ect it
was, if possible, _to be seen_, but indispensably to be _heard_, _felt_,
and _understood_.

"His whole performance is distinguished by a grave and majestic
simplicity, as far removed from the careless reader of a common story,
as from the declamation of an actor. His hearers leave the church, not
so much in raptures with the preacher, as affected with the truths he
has delivered. He says, he always finds he has done most good when he
has been least praised, and that he feels most humbled when he receives
the warmest commendation, because men, generally extol most the sermons
which have probed them least; whereas those which really do good, being
often such as make them most uneasy, are consequently the least likely
to attract panegyric. '_They_ only bear true testimony to the excellence
of a discourse,' added he, 'not who commend the composition or the
delivery, but who are led by it to examine their own hearts, to search
out its corruptions, and to reform their lives. Reformation is the
flattery I covet.'

"He is aware that the generality of hearers like to retire from the
sermon with the comfortable belief, that little is to be done on _their_
parts. Such hearers he always disappoints, by leaving on their minds at
the close, some impressive precept deduced from, and growing out of, the
preparatory doctrine. He does not press any one truth to the exclusion
of all others. He proposes no subtleties, but labors to excite
seriousness, to alarm the careless, to quicken the supine, to confirm
the doubting. He presses eternal things as things near at hand; as
things in which every living man has an equal interest.

"Mr. Stanley says, that though Dr. Barlow was considered at Cambridge as
a correct young man, who carefully avoided vice and even irregularity,
yet being cheerful, and addicted to good society, he had a disposition
to innocent conviviality, which might, unsuspectedly, have led him into
the errors he abhorred. He was struck with a passage in a letter from
Dr. Johnson to a young man who had just taken orders, in which, among
other wholesome counsel, he advises him 'to acquire the courage to
refuse _sometimes_ invitations to dinner.' It is inconceivable what a
degree of force and independence his mind acquired by the occasional
adoption of this single hint. He is not only, Mr. Stanley, the spiritual
director, but the father, the counselor, the arbitrator, and the friend
of those whom Providence has placed un