ur sermons? In
action and in unction you had not your superior in the Synod. Do give us
a screed about Nimrod or Nebuchadnezzar. No desecration in a
sermon--better omitted, we grant, prayer and psalm. Should you be unable
to reproduce an entire discourse, yet by dove-tailing--that is, a bit
from one and a bit from another--surely you can be at no loss for half
an hour's miscellaneous matter--heads and tails. Or suppose we let you
off with a View of the Church Question. You look glum and shake your
head. Can you, Mac, how can you resist that Pulpit?

Behold in that semicircular low-browed cliff, backed by a range of bonny
green braes dipping down from the hills that do themselves come shelving
from the mountains, what appears at first sight to be a cave, but is
merely a blind window, as it were, a few feet deep, arched and faced
like a beautiful work of masonry, though chisel never touched it, nor
man's hand dropped the line along the living stone thus wrought by
nature's self, who often shows us, in her mysterious processes,
resemblances of effects produced by us her children on the same
materials by our more most elaborate art. It is a very pulpit, and that
projecting slab is the sounding-board. That upright stone in front of
it, without the aid of fancy, may well be thought the desk. To us
sitting here, this spot of greensward is the floor; the sky that hangs
low, as if it loved it, the roof of the sanctuary; nor is there any harm
in saying, that we, if we choose to think so, are sitting in a kirk.

Shall we mount the pulpit by that natural flight of steps, and, like a
Sedgwick or a Buckland, with a specimen in one hand, and before our eyes
mountains whose faces the scars of thunder have intrenched, tell you how
the globe, after formation on formation, became fit residence for
new-created man, and habitable no more to flying dragons? Or shall we,
rather, taking the globe as we find it, speculate on the changes wrought
on its surface by us, whom God gave feet to tread the earth, and faces
to behold the heavens, and souls to soar into the heaven of heavens, on
the wings of hope, aspiring through temporal shades to eternal light?

Brethren!--The primary physical wants of the human being are food,
clothing, shelter, and defence. To supply these he has invented all his
arts. Hunger and Thirst cultivate the earth. Fear builds castles and
embattles cities. The animal is clothed by nature against cold and
storm, and shelter