of the ideal and impalpable.  In the latter class there are vast differences, but uniformly intellect is prominent above sensibility; human faith and love are exhalant, aspirant, and rendered of a vapory subtilty by the interpenetration with them of the Olympian sunlight of thought and imagination.  In Beecher this ideality is of a philosophic sort.  Thought in him is forever dividing and illustrating truth; and that which is his great peculiarity is that he is at the same time so strictly philosophical, even to a metaphysical nicety, and so very popular.  We have heard him, in a single discourse, give utterance to so much philosophic truth relating to theology, as, if it were spread out over a dozen sermons by doctors in divinity whom we have also heard, would be capital sufficient to secure a professor’s chair in any theological seminary in the country.  Yet he is never abundant in analytic statements of truth:  these in any one of his sermons are “few”—­as they should be—­“and far between”:  the greater portion of his time and the most mighty efforts of his dramatic power being devoted to the irradiation and illustration of these truths.  This is the fertility of his genius, that, out of the roots which philosophy furnishes, it can, through its mysterious broodings, bring forth into the breathing warmth of life organisms so delicate and perfect.  Here is the secret of his popularity.  Jeremy Taylor, without being at all metaphysical, without ever diving down to examine the beginnings of things in Nature or in men’s hearts, had an infinitely more fertile imagination, and the result was therefore more various and multiplex; it reached a higher point in the graduated scale of ideality, it was the afflatus of a diviner inspiration, and was more akin to the effects of the most exalted poetry:  yet it was of far less value as something which was to operate on men’s minds than the result of Beecher’s more pointed, more scintillating discourse of reason.  The fact is, that both Henry Ward Beecher and Jeremy Taylor must of necessity depend, for any beneficial effects which they may seek to bring about in the lives of their hearers, upon certain intellectual qualities already existing in their audience.  Even in order to be appreciated, they must have at least partially educated audiences.  Give either of them Whitefield’s auditory, and these effects become impossible.  Here we come upon the inert masses, which cannot by any possibility be induced to ascend one single stair in any upward movement, but must be swayed this way or that way upon a thoroughly dead level.

It is just here that the realistic preaching of the Spurgeon school is available, and nothing else is.  Here things must be taken just as they are found,—­must be taken and presented in their natural coloring, in their roughest shape.  Polish the thought here, or let it be anything save the strictest rescript from Nature, and you make it useless for your purposes.  Here it is not the crystal that is wanted, but the unshapely boulder.  And provided you wield your weapons after a masterly fashion, it matters very little what your manner or style may be as regards the graces of composition; if only a giant, you may be the most unseemly and awkward one of all Joetunheim.