THERE is no theme on which the flippant and fashionable litterateur of the day is accustomed to descant with a jauntier air of superiority, conceit, and complacency, than the decadence of the pulpit. Without troubling himself about proof, he takes the fact of this decadence for granted; and, seeing that every defect of the pulpit is in his view more than compensated for by the rise in influence and eminence of the brethren of the pen, he does not affect to regret the circumstance.

In so far, he is unquestionably correct. The pulpit is not at this time the same power which it was in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The pulpit was the grand intellectual instrument of those ages. Printed books and the drama had indeed a place among the influences which acted upon the minds of men; but they were comparatively unseen, unfelt, unimportant. When the religious fervour which agitated Europe for a century and a half after Luther affixed his Theses to the church door of Wittenberg, reached its climax in England, books and plays were swept impatiently into the background; and even Milton owned that the spirit of the time demanded the postponement of his great poem. The pulpit then performed for the people a vast proportion of those duties now performed by the press. From the lips of the preacher, the congregation first learned that some great event had taken place, that some new line of policy had been adopted. In the preacher, the people discerned a censor, before whose words of fiery rebuke sovereigns winced and courtiers trembled. Sermons furnished the mental entertainment of the day. The earnest and impassioned preachers uttered their thunders like our leading journalists: the graceful, sentimental, and flowery preacher corresponded to our popular novelist or inditer of brilliant essays. Beyond question, the pulpit is not now so comprehensive and tremendous an agency as it was in the time of Knox and Latimer.

The time in which we live is pre-eminently intellectual. Since the Reformation, the revolt of reason against authority has been constantly

extending its scope, and adding to the roll of its triumphs. The Protestant pulpit proclaimed as with clarion-blast the freedom of the human mind in judging of truth, and Europe awoke at the sound. The first grand enterprise of the modern time-that without which its entire intellectual activity would have been paralysed -was the breaking of those priestly fetters which had bound the human mind in the middle ages. This indispensable, this arduous and perilous enterprise, was performed by the pulpit. True, in performing it, the pulpit called into existence a new power,-the power of the press. The younger brother has now waxed in strength and stature, has forgotten his obligations to the elder, and is apt to speak of the pulpit with contempt. But the historian will acknowledge and do justice to the fact that the insurrection of European intelligence against Rome - the commencement of our strictly modern civilisation, the condition of all that modern society has done or hopes to do—was headed by the Protestant clergy.

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And let it not be rashly concluded that, because the pulpit in our time does not attempt so much as of old,—because it leaves politics to the statesman, and general information to the newspaper-it has ceased to have a sphere of its own, and no longer exerts an influence upon men. This is by no means the case. great principle of the division of labour has been applied in this department. The pulpit has beheld certain parts of its previously assumed work, for which in truth it was never particularly well qualified, taken off its hand; but it has ample work of its own; and by doing its own work well it will continue to exert an influence, perhaps, not so comprehensive, but, mayhap, even more penetrating and potent than that exerted by the pulpit in what are generally considered its palmiest days. The spiritual province it may still claim as supremely its own; and does not the human spirit require to be ministered to in these days by the teachers and preachers of religion? Our knowledge has been vastly increased, but do we stand less in need of reverence? The agitations of the age, its tumult of enterprise and

the press. Sermons constitute an exceedingly popular department of literature; and there is bardly an eminent preacher in the country who does not address two congregations, one within his church or chapel, the other out of doors; one from the pulpit, the other from the press. If we consider, last of all, that we have now, not one, or one hundred, but a whole legion of preachers who, wherever they preach, attract immense audiences, we shall be constrained to admit that the pulpit continues, in our day, to be an agency of incalculable power.

Two things favour the pulpit at the present time, and enhance the value of its influence, as compared with the pulpit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the first place, immense progress has been made in the scientific investigation of the world, and nature is known to us as it was not known to our fathers. This, we submit, is an advantage to the preacher of Christianity. Some may view our assertion with surprise. There are not a few who think of modern science as hostile to Christianity. Nor can it be denied that some not unreasonable grounds may be adduced for entertaining this opinion. It were affectation to ignore the fact that a large proportion of the men devoted to the pursuit of science in Great Britain have cast off all faith in the Christian Revelation. More than this: they are not neutral, candid, and impartial, in relation to theology, but animated, in many instances, with a spirit of offence and aggression. An apparent discrepancy between science and Scripture is paraded rather than disguised; and bold adhesion to what is sneeringly styled the popular religion is a prejudice against a man in not a few scientific circles. At this moment a far higher exertion of moral courage would be required, by any man ambitious of a scientific reputation, in bringing forward facts or reasonings which might tend to discredit infidel speculation, than in stating opinions which should involve a contemptuous rejection of the authority of Scripture. It is a short cut to fame in the halls of science to light upon some tiny vestige of a fact which seems to aid the argument for man's relationship to the gorilla, or to countenance the theory of spontaneous generation. The day has long gone by when science trembled before orthodoxy, and the young scientific aspirant now fears to be deemed orthodox.

All this is true; and the reflection that it is true may, we say, cause surprise in some quarters at our distinct declaration that the progress of science is an advantage to the preacher of the Gospel. But we deliberately repeat the statement; and add, that it appears to us so obviously valid that its formal proof

may be dispensed with. God's Word and God's Works are a commentary,—the best of commentaries, the one upon the other. It is impossible, it is inconceivable, that they should be aught else. The Word of God gives the spirit in which man ought to peruse the volume of God's Works,-that, namely, of reverence, humility, wonder, and adoration. The Works of God enlarge our acquaintance with the laws by which He governs men. If we believe that God is the Creator of the world, it is contradictory and absurd, not to say blasphemous, to admit the idea that any fact in the structure of the world or of animals is dishonouring to God, inconsistent with Divine truth, or anything except what God wills it to be. The only question, therefore, which the devout Christian can put respecting any alleged fact in God's world is, whether it is proved or not proved. That he cannot reconcile it with certain other facts respecting God's will which he receives on evidence of another kind, cannot reasonably or logically stagger his faith, except on the supposition that he, with his finite and erring intelligence, may expect to understand the counsel of the Most High, to perceive the connection of part with part in the scheme of the Divine government, and to measure the power and wisdom of the Eternal. It is insolent assumption in a finite being to decide even in thought what the facts of God's universe ought to be; the sole question competent to him is what they are: and no man of ordinary information is ignorant that modern science has made additions so vast to our stock of ascertained and indubitable facts, that they may be said to amount to a new revelation of the works of God.

That illumination which, for the reverent mind, is cast by the volume of nature upon the volume of God's written Scripture, never beamed so brightly as in these days. Rightly understood, faithfully and gratefully accepted, the discoveries of science in our time are fitted to repay, in some degree at least, that service which the Christian religion in former ages did to science. It is not too much to say that Christianity made modern science possible. What science could there be, when every wood was haunted with the phantoms of superstition, when every mountain had its god, when the very idea of the unity of nature's laws was shut out from the mind by the belief in a host of divinities which shared with each other the dominion of earth, air, and sea; and which fought, squabbled, intrigued, murdered, as if the grand privilege of divinity was to make wickedness immortal? Christianity, proclaiming the unity of God, prepared the way for the fundamental conception of modern