yet these were stars of hardly less
magnitude. The two Wares, father and son, the younger Buckminster, whose
singular power as a preacher was known not only to wondering hearers,
but to readers on both sides of the ocean, Gannett and Dewey--these were
among them; and, in the next generation, Henry W. Bellows, Thomas Starr
King, and James Freeman Clarke. No body of clergy of like size was ever
so resplendent with talents and accomplishments. The names alone of
those who left the Unitarian pulpit for a literary or political
career--Sparks, Everett, Bancroft, Emerson, Ripley, Palfrey, Upham,
among them--are a constellation by themselves.

To the merely literary critic those earnest preachers, such as Lyman and
Edward Beecher, Griffin, Sereno Dwight, Wayland, and Kirk, who felt
called of God to withstand, in Boston, this splendid array of not less
earnest men, were clearly inferior to their antagonists. But they were
successful.

A few years later, the preeminent American writer of sermons to be read
and pondered in every part of the world was Horace Bushnell; as the
great popular preacher, whose words, caught burning from his lips,
rolled around the world in a perpetual stream, was Henry Ward Beecher.
Widely different from either of these, and yet in an honorable sense
successor to the fame of both, was Phillips Brooks, of all American
preachers most widely beloved and honored in all parts of the church.

Of living preachers whose sermons have already attained a place of honor
in libraries at home and abroad, the name of Bishop F. D. Huntington
stands among the foremost; and those who have been charmed by the
brilliant rhetoric and instructed from the copious learning of his
college classmate, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, must feel it a wrong done to
our national literature that these gifts should be chiefly known to the
reading public only by occasional discourses and by two valuable studies
in religious history instead of by volumes of sermons. Perhaps no
American pulpits have to-day a wider hearing beyond the sea than two
that stand within hearing distance of each other on New Haven Green,
occupied by Theodore T. Munger and Newman Smyth. The pulpit of Plymouth
Church, Brooklyn, has not ceased, since the accession of Lyman Abbott,
to wield a wide and weighty influence,--less wide, but in some respects
more weighty, than in the days of his famous predecessor,--by reason of
a well-deserved reputation for biblical learning and