The form of sermons, whether composed by Anglicans or Puritans, continued after the Restoration to be that which we may call textual, rather than topical, and Sanderson, who survived that crisis, broke up what he had to say upon a text into a perplexing arrangement of divisions and subdivisions; so far he resembled Andrewes, the great preacher of the reign of James I. This practice did not form the peculiarity of a class. It had been borrowed from the schoolmen, and came to be adopted alike by those who were most Protestant and those who were most Catholic. As it was with the teachers, so it was with the taught; the people, no doubt, liked this method, and acquired a habit of threading the mazes of a lengthened homily through all its numerical departments, with an expertness resembling that of modern schoolboys who perform such wonderful evolutions in mental arithmetic. Tastes began to change before the Revolution. Even Dr. Donne, in the beginning of the century, broke somewhat through technical trammels, and indulged in sonorous periods, flowing out into ample paragraphs; and Baxter himself, slave as he often was to scholastic fashions, would often burst into a strain of impassioned rhetoric which carried him page over page without a single break. South may be mentioned as a distinguished instance of departure from the old style, and Bates may be named also as an example, so far, of the same class. Sermons were very long. Some compositions, indeed, bearing that name, but extending to the dimensions of a considerable treatise, were never delivered at all. They were intended to be read, not heard. This was the case with some compositions from the pens of Baxter and Barrow: but anecdotes related respecting the latter Divine, show the enormous length to which he sometimes carried his oral addresses. Once, before he preached in Westminster Abbey, the Dean requested him to be short. He showed the sermon to that dignitary, who, finding it consisted of two parts, requested him to deliver only one of them. Barrow did so, yet that occupied an hour and a half in the delivery. Upon another occasion, he “enlarged” so much, that the vergers who were anxious to show to impatient visitors “the tombs and effigies of the Kings and Queens in wax,” “caused the organ to be struck up against him, and would not give over playing till they had blowd him down.” His Spital sermon lasted three hours and a half; what the Lord Mayor and Aldermen thought of it we do not know; but we are informed that the preacher, when asked if _he_ felt tired, replied, that “he began to be weary of standing so long.”[311] Barrow’s case, no doubt, is an extreme one; but although he exceeded what might be common, it is plain enough from the specimens of pulpit eloquence belonging to that age, that they usually were such as would exhaust the patience of modern congregations. [Sidenote: PREACHING.]