SERMONS

PREACHED

IN THE ORDINARY COURSE OF HIS MINISTRY,

AND CHIEFLY AT

MANCHESTER.

BY THE LATE

ROBERT STEPHENS MALL, LL.D.

LONDON:

JACKSON AND WALFORD,

18, ST. PAUL'S CHURCHYARD.

gift JH. Russell 6-6-33

PREFACE.

THE title of this book is intended not only to describe its contents, but to mark in what respect they are broadly distinguished from those of the two volumes by the same Author, published under the accomplished Editorship of the Rev. Dr. WARDLAW, and entitled, "Discourses on Special Occasions."

Those volumes comprised a selection from such of Dr. M'ALL's compositions as had been prepared and revised by himself, with that kind and degree of care which he could not but think due to the occasions requiring him to deliver them, and to the peculiar audiences then drawn together. Of all his manuscripts, therefore, (not one of which had ever been written with the intention to print it,) the discourses thus selected were the fittest to meet the public eye : they had most of that elaboration and finish which might have been expected to belong to any thing which he should himself have been brought to publish. And, as the Preacher "on Special Occasions," he is presented to the reader of those volumes, with as much fidelity and fulness as he could be by any thing left behind him.

But, in a circle not very contracted, and particu

larly amongst readers familiar with his ordinary ministrations, a desire has often been expressed for something whereby he, "being dead," should "yet speak," as he was commonly heard speaking in the services of the Lord's day, when under no stimulus but that of his ardent and affectionate concern for the instruction and salvation of his own people.

The means of gratifying this desire were but limited. Dr. M'All very rarely wrote at length the sermons he intended to preach to his usual congregation indeed, he scarcely did so at all during the latter years of his ministry. Perhaps a profound mathematician does not more laboriously and accurately work out, step by step, in his own mind, those intricate processes of which a few figures are afterwards to express the results, than Dr. M'All habitually thought out the subject he had set himself to treat, arranged the method of treatment, and settled the conclusions to which his hearers were to be conducted. And, like the mathematician with his figures, he could, by a few brief notes, enable himself to recal the whole series of his meditations, and impart them as completely, and, in most cases, with as much regularity and sequence, as though all had been written in the form and order wherein they first arose in his mind. But, unlike those figures, these notes, which are all the legible memorials of nearly whole years, and many years, of his labours, do not qualify others to realize and reproduce the intellectual creations, which, by means of them, he, with such ease and grace and power, could make manifest. It is therefore that, in this volume, those

who loved and prized his teaching in its later exhibitions, will miss some remarkable discourses which they remember with special interest, and have earnestly wished to see in print. The Notes from which he preached exist; but they are notes only. The "skeleton" is there, perfect in all its skilful reticulations and masterly contrivances: but the nerves, the heart, the vital substance of the full-developed body, and its covering of beauty, have passed away with the spirit that gave them animation. The chief links of the chain of reasoning, the framework of the composition, remain as he traced them for his own use but that exposition of text and context which seemed to reveal the innermost recesses of the sacred writer's mind; those glowing illustrations; those bursts of yearning affection; those resistless appeals to the conscience; that application of the subject which almost made the actual speaker disappear, and the hearers feel as though God's prophet or Christ's apostle himself were before them, bringing the everlasting truth of the ancient Oracle to bear upon their own times and their own souls; that solemn, or rapturous, or pathetic strain at last, which, in many a well-remembered instance, so affected the audience, that, in the deep silence which followed, an observer, less spell-bound than the rest, might have seen the mixed multitude around him entranced like our great forefather in MILTON's exquisite description, when

The angel ended, and in Adam's ear

So charming left his voice, that he, awhile,

Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear;