they were very many and very dry.” He adds, “A single rose bush, or a dwarf pear, with all their leaves, flowers, and fruit about them, have more beauty and spirit in themselves, and yield more food and pleasure to mankind, than the innumerable branches, boughs, and twigs of a long hedge of thorns.” In the same manner he satirizes another kind of preaching, in which there are no breaks and pauses. “Is there no medium,” he says, “between a sermon made up of sixty dry particulars, and a long loose declamation without any distinction of the parts of it? Must a preacher divide his works by the breaks of a minute watch, or let it run on incessantly like the flowing stream of sand in the hour-glass?” And thus he inquires, “Can a long purling sound awaken a sleepy conscience? Can you make the arrow wound where it will not stick? Where all the discourse vanishes from the remembrance, can you imagine the soul to be profited or enriched? When you brush over the closed eyelid with a feather, did you ever find it give light to the blind? have any of your soft harangues, your continued threads of silken eloquence, ever raised the dead?” Very happily he says, “Preachers talk reason and religion to their auditories in vain, if they do not make the argument so short as to come within their grasps, and give a frequent rest to their thoughts; they must break the Bread of Life into pieces to feed children with it, and part their discourse into distinct propositions, to give the ignorant a plain scheme of any one doctrine, and enable them to comprehend or retain it. The auditors of the first kind of preacher have some confusion in their knowledge, the hearers of the last have scarce any knowledge at all.” The reader will not fail to notice, in this nervous passage, the happy imagery by which the writer gives point to his ideas.