who has felt the like. There is a hollowness, a certain want, in the
talk about much tribulation of the very cleverest man who has never felt
any great sorrow at all. The great force and value of all teaching lie
in the amount of personal experience which is embodied in it. You feel
the difference between the production of a wonderfully clever boy and of
a mature man, when you read the first canto of "Childe Harold," and then
read "Philip van Artevelde." I do not say but that the boy's production
may have a liveliness and interest beyond the man's. Veal is in certain
respects superior to Beef, though Beef is best on the whole. I have
heard Vealy preachers whose sermons kept up breathless attention. From
the first word to the last of a sermon which was unquestionable Veal, I
have witnessed an entire congregation listen with that audible hush you
know. It was very different, indeed, from the state of matters when a
humdrum old gentleman was preaching, every word spoken by whom was the
maturest sense, expressed in words to which the most fastidious taste
could have taken no exception; but then the whole thing was sleepy: it
was a terrible effort to attend. In the case of the Veal there was no
effort at all. I defy you to help attending. But then you sat in pain.
Every second sentence there was some outrageous offence against good
taste; every third statement was absurd, or overdrawn, or almost
profane. You felt occasional thrills of pure disgust and horror, and you
were in terror what might come next. One thing which tended to carry all
this off was the manifest confidence and earnestness of the speaker.
_He_ did not think it Veal that he was saying. And though great
consternation was depicted on the faces of some of the better-educated
people in church, you could see that a very considerable part of the
congregation did not think it Veal either. There can be no doubt, my
middle-aged friend, if you could but give your early sermons now with
the confidence and fire of the time when you wrote them, they would make
a deep impression on many people yet. But it is simply impossible for
you to give them; and if you should force yourself some rainy Sunday to
preach one of them, you would give it with such a sense of its errors,
and with such an absence of corresponding feeling, that it would fall
very flat and dead. Your views are maturing; your taste is growing
fastidious; the strong things you once said you could not bring yours