THE TRUE KIND OF PULPIT ORATORY.

(Daily Telegraph, April 4.)

" As dull as a sermon " no proverb is more trite "The age of the pulpit has gone by ;" no idea is more readily taken for granted by cultivated men. On these commonplaces of society, however, a strange commentary has been furnished by the afternoon Lenten services at St. James', Piccadilly
. . .
The sermons have dealt with the profoundest questions that can engage the human mind. In what form the religious instinct has revealed itself in successive ages, and among different peoples, what has been done to satisfy that instinct by Pantheism on the one hand, or by Positivism on the other, what lines of connection exist between the speculation of modern Germany and that of ancient Greece ; how evil has intertwined itself with the works of a sinless Creator, and with what hope of answer the prayers of a finite being can be addressed to an Infinite Creator— such are the subjects on which Canon Liddon has been discoursing to the great West end crowd. And if the themes have seemed unlikely to be popular, still less popular might appear the method of treatment. No appeals have been made to excited feelings, and the vigorous now of rhetoric has been disturbed by no bursts of vague eloquence. Every sermon has manifestly been written with elaborate care, and the successive links of the reasoning have been so closely knit that to keep them all in view has needed the closest attention even of trained minds. No insult is offered to the intellect of the audience by the doubt whether any of the hearers fully comprehended the theistic argument which Mr Liddon drew from the reasoning of Kant with respect to the supremacy of the moral law. Nor is the metaphysical learning of the West End ladies disparaged by the suspicion, that few possessed such knowledge as he took for granted when he reviewed the efforts of Hume and Mill to resolve cause and effect into a mere antecedent and consequent, bound together by no tie of force, but merely by the link of position in time or space. Yet, while the preacher was minutely detailing and elaborately criticising the arguments of Fuerbach or Comte the huge audience has preserved such silence, and displayed such fixity of attention, as to recall the triumphs of be Opera rather than of the Pulpit. . . .

And what is the secret of the preacher's success? In the first place he has something to say. Instead of clap trap sentiment, or vague declamation, he gives the results of long study and careful thought Even when most widely disagreeing with Mr Liddon's conclusions, the student of philosophy, theology, or Church history sees that each sermon sums up the reading and the thought of years Such general erudition could be matched by that of few divines in a Church which, even in the era of Georgian mediocrity, never lost the reputation for learning achieved by the Cudworths and the Hookers. So wide and so accurate an acquaintance with the speculation of Germany and France could be outmatched only by the few English divines, who, like Dean Mansel, have made ontology, and psychology their special province. Just as Mr Liddon's Bampton Lectures on " The Divinity of Our Lord," were at least as remarkable for their display of minute familiarity with the destructive criticism of Strauss and Baur as for the acuteness of the reasoning or the force of the rhetoric, so the Lenten Sermons are not least distinguished by a wide and varied erudition. But erudition, when it stands alone is a poor endowment for a preacher, and Mr Liddon is a reasoner as well as a scholar. In these days of loosely reasoned discourses, when preachers do not even dream that a defiance of accurate thinking is a great sin it is a positive wonder to see Mr Liddon's attempt to link the deliverances of dogmatic theology with the primary instincts of our nature by a hard chain of of logical inference. We do not say that the cogency of the argument would win a tribute of admiration from his philosophical opponents. His attempt to overthrow the Pyrrhonism of Hume will not, we fear, strike terror into the small but enthusiastic band of Comtists ; his assault on the Utilitarian theory of ethics will not give Mr. Mill reason for a change of front; nor, we suspect, will his treatment of that mystery of mysteries, the origin of evil, give more universal satisfaction than the vehement rhetoric which rang through the tents of the Arabs untold centuries ago. . . . .

And what is the moral of the brilliant success which is attending these remarkable lectures? It is a moral which, us old as human thought itself, has been denied by age after age only to be reasserted with renewed vehemence and vigor. It is the moral that, of all subject those which concern the everlasting destinies of man excite the profoundest interest and that when discussed with earnestness and sterling intellectual power such themes exercise a resistless fascination.
Again and again does scepticism seem the omnipotent creed, and the very idea of religious belief to have vanished from educated society ; but the chill of unbelief passes away, and the fever of faith comes back again. Voltaire and the Encyclopædists fancied that from the belief of cultivated Europe they had at last banished every tenet except naked Deism, and had reduced Christianity to a bugbear of the priests. Hume imagined that he had finally demonstrated the futility of reasoning with respect to the invisible world. And, stealing weapons from the armoury of the great Scottish sceptic, Comte, waged war against all forms of the supernatural, on the ground that we can reason accurately only from the data furnished by sense, and that, when we cannot reason correctly, it is a breach of morality to reason at all. Voltaire, Hume, and Comte have taught that it is a culpable waste of time to perplex ourselves with such insoluble questions as whether we can determine our own fate in the infinite hereafter, and whether the Omnipotent Ruler of the universe listens to the prayers of His creatures And yet these questions are as eagerly discussed now as they were five thousand years ago. To any fresh or earnest word on those most solemn and mysterious of themes, men listen with some measure of the eagerness which a fond imagination ascribes to the ages of faith. Generation after generation feels those questions start up with the greenness of a recurring, spring. Dynasties come and go, empires ruse and fall, literatures vanish from the the memory of man, forms of polity wax old and perish, and the ancient homes of great peoples survive in the sepulchres of the dead ; but the broodings of the soul on the dim hereafter never fade or die. With immortal vigor they reveal themselves in each generation and baffle the efforts of logic or sarcasm to numb them into death. It is these undying problems that Mr Liddon has been passing under review, with the help of a rare erudition and a vigorous dialectic, it is these yearnings of the soul that have found expression in the solemn passion of his rhetoric, and hence, despite his constant recourse to the profundity of German analysis a brilliant and overflowing audience has flocked to hear his lofty discourse.

 The Brisbane Courier 24 June 1870,