or his years, and in
his own way does his best; he is a man of much experience, and has
fair intellectual powers; but his temperament is very icy and
flatulent; his humours heavy and watery, and a phlegmagog purge
would do him good. He is a rigid methodical man; believes in
original rules and ancient prerogatives; is a Wesleyan of the
antique type, but is devoid of force and enthusiasm; he never sets
you on fire with declamation, nor melts you with pathos; he had
rather freeze than burn sinners; he thinks the harrier principle of
catching a hare is the surest, and that travelling on a theological
canal is the safest plan in the long run. He is more cut out for a
country rectory, where the main duties are nodding at the squire and
stunning the bucolic mind with platitudes, than for a large circuit
of active Methodists; he would be more at home at a rural deanery,
surrounded by rookeries and placid fish ponds, than in a town
mission environed by smoke and made up of screaming children and
thin-skinned Christians. Mr. Rayner has many good properties; but
short sermon preaching is not one of them. Some of the descendants
of that man who, according to "Drunken Barnaby," slaughtered his cat
on a Monday, because it killed a mouse on the Sunday, were in the
bait of preaching for three hours at one stretch. Mr. Rayner never
yet preached that length of time, and we hope he never will do; but
he can, like the east wind, blow a long while in one direction. One
Sunday evening; when we heard him, be preached just one hour, and at
the conclusion intimated that he had been requested to give a short
sermon, but had drifted into a rather prolix one. We should like to
know what length he would have run out his rhetoric if be had been
requested to give a long discourse. By the powers! it would have
"tickled the catastrophe" of each listener finely--doctors would
have had to be called in, a vast amount of physic would have been
required, and it would never have got paid for in these hard times
so that bad debts would have been added to the general calamity. We
could never see any good in long sermons and nobody else ever could
except those giving them. Neither could we ever see much fun in a
parson saying--"And now lastly" more than once. In the 60 minutes
discourse to which we have alluded, the preacher got into the lastly
part of the business five times. If that other conclusive phrase--
"And now, finally brethren"--had been taken advanta