years, said to me one day, ’Now-a-days, people make a work if a minister preach the same sermon over again in the course of two or three years.  When I was a boy, we would have wondered if old Mr. W——­ had preached anything else than what we heard the Sunday before.’  My old friend used to tell of a clergyman who had held forth on the broken covenant till his people longed for a change.  The elders waited on him to intimate their wish.  They were examined on their knowledge of the subject, found deficient, rebuked, and dismissed, but after a little while they returned to the charge, and the minister gave in.  Next Lord’s day he read a large portion of the history of Joseph and his brethren, as the subject of a lecture.  He paraphrased it, greatly, no doubt, to the detriment of the original, but much to the satisfaction of his people, for it was something new.  He finished the paraphrase, ‘and now,’ says he, ’my friends, we shall proceed to draw some lessons and inferences; and, 1st, you will observe that the sacks of Joseph’s brethren were ripit, and in them was found the cup; so your sacks will be ripit at the day of judgment, and the first thing found in them will be the broken covenant;’ and having gained this advantage, the sermon went off into the usual strain, and embodied the usual heads of elementary dogmatic theology.”

In connection with this topic, I have a communication from a correspondent, who remarks—­The story about the minister and his favourite theme, “the broken covenant,” reminds me of one respecting another minister whose staple topics of discourse were “Justification, Adoption, and Sanctification.”  Into every sermon he preached, he managed, by hook or by crook, to force these three heads, so that his general method of handling every text was not so much expositio as impositio.  He was preaching on these words—­“Is Ephraim my dear son?  Is he a pleasant child?” and he soon brought the question into the usual formula by adding, Ephraim was a pleasant child—­first, because he was a justified child; second, because he was an adopted child; and third, because he was a sanctified child.

It should be remembered, however, that the Scottish peasantry themselves—­I mean those of the older school—­delighted in expositions of doctrinal subjects, and in fact were extremely jealous of any minister who departed from their high standard of orthodox divinity, by selecting subjects which involved discussions of strictly moral or practical questions.  It was condemned under the epithet of legal preaching; in other words, it was supposed to preach the law as independent of the gospel.  A worthy old clergyman having, upon the occasion of a communion Monday, taken a text of such a character, was thus commented on by an ancient dame of the congregation, who was previously acquainted with his style of discourse:—­“If there’s an ill text in a’ the Bible, that creetur’s aye sure to tak it.”