aralleled in the pulpit at the present day. You are kept in
breathless attention. The continuity of thought is unbroken for an
instant. Every sentence is connected with that which precedes or
follows; and, as the preacher goes on his way like a giant, every instant
mounting higher, every instant pouring out a more gorgeous rhetoric,
every instant climbing to a loftier strain, you are reminded of some
monster steam-ship ploughing her way across the Atlantic, proudly
asserting her mastery over the mountain-waves, landing her precious cargo
safe in port. When she started, you trembled for her safety; she was so
lavish of her power that you feared it would fail her when she needed it
most. But on she wends her gallant way, scattering around her the mad
waves as in play. I can compare Melville with nothing else, as he stands
in that pulpit--in that sea of human souls--drowning all discord by his
own splendid voice, mastering all passions by his own irresistible will,
piercing all scepticism by his own living faith.

And yet Melville is not what some understand by the term, 'an
intellectual preacher.' He does not aim to demonstrate the
reasonableness of Christian truth--to convince men whose understandings
reject it. With the large class who are perpetually halting between two
opinions, who to-day are convinced by one man, and to-morrow by
another--who have lost themselves hopelessly in German
mysticism--Melville has no sympathy whatever. I never heard him use the
terms objective and subjective in my life. Of honest intellectual doubt,
with all its pain and horror, he seems to have no idea. Melville always
is as positive as Babington Macaulay himself. In no circumstances could
he have been a Blanco White, or a Francis Newman, or a Froude. As a
churchman he stands rigidly inside the pale of the Church. His God is a
personal God. His Christ descended into hell. His heaven has a golden
pavement, and shining thrones. Wordsworth tells us--

'Feebly must they have felt, who in old times
Array'd with vengeful whips the furies.
Beautiful regards were turned on me,
The face of her I loved.'

Melville never could have written that. His hell is physical, not
mental. It is a bottomless pit where the smoke of their torment ever
ascends--where the worm never dies--where the fire is not quenched. In
all other matters his vision seems similarly clear, and intense, and
narrow. Beside the Church, whose c