“When we hear the thunder rumbling in some distant quarter of the heavens, we sit calm and serene amidst our business or diversions; we feel no terrors about us, and apprehend no danger. When we see the slender streaks of lightning play afar off in the horizon of an evening sky, we look on and amuse ourselves as with an agreeable spectacle, without the least fear or concern. But lo! the dark cloud rises by degrees; it grows black as night, and big with tempests; it spreads as it rises to the mid-heaven, and now hangs directly over us; the flashes of lightning grow broad and strong, and, like sheets of ruddy fire, they blaze terribly all round the hemisphere. We bar the doors and windows, and every avenue of light, but we bar them all in vain. The flames break in at every cranny, and threaten swift destruction; the thunder follows, bursting from the cloud with sudden and tremendous crashes; the voice of the Lord is redoubled with violence, and overwhelms us with terror; it rattles over our heads as though the whole house was broken down at once with a stroke from heaven, and was tumbling on us amain to bury us in the ruins. Happy the man whose hope in his God composes all his passions amid these storms of nature, and renders his whole deportment peaceful and serene amidst the frights and hurries of weak spirits and unfortified minds.” Many pages might be filled with such passages in which the compactness of the proverb, or the pleasantry of the fancy, or the richness of the description, is remarkable. It comes out of such characteristics as we have noticed, that he reformed the preaching of his day, especially as to the structure of sermons; it was the age of, what he calls very felicitously, “branching sermons;” and even John Howe, as both Robert Hall and Henry Rogers[50] have remarked, “far outwent many of his most extravagant contemporaries in minute and frivolous subdivision; we have sometimes heads arranged rank and file, half a score deep.” Henry Rogers continues, “If any would wish to see the full extent to which Howe carried this fault, they may look into the ‘scheme’ (a very accurate one), which his publishers prefixed to the first edition of the ‘Delighting in God,’ and by the time the student has thoroughly digested and mastered that, he will find little difficulty I apprehend in any of the first books of Euclid.” It was the characteristic of nearly all the great Puritan preachers before Watts. He speaks of some who would draw out a long rank of particulars in the same sermon under one general, and run up the number to eighteenthly! or seven and twentiethly! until they cut all their sense into shreds, so that everything they say of anything is a new particular; and he says, he has sat under this preaching until he has thought of Ezekiel’s vision in the valley full of bones, “behold