thee; riches and poverty are more in the heart than in the

hand; a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things which he possesseth. The contented are ever wealthy, the avaricious ever poor. By thy dinner of herbs may rest the foot of that Jacob's ladder, by which thou canst exchange visits with the celestial.

AN UNTHINKING PULPIT.

I.

▲ YOUNG raw preacher is a bird not yet fledged, that hath hopped out of his nest to be chirping on a hedge, and will be straggling abroad at what peril soever. The pace of his sermon is a full career, and he runs wildly over hill and dale till the clock stops him. The labour of it is chiefly in his lungs; and the only thing he has made in it himself is the faces. His action is all passion, and his speech interjections. He has an excellent faculty in bemoaning the people, and spits with a very good grace.

His

style is compounded of twenty several men's, only his body imitates some one extraordinary. He will not draw his handkerchief out of his place, nor blow his nose without discretion. His commendation is, that he never looks upon book; and, indeed, he was never used to it. He preaches but once a year, though twice on Sunday, for the stuff is still the same, only the dressing a little altered; he has more tricks with a sermon than a tailor with an old cloak, to turn it and piece it, and at last quite disguise it with a new preface. If he have waded further in his profession, and would show

reading of his own, his authors are postils, and his school divinity a catechism. BISHOP EARLE.

II.

As an cagle, so long as her young ones be not fledged and thoroughly feathered, she doth not suffer them to go out of the nest, and to fly abroad; but after they be perfectly winged, and in the beauty and strength of their feathers, she throweth them out of the nest, that they may fly and exercise their wings and feathers and use them to the end wherefore they have them; even so our Saviour Christ, that heavenly Eagle, after His resurrection, commanded his disciples to stay at Jerusalem, as it were in a nest, and not to depart thence until, en the day of Pentecost, He had filled them with the grace of the Holy Ghost, and then He commanded them, that, passing through the world and travelling through divers coasts of the earth, they should publish abroad, and spread far and near the Gospel of His kingdom.-Things New and Old.

III.

It is said of Archbishop Whitgift, that though he preached often, yet he never durst adven

ture into the pulpit but he first wrote his notes in Latin, and afterwards kept them by him during his life; and he would say himself, "That whosoever took that pains before his preaching, the older he waxed the better he would discharge that duty: but he, if he trusted to his memory only, his preaching in time would become prattling." What shall we, then, say to those that rush into the pulpit without any preparation at all, that presume upon a dabitur in illa hora, so that quicquid in buccam (out comes that which lies uppermost)? Whether sense or nonsense, all is one, running like a horse with an empty cart over hedge and ditch, till the hour-glass stops them. It was the complaint of St. Jerome, of such shallow brains, in his comment on Ecclesiastes ix. 11. "Nam videas in Ecclesia imperitissimos quosque florere, &c." You may see how, in the Church, the most ignorant are the most esteemed; and because they have profited in boldness of front and volubility of tongue, they are accounted the only preachers of the time; and, to speak the truth, impudence and ignorance are the only qualifications of such preachersThings New and Old.

IV.

Zeuxis, the famous painter, was observed to be very slow at his work, and to let no piece of his go abroad into the world to be seen of men till he had turned it over and over, this side and that side, again and again, to see if he could spy any fault in it; and being upon a time asked the reason why he was so curious, why so long in drawing his lines, and so glow in the use of his pencil, he made this answer, "I am long in doing what I take in hand, because what I paint, I paint for eternity." What ministers do, they do for

eternity. Their words will ring for ever and ever in the memory of their auditors. Ah! more than ring in memory, they will work in their experience and help to shape their destiny. Every subject should be well studied, every truth well stated. In truth, the doctrine propounded has to come from the speaker's mouth as a thing of life, and radiate his countenance as with a beam from eternity.-EDITOR.

A SKETCH OF DR. ARNOLD IN HIS PULPIT AT RUGBY.

"The oak pulpit standing out by itself above the school seats. The tall gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice, now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle, of him who stood there Sunday after Sunday witnessing and pleading for his Lord, the King of righteousness and love, and glory, with whose spirit he was filled, and in whose power he spoke. The long lines of young faces, rising tier above tier, down the whole length of the chapel; from the little boy's who had just left his mother, to the young man's who was going out next week into the great world rejoicing in his strength. It was a great and solemn sight, and never more so than at this time of year, when the only lights in the chapel were in the pulpit, and at the seats of the præposters of the week, and the soft twilight stole over the rest of the chapel, deepening into darkness in the high gallery behind the organ.

But what was it after all which seized and held these three hundred boys, dragging them out of themselves, willing or unwilling, for twenty minutes, on Sunday afternoons? True, there always were boys scattered up and down the school, who in heart and head

were worthy to hear, and able to carry away the deepest and wisest words there spoken. But these were a minority always, generally a very small one, often so small a one as to be countable on the fingers of your hand. What was it that moved and held us, the rest of the three hundred reckless, childish boys, who feared the Doctor with all our hearts, and very little besides in heaven or earth; who thought more of our sets in the school than of the Church of Christ, and put the traditions of Rugby, and the public opinion of boys in our daily life above the laws of God? We couldn't enter into half that we heard; we hadn't the knowledge of our own hearts, or the knowledge of one another; and little enough of the faith, hope, and love, needed to that end. But we listened, as all boys in their better moods will listen (yea, and men, too, for the matter of that), to a man who we felt to be, with all his heart and soul and strength, striving against whatever was mean, and unmanly, and unrighteous in our little world. It was not the cold clear voice of one giving advice and warning from serene heights to those who were struggling and sinning below, but the warm living voice of one who was fighting for us and by our sides, and calling on to us to

was

help him and ourselves and one another. And so, wearily and little by little, but surely and the whole, steadily on brought home to the young boy, for the first time, the meaning of his life; that it was no fool's or sluggard's paradise into which he had wandered by chance, but a battle field ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them, showed them at the same time, by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life, how that battle was to be fought; and stood there before them their fellowsoldier and the captain of their band. The true sort of captain,too, for a boy's army; one who had no misgivings and gave no uncertain word of command, and, let who would yield or make truce, would fight the fight out (so every boy felt) to the last gasp and the last drop of blood. Other sides of his character might take hold of and influence boys here and there, but it was this thoroughness and undaunted courage which more than anything else won his way to the hearts of the great mass of those on whom he left his mark, and made them believe first in him, and then in his Master."

THOMAS HUGHES, M.P.

BAPTISM.

To aid "Inquirer" in his search for "the Gospel idea of Baptism," allow me to raise a few questions upon the extract you append as a reply to his inquiry, pp. 175, 176.

1. In the list of passages enumerated by Mr. Godwin as mentioning "the baptism of the body with water," has he not omitted the most important one, viz., our Saviour's commission to his disciples in Matt. xxviii. 19, 20, "Go ye therefore, and teach (disciple) all nations, baptising them," &c.? Is not the baptism there commanded by Christ "the baptism of the body with water"? It cannot be the baptism of which He spoke in Mark x. 29; Luke xii. 50; and which his disciples were to share with Him, because it was to be administered by them to their converts. It cannot be the baptism of the Holy Ghost, because it was to be administered in the name of the Holy Ghost. What other baptism, then, could it be?

2. Does not that passage fix the nature and use of the rito as a baptism of the body with water, to be administered in the name of the Trinity by Christian teachers to those whom they disciple in the Christian faith, and personally obligatory on all such, in every age and nation?

3. Has not the "assumption" that in "the figurative expressions of the apostles," in the passages quoted by Mr. G., "there is a reference made to immersions

cases

in water," received the support of some of the ripest scholars of every age? Dr. Crawford, of Edinburgh University, in his recent work on "The Fatherhood of God," after quoting the same passages, writes: "It ought to be remembered that the cases of baptism which are referred to in the above passages were not of baptism administered in infancy, like those with which alone we are ordinarily conversant, but of baptism administered to persons of mature age, who had been converted from Judaism or from heathenism, and who, on making an intelligent and deliberate profession of their faith in Jesus Christ, had been solemnly received into the communion of the Christian Church." (Second edition, p. 307.) He therefore regards them not as figurative expressions," but as allusions to cases of a literal burial by baptism.

66