re is a smaller class of religious writers that may be called
mock-eloquent writers. They try at a superior style, but forget that
true eloquence resides essentially in the thought, the feeling, the
character, and that no words can make genuine eloquence out of that
which is of no worth or interest. They mistake a gaudy verbosity for
eloquence.

9. The moral and theological _materials_ of many religious books are as
faulty as their style, and the injury they do the Gospel is
incalculable. Here is a systematic writer in whose hands all the riches
and magnificence of revelation shrink into a meagre list of doctrinal
points, and not a single verse in the Bible is allowed to tell its
meaning, or even allowed to have one, till it has been forced under
torture to maintain one of his points. You are next confronted with a
prater about the invisible world, that makes you shrink away into
darkness; and then you are met with a grim zealot for such a revolting
theory of the Divine attributes and government, that he seems to delight
in representing the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose dominion
is overshadowed with vengeance, whose music is the cries of victims, and
whose glory requires to be illustrated by the ruin of His creation. One
cannot help deploring that the great mass of religious books were not
consigned to the flames before they were permitted to reach the eyes of
the public. Books which exhibit Christianity and its claims with
insipid feebleness, or which cramp its majesty into an artificial form
at once distorted and mean, must grievously injure its influence. An
intelligent Christian cannot look into such works without feeling
thankful that they were not the books from which he got his conceptions
of the Gospel. Nothing would induce him to put them into the hands of an
inquiring youth, and he would be sorry to see them on the table of an
infidel, or in the library of his children, or of a student for the
ministry.--_Foster's Essays._

These sentiments answered so astonishingly to my own thoughts, that I
read them with the greatest delight. I laid them, in substance, before
my brethren. I explained them. I illustrated them by quotations from
books and sermons. I gave them instances of the various faults pointed
out by Foster, taken from their favorite authors, and in some cases from
the discourses of living preachers. I wrote several essays on the causes
of the slow progress made by Christianity, in which I e