others have thrown, they will frequently prove to be blunted arrows. But if he makes his own breast his laboratory, and there casts and shapes, points and burnishes his weapons, he will be far more likely to have those which will do the work intended. Heart answers.to heart; heart swallows up the product of heart. It feels what comes from this fountain of feeling. Hence the power of experience; and the necessity, that the preacher who would have power, be a man of experience;one who has not merely seen the majestic body of truth, but has undergone its transforming spirit. He must unite these two things; theoretic knowledge of the truth, and thorough experience of it. In other words, a clear head, and a warm and active heart. No matter how clear the head, if the heart is only warm; no matter how warm the heart, if the head is only clear.

This leads us to say, that strong logical acumen, and great power of feeling combined, are requisite, to ensure convincing and effective speaking. These are often found apart, not so often found together. There are many who have one finely developed and vigorous faculty; and if they only had another and contrasted faculty, to be joined, as a true yoke fellow, to the one they have, they would be very strong men. Here is a preacher, who is very warm-hearted. His soul is full of benevolent emotion. But he cannot move five minutes in a consecutive train of thought. There is power; but there is wanting a chain to conduct it from the source to the object. Another is very lucid, very logical; but has no passion, no emotion. He proves his point with sun-light certainty; but the conviction effected is chilly and unproductive. He shows demonstratively, that the sinner should repent; that he has power to comply with the requirement of God. The transgressor is satisfied, that it is so; he sees the truth, bows a full, unhesitating assent, and moves deliberately on to death. Logic alone will make the sinner see that he ought to repent; logic joined with pure and fervid emotion will make him feel that he must repent. These two together, the reasoning power and the feeling power, will elaborate luminous and burning appeals. You have a preacher who can prove a point and press it,-who can hold up truth convincingly before the mind, or deeply sink it into the hidden recesses of the heart. His passion vivifies his logic; his logic guides and concentrates his passion.

Thus far I have spoken of knowledge doctrinal and experimental, of the power of reasoning, and the power of feeling, as elements in the truly effective preacher.

In proceeding with our estimate, we may not omit practical talent. Perhaps it is better to call it practical intent, or the purpose of doing something on the souls of men when we speak, and the skill to do it. It is very important, that there be both the intention and the tact. Indeed, they are indispensable to a truly productive power. There are men, who make admirable sermons; as specimens of reasoning, they are conclusive; in style and structure, they are splendid. On hearing one of these sermons, all admit it was a noble production. But it failed to do the appropriate work of a sermon. It aroused no dormant conscience; it reached and troubled no obdurate heart; because the preacher did not mean to do any such thing. His object was not present, redeeming effect. Such is the object of the preacher, whose outline I am trying to give. He is always a man of definite, pointed intention. If he preaches doctrine, it is for its enlightening and sanctifying power, and for the duty which grows out of it. If he preaches duty, it is that he may induce men to do it. His purpose before ignorant men, is to instruct them; before careless men, to awaken them; before skeptical men, to convince them; before the obdurate, to melt them down; in short, to urge if possible, every unsheltered soul to the refuge by God provided. If he has accomplished none of these points, he feels that he has done but little. He cannot be satisfied with the idea, that he is casting seed which will germinate in other centuries. He cannot console himself with the wonders which may spring from his labors, ages after he is dead. His purpose-a purpose his heart has grasped, is, by the grace of God, to accomplish something in the very effort and in every effort.

But the preacher may have an object, and err in the way of reaching it. He may intend to plant the fire of truth in those already inflamed consciences, and yet not know how to do it. The preacher, to be effective, must have the peculiar, and it may be added, rare kind of skill demanded for this thing. He must know the human mind, not merely as learned in books, but as read in the field, the street, the shop, the mart, on the ocean. He must know the common mind, in its variety, its measure of knowledge, its mode of reasoning, its springs of feeling and action; otherwise, he will reason without producing any conviction, and in his most fervid appeals, he will awaken not a particle of emotion. All well enough, it may be, for another order of beings, but not in the least suited to the beings

the preacher has before him. The whole elaborate and masterly production goes completely over the heads to be enlightened, and the hearts to be affected. In order to any practical effect on common minds, the preacher must consent to keep down where such minds live and move and have their being. He must consent to think and feel as they do. They are men of this world, on probation for another; and so is he. It is very unfortunate for him to forget that he is a sublunary being, and that he addresses sublunary beings. Some do forget this most egregiously. The moment they begin to move, they rise aloft. They leave the regions of business and real life, and mount up to the domain of balloons; and sometimes we are compelled to infer it is for the same reason,-because they are inflated. When men, living, active, tempted men, are understood and aimed at, the appeal will very likely be a simple, direct, unpretending appeal. The strength will be expended on the object, not wasted in the air. The truths and illustrations employed, will be the very truths and illustrations demanded by the peculiarities of the case. A good aim, the right weapon, an elastic sinew, will ensure an effect. But no matter what the power, or the purpose of the preacher, if he seizes upon an unfitting truth, he will probably accomplish nothing by his effort.

A nice selective talent, then, is of great value to the preacher. Whoever has it, has one of the best elements of power. The kind of preacher we are considering has it. He knows the persons before him; their natures and circumstances; and when thoughts and truths, arguments and appeals, come thronging in his mind, he almost instinctively takes out from the mass, the precise matter which will do the work intended, the matter which will most surely reach and affect the souls he has to deal with. He is appropriate; every sentence is in its place and worthy of its place. The whole has a meaning for the minds in view. But the preacher, who has not this niceness of discrimination and selection, who puts on his paper or utters from his lips, every thing which comes into his head, loads his discourses with masses of so alien a character, that they cloud its meaning, and cover up its edge. He is clumsy, tedious, oppressive. Whereas if he would only say the things he ought to say, and let the rest alone, he might be attractive, stirring and pungent. "Evil communications corrupt good manners. Bad company is as fatal to the influence of a good idea, as of any thing else. A rich, opportune, robust thought with a dozen abortions cleaving to it, is inevitably impeded in its work.

ment.

It cannot move freely and boldly to the commissioned achieveWe say, then, take what is vigorous and fitting, and cast off the rest as an intrusion and embarrassment, incomparably worse than nothing. The right truths, and only these, are wanted.

Power of application is another thing, necessary to make the truly effective preacher. He may be pointed in his intention, select in his matter; but if he is not also actually pointed, urgent, significantly close in his appeal, he will assuredly fail of doing the good he ought to do. Here comes in a certain severity of feeling,-not rudeness, not rash recklessness. He, who is admitted to the most hallowed recesses of the heart, who has to do with its finest and noblest sensibilities, whose hand moves over chords which reach in their vibrations to other worlds and unending ages, should be a man of carefulness and delicacy. In one sense, he should tread lightly, and touch tenderly, where feelings and interests so intimate, sacred, and enduring, are concerned. But if his delicacy is so refined and fastidious, that he shrinks from touching at all; that he forbears to bring the truth in its authority and pungency upon the conscience, he doubtless stands chargeable with a grand deficiency. It is often a morbid delicacy, and he must get rid of it, if he would do his Master's work on the souls of men. He must be willing occasionally to hurt the feelings of people. He must come sharply and roughly across men's hearts, and insert pangs there, which are keen as the probings of the surgeon's knife.

We should all like very well to be excused from this part of our office. But the Lord Jesus will never excuse us. He insists upon having this work done. Until it is done, in some cases, little or nothing is done, in the momentous business of saying souls from death.

We would have go together, this close, searching, truth-applying fidelity, and a wholesome delicacy of feeling. Then, while the preacher delivers his message clearly and strongly ; while he goes with it into the heart, and lodges its goading stings in the conscience, he carefully abstains from all wanton and gratuitous severity. While he keeps back nothing either of reproof or alarm, while he uncovers the pit, and gives us visions of its ascending smoke, and audience of its anguished wailings, it is done in the spirit of love; not with a relish, as though he were in his element, when ranging those regions of

blackness and terror, and brandishing and hurling the bolts of perdition. It is done tenderly,-done reluctantly; but it must be done; and truth in its most awful, agitating aspect, held up plainly, and urged home faithfully. It is indispensable to efforts of power and results of redemption.

It has been implied all along, that the effective preacher speaks with a very considerable plainness. It is certain, that if his theology or his rhetoric-his doctrine or his language, have to go through an interpreter, they will get very much diluted on their way to men's hearts. He should speak not only so that may be understood, but so that he cannot fail to be understood; indeed, so as to impel his meaning into the minds of his hearers.

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It will not answer for him to be always very beautifully and exquisitely finished., Rounded periods rarely prick. I speak here of aiming at elegance as an end. Whoever sits down to make a very beautiful sermon, assuredly will make a useless one, Occasionally there comes forth such a sermon; elaborated most deliciously. Every sentence has a flower; every line is music; and every body is charmed. "He is to them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument; they hear his words, but they do them not." This is the character and end of all such preaching, splendid and powerless.

But there is another extreme; an absolute and arid plainness. The whole field which the preacher spreads before us, is without bloom, or greenness, or any such thing. The imagination is exorcised, as if it were an evil spirit, and all its product repudiated, as rank abomination. Such a man makes a great mistake. He cannot reach a high point of efficiency. Certainly, he cannot approach and enter the hearts of men, whilst he refuses to walk in the high way which God has opened to their hearts. The preacher must use the imagination; he must address the imagination. Men who have swayed and thrilled and melted the popular heart have done so. Whitefield, Edwards, Payson did so. There are images which are the best arguments. There is an elegance, which augments strength; there is a polish, which touches the temper of the steel. The sword which hung at Eden's gate had the brightness of fire. Rhetorically, as well as literally, a blade may be burnished, and still have a terrible keenness of edge. A discourse may be ornate, and pierce to the dividing asunder of the soul and spirit,