ly fact--a fact indicating that Dissent will have to undergo a
very formidable purifying process before men of taste, and intellect, and
learning will be found willing to join its ranks.

THE REV. THOMAS T. LYNCH.

The one great want of the metropolitan pulpit is men abreast of the age,
who can sympathize with its pulsation, can respond to its wants, can
permeate it with a living faith. The majority of the men in the pulpit
cease to be such when they get there. Of the human heart, as it is
fevered with passion, or boils over with desire, they know nothing. They
see men under a mask. Smith does not talk to his minister as he does to
Brown; with Brown he is facetious--occasionally a little loose--and,
after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, speaks in terms almost of
approval of fashionable follies. The minister comes in and the
conversation is changed--allusions are made to the 'Evangelical
Magazine'--the Missionary Society is referred to--something is said of
Sunday Schools, and the world for a time is dropped. Smith, junior, acts
in a similar way. Before his minister he assumes a virtue, if he have it
not--is sedate--quiet, anything, in short, but what his intimates find
him to be. It seems to be the condition of the pulpit that it shall see
life under a mask; and as to thought, that does not move in the regular
time-worn ruts, that is condemned at once. It is not the thought of the
pulpit, and it therefore must be false. It may be born of vigorous
intellect; it may have been nursed by years of severe thought; to get at
it, the thinker may have sacrificed many an early friendship--many a
cherished association--many a sacred tie; but, nevertheless, the pulpit
would blast it with its stern anathemas, and pronounces it a crime.
Occasionally, a man in the pulpit can act differently. Some few years
back, when Professor Scott, then of University College, London, now of
Owen's College, Manchester, was in town, it seemed as if an honest
attempt was made to meet and win to Christianity the philosophy that was
genuine and earnest and religious, though it squared with the creed of no
church, and took for its textbook the living heart of man rather than the
written Word. In our time the same thing is attempted. The man who has
had the courage to make the attempt--and to whom honour should be given
for it--is the Rev. Thomas Lynch.

Judged by externals, the Rev. Thomas Lynch is a failure. He is a small
spare ma