INTRODUCTION. BY REV. D. D. WHEDON, D. D. Ir is now about three quarters of a century since the following discourses were delivered by their eloquent and accomplished author in the ordinary routine of pulpit duty in one of the provincial towns of Scotland. Though he won thereby a deserved celebrity with a wide circle of friends and admirers, and enjoyed the personal intimacy of some of the most distinguished men of his native country, yet his name has not obtained a conspicuous place in the literary world; and even these sermons, on which his claim upon our notice principally depends, have been known and appreciated mainly by the comparatively few, even of professional readers, whose taste leads them into an extended perusal of pulpit literature. An American edition, published some fifty years ago, having long since been out of print, it is believed that a republication will be acceptable to our American public. We venture to present them not only as a choice model for the aspirant for professional excellence, but as a valuable addition to our religious literature, well calculated to exert a purifying influence upon the public mind, and fully entitled to take an honorable and permanent position in our libraries, as a standard SACRED CLASSIC. JOHN LOGAN was born in the parish of Fulla, county of Mid-Lothian, in the year 1748. His parents belonged to that class of dissenters, who call themselves Burgher Seceders; and were distinguished for rectitude, benevolence and piety. As John exhibited, in addition to these qualities, early proofs of superior genius, his gratified parents fostered his love of learning, and resolved to educate him to the sacred profession. Having prepared at the parochial school, he entered the University of Edinburgh, where he formed a friendship with Dr. Robertson, which continued through life. The congeniality of genius cemented a friendship also between Logan and Michael Bruce, a young poet, whom premature death deprived of his fame: Logan paid to the deceased young poet the tribute of publishing his poems in a small volume, in which he inserted also some poems of his own, leaving the respective shares of the two a matter of doubt among the friends of both. Having completed his theological course, and entered the ministry, Logan soon became celebrated for his eloquence, and received a unanimous call from the kirk-session, and incorporations of South Leith, to become one of the ministers of that church and parish; and he was accordingly ordained in the year 1773. He discharged the duties of his ministerial office with steadiness and fidelity. His talents won the admiration and friendship of such men as Robertson and Blair. It was during his ministry at this place that the sermons forming the collection of this volume were preached. The elegant taste and fervid genius of Logan looked with longing eyes to the attractive fields of general literature, poetry and belles-lettres. Having delivered, with much success, a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of History, his friends proposed him for that chair in the University, but without success, as that Professorship seems by custom to have been appropriated by the legal profession. He subsequently published the substance of his Lectures. He published at different times poems lyric, elegiac and dramatic. The same genius which shines so resplendently in his sermons, sheds its clear and beautiful light through his poems, but not with the same degree of splendor. An imagination pure and mild rather than intense; a taste refined and perfect; a sensibility alive to the gentler aspects of nature pervade his poems. Something of the excessive sensitiveness of the poet, too, we are sorry to say, resided in the personal character of Logan. The want of the full tide of literary success deeply impressed him with feelings of disappointment. Melancholy brooded over his spirit. Dissatisfaction arose between his parishioners and their pastor; in anguish of heart he resigned the ministry, and devoted his few remaining days exclusively to literary pursuits. In the bloom of his years his health declined, and he closed his life December 25th, 1788. The tears of friends warmly attached to his memory mingled with the regrets of those from whom he had suffered, over the grave of the lamented Logan. Two years after his death, in 1790, a volume of his sermons was given to the public under the inspection of Drs. Robertson, Blair & Hardy. A second volume followed in the following year. Both volumes attained a fourth edition in 1800. Several of his literary writings, we believe, have never been published. In regard to his secular productions, posterity will not change the verdict of his contemporaries. A measure of merit, a degree of beauty, a gentle attractivenesss, will be readily conceded them; but amid the crowd of aspirants for the attention of the world, that mighty arbiter has no time to spend on secondary merit. Less and less are growing the chances of respectable poets. To a choice quire of superlative genuises alone, does a glutted and fastidious Public daily incline to confine its ear. For the gentle spirit of our friend as a poet then there is no hope. But why not be satisfied with the clustering honors that gather and must gather around the pulpit orator? Did he undervalue-we cannot believe it—or did he not anticipate, that while all his literary efforts would be abandoned to perish, the world would never let those sermons die? We shall not condemn him, that his sympathizing breast sighed at the thought of being forgotten by his fellow men; for even scripture promises it as a blessing to the just to be held in everlasting remembrance. But we seem to ourselves to wish that the despondencies that withered his life could have been cheered away with the presentiment, that though the memorials of himself which he wished to perpetuate, should perish, there were other memorials in which he less trusted, which should stand the test of time. Or rather that his soul might have listened to the voice of the divine spirit, teaching him wherein his great strength lay, and guiding him back to his lofty post of duty and honor, to put on a mightier manhood still, and raise still nobler monuments in the field of pulpit literature. For our own part, we think a great sermon to be quite as noble an intellectual performance as a great poem. It is as great a genius that produces it. There are thousands we know to whom the name of sermon is a synonim with tedium. And as many thousands to whom poetry is just what the beauty of the starry firmament is to a herd of chewing kine— nothing. But a sermon just as truly as a poem, to gain our suffrage must not be respectable. And we aver it costs just as much genius to lift a sermon out of the respectable as it does a poem. We suppose the number of sermons delivered is immensely greater than that of poems written; and the immense mass of these are respectable. They must be so, and can afford to be so, for they are produced for plain, practical, homely use. And this utility is, in the more complimentary and the less complimentary sense of the term, respectable. And the very fact that of the immense number of sermons printed, so few survive their generation, fully proves that he who raises a sermon into an imperishable elevation, is greater than he who writes an immortal poem. Poorly do we think of an earthly immortality, such as men bestow on genius, compared with that immortality and eternal life which God bestows on goodness. Yet if the Saviour promised to the Mary who anointed him for his burial, that her alabaster box should be spoken. of in all the world for a memorial of her, it may be in accordance with the great Master's purpose, that his servants, even in this world, shall have no cause to envy the monuments of the worldly great. There are minds to whom the aspiration or endeavor after excellence in pulpit performance is esteemed an unhallowed ambition. To aim at a cultivation of the natural powers, to study the models, or practise the precepts of masters in that department, to form rules of criticism and apply that criticism to another's or own pulpit productions, in fine to construct a homiletic art, or accumulate a pulpit literature, is in their view, either in fact or in tendency, a vainglorious desecration of the sacred office, and a dishonor and dismissal of the Divine Spirit, by whose direct promptings alone the preacher should spontaneously speak. Now that there are dangers here, against which the preacher should carefully guard, we would not only concede, but most solemnly and warningly maintain. But our present purpose is to suggest to these mistaken consciences, that there is just as great a danger on the other side. He who would avoid an unholy ambition by discarding all endeavor after excellence, or would honor a divine aid, by abdicating the proper cultivation and energetic use of his own powers, will neither secure thereby his own higher holiness, nor attain the divine approbation on his own inertness. The danger also is that this prohibition of pulpit criticism and culture will produce an indolent presumption and a crude coarseness; which will forfeit all power over an intellectual age by clothing religion in the garb of a repulsive fanaticism. The true rule on this subject is a plain one. A pious divine of the last century gave this striking advice to a young minister: "Prepare yourself as laboriously for preaching, as if there were no Holy Spirit; and then fling yourself as fully upon Divine aid, as if you had made no preparation." This embraces the whole case. In his educational preparation, let the young minister labor, and in preparing her ministry let the church work, as if man must do all; and pray then and trust, as if God would do all. This secures us equally from the Antinomianism of expecting God to honor our indolence; and from the Pelagianism of setting up an independence of the Divine Spirit. It leaves us under the obligation to use all human appliances to secure excellence in the sacred profession. It opens wide the field for homiletic study, for criticism, model, and pulpit literature. It bids us use all these means in glad trust for the Divine blessing upon the whole. He who, in the engrossment of his preparations, forgets or, loses that spirit of trust, loses, in fact, the deepest, richest, divinest delight in duty as well as the truest aid to his sacred eloquence. Let him never fear to shape his periods to the most finished perfection; but let him never forget that, be his periods ever so rhetorically perfect, without that divine element impregnating them, they will not be divinely eloquent. The rhetorical round and sound will be there; but there are tests by which he may sadly know, that the life and soul are wanting. It is not the minister alone who is in danger of a dishonest forgetfulness of the bounden object of his efforts in the mere literature of his profession. The advocate may, as some most eminent advocates have done, most unjust |