ular success of Chalmers, seems to be in a considerable measure
owing to his attention to this fact. He has abandoned the pure and
measured style, and adopted a heterogeneous mixture of the gaudy,
pompous, and colloquial, offensive indeed to the ears of literary men,
but highly acceptable to those who are less biassed by the authority of
a standard taste and established models. We need not go to the extreme
of Chalmers,--for there is no necessity for inaccuracy, bombast, or
false taste--but we should doubtless gain by adopting his principle. The
object is to address men according to their actual character, and in
that mode in which their habits of mind may render them most accessible.
As but few are thinkers or readers, a congregation is not to be
addressed as such; but, their modes of life being remembered, constant
regard must be had to their need of external attraction. This is most
easily done by the familiarity and directness of extemporaneous address;
for which reason this mode of preaching has peculiar advantages, in its
adaptation to their situation and wants.

The truth is, indeed, that it is not the weight of the thought, the
profoundness of the argument, the exactness of the arrangement, the
choiceness of the language, which interest and chain the attention of
even those educated hearers, who are able to appreciate them all. They
are as likely to sleep through the whole as others. They can find all
these qualities in much higher perfection in their libraries; they do
not seek these only at church. And as to the large mass of the people,
they are to them hidden things, of which they discern nothing. It is not
these, so much as the attraction of an earnest manner, which arrests the
attention and makes instruction welcome. Every day's observation may
show us, that he who has this manner will retain the attention of even
an intellectual man with common-place thoughts, while with a different
manner he would render tedious the most novel and ingenious
disquisitions. Let an indifferent reader take into the pulpit a sermon
of Barrow or Butler, and all its excellence of argument and eloquence
would not save it from being accounted tedious; while an empty declaimer
shall collect crowds to hang upon his lips in raptures. And this manner,
which is so attractive, is not the studied artificial enunciation of the
rhetorician's school, but the free, flowing, animated utterance, which
seems to come from the impulse of the subj