which, though centripetal, forever seeking the earth, and forever trailing their mountain-weight of glory along the line of and through the midst of flesh-and-blood realities, yet never found any impediment in all their course, but swept the ground like a whirlwind.  This distinction between Spurgeon and Luther in the matter of strength is an important one; and it is, moreover, a distinction which may easily be derived—­even if no other source lay open to us—­from a palpable difference between their faces.  But the resemblance between these two men as to tendencies and modes of operation is still more important, and especially as helping us to draw the line between two distinct orders of human genius.  Upon this resemblance we desire to dwell at some length.

Luther and Spurgeon are both grossly realistic.  They are both groundlings.  In their art, they build after the simple, but grand style of the Cyclops; they have no upward reach; with no delicate steppings do they haunt the clouds; because they will not soar, they draw the sky down low about them, and, wrapping themselves about with its thunders and its sunlights, play with these mysteries as with magnificent toys.  In them there is no subtilizing of human affections, of human fears, or of human faith.  All these maintain their alliance magnetically, by channels seen or unseen, but forever felt, with the earth, and, Antaeus-like, from the earth they derive all their peculiar strength as sentiments of the human heart.

How widely different are these men from Bacon, Kant, or Fichte,—­or, to compare them more directly with the artists of literature, by what chasms of space are they removed from Milton, Shakspeare, and even from Homer, who, although he was a realist, yet had eagles’ wings, and was at home on the earth and in the clouds, amongst heroes, amongst the light-footed nymphs, and amongst the Olympian gods!  In these latter the movement of imagination is centrifugal, it sustains itself in the loftiest altitudes, and in the most evanescent and fleecy shapes of thought it finds the materials from which it wreathes its climbing, “cloud-capped” citadels.  The opposite order of genius is, as we have previously called it, centripetal, gravitating earthward.

Both orders are to be found among those celebrated as pulpit orators,—­all, indeed, who have ranked as powers in this department of human effort belonging eminently, nay, we may almost say exclusively, to one or the other.  If we take Spurgeon, Whitefield, Bunyan, and Luther as representatives of one order, we shall have also representatives of the other in such orators as Jeremy Taylor,—­the Shakspeare of the pulpit,—­and, though in a very different sort, Henry Ward Beecher.  That in which these two classes of orators differ is mainly the plane of their movements,—­the one hardly lifted above the earth’s surface or above the level of sensibility, while the other rises into the sphere