self-consistency. His mind was constructive rather than analytic. On most classes of subjects, he was content to build on foundations laid to his hand; and in his peculiar department of theology, though well versed in the grounds of argument, he contributed to the defence of Christianity only the example of his own faith, and the clear, vigorous, and eloquent statement of its reasons and its evidences. In fine, his mind was chiefly noted for its distinct cognizance of the practically important points of every subject, for its strong and healthy action, its conscientious adherence to the right and the true, and the earnest consecration of all its energies to the highest interests of freedom, virtue, and piety. When sane, he was perfectly sane; and it would be hard to point to a writer more constantly under the guidance of common sense and practical wisdom. Hall's style is rich, but chaste, highly rhetorical, but never gaudy. He has no sentences penned for show or sound; but solid thought always underlies his ornament and points his metaphors. His tone varies gracefully and naturally with the progress of his discourse. In his sermons, the exordium is always simple, the discussion perspicuous, direct, and often marked by a piquant vivacity of manner; and then from the argumentation he easily rises to a sustained and solemn eloquence, hardly equalled in grandeur and pathos by any writer in modern Christendom, and often reminding us of the loftiest passages of Isaiah or St. Paul, when he crowns one of his complex trains of reasoning with a pæan of gratitude and adoration. His mastery of the resources of the English language is unrivalled and perfect. It would be difficult to find, in his finished writings, a word, idiom, or construction of doubtful purity, or a passage faulty in point of euphony; and there often runs, through page after page, a rhythm hardly less perfect than if restricted by metrical laws. Much of the beauty of his style is to be ascribed to his uniform preference for words of Saxon origin. On this point his biographer relates a conversation, which is well worth transcribing, both for doctrine and reproof. "In one of my early interviews with Mr. Hall, I used the word felicity three or four times in rather quick succession. He asked: Why do you say felicity, sir? Happiness is a better word, more musical and genuine English, coming from the Saxon.' 'Not more musical, I think, sir.' 'Yes, more musical; and so are words derived from the Saxon generally. Listen, sir: "My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; "there's plaintive music. Listen again, sir: "Under the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice;" there's cheerful music.' 'Yes; but rejoice is French. True, but all the rest is Saxon, and rejoice is almost out of tune with the other words. Listen again: "Thou hast delivered my eyes from tears, my soul from death, and my feet from falling;" all Saxon, sir, except delivered. İ could think of the word tear, sir, till I wept. Then again, for another noble specimen, and almost all good old Saxon-English: "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."— p. 31. We have spoken of the sermon on the death of the Princess Charlotte. This is undoubtedly the most eloquent of his sermons, and we have been led only to admire it the more by attempting to compare it with the magnificent funeral discourses of Bossuet and Massillon. Indeed, we suppose that a taste for their style of pulpit eloquence is almost always outgrown, and may be regarded as marking an era of immature judgment. We can remember the time when we hardly thought any sermons but theirs worth reading; while now, they would yield us but Lenten fare. They never for a moment merge the rhetorician in the Christian preacher. They make the spiritual utterly subordinate to the artistical element. Their most startling appeals and apostrophes have more of theatrical clap-trap than religious unction. Their pointed antitheses, their epigrammatical turns of thought, their studied bursts of emotion, their measured flights into the empyrean, with the wires that pull them back upon the stage-floor in clear view, belittle the great themes of death, judgment, and eternity, and chill the heart while they amuse the fancy. We can imagine an easy and natural transition from their sermons to the ballroom and the theatre, and find no difficulty in believing, that their preaching might have been a favorite entertainment for the dissolute court of Louis the Fourteenth, without starting a penitential tear, or converting a soul. We should as soon seek warmth from the coruscations of the aurora borealis, as spiritual edification from their always brilliant and sparkling, but never fervent, declamation. In their funeral eulogies, they put every rhetorical art and trick in the fullest play; but uniformly desecrate the sad solemnities of death and an opening eternity by the most abject man-worship. Nowhere do they so magnify the artificial distinctions and additions of humanity, the trappings of royalty, the pomp of office, the gewgaws of fashion, as in the presence of the great leveller, and in the contemplation of that event which consigns the unclothed soul to the tribunal where the monarch and the beggar find equal privilege. Far otherwise does Robert Hall treat the occasion which called a nation to mourning. He manifests no coarse indifference to the peculiar circumstances of the event. In the illustrious rank of the princess, he hears no ordinary voice of Providence. The hopes that were centred in her person make her dissolution the more profoundly impressive, and read the more eloquent lesson of man's dependence and frailty. Yet not with rhetorical artifice, but with the instinct of a Christian heart, he isolates the princess from her exalted place and destiny, and sees in her unwarned death simply the passage of an humble, dutiful disciple of Christ from a scene of arduous trial to the home of the faithful. There is not a word of adulation; the panegyric is carefully kept far within the limits of well-known fact, and is less full and free than it would have been at the obsequies of some obscure wife and mother in his own flock. He manifestly fears the faintest show of the adoration of earthly greatness in the presence of the King of kings; but maintains throughout the attitude of a prayerful interpreter of the religious uses of this great public calamity. To justify these remarks, we quote one of the most impressive passages. "When Jehovah was pleased to command Isaiah the prophet to make a public proclamation in the ears of the people, what was it, think you, he was ordered to announce ? Was it some profound secret of nature, which had baffled the inquiries of philosophers? or some great political convulsion which was to change the destiny of empires? No: these were not the sort of communications most suited to the grandeur of his nature, or the exigencies of ours. The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the spirit of the Lord bloweth_upon it : surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth but the word of our God shall stand for ever. Instead of presenting to our eyes the mutations of power, and the revoNO. 135. 34 VOL. LXIV. - lutions of states and kingdoms, he exhibits a more awful and affecting spectacle, the human race itself withering under the breath of his mouth, perishing under his rebuke; while he plants his eternal word, which subsists from generation to generation, in undecaying vigor, to console our wretchedness, and impregnate the dying mass with the seed of immortality. As the frailty of man, and the perpetuity of his promises, are the greatest contrast the universe presents, so the practical impression of this truth, however obvious, is the beginning of wisdom, nor is there a degree of moral elevation to which it will not infallibly conduct us. "The annunciation of life and immortality by the Gospel, did it contain no other truth, were sufficient to cast all the discoveries of science into shade, and to reduce the highest improvements of reason to the comparative nothingness which the flight of a moment bears to eternity. "By this discovery the prospects of human nature are infinitely widened, the creature of yesterday becomes the child of eter nity; and as felicity is not the less valuable in the eye of reason because it is remote, nor the misery which is certain less to be deprecated because it is not immediately felt, the care of our future interests becomes our chief, and, properly speaking, our only concern. All besides will shortly be nothing; and, therefore, whenever it comes into competition with these, it is as the small dust of the balance. "Is it now any subject of regret, think you, to this amiable princess, so suddenly removed, that her sun went down while it was yet day? or that, prematurely snatched from prospects the most brilliant and enchanting, she was compelled to close her eyes so soon on a world of whose grandeur she formed so conspicuous a part? No: other objects occupy her mind, other thoughts engage her attention, and will continue to engage it for ever. All things with her are changed; and viewed from that pure and ineffable light, for which we humbly hope religion prepared her, the lustre of a diadem is scarcely visible, majesty emits a feeble and sickly ray, and all ranks and conditions of men appear but so many troops of pilgrims, in different garbs, toiling through the same vale of tears, distinguished only by different degrees of wretchedness. "In the full fruition of eternal joys, she is so far from looking back with lingering regret on what she has quitted, that she is surprised it had the power of affecting her so much; that she took so deep an interest in the scenes of this shadowy state of being, while so near to an eternal weight of glory; and, as far as memory may be supposed to contribute to her happiness by 1 associating the present with the past, it is not the recollection of her illustrious birth and elevated prospects, but that she visited the abodes of the poor, and learned to weep with those that weep; that, surrounded with the fascinations of pleasure, she was not inebriated by its charms; that she resisted the strongest temptations to pride, preserved her ears open to truth, was impatient of the voice of flattery; in a word, that she sought and cherished the inspirations of piety, and walked humbly with her God. This is fruit which survives when the flower withers, the only ornaments and treasures we can carry into eternity. "While we look at this event with the eyes of flesh, and survey it in the aspect it bears towards our national prospects, it appears a most singular and affecting catastrophe. But considered in itself, or, more properly, in its relation to a certain, though invisible futurity, its consequences are but commensurate to those which result from the removal of the meanest individual. He whose death is as little regarded as the fall of a leaf in the forest, and he whose departure involves a nation in despair, are, in this view of the subject (by far the most important one), upon a level. Before the presence of the great I AM, into which they both immediately enter, these distinctions vanish, and the true statement of the fact, on either supposition, is, that an immortal spirit has finished its earthly career; has passed the barriers of the invisible world, to appear before its Maker, in order to receive that sentence which will fix its irrevocable doom, according to the deeds done in the body. On either supposition, an event has taken place which has no parallel in the revolutions of time, the consequences of which have not room to expand themselves within a narrower sphere than an endless duration. An event has occurred, the issues of which must ever baffle and elude all finite comprehensions, by concealing themselves in the depths of that abyss, of that eternity, which is the dwelling-place of Deity, where there is sufficient space for the destiny of each, among the innumerable millions of the human race, to develop itself, and, without interference or confusion, to sustain and carry forward its separate infinity of interest." pp. 405-408. The volume before us (which, we remark in passing, contains almost every thing fully worthy of Hall's reputation that has been preserved) gives us also four other sermons, and among them that on "Modern Infidelity," which is a calm, thorough, logical analysis of the remedies for social and political inequalities and evils proposed by the French school of atheistical philosophy, which had then [in 1799] multiplied its proselytes and partisans in England. |