and a phlegmagog purge would do him good.  He is a rigid methodical man; believes in original rules and ancient prerogatives; is a Wesleyan of the antique type, but is devoid of force and enthusiasm; he never sets you on fire with declamation, nor melts you with pathos; he had rather freeze than burn sinners; he thinks the harrier principle of catching a hare is the surest, and that travelling on a theological canal is the safest plan in the long run.  He is more cut out for a country rectory, where the main duties are nodding at the squire and stunning the bucolic mind with platitudes, than for a large circuit of active Methodists; he would be more at home at a rural deanery, surrounded by rookeries and placid fish ponds, than in a town mission environed by smoke and made up of screaming children and thin-skinned Christians.  Mr. Rayner has many good properties; but short sermon preaching is not one of them.  Some of the descendants of that man who, according to “Drunken Barnaby,” slaughtered his cat on a Monday, because it killed a mouse on the Sunday, were in the bait of preaching for three hours at one stretch.  Mr. Rayner never yet preached that length of time, and we hope he never will do; but he can, like the east wind, blow a long while in one direction.  One Sunday evening; when we heard him, be preached just one hour, and at the conclusion intimated that he had been requested to give a short sermon, but had drifted into a rather prolix one.  We should like to know what length he would have run out his rhetoric if be had been requested to give a long discourse.  By the powers! it would have “tickled the catastrophe” of each listener finely—­doctors would have had to be called in, a vast amount of physic would have been required, and it would never have got paid for in these hard times so that bad debts would have been added to the general calamity.  We could never see any good in long sermons and nobody else ever could except those giving them.  Neither could we ever see much fun in a parson saying—­“And now lastly” more than once.  In the 60 minutes discourse to which we have alluded, the preacher got into the lastly part of the business five times.  If that other conclusive phrase—­ “And now, finally brethren”—­had been taken advantage of, and similarly worked, we might never have got home till morning.  Summarising Mr. Rayner, it may be stated that he is calm, phlegmatic, earnest but too prolix, likes to wield the rod of authority and occupy one of the uppermost seats in the synagogue, is an industrious minister but adheres to a programme antique and chilling, is a real Wesleyan in his conceptions, but behind the times in spirit and mental brilliance, is in a word good, grim, imperial, cold as ice, steady, and soundly orthodox.