house, and to the assistance of Samuel Davies in his education for the ministry, and to the subsequent employment of that "prince of preachers" in the vicinity of that same reading house, and to the long continued results of his labors in the region which was first enlightened by a leaf from the Fourfold State But from the circumstance that all things are important in their operation upon society, it were singular to infer that the Christian ministry is not important. The agency of many causes is, in the common language, accidental; that of the pulpit is the uniform operation of known laws. It is a prominent agency, attended with consequences peculiarly extensive, and meliorating the state of man more directly than is done by other causes, more uniformly and more radically. It is true that the influence of the preacher is not always tangible. He founds no cities which are called after his name. There is no pillar like Trajan's, no Coliseum, no Simplon to remain as a specimen of his skill. Such effects may be produced indirectly and ultimately by the minister, but in general what is stately and imposing, filling the eye of the million, and fit to be celebrated with bonfires and illuminations, is not the immediate result of his labors. His direct influence is refined and inward. It is upon the soul, is felt oftener than celebrated, but is certainly none the less sublime because of its intangible value. Not seldom is it too modest to be even discovered, or to be described save by negations. That bad men are no worse rather than that good men are so good; that moral evil stops where it does rather than that goodness prevails and triumphs, is often the chief praise of the clergyman's usefulness. The father of our country displayed his generalship not so much in his victorious onset upon the hostile invaders, as in preventing their depredations upon him; and sometimes a spiritual shepherd has had no success in aggressive movements, but his great and only honor is to have guarded his flock from the wolves, and to say, "Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them is lost." We wrong the good man's ministry, when we disparage it for its want of positive acquisitions. Bad as his people are, no one can tell how useful he has been in preventing them from becoming worse. The great parade they make of indifference to his teaching is often an attempt to hide their real alarm, and they are restive against him because they are held in by the curb. The bravado of wicked men is often a eulogium upon their minister, and their os

tentation of sin comes from their very fear of doing what they boast to have done, and from an unwillingness to let any one know how much they dread the reproofs of the pulpit.

The preacher has an influence upon the intellect of his people. He presents to it the most enlivening and enlarging thoughts; and nothing takes so deep a hold of the reasoning powers as the series of proofs which he may enforce. The mind is invigorated by grappling with the objections that have been urged against the omniscience and goodness of God, the responsibility of man, the whole scheme of moral government. A sermon, if it be in good faith a sermon, reaches the very elements of the soul, and stirs up its hidden energies; for such a sermon is a message from God; is pregnant with what the mind was made for, the solemn realities of eternity; is prolific, if need be, in stern and skilful argument, holds out a rich reward to man's desire of mental progress, and allures as well as urges to an intense love of study. It is a book of mental discipline to its hearers, and its author is a schoolmaster for children of a larger growth. A late professor in one of our universities, who has been famed throughout the land for his effective eloquence at the bar, and on the floor of Congress, says that he first learned how to reason while hearing the sermons of a New England pastor, who began to preach before he had studied a single treatise on style or speaking; and two or three erudite jurists, who dislike the theological opinions of this divine, have recommended his sermons to law students as models of logical argument and affording a kind of gymnastic exercise to the mind. It is thus that one of the most modest of men, while writing his plain sermons, was exerting a prospective influence over our civil and judicial tribunals. The pulpit of a country village was preparing speeches for the Congress of the nation. The discourses and treatises of such divines as Chillingworth1 and

1 "Chillingworth is the writer, whose works are recommended for the exercitations of the student. Lord Mansfield, than whom there could not be a more competent authority, pronounced him to be a perfect model of argumentation. Archbishop Tillotson calls him "incomparable, the glory of his age and nation." Locke proposes "for the attainment of right reasoning, the constant reading of Chillingworth; who by his example,” he adds, "will teach both perspicuity and the way of right reasoning, better than any book that I know; and therefore will deserve to be read upon that account over and over again; not to say anything of his arguments." Lord Clarendon, also, who was particularly intimate with him, thus cele

Butler have been often kept by lawyers and statesmen, on the same shelf with Euclid and Lacroix. Patrick Henry lived from his eleventh to his twenty-second year in the neighborhood of Samuel Davies, and is said to have been stimulated to his masterly efforts by the discourses of him who has been called the first of American preachers. He often spoke of Davies in terms of enthusiastic praise, and resembled him in some characteristics of his eloquence.1

The minister's influence is upon the taste as well as intellect. There is a kind of mystic union among all the virtues and excellences of the head and heart. A golden chain seems to bind them together, and when one link is gained all the rest are drawn along with it. Thus there is a strange tie between the sense of right and the sense of beauty, between the good and the elegant. The preacher holds out before his congregation the choicest models of all that can please the taste; of that spiritual comeliness which is the archetype of whatever is graceful and refined in nature or art. By winning his hearers to what is beautiful and grand in religious truth, he fosters the love of those lower excellences that are but the shadowings forth of the good things in heaven. In many minds he cherishes a taste for the elegances of Addison and Gray and Cowper and Wordsworth, and encourages that sense of honor, that interest in heroic deeds, that reverence for genius and worth, in fine all those amiable sentiments which are allied with a due appreciation of the beauties of nature and art.

brates his rare talents as a disputant: "Mr. Chillingworth was a man of so great subtilty of understanding, and of so rare a temper in debate, that as it was impossible to provoke him into any passion, so it was very difficult to keep a man's self from being a little discomposed by his sharpness and quickness of argument and instances, in which he had a rare facility and a great advantage over all the men I ever knew. He had spent all his younger time in disputation; and had arrived at so great a mastery, as he was inferior to no man in these skirmishes."" Chillingworth has been named, for the reasons above assigned, as eminently calculated to subserve the purposes of mental discipline, for the student. He need not, however, be the only one. The subtle and profound reasonings of Bishop Butler, the pellucid writings of Paley, the simplicity, strength, and perspicuity of Tillotson, may all be advantageously resorted to by the student anxious about the cultivation of his reasoning faculties."-See Warren's Law Studies, § 153, 154, 160.

1 See Davies's Sermons, vol. I. p. xliv. Stereotyped Ed.

Working as the preacher does upon the mental sensibilities, he of course modifies the literary character of a people. Whitefield made so little pretension to scholarship, that men often smile when he is called the pioneer of a great improvement in the literature of Britain. They overlook the masculine and transforming energy of the religious principle, when stirred up, as it was, by his preaching against the pride and indulgences and selfishness of men. They forget, that influence often works from the lower classes upward; and that when the mass of men become intellectual, the higher orders must either become so, or must yield their supremacy. Whatever operates deeply on the soul of the humblest mechanic, will modify the character of the popular literature. The sermons of a parish minister are the standard of taste to many in his society; his style is the model for their conversation and writing; his provincial and outlandish terms they adopt and circulate; and his mode of thinking is imitated by the school-teacher and the mother, the merchant and the manufacturer. You can see the effects of his chaste or rude style in the language of the ploughboy and the small talk of the nursery. He has more frequent communion than other literary men with the middle classes of the people, and through these his influence extends to the higher and the lower. He is the guardian of the language and the reading of the most sedate portions of society; and in their families are trained the men of patient thought and accurate scholarship. His influence on the popular vocabulary is often overlooked, and is not always the same; but he often virtually stands at the parish gate, to let in one book and keep out another; to admit certain words and to exclude certain phrases, and to introduce or discard barbarisms, solecisms, impropriety and looseness of speech. The sermons of Leighton, South, Howe, Bates, Atterbury and Paley show somewhat of the extent to which the literature of England is indebted to her priesthood. When Lord Chatham was asked the secret of his dignified and eloquent style, he replied that he had read twice from beginning to end Bayley's Dictionary, and had perused some of Dr. Barrow's sermons so often that he had learned them by heart. Dryden "attributed his own accurate knowledge of prose writing, to the frequent perusal of Tillotson's works." "Addison regarded them as the chief standard of our language, and actually projected an English dictionary to be illustrated with particular phrases to be se

lected from Tillotson's sermons." "There is a living writer," said Dugald Stewart," who combines the beauties of Johnson, Addison and Burke, without their imperfections. It is a dissenting minister of Cambridge, the Rev. Robert Hall. Whoever wishes to see the English language in its perfection, must read his writings." No one can be familiar with the style of Jeremy Taylor and that of several British essayists, without recognizing his influence upon them. The tincture of his phraseology is discernible in the expressions of Charles Lamb even. The character of Herbert's writings is stamped upon those of Izaak Walton, and the insinuating power of Walton upon the English language has not been, nor will it be inconsiderable. By the influence which a minister's own mind receives from his habit of sermonizing, and which he sends forth from the pulpit and from the fireside, he often raises the standard of scholarship, and excites the youth in his society to a course of liberal education. Very much through the instrumentality of a single clergyman living in a retired part of Massachusetts, thirty young men of his parish were trained for professional life. More than this number have gone to our colleges from a single religious society in New Hampshire. The Rev. Moses Hallock, of Plainfield, Mass., prepared about a hundred youth for college; Dr. Wood, of Boscawen, New Hampshire, prepared the same number, and among them his two parishioners, Ezekiel and Daniel Webster. A hundred and sixty-two young men were educated by a plain pastor in the neighborhood of Boscawen, and about thirty of them are members of the learned professions. Each of these clergymen will long live in his pupils, and whatever may have been his own literary attainments, will produce and has produced, a visible effect on the literary character of multitudes. This effect was not indeed produced by sermons altogether, but in some degree; not merely by their direct influence upon the auditor, but also by their reflex operation upon the preacher himself. His appropriate work inspires and prepares him for subordinate literary labors. He cannot fitly prepare his discourses without feeling a stimulus to labor in the cause of general education. From his habit of oral address he derives a certain kind of directness and energy of thought and expression, which qualify him for exerting an important influence from the press. Had not Martin Luther been trained for and in the pulpit, he had never been so forceful and popular in his written es