Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/877

1858.]

"With what affectionate tenderness does this great, faithful soul pour out his love to his own church! He invites men to the communion-service.

And again, when a hundred were added to his church, he says:—

He has admirable power of making a popular statement of his opinions. He does not analyze a matter to its last elements, put the ultimate facts in a row and find out their causes or their law of action, nor aim at large synthesis of generalization, the highest effort of philosophy, which groups things into a whole;—it is commonly thought both of these processes are out of place in meeting-houses and lecture-halls,—that the people can comprehend neither the one nor the other;—but he gives a popular view of the thing to be discussed, which can be understood on the spot without painful reflection. He speaks for the ear which takes in at once and understands. He never makes attention painful. He illustrates his subject from daily life; the fields, the streets, stars, flowers, music, and babies are his favorite emblems. He remembers that he does not speak to scholars, to minds disciplined by long habits of thought, but to men with common education, carelul and troubled about many things; and they keep his words and ponder them in their hearts. So he has the diffuseness of a wide natural field, which properly spreads out its clover, dandelions, dock, buttercups, grasses, violets, with here and there a delicate Arethusa that seems to have run under this sea of common vegetation and come up in a strange place. He has not the artificial condensation of a garden, where luxuriant Nature assumes the form of Art. His dramatic power makes his sermon also a life in the pulpit; his auditorium is also a theatrum, for he acts to the eye what he addresses to the ear, and at once wisdom enters at the two gates. The extracts show his power of thought and speech as well as of feeling. Here are specimens of that peculiar humor which appears in all his works.

Here are some separate maxims:—