mic ghost in whose brain there is hollowness and in
whose eye there is no fire of speculation. What a head the man
has--ample, well formed, well and fairly developed. What a voice the man
has--strong as a mountain torrent, impetuous, irresistible, mastering
all, carrying like a Niagara all before it. Dr. Parker is better off
than Paul. Apparently the earthen vessel in which he has his treasure is
of admirable adaptation and utility.

London has gained and Manchester has lost Dr. Parker. Already he has
made himself no stranger in London. To many his "Ecce Deus" has
commended itself as the work of a vigorous thinker, and all have
confessed that his "Springdale Abbey" was full of very clever talk. No
ordinary preacher could have written such books, that was clear. In
Manchester he had become a success. How came he to be such? Partly I
have explained the reason. In the first place, in an age of doubt, of
negative theology, of blinding and bewildering speculation--when between
the so-called Christian and the Cross in all its eternal lustre has risen
up a fog of gloom--when the Gospel of unbelief and despair has come into
fashion, so that when we listen for the shout of psalm or the holy
exultation of prayer, we hear instead

"An agony
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills
All night in a waste land, where no one comes,
Or hath come since the making of the world."

Dr. Parker has a living faith. And then again he has a deep sense of
what the pulpit requires, and an unmitigated scorn of that kind of
preaching which is too common there. "Almighty God has to tolerate more
puerility in His service than any monarch on earth. If Christianity had
not been Divine it would have been ruined by many of its own preachers
long ere this. The wonder is, not that it has escaped the cruel hand of
the infidel (it can double up a whole array of crazy atheists), but that
it has survived the cruel kindness of its shallow expositors." Whose
language, you ask, is this? Why, Dr. Parker's own. The preacher who can
thus censure his fellows is bound to guard sacredly and constantly
against that which he condemns, and to come to his pulpit with every
feeling attuned and with every energy aroused for its gigantic work.
Give to such a man the requisite brain and tongue, let him have the
requisite delivery, let his lips be touched by that spirit which

"Touched Isaiah's lips with hallowed fire,"

and y