I do not say but that the boy’s production may have a liveliness and interest beyond the man’s.  Veal is in certain respects superior to Beef, though Beef is best on the whole.  I have heard Vealy preachers whose sermons kept up breathless attention.  From the first word to the last of a sermon which was unquestionable Veal, I have witnessed an entire congregation listen with that audible hush you know.  It was very different, indeed, from the state of matters when a humdrum old gentleman was preaching, every word spoken by whom was the maturest sense, expressed in words to which the most fastidious taste could have taken no exception; but then the whole thing was sleepy:  it was a terrible effort to attend.  In the case of the Veal there was no effort at all.  I defy you to help attending.  But then you sat in pain.  Every second sentence there was some outrageous offence against good taste; every third statement was absurd, or overdrawn, or almost profane.  You felt occasional thrills of pure disgust and horror, and you were in terror what might come next.  One thing which tended to carry all this off was the manifest confidence and earnestness of the speaker. He did not think it Veal that he was saying.  And though great consternation was depicted on the faces of some of the better-educated people in church, you could see that a very considerable part of the congregation did not think it Veal either.  There can be no doubt, my middle-aged friend, if you could but give your early sermons now with the confidence and fire of the time when you wrote them, they would make a deep impression on many people yet.  But it is simply impossible for you to give them; and if you should force yourself some rainy Sunday to preach one of them, you would give it with such a sense of its errors, and with such an absence of corresponding feeling, that it would fall very flat and dead.  Your views are maturing; your taste is growing fastidious; the strong things you once said you could not bring yourself to say now.  If you could preach those old sermons, there is no doubt they would go down with the mass of uncultivated folk,—­go down better than your mature and reasonable ones.  We have all known such cases as that of a young preacher who, at twenty-five, in his days of Veal, drew great crowds to the church at which he preached, and who at thirty-five, being a good deal tamed and sobered, and in the judgment of competent judges vastly improved, attracted no more than a respectable congregation.  A very great and eloquent preacher lately lamented to me the uselessness of his store of early discourses.  If he could but get rid of his present standard of what is right and good in thought and language, and preach them with the enchaining fire with which he preached them once!  For many hearers remain immature, though the preacher has matured.  Young people are growing up, and there are people whose taste never ripens beyond the enjoyment of Veal.  There is