want, and perhaps of crime. He sees men in joy and in grief, at a wedding and a funeral, and when flushed with hope, when wrung with pain, when the soul bids earth farewell. If a true man, the most precious confidence is reposed in him. He looks into men's eyes as he speaks, and in their varying faces reads their confession, what they could oft conceal, both ill and good,-reads sometimes with astonished eyes. Reader, you have seen an old coin, worn smooth so that there was no mark on it, not a letter; you know not whence it came nor whose it is; but you heat it in the fire, and the stamp of the die is plain as when the coin was minted first; you see the image, read the superscription. So the excitement of a scrmon reveals the man's character in his oft-unwilling face, and the preacher, astonished, renders unto Cæsar the things that are his, and unto God His own. Sometimes one is saddened to see the miser, satyr, worldling in his many forms, under a disguise so trim and neat; but oftener, perhaps, surprised to find a saint he knew not of before; surprised at the resurrection of such a soul from such a tomb. The minister addresses men as individuals: the lawyer must convince the whole jury, the senator a majority of the senate, or his work is lost; while if the minister convinces one man-or but half convinces himhe has still done something, which will last. The merchant deals with material things, the lawyer and the politician commonly address only the understanding of their hearers, sharpening attention by appeals to interest; while the minister calls upon the affections, addresses the conscience, and appeals to the religious nature of man-to faculties which bind man to his race, and unite him with his God. This gives him a power which no other man aspires to; which neither the lawyer nor tho merchant, nor yot the politician, attempts to wield; nay, which the mere writer of books leaves out of sight. In our day we often forget these things, and suppose that the government or the newspapers are the arbiters of public opinion, while still the pulpit has a mighty influence. All the politicians and lawyers in America could not persuade men to believe what was contrary to common-sense and adverse to their interest; but a few preachers, in the name of Religion, made whole millions believe the world would perish on a

certain day, and, now the day is past, it is hard for them to believe their preachers were mistaken!

Now all this might of position and opportunity may be used for good or ill, to advance men or retard them; so a great responsibility rests always on the clergy of the land. Put a heavy man in the pulpit, ordinary, vulgar, obese, idle, inhuman, and he overlays the conscience of the people with his grossness; his Upas broath poisons every spiritual plant that springs up within sight of his church. l'ut there a man of only the average intelligence and religion -he does nothing but keep men from sliding back; he loves his people and giveth his beloved-sleep. Put there a superior man, with genius for religion, nay, a man of no genius, but an active, intelligent, human, and pious man, who will work for the human race with all his mind and heart-and he does wonders; he loves his people and giveth his beloved his own life. He looks out on the wealth, ignorance, pride, poverty, lust, and sin of the world, and blames himself for their existence. This suffering human race, poor blind Bartimæus, sits by the wayside, crying to all men of power-" Have mercy on "the minister says, "What wilt thou?" he answers, "Lord, that I might receive my sight." No man may be idle, least of all the minister; he least of all in this age, when Bartimæus cries as never before.

me;

Dr Channing was born at Newport in Rhode Island, the 7th of April, 1780, and educated under the most favourable circumstances which the country then afforded; employed as a private teacher for more than a year at Richmond, and settled as a clorgyman in Boston moro than five and forty years ago. Here he laboured in this calling, more or less, for nearly forty years. He was enphatically a Christian minister, in all the high meaning of that term. He has had a deep influence here; a wide influence in the world. For forty years, though able men have planned wisely for this city, and rich men bestowed their treasure for her welfare, founding valuable and permanent institutions, yet no one has done so much for Boston as he-none contributed so powerfully to enhanco the character of her men for religion and for brotherly love. There is no charity like the inspiration of great writers. There were two excellent and extraordinary

ministers in Boston contemporary with Dr Channing, whose memory will not soon depart-we mean Buckminster and Waro. But Dr Channing was the most remarkable clergyman in America; yes, throughout all lands where the English tongue is spoken, in the nineteenth century there has been no minister so remarkable as he; none so powerful on the whole. No clergyman of America ever exercised such dominion amongst men. Edwards and Mayhew are great names in the American churches, men of power, of self-denial, of toil, who have also done service for mankind; but Channing has gone deeper, soared higher, seen further than they, and set in motion forces which will do more for mankind.

What is the secret of his success? Certainly his power did not come from his calling as a clergyman: there are some forty thousand clergyman in the United States. We meet them in a large city; they are more known by the name of their church than their own name; more marked by their cravat than their character. Of all this host, not ten will be at all well known, even in their own city or village, in a hundred years; perhaps not one. Nay, there are not twenty who are well known in America, now even, out of their denomination-they, perhaps, known by the unlucky accident of some petty controversy, rather than by any real eminence of character and work. Who of them is otherwise known to Europe, or even to England? But Dr Channing is well known in Germany and France; his writings more broadly spread in England than in his native land; his power widens continually, and deepens too.

His eminence came from no extraordinary intellectual gifts born with him. Truly his was a mind of a high order. Yot it is not difficult to find mon of far more native intellectual force, both here and everywhere; and throughout all his life, in all his writings, you see the trace of intellectual deficiencies-his deficiencies as a writer, as a scholar, and still more as an original and philosophical thinker. Nor did it come any more from his superior opportunities for education. True, those were the best the country afforded at that time, though far inferior in many respects to what is now abundantly enjoyed with no corresponding result. In his early culture there were marked defi

ciencies the results of which appear in his writings even to the last, leading him to falter in his analysis, leaving him uncertain as to his conclusion, and timid in applying his ideas to practice. His was not the intellect to forego careful and laborious and early training; not an intellect to cultivate itself, browsing to the full in scanty pastures, where weaker natures perish for lack of tender grass and careful housing from the cold.

His signal success came from no remarkable opportunity for the use of his gifts and attainments. He was one minister of the forty thousand. His own pulpit was only higher than others, his audience larger and more influential, because he made it so. His clerical brothers in his last years hindered more than they helped him; his own parish gave him no remarkable aid, and in his best years showed themselves incapable of receiving his highest instructions and in the latter part of his life proved quite unworthy of so great a man.

He had none of the qualities which commonly attract men at first sight. He was little of stature, and not very well-favoured; his bodily presence was weak; his voice feeble, his tone and manner not such as strike the many. Beauty is the most popular and attractive of all things-n presence that never tires. Dr Channing was but slightly favoured by the Graces; his gestures, intonations, and general manner would have been displeasing in another. He had nothing which at first sight either awes or attracts the careless world. He had no tricks and made no compromises. He never flattered men's pride nor their idleness-incarnating the popular religion; he did not storm or dazzle; he had not the hardy intellect which attracts men with only active minds, nor the cowardly conservatism which flatters Propriety to sleep in her pew; he never thundered and lightened-but only shone with calm and tranquil though varying light. He had not the social charm which fascinates and attaches men; though genial, hospitable, and inviting, yet few came very near him.

He was not eminently original, either in thought or in the form thereof; not rich in ideas. It is true, he had great powers of speech, yet he had not that masterly genius for eloquenco, which now stoops down to the ground and moulds the very earth into arguments, till it seems as if

the stones and trees were ordained his colleagues to preach with him, obedient to his Orphic enchantment;-not that gonius which reachos up to the hoavens, prossing sun and moon and each particular star into the service of his thought; which proves by a diagram, illustrates by a picture, making the unwilling listeners feel that he had bribed the universe to plead his cause; not that rare poetic power, which is born Genius and bred Art, which teems with sentiments and ideas, clothes and adorns them with language gathered from letters, nature, art, and common life, grouping his family of thoughts as Raphael in a picture paints the Madonna, Joseph, Baby, Ass, Angel, Palm-tree, those incongruous things of earth and Heaven, all unified and made harmonious by that one enchanting soul. He had not that intellectual, wealthy eloquence, beautiful as roses yet strong as steel. Nor had he the homely force of Luther, who in the language of the farm, the shop, the boat, the stroot, or nursery, told the high truths that reason or religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian soul, baptizing every head anew—a man who with the people seemed more mob than they, and when with kings the most imperial man. He had not the blunt terse style of Latimer, nor his beautiful homeliness of speech, which is more attractive than all rhetoric. He had not the cool clear analysis of Dr Barrow, his prodigious learning, his close logic, his masculine sense; nor the graceful imagery, the unbounded imagination of Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," nor his winsome way of talk about piety, elevating the commonest events of life to classic dignity. He had not the hard-headed intellect of Dr South, his skilful analysis, his conquering wit, his intellectual wealth :-no, he had not the power of condensing his thoughts into the energetic language of Websternever a word wrong or too much-or of marshalling his forces in such magnificently stern array; no, he had not the exquisite rhythmic speech of Emerson, that wonderful artist in words, who unites manly strength with the rare beauty of a woman's mind.

His

His eminence came from no such gifts or graces. power came mainly from the predominating strength of the moral and religious element in him. He loved God with