ve more insinuatingly at the heart when the stomach is at peace.
There was a genial kindness in Parson Dale's way of preaching at you.
It was done in so imperceptible, fatherly, a manner that you never felt
offended. He did it, too, with so much art that nobody but your own
guilty self knew that you were the sinner he was exhorting. Yet he did
not spare rich nor poor: he preached at the squire, and that great
fat farmer, Mr. Bullock, the churchwarden, as boldly as at Hodge the
ploughman and Scrub the hedger. As for Mr. Stirn, he had preached at him
more often than at any one in the parish; but Stirn, though he had the
sense to know it, never had the grace to reform. There was, too, in
Parson Dale's sermons something of that boldness of illustration which
would have been scholarly if he had not made it familiar, and which
is found in the discourses of our elder divines. Like them, he did not
scruple now and then to introduce an anecdote from history, or borrow
an allusion from some non-scriptural author, in order to enliven the
attention of his audience, or render an argument more plain. And the
good man had an object in this, a little distinct from, though wholly
subordinate to, the main purpose of his discourse. He was a friend to
knowledge,--but to knowledge accompanied by religion; and sometimes
his references to sources not within the ordinary reading of his
congregation would spirit up some farmer's son, with an evening's
leisure on his hands, to ask the parson for further explanation, and so
to be lured on to a little solid or graceful instruction, under a safe
guide.

Now, on the present occasion, the parson, who had always his eye and
heart on his flock, and who had seen with great grief the realization of
his fears at the revival of the stocks; seen that a spirit of discontent
was already at work amongst the peasants, and that magisterial and
inquisitorial designs were darkening the natural benevolence of the
squire,--seen, in short, the signs of a breach between classes, and the
precursors of the ever inflammable feud between the rich and the poor,
meditated nothing less than a great Political Sermon,--a sermon that
should extract from the roots of social truths a healing virtue for
the wound that lay sore, but latent, in the breast of his parish of
Hazeldean.

And thus ran--

THE POLITICAL SERMON OF PARSON DALE.

CHAPTER XII.

For every man shall bear his own burden.--Gal. vi. 5.

"BRETHREN!