ture has been formed by generous culture, and enriched by reading and society, and above all, has learned the true force and preeminent power of simplicity, and we have the secrets of his power. We could desire that these excellencies should be seen more frequently in the many books and the much preaching, which exert so powerful an influence in training the tastes and in forming the characters of the present generation, and, above all, that they should lend their aid and add their charm to the defense and enforcement of what we hold to be a more perfect Christianity, than that of these discourses. We have no right to expect, that the same natural gifts and the same refinement of culture will be brought by every one to this high service. But we do contend, that the standard of true excellence in religious teaching should be most rigidly applied, and that every deviation should be visited with severe censure. If this can not be done by the popular taste, which is liable to be dazzled by the tawdry and to despise the simple, there ought to be but one judgment expressed by the entire profession of religious teachers and writers.

We believe that there is no kind of production in which the proportion of the inferior to the excellent, is so great as in that of religious teachings. One cause is the natural shrinking from finding fault with any man of good intentions. There are the tendencies which we have specified against fresh thoughts in a natural style; there is the influence of great publishing houses and publishing societies, who seem often to estimate their power and usefulness by the quantity rather than by the quality of the matter which they circulate; and there are other causes which we need not specify.

The demand, too, is pressing if it is not loud, for a preaching and writing which shall excite greater interest and give better satisfaction. Hence the frequent call for preachers and writers of greater originality, attractiveness, &c. Alas, we fear that those who make this demand, have too generally a depraved judgment of what good preaching and writing are, and that many who attempt to satisfy the demand, do it in ways which render this taste still more depraved.

Our limits will allow us to glance at a few only of the various methods which are adopted to meet this demand, and to give variety and interest to the religious teaching of the times.

The ingenious philosopher, hopes to give life to the common places of religious truth, by recasting them in a new logical order and arranging them after a peculiar philosophical development. Metaphysical ingenuity is his study, and he hopes by the play of the various lights that sparkle from the corners of his many-angled system, to secure life and interest in his instructions. Order and development, we acknowledge to be prime essentials. They are even indispensable to the ease and simplicity of communicating

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and receiving truth of any kind. But order and deduction alone, never can attract or sustain a fresh and new interest in any religious teacher or writer. There must be principles from which to begin, on which the mind supports itself as on an unshaken rock, and from which it borrows strength, while it rests upon them. There must be arguments to be arranged, that arrest the attention and hold the thoughts, or the mere development however ingenious, becomes no better than a striking combination of algebraic symbols. Lights that are beautiful and attractive do indeed play from the brilliant surfaces and the sparkling angles of the many-faced diamond, but let the dead and earthy clay, be moulded as ingeniously as you will, and it neither shines nor attracts. The metaphysician who depends for the life and power of his teaching upon the form only and not the matter of his thoughts, becomes the poorest retailer of common-places, and sinks below the windy though earnest declaimer, and the cold but polished essayist. He does not comply with the indispensable condition of originality on which we have insisted. He has not baptized the truth with that fresh and original interest with which it is then invested when it becomes his truth as distinguished from that of every other man -that is, when it is clothed with those varied associations, with which each man believes and loves the truth for himself. Not having received this human interest from the action of the mind that utters it, it can have little freshness and novelty for those who hear. As to that added interest which comes from earnest feeling, he does not even propose to secure it, he fails of it altogether. Greatly as we esteem a just philosophy as the basis of all successful teaching, and important, nay, absolutely necessary as we know an orderly method to be to natural communication, we insist as strongly, that a philosophy that lends freshness to preaching must be a philosophical handling of subjects about which human beings are supposed to care, and that a method of nothing and for nothing, except of and for itself, is likely to attract the attention of few except its author.

The elegant and mellifluous utterer of common-places, next presents himself. He makes no pretensions to originality, the thought of it startles him as profane. The truths of religion are in his view so familiar, that any attempt to give to them novelty must be a failure, if the attempt is not to be counted an affront to heaven. All that he hopes to accomplish is to clothe them in a clear style and to express them in well balanced phraseology. For a while the style attracts by its clearness. The well turned sentences tinkle pleasantly on the ear. But by-and-by, the reader and hearer tire of the pleasant monotony, and the tinkle lulls to drowsiness. They wonder whether their instructor ever had a thought of his own, whether there can be in his soul the earnestness that becomes a living man.

The rhetorician next appears. He believes in variety, in interest, in beauty and power, and strives most faithfully to give a peculiar interest and life to the truth as coming from himself. But his ideal is false, especially false, strikingly inappropriate, as an ideal for religious teaching. No beauty of illustration, no felicity of expression, no prettiness of conceits, no splendor of diction, piled upon the exterior of the theme, can produce any effect that is worthy of a religious teacher, nay, the effect is one which as a man he should despise, and which as a Christian teacher, he should abhor. An audience listening in rapt attention, and so engrossed with the theme skillfully and earnestly enforced by a teacher, as to go away thinking of the truth rather than of the eloquence of the man who has said it, is the highest glory of the preacher, and to secure such an audience should be his aim and his delight. But an audience admiring the flights of an exaggerated and hollow rhetoric, or pleased by the conceits of a fopling litterateur, or entranced by the soaring of a labored declamation, and going away loud in their praises of the eloquence of the preacher, ought to be judged each one of them as uttering the severest condemnation on the teaching and the man who gives it. Empty is the head and the heart of the man who will sell himself in the name of Christ for such praises, or who proposes to himself such an ideal. Empty are the hearts and heads of the people who think such kind of exhibitions constitute preaching the gospel, or who with such an interpretation of the word popular, seek for such a popular preacher to fill their pews.

Of all the various classes of rhetoricians, as distinguished from the truly eloquent, whether in the pulpit or by the press, the windy and wordy variety is the most offensive. It moves our pity and disgust. We pity the poor mortal who is obliged to go through the necessary inflation which must precede the giving forth of what he esteems to be eloquence. We have sincere compassion for the galvanic excitements, by which the reluctant spirit forces itself to produce its pompous nothings. We are offended even to disgust, at the taste which in full view of the severe examples of a manly eloquence with which the records of the pulpits abound, can be so ignorant as to suppose such empty inanities to be eloquence at all, or having the least knowledge of any thing better, can deliberately commit intellectual and moral suicide, to please the ear of the multitude or to gain the fame of a popular writer or preacher. And yet the triumph of windiness seems to be in the ascendant. Sermons, platform speeches, reviews, anniversary orations, books devotional and even theological, on both sides the water, seem to be constructed on the principle that windiness and wordiness constitute eloquence, or if eloquence of a certain kind can be attained from the old fashioned materials of fresh thoughts and a glowing soul, yet that of the

highest order, fit for this glorious nineteenth century of religious wonders, can only be attained by a hail storm of words with much wind. Notwithstanding all this we remain stedfast in the assurance that "the Lord is not in the wind." We are ashamed that a taste so corrupt should so far prevail in our religious communities, and that it should be fostered by so many influences from the pulpit and the religious press.

We are well aware, that there are many causes of the prevalence of this sun-flower style of eloquence, and that these causes operate with special energy in the religious world. There are many from whose better judgment we should expect the sternest rebuke to these ridiculous exhibitions, who not only excuse them in others, but enact them themselves. They reason thus,-whatever attracts attention and excites interest on a subject to which men are so indifferent or so disinclined, as that of religion, must of necessity be praiseworthy, and so the hearer forces himself to endure and then to praise what his good feelings ought to reject, and the writer or teacher stoops to the self-degradation, at first from the sense of duty, and in it at last he learns to delight, from the golden rewards which it ensures.

But let no man be thus imposed on, especially let no young man think that to be a popular and useful religious writer or speaker, nay, one who is eloquent and powerful, he must do violence to his good sense or his good feelings. It will end in the destruction of that which is the best part of any man, that delicacy of moral taste, which has a near alliance to delicacy of conscience; and a surrendering of self-respect and of natural truthfulness which itself speaks a sterner and louder reproach against the Christian profession, than the most stirring sermons that he can write or speak, can speak in its favor. It is indeed necessary, that the man who writes for the people should cherish a strong sympathy with men as they are. He should be something else than a scholastic or an acute reasoner, or a man of cultivated taste. He must himself be familiar with living men, and know how they think and reason and feel, and to the thoughts and feelings which rise and fall in their minds, must adapt the expression of his own. But the true secret, nay, the only secret of power over others is, as we have contended, to give variety and freshness to the truths which you declare, by living upon them yourself. Especially is this the case with religious truth. Of itself and as the common stock of a Christian community, it is more hackneyed and common-place, than any other theme. And yet if applied by a man to himself, it is invested with an interest to him, that transcends the interest of all other themes united. If bathed in his own feelings and associated with his own best and strongest emotions, it is clothed with freshness brighter and more cheering than that of the morning dew.

The man who finds here the secret of his power and interest, can not but be natural. As the truth which he speaks is made his own, in the highest sense in which it can be, so will the way of communicating it be his, and that of no one else, and all the miserable tricks of a factitious and imitative rhetoric, and the gaudy ornaments of "fine writing" will be seen to be but poor and stale in the comparison. If such were the maxims with which every young preacher should set off in his course, if he should esteem this honesty in his own thoughts, to be no less sacred and binding, than the vulgar honesty of commercial intercourse, the clerical profession would be redeemed somewhat from the degradation to which it is tending. A higher order of minds would be attracted by its duties who are now repelled from it by the offense which it involves to their good sense and good judgment, and the religious public would esteem the office of a religious teacher to be higher and better than that of one "who can play well on an instrument."

• Noah Poster. Gro

ART. VIII. ALLSTON'S LECTURES.

Lectures on Art and Poems. By WASHINGTON ALLSTON. Edited by RICHARD HENRY DANA, Jr. New York: Baker & Scribner. 1850. 12mo, pp. 380. New Haven: Thos. H. Pease.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON was one of the most gifted men which our country has ever produced. As a painter he is acknowledged by all to stand at the head of American artists. He was one of the greatest masters of coloring which the century has seen, while in drawing and grouping, and the other elements which are essential to the external or the material in art, he satisfied the demands which were awakened by his mastery over colors. In the poetry of his art, he was as remarkable as in the representation of his conceptions. His conceptions were always bold, and the subjects which he proposed were often daring in the extreme. Yet he never failed to carry out the conception with an unfaltering hand, and to meet fully the highest demands of his theme. Nor did he resort to the indefinite in order to suggest the sublime; but his most remote, complicated and unearthly subjects are finished with the nicest detail and elaborated with the exactest care, showing that he trod firmly along the verge where the step of most men will falter, and that his eye was clear when that of most great painters is dazzled and dimmed.

Nor was he scarcely less distinguished, though less practiced, as a poet. His best productions, though brief, and evidently the