to things practical, and if the message from the pulpit is to be effective it must be presented in a way that can be readily understood by all.

The various humanitarian movements of the day are demanding more and more attention from the pulpit, and within certain limitations this is right. Nothing that concerns humanity should be foreign to the minister's sphere of activity. But he should not become absorbed in these matters to the subordination of his greater work. The discussion of the "burning questions of the day" has its proper sphere in the general working plans of the minister's pulpit activities, but this discussion should be held within reasonable limits. Dr. Washington Gladden may be right when he says that two classes of people object to discussing current sociological and economical problems in the pulpit-" those who hold the old notion that religion is mainly concerned with another world, and those who do not wish to know what are the applications of the Christian law to the business of this life, because they fear that it would interfere with their gains and pleasures." No doubt the selfishness of the pew does sometimes influence the deliverances of the pulpit, but Dr. Gladden will hardly admit that the discussion of such questions is of equal rank and importance with the preaching of Jesus Christ and him crucified. Chalmers gave himself over to this sort of preaching during the early years of his ministry at Kilmany, but he was frank enough to confess that his experiment in preaching against "all those deformities of character which awaken the natural indignation of the human heart against the pests and disturbers of human society" was a failure. He says:

It was not till I got impressed by the utter alienation of the heart in all its desires and affections from God; it was not till reconciliation of him became the distinct and preeminent object of my ministerial exertions; it was not till I took the scriptural way of laying the method of reconciliation before them; it was not till the free offer of forgiveness through the blood of Christ was urged upon their acceptance; it was not till the Holy Spirit given through the channel of Christ's mediatorship to all who ask him was set before them as the unceasing object of their dependence and their prayers; in one word, it was not till the contemplations of my people were turned to these great and essential elements in the business of a soul providing for its interests with God and

the concerns of its eternity that I ever heard of these subordinate reformations. To preach Christ is the only effective way of preaching morality in all its branches.

In connection with this solemn declaration of one of the greatest preachers of the beginning of the present century consider this testimony from Joseph Parker, probably the peer of any English preacher of our day:

Looking back upon all the checkered way, I have to testify that the only preaching that has done me good is the preaching of a Saviour who bore my sins in his own body on the tree; and the only preaching by which God has enabled me to do good to others is the preaching in which I have held up my Saviour, not as a sublime example, but as the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.

If the pulpit to-day does not "grip the consciences of men as vigorously as that of the fathers did," may it not be because so many preachers belittle the cross or "veil its magnetic attractions with the speculations of men?" A great need of the pulpit to-day is the immediate and complete return to the preaching of the cross of Calvary. Shallow views of the sacrifice on Calvary will inevitably lead to the weakening of the motives of Christian living and working, while the faithful preaching of the atonement of Jesus Christ is irresistible in its transforming effects upon the heart and life. Such preaching is sure to be in the direction of the fulfillment of Christ's promise and prophecy, "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me," will inevitably lead to the spiritual quickening of the Church, and will contribute appreciably to the greater glory of God.

5. J. Herben

ART. VI.-DOCTOR JOHN LORD-HIS LITERARY RANK.*

Ir is not yet five years since the death of Dr. John Lord-a man peculiar in physical attributes, insignificant in person, awkward in bearing, and a stammerer in speech, yet informed with an intelligence and aspiration so lofty that he died leaving behind him accomplishment equaled by that of but few Americans. For the last forty years of his life he made his home in the city of Stamford, Conn., from which point he passed out on his unceasing lecture tours, addressing tens of thousands of his countrymen, making his figure and his literary work familiar throughout the length and breadth of the land. He was nearly equally well known in England. Attention to his work, temporarily diverted for a brief interval succeeding his death through the absence of his unique personality, is beginning to be recalled in full measure by the solidity and worth, as well as by the brilliancy, of his literary remains. His works, published in completed form and showing the man in his real intellectual proportions, are now being sought for by thousands of readers on both sides of the Atlantic. The fact is gratifying to the lovers of elevating literature everywhere.

Next to the poet and essayist, who deal with elemental ideas and human emotions, may be ranked as literary benefactors the artist historians, the writers who, like Thucydides and Tacitus and Hume and Gibbon and Macaulay, present the facts of the past in such attractive robes of speech that their narratives remain lasting possessions to our kind. Though the interval which has elapsed since his death and the appearance of the full body of his works has not been sufficient to give his achievement the benefit of this permanent perspective, there can hardly be a doubt that Dr. Lord is destined to take high rank, even among these greater gods of his literary class. And this will appear true, whether he is judged by the volume of his contribution to historical writing or by the riches of thought and the quality of the diction in which he has

* Copyright, 1899, by William Jackson Armstrong.

embalmed his work. In this latter regard of a luminous and fascinating literary style he is certainly exceeded by no American writer of history, whether it be Prescott, or Parkman, or Irving himself, or even our latest luminary, John Fiske; and, if Bancroft and Motley may be considered to take precedence of him by virtue of sustained efforts covering whole periods of national history, the admirers of Dr. Lord may fairly claim that, in the surpassing range of his historical studies, he has an advantage of even these acknowledged masters. In the respect, indeed, of extended investigation and variety of themes Dr. Lord stands alone, without a peer or competitor in the entire list of historical essayists. It is safe to believe, in fact, that with the single exceptions of Macaulay and the late Spanish Castelar, no other modern literary student has looked so familiarly as he over the long perspective of the world's events.

Dr. Lord's early discipline for his lifework as a literary man was of the loose and desultory sort which is the frequent antecedent of the career of genius. It is the instinct of winged talent to soar to its purpose, even after many falls from attempted flight. Such was the experience of the young historian in his school and college years. Born in the old town of Portsmouth, N. H., in the year 1810, he received his first rudiments of education under the severe and somewhat repugnant methods of the old-fashioned private school of that gloomy half-Calvinistic period of New England history. He confesses in the partially written account of his own life that his schooldays were not happy, and that, being addicted to shirking his tasks, he rarely escaped one whipping a day and sometimes got two, until his hand became "as hard as a sailor's." His experiences at home were hardly more exhilarating, under the tutelage of his pious Calvinistic mother, who, he records, brought up her children in the old-fashioned orthodox way to "attend meeting three times on Sunday, besides going to Sunday school;" and, as that day was supposed to begin on Saturday at sundown, no books could be read until Monday except such works as Baxter's Saint's Rest, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, Taylor's Holy Living, with the Boston Recorder for lighter reading."

Removing with his parents in his tenth year to the little town of Berwick, in the neighborhood of Portsmouth, young Lord continued his studies in the village academy under instructors who were described by him as having "pedantry without learning" and "vigor without discipline,” until, at the end of six years, he left the institution, as he acknowledges, without having made any acquisitions except a repugnance to the study of Latin and Greek and the knowledge of mythology obtained from Lemprière's Dictionary. A year or two later, in 1829, he was sent by his parents to Dartmouth College, the great northern seat of New England learning, presided over, at that time, by his distinguished uncle, Nathan Lord, erudite in his generation, but who has been pictured as, after the manner of college presidents of the period, a "disciplinarian rather than a teacher;" and as a "rigid Calvinist who accepted all the deductions to which that system logically led." Calvinism, indeed, appears to have been the creed under whose shadow and influence the future historian was destined to begin and end his intellectual novitiate. And never did a somber theological mantle fall upon a more joyous and magnanimous spirit than in the case of this artist chronicler of the world's events; for while accepting, to the last, in theory, like his distinguished uncle and instructor, the postulates and deductions of a rigid and time-worn theology, Dr. Lord, as the mature essayist and philosopher, treated all systems of faith and the followers of all creeds with a charity and tolerance as catholic as the needs of historical judgment. And only, perhaps, in the direction of impatience of rationalistic criticism, impairing the authority of revelation itself, did his peculiar theology narrow him. But who will venture to assert that, as a professed believer in that revelation upon whose integrity the whole body of historical theology must stand, or through whose even partial discredit it must fall, he was not rigidly consistent? It is surely not the swarm of modern doctors of theology, who weakly consent to the compromise of rationalism with faith, that can assume the rôle of his critics here.

Four years at Dartmouth and three additional years spent at Andover Theological Seminary-whither he repaired at the 60-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV.