Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/344

 avoided exciting the people's feelings too much, and that they themselves appeared without emotion. This morning their discourses appeared to me feeble, and especially to be wanting in popular eloquence. They preached morality. But a mere moral sermon should not be preached when it is the heart that you wish to win; you should then tell, in the language of the heart, the miracle of spiritual life. It was, therefore, a real refreshment to me when the unimpassioned and well-fed preachers, who had spoken this morning, gave place to an elderly man with a lively and somewhat humourous expression of countenance, who from out the throng of hearers ascended the pulpit and began to speak to the people in quite another tone. It was familiar, fresh, cordial, and humourous; somewhat in the manner of Father Taylor. I should like to have heard him address these people, but then, I am afraid the negroes would have been quite beside themselves!

The new preacher said that he was a stranger,—he was evidently an Englishman—and that it was a mere chance which brought him to this meeting. But he felt compelled, he said, to address them as “my friends,” and to tell them how glad he had been to witness the scenes of the preceding night (he addressed himself especially to the blacks) and to give them his view of the Gospel of God as made known in the Bible, and of what the Bible teaches us of God. “Now, you see, my friends,”—this was the style of his discourse—“when a father has made his will, and his children are all assembled to open it and learn from it what are the latest wishes of their father; they do not know how their father has disposed of and arranged his property; and many of them think, ‘perhaps, there is nothing for me; perhaps he never thought of me!’ But now, when they open the will and find that there is something for John, and something for Mary, and something for Ben, and something for Betsy, and something for