may at first bring from the brain things new and old; but in process of time the draft becomes a routine, and the routine a drag. This must be the result, unless the mind be carrying on, meanwhile, a corresponding process of replenishment. To supply all this outgo, there must be an income. Unless the feeding springs are generous, evaporation and drainage will run any lake dry. A classmate of ours, now a successful preacher, held a jubilee over the completion of his first sermon, but bemoaned his hard fate in being obliged to put into this one all he knew; where the material for a second one was to come from, he dared not anticipate. That was sensible advice of the old minister, who told his young friend to "fill up the cask, and he would get a stream wherever he chose to tap it." He who says the same things on all varieties of subject, cannot long instruct or keep his audience. He must replenish, and his sermons exhibit the results of his replenishment. People who will not listen to straight-forward disquisition, will be convinced by the same arguments when illumined by facts and examples. And it would seem that for extent and variety of illustrative resources, no branch of learning could surpass the study of history. Many a discourse, thoughtful and truthful, but lustreless and therefore powerless, could be redeemed by historical illustration; the dull periods would be quickened into life; the feeble sentences made executive; the arguments, before indecisive and unretainable, would now convict; the whole discourse would more readily and vividly seize upon the mind. The transformation of dullness into beauty and life, would find an apt symbol in the famous boast of the second Cæsar-"I found Rome brick, and left it marble." The preacher would make better sermons; he would be greeted by a heartier sympathy among his hearers; and the sarcasm of Coleridge would in no sense be true for him, that "four-fifths of the people who attended his preaching, did so from a sense of duty to the other fifth."

The other element infused into the sermon by the free use of history, is the power of conviction by example. It is not only possible to beguile the wandering mind and constrain it to interest itself in the subject, it is even possible to overwhelm it

with such decisive facts that it cannot choose but surrender at discretion. Curiosity may be wrought into conviction. The force of historical example may not only fasten the mind upon the subject, but fasten the subject into the mind. Without being discursive, the preacher may move straightforward to his point, gathering illustrations on every hand and loading them with meaning as an army impresses wagons along its route to carry the matériel of war.

Illustrations are to sermons what pictures are to words. Some descriptions would be unintelligible without a sketch. Some arguments can be more faithfully and more vividly pictured by an apt example which lights up the meaning, than could be hoped from any prolixity of detail. You have laid down a principle. You have defined it-supported it—urged it, with everything but facts. There is still among your hearers a residuum of lurking incredulity, or at least of apathy, which you are conscious you have not touched. The point is not carried; your position is yet in peril. Try now the effect of a well-selected reinforcement from the field of history; here, on the one hand, is your statement, logically accurate, yet unaccepted-here, on the other hand, is a fact which shows this principle in active play. The fact is incontestible; your hearers acknowledge it, and surrender. You have a theory which you believe will solve many puzzling problems; you wish it to be substantiated. You have set forth the probabilities; you have made it plausible; you have shown its worth and utility, if true; "Very good," say your auditors, beginning to yield; "it looks well-if you can authenticate it, we will believe; let us see the thing done." Now, then, appeal to facts. Find in the history of the race, experiences and events which can be satisfactorily accounted for only upon the truth of your hypothesis, and your work is done.

Ruskin somewhere remarks that talkative facts are always more interesting and important than silent ones. The distinction is especially appropriate in the selections of the sermon writer. There are hosts of facts which to him are mute. An active mind will indeed make all its reading subservient to the one great business. It will make all the streams of knowledge

which flow through its grounds tributary to the fulness and growth of its life; as the "rivers of Damascus," conducted in a thousand circling channels through the gardens that environ the city, are forced to yield themselves up for the fertilizing and beautifying of that Paradise of the East, and but a single shallow rivulet of the depleted waters escapes to continue its course beyond. Still, he who lives by a broad, sweet river will not travel far to drink from scantier fountains. He who has begun to draw from the tide of history, finds less nourishment at other springs. There are whole sciences and arts and trades, which have almost no aid for the peculiar wants of the preacher. The art of painting, for instance, could furnish him valuable knowledge, if he were a sculptor, or an architect; but beyond the general education of his taste, it has nothing which would repay him, in the line of his profession, for the toil of becoming familiar with its technicalities. The sciences of chemistry, botany, anatomy, geometry, and the like, the profession of law or of medicine, the business of the merchant or the machinist-he accepts as facts, both in the mass and in the bewildering variety of their details. But they are for the most part "silent facts" to him. The knowledge of them might make him a more learned man, might accumulate in his memory, might gratify his tastes, might suggest an occasional metaphor. And yet, as every one must see, they would yield him an infinitesimal return for all his outlay of time and brains. Though he has "all knowledge," though he has invaded every realm of learning, he may, with all his attainments, find himself in the dilemma of Philip II. of Spain-"the man who owned all America and half of Europe "*-and who nevertheless from such immense territories could reap but a beggarly revenue, totally insufficient for the dignity, or even the subsistence, of the royal estate. While, on the other hand, he who adds to the exegetical and theological studies of his profession, only a general acquaintance with matters of science, and business and art, but a familiar acquaintance with history, can be better compared to the Netherlands, so long the antag

* Motley.

onist of Philip; a country rescued first from the waves, and then from his iron grasp; a country whose commercial enterprise could afford an eighty years' struggle with Spain, and then outstrip the maternal wealth tenfold with its rentals from the sea. What the sea was to the Netherlands, so enriching will the ocean of history be to him whose keel diligently plows all its waters, and whose freights come in from its most affluent climes. The preacher's replenishment of material from history, which is exuberant of "talkative facts," may be computed as far above his revenue from any and perhaps all other sciences outside of his professional course. The latter are remote allies of Christian truth; the former is its dwelling-place, its home. The latter may help to "prepare the way of the Lord;" the former is itself the broad plain along which the "highway" is to be cast up. The Piedmontese road over which Hannibal led the armies of Carthage, was the same by which Irenæus afterwards carried the gospel into Gaul. So the paths by which nations and periods have marched, still abide for "the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace."

It remains to suggest, that our Great Exemplar in all things else, be taken for our pattern in this. The discourses of our Lord abound in illustration. If we may judge of his general practice by the memorabilia of his daily discourses preserved by the evangelists, we should have reason to infer that his most important and convincing illustrations were drawn from history, far more frequently than from the things of common life, or from natural objects within view. The most elaborate of his parables received a historical cast; they are allegory more than metaphor. Such, for instance, are the Good Samaritan-the Rich Man and Lazarus-the Prodigal Sonthe Wicked Husbandmen-the Marriage of the King's Sonthe Unjust Steward--and the like. These were put into the narrative form; and for aught that appears, might have been citations from veritable fact.

In the sermon on the mount, the illustrations are almost entirely drawn from the affairs of common life, and from visible objects near to the speaker. The only exception was His brief

and suggestive comparison of the lilies of the field with "Solomon in all his glory."

In the conversation with Nicodemus, a typical event was adduced, and its meaning and fulfillment explained: "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

On the day of his rejection by his fellow townsmen at Nazareth, after preaching in their synagogue with such effect that "all wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth," he answered their clamors for a miracle with this cutting retort: "No prophet is accepted in his own country. But I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land; but unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel, in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian."

When the Pharisees upbraided him for allowing his disciples to pluck and eat the ears of corn on the Sabbath, he turned upon them and confounded them with a like example of supposed sacrilege, drawn from their own sacred books: "Have ye never read what David did when he had need and was an hungered, he and they that were with him; how he went into the house of God, in the days of Abiathar, the high priest, and did eat the shew bread, which is not lawful to eat, but for the priests; and gave also to them that were with him?"

To the Pharisees who asked a sign from heaven, he answered by appealing to facts with which they were familiar, and which strongly reflected upon their degeneracy: "There shall no sign be given, but the sign of the prophet Jonas; for as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh shall rise in judg ment with this generation and shall condemn it; because they repented at the preaching of Jonas, and behold a greater than Jonas is here. The queen of the south shall rise up in judg