Sermons are literary products in which change from fashion to fashion of thought and of form makes itself felt more than in almost any other kind of literature. The sermons of one age are generally doomed to be obsolete in the age next following. But to this general rule Saurin's sermons come near constituting an exception. They might, many of them, perhaps most of them, still be preached. This, certain pulpit plagiarists of a generation or two ago, are said to have learned. The following extract will give our readers an idea how Saurin, toward the close of a discourse--having now done, for the occasion, with dispassionate argument--would follow up and press his hearer with deliberately vehement, unescapable oratoric harangue and appeal. His text is: "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." Analyzing this, he states thus his second head of discourse: "Motives to virtue are superior to motives to vice." What [under the first head] I affirmed of all known truth, that its force is irresistible, I affirm, on the same principle, of all motives to virtue: the most hardened sinners cannot resist them if they attend to them; there is no other way of becoming insensible to them than to turn the eyes away from them.... And where is the man so blinded as to digest the falsehoods which the motives to vice imply? Where is the wretch desperate enough to reason in this manner: "I love to be esteemed; I will, therefore, devote myself exclusively to acquiring the esteem of those men who, like me, will in a few days be devoured by worms, and whose ashes will in a few days, like my own, be mixed with the dust of the earth; but I will not take the least pains to obtain the approbation of those noble intelligences, of those sublime spirits, of those angels, of those seraphims, who are without ceasing around the throne of God; I will not take the least pains to have a share in those praises with which the great God will one day, in the sight of heaven and of earth, crown those who have been faithful to him. "I love glory; I will therefore apply myself exclusively to make the world say of me: That man has a taste quite exceptional in dress, his table is delicately served, there has never been either base blood or plebeian marriage in his family, nobody offends him with impunity, he permits none but a respectful approach; but I will never take the least pains to make envy itself say of me: That man fears God, he prefers his duty above all other things, he thinks there is more magnanimity in forgiving an affront than in revenging it, in being holy than in being noble in the world's esteem, and so on.