preacher; that his words come with power, not as his words but those of God; that they borrow efficacy from the house, the time, the whole scene of their utterance, and are retained in the memory long after they seem to be lost. A movement of the arm or eye has often a meaning in the pulpit which it has no where else; for it is enveloped there with new means of suggestion, and is witnessed by men of excited, quick-moving sensibilities. The preacher stands like one insulated and charged with the electric fluid; the touch is now startling which a few minutes ago was like the touch of a common man. Or, if we may change the figure, he is like the surgeon operating on the most delicate tissues, and a hair's breadth movement of the knife saves or kills. That is not an office for the indolent, weak or trifling, in which the causes are for a moment and the effects for eternity; the causes are a short phrase condensing a world of import, or a breath of air making a significant interjection, or a line on the face indicative of a thousand hopes or fears; and the effects are, what "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man."

The high character of the preacher's work is further illustrated by the bad effects which he may produce in a very short time. The evil that may ensue from an office poorly filled, sets out in relief the good that may be done by a fit incumbent. He is an important man who may do much hurt, even if he can never become a positive and decided benefactor. Though an armed maniac is powerless for good, he is guarded with jealous care merely for his tendency to mischief. Now the preacher may benumb the intellect which he ought to arouse and brighten. He may darken the conscience that he ought to illuminate, and may deprave instead of purifying the tastes and affections. As the soul which, with aid from above, he might have allured toward heaven, would have gained without ceasing new capacity for holiness and bliss, so the soul which he now indisposes for a pious life will be perpetually drinking in new sin and new punishment. The sin is just as debasing as the holiness would have been exalting, and the punishment is as refined, and spiritual, and keen, as would have been the reward. Nor does this soul go on alone to its ruin. Spirits move in sympathy, and make companions for their gloom if they do not find them.

The man whom the preacher hardens in guilt imparts a like hardening influence to at least three or four of his friends, perhaps of his household; and these will not shut up the contagion within their own breasts, but will spread it perhaps through nine or twelve of their admirers or dependents; and in this geometrical ratio the progress of the contamination may not cease in this world till the millenium, nor in the world to come till spirits no longer assimilate with each other. If the tide of virtuous influence flows upward from generation to generation, what shall be the breadth and depth and bitterness of that river of death that flows downward! Nor is it only from the aggregate of the preacher's life that this evil may take its rise. It is from one sermon and one sentence that a hearer may start in his course of desperation, and go on diverging further and further from the line of hope. A single unguarded expression has gone from the pulpit and eased a conscience that had for days been extorting the complaint, Oh wretched man that I am! A rough remark on the perdition of infants has been known so to shock a hearer, as make him leave the house of God and never listen again to an evangelical ministry. A morose appellative on the doctrine of eternal punishment was referred to by an enemy of that doctrine, as the first thing that inflamed his mind against it, and induced him to become a minister of false tidings, proclaiming peace to large assemblies for whom there was no peace, said the Lord. "Though the number of the children of Israel be as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved;" this was one of the first texts from which Mr. Murray discoursed on his first visit to Boston. "If one should buy a rich cloth, and make it into a garment, and then burn the garment, but save the remnant, what must be thought of him;" this was one of his first sentences. Homely and clumsy as was the argument, it had a strange and sad effect upon a young man of enterprise who heard it; he carried it to his home in one of our inland towns, and made it the means of awakening a curiosity and a prejudice that terminated in the defection of a large neighborhood from the faith. From that neighborhood have gone several lettered men, who have blended the fascinations of learning with the ungainly creed of their childhood; and may it not be a rational fear that several congregations will be seduced into ruin by a

train of influences that started from the one witless illustration of John Murray? And well would it be if all the evil that flows from the pulpit were the emanation of an unsanctified ministry. Does not much of it come from the imperfect addresses of even pious divines; from their bad utterance, that gives an unkind meaning to goodly words; from their style of composition, that makes a hearer turn away the richest truth coming in such repulsive attire; from their want of forethought and skill; from an undue neglect of prayer and study; from low purposes, little faith, clouded views, dull feeling? And, moreover, must it not deepen our sense of the preacher's critical situation to reflect, that he often does not foresee the results of his language? He does good without knowing it, and evil also. A sentence that hastily escapes him has performed its work as hastily, and has broken what a century's discoursing will never mend. God has concealed from us the day of our death, so that every day may be the pivot on which our eternity is seen to depend. He has hidden from us the names of the elect, so that no sinner may fail of applying to himself the invitations of grace, and no Christian refuse the duty of perseverance in view of a final preservation promised of God. There is this apparent indefiniteness and obscurity flung over the works and ways of Jehovah, and therefore the seriousness which might otherwise be confined to a single point is now diffused through a whole existence. If the preacher could always determine the moment when his auditory would be most impressible, he might set a double guard upon that moment. If he knew exactly what discourse or what paragraph would happen to seize the peculiar attention of an inquirer or a caviller, a bright child or an inquisitive student, he might lay out his great strength on a few sentences and feel somewhat secure. He can indeed foresee that some parts of his ministration will require more skill than others; but he will often find a surprising efficacy where he looked for nothing. A discourse of Payson, which he thought little of and wrote almost entirely at a sitting, was one of the most effective that he ever preached. "I could not but wonder," he says, "to see God work by it." So too the sentence which the preacher utters without even a thought of its power, becomes the watchword of a hearer's perdition. The word fell almost unbidden from

the pulpit, and it was perverted to the eternal sorrow of one who listened to little beside that word. The critical and momentous character of the preacher's work is therefore spread out over all its parts, even the most minute. He sometimes labors on his arguments and has no fear for his illustrations; but his illustrations are misunderstood and more than undo the effect of his reasoning. When he raises his hand to enforce a saying, he is like the man of old who drew a bow at a venture, and knew not whom or what he should smite. We have read of navigators whose hair turned from black to gray while. they were steering their bark through a dangerous pass, and feeling that a movement of the helm even for a single inch would be for the crew's life or death. But it is often told with seeming surprise, that Martin Luther never stood in the pulpit without trembling; as if there were no cause for his trembling when immortal interests may have been suspended upon one felicitous or inapposite remark. It was because Paul understood the quickness of human sympathies, and the facility of doing evil, and the certainty of doing something either for the hardening or the mellowing of his hearers, that he preached with an alternation of hope and grief and courage and much heaviness of spirit. Nothing can be a more philosophical inference from such dubiousness of result, than the command of an ancient preacher, "In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand, for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good." He who gives great heed to some things in his preaching and none at all to others, is like one who watched all the night and let the thief enter in the morning; who built his walls thick and high, and left only one aperture open to the enemy. The spiritual watchman ought always to pray and never to faint.

The dignity and importance of the preacher's work may be illustrated still more clearly by the fact, that God has devised and approved it as the chief instrument of promoting his glory among men. What God has instituted may not be called common; and his mandate is not so much in the useful words of human philanthropy, 'disseminate tracts,' organize Sabbath schools,' as in the words of the Saviour's wisdom, 'Go ye and preach the gospel.' God has so formed the voice of the minister and the ear of the

people, that the philosophical consequence is, "faith cometh by hearing," if the Spirit is near with his aid. He has so made the hand and the face of the speaker, and the eye and heart of the hearer, that the sacred office seems to have its foundation laid in the very constitution of the body and soul; and like the Sabbath, to have what is technically called a moral as well as positive ground-work. The eye, voice, lips, arm and attitude of such a man as Stillman seem to have an edifying power, because they are symbols of the truth which edifies. This mysterious relation between the spirit of the gospel and the tones of voice which express it is a sign that the preacher's office is no arbitrary device. But the Christian ministry is not merely of divine institution. God has shown that he approves of it as his chief instrumentality for Zion. He diffused the knowledge of his gospel over what was termed the whole world, and planted churches in great numbers, before a single book of the New Testament was written. He sent forth apostles with no message save what came from their own mouths, and "they went every where preaching the word." God testified his approval of their labors by the fact that on the same day with one of Peter's sermons there were added to (the church) about three thousand souls,' and a few days afterward the number of the men (who believed) was about five thousand.' And in all succeeding times there have been some who preached, and their words were "as goads and as nails fastened by the masters of assemblies;" but when their posthumous sermons were read on the mute parchment, it became a wonder where was the hiding of their power. The seals of peculiar favor which this office has received from God are also found in the direct expressions of the men whom he inspired. We hear indeed of the foolishness of preaching; it is not, however, a real foolishness but only a seeming one to the Greeks and them that perish. As in the soberest kind of irony we call him a great and wise man, who is great and wise only in his own esteem, so the apostle calls that work foolishness which is so only in the regard of perverse men, and which though fruitless without aid from heaven, is yet "the power of God and the wisdom of God." Jeremy Taylor did well in saying, "Let no preacher compare one ordinance with another, as prayer with preaching, to the