self. If he be but the patchwork from admired models, he covers over the image which his Creator enstamped upon him, and posterity will never distinguish his features in the indiscriminate mass. He becomes but a new channel for fountains that have long been open, instead of sending forth from the depths of his own original nature a full current of good influences to mankind.

It becomes the preacher to watch also with sedulous jealousy the moral and religious impressions which he leaves upon others. "If a minister," says Dr. Scott, go to the verge of a precipice, his people will be sure to go over." The corrupt doctrine, the impure example will be working its silent work, long after the hand that started it has crumbled into dust. There is a certain disease which seems to stay its progress after it has destroyed the life of its victims, so that those who look into their coffins for months after they are buried will find the dead in the freshness of their first entombment. Sometimes a whole family will follow each other with strange rapidity into the embraces of this wasting foe, and there is a vulgar but terrible tradition, that the dead sustain the appearance of vitality by preying upon the life of surviving friends. The dead one comes in to touch with skinny fingers the food they eat, to taint with corrupted lungs the air they breathe, to press them in a close embrace, till they are won to his own ghastly fellowship. And just such is the power of a diseased influence from the pulpit. It must live long after the preacher is dead. It must stalk with fearful contagion through the paths of his corrupting walk. It must brood as with raven-wing over the altar where he proclaimed his pestilent doctrines. It must gather its victims from the lambs of his own flock, and poison the famished ones that cried at his table for food. Sometimes it may fix its viperfangs in the very heart of the community and reduce the whole region to the loathsomeness of death.

Finally, the preacher should cultivate a habit of living above, and independently of the bondage of time, or death. "We cannot deceive God and nature," says an old writer, "for a coffin is a coffin, though it be covered with a pompous veil; and the minutes of our time strike on, and are counted by angels, till the period comes, which must give warning to all the neighbors that thou art dead. And if our death can be put off a little longer, what advantage can it be in the accounts of nature and felicity. They that three thousand years agone died unwillingly, and stopped death two days or staid it a week—what is their gain—where is that week?" And the preacher who casts his eye far down the lapse of years, into the very bosom of that eternity where time shall almost be forgotten-such a one will make his life a life, short though it be, and will count its days by labors, and its years by fruits. In that great harvest, the question asked shall be, not how long, but how much. We shall all be there -these venerable laborers from the vineyard, and those who go down to their graves youthful and strong. The differences of age and station shall then be forgotten, when each shall have placed in his hand and before his eye that golden chain which connects him with the whole brotherhood of being. And there shall be the long line of our spiritual descendants, like jewels that pave the eternal vista. Though they stand not by our death-beds, like those old philosophers, to inhale our spirits, we shall feel our own warm breath coming back upon us, and shall discern our own lineaments as in a mirror. Though they seek not in the spirit of that ancient affection, to place their burial-urns close to ours, or to mingle their ashes with our own, long before deposited, they shall come at last to lie down with us in our joy or our woe.

13

THE DRAMATIC ELEMENT IN PULPIT ORATORY.

THE earliest modern attempt to make the Drama a vehicle of spiritual instruction was rather amusing than successful. As was its origin in classic Greece, so was its revival in catholic Europe most intimately connected with religion. The monks of the dark ages, unable to render attractive the simple truths of the bible, endeavored to set forth its events and doctrines by scenic representation. But the stupidity of both teacher and pupil made way for barbarous anachronisms in these sacred mysteries. The motley stage-group would at one time bring together in strange commingling, the Saviour of the world, the ass of Balaam, and the poet Virgil talking in rhyme. Another catastrophe would present the figures of our first parents arrayed with the implements of modern industry-Adam with spade and plough, and his frail consort at her spinning-wheel. "I have myself," says Coleridge, " a piece of this kind on the education of Eve's children, in which after the fall and repentance of Adam, the offended Maker condescends to visit them and to catechize the children, who with a noble contempt of chronology are all brought together from Adam to Noah. The good children say the ten commandments, the apostle's creed, and the Lord's prayer, but Cain after he had received a box on the ear for not taking off his hat, and afterward offering his left hand, is tempted by the devil so to blunder in the Lord's prayer as to reverse the petition and say it backward."

And yet there is a dramatic exhibition of truth very different from the measured tread of the buskin, or the flummery of modern theatricals. The stage has become so corrupt that it has degraded the very taste and spirit on which it is founded. We speak of the dramatic element such as it ex

arp

oce

B

Let

SOU

and

ists in true naturalness and dignity within the soul of man, such as even Inspiration has employed to arouse attention to its solemn themes. The Old Testament contains whole books, which are eminently dramatic both in their structure and style. The exquisite poetry of Solomon's Song takes the form of almost constant dialogue between the various individuals of the nuptial group, while the company of virgins, as the scholar cannot fail to notice, is like the chorus of the Grecian Tragedy. The poem of Job, not alone in the distinctness of its characters, but in the varied interest of its scenes and the deep and startling power of its descriptions, may lay claim to the dramatic sisterhood. Even David often combines the drama with the ode, and we lose the charm of some of his richest melodies, unless we hear separate and responsive voices, sometimes from a single companion in music and praise, sometimes from the assembled chorus of Israel, again from the ever-eloquent depths of nature, and now deep and solemn from the bosom of God.

Yet it is the dramatic spirit rather than the dramatic form that we chiefly notice in scripture. It is that intense, vivid and picture-like expression, into which the poetry of the bible in its flashes of excitement so often rises. Such are those sudden changes of person throughout the Psalms, where the narrator becomes at once the actor, and throws down the harp to take up the sword and shield. Such is the sombre procession of ghosts that Isaiah summons to meet the king of Babylon. Ushered in by the exulting fir-trees and cedars of Lebanon, they come to utter taunts over his unburied corse, to sound the noise of viols in his ears, and to spread over him his wormy coverlid. The prophets in fact are pervaded throughout by this dramatic spirit. We hear in them the voices of busy multitudes, and the din of bustling action. They hurry us across a stage hung with every form of scenery, fields waving with harvests, or bristling with spears-nations charioted and crowned in triumph, or sitting in sack

cloth, solitary. In our ears are the shouting for the summerfruits, or the trumpeted alarm from the mountains, or the doleful creatures howling over the ruins of ancient splendor, and sometimes sweet strains of the orchestral music of heaven.

Nor in the more didactic dispensation of the New Testament are we entirely destitute of the same rhetorical feature. It is true, the inspired fishermen tell their story with few of the graces of style, and but little vividness of emotion. Luke, the most accomplished historian, has a severe classical taste which confines him to the simple language of narrative and the chasteness of Greek models. Paul, though he occasionally introduces the forms of logical dialogue, would seem to have studied in the school of Demosthenes rather than that of Aeschylus. But where can be found a richer variety of the dramatic style in its simple elements, than in the parables and discourses of our Saviour, crowded as they are with beauty and tenderness and solemn sublimity, and appealing to the soul of man from its sympathy with life and action. And how full of the loftiest dramatic life is the vision unfolded at Patmos, where the spirit of Hebrew Poetry looks out at the eye of the last of the prophets, and

"gorgeous tragedy,

In sceptred pall, comes sweeping by."

With what a magic hand are we hurried through the three great acts of this sublime yet mysterious drama—to watch the shifting scenes in seals and vials and trumpets-each movement of the grand plot amid thunderings and earthquakes -till time deepens into eternity, and the toiling church on earth becomes the praising church in heaven.

With these inspired models, and with subjects so fitted to foster the dramatic spirit, it seems natural that the preacher should exhibit something of this element in his discourses. The most eloquent pulpit-orators have often availed them