of oratory which theology in its best sense contains. We refer to that form of religion which repels what are regarded as the darker and sterner features of Christianity as it has been usually received in the world. This theology is founded on the beautiful and grand in the works of nature, or in the scenes of redemption. It finds pleasure in the contemplation of the starry heavens; of hills, and streams, and lakes, of the landscape and of the ocean; and is willing in these things to admire and praise the existence and perfections of the Creator. In the contemplation of these things, there is no reluctance to admit the existence of a God, or to dwell on his natural perfections; for in the placid beauty of a landscape, in the silvery murmuring of a rivulet, and in the opening of a rose-bud, no attribute of the Deity is revealed on which the mind even of the gay and the wicked, is unwilling to dwell. This religion is found in all the departments of poetry, and in all the conceptions of mythology. It abounded most among the Greeks, a people who carried the love of the beautiful to a higher eminence than any other, and who embodied it in their unequalled works of art. Over each of the works of nature; over every element, and every event; over every tree, and flower, and breeze, and waving harvest-field, and fountain, they supposed a divinity to preside; and all the skill of the chisel, and the harmony of numbers, were employed to embody and perpetuate their conceptions.

This is still the theology of poetry and romance; and over a large portion of the world, claiming particularly to be ranked among the refined and the intellectual, it yet maintains its dominion. The names, indeed, which were used by that refined and elegant people with so much propriety to express their conceptions, are employed no more. Statues of breathing marble no longer embody their conceptions, but the ideas of virtue and of man, of the influence of religion on the character, and of the prospects which it opens in the future world, differ little from theirs. The heaven to which they look, differs little from the Elysian fields. That which is needful to prepare for that world, differs little from the virtues which a re

fined Athenian deemed necessary to fit him for the world of beauty and of joy to which he looked forward.

This theology, of course, admits the existence of one God as the Creator and moral Governor of the universe, and dwells with rapture on what are regarded as the amiable and lovely traits of his character. It receives, under the Christian form, the great Messenger whom he has sent, as a moral teacher, and ascribes to him, in all respects, an unsurpassed, and in most respects, an unequalled perfection. It admits his authority to give laws, and to suggest the principles of morals. It receives the Bible as containing a revelation, and finds in that much to admire; for, whatever may be its other characteristics, there is no book which contains so much to commend itself to a religionist of this kind as the Bible. So far as man is concerned, this system regards him as indeed in a less desirable condition respecting religion and morals, than he may once have been, and as having some strong propensities to evil; but he is regarded as in such a state that what is needful for him is not a radical and total change, but the development of internal virtues still living within him; the cultivation of his noble and godlike powers. What this theology proposes to do is not to effect an entire transformation, securing the very beginning of goodness in the soul, but to cultivate the virtues already existing there, which need only to be unfolded.

This theology is not without its use in the world, and produces some effects on society. It finds its appropriate home in poetry; in moral essays; in the slight infusion of religion which a refined literature demands; in the deference to religion which the urbane and well-educated find it convenient to show; and in the obvious necessity for keeping up some kind of worship in the world.

But it is little adapted to preaching. It is not the kind of theology which men instinctively feel to be proper for the pulpit. It may have, indeed, all the elegance of language, and beauty of thought, and grace of scholarship, which the pulpit demands-and in these respects may furnish models

which men embracing and preaching a more correct theology would do well to copy-but it lacks the elements of power which we expect in the pulpit; it lacks the variety and depth and sublimity furnished to preachers by a different kind of religion. The Greeks never attempted to preach their theology. They inwove it into their poetry, and they gave it a permanent form in the master-works of the chisel; but they never preached it. Plato, Socrates, Zeno, and Epicurus, appointed no preachers to make known their doctrines to the world. Much as they valued the results of their speculations, and important as they deemed them for the good of mankind, they never seem to have supposed that their dogmas contained the elements of powerful oratory. Our recollections of the eloquence of Greece are not in fact associated with them, but with a far different kind of public speaking, for little of the recorded eloquence of Greece grew out of religion. It is not certain but that the speech of the Apostle Paul, on Mars' Hill, was the first specimen of true eloquence, connected with religion, that was ever listened to in Athens. We have among the Greeks, dialogues, disputations, poetry, essays on religion, but no sermons. Their patriotism furnished grounds of lofty appeal to men; their religion none. They embodied their religious conceptions in poetry and in marble; they reared temples, built altars, perpetuated the images of the gods in statuary; but Greece never sent out a preacher to convert the world to its faith. And who now would undertake to preach the theology of Seneca, or of Thompson's Seasons, or of the Spectator or the Rambler? We feel that whatever

beauty or propriety these things may have there, they are ill-adapted to the pulpit. When men undertake to preach such a system, the topics of public discourse, always tame and powerless, are soon exhausted; there is nothing to seize strongly upon men, and to alarm their consciences, and to bind their powers to religion; they themselves soon become weary, and are ready to embark in some other profession; they cast about in passing events for new topics of exciting thought in the conscious barrenness of the themes of the pul

pit war, the plague, a conflagration, or a steamboat explosion, become a "windfall" in furnishing a topic of public address; and whatever may be the elegance of diction or of manner, every man feels that the pulpit is robbed of its great and peculiar power in moving the minds of men. For there is an instinctive feeling which all men have respecting the pulpit. Whatever else it is, it is to be a place of power. It is designed to discuss great and stirring themes; it is intended to take a firmer hold of men than any topics which can be urged in the forum or the senate-chamber, to bring before men motives and thoughts which shall do more to sway them than all other causes combined. Every man feels that the pulpit is not a place in which to discourse on botany, or poetry, or the mere beauties of nature, or to pronounce eulogiums on man, or to furnish descriptions of imaginary fields of the blessed to which all will yet come. Nor can that philosophy which prevails in the world, and which lies at the foundation of the mental systems which are inculcated in the schools, be the basis of preaching. The philosophy of the world is wrong; and there is a jar between that which prevails in the schools, and that which exists in reality. In those systems the great truth is overlooked, which in fact modifies every other truth in regard to man-that the mind is not to be contemplated as a perfect mind, but as disordered and in ruins. The grand questions which we are to contemplate in philosophy, are not what would be the laws of the mind, if it were not wrecked and ruined; not what are the laws which regulate unfallen minds, but what is the human mind fallen and lost, disordered and diseased, under the control of evil passions, and a perverse and stubborn will, and corrupt desires. It is like contemplating the nervous system, not as it would be if never diseased, and if performing its functions in a state of healthfulness, but as subject to disease, and liablé always to derangement. The thing to be done in man is not what philosophy contemplates--development, but it is recovery and rescue—à work peculiar to the gospel of Christ. Preaching addresses man as in ruins; philosophy addresses him as what mind

would be if the fall had never occurred-and that is not a system which can be preached. The primary thought, every one instinctively feels, in addressing man from the pulpit, is that he is a sinner; the grand theme is redemption, and reconciliation with God; the issues referred to are an eternal heaven and hell; the world, though full of beauty, is a world of probation, from which the results of human conduct are borne ever onward into far-distant worlds; and in reference to these things, and to the eternal judgment, the most amazing and wonderful events have occurred on earth-the incarnation and the atonement. When these are the topics of preaching, men feel that, however imperfect may be the execution, the themes are those which belong to that place, and are the only themes which can invest the pulpit with dignity over the Academy, the Porch, and the Forum.

There is a second kind of theology which is not adapted to be preached. It is that which does not contemplate preaching as the principal means of its propagation and perpetuity. For its continuance in the world, and its extension-for of all the forms of theology this aims most decidedly at extensionit relies on other things than preaching. The main thing on which dependence is placed, is not truth applied to the heart, and accompanied by the agency of the Divine Spirit; not a system of doctrines commending themselves to the consciences and understandings of men; not argument, and powerful thoughts, and appeals to men contemplated primarily as reasoning and responsible agents; not those things in the ministry of a personal character, which give power to eloquence; but those things which have a very slight connection with eloquence in the pulpit, and which depend little on it. It is a theology whose main sources of influence in the world lie back of the pulpit, and apart from the pulpit; a theology which calculates on success with nearly equal degrees of certainty, whatever the pulpit may be. Its main reliance consists in regarding the church as the inclosure within which alone grace is conveyed; in the apprehensions entertained of the ministry, as being within a certain line along which, by a