camps and courts, in streets, schools, cities, and villages, some times with great composure and coolness, at other times with vehement action and rapturous energy; sometimes in a plain blunt style; at other times in all the magnificent pomp of Eastern allegory. On some occasions, the preachers appeared in public with visible signs, with implements of war, yokes of slavery, or something adapted to their subject. They gave lectures on these, held them up to view, girded them on, broke them in pieces, rent their garments, rolled in the dust; and endeavoured, by all the methods they could devise agreeably to the customs of their country, to impress the minds of their auditors with the nature and importance of their doctrines. These men were highly esteemed by the pious part of the nation; and princes thought proper to keep seers and others, who were scribes, who read and expounded the law, 2d Chro. xxxiv, 29, 30. 2d Chro. xxxv, 15. Hence false prophets, bad men who found it worth while to affect to be good, crowded the courts of princes. Jezebel, an idolatress, had four hundred prophets of Baal; and Ahab, a pretended worshipper of Jehovah, had as many pretended prophets of his own profession, 2d Chron. xviii, 5. When the Jews were carried captive into Babylon, the prophets who were with them inculcated the principles of religion, and endeavoured to possess their minds with an aversion to idolatry; and to the success of preaching we may attribute the re-conversion. of the Jews to the belief and worship of one God; a conversion that remains to this day. The Jews have since fallen into horrid crimes; but they have never since this period lapsed into idolatry, Hosea, 2d and 3d chap. Ezekiel, 2d, 3d, 34th chap. There were not wanting, however, multitudes of false prophets among them, whose characters are strikingly delineated by the true prophets, and which the reader may see in the 13th chapter of Ezekiel, 56th Isaiah, 23d Jeremiah. When the seventy years of the captivity were expired, the good prophets and preachers, Zerubbabel, Joshua, Haggai, and others, having confidence in the word of God, and aspiring after their natural, civil, and religious rights, endeavoured by all means to extricate themselves and their countrymen from that mortifying state into which the crimes of their ancestors had brought them. They wept, fasted, prayed, preached, prophesied, and at length prevailed. The chief instruments were Nehemiah, and Ezra: the first was governor, and reformed their civil state; the last was a scribe of the law of the God of heaven, and addressed himself to ecclesiastical matters, in which he rendered the noblest service to his country, and to all posterity. He collected and collated manuscripts of the sacred writings, and arranged and published the holy canon in its present form. To this he added second work as necessary as the former; he revived and new modelled pabite preaching, and cx emplified his plan in his own person. The Jews had almost lost in the seventy years' captivity their original language: that was now become dead; and they spoke a jargon made up of their own language and that of the Chaldeans and other nations with whom they had been confounded. Formerly preachers had only explained subjects: now they were obliged to explain words; words which, in the sacred code, were become obsolete, equivocal, or dead. Houses were now opened, not for ceremonial worship, as sacrificing, for this was confined to the temple: but for moral obedience, as praying, preaching, reading the law, divine worship, and social duties. These houses were called synagogues: the people repaired thither morning and evening for prayer; and on sabbaths and festivals the law was read and expounded to them. We have a short but beautiful description of the manner of Ezra's first preaching, Nehem. viii. Upwards of fifty thousand people assembled in a street, or large square, near the Watergate. It was early in the morning of a sabbath day. A pulpit of wood, in the fashion of a small tower, was placed there on purpose for the preacher; and this turret was supported by a scaffold, or temporary gallery, where, in a wing on the right hand of the pulpit, sat six of the principal preachers; and in another, on the left, seven. Thirteen other principal teachers, and many Levites, were presen., also, on scaffolds erected for the purpose, alternately to officiate. When Ezrascended the pulpit, he produced and opened the book of the law, and the whole congregation instantly rose up from their seats, and stood. Then he offered up prayer and praise to God, the people bowing their heads, and worshipping the Lord with their faces to the ground; and, at the close of the prayer, with uplifted hands, they solemnly pronounced Amen, Amen. Then, all standing, Ezra, assisted at times by the Levites, read the law distinctly, gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading. The sermons delivered so affected the hearers, that they wept excessively; and about noon the sorrow became so exuberant and immeasurable, that it was thought necessary by the governor, the preacher, and the Levites, to restrain it. Go your way, said they; eat the fat, drink the sweet, send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared. The wise and benevolent sentiments of these noble souls were imbibed by the whole congregation, and fifty thousand troubled hearts were calmed in a moment. Home they returned, to eat, to drink, to send portions, and to make mirth, because they had understood the words that were declared unto them. Plato was alive at this time, teaching dull philosophy to cold academics; but what was he, and what was Xenophon or Demosthenes, or any of the Pagan orators, in comparison with these men? From this period to that of the appearance of Jesus Christ, public preaching was universal; synagogues were multiplied, vast numbers attended, and elders and rulers were appointed for the || required such assistance as human purpose of order and instruc-laws or wordly policy, the clotion. quence of the schools or the terror of arms, the charms of money or the tricks of tradesmen, could afford them. The apostles being dead, every thing came to pass as they had foretold. The whole Christian system underwent a miserable change: preaching shared the fate of other institutions, and this glory of the primitive church was now gradua'ly degenerated. Those writers whom we call the Fathers, however, held up to view by some as models of imitation, do not deserve that indiscriminate praise ascribed to them. Christianity, it is true, is found in their writings; but how sadly incorporated with Pagan philosophy and Jewish allegory! It must, indeed, be ab lowed, that, in general, the simplicity of Christianity was maintained, though under gradual de+ cay, during the first three centu ries. The next five centuries pro The most celebrated preacher that arose before the appearance of Jesus Christ was John the Baptist. He was commissioned from heaven to be the harbinger of the Messiah. He took Elijah for his model; and as the times were very much like those in which that prophet lived, he chose a doctrine and a method very much resembling those of that venerable man. His subjects were few, plain, and important. His style was vehement, images bold, his deportment solemn, his actions eager, and his morals strict; but this bright morning-star gave way to the illustrious Sun of Righteousness, who now arose on a benighted world. Jesus Christ certainly was the prince of preachers. Who but can admire the simplicity and majesty of his style, the beauty of his images, the alternate softness and severity of his address, the choice of his subjects, the grace-duced many pious and excellent fulness of his deportment, and the preachers both in the Latin and indefatigableness of his zeal? Let Greek churches, though the docthe reader charm and solace him-trine continued to degenerate. self in the study and contempla- The Greek pulpit was adorned tion of the character, excellency, with some eloquent orators. Ba and dignity, of this best of preachers, as he will find them delineated by the evangelists. The apostles exactly copied their divine master. They formed multitudes of religious societies, and were abundantly successful in their labours. They confined their attention to religion, and left the school to dispute, and politicians to intrigue. The doctrines they preached they supported entirely by evidence; and neither had nor sil, bishop of Cæsarea, John Chrysostom, preacher at Antioch, and afterwards patriarch (as he was called) of Constantinople, and Gregory Nazianzen, who all flourished in the fourth century, seem to have led the fashion of preaching in the Greek church: Jerom and Augustine did the same in the Latin church. For some time, preaching was common to bishops, elders, deacons, and private brethren in the primitive church: in process, it was restrained to the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, who took down what they said. Sermons in those days were all in the vulgar tongue. The Greeks preached in Greek, the Latins in Latin. They did not preach by the clock (so to speak), but were short or long as they saw occasion, though an hour was about the usual time. Sermons were generally both preached and heard standing; but sometimes both speaker and auditors sat, especially the aged and the infirm. The fathers were fond of allegory; for Origen, that everlasting allegorizer, had set them the example. Before preaching, the preacher usually went into a vestry to pray, and afterwards to speak to such as came to salute him. He prayed with his eyes shut in the pulpit. The first word the preacher uttered to the people, when he ascended the pulpit, was "Peace be with you," or "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and But the glorious reformation was the offspring of preaching, by which mankind were informed: there was a standard, and the religion of the times was put to trial by it. The avidity of the common people to read scripture, and to hear it expounded, was wonderful, and the Papists were so fully convinced of the benefit of frequent public instruction, that they who were justly called unpreaching prelates, and whose pulpits, to use an expression of Latimer, had been bells without clappers for many a long year, were obliged for shame to set up regular preaching again. The church of Rome has produced some great preachers since the reformation, but not equal to the reformed preachers; and a question naturally arises here, which it would be unpardonable to pass over in silence, concerning the singular effect of the preaching of the reformed, which was ceses. In the pulpit of the unigeneral, national, universal re-versity of Salamanca he induced formation. In the darkest times of popery there had arisen now and then some famous popular preachers, who had zealously inveighed against the vices of their times, and whose sermons had produced sudden and amazing effects on their auditors: but all these effects had died away with the preachers who produced them, and all things had gone back into the old state. Law, learning, commerce, society at large, had not been improved. - Here a new scene opens; preachers arise less popular, perhaps less indefatigable and exemplary; their sermons produce less strikingimmediate effects; and yet their auditors go away, and agree by whole nations to reform. Jerom Savonarola, Jerom Narni, Capistran, Connecte, and many others, had produced by their sermons great immediate efforts. When Connecte preached, the ladies lowered their head-dresses, and committed quilled caps by hundreds to the flames. When Narni taught the populace in Lent, from the pulpits of Rome, half the city went from his sermons, crying along the streets, Lord, have mercy upon us; Christ, have mercy upon us; so that in only one Passion week, two thousand crowns worth of ropes were sold to make scourges with; and when he preached before the pope to cardinals and bishops, and painted the crime of non-residence in its own colours, he frightened thirty or forty bishops, who heard him, instantly home to their dio eight hundred students to quit all worldly prospects of honour, riches, and pleasures, and to become penitents in divers monasteries. Some of this class were martyrs, too. We know the fate of Savonarola, and more might be added: but all lamented the momentary duration of the effects produced by their labours. Narni himself was so disgusted with his office, that he renounced preaching, and shut himself up in his cell to mourn over his irreclaimable contemporaries; for bishops went back to court, and rope-makers lay idle again. Our reformers taught all the good doctrines which had been taught by these men, and they added two or three more, by which they laid the axe to the root of apostacy, and produced general reformation. Instead of appealing to popes, and canons, and founders, and fathers, they only. quoted them, and referred their auditors to the holy scriptures for law. Pope Leo X did not know this when he told Prierio, who complained of Luther's heresy, Friar Martin had a fine genius! They also taught the people what little they knew of Christian liberty; and so led them into a belief that they might follow their own ideas in religion, without the consent of a confessor, a diocesan, a pope, or a council. They went farther, and laid the stress of all religion on justifying faith. This obliged the people to get acquainted with Christ, the object of their faith; and thus they were led into |