ing by the magnificence of its ruins." "And certainly that must needs have been very glorious, the decays of which are so admirable. He that is comely when old and decrepid surely was very beautiful when he was young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of paradise."

A man who had thus signalized himself both by his powers and his loyalty could not escape notice and preferment. In 1663, he was made prebendary of Westminster; in 1670, canon of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1677, he accompanied, as chaplain, Lawrence Hyde, the son of Clarendon, sent by Charles the Second as ambassador to Poland. On the 30th of April, 1668, we find him returned, and preaching at Oxford. In his sermon on Christ's Promise the Support of Ministers, he has some remarks which seem directed against Jeremy Taylor. He recommends plainness and simplicity of speech to the minister, and, alluding to St. Paul's mode of teaching, he says, "Nothing here of the fringes of the North Star'; nothing of 'nature's becoming unnatural'; nothing of the down of angel's wings,' or the beautiful locks of cherubims'; no starched similitudes, introduced with a 'Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and the like. No, these were sublimities above the rise of the apostolic spirit. For the Apostles, poor mortals, were content to take lower steps, and to tell the world in plain terms, that he who believed should be saved, and that he who believed not should be damned." There is a good deal more about gaudery, frisking it in tropes, fine conceits and airy fancies, shooting over men's heads while professing to aim at their hearts, all of which might seem to have been levelled at Taylor, by one whose energetic and fiery spirit could ill brook the "process of smoothness and delight" by which the sweet poet of theology would draw men into heaven. South, also, in this sermon, darts with his usual practical acuteness on the motives which animated many of the opponents of the church in their dolorous complaints. When they desire to get the clergy under their feet, then the clergy are too high and proud. "When avarice disposes men to be rapacious and sacrilegious, then forthwith the church is too rich." And when, by gaming and revelling, these same men have disabled themselves from paying their butchers, brewers, and vintners, "then immediately they are all thunder and lightning against the intemperance and luxury of

the clergy, forsooth, and high time it is for a thorough reformation."

In 1681, South preached before the king, at Westminster, his sermon on All Contingencies directed by Providence. In this discourse, he referred to the impossibility of foreseeing the tremendous results of small things on the stability and happiness of states; and, after giving two instances drawn from history, he exclaimed," And who that had beheld such a bankrupt, beggarly fellow as Cromwell first entering the Parliament House with a threadbare, torn cloak, and a greasy hat (and perhaps neither of them paid for), could have suspected, that, in the space of so few years, he should, by the murder of one king and the banishment of another, ascend the throne, be invested in the royal robes, and want nothing of the state of a king but the changing of his hat into a crown?" Charles laughed heartily at this, and said, turning to Hyde, — " Odsfish! your chaplain must be a bishop; therefore put me in mind of him at the next death." It was the misfortune of South to preach his doctrines of passive obedience, and God's particular care of kings, in the reign of a good-natured rascal, who had not a single quality of majesty to sustain the theory of the divine by the example of the monarch. South seems to have been ambitious rather to be the champion of the church, than to enjoy its high and lucrative offices. He repeatedly declined preferment. In the reign of James the Second, though he disliked the measures of that monarch relating to Popery, he would not oppose him, and, when pressed to sign the invitation to the Prince of Orange, steadily refused. After the revolution, he rather submitted to the new government than acknowledged it. He might have had one of the vacant bishoprics, had he pleased; but he felt too strong a sympathy with the nonjurors to step into any of their late offices. The rest of his life was spent in the same unwavering devotion to the church which had characterized his youth and manhood. He opposed all measures to produce a union of dissenting Protestants, that involved the slightest sacrifice of the forms and ceremonies of the church. He died July 8, 1716, after a long life of intellectual labor. His biography is to be read in his sermons. In them are chronicled the results of his studies, the opinions he entertained of men and measures, the thoughts he grasped in contemplation, the passions he felt in actual life; and on them is impressed the undeniable marks of the daring, straightforward character of the man.

In both his life and writings, South presents himself as a man of more than ordinary dimensions. His understanding was large, strong, and acute, grappling every subject he essayed to treat with a stern grasp, and tearing and ripping up, with a peculiar intellectual fierceness, systems and principles which contradicted his own. He possessed a constant sense of inward strength, and whatever province of thought he willed to make his own always yielded to his unceasing and unwearied effort. Difficulties and obstacles, in conception or expression, instead of daunting him, only seemed to rouse new energies of passion, and set his mind on fire. Many sentences in his works seem torn from his brain by main strength, expressing not only the thought he intended to convey, but a kind of impatient rage that it did not come with less labor. He wrote probably from his own consciousness, when he represented study as racking the inward and destroying the outward man, as clothing the soul with the spoils of the body; "and like a stronger blast of lightning, not only melts the sword, but consumes the scabbard." And again, in another connection, he calls truth a great stronghold barred and fortified by God and nature, and diligence, the understanding's laying siege to it. "Sometimes it thinks it gains a point; and presently again it finds itself baffled and beaten off; yet still it renews the onset; attacks the difficulty afresh; plants this reasoning and that argument, this consequence and that distinction, like so many intellectual batteries, till at length it forces a way and passage into the obstinate inclosed truth that so long withstood and defied all its assaults." To great sharpness and penetration of intellect, which pierced and probed whatever it attacked, he joined a peculiar vividness of perception, to which we can give no more appropriate name than imagination. In almost every subject which he treats, he not merely reasons powerfully, but he sees clearly; and it is this bright inward vision of his theme that he most warmly desires to convey to the reader. Like every truly great thinker, he thinks close to things, without the intervention of words, and masters the objects of his contemplation before he seeks to give them expression. His style, therefore, has singular intensity, vitality, and richness. It expresses not only the thought, but the thought as modified by the character of the thinker. In this respect, he is among the most original of writers.

His commonplaces never appear echoes of other minds, but truths which he has himself seen and proved. The strange and strained conceits, the harsh metaphors, which, when tried by general principles of taste, must be conceded to disfigure many of his sermons, are still legitimate offsprings of a mind passionately in earnest to fix and express some "slippery uncertainties," some fugitive and elusive thoughts, whose bright faces shone on his mind but a moment, and then flitted away into darkness. The coarse expressions and comparisons in his writings are also indicative of his impatience at all coquetry with language, and his disposition to give things their appropriate garniture of words. If the expression disgusts, the object of the preacher is attained, for disgust at the expression is naturally transferred to the thing which he desires to make disgusting. Thus, when he wishes to indicate the disproportion between the pleasures of the thinking and the eating man, he represents them to be as different "as the silence of Archimedes in the study of a problem, and the stillness of a sow at her wash." Again, when he desires to make graphically evident that pleasure is merely a relative term, and consists in the suitableness of objects to varying conditions of character, that what is pleasure to one man is pain to another, he declares that the pleasures of an angel can never be the pleasures of a hog." His works would furnish numberless instances of the same felicity of vulgar allusion. Indeed, he lived among a generation of sinners, whose consciences were not assailable by smooth circumlocutions, and whose vices required the scourge and the hot iron. South vividly perceived the baseness and contemptible nature of sin, through all the gilded shows in which it was incased, and could draw from natural objects no images which he thought too foul and hateful to picture it to the imagination.

The intensity of feeling and thinking which burns throughout South's writings has no parallel in English theology. It resembles the unwearied fire of the epic poet. If it had been allied to a shaping and fusing imagination, like that of Milton, the Puritans would not perhaps have produced the only great poet of that age. As it is, we doubt if, in the single quality of freshness and force of expression, of rapid and rushing life, any writer of English prose, from Milton to Burke, equalled South. In him, this animation is not confined to particular

passages or sermons, but glows and leaps through the whole body of his writings. His vast command of language, and his power of infusing the energy of his nature into almost every phrase and image, would make his sermons worthy the attention of all students of expression, even if they were not fascinating for their brilliant good sense in questions of social morals, and the vigor of intellect brought to the discussion of controverted points in theology and government.

The wit of South is bountifully sprinkled over his sermons, and it is by this quality that he is most commonly known. He uses it often as a gleaming weapon of attack and defence. It is, however, no light and airy plaything with him, but generally a severe and masculine power. It gleams brightest and cuts sharpest, when its possessor is most enraged and indignant. Though sometimes exhibited in sly thrusts, shrewd innuendoes, insinuating mockeries, and a kind of raillery, half playful and half malicious, it is more commonly exercised to hold up adversaries to contempt and scorn, to pierce iniquity and falsehood with shafts that wound as well as glisten, or to evade logical dilemmas by lightning-like transference of an analogy of fancy for one of the reason. In many cases, it makes his understanding play the part of a partisan, on subjects where it is abundantly able to act the judge. So fertile was South's mind in ingenious turns, quirks, and analogies, that an epigram often misled him from his logic; and to fix an unanswerable jest upon an opponent was as pleasing as to gravel him with an unanswerable argument. Thus, the Puritanic party were continually putting forward the phrase liberty of conscience as the object of their struggles. A mind like South's would evade the justice of such a plea somewhat in this wise. Conscience would suggest piety and honesty. Now among the Puritans were many notorious hypocrites and sharpers. The cry of conscience, of course, would be with them a mere disguise for selfish objects. Consequently, what the Puritans wanted was not liberty of conscience, but liberty from conscience. The inward delight following such a dexterous turn of words, embodying a principle but partially true, would prevent South from pursuing the subject farther, or rescuing his argument from the fallacy into which it had been seduced by epigram. Most of his sermons bearing upon dissenters and republicans swarm with sophisms of a similar character, in which there is just enough truth to give