such points as these involve inscrutable mysteries; and we shall do well, without bending God's word to man's intellect, to follow it wherever it may lead us; not taking much account of theoretical objections from which few things are free. Our correspondent's own remark, that "without (ministerial) faithfulness the means of grace cannot be duly administered to either saints or sinners,” embodies the very difficulties which he alludes to. Means are ours; the issue is of God.

DEFENCE OF EXTEMPORE PREACHING.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

A DISCUSSION was lately revived in your pages upon the comparative merits of written sermons, and those which (in the absence of a juster designation) I must call extempore. It appears to me that the latter are hardly dealt with by some of your correspondents; and as I believe the Church of England and the cause of God are suffering not a little from the contempt in which extempore sermons are in general held among us, perhaps you will favour me with a page, in order that I may offer a few hints upon the subject.

I have said that in general extempore sermons are held in contempt among us; and though the expression is a strong one, I fear it is but too correct. Even in your own pages one of your correspondents seems to think he has decided the question, when he has asked whether the extempore preacher can say that he has given his best to God! Thus an extempore sermon is condemned at once as the work of sloth and self indulgence. A worthy incumbent lately advertised for a curate in the Ecclesiastical Gazette thus: "None but a graduate need apply; nor any one who thinks he can preach extempore !"

Many able ministers who occasionally preach extempore, at once attest the existence of this contemptuous estimate, and lend their aid to deepen it by their own conduct. If an occasion of great importance present itself, the sermon is laboured with much care, and the manuscript is seen in the pulpit. When they are sick or indolent, or when they preach to rustic audience, they preach extempore. Thus it is the constant practice of many clergymen to preach without notes in the afternoon to a congregation of the poor, who in the morning invariably read their sermons. So that of course an extempore sermon is regarded as an inferior thing; something very suitable for the poor.' And it is no uncharitable surmise that many a man of God is prevented from using this two-edged sword from a deference to the fastidious ears of his flock; or it may be, a regard to his own high intellectual character.

Thus it has come to pass that a vast deal of extempore preaching is of a very ordinary character. Few of our greater minds attempt it; those who do so, are careful to have it known that they only preach extempore in the country, or when ill prepared ;-and then there are the vain, the shallow, and the idle, who heap discredit upon this species of address, by presenting their hearers with what is merely crude, superficial, and declamatory.

But all this and much more than this; for I am not blind to the many dangers which lie in wait for the extempore preacher-all this detracts in no respect from the importance of this sacred exercise.

I

will venture just to mark down briefly the advantages of this mode of address; more especially with a view to our younger brethren in the ministry.

:

1. Preaching is a complex idea, including far more than the mere utterance of so many sentences, from the elevation of a pulpit and on the subject of religion. A preacher must be "apt to teach," and therefore he must have it in his power to command the attention of his hearers for until this point is gained his "teaching" will be of small account. A college tutor commands attention by the authority of his station; by the interest of his subject; by the keen rivalries which stimulate his class; and therefore his business is merely to instruct a prepared and listening audience. He finds in them a predisposition to be taught; and he is the best lecturer who affords them the greatest amount of instruction, in simple and lucid terms, in the given space of time.

With lamentable ignorance of human nature it seems to be at once assumed that the scholastic method of instruction, because suited to the college, is the model for the pulpit. Because the accurate and logical lecture is full of interest to academical students, therefore the Gospel must be presented in the same form to servant maids and village shopkeepers. And hereupon has arisen a mighty feud between the teachers and the taught. We blame them for neglecting our ministrations; they reply in effect, and sometimes in plain words, "your sermons are uninteresting:" and ever and anon some straggler to the Dissenting or Wesleyan Chapel reports that they "hear better" there.

This "hearing better" perplexed me sorely for some time. I thought, sir, the poor and tradespeople must be deaf, so I raised my voice, and cruelly distressed my chest and lungs. But at length I discovered that by "hearing better," they meant being more interested and better taught. A clerical friend of mine has endeavoured to meet the wants of these complainers by lingering always among the elements and outworks of religion. But here again he has failed. Bishop Horsley was undoubtedly right, when he said that we mistake both our own duty and the capacity of our common hearers, when we thus avoid all that is profound and difficult; and doom them to grow old in ignorance of the deeper things of God. Even the poor and unlearned soon display an impatience of that ministry which supplies them only with the "milk" of "babes in Christ."

2. No, Sir, it is not that the people do not understand us. It is not that we are too profound; nor do I think the hard long words we use (it were better to avoid them) explain the evil; for I never hear a Dissenting or a Wesleyan minister speak upon a platform, but I observe he is sure to carry off the palm for long words and hard ones too. And the common people are marvellously fond of catching up new sounding words, while they still scarcely understand their meaning. It is not our learned speech, it is our learned scholastic manner, which they quarrel with. Reading is an exercise, either mentally or physically considered, very different from speaking; and if human nature says the former exercise is uninteresting to the hearer, compared with the latter, I fear the wisdom of both Universities will never bring the world to another mind.

3. For "the wise and the unwise" are both arrayed against us. I have met, sir, with many a man who declaims against the repetition, the poverty of thought, the baldness and the vulgarity of extempore

preaching; and I meet with some who declare that the manner of the preacher is nothing; they merely wish to hear what he has to say. But this is either pedantry, or the vexation arising from the repeated disappointment of hearing a poor extempore preacher. It is not in man, until rendered callous by some malign influence, to defy the influence of man upon him. Let the speaker throw his soul into his sermon; not in the affectation of a warmth which he does not feel; not in the vehemence which is meant to conceal the lack of thought, and argument, and illustration; but as one who comes forth after prayer and study to speak "as dying unto dying men," and the sympathies of nature will be felt even by those who continue strangers to the diviner influence of grace.

4. Indeed, I confess myself astonished at the influence of extempore speaking. It would not be difficult to mention large congregations which are held together by this single spell. Where the lack of wisdom, and perhaps of grace, in the pastor, is apparent; yet his facility of utterance, his natural, or perhaps his very artificial, eloquence, so that it do but reach the heart by sympathy, if by no better path, has charms sufficient to bind down the various elements of which a large congregation is composed. If this be so, ought an instrument of such power to be despised? If the conceited and the idle can use it to such purpose, what might not, under God, the effect become in the hands of the industrious, the devout, the able minister?

5. Let it be well considered too, that extempore speaking has been, in every age, that lever which Archimedes wanted. It has moved the world. All our great preachers, the men who impressed their character upon the times in which they lived, and gave an impulse to posterity-the men who were wont dominari in concionibus-were all extempore preachers. Such were the reformers; such were the giants of the seventeenth century: Baxter and Bishop Hall were such; though from the fact of his writing out his sermons in the study, one of your correspondents brings forward Bishop Hall's example on the other side.* I need not mention Wesley, Whitfield, and their band;

It is curious to observe, by the lapse of time and the caprice of fashion-for there is a fashion even in such grave affairs as these the practice of extempore preaching, now so deeply in disgrace, was once the only kind of address which our pulpits tolerated. The famous injunction from Charles II. to the University of Cambridge, is highly important, at least in two respects. It authoritatively declares the primitive custom of the Church of England to be in favour of extempore sermons; and it traces up the custom of reading in the pulpit-now-a-days almost regarded as a test of true Churchmanship-to the dark days of Presbyterianism, and the Commonwealth! Perhaps you will reprint this curiosity.

"Mr.Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen, "Whereas his Majesty is informed that the practice of reading Sermons is generally taken up by the preachers before the University, and therefore continued even before himself, his Ma

jesty hath commanded me to signify to you his pleasure, that the said practice, which took beginning with the disorders of the late times, be wholly laid aside, and that the aforesaid preachers deliver their Sermons, both in Latin and English, by memory, or without book, as being a way of preaching which his Majesty judgeth most agreeable to the use of all foreign churches, to the custom of the University heretofore, and the nature and intendment of that holy exercise.

"And that his Majesty's command, in the premises, may be duly regarded and observed, his further pleasure is, that the names of all such ecclesiastical persons, as shall continue the present supine and slothful way of preaching, be from time to time signified unto me by the Vice Chancellor for the time being, upon pain of his Majesty's displeasure. 66 MONMOUTH."

"October 8, 1674."

nor the venerable Simeon, and Biddulph, and Cecil, and a host besides; nor Robert Hall and Richard Watson, who carried the art to a perfection which perhaps never was surpassed. I doubt, in short, if Dr. Chalmers be not the first preacher who has produced any great effect in the pulpit, by the mere reading of his manuscript.

6. The difficulty of extempore speaking I conceive to be much exaggerated. Men of sense and education find no difficulty in expressing themselves with propriety in other places; why then must they believe it impossible in the pulpit? Most Dissenting and all Wesleyan ministers preach extempore. Are their talents such as to render that practicable in their case, which is impossible to us of the Establishment? Does their education make all the difference? Are not the advantages entirely with us in the latter point, and perhaps, I may say, in the former too? Yet Archbishop Secker's complaint is still too true; "our people fall away to sectaries :" not, I hope, any longer, because we do not preach in a manner sufficiently evangelical," but because, while they are natural, we are scholastic. Their eyes, their hands, their very tears, all preach-as Mr. Simeon, with pardonable egotism, once said of himself-while we preach only with the lips and the intellect. Meanwhile infidels are eloquent; and Romish priests-if we may believe the newspapers-both preach well, and preach extempore.

J. B. M.

SUPPOSED MOSAIC ORIGIN OF THE HEBREW ALPHABET.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

It is not an uncommon opinion, that the letters of the ancient Hebrew alphabet were not known, till they were written by the finger of God on the tables of stone given to Moses upon Mount Sinai; and in a late Number of one of our periodicals, the following quotation was inserted from an able writer of the present day, which seems to imply the same opinion. "It is extremely probable that, previous to the giving of the Ten Commandments, Moses was only acquainted with the hieroglyphic mode of writing, which he must have learned in Egypt; but partly in order to discourage image-worship, and partly with a view to give facility to the transmission of the truths of Divine revelation, God furnished him, on this occasion, with an important specimen of alphabetical scripture, and taught him how to compose in it the other laws and ordinances which he revealed to him."

As it appears to me that this opinion opposes the consistency and deteriorates the internal evidence of the Mosaic writings, I think its truth should be examined into as far as Scripture evidence will allow. By tracing back the history and character of literature among the earliest empires of Asia and Africa, and among the earliest descendants of Japheth in the southern parts and islands of Europe, we may safely infer the existence, not only of hieroglyphic, but of other modes of writing before the time of Moses; and I have no doubt that a good theological historian could fairly prove that the geneological tables, and chronological events recorded by Moses, under the influence and direction of Divine inspiration, had been preserved in written characters, and transmitted along the patriarchal line from Noah to Eber CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 15.

and Abraham down to the days of Moses. But I wish to confine my present observations to the Mosaic era.

My first proposition is, that Hebrew writing was known and adopted by Moses himself before he arrived at Mount Sinai. In Exodus xvii. 8-16, Moses gives an account of a battle fought between the Amalekites and Israelites at Rephidim; the particulars of which he was commanded by God to write for a memorial in a book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua.

- Two topics here claim our notice; the time of the event, and the character of the writing. By collating the first and second verses of the 16th, 17th, and 18th chapters of Exodus, we observe, that it was about six weeks after the departure of the Israelites from Egypt, that they came to the "wilderness of Sin," and journeyed further till they pitched at Rephidim; but that it was not till the third month that they came "to Mount Sinai, and encamped after they had departed from Rephidim." This gives a sufficient lapse of time between the events at Rephidim, and the first ascent of Moses up Mount Sinai, for him to have recorded those events, and also for the interview with Jethro his father in-law, as also related by him; and that Moses did not delay the commandment of God, but was accustomed to write from time to time, according to the succession of events, will further appear from Exodus xxiv. 4-7; where it is declared that Moses "wrote all the words of the Lord," including various laws and ordinances, and afterwards "took the book and read it in the audience of the people" and this was transacted before he went up into the Holy Mount for the purpose of receiving the tables of stone.

Let us now inquire into the characters of the writing; and I assume that it was written in letters, as well as language, which the Israelites already understood; for it was to be for a memorial to them and their generations, implying, in the injunction, that all should read or hear it read, and teach it to their children after them; but if any other letters than their own had been used, or supposing that they had no letters of their own when the writing was accomplished, then the purpose of the writing or command could not have been carried out, or would be endangered; since such foreign writing would become obsolete and unintelligible, after their own Hebrew letters were made known to them.

Yet, supposing the Hebrew letters were not yet adopted, the only other mode of writing assumed, was the Egyptian hieroglyphic; and as Moses was doubtless acquainted with this, as part of "the learning of Egypt," which he had studied; it may appear plausible to some, that he should have applied it to the sounds and words of the Hebrew tongue, as the Missionaries in our own day have applied the English (or rather Roman) letters to the Polynesian dialects. But can we suppose that the Holy God of Israel would allow his mercies to be recorded, his attributes to be expressed, and his sacred name Jehovah nissi (Exod. xvii. 15) pourtrayed, (as it must have been,) in the idolatrous hieroglyphics by which the Egyptians represented their false deities, and profane and abominable rites and customs? Could such a mode of writing have been suitable for a memorial to the people of God, or to their children?

But the quotation at the head of this paper fully agrees, that hieroglyphics could not have been applied to these purposes; therefore it follows, either that Moses did not write the memorial, &c. when he was commanded, or that Hebrew writing was then known to him.