searching descriptiveness, bringing, as it does, a response from the bosom subjected to it, often does more in the work of conviction than all the external array of logic. It helps to account for what sometimes seems an anomaly in pulpit eloquence. We hear a discourse, which we pronounce to be of almost unparalleled cogency; we expect to witness great effects from it, but are disapppointed; and the reason of the failure probably was, that it was too much of a theoretic cast—about religion, God, eternity. It was the tempest, the tornado of eloquence, which awed and astonished us, but which has little fitness to move the mind or win the heart to truth and duty. We hear another of a more unpretending sort; it does not overwhelm, it convinces, it melts us; so true to the heart, it goes right into the heart.

The preaching of our author having so much to do with the heart, had of course a pervading warmth and earnestness. We adduce this as another means of his power. We are aware that this is a very common-place quality. There is a great deal of a sort of earnestness in public speakers, and often earnestness where there is no power; earnestness, indeed, where it is all a foolish, a mere physical bluster. While the outward and facti- . tious is ridiculous, the true, the deep, the pervading, is commanding and mighty. Dr. Griffin, we have seen, was constructed for earnestness. With him it was genuine, spontaneous, and appears in all the parts of his sermons. We see it in the very design of them. His heart was ever glowing upon the great end of the sinner's conversion, and this end he kept in view more constantly than is usual in preaching. Most of his printed sermons are revival sermons; in nearly all of them we see the fervid intention to produce an effect; to do as much present good upon the souls before him as possible. This fervid purpose is indispensable to effective preaching. If the minister does not mean to strike the people with the truth he wields, he surely will not; if there be this vagueness of aim, it will be a frigid and vague perform

How many scattering and powerless sermons appear, simply because the heart of the preacher meant nothing in the framing of them.

While the earnestness of our author was often impassioned, it was never a ferocious earnestness. There was in him not a little

a of the tender and weeping prophet. In his better and more subdued frames, we apprehend, he was strongly characterized by solicitous, subduing feeling: and this, perhaps, more than anything else, gave power to the urgent and awful passages which are found in very many of his discourses. Dictated and delivered in this spirit, they could not fail to make their way to the heart. This controlling earnestness affected the choice of matter, permitting to remain only what he deemed would do execution. It affected the choice of words; the strong, the vivid, the trust

ance.

ing being taken, the vague, the general, the abstract, being let alone.

It goes into the reasoning of his sermons, making it of a popular, common-sense sort; leading to the laying aside of the stiff forms of argument, if practicable; if not, relaxing and limbering them by the pervading warmth. It prevented that excess of reasoning, that ever-recurring and gratuitous reasoning--proving what needs no proof-which is so common and so capital a way of burdening and embarrassing sermons. It is true, some defects were induced by the strength and predominance of this ardor. It led, sometimes, to an extravagant statement of the propositions, making them broader and stronger than the proofs brought forward would justify. It allowed, occasionally, the introduction of unsound arguments, which the wary adversary would come along and throw down, in a way to make the rubbish of the bad cover up and conceal the force and beauty of the good. Sometimes, when we are looking closely upon the points or lines of an argument, there comes a flash of brilliancy, so intense and sudden, as for the moment to blur our vision; again, there falls a bolt so heavy and hot, that it threatens to melt some link of the chain we are tracing. Bursts of emotion, interjected into a process of reasoning, serve to break the attention, and weaken the force of the argument:but a healthful glow infused through such a process, increases the 'attractiveness without abating the cogency. Of this combination of the impassioned and argumentative, which constitutes the highest style of eloquence, our author gives us many admirable specimens. As a general thing, he uses his ardor with great effect. He so works together the light and heat, reasoning in his exhortation, and exhorting as he reasons, interpolating into the same paragraph the fervor of appeal and the strength of argument, that, ere we are aware, we are swept on to the conclusion he would bring us to; we are convinced of the truth, and are ready and eager for the duty.

We wish to say this in connexion, that Dr. Griffin was great and powerful in the application of truth. He had more of exhortation and appeal than is usual in sermons. This part was not loose and frothy, whipped up from a little substance, it was solid, and rested on a solid foundation. He elucidated a subject and made his hearers see that it was truth: he then set it home, and they felt that it was truth. The boldness and strength of application in some of these sermons has been rarely surpassed. For example the close of the Sermon on the weeping at the last day.”

“I will not conceal my anxiety; my soul is distressed with the apprehension that I shall another day see some of my hearers crying to rocks and mountains to cover them, and cursing the day that they ever heard a gospel sermon

Practice

no longer upon yourselves the cruelty of tigers. Have some compassion on those souls for which Christ died. Have mercy on yourselves; have mercy on me. O! for mercy, mercy, mercy ! I cry to you as a dying man for relief. My prayer to you is for this one boon, that you would be happy yourselves.

I entreat you by that compassion which looked down from the height of the sanctuary; by that love which bled on Calvary; by that patience which has called after you from childhood. I warn you, by all the dreadful weight of your guilt, by the terrors of a dying bed, by the solemnities of the last judgment. In the name and by the authority of the eternal God, I charge you not to make your bed in hell."

Powerful and successful application is rather a rare quality in sermons. It is no easy matter to give vivacity and weight to the hortatory part—to retrieve it from the sameness it is so apt to fall into. Nowhere is invention more severely tas ked, or the mind more often admits its exhaustion. But though difficult it is sometimes carried to excess, particularly by men of the fervid and urgent temperament. They themselves, now and then, use violence upon the sinner, in order that the kingdom may suffer violence and the violent take it by force. At any rate, they decidedly overdo the matter of assailing the sensibilities; they keep them throbbing almost all the time. Nearly every sermon furnishes an extended piece of heated hortation. It may be very powerful, at times all but irresistible. Still, there is too much of it; the effect would be greater were there less. The hammering is disproportionate to the fire. God's word is as fire and as a hammer. If we continue to use the hammer after our fire is all expended, we fail to break the rock in pieces; we rather harden the mass we mean to demolish. If our author erred, we think it was on the side of excessive application. He certainly attached, as all should, a high importance to this part of the discourse; he seemed unwilling to let the sinner go until he had yielded. In some of his appeals, however, there appears a degree of importance, as though he thought it strange (as it really was) that they could stand out against such considerations as were pressed upon them. " What frenzy has seized your brain ? What fumes from hell have bewildered your rational sense? 0! if there is one glimmering of reason left—if one lucid interval of sense, hear this expostulation; hasten, submit yourself to God. Do it, that your soul may live. Do it now Have you done it ?-you deserve eternal death for that neglect.”

There is sometimes very apparent in speakers, a straining and stretching of the powers to utter things very forcibly and strikingly. We seem to see, in the agony of the effort, the distended muscle and the swollen artery, But there is very apt THIRD SERIES, VOL. II. NO. 4.

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to be an unwholesomeness in the production, where there is this desperateness in the endeavor to bring forth-an unwholesomeness arising from the false excitement and the unnatural power the author is strained up to. The state in question is a species of frenzy; very fine things may be said, even prophetic things. On the other hand, very monstrous things may come out. All is unwholesome, uncertain, unsafe. The true greatness of mind throws off its great things without much seeming exertion. President Edward's sermons are an instance of this. There is astonishing power in them; they produced great effects when delivered; they produce a strong effect upon us as we read them. But he seems to be saying the easiest and simplest things in the world. He lays off his sentences and paragraphs as though it were mere pastime, costing him nothing. All this is proof of the wonderful and inherent power of the man.

Not a little of Dr. Griffin's power is found in his use of figurative language. The earnestness we have spoken of, extended to his figures; his are the impassioned figures; many of them singularly bold and startling; figures of the higher sort, which most preachers are willing to let alone, he threw out, from his heated centre, just when he pleased—such as exclamation, vision, personification, apostrophe. The first of these is quite a favorite figure with the author, and he sustains it admirably for the most part. The speaker is supposed to look with so intense a gaze upon what is distant in space or time, as to annihilate that distance, and the grandest scenes and events are full in his view. “Standing as I now do, in sight of a dissolving universe,

. beholding the dead arise, the world in flames, the heavens fleeing away, all nations convulsed with the terror or rapt in the vision of the Lamb, I pronounce the conversion of a single pagan, of more value than all the wealth that ever Omnipotence produced." In his sermon before the Pastoral Association of Massachusetts, he breaks out at the close—"But what is that I see? A horrid shape, more deeply scarred with thunder than the rest, around which a thousand dreadful beings, with furious eyes and threatening gestures, are venting their raging curses. It is an unfaithful pastor who went down to hell with most of his congregation.” We have the same figure surprisingly sustained in the close of the sermon entitled “The Watchman.” Perhaps it is the boldest and ablest passage Griffin ever uttered. There is certainly not much to exceed it, in this respect, in the whole range of eloquence. It has often been printed, but it is worth presenting again.

“Therefore, I solemnly declare in the name of God, that there is a dreadful war waged by all the divine perfections against sin ... In equally solemn tones I declare, as my office bids me, and call every angel to witness, that in this war, God is right, and the world is wrong. This great truth, while I live, I will declare, and hope to pronounce it with my dying breath; God is right, and the world is wrong. I wish it were set forth in broad letters upon every forehead, and with a pen dipped in heaven it were written upon every heart. I wish it were posted in sunbeams at the corner of every street, and were graven with the point of a diamond on the rock forever, God is right, and the world is wrong. Let this great truth pass from land to land, to prostrate nations of unknown tongues, and rolling through every clime, bring an humbled world to their Redeemer's feet.

"Standing on my watch-tower, I am commanded, if I see aught of evil coming, to give warning. I again solemnly declare, that I see evil approaching. I see a storm collecting in the heavens; I discover the commotion of the troubled elements; I hear the roar of distant winds; heaven and earth seem mingled in the conflict; and I cry to those for whom I watch-a storm! a storm! get into the ark or you are swept away. Ah ! what is it I see? I see a world convulsed and falling to ruins; the sea burning like oil; nations rising from underground; the sun falling; the damned in chains before the bar, and some of my poor hearers with them; I see them cast from the battlement of the judgment seat. My God, the eternal pit has closed over them forever !".

Our author gives us numerous specimens of the lively, antithetical style. The following is admirably well balanced and melodious in its movement: "Redemption is a cause worthy to be the object for which all things were created. It is the beloved cause on which the heart of the son of God was set, when it beat in the babe of Bethlehem, and when it bled on the point of the spear. It is the cause to which angels have zealously ministered; to which devils have involuntarily lent their aid.” One of Dr. Griffin's most finished and finest passages is found in the sermon entitled, “ The Lamb in the midst of the Father's throne.” He doubtless deemed it one of his best, as, Demosthenes-like, it is inserted with slight variations in two different discourses. It is a sustained, high wrought antithesis. It begins

“ How delightful to contemplate the honors which encircle the Lamb in the midst of his Father's throne. After being so long marred with grief and shame, how sweet to know that he has found a throne ...... After all the mockery of the judgment, shall we exult to hear the shout of all heaven in his praise. After the crown of thorns, we are enraptured to see him wear the diadem of the universe."

There is a great deal in Dr. Griffin of the rapid and graphic movement--the quick, bold sketching which arrests, absorbs and holds us, and so we are swept forward at the will of the speaker