Now, as for centuries past, the hundreds of religious reviews, magazines, and newspapers, have been publishing sermons, when a clergyman has a rather limited allowance of imagination, these periodicals furnish him with the materials for edifying the faithful on Sundays; he has but to copy old sermons. For proof of this, you need only take a peep at the great reading-room of the British Museum any Saturday of the year. Every seat is monopolised by the ministers of the hundred and odd religious sects who have set themselves the task of wiping out from the registers of the next world the thousand and one little stains that John Bull has contracted in this. It is a sight worth looking at to see them poring over old dusty volumes, from which is to be extracted the balm that is to give fresh life to the flocks confided to their care. While listening to the scratching of these hundreds of quills as they flew over the paper I have sometimes said to myself: "Some folks earn their salaries easily." And yet the public good should be the first consideration, and, after all, I do not know that there is any harm about copying a sermon. On the contrary, why not follow the advice that Voltaire gives in the _Dictionnaire Philosophique_, at the chapter of Eloquence? This is what he says after having spoken of Massillon: "Such masterpieces are very rare; besides, everything has become common-place. Those preachers who cannot imitate these great models would do well to learn them by heart, and (supposing they have that rare gift, a talent for declamation) recite them to their congregation, piece by piece, instead of holding forth in a wearisome manner upon themes as stale as uninstructive." The regular Saturday visitors of the British Museum are quite of the same opinion, only, as to commit to memory two sermons a week, and sometimes more, would take up too much of the precious time that they owe to the spiritual family that have to be fed with the Word of Life, they copy them off, and read instead of reciting them: it is an economy of labour. "Whenever I wish to move my hearers," said a worthy parish priest one day, "I repeat some Massillon to them." But the fact is that pulpit eloquence is not much encouraged in England. A really eloquent preacher would approach too nearly to the actor to please a people so susceptible in religious matters. He would not inspire confidence. The Englishman likes dogma before all things; torrents of eloquence, _à la Bossuet_, would make him look askance at the preacher; phrases polished and studied like those of Flechier, expressions elegant and graceful, like those of Massillon, would awaken suspicions in his mind; what he prefers is argument pure and simple, and leaves to the lower orders the pleasure of being terrified by revivalists. We were speaking of English pulpit eloquence one day to an important member of the political world. "English pulpit eloquence!" said he to me, "we have none."