"Comus" and "Lycidas," Wordsworth's " Ode to Immortality," Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and others likely to come to mind, until they become familiar, one would possess a rare store of healthy and vigorous thoughts clothed in felicitous and chaste English. A late writer on elocution quotes Lord Stanhope's reply to the question, to what he ascribed the two qualities for which his eloquence was conspicuous—namely, the lucid order of his reasoning and the ready choice of his words. He said, "he believed he owed the former to an early study of Aristotelian logic, and the latter to his father's practice of making him, every day after reading over to himself some passage in the classics, translate it aloud and continuously into English prose." The vigorous reading of our English classics would enrich the vocabulary of a preacher to a degree scarcely less than the exercise of translation mentioned above. Monotony of tone in preaching is frequently an unrecognized source of weakness in the vocal organs. The preacher strikes a certain key in his first sentence and holds on his way to the close, without break or modulation. The dreary monotone not only puts the hearer into a non-receptive attitude, in spite of his will, but is a damaging abuse of the voice, because a departure from the law of its structure The latter makes it capable of great flexibility, range and compass of tone, It has been asserted (and we think with reason), that "even persons who are unaffected by music are often subdued by the gentle accents of the voice, or roused by its deep intonations." An apostle exhorts believers to "let their moderation be known to all men." Many a public speaker would find his efficiency greatly increased, could he let his modulation be known to all his hearers. All the rich varieties of emphasis, inflection and tone are impossible in monotonous speech. Indeed, it puts an injunction on the very power of thought itself, by clothing it in a stilted and unnatural sameness. A clergyman now widely known as a preacher of power told the writer the secret of his own recovery from the monotonous habit of his early life. Once, in the middle of a sermon which he was delivering in a high, unbroken key, he had occasion to stop and ask the sexton to close a door. He made the request in a natural modulated tone, and was struck by the contrast between it and his preaching. He took the hint and adopted afterwards, little by little as he could master it, a more flexible speech in public discourse. There are sources of disability in speaking in which unnatural breathing is the chief thing to be obviated. Without full chest inspirations the physical effort of speaking, even for a half hour, will be ordinarily attended with fatigue. To remove this difficulty one needs the advice of a competent instructor, and sometimes no little training. VII-LEAVES FROM A PREACHER'S NOTE-BOOK. NO. VII. BY ARTHUR T. PIERSON, D.D., PHILADELPHIA. LXXVI. Things unseen and eternal. Not long before his death, Dr. Wm. Adams preached for Dr. Cuyler; and, referring to the contrast between things seen and unseen, he said: "You stand in the Vale of Chamounix and look up. There is nothing visible where you know that Mont Blanc ought to be but a thick veil of mist that hangs so low as to seem to envelop you. The sun rises and pours a flood of rays upon the thick bank of cloud, and presently it vanishes into invisible vapor, and, like the great white throne, there stands before you the unseen and eternal !" LXXVII. Beethoven and Mozart. "One brought angels down; the other lifted mortals up." LXXVIII. "Architecture is frozen music," is attributed to Madame de Stael by some; by others, to Schlegel. A poetic thought that bears expansion. Yes, as though the strains immortal, At the silver hush of even; Should by some transforming power, LXXIX. "The Old Testament is patent in the New; the New is latent in the Old." So said Augustine. LXXX. This life is at best only the scaffolding about our true life, which is immortal. A scaffolding, though useful in construction, really hides the beauty of the building, and is torn down when the building is complete. Useful as it is, it be comes a deformity when it needlessly withdraws attention from the main structure. Should a builder erect his scaffolding as though it were the building, expending on it so much time and labor and money, as to delay or risk the final completion of the edifice, he would be a fool, giving to the scaffolding what can properly be bestowed only on the structure itself, exhausting his means on that which is transient, rather than that which is permanent. Such is the folly of a worldly life. In one dread moment all that is temporal collapses and falls into ruin, however elaborate and costly. In what condition will it reveal our eternal house! LXXXI. When Garrick conducted Dr. Johnson over his new and magnificent residence at Hampton Court, and showed him, with minuteness of detail, all its luxurious appointments, Dr. Johnson said: “Ah, yes, Garrick; but these things are what make a death-bed terrible !" LXXXII. The story of Naaman, the Syrian leper.-2 Kings v. is a beautiful example and illustration: 1, Of the impartiality of grace, treating alike the great and the small. 2, Of the simplicity of the way of salvation. Whatever mystery there be in the process, the duty is plain. 3, Of the efficacy of Divine ordinances. No inherent power, but all dependent on a divine arrangement. 4, Of the necessity for a complete compliance. No blessing until the seventh immersion. 5, Of the awful contrast of life. Naaman, the Syrian, healed; Gehazi, the prophet's servant, smitten. LXXXIII. There is a curious fable or myth, either Italian or German in its origin, which represents the devil as plotting to mar the image of God in man, and con sulting with his grandmother in hell. He forms four successive plans before he satisfies himself and his grand-dame. First, he proposes to implant in man's heart the lust of evil. But this plan has the defect that evil will be recognized as such and be repelled. Then he plans to make him a monster of self-love and self-will; but even selfishness will appear to him to be monstrous and hateful. Then Satan plans to pervert his moral nature so that he shall mistake right for wrong, and wrong for right. But the difficulty again is, how shall man be so perverted? The fourth plan is a master-device. He will ensnare man by things seemingly innocent-love of dress and temporal good. He will feed his vanity and make him the slave of fashion. Man will say all this is not in itself wrong; there can be no wrong save in excess; and, while he is philosophizing, he shall be drawn into excess. The old grand-dame is represented as casting her old serpent skin, glowing with rainbow hues, and Lucifer takes that as the material out of which to form the gay attire of fashion; and then there was a jubilee in hell over the triumph of Satanic ingenuity! LXXXIV. The "hanging gardens" of Babylon-one of the seven wonders of the world-are supposed to have been built in a pyramidal shape-1,000 feet square at the base, rising to an apex 400 feet high, terrace above terrace, crowned with rare trees, plants and flowers. They were constructed to reconcile Queen Amytis to her Chaldean home. Beneath and within all this mountain of verdure and bloom was the lions' den! Ah, Babylon, the gilded!-Rev. xvii: 4, margin. LXXXV. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted a picture of the famous Sarah Siddons in the character of the Tragic Muse. Instinctively he chose, and instantaneously, the very attitude and expression desirable in the picture. The portrait was so fine, and the poetry embodied in it so approached its ideal, that many persons were strongly affected in contemplating it. He assured the gifted Mrs. Siddons that the colors would remain unfaded as long as the canvas would hold together, and beautifully and gallantly added: "And to confirm my opinion, here is my name; for I have resolved to go down to posterity on the hem of your garment." Accordingly, his name appears on the border of the drapery. Soon afterward ended his precious life. LXXXVI. LOST-SOUGHT—SAVED.-Luke xix: 10. 1. What a description of the sinner's slate! Away from home, not knowing the way back, unable to get back, if he knew the way. 2. What a suggestion of Christ's work! He knows the way, and is the way. He bears the lost on His shoulders. He will never let the believer perish. 3. What an exhibition of free grace! It is not we who seek, but He. God beseeches men to be reconciled. He stands knocking; not we. Dr. Munhall says, there is not even a command to any sinner to pray before believing. A challenge came from a clergyman in the audience, who quoted Romans x: 13: "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved." "Yes," said Dr. M.; "but read the next verse: 'How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed'?" LXXXVII. Daniel Krummacher, being once asked in an assembly of his brethren, "Who is the elder son in the parable of the prodigal ?" solemnly said, "I well know now, for I learned it yesterday." Being further questioned, he quaintly, but laconically replied, " Myself," and then confessed how it had fretted his heart, the day before, to find that a very ill-conditioned person had suddenly been enriched with a very remarkable visitation of grace. Even so do the very prodigals who have returned to God, find working in their heart the leaven of malice and envy and uncharitableness. SERMONIC SECTION CHRISTIAN SCIENCE. BY REV. STACY FOWLER, BOSTON. [We give place to this paper, although not strictly sermonic in structure, both because of its intrinsic merit, and of the interest and discussion it called forth when read at the Suffolk North Association of Congregational Ministers; and also when read again in Pilgrim Hall, Boston, at the weekly meeting of ministers. It is unnecessary to add that the mode of "Healing" here criticised has caused no little stir in Boston and elsewhere.-ED.] Beloved, I pray that in all things thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.- 3 John i: 2. THERE is a mint of ratial truth in Edmund Burke's estimate of himself. His life, he says, might be divided into "fyttes" or manias. He began with a fit for poetry which was succeeded by a fit for rhetoric, and the mania for statesmanship ran into the mania for philosophy. In the description of his own fitful experiences Burke voiced humanity; for there is a good deal of mania in human life, even in the best of human life. In the tremendous onsweepings of society-changing its polities, its philosophies, its forms of government and its principles of reciprocity-the science of medicine, its study and practiceseems to me to be among the very fitful movements of the world. Within the sweep of my memory, if there have not been revolutions and evolutions, there have been upheavals, sudden ebullitions, new discoveries, radical and extreme changes. In my early days the instinctive dread of every boy in a country town was the sight of a doctor with his saddle bags. Usually it meant the tapping of a vein in the arm, and a dose of castor oil, if not of calomel and jalap. I remember how the discovery of the medicinal use of a weed was regarded as the finding of a panacea. People searched the fields for lobelia. It was the era of a new pathology. Upstart doctors took a short cut to practice. We remember the excitement occasioned by the advent of new doctors. We note people at one time taking codliver oil, almost as a luxury, but anon they are swallowing bitters. We see them now wearing flannels, now discarding them; now donning porous buck-skin under vests, now bathing; now taking sweats, now manipulating; now using stimulants, now dieting. We see people of striking human sympathies. One is sick: others, being sympathetic, imagine they are sick. One is trying a new remedy: others rush for it. The most skillful physicians are at times sadly at fault, while blunderers, now and then, hit upon remarkable cures. While the nation's medical skill is probing the burrowing pus-cavity in Garfield's side the bullet is incysting near the spine. We note by readings and observations, how easily susceptible to new remedies are many educated and some great men. It was no less a man than Bishop Berk. ly who thought he saw in the use of tar-water a cure for the most of human ills. We recall the Blue Glass mania of recent years. Educated, and I believe scientific men, took stock in it. I think there has been genuine progress in the science of medicine within the range of my memory. Drugs are not prescribed as they were aforetimes. Indeed the most skillful doctors do not administer much medicine now. But admitting all that can fairly be claimed for progress. the stern fact remains that we still live in a diseased world; in a suffering and dying world. Doctors are baffled: skill is often confused, confounded. Like the woman in the Gospel, people spend fortunes on physicians. All that a man hath will he give for his life is a true word yet if the devil did say it. It is not strange, therefore, that people seek new things. There is some satisfaction in changing the place if you keep the pain. Nei ther is it strange that people are easily susceptible to impositions, nor that quacks and charlatans have great success in playing upon popular credulity. Poor, suffering humanity, sinbitten and death-smitten, persistently seeks relief: not finding it in one place it rushes to another. At the present time, in Boston and many other places, the so-called "Christian Science," or Metaphysical Healing," is taking a strong hold in the communities. My attention was first called to the movement a year ago by intelligent and educated friends who were enthusiastic, and who claimed to be benefited by the "cure." I thought they were in an eccentric state of mind, and concluded that they were generalizing from slight principles of philosophy and religion. It then occurred to me to study the "Science " from the sympathetic view point, and accordingly I made an effort to see it through the eyes of its originators and expounders. After reading the books of Mrs. Dr. Eddy and Dr. E. A. Arens, I had interviews with them and with other so-called "healers." Then taking my stand at the "Metaphysical College" of Mrs. Eddy I found myself in the centre of the movement. Dr. Arens took lessons of Mrs. Eddy's husband, and though he claims to heal by the "Old Theology," he uses essentially the same principles which he learned at the "college." He is but an imitator. Mrs. Eddy is a remarkable woman. She has been a member of a congregational church; she has been in the hands of physicians of various schools and of no school, and claims at last to have "healed" herself by coming into the "understanding of God." She has been a student of the Bible and claims that her "Science" is the true interpretation of Scripture. What then is the Christian Science" as expounded by Mrs. Dr. Eddy? She begins with God, who is "Spirit" and the only "Substance" in the universe. He is omnipotent and omnipresent. He is Life, Truth and Love. But God is not a person; He is "principle." Personality limits, but God is infinite, and therefore cannot be personal. The point to keep clearly in mind is that God is "principle" and not a person. This thought is iterated and reiterated with intense positive Dess. From this high positive thought she bounds to the most astounding negations. She denies the "reality" of matter and of all material laws. Matter is not "substance" but only the "shadow' or "reflection" of God. She denies the "reality" of the human body; spirit only is "real;" man has not even a personal mind. She as emphatically denies the human, as the Divine personality. There is but one mindGod, Spirit. But man has what she calls the "mortal mind" which is the opposite of God, the very antipode of Spirit. The "mortal mind" is simply and only a false "belief" which man has generated in himself. He has begotten the "belief" that matter is substance," and so has fallen from the true knowledge of God. This mortal thought is the source of all his ills. He thinks he is sick, but the thought is an illusion. The sickness is in the false belief and not in the body. "We say," she remarks, "the body suffers from the effects of cold, heat, fatigue, etc.: but this is belief and error, and not the truth of being, for matter cannot suffer: mortal mind alone suffers, and not because a law of matter has been transgressed, but a law of the mind." The body never suffers from the effects of heat, cold and fatigue! How comforting to people living near the Franconia Notch to be told when the thermometer is thirty degrees below zero that the body is not cold, and that if they would only change their minds on the subject they might remain out of doors all night and feel warm glows running all over them! How cheaper than fuel and clothes, to say nothing of the comfort! Change your minds and your bodies will never be weary! This conclusion, ridiculous as it is, is the logical result of the senseless assumption. |