Taylor, no fool surely, and you find, that in sermons which he artlessly tells us were preached to "the family and domestics of his patron, with a few cottagers of the neighborhood," there occurs a profusion of classical allusion, which seems like the echo of an Oxford lecture-room. Quotations from Plautus and Homer occur in a singular medley with others from Cicero and Seneca.

As sensible men, we must condemn all this; and we marvel that he had not the good sense to condemn it also. But we do him great injustice, if we judge him by the tastes of this age. One of the most curious inlets to the character of the English pulpit of those times is located just here. Not only is it true that this pedantry accorded with the scholastic taste of that age, but the popular taste refused to respect preaching which was not sprinkled with it. I open almost at random the sermons of a contemporary of Jeremy Taylor, and I find the text quoted in Latin, two Greek quotations on one page, and four Latin extracts on another. Reverence for the classic languages had descended to the seventeenth century from a century earlier, when there was no literature to speak of in the vernacular tongues of Europe. Erasmus risked his life in a mob, because he would not talk Italian. He abandoned a benefice offered to him in England, because he would not stoop to learn the English language. He often refused to converse in German, though he knew the language expertly. He thought the Reformation degraded by Luther's preaching and writing in German. This was the general taste of the scholars of his age. Erasmus was the most liberal of them all. They looked upon the classic tongues as the only tongues in which a scholarly literature could ever exist.

LECT. XIX.]

POPULAR SCHOLASTICISM.

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The common people, therefore, did their best to ape the folly of their betters. Through that whole period, down to a time long after Jeremy Taylor, this was the inherited taste of the people. They could not read or understand Latin and Greek; but they could hear it, and their ears were elongated by that. The relics of that taste remained to our own day. So lately as in the last decade of the eighteenth century, Clarkson published a pamphlet in England against the slave-trade, which he thought it politic to publish in Latin, lest he should not attract the attention of the learned men of Europe. It is within the remembrance of men now living that German scholars began generally to think it respectable to write commentaries in German.

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In the time of Jeremy Taylor this taste for pedantry was, in one aspect of it, a virtue in the people, whatever it was in the scholars of the age. In the people it was, in part, the natural expression of their respect for learning. They objected to the learned Edward Pocock, professor of Arabic at Oxford, that he was a plain, honest man, but no Latiner." Even modest George Herbert, when he began to preach, thought it necessary to awe the people by preaching to them a prodigiously learned sermon, in which he showed them that he was equal to the best as a "Latiner;" but in his pious simplicity he informed them that he should not generally preach to them so learnedly as that, but henceforth he should try to save their souls.

These illustrations show the practical necessity of the. principle before us to a sound judgment of literature. To know an author well, we must know the man; and, to know the man well, we must know the times of which, by an irrevocable law of nature, he was the representative and the child.

Collateral reading will often disclose to us the secret of otherwise inexplicable effects of literature in the age when it was written. Contemporary influence is often the mystery of the next age. Our American pulpit already contains remarkable illustrations of this. President Edwards's sermons, as we read them, do not explain to us the astonishing effects of some of them. His elocution had almost no concern with them, except to moderate their fiery pungency. No audience of to-day could be plunged into an incontrollable fit of weeping by the sermon on the text, "Their feet shall slide in due time." An eye-witness testifies that Mr. Spurgeon's audiences listen to sermons from him which resemble that one from President Edwards, not only without a tear, but with signs of the most stolid indifference. To explain the experience of the church at Enfield, we must take note of the idiosyncrasies of that age as they are pictured in the history of the "Great Awakening."

7. A PRINCIPLE fundamental to a preacher's study of literature is that it should be accompanied with habitual practice in composition.

If rightly conducted, a pastor's compulsory habits of production are rather a help than a hinderance to the scholarly character of his reading. Criticism and production re-act favorably upon each other. Nothing else is so powerful a tonic to the mind as composing: in certain conditions of the cerebral system it is a direct tonic to the brain, if conducted on the principle of alternation. Composition is creation. It is athletic exercise. The weakest minds are the most active absorbents, with the least capacity of production. The working of a healthy mind in study is like respiration: inhalation and exhalation are reciprocal. Without such reciprocity, a very large portion of our reading must be useless. It passes through the mind, but does not remain there. The power of retention needs the stimulus of production.

What knowledge is that which is most indelibly fixed in your memory, that which you have learned only, or that which you have taught? What accumulations are most perfectly at your command, - those which are

stored by the dead-lift of memory, or those which you have used by reproduction? The discovery is often disheartening, but it is healthful, that one is making a mere valve of one's mind, opening it for a stream of reading to run through, and shutting it upon nothing.

Again: study, without mental production, creates in the mind itself inferior habits of thinking. We think very differently in the two cases, of thinking for the purpose of expression, and thinking passively. We think more clearly and less discursively when we think for the purpose of communication; we analyze more accurately; we individualize more sharply; we picture thought more vividly; we are more apt to think in words.

Test this view by your own experience. Why is it that reverie has such a debilitating effect upon your mental energy? Why is it that nothing else so surely unfits you for a morning's work in composing as to begin it with a waking dream? And why is it that nothing else breaks up the dream so sternly as the act of thinking with the pen? Some of the most accomplished writers have formed the habit of taking the pen in hand as the most efficient aid to quick, consecutive, clear, profound, and vivid thinking. Robert Southey says, "It is the very nose in the face of my intellect that I never enter into any regular train of thought unless the pen be in hand.”

Professor Stuart, who was one of the most fluent composers of his time, once told me, that, when he was a young man, he was often compelled to quit his sermon, and walk in his garden, in sheer vacuity of thought, not knowing what to say next. "But now," said he, "my mental working is all instantaneous and