preach it are the most popular preachers.
Their Gospel tramples on intellect, and they do the same. According to
them, the weak things of the world, and the things that are despised, are
powerful to bring to nought things that are; and, therefore, they take
their stand above the science and literature and philosophy of man, which
they hold but as dirt in comparison with the truths they teach and the
discoveries they reveal. Their appeal is not to the intellect or the
taste. For neither do they care. They display no pride of learning, no
affluence of imagination, no pomp of words. They abound with no thoughts
rich and rare. The perilous paths which the human intellect finds for
itself, when in wandering mazes lost, they altogether ignore.

Hence their immense success. The common mass of church and chapel goers
are not given, by mental speculation, to trains of abstract and
protracted thought. Generally, their education is of the most limited
description, consisting of little more than is requisite for the ordinary
business of ordinary life. The London _bourgeoise_ are not a very
learned folk. Were a Coleridge set down amongst them they would say,
'Much learning hath made this man mad.' They would at any time prefer a
Hall to a John Foster, or such a man as Robert Montgomery to Professor
Maurice or Mr. Lynch. But they can be reached through the heart, and
they love so to be reached. Nor on religious matters is this very
difficult to do so. The chief requirements are simplicity and
earnestness--that you should not reason, but command and appeal. The
more simply and authoritatively this is done, of course, the better it is
done. An audience does not love to be distracted, or to have its mental
powers severely taxed; but it comes to be excited, to be quickened, to be
delivered for a time from the things which are seen and temporal, and to
realise those which are unseen and eternal. The men who aim straight at
this end--if they have at all the requisite amount of voice and
manner--are sure to have an audience fit, and not few.

Thus Mr. Martin has won his way, and become a power in the pulpit. About
fifteen years since, he came to London from a provincial college--a
college which the self-satisfied young gentlemen of Highbury, with their
acknowledged popular preaching talents, regarded in much the same way as
Nazareth was regarded by the Jews. A new chapel had just been erected in
Lambeth by the Congregati