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cial interest and importance. Our remarks upon books will be generally classed under the head of "Critical Notices," the object of which will be to furnish the reader, in as few words as possible, a clew to the leading topics of the most important publications which shall issue from the press both in this country and in Europe, with such opinions of their merits or defects as we may judge it suitable and useful to express.

This department of the Repository will be hereafter somewhat more extended than it has been in the former series of the work. It is proposed to furnish in each No. a Quarterly list of the most important new publications. This we shall make as complete as shall be practicable, and publishers will greatly oblige us by furnishing for our use the titles of their books, or the books themselves, as soon as they are issued. In this way we shall endeavor to keep our readers apprised of the productions of the press from time to time, and to aid them in forming a correct judgment of the merits of such works as shall invite their attention.

To the notices of new publications will be added in each No., such literary and miscellaneous intelligence, as shall appear to be of special interest and of permanent value to the christian scholar. We shall thus aim to make our work an interesting miscellany, a repository of useful knowledge and of articles adapted to promote the advancement of sound biblical and theological learning, as well as to elevate the standard of general and professional education in all our institutions. We shall hope also to contribute something to advance the cause of morals and religion in our country generally, and to promote the purity and peace of the American churches, as well as their christian efficiency in the several works of benevolence and philanthropy which now invite their exertions and animate their hopes.

ARTICLE II.

ON SOME OF THE CAUSES OF THE CORRUPTION OF PULPIT ELOQUENCE.*

By Rev. Leonard Bacon, Pastor of the First Church, New Haven, Conn.

THERE is always some touch of melancholy in the feelings, however pleasant, with which we revisit scenes once familiar, but grown strange by long absence. The changes that take place around us, and in our own persons, come on successively, and, for the most part, gradually; and if there is now and then some sudden and violent shock which agitates us for the time, we soon recover ourselves, and the mind in all its habits becomes adjusted to its new circumstances, and ceases to realize how great is the difference between what is, and what was. Thus we pass along from one period of life to another; everything is changing around us; we ourselves are changing continually; and yet we are ordinarily little conscious of the rapidity of our progress. But when, in mid life, we come back to the scenes of youth, the changes of half an age crowd at once upon the consciousness; and the pleasure of reviving the past is tinged with melancholy.

Fifteen years ago, I parted here with my theological classmates. I find myself standing where I stood when as a class we bade farewell to these hallowed scenes. The same walls are around me. The same windows look out upon the same broad landscape. The same sort of an assembly is before me, the old, the young, the learned, the venerable, the lovely ;— and in the assembly, how many of the same forms and faces, looking to me, almost as they looked that day. But all are not

*[This Article is the substance of an Anniversary Discourse, pronounced by Mr. Bacon, in the chapel of the Theological Seminary, Andover, Mass., Sept. 4, 1838, before the Porter Rhetorical Society. This will account for several remarks which it contains and the form of address which it preserves throughout. We have thought it proper also to retain the touching introductory remarks of the author. Though local and personal, and especially adapted to the occasion that produced them, they are too rich and various in their allusions to be objected to, even by readers who are strangers to the scenes to which they refer.-ED.]

here. One tall, spare figure*-one wrinkled, speaking countenance is here no more; nor shall we ever catch again one whisper of that impressive utterance. And where are they, the hearts of youthful manliness that were then around me, beating with grateful affection, and with common impulses? The same affections and hopes, the same high impulses, are here to-day, but the hearts in which they were then beating, can never meet again. Where are they? As I run over the catalogue, and think, Whose names are these ?-I find the names of men who are beginning to grow gray in the ministry. One,† in this Commonwealth, has seen a great seat of learning rise under his labors and those of his successive associates, from the germ. One, worthy to bear a sainted name, has served out his weary years of imprisonment in a Southern penitentiary, a noble martyr to liberty and truth, and is still pursuing his missionary work among the grateful barbarians whose language his translating pen has helped to enrich with the living oracles of God. Others, more in all than one out of every five, are in their graves. The first, sleeps in the old church-yard, where the shadow of the sanctuary in which he was baptized, falls on the green turf that covers him. Another-to me the most intimate of all my early friends||-rests among the sepulchres of the people who, during his brief ministry, honored him as an angel of God. The third is buried under the palm-trees of India. The fourth,** whose soul was made of fire, lies at the base of hoary Argeus on the utmost bounds of Cappadocia, where stranger hands have written on his tomb in a strange tongue,

"A bright star of the new world arose from the west,

And with wonderful swiftness, went down in the east.”

And the fifth,tt having gathered wisdom in various regions and climates, and having just shown, as a writer, and as a pastor,

* The Rev. Dr. Porter, deceased, Professor of Sacred Rhetoric and the first President of the Institution.

+ Prof. Fiske, of Amherst College.

Rev. S. A. Worcester.

§ Joseph Hyde, of Green's Farms, Fairfield, Conn.

| Rev. Chester Isham, of Taunton, Mass.

¶ Rev. Edmund Frost, Missionary at Bombay.

** Rev. Elnathan Gridley, Missionary in Asia Minor.

+ Rev. William Shedd, of Abington, Mass.

what might be expected from his gifts and graces, found his grave where those whom he taught, are to rise with their pastor in the last great day. Such are the departed; when I think of them, and think to what purpose some of the survivors have outlived them, it seems a sentiment as just as it is natural, "The good die first."

Returning then to myself, and looking around on these familiar scenes, I realize that I am no longer young. Life is fast passing away;-and O, to how little effect! How little have I accomplished in the fifteen years since I began to be a preacher! And why so little? I can see that I might have done much more, had I been more faithful, more industrious, more fearless, more single-minded, and more abundant in prayer to Him who giveth the increase; but, at the same time, I can see, just as every other minister can see, in reviewing the past, that I might have done more, had I been more skilful, had I been furnished with larger stores of knowledge, had the powers which God has given me been disciplined by a more complete education, and had my honest efforts to do good been guided by a sounder wisdom.

The great question with a minister of the gospel-the great question too with a student for the ministry-is, How shall my ministry be made most effective for the glory of God in the spiritual well being of my fellow men? The end of the ministry is the effect which is to be produced upon men by this instrumentality. All that preparatory study, all that various disciplining and furnishing of the mind, by which a man is educated for the ministry, has its value only in its relation to this end. If you study the Scriptures in their original languages, and in the principles and methods by which they are to be interpreted, it is that you may preach effectively. If you study the great scheme of christian doctrine, seeking to refer every part to its principle, and to see every principle in its harmonious relations to the vast system, it is that you may preach effectively. If you study any other branch of knowledge, sacred or secular, history, politics, jurisprudence, the philosophy of mind, the wonders of physical science, as a part of your preparation for the ministry, it is that your ministry may be effective. And most of all, or rather most immediately and obviously, in that department of study and discipline which is the special object of this Association; when you give your thoughts and efforts to the act itself of preaching; when you inquire after the best modes

of exhibiting the gospel; when you train all those faculties of body and mind, which are employed in the just exposition and in the vivid, winning, and majestic utterance of the truth; it is that you may be efficient ministers of the word of God. And, permit me to say, that as the years of your life of labor froll away, however God may bless you with success, the saddest thought, in the review of the past and in the prospect of the ever lessening future, will be the thought that your efforts are accomplishing so little in a work so magnificent. You will have occasion, doubtless, great occasion to ascribe the deficiency to your unfaithfulness; but you will have equal occasion to ascribe it to your unskilfulness. The longer you labor in the ministry, if you are not too wise in your own conceit to learn anything, the more you will see, not only of your own moral imperfection, but of your actual inability to do justice to the work. The more experienced you become in the ministry, the higher will be your estimate of the value of a complete equipment for the ministry. The longer you go on improving in this work, the keener will be your sense of the mischievousness of every influence upon your habits of mind or heart, of thought or style, that has impaired the efficiency of your efforts as a preacher.

In selecting a subject with which to occupy the hour assigned to this exercise, it would be unseemly to depart from the range of topics indicated by the name and object of your Association. I must speak of something relating to eloquence, and particularly to the eloquence of the pulpit. Let me attempt then to point out some of the causes which may operate, in our day, to produce a vitiated and inefficient style of preaching.

I. There are dangers arising from a misunderstanding of the end at which the preaching of the gospel ought to aim. I do not allude here to those who, rejecting such truths as are declared to be the wisdom of God and the power of God to salvation, consider the end of preaching to be nothing else than the cultivation of men's natural affections, and the promotion of social and domestic enjoyment, by lectures on ethics. It would be easy to show how such views of the end of preaching affect the eloquence of the pulpit-how naturally that preaching, the character of which is determined by such views, loses all vital warmth, and though perhaps magnificent with the creations of a poetic philosophy, or brilliant with the light of genius, becomes, to those sensibilities of man's nature which the gospel is designed to quicken, cold as a grotto of icicles glittering in the 4

SECOND SERIES, VOL. I. NO. I.

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