e the consequences of the most common vices
and meannesses when they get the mastery. Mr. Beecher has frequently
shown, by powerful delineations of this kind, how large a part
legitimate terror must ever play in the services of a true church,
when the terrors of superstition have wholly faded out. It cannot be
said of his preaching, that he preaches "Christianity with the bones
taken out." He does not give "twenty minutes of tepid exhortation,"
nor amuse his auditors with elegant and melodious essays upon virtue.

We need not say that his power as a public teacher is due, in a great
degree, to his fertility in illustrative similes. Three or four
volumes, chiefly filled with these, as they have been caught from his
lips, are before the public, and are admired on both continents. Many
of them are most strikingly happy, and flood his subject with light.
The smiles that break out upon the sea of upturned faces, and the
laughter that whispers round the assembly, are often due as much to
the aptness as to the humor of the illustration: the mind receives an
agreeable shock of surprise at finding a resemblance where only the
widest dissimilarity had before been perceived.

Of late years, Mr. Beecher never sends an audience away half
satisfied; for he has constantly grown with the growth of his splendid
opportunity. How attentive the great assembly, and how quickly
responsive to the points he makes! That occasional ripple of
laughter,--it is not from any want of seriousness in the speaker, in
the subject, or in the congregation, nor is it a Rowland Hill
eccentricity. It is simply that it has pleased Heaven to endow this
genial soul with a quick perception of the likeness there is between
things unlike; and, in the heat and torrent of his speech, the
suddenly discovered similarity amuses while it instructs. Philosophers
and purists may cavil at parts of these sermons, and, of course, they
are not perfect; but who can deny that their general effect is
civilizing, humanizing, elevating, and regenerating, and that this
master of preaching is the true brother of all those high and bright
spirits, on both sides of the ocean, who are striving to make the soul
of this age fit to inhabit and nobly impel its new body?

The sermon over, a livelier song brings the service to a happy
conclusion; and slowly, to the thunder of the new organ, the great
assembly dissolves and oozes away.

The Sunday services are not the whole of this remarka