deed there may be great need of an outside, when there is little or nothing within. And thus also it is with the most necessary and important truths; to adorn and clothe them is to cover them, and that to obscure them. . . .

'I speak the words of soberness,' said St. Paul (Acts 26. 25). And I preach the Gospel not with the 'enticing words of man's wisdom' (1 Cor. 2. 4). This was the way of the apostles' discoursing of things sacred. Nothing here of 'the fringes of the North Star'; nothing of 'Nature's becoming unnatural'; nothing of the down of angel's wings,' or 'the beautiful locks of cherubims'; no starched similitudes, introduced with a 'Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy mansion,' and the like. No; these were sublimities above the rise of the apostolic spirit. For the apostles, poor mortals, were content to take lower steps, and to tell the world in plain terms that he who believed should be saved, and that he who believed not should be damned. And this was the dialect which pierced the conscience, and made the hearers cry out, Men and brethren, what shall we do?' It tickled not the ear, but sunk into the heart; and when men came from such sermons, they never commended the preacher for his taking voice or gesture, for the fineness of such a simile, or the quaintness of such a sentence; but they spoke like men conquered with the overpowering force and evidence of the most concerning truths, much in the words of the two disciples going to Emmaus, 'Did not our hearts burn within us, while he opened to us the Scriptures?'

In a word, the apostles' preaching was therefore mighty and successful, because plain, natural, and familiar, and by no means above the capacity of their hearers; nothing being more preposterous than for those who were professedly aiming at men's hearts to miss the mark by shooting over their heads.

3. The gift of preaching, conferred by Christ upon his apostles, required a suitable zeal and fervor to attend it; for without this, as high and important a truth as the gospel preached by them was, none would have believed that it had any powerful effect upon the preacher's own affections, nor consequently that it could

have wrought at all more upon other men's; this is most certain. So true is it that the same things, differently expressed, as to the proper effects of persuasion are indeed not the same. A cold indifference dispirits a discourse; but a due fervor gives it life and authority, and sends it home to the inmost powers of the soul, with an easy insinuation and a deep impression. .

Thus when Christ accosted Jerusalem with that melting exprobration in Matt. 23. 37, 38, O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.' Now what a relenting strain of tenderness was there in this reproof from the great Doctor as well as Saviour of souls, and how infinitely more moving than if he had said only, 'O ye inhabitants of Jerusalem, how wicked and barbarous is it in you thus to persecute and stone God's prophets! And how can you but expect some severe judgment from God upon you for it?' Who, I say, sees not the vast difference in these two ways of address, as to the vigor and winning compassion of the one, and the low, dispirited flatness of the other in comparison? Likewise for St. Paul, observe how he uttered himself in his excellent farewell discourse to the elders of Ephesus (Acts 20, from verse 18 to the end of the chapter, and particularly in verse 31). 'Remember,' says he, 'how that for the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.' These were the arguments here used by this great apostle, arguments in comparison of which he knew that the most flowing rhetoric of words would be but a poor and faint persuasive. And then again, in 2 Cor. 11. 29, with what a true and tender passion does he lay forth his fatherly care and concern for all the churches of Christ! 'Who,' says he, 'is weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I burn not?' Than which words nothing doubtless could have issued from the tongue or heart of man more endearing, more pathetical and affectionate.

[SOUTH, The Scribe Instructed.]

In God's word we have not only a body of religion, but also a system of the best rhetoric; and as the highest things require the highest expressions, so we shall find nothing in Scripture so sublime in itself, but it is reached, and sometimes overtopped, by the sublimity of the expression. And first, where did majesty ever ride in more splendor than in those descriptions of the divine power in Job, in the 38th, 39th, and 40th chapters? And what triumph was ever celebrated with higher, livelier, and more exalted poetry than in the Song of Moses in the 32d of Deuteronomy? And then for the passions of the soul — which being things of the highest transport and most wonderful and various operation in human nature, are therefore the proper object and business of rhetoric let us take a view how the Scripture expresses the most noted and powerful of them. And here, what poetry ever paralleled Solomon in his description of love, as to all the ways, effects, and ecstasies, and little tyrannies of that commanding passion? See Ovid, with his Omnia vincit amor, etc., and Virgil, with his Vulnus alit venis et cæco carpitur igni, etc.; how jejune and thin are they to the poetry of Solomon, in the 8th chapter of the Canticles and the 6th verse, 'Love is strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave!' And as for his description of beauty, he describes that so, that he even transcribes it into his expressions. And where do we read such strange risings and fallings, now the faintings and languishings, now the terrors and astonishments of despair, venting themselves in such high, amazing strains as in the 77th Psalm? Or where did we ever find sorrow flowing forth in such a natural, prevailing pathos, as in the Lamentations of Jeremy? One would think that every letter was wrote with a tear, every word was the noise of a breaking heart; that the author was a man compacted of sorrows, disciplined to grief from his infancy, one who never breathed but in sighs, nor spoke but in a groan. So that he who said he would not read the Scripture for fear of spoiling his style showed himself as much a blockhead as an atheist, and to have as small a gust of the elegancies of expres

sion as of the sacredness of the matter. And shall we now think that the Scripture forbids all ornament of speech, and engages men to be dull, flat, and slovenly in all their discourses? But let us look a little further, and see whether the New Testament abrogates what we see so frequently used in the Old. And for this, what mean all the parables used by our Saviour, the known and greatest elegancies of speech? So that if this way was unlawful before, Christ by his example has authorized and sanctified it since; and if good and lawful, has confirmed it.

[CARDINAL NEWMAN, Idea of a University, pp. 289-290.]

Scripture not elaborate! Scripture not ornamented in diction, and musical in cadence! Why, consider the Epistle to the Hebrews where is there in the classics any composition more carefully, more artificially written? Consider the book of Job-is it not a sacred drama, as artistic, as perfect, as any Greek tragedy of Sophocles or Euripides? Consider the Psalter - are there no ornaments, no rhythm, no studied cadences, no responsive members, in that divinely beautiful book? And is it not hard to understand? are not the Prophets hard to understand? is not St. Paul hard to understand? Who can say that these are popular compositions? who can say that they are level at first reading with the understandings of the multitude?

That there are portions indeed of the inspired volume more simple both in style and in meaning, and that these are the more sacred and sublime passages, as, for instance, parts of the Gospels, I grant at once; but this does not militate against the doctrine I have been laying down. . . . I have said Literature is one thing, and that Science is another; that Literature has to do with ideas, and Science with realities; that Literature is of a personal character, that Science treats of what is universal and eternal. proportion, then, as Scripture excludes the personal coloring of its writers, and rises into the region of pure and mere inspiration, when it ceases in any sense to be the writing of man, of St. Paul or St. John, of Moses or Isaias, then it comes to belong to Sci

In

ence, not Literature. Then it conveys the things of heaven, unseen verities, divine manifestations, and them alone - not the ideas, the feelings, the aspirations, of its human instruments, who, for all that they were inspired and infallible, did not cease to be men. St. Paul's epistles, then, I consider to be literature in a real and true sense, as personal, as rich in reflection and emotion, as Demosthenes or Euripides; and, without ceasing to be revelations of objective truth, they are expressions of the subjective notwithstanding. On the other hand, portions of the Gospels, of the book of Genesis, and other passages of the Sacred Volume, are of the nature of Science. Such is the beginning of St. John's Gospel. . . . .. Such is the Creed. I mean, passages such as these are the mere enunciation of eternal things, without (so to say) the medium of any human mind transmitting them to us. The words used have the grandeur, the majesty, the calm unimpassioned beauty of Science; they are in no sense Literature, they are in no sense personal; and therefore they are easy to apprehend, and easy to translate.

5. Rhythm of the Bible.

[WATTS, in Encyclopædia Britannica, ninth edition, Article

Poetry.]

Perhaps it may be said that deeper than all the rhythms of art is that rhythm which art would fain catch, the rhythm of nature; for the rhythm of nature is the rhythm of life itself. This rhythm can be caught by prose as well as by poetry, such prose, for instance, as that of the English Bible. Certainly the rhythm of verse at its highest, such, for instance, as that of Shakespeare's greatest writings, is nothing more and nothing less than the metre of that energy of the spirit which surges within the bosom of him who speaks, whether he speak in verse or in impassioned prose. Being rhythm, it is of course governed by law, but it is a law which transcends in subtlety the conscious art of the metricist, and is only caught by the poet in his most inspired moods, a law