was an epochal year, marking the formation of the London Missionary Society. To this society Hill gave much time and influence. It was well-nigh his hobby. Its interests were his unending concern. He was one of the first directors of the society. It was Rowland Hill who brought its first meeting to a close with a prayer-and few men of his generation approached him in prayer-power-for the blessing of God upon its designs, and it was in the vestry of his chapel that the suggestion was made that the beginning of the conflict, which is not to end till all the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ, should be made in the South Sea Islands. If John Wesley and Rowland Hill can look now upon the whitening fields and know of the glorious harvests of souls in all lands they surely must be moved to sing that triumphant hymn of Charles Wesley's, See how great a flame aspires, Kindled by a spark of grace,

or perhaps they have learned the deeper import of the new song and join their voices in heaven's hymn of adoration and victory: "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing. Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb forever and ever."

The day Rowland Hill entered upon his eighty-fifth year happened to be the Sabbath, and under the impression that it would be his last birthday he preached in the evening-he had preached in the morning also-from the text, "Death is swallowed up in victory!" He flung the gates wide open. Heaven seemed very near as with glowing heart and exuberant imagination he portrayed his anticipations of the invisible glories, pictured the perfect holiness and bliss of the unrevealed scenes of the city of God, and led them with the ransomed hosts in glad triumph up the shining streets of the New Jerusalem. This, however, was not his last sermon. That was preached Sunday, March 31, 1833. The text was 1 Cor. ii, 7, 8. He hoped to preach the following Sunday,

which was Easter, and had selected a text, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead," but was not well enough to attempt it. The Thursday after Easter he died. Before he died he said: "It is a solemn thing to die. I have no rapturous joys, but peace, a good hope through grace, all through grace. Christ is everything to a dying man, but I want to be perfectly holy, perfectly like my dear Lord; without holiness there is no such thing as getting to heaven." He spoke the truth. Without holiness no man can see the Lord.

All in all, Rowland Hill was England's most conspicuous preacher during the last quarter of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The heart of the man is most completely revealed in his frequent observation, "The best of living is to live for others." This also discloses the motive and explains the success of his preaching.

agra Squier Pipple

ART. III. THE PREACHER AND THE POET. THE preacher is every good man's brother. He is God's licensed lover of the best. The best men, measures, manners, places, vocations, avocations, neighborhoods, doings, sayings, all catch his eye and heart and hold them in loving fealty. This it is that makes the preacher's business and life unapproachable for beauty. His vocation is as stately as Edinburgh, as beautiful as Naples, and as bewildering as a great metropolis. He is not common man nor hath common method nor intent in life. He comes to help the cause of goodness on. He challenges men and women, saying, "Have ye seen God today?" He has the apostolate for virtue, ethics, Christ, Christianity. He belongs to all worlds. He speaks in the vernacular of the highest thought and love and hope and dream. No things lie below his horizon. He marches toward the eternal dawn, and so has all daylights along the path he takes. Like St. Christopher, he serves the highest; and his commission is signed of Christ. Now, seeing the preacher is such a man, so boundless in purpose and high in his aspirings and blood relative to the divinities in time and in eternity, it can but be that he will find himself homesick for the most elect

fellowships earth supplies. We would think it of him in theory and find it of him in fact. This is the halo about a preacher's head-that good things beckon to him as familiar friends. There is no compliment like that- Preacher, if you saw Elia going along your street would you not hug up to him? or if the broad-browed Plato meditated along some Academe would you not beat time with your feet to his measured goings and with your brain and heart to his wide sayings? or if Eschylus with his winter locks should mumble to himself some strophes from his "Agamemnon" would you not listen? or if Francis Bacon read over to himself his essay on "Atheism" would you not thank your stars that you were there to hear him read it? or if Alexander Smith were writing Dreamthorp or Emerson his essay on "Beauty" would you

not say the day you spent in their society was a marked day in your calendar? A preacher's affiliations are princely. He belongs to all fraternities of noble worth without the trouble of joining. He is born to them. Every high thing fits his hand as if it were a sword made for his sole using. Botany, astronomy, philosophy, biology, psychology, chemistry, literature, painting, architecture, eloquence, poetry do not need to plead with him for hearing. He sits an eager auditor to all they have to say. When I think what a preacher is, how far and high his thought may aspire to soar, how long a journey he enters on with his own feet, how equivocal his position on all things pertaining to virtue, how certified a champion he is of weakness and worth, how God lets him talk about his own and one Son, Jesus Christ-then I laugh out loud nor can forbear my laughter.

Prayer I assume to be the highest expression of the human soul, and next to prayer is poetry. As a method of speech, then, poetry is the soul's highest form of utterance. What need, then, to suggest that poetry and the preacher are necessitated friends? I assume that since the apostolic days preaching, as preaching, has never soared so high as in Henry Ward Beecher. There were in him an exhaustlessness and an exuberance, an insight deep as the soul, a power to turn a light like sunlight for strength on the sore weakness of humanity, a bewilderment of approach to the heart to tempt it from itself to God that I find nowhere else; and it has been my pleasure to be a wide reader of the sermonic literature of the world. Compared to him, Hillis is a little meadow, and Berry, the English preacher, whom Beecher thought most apt to be his successor in Plymouth pulpit and who was invited by that church to such successorship-Berry was an instrument of a couple of strings matched with Beecher's harp of gold. Phillips Brooks cannot in any just sense be put alongside him, and Simpson in his genius was essentially extemporaneous and insular. Beecher was perpetual, like the eter nal springs. In Robertson of Brighton are some symptoms of Beecher, but they are cameo and not building stone resem

blances. Beecher was the past master of our preaching art. Storrs and Beecher were contemporaries in the same city. Storrs was a field of cloth of gold. Gorgeous he was and a man of might. But you cannot get from the thought of effort in him in his effects. In Beecher is no sense of effort, any more than in a sea bird keeping pace with a rushing ship. As I have seen birds sail hour on hour and never flap a wing and yet dig down into the valleys and rise high where the blue sky was dappled with its clouds, so Beecher does. In him are the effortless music and might of a vast reserve of power. Now, this estimate of Beecher may be right or wrong. I give it as my estimate of him. He has no successor, as Samson had no son. Now, how did Beecher stand related to poetry? I urge this concrete case because it affords an expeditious way of getting at the vitalities of this theme. Beecher never quoted poetry. But Beecher never quoted the Bible, the reason being he was not possessed of a memoriter memory, just as Joseph Parker was not. But he held the Bible in solution as the sea holds the salt or the sun holds iron and gold. All things told, it were better to be saturated with a thing and hold it in your blood than to be plastered over with a thing. Beecher in his earlier Plymouth pulpit days preached Bible, its spirit, urgency, central loveliness, light, penetration, not less certainly because he seldom gives an exact phrasing from the book. He does the same with poetry. Neither from hymn book nor volume of anybody's poetry do you hear Beecher quote; but he is soaked with poetry. He is a poet. Hear him pray and you must see that. In extemporaneous prayer I have observed that the actual spirit of a soul becomes apparent as in no other part of life. When a man prays he is, so to say, off guard. He looks out and a long way off. Himself is left in the wake like the shimmer in a vessel's track. His spirit walks without help. Reading prayers cuts the life off from its highest opportunity of taking its truest flight and highest. So in Parker, nothing is quite so noble as his praying, and Beecher his prayers have wings as God's doves do. What music and touch of deep truth-only a touch like an angel's