n; his bodily presence is contemptible; he is a reed shaken by
the wind. You get no idea of the church militant when you look at him,

'Of the drum ecclesiastic,
Beat with fist instead of a stick.'

He is none of your bully 'Bottoms,' to roar 'so that the Duke will say,
let him roar again.' His chapel is in the very unfashionable
neighbourhood of Tottenham Court Road. His hearers are few and far
between. Out of the immense crowd of church and chapel goers in this
great city, not three hundred can be got to hear him; and yet I know no
man better worth your hearing. Your popular orators, your Dan O'Connells
and your Dr. Leifchilds, are big men--and yet your small men have often
the organization favourable to the development of poetry and thought. So
is it with Mr. Lynch. It is the old Gospel he preaches; but he handles
it in a new and fresh form. What is wearisome from others, comes with a
peculiar fascination from him. The truths common-place men have made
prosaic and common-place, the magic of his genius can render quite the
reverse. His is the rare power, given to the true poet alone, 'to clothe
the palpable and the familiar with golden exhalations of the dawn;' and
his also is the still rarer power to show piety--

'Sitting as a goddess bright,
In the circle of her light.'

You see that Christianity to him is life and power--no form of words, but
a reality; that it fills his heart; that it works in his intellect; that
it sanctifies his utterance. Hence it comes fresh to you as it does to
him; it is alive with the light of genius and of God; with him it is
applicable to the conditions of existence, to man's need and nature--no
tinkling cymbal--no empty brass. A brother and a man preaches to you;
your equal in philosophy, in thought, in lettered lore; your superior in
what is greater and nobler still. Yes, that frail man, with an imperfect
frame--with a voice so weak that you can scarcely hear him--with an
appearance so homely that you would never think that in such a casket a
soul of any greatness could be enshrined--can speak to you of the great
things of God--of righteousness, and temperance, and the judgment to
come, so that you--worldly scoffer or philosophic sceptic though you
be--must listen with admiration and respect.

A tale is told of a certain divine who was much given to a practice
common in the Scotch Church, though not very popular here--of exposition.
Once upon a ti