awful and tremendous topics of our religion, when it scarce ever leaves any distinct impression of one of them on his soul? Can you make the arrow wound where it will not stick? Where all the discourse vanishes from the remembrance, can you supposet he soul to be profited or enriched? When you brush over the closed eyelids with a feather, did you ever find it give light to the blind? Have any of your soft harangues, your continued threads of silken eloquence, ever raised the dead? I fear your whole aim is to talk over the appointed number of minutes upon the subject, or to practise a little upon the gentler passions, without any concern how to give understanding its due improvement, or to furnish the memory with any lasting treasure, or to make a knowing and a religious Christian.

Ask old Wheatfield the rich farmer, ask Plowdown your neighbour, or any of his family, who have sat all their lives under your ministry, what they know of the common truths of religion, or of the special articles of Christianity? Desire them to tell you what the gospel is, or what is salvation; what are their duties toward God, or what they mean by religion; who is Jesus Christ, or what is the meaning of his atonement or redemption by his blood. Perhaps you will tell me yourself, that you have very seldom entertained them with these subjects. Well, inquire of them then, what is heaven; which is the way to obtain it; or what hope they have of dwelling there. Entreat them to tell you wherein they have profited as to holiness of heart and life, or fitness for death. They will soon make it appear, by their awkward answers, that they understood very little of all your fine discourses, and those of your predecessor; and have made but wretched improvement of forty years attendance at church. They have now and then been pleased perhaps with the music of your voice, as with the sound of a sweet instrument, and they mistook that for devotion; but their heads are dark still, and their hearts earthly; they are mere heathens with a christian name, and know little more of God than their yokes of oxen. In short, Polyramus's auditors have some confusion in their knowledge; but Fluvio's hearers have scarce any knowledge at all.

But you will tell me your discourses are not all made up of harangue; your design is sometimes to inform the mind by a train of well-connected reasonings, and that all your paragraphs, in their long order, prove and support each other; and though you do not distinguish your discourse into particulars, yet you have kept some invisible method all the way; and by some artificial gradations you have brought your sermon down to the concluding

sentence.

It may be so sometimes, and I will acknowledge it; but, believe me, Fluvio, this artificial and invisible method carries darkness with it instead of light; nor is it by any means a proper way to instruct the vulgar, that is, the bulk of your auditory: their souls are not capable of so wide a stretch, as to take in the whole chain of your long-connected consequences; you talk reason and religion to them in vain, if you do not make the argument so short as to come within their grasp, and give a frequent rest for their thoughts: you must break the bread of life into pieces to feed children with it, and part your discourses into distinct propositions to give the ignorant a plain scheme of any one doctrine, and enable them to comprehend or retain it.

Every day gives us experiments to confirm what I say, and to encourage ministers to divide their sermons into several distinct heads of discourse. Myrtilla, a little creature of nine years old, was at church twice yesterday in the morning the preacher entertained his audience with a running oration, and the child could give her parents no other account of it, but that he talked smoothly and sweetly about virtue and heaven. It was Ergates' lot to fulfil the service of the afternoon; he is an excellent preacher, both for the wise and for the unwise: in the evening Myrtilla very prettily entertained her mother with a repetition of the most considerable parts of the sermon ; for "Here (said she) I can fix my thoughts upon first, se"condly, and thirdly; upon the doctrine, the reasons, and "the inferences, and I know what I must try to remem"ber, and repeat it when my friends shall ask me: but as "for the morning sermon, I could do nothing but hear it, "for I could not tell what I should get by heart."