to them." But I must learn to speak extempore, and the way of learning to do a thing is to do it. I cannot acquire the art of swimming by means of a hand-book on swimming; I must plunge into the sea." If you preach for the sake of practising rhetoric you are violating the most essential rules of rhetoric. An inexperienced surgeon does not begin his practice by amputating the limbs of "kings and priests." You are not doing a work of necessity when you are learning your trade on the Sabbath-day; neither is this oratorical discipline a work of mercy for your hearers. Mercy to them requires that you speak in a manner for which you have disciplined yourself on secular days. You are to try your experiments in elocution before a debating club, a company of critics. You ought to learn such maxims of the anatomist as "Fiat experimentum in corpore vili": and also, "In capite orphani discit chirurgus." Men do not come into the temple at the hour of worship in order to be excruciated by your experiments in preaching from the treasures of your own mind."Is it not with extemporization as with the art of swimming: whoever dares to swim, swims; whoever dares to extemporize, extemporizes"? There are two questions: first, can a man extemporize? second, can he draw men to hear him the second time? May he not, as Congreve expresses it, have that everlasting rotation of tongue that echo has no chance with him, but must wait till he dies to catch his last word'? Words, and more words, and nothing but words, a man may dare to utter them, and not be a preacher. Not every man can preach extempore; but nearly every educated minister can train himself to preach so.

7. When you have been successful in an extemporary sermon make it the basis of a written one. Often the most edifying discourses which a man works out in his library were first delivered by him sur le champ et de son fond. His happiest thoughts may have vanished from his memory; but the general train of them was recalled; and the spirit of

1 See § 2. II. 6 above.

the first sermon enlivened the second. Sometimes, by the arts of phonography and tachygraphy, he may obtain an exact copy of the words which came gushing from his heart. "In short, Sir, the man is inspired," said Dr. Parr of Robert Hall. "There is no man," remarked Hannah More, "in the church nor out of it, comparable to Robert Hall." If the stenographers of his day had been faithful to the men of our day, they would have preserved to us rare treasures of wisdom. As he pronounced his discourse on Modern Infidelity, he seemed

"Not touched, but rapt; not wakened, but inspired."

We can easily credit Mr. Cottle, when he says: "This sermon I was so happy as to hear delivered, and have no hesitation in expressing an opinion that the oral was not only very different from the printed discourse, but greatly its superior. In the one case, he expressed the sentiments of a mind fully charged with matter the most invigorating and solemnly important; but, discarding notes (which he once told me always hampered him), it was not in his power to display the same language, or to record the same evanescent trains of thought; so that in preparing a sermon for the press no other than a general resemblance could be preserved. In trusting alone to his recollection, when the stimulus was withdrawn of a crowded and most attentive auditory, the ardent feeling, the thought that burned, was liable in some measure to become deteriorated by the substitution of cool philosophical arrangement and accuracy for the spontaneous effusions of his overflowing heart; so that what was gained by one course was more than lost by the other." 1

As some extemporizers in copying their sermons have indulged themselves in too much correction, so others have contented themselves with too little. Perhaps they were unable to write with elaborative care what they had spoken with marvellous power. More learning might have made them dull. "Omnia non pariter rerum sunt omnibus apta."

1 Recollections of Coleridge, Vol. i. pp. 104-106.

1

We read of John Bunyan that "in the middle of winter he would sometimes have more than twelve hundred hearers before seven o'clock in the morning of a week-day; and when he visited the metropolis, one day's notice of his preaching would bring many more than the place of worship could contain." "It is said that [John] Owen was in the practice of frequently hearing Bunyan preach when he came to London, which led Charles II. to express his astonishment that a man of the Doctor's learning could hear a tinker preach; to which Owen is said to have replied: 'Had I the tinker's abilities, please your Majesty, I would most gladly relinquish my learning."" The heart of Bunyan in the pulpit came into close contact with the hearts of his hearers. His sermons were poured forth from his inmost soul. Some of them were afterwards given to the press. We are thankful for their marks of his genius. But if he had possessed the power of revising his sermons, of adding the sound logic and comprehensive philosophy which ought to characterize a written discussion, to the natural, lively, graphic style which does characterize his unwritten effusions, he would have made the race doubly indebted to him. So we may say of Whitefield, Summerfield, and other preachers whose power of moving men evanesced with their breath. They had more eloquence for their own day than patience for the days which came afterward. The majority of ministers, however, have no such excess of genius as need interfere with their retaining in a permanent and improved form the thoughts which flashed upon them in their extemporary speech. The evening preachment in the remote schoolhouse will be the very soul of the discourse which afterward subdues the great congregation.

1 Ivimey's History of the English Baptists; Gillies' Collections, as cited in Orme's Memoirs of Dr. Owen, pp. 305, 306.

ARTICLE VI.

NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

A. GERMAN WORKS.

HISTORY OF JESUS OF NAZARETH.-The fourth, and concluding volume, or part, of this most recent German Life of Jesus, has at length appeared. We have noticed the previous volumes as they were published. The whole work deserves a careful and extended examination, on the one hand, because of the evident sincerity of its author; and on the other, because his results will probably be substantially accepted by the so-called advanced and liberal thinkers of the present time in America and England. At present, however, this examination is beyond our power. The present part is entitled "The Jerusalemic Messiah-Death" (Der Jerusalemische Messiastod), and deals with the history of Christ's arrest, trial, condemnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension. A concluding chapter is devoted to a résumé of the author's general view of the person and work of Christ. The most interesting, and we may add also, perhaps the most able, section is the one relating to the resurrection. The account given of the early and later theories intended to explain the faith of the disciples, without conceding the reality of Christ's bodily resurrection, is admirable. Keim's critical examination of the visionary hypothesis, or, as one writer has proposed to term it, the faith-hypothesis, is marked as much by its candor as by its skill and vigor. The grounds adduced against it seem to us irrefragable; one or two of them remarkably striking. But when we came to his own view, we must confess to being bitterly disappointed. The passage in which its presentation occurs runs as follows: "In view of all these considerations one cannot but confess that the theory which has latterly become so great a favorite (the vision-theory) is a pure hypothesis, which, whilst it explains some things, leaves the chief point unexplained; nay more, sets what is founded on historical evidence, on the whole, in an unfair and untenable light. But if, on the other hand, both the attempt to establish the traditional view of the history of the resurrection, as well as the effort to account for it by a resort to the visions of St. Paul, fails, the only course open to the historian is, openly to confess that it is impossible to arrive at any certain result regarding the mysterious issues of the life of Jesus, important as they are in themselves, and for their influence 1 Geschichte Jesu von Nazara in ihrer Verkettung mit dem Gesammtleben seines Volkes, etc. Von Dr. Theodor Keim. Band III. Zürich: Orell, Füssli,

on the history of mankind. For history, so far as it deals alone in manifest numbers and series of tangible, recognized causes and effects, the only thing about the whole subject that can be designated fact and regarded as beyond doubt, is the firm faith of the apostles that Jesus rose from the dead and the immense influence exerted by this faith in the christianization of mankind." Keim, therefore, has scarcely got a step beyond his master, Dr. Baur of Tübingen. He concedes to "faith," however, afterwards a sort of right to pass out beyond the natural to the supernatural, the visible to the invisible world, and there to recognize Christ as really living, though not risen from the dead here; and permits us to ascribe the visions of the apostles to the direct activity of their glorified Lord. That this view may offer a resting-place for Dr. Keim we are quite willing to believe; we cannot, however, but regard it as extremely unsatisfactory; nor do we know where to find better arguments for its unsatisfactoriness than in Dr. Keim's own pages.

With regard to the sinlessness of Jesus, Dr. Keim's result is equally uncertain; or, rather, scarcely uncertain, when we find him saying: "The acknowledgment must be made that the assumption of a totally exceptional moral faultlessness is reducible in the last instance to dogmatical presuppositions rather than to historical reasons...... The actual facts of his moral life, as well as his own confessions, show, too, that notwithstanding his moral conquests and glories, at individual points, he was subject to human limitations."

As in the first volume of his work, so in this, the last, Dr. Keim exhausts himself in expressions regarding the exalted position of Christ among men, without, however, conceding his divinity. If there is any difference between the beginning and close of his Life of Jesus, it is, that at the close he is a little less enthusiastic than at the beginning. He speaks as follows: "Christianity is the crown of the creations of God, and Jesus is the chosen, the image, the beloved of God - his foreman and worldmoulder in the history of humanity. He is the rest and he is the motive power of the history of the world. The noblest ideals of which humanity has dreamt in the twilight stages of its development are met in him...... He is the great one who, with all that was mysterious about him, surpassed other men, not, indeed, in nature and essence, but still in degree, and flashes into the world of humanity as an unique, bold, and never-to-berepeated creation of God."

The impression made on our mind by the volume noticed in the last number of the Bibliotheca Sacra (January, 1872, p. 198) of an increasing dominance of the cold, critical, rationalistic spirit in the later as compared with the earlier chapters of the history, has again been repeated. But, differ as we must from Dr. Keim, we cannot help saying that no orthodox writer or inquirer can well afford to ignore his investigations.