Sermons now-a-days produce little or no effect, because there are too many of them. The ears of hearers have been tickled till they are no longer capable of sensation. One hears curates boast of having preached some seven sermons in one week, and miserable stuff it must have been that flowed so freely; and yet good enough for the hearers, who, by accustoming their ears to be always hearing, are unable to appreciate a really good discourse, or if they appreciate, allow it to produce no effect whatever upon them. Our audiences in church are like those who live in railway arches, who become so accustomed to the rush overhead of trains, that none ever rouse them, and they cannot sleep without the intermittent rush to lull them. The sermons of the end of last century and the beginning of this do not please us, because they are cast in a different mould, they _generally_ appeal to a different side of us than do those of the present day. They were addressed to the natural, healthy conscience, and to plain, everyday common-sense, such as all men possess. Modern sermons are appeals to the feelings, amiable, sentimental emotions, and these amiable, sentimental emotions have become accustomed to be scratched, like cats, and purr when that is done. It was an epithet of scorn launched on Pope Damasus, that he was "ear-scratcher" to the ladies,--such is, however, the highest glory of a modern preacher. Crabbe undoubtedly hit the old country parsons on their weak point when he said of his vicar, that his main characteristic was timidity. He was infinitely blameless, but also immeasurably afraid. "Thus he his race began, and to the end His constant care was, no man to offend; No haughty virtues stirr'd his peaceful mind; Nor urged the Priest to leave the Flock behind; He was his Master's soldier, but not one To lead an army of His martyrs on: Fear was his ruling passion." Courage is born of conviction, and our old English country parsons had no definite convictions, a sort of vague, nebulous, inchoate notion that Christianity was all right, and that the Church of England was a _via media_, and they deprecated anything like giving precision and outline to faith, and assuming a direct walk which was not a perpetual dodging between opposed errors. I ventured in one of my novels, _Red-Spider_, to sketch this sort of parson, who never in the pulpit insisted on a doctrine lest he should offend a Dissenter, nor on a duty lest he should make a Churchman uneasy. And it was characteristic of the race. In the Faroes there are sixteen different names for fogs, and the articles of the Christian faith were only varieties in fogs to these spiritual pastors. The nebulous theory prevailed in astronomy, and in divinity as well. Some old-fashioned people resented the resolution of the nebulæ into fixed stars; and so also in that other province do they look on it as next to sacrilege to give to faith definition.