strength of their principles; and
while the people were thus taught to regard churchmen as tools, and
the ministers to use them as dependents, the cause of truth sank
between both. The Scriptures are the life of religion. It can no more
subsist in health without them, than the human frame can subsist
without food; it may have the dreams of the enthusiast, or the frenzy
of the monk; but, for all the substantial and safe purposes of the
human heart, its life is gone for ever. It has been justly remarked,
that the theological works of that day, including the sermons, might,
in general, have been written if Christianity had never existed. The
sermons were chiefly essays, of the dreariest kind on the most
commonplace topics of morals. The habit of reading these discourses
from the pulpit, a habit so fatal to all impression, speedily rendered
the preachers as indifferent as their auditory; and if we were to name
the period when religion had most fallen into decay in the public
mind, we should pronounce it the half century which preceded the reign
of George the Third.

On the subject of pulpit eloquence there are some remarks in one of
the reviews of the late Sydney Smith, expressed with all the
shrewdness, divested of the levity of that writer, who had keenly
observed the popular sources of failure.

"The great object of modern sermons is, to hazard nothing. Their
characteristic is decent debility; which alike guards their authors
from ludicrous errors, and precludes them from striking beauties. Yet
it is curious to consider, how a body of men so well educated as the
English clergy, can distinguish themselves so little in a species of
composition, to which it is their peculiar duty, as well as their
ordinary habit, to attend. To solve this difficulty, it should be
remembered that the eloquence of the bar and of the senate force
themselves into notice, power, and wealth." He then slightly guards
against the conception, that eloquence should be the sole source of
preferment; or even "a common cause of preferment." But he strongly,
and with great appearance of truth, attributes the want of public
effect to the want of those means by which that effect is secured in
every other instance.

"Pulpit discourses have insensibly dwindled from speaking into
reading; a practice of itself sufficient to stifle every germ of
eloquence. It is only by the fresh feelings of the heart that mankind
can be very powerfully affected. What can be