ee of exaggeration is indispensable. In order to
create the impulse necessary to overcome the _vis inertiae_ of
society, and induce in the particular case the required amount of
exertion, the stream of the moving power has--if we may so speak--to
be elevated to the level of hopes raised high above the point of
possible accomplishment. To employ the language of the mechanist, the
necessary _fall_ would be otherwise awanting, and the machine would
fail to move. If, for instance, all men had estimated the advantages
of free trade according to the sober computations of Chalmers, the
country would have no Anti-Corn-Law League, and no repeal of the
obnoxious statutes. And yet who can now doubt that the calculations
of Chalmers were in reality the true ones? In like manner, if it
had been truly seen that the 'baths for the working classes' could
have merely extended to the humbler inhabitants of our cities those
advantages of ablution which the working men of our sea-coasts
already possess, but of which--when turned of forty--not one out of a
hundred among them ever avails himself, we would scarce have
witnessed bath meetings, with Dukes in the chair; nor would the
baths themselves have been erected. But the natural exaggerative
feeling prevailed. Baths for the working classes were destined
somehow to renovate society, it was thought; and so, though
Chartism be now as little content as ever, baths for the working
classes our cities possess. And, doubtless, exaggeration of a
similar kind has tended to heighten the general estimate of the minor
duties of the clergyman; and were there no invidious comparisons
instituted between the lesser and the paramount duties,--between
what is secondary in its nature magnified into primary importance,
and what is primary in its nature diminished into a mere secondary,
and standing as if the one had been viewed by the lesser, and the
other through the greater lens of a telescope,--we would have no
quarrel whatever with the absolute exaggeration in the case, regarded
simply as a mere moving force. But we must quarrel with it when we
see it leading to practical error; and so, in direct opposition to
the common remark, that preaching is but a small part of the
minister's duty, we assert that it is not a small, but a very
large, and by far the most important part of it; and that it is not
our standards or the Scriptures that are in error on this special
head, but the numerous class who, taking up